Ew, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
Starsector, perhaps the greatest 2D space game of all time.
What are some cool/decent PC games that are not on Steam?
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Katana314@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
monstoor@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This actually looks really good! I’ll have to ask the missus for an advance on my pocket money 😀
chahn.chris@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I’m genuinely curious about this game but the dev blog goes back to 2010? Is this another star citizen or is it actually a full / good game?
Rinn@awful.systems 3 weeks ago
It’s perpetually in progress but what’s there is already pretty much a complete game, dev just can’t stop adding/revamping things. I’ve played it like 5 years ago, spent 50+ hours and had a great time. There’s also an active modding community.
Minnels@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
There is a lot of game there. It is like Mount & blade in space so don’t except a story or something like that. You make your own. Totally worth the money.
Kirp123@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There is quite a lot of game and there is a solid modding scene as well. It is worth the money.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
More like Project Zomboid or Warframe. They could be released as version 1.0, but they just always have ideas for more things to add, and they do it in a way that doesn’t make the experience feel incomplete, just that it feels better when there’s new stuff added.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This isn’t an underrated game, because everyone I’ve ever seen talk about it only praise it. It is an underrecognized game though. It’s sad how few people know about it despite how well it’s received.
alexquiniou@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
If you are brave enough there is big list of open source clone games.
Most of them are not on any play store.
luipaard0011@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
This is gold
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’ve probably played a few hundred hours of SuperTuxKart. It’s a mario kart clone except i like it way better than the mario karts I’ve played.
Mindustry is fun, it’s like a space factory builder thing.
I was going to say the powder toy but it turns out its on steam now
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 weeks ago
It’s a way for the devs to get some revenue. Doesn’t mean that you have to buy it. Same with Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Super Tux is also on Steam but not paid.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Most of the time the steam version acts as the “donation button” for many small indie and f2p open source games. It exists for no other reason then to cost money so you CAN buy the dev a beer if you want.
False@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s worth giving the guy ten bucks imo.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh what, that’s very weird
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Note for the below links: Flathub is a repository for Linux. If you are on Windows, go to their website and look for downloads.
- Luanti: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Very close Minecraft like clone (note its old name was Minetest for the longest time). Each downloadable subgame requires extremely low space, in the MBytes range! No account or any online servers are needed. Open Source.
- osu!: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Rhythm style game where you use the mouse. I think the code is Open Source, but not the assets? I’m not sure.
- Taisei Project: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Fan project in the Touhou Project series. Old school bullet hell shmup from top down perspective. Open Source.
I was focusing on non commercial free games that are also (for the most part) Open Source too.
macros@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
For Luanti I want to especially recommend the Game “Glitch” which is not minecraft like at all, but surprisingly great.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Regarding osu’s source code, I think the original osu (osu!stable) is closed-source, and I think the servers might be closed-source, but I believe osu!lazer, the new reimplementation in C#, is fully opensource. It’s an ongoing effort and a long-term migration it’s in the middle of, but lazer looks great and I think it’s already meant to be the main version now.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Stable is also dead, thats part of the reason its closed source and staying that way. He doesn’t want people using it and it will be retired entirely at some point. Its basically a unsaveable pile of pasta.
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Funny enough, moving to Linux meant I discovered a lot of cool tools and games that I wouldn’t have otherwise…and then eventually learned they had Windows releases anyway, so it wasn’t strictly necessary to ditch MS for them. But beneficial anyway.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
One of the reasons why you find so many interesting tools on Linux is, that you are new and need to setup your environment. Maybe even searching for alternatives. That will make you discover lot of stuff by nature.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
An MMO with no micro transactions: Clan Lord
It’s been around since the 90s, the original developer is now a farmer and gave control of the world to the players rather than selling to a larger company.
We could use an influx of newbies, just don’t be a turd.
Red0ctober@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Battle for Wesnoth, very good high fantasy strategy game. Lots of player created campaigns, and tons of mods
JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Yeah, it’s available on Steam (for free) but I think it still fits this thread nicely.
It’s impressive that they’re still actively developing it after 20 years. For anyone else like me who used to play Wesnoth a lot but hasn’t touched it in a couple of years, I just noticed that they have added a new mainline campaign fairly recently.
Red0ctober@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I love that it continues to be worked on too. I remember playing it well over a decade ago.
Avorn@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Love this game! It still holds up pretty well
FilthyHands@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Vintage Story, Voices of the Void
Console_Modder@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
2nded for voices of the void
False@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Starsector is one of my favorites from the last decade.
warmaster@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
- 0 A.D.
- Beyond All Reason
- Open BOR (beats of rage)
- M.U.G.E.N
FoxAlive@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
OSU. There’s a open source client don’t know anymore which ones good.
CaptainBasculin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Lazer client works native on Linux, and is perfectly suitable to play with. Lower audio latency on both Windows (WASAPI) and Linux (runs native and not via Wine) is a pretty solid reason why most people prefer it, but the interface isn’t as skinnable as Stable is currently and slider head accuracy is confusing for some old players, but other than that there isn’t any reason not to use Lazer.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
If i recall lazer also doesn’t let you “cheat” with spinners or some such and thus points are on avg lower compared to what people are use to.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
CLICK THE CIRCLES
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a really good traditional roguelike, often considered one of the four pillars of the genre along with NetHack, ADOM, and TOME. (Those are on Steam, however; Crawl is not.)
NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Voices of the Void
Absolute peak game that doesn’t really have any contemporaries.
A game with base management, fully open map, random events ranging from spooky to hilarious, minigames to fix equipment, little robot helpers, big robot helpers that require some assembly, but don’t need charging thanks to running on nuclear power, and a quadbike you can backflip.
And the Christmas gun.
Ace0fBlades@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Beyond All Reason (BAR) A spiritual successor to supreme commander made by a team of fans. It’s free and had LAN and online multiplayer. Really fun if you enjoyed the source material.
afaix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m surprised no one mentioned it yet, but Kitten Space Agency
It’s a free spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program that tries to be everything that KSP2 wasn’t. It’s still in early development by its progressing fast and it already looks great and allows you to do a lot of cool things, and it’s also built using their own engine instead of Unity and has modding support.
And it’s not on steam.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Probably because it’s not really a game yet. You can play it, but there’s really nothing to do at the moment. It’ll be on a list like this when there’s actual gameplay.
However, the studio also make Stationeers, which more people should play. It is on Steam though, so it’s not for this list. I’m a pretty big fan of their studio. They seem to be doing everything right.
afaix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Seems to have the things KSP had when I first played it in 2013, before career was added
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Is stationeers actually done yet? Last time I played the best station was a single cube with as few features as possible.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
SRB2K, or Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, is a mod of SRB2, itself a doom mod, that is an absolute love letter to the classic days of Mario Kart (I’m thinking super mario kart or 64). Full of small QoL changes, and with a forum full of mods for any character you can think of, it’s an easy pitch if you’ve ever wanted to play a kart styled game thats better than the original, with online play
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Worth noting the devs have since released a sequel, Robotniks Ring Racers, but it does it’s own thing in a way that does less for me personally in terms of nostalgia, and is also generally more complicated, and thus harder to pull random friends into. That’s not to say it’s worse or bad, it’s just got very different appeal
IronKrill@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Sauerbraten is always worth a mention for me. It’s a quake style open source shooter with built-in mapping tools. Definitely a little dated but the game still feels more responsive and fun than a lot of other games today. I think I would really enjoy tinkering with it if I was still a teenager.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Racing simulator that launched in the early 2000s and is still going. There have been some rough times but overall the feeling of admiration is hard to deny for the 3 (mostly 2 now) devs. A couple years ago they updated it to create and allow mods and this year they released a public test for new graphical updates. I don’t even play often anymore but I still check for updates almost daily :)
I_Jedi@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Japanese visual novels that never get translated are a big one. A huge chunk of them live on novelgame, DLSite, and DMM. In fact, there are some full fledged Japanese games that are DLSite exclusive. I’ve tried a few, and some can be quite good.
The Star Trek games on GOG (like Elite Force I and II, and Armada) are worth your attention.
Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is also typically bought on JAST.
There are also a bunch of gacha games that never released on Steam, though the bigger ones are working to change that.
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
There are a substantial number of non-commercial FOSS games that aren’t on Steam.
Many—though not all—of them are packaged in Linux distros.
Luanti, basically a FOSS Minecraft clone, is one example; that’s in Debian.
A number of older games occur to me that aren’t either in Linux distros or on Steam. They aren’t necessarily the top FOSS games, but people may not be aware of them, if they rely on looking in distro packages or Steam to find things.
Linley Henzell, the guy who did Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, which later became the well-known roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, had a couple of open-source games that he wrote way back. Overgod looks like it’s been packaged and is in Debian. Lacewing is in Fedora, but not in Debian.
There’s a genre of games based on Paradroid. One of the first games I played on Linux was in this genre—NightHawk. It used to be in Red Hat Linux, but it looks like at some point, it fell out of the package repository, as it doesn’t appear to be in present Fedora, and it’s not in present Debian either today. Not on Steam, either.
I can’t find any videos of anyone playing NightHawk on YouTube.
Abuse is a DOS-era action platformer, heavy on jumpscares, that was open-source and had some of the data files (the ones for the shareware version) put into the public domain. Could use the full game’s datafiles too, if you got ahold of them. I think that that used to be packaged and in Red Hat Linux at one point, but it’s not in Fedora or Debian these days, and it’s not on Steam.
Surprisingly, while Empire—a very early game in the genre—is in Debian, xconq is not, and doesn’t look like it’s in Fedora either. Neither are on Steam. You may have played later hex-based strategy wargames in the genre, like Battle for Wesnoth.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I think most people know, but Luanti is more of a minecraft type voxel engine with a game launcher at this point.
From there you can play several variations of voxel type games and manage them.
I say that because if people think its just Minetest with a new name, that isn’t quite accurate.
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’ve been playing a lot of Gyakuten Live. It likely can’t be officially monetized because it infringes upon “Love Live School Idols” as well as stealing a few assets from the Ace Attorney games. But, the game has quite an impressive amount of production value, with many emotive character faces, a full custom soundtrack, numerous cinematics between cases, and a lot of artwork to help visualize the scenarios. It centers around what seem like relatively innocuous cases, like a missing treasure, or fraudulent tickets, but (aside from the intro case) tends to dive into some complex character emotions as the motive behind each incident.
The other game that made me think of posting this is Hytale, which looks to basically be an indie, non-Microsoft, pro-modding version of Minecraft.
TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Seconding HyTale!
TallonMetroid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Holy shit. As a fan of both Love Live and Ace Attorney I never realized how much I wanted something like this. Unfortunately I don’t have any recs to give, so all I can offer are my thanks and an upvote.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just finished the fourth case (each of them are at least about as long as standard Ace Attorney cases), and it turns out the creator has plans to keep going.
I imagine a lot of AA fans getting put off with the first case being as simple as someone being served spicy bread, but things have gotten progressively more intense, with some very tricky writing to justify them not going to the police.
::: Case 4 Up until case 4, you get hints of cold Missing Persons cases. By this case, you’re dealing with a literal murder, and there’s a cold expectation that the police would be unable to stop this person. :::
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 3 weeks ago
Phantasy Star Online, especially with private servers
For Linux: github.com/zeroz41/pso_wine/tree/master/pso/pc#re…
missingno@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
Panel Attack is a FOSS clone of Panel de Pon with rollback netcode and modding support.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I know this one! As I love Tetris Attack, its so nice to have this as an Open Source project. Never thought that anyone in the world would recommend this (not because its bad or so, but because usually nobody knows.) But I never played it much beyond testing, to be honest. It’s been a long time… 5 years or so. I guess its improved a lot since then. But weirdly, they have no link to the source code on their website: github.com/panel-attack/panel-game
kyTdKZx9PtDQ9e56u06@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Freelancer. Basically abandonware at this point, but tons of community support, with some great mods and servers.
Vitaly_Chernobyl@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Love this game.
Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I really wanted Freelancer 2. Star Citizen was meant to be it before Chris Roberts did… well I have no idea what he did, what he is doing or the state of Star Citizen any more, its got so out of hand.
Elite Dangerous just wasnt it for me. The ship and space stuff is amazing but the world just isn’t as fun as Freelancer. I know its come a long way after I played it just after release but it doesn’t seem to quite fill the same niche.
kyTdKZx9PtDQ9e56u06@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Same. And star citizen isn’t necessarily bad. But the scope creep has gotten out of hand. I started playing back in the mid 3.0 releases, back when delamar was still part of Stanton, and I thought the future state of the game was clear and obvious. But man CIG, or Chris, just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger. A lot of people talk about SC without playing it, and that’s a shame because it has so much going for it. They truly are developing amazing things… But I have to agree. The vision is super muddy. Freelancer 2 it is not. I don’t even think they know what the ultimate goal is. I keep saying its an indefinite test bed for things they want to develop. No end goal in sight. Just play and QC our development sandbox please.
rethnor@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Destroyed
Dwarf fortress is on steam, humble bundle, itch io and free on their website.
Dwarf fortress is an essential gaming experience.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Should be played until your most common cause of fortress failure is FPS death
rethnor@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
And then you should start to experiment with science!
londos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Armadiilo Run www.armadillorun.com
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh man I sunk countless hours into this like… 20 years ago. Amazing game.
GrilledCheese@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Wow what a flashback to my teenage years!
CovertOperative@piefed.zip 3 weeks ago
I recently logged back into my telltale account on a whim and was surprised to find that I owned “Back to the Future: The Game”. Even though I’m certain I never bought it. It’s not listed on Steam or GOG, but I think you can find it as abandonware somewhere.
Have only played a bit so far, but it looks pretty good. It’s a typical point-and-click, not a “X will remember this” story game.
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
It was a decent 4th installment. Still have it on steam, but not tried it on modern machines.
Mikelius@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Dunno if anyone already said it, but Devotion is always a favorite of mine to share. Beautifully well done story for anyone into horror games.
graynk@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Had to buy it there too, still pissed about it getting dropped from absolutely everywhere. Glad the studio is doing OK (at least I believe Nine Sols sold quite well)
dukeofdummies@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Vintage story. Much grittier minecraft with a larger emphasis on survival
Konraddo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
StarSector
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Bought it myself. On my 5th playthrough and its such a blast still. Mods keep the game fresh. All ya gotta do is.download a folder from the game’s forums and put it in the right place. If thats to much work, there is always TriOS mod manager
Starsectors website: fractalsoftworks.com
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Vintage Story, a Minecraft-like game that focuses on a tough, realistic survival experience. There are climate zones and seasons. Things like smelting ores or growing food are much more involved than they are in Minecraft, which makes for a strong sense of progression when you’ve finally managed to make iron or build a windmill.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hytale too, completely different direction than VS but another fun minecraft-ish game
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I will add that it’s Minecraft-like only graphically. Anyone going into Vintage Story expecting their Minecraft knowledge to carry over is going to have a very bad time because the actual overlap is minimal.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Really, its hard to under state how calling VS “minecraft like” is utter bullshit nonsense. Its like calling borderlands and tarkov the like each other. Its so insanely superficial that its absurd.
BreadGar@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I second vintage story, such a cool game