Everything feels like it’s happening so fast. I’ve barely had time to blink since our last Winter Sale roundup, and a fresh mountain of interesting and oddball indie games have come, been, and faded from memory already. But I remember, and I’m here to shine a belated spotlight on another set of games from the past year (and a bit) that I believe deserve a second look.
This time around, I’ll keep things a LITTLE more focused, with a mere 15 games to spotlight and a handful of brief bonus mentions, but I’ve found a particularly interesting and varied crop this year. As always, I try to keep things within some self-established rules. Here’s what I’m working with today:
- Ideally released in 2024-2025, although I do bend this rule a bit here
- Something I’ve played enough to consider being worth your (or my) money
- Undersold & unknown—generally under 500 user reviews on Steam
- The weirder, the better—Games that defy reason make for great little treats
- 30% discount at minimum—Bigger discounts, because we’re all struggling
- As broad a range of genres as possible. A little something for everyone
While the rules are slightly flexible, most games check off all the above. As always, I hope you find something fresh and special. Let’s get started, and spread the word!
Motordoom – Tony Hawk’s Vampire Survivors
Price: $9.79 / £8.25 (30% off) | Developer: Hobo Cat Games
The genre says it all. A grungy fusion of Tony Hawk (or Dave Mirra) style stunt-chaining arcade biking, grinding and half-piping with Vampire Survivors style combat, heavy on the spam and auto-aim. Probably the most Tony Hawk-authentic take on the formula, even moreso than Helskate or Rollerdrome (both 75% off), with a fun metal-heavy soundtrack and enough unlocks to provide reason to play beyond just the joy of mashing thousands of demons as a pair of funny skeletons driving a sidecar bike.
Alternatively: Tuna Hake’s Underwater (40% off, £1.49/$1.79) if all that violence is a bit much and you just want to flop around (extremely fast) as a fish with pure Y2K vibes. Bite-sized and priced to match.
4D Golf – Hyperdimensional Pastime Sim
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Price: $13.99 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: CodeParade
From the developers of non-euclidean activity center Hyperbolica comes the most mentally destructive round of golf you’ll ever play. Minigolf is tricky enough in three dimensions (getting those balls up hills is a pain), but trying to putt when the hole might be both on an incline and on a different, imperceptible plane of existence is something else entirely. At least it gives you multiple vision modes to help parse multidimensional space. Surprisingly beefy game too, introducing plenty of fun new brain-busting gimmicks as you unlock new courses, and with plenty of community-made holes to play, too.
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Price: $9.99 / £8.37 (50% off) | Developer: Feperd Games
Half price, and you’re only getting half a game right now, but this one has incredible promise. From the solo dev behind the excellent Spark The Electric Jester series (so, someone who understands going VERY fast), what you get now is an extremely good riff on F-Zero’s hyper-speed hovercar racing action. The other half (yet to come) is the story mode, which will include on-foot platforming and brawling (a bit like Spark, but slower, according to this dev footage) to fund your racing ambitions and let you experience more of a hovercar racer’s life.
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Price: $17.49 / £14.69 (30% off) | Developer: MICA Team/Sunborn
Probably the closest thing to mainstream you’ll find in one of these roundups, but largely unknown outside of China and Japan. A lengthy, story-heavy squad tactics game set in the same post-apocalyptic sci-fi world (later in the timeline, even) as the Girls’ Frontline series, but without any of the gacha stuff, and no desire to be casual, mainstream entertainment. Even the ‘easy’ mode here is XCom-hard. Normal is brutal, demanding you use every consumable item you have to even the odds. Hard mode is annihilation. Surprisingly, this is also a remake of one of the studio’s first indie titles, and the original version is a hidden unlockable.
Price: $9.74 / £8.31 (35% off) | Developer: Goba
Still in early access, but I reckon Carter’s Quest is still worth the money if ‘Ocarina Of Time fused with Devil May Cry, fueled by intense bisexual energy’ sounds like your jam. Featuring a weird (and very glam) fantasy setting with a fun sense of humor, plus combo and juggle-heavy combat. Right now you’re getting just Act 1 of a larger game, but it’s a real fun ride, featuring some great setpieces (including one particularly cool music-synched boss fight), fun character moments, and it’ll still take you around 4-5 hours to get through, and Act 2 seems deep into production.
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Price: $9.99 / £7.99 (50% off) | Developer: Ackk Studios
Why’s a game from 2019 on this list? Well, I make the rules, but also the YIIK you can buy now is an almost entirely different game to the much-maligned original release. Still a bit oddly paced at times, but honestly, I dig it! Taking years of extensive critique of the original release to heart, the entire thing has been rebuilt with new story arcs and even a sorta-sequel. Most dramatic is the changes to combat—it’s a whole new game, with a hand of “cards” determining each character’s attacks but also acting as shields. Yes, protagonist Alex is still a deeply flawed person, but the game makes it clearer now that he is not someone you’re meant to aspire to be.
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Price: $7.49 / £6.39 (50% off) | Developer: Masala Games
A charming, if rather casual (and minigame-filled) point-and-click detective adventure, and possibly the most overwhelmingly Indian game I’ve played. Dotson is a bookish everyman and aspiring Bollywood star, dragged into solving a series of weirdly related mysteries starting as humbly as tracking down a missing pot of Biryani, and escalating into solving his father’s murder. Plus, there’s an hour-long prologue movie voiced fully in Hindi. The only real issue I have with Dotson is that the game currently ends on a cliffhanger: the developers have said they plan on continuing the story in a free update.
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Price: $13.99 / £11.19 (30% off) | Developer: Strange Scaffold
Where do the makers of I Am Your Beast, El Paso Elsewhere and Clickolding go next? Anywhere they want, and that’s why we’ve got this ridiculous game, which is actually not the third in any series. A Puzzle Quest-inspired match-3 puzzler that’s also a branching visual novel where plot branches act as key items to unlock new areas and story routes. It’s also a screwball parody of survival horror tropes (written by people who have internalized every trope in every Resident Evil) AND a heartfelt metatextual musing on the difficulties of game design. It also has an all-polka soundtrack as well. Of course.
NBB.EXE – Bomberman: The Precision Platformer
Price: $9.99 / £8.37 (50% off) | Developer: Raptus Games
Probably the brightest game I’ve played this year, bombarding my eyes with searing bubblegum neon aesthetics. All paired with a surprisingly dark story lurking just under the surface. NBB.exe is a tricky 3D precision platformer inspired by Bomberman of all things, although you’ll be doing as much jumping over death-beams and air-dashing around impossible corners as clearing obstacles and enemies with bombs. Between levels, you get to explore a TRON-like cyberworld, meeting silly robot people and looking for hidden areas and bonus exposition.
Ink Inside – Cartoon Dodgeball Co-op RPG
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Price: $9.99 / £8.37 (50% off) | Developer: Blackfield Entertainment
Ink Inside feels like a game that should have been big news. A team of cartoon pros (including talent from Steven Universe) script up a cartoon, but instead rework it into a game. A whimsical RPG with real-time action dodgeball battles and a big focus on local co-op, splitting the action between the two protagonists. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have sold much at all, potentially endangering the developer’s plans on making this into a trilogy. The current game being effectively ‘season 1’ of the would-be show – a full story unto itself, but with hooks for more.
Redline Crooks – Arcade Roguelike Demolition Derby
![REDLINE CROOKS Gameplay Trailer [2024] - YouTube](https://techjournalnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/1751931909_655_maxresdefault.jpg)
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Price: $6.95 / £5.79 (42% off) | Developer: Alexander Golke
An absolute joy of an arcade roguelike, and not quite like anything else I’ve played. You’re a crook on the run from the law. Drive fast (and sometimes through walls), smash up police cars and bounty hunters to keep your health topped up and get to the finish line in one piece. There’s some real classic arcade soul to Redline Crooks, with a fantastic sense of speed and very varied playable characters/vehicles. My favourite being the forklift that can pick up and throw other cars as projectiles. A gem that more people should know about.
Alternatively: Odinfall (25% off, $9.74/£8.24) is like Nuclear Throne dressed up as a saturday morning cartoon about cyber-vikings. It is also great wall-smashing fun.
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Price: $17.99 / £14.99 (40% off) | Developer: The Game Kitchen
This one shouldn’t be a hidden gem, but despite glowing reviews and being from the team fresh from the excellent Blasphemous games, this Commandos-esque historical adventure about a band of mentally unwell oddballs plotting their escape from a Spanish monastery just slipped under the radar when it launched. A terrible shame, because it is a gorgeous and creative take on an already-niche subgenre, with each character having both fun abilities to use and their own phobias, making certain actions more difficult or even impossible for them to carry out.
Goldenheart – King’s Field’s weird desert-dwelling cousin
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Price: $2.99 / £2.55 (70% off) | Developer: Milenniapede
The rise of the Souls-like has had one repercussion I never would have expected; a return to the roots of the genre, and a fresh crop of games inspired by King’s Field, the great granddaddy of first-person action dungeon crawls. Goldenheart feels like an outsider’s take on the concept, fusing that claustrophobic up-close combat with Zelda-like lock-on mechanics, a big focus on mixing up bow and sword combat and frequent health drops to top up your all-too-small health pool. Wrap that all up in a strange, unique desert fantasy setting and you’ve got a thorny but refreshing experience.
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Price: $5.99 / £4.99 (50% off) | Developer: Seafloor Games
A charming and surprisingly tough metroidy-type exploration platformer with a very fun setting. You play as a whole squad of cute critter combat-ecologists, fighting parasitic monsters and other bodily threats that might endanger the giant space turtle that they all live inside. Each character has their own powers, and boss fights tend to require a lot of switching between them. Bonus points for the game’s fast-travel system being through the turtle’s circulatory system. Just check the map for where those veins lead and hop into the bloodstream. Gloopy.
Alternatively: Zexion (20% off, $15.99/£13.40) is one of the best Metroid-likes I’ve played in years, and packed with amazing setpieces. Only thing not exceptional about it is the discount.
Chambers – Immersive Sim on a Mescaline trip
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Price: $13.99 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: Mr. Pink
Chambers is a wild west adventure from the maker of nightmare comedy roguelike Golden Light, and it’s almost as surreal. This broken world is obsessed with guns. Looming gun-metal megastructures tower over the desert. Barrels might secretly be gun-mimics. People have been known to grow more arms just so they can carry more guns, except for that one cyborg guy who’s part moonshine still. Expect weirdness and jank and of course it’s in early access too, but it’s a ton of fun now and will likely grow into something even more horrible and strange.
Plus, a bonus round of STEEP discounts that didn’t quite fit in anywhere. Shmup fans, don’t go sleeping on the The Seventia Collection; two excellent shmups set in the same universe at a silly 96% discount. Another arcade gem at a silly price (95% off) is Swordship, an arcade ‘anti-shmup’ where you’ve got no guns and have to trick enemies into shooting each other.
And that’s it for now, until I blink again, at least. Never stop looking for interesting games outside of the mainstream and supporting smaller studios. And it bears repeating that just because a game is a few years old that it isn’t any worse for it. Usually the opposite, given how even niche stuff often gets years of updates. Most games in my earlier roundups are on sale again, so don’t miss out on the past couple years of hidden gems below:
Winter 2024 (20 games)
Summer 2024 (40 games)
Winter 2023 (20 games)
Summer 2023 (20 games)
Spring 2023 (15 games)
Winter 2022 (15 games)
Summer 2022 (15 games)
Indie GOTY picks 2023 (6 games)
And to the creators of all these games, once more, thanks for making these weird and magical artifacts that got me into writing about games in the first place. Times are tough. Hold strong, and never let your creativity fade out.
And remember, if you found something to love here, let people know! Tell your friends, shout about it on social media. These are hidden gems because nobody else cared to dig them up.
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