Offendron Warrior is a superb retro gaming tribute to Eugene Jarvis‘s arcade classic Defender, using modern pixels and effects, by talented and prolific Korean Hijong Park. It’s currently available for free or donationware on Steam.
If you don’t know Defender – look it up, then go play it. Then come back and continue reading this.
Another excellent Hijong Park retro tribute game – this one possibly his best so far – Steel Alcimus is an overhead helicopter shooter with either twin-stick joypad, or keyboard and mouse controls. I played it with mouse and keys and found the control system to be really quite ingenious.
Rolling Bird is a modern tribute to the classic arcade game Rolling Thunder.
Graphically it looks a bit like an NES game, or an old arcade game. The colours are bold and the animation simple, but still excellent.
A brilliant sequel to the tile-based RPG of 2012, Legend of Grimrock II is more of the same atmospheric adventuring from developer Almost Human, but with 2014‘s new content and ideas.
Grimrock 2 begins after a shipwreck; on a beach, with rocky, exterior locations, which is a surprising and refreshing way to start a game like this. You can even walk in the shallow water, which is nice, and on the very first level the shallow water holds an important secret. Don’t miss it.
Golden Hornet, by Hijong Park, is an excellent ‘modern retro’-style, ‘twin stick’, helicopter-based shoot ’em up, set in a variety of different scrolling levels.
Terry Cavanagh‘s VVVVVV is an extremely smart-but-simple platform/indie game that feels a lot like a Commodore 64 game from the ’80s, although it was actually released in 2010.
This incredible “indie” dungeon crawler absolutely drips atmosphere and is bloody terrifying in places! It’s a heck of a challenge too…
Legend of Grimrock plays very much in the mould of Dungeon Master, and other first-person, tile-based RPGs, but it does it so much better than almost all of the others.
Bit Blaster XL is a modern (2016) take on the age-old Asteroids style of gameplay, and what it does it does extremely well.
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a smart modern, indie retro game that crosses rhythm game mechanics with rogue-like dungeon-crawling. And it works extremely well and is a lot of fun to play. Crypt of the NecroDancer is like Ultima, but played to the beat of an Abba tune…
Sunless Sea was developed by Failbetter Games with the help of a Kickstarter campaign in 2015.
