Good PC games outside of Steam

[Megazao]

I wanted to diversify some of the stuff I play and that got me thinking I should probably explore things outside the major storefronts, like Steam and Epic. The place that comes to mind is Itch, but I didn't limit it in the title because there may be others (hell, the dev may even host the game on their own website).
So I humbly ask of you, do you have any obscure game recommendations like that? Genre and length don't matter a whole lot, I just want good/interesting stuff!

 

[ShinnAsukaYESTaylorSwiftNO]

IKEMEN GO is the closest thing we will ever get to a MUGEN 1.1/2.0.

Ikemen GO - Open Source Fighting Engine

Ikemen GO is an open source fighting game engine that supports M.U.G.E.N resources, made in the Go programming language.

ikemen-engine.github.io

 

[Graves Ruinwalker]

GoG is a good Platform for older games that you wont find on steam .
A huge treasure-trove of oldschool gems !

 

[waterxwraith]

Tales of the Drunken Paladin

www.drunkenpaladin.com

free indie jrpg that's been getting updates for over a decade. huge dialogue overhaul coming next month. nearly every object in game has unique dialouge.

 

[IyoTheHelpfulWolf]

GoG is a good Platform for older games that you wont find on steam .
A huge treasure-trove of oldschool gems !

Can confirm. It's also good for indie games and sometimes 2010's AAA games get dropped on their for cheap as fuck. I got the entire Metro series, DLC included, for 10 USD, with no copy protection whatsoever. It's technically still a revokable license, but no one has any real control over my local copy.

 

[Kard]

Iji is pretty cool:

 

[longestseason]

I bought it, it looks interesting but never played it:

Basilisk - 2000 by KIRA

akuma-kira.itch.io

Basilisk 2000, an unfinished game believed to be lost, came back to life thanks to a fan who developed a tool to interact with its level editor. Now you can explore all the environments in the game and maybe find out what happened to the project and why it was abandoned.

Pretty cool concept, not gonna lie. It's by the creator of Lunacid and Lost in Vivo.

 

[Tonberry]

This game is one of my favorites, and it's freeware!

It's an open-ended platformer with a heavy emphasis on ambience and exploration. You crashland in a strange land after being abducted by an alien and you have to explore to find parts of the ship in order to repair it.

It has a bunch of sequels and iterations, but I think the first game is just magical.

 

[thanonyx]

I think you'd love Super Rad Raygun. It used to be on Steam but I think the developer of the game went defunct so it moved to itch.io. I managed to snag it before the shutdown though but if you still want it it's $10USD (I don't know how much it is in other countries).

It's about a robot named Rad Raygun who looks like an original Game Boy who has to stop the Soviet Union from destroying America and thus take over the world. The whole game looks like it's on an OG Game Boy and of course Rad can be upgraded and all the levels in the game take place in different parts of the world. It plays a lot like a Mega Man game so if you like Mega Man you're gonna like this.

Super Rad Raygun by TRU FUN Entertainment

Rad Raygun must travel the world fighting communist robots and save the 1980′s by shooting his way through the decade.

trufun.itch.io

 

[Mopeybloke]

GOG has SWAT 4.
This is how it plays.

 

[Yousef]

Just google a delisted game followed by “archive.org”

 

[SLEDGE_DOG]

Indie - cool freeware games you've happened upon

when i was still in school i used to bring in games on a flashdrive to play in my computer class, and i liked to find really weird and cool freeware games to do this with, generally small ones that wouldn't take up all my flashdrive space. this lead to me having an affinity for freeware games...

retrogametalk.com

Check this thread for some neat stuff.

 

[Trix_]

Streets of Rage Remake is good but I find it harder than the originals, hehe.
There's a ton of old PC games that are interesting, I still have to go through them but the most unique one I found was Missing: Since January. The game connected to the internet, and you had to receive mails and visit sites to progress. A fan managed to reverse engineer and recreate the server, but that project has been inactive for a while now.

GOG has great choices too, like point and click adventure games. I highly recommend playing The Longest Journey, which is one of the best games ever made.
The Last Express is pretty cool too, it was made by Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia. The defining feature of TLE are the rotoscoped visuals and the fact that you can turn back time.

Itch.io has interesting content, but I don't know much about it.
However, I downloaded games from it a while back that I want to try in the future.
They are more artsy and experimental, not sure if that's up to your taste.
The names are:
- Discover My Body
- 0_abyssal somewhere
- Don't Make Love (also on Steam)
- Fugue In Void
- Water Womb World

I also have 'You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter', but that one is super short and barely interactive.
I like the ASCII graphics.

If you're interested in the history of the internet, try Digital: A Love Story.