Ayup, another Steam roundup! This time around I’ll be talking about all indie titles, which Steam has been great for finding. Sure, not all indie titles are great, but these ones are and are all priced pretty low. In fact, they’re cheap enough that if you bought all of them at the same time, you’d be paying right around what you would be for a brand new mainstream title and you’d get oh so much more!

By the point, I’m not sure there’s anyone that exists that DOESN’T have this game, but here goes. Recettear is, at its core, a trading game. It’s also a fun and funny JRPG that has a lot of elements to it such as day planning, dungeon crawling, store management, and far more than you’d expect from what on the surface appears to be a cutesy indie casual title.

As time marches on in the game, you have to ensure you’re widening your customer base, getting better and better stock, buying and selling for maximum profit, and ensuring that you’re making enough profit to effectively pay off your debts and continue the game. All in all, with how many elements are at play, all of them being utilized effectively, and at a low price of a mere $20, this is a must have title that you probably already own, but definitely should if you don’t already.

So imagine Portal, but instead of using portals to get around, you manipulate gravity, time, density, and various other things. QC is a game that will constantly test your mind, often to the point of frustration, but in such a way that you’ll keep coming back, especially for additional challenges. Especially if you’re a fan of puzzlers, this is a must have.

McPixel is…well, very…VERY…weird. It can best be summed up as a WarioWare-like title where there are several minigames, but it’s more than that. You have to find the correct solution based on different items and people to interact with in order to ensure a bomb of some sort doesn’t blow up the place you’re in. How exactly that is done is often fairly random and hilarious.

If there’s any one thing I would harp on the game for, it’s that this is literally all it does. It’s not challenging, it’s highly repetitive, and often the jokes range from lame to bizarre. I wouldn’t say it’s for anyone, but at only $5, you can’t go wrong.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to think about this title…especially given the pricetag. What I will say is don’t let the graphics fool you; this is actually a pretty spot on sim/visual novel style game with a plot that’s fun, easy enough to understand, and has a lot of great twists and elements involved. Especially if you’re a fan of games like Princess Maker, this should be right up your alley.

I’m not a huge fan of Minecraft. I think it’s mostly because for as simple a game as it seems on the surface, there’s so much you have to figure out so quickly that really isn’t explained very well that it gets ridiculous. Sure, some people have gotten a lot out of it, but I felt there was an inherent learning curve meant only for the most dedicated, so I never really got into it that much.

All the same, Terraria does what Minecraft was attempting to do and, at least in my opinion, better. There are good tutorials from the get-go, plenty of stuff to bash and build, and it’s got a cutesy little bitisized look to it. Hell, there’s even co-op! Honestly, this game is a bargain at $10 and I highly recommend it.

Conclusion

Not all indie is amazing and fantastic, but these titles alone are indicative of what to expect with most indie titles. They’re fun, quirky, and have a lot of great elements to them that often the industry doesn’t bother with because “they don’t sell games.” Well, if anything, they sold me on all of these concepts and I’d love to see more games like these!