Modern-ish Freeware Game Recomendations!

Hello! I'm going to be pretty formal on this post, as I believe these games deserve some respect. (also maybe so I could repost this to tumblr sometime?)

This is going to be a list of fun little games that you can play for free on limited hardware that I enjoyed thoroughly or that I want to get around to playing. Some of these are completely free, others are name your own price. I'll write a short description for each of them too, so you can get a sense for what they're about. So if you cant really spend too much money, are looking for something short, or cant run big games too well, this is the list for you!


1- UNDERTALE Yellow and Deltarune Chapters 1 & 2
I just played through Undertale Yellow, a full length fangame for the original Undertale that only just came out of a 7 year development period. I loved it to absolute bits. The bullet patterns are creative as the original's, the new additions to the world seem really cohesive the more time you spend with them, making the underground feel much more alive and interconnected. Some areas really do stretch the idea of being trapped in an underground cavern, but the environments are so vividly made that its hard not to marvel at them. While at first the characters didnt grab me, they ended up growing more and more compelling, to the point I ended up crying at a lot of story beats. The connections it makes back to the original game feel strongly satisfying, and while not exactly everything feels 100% lore cohesive, as the game was first conceived a few months after the original, it takes full advantage of being a prequel and feels like it could have happened in the same world as the original game. Would highly recommend if you enjoyed the original. (The only real issue that I have is that I experienced a bug right after one of the final boss battles during what I assume to be the penultimate cutscene, causing me to have to restart the game and try the multiphase final fight I was having a real challenge with all over again, making it kinda hard to be invested again to get through it all. I did end up beating it in the writing of this post, and I added a few more tears to the counter, evevn though i had been thoroughly spoiled by that time.) Also, if you have any interest at all in Toby Fox and haven't already, the first two chapters of Deltarune are free! The later chapters are going to be a paid bundle of some variety, but they are some pretty fulfilling as stories and fun romps on their own, while leaving a lot of intruige in the air as it sets up for future plot points.


2- Cave Story
How could I not put this one on here. Its a fun little game where you play as a robot called Quote, trying to save a bunch of rabit people in a cave, in the sky, from an evil scientist. I cant really say much else that hasnt been said, so here's a link.
https://www.cavestory.org/download/cave-story.php

3- Another Metriod 2 Remake (AM2R)

AM2R is exactly what it says on the lid. A fan made remake of Metroid 2 on the Game Boy. Nintendo took this one down as a licensed take on a reamke was made for the 3DS by MercurySteam, who later went on to make Metroid Dread. Its been a while since I've played through it, but I remember it very fondly. It looked and sounded great, was challenging, and is a very fun re-imagining. Its pretty easy to track down a download link however, and there are some fan mods for this fangame that allow multiplayer of a few varieties. Would very much recommend.

4- Susan Taxpayer
Susan Taxpayer is a little platformer game made by Punkitt made in the SMBX2 engine, inspired by Warioland 4! It gets compared to Pizza Tower a bit because they both draw from the same influences, which can be kinda annoying, but susan taxpayer stands on its own. Set around the theme of an office complex and general mundanity turned very cartoonish, its a real visual treat. Its been real fun watching this one be made progress on. It gets compared to Pizza Tower a bit because they both draw from the same influences, which can get a bit annoying at times but goddamn it we need more Wario like games because they can be so fun. Its in a few demo collections, the most recent being the SAGE Christmas bundle for this year, and is also available on Punkitt's itch.io page. On that same page is Astral Guard: Table Talk, a little teaser for another project she's working on in RPGMaker 2003. Hell, you could probably just scroll around on rpgmaker.net to find some well made stuff. Speaking of RPGMaker 2003 though....


5- OFF by Mortis Ghost
OFF is a good old fashion RPGMaker horror game first releasing in 2008. Made in collaboration with the yet to be comic artist Mortis Ghost, and the composer Allias Conrad Coldwood, the world of OFF is so eerie and strange, these surreal environments in odd colors with twisted versions of somewhat recognizable concepts, presented with this almost scrap-bookish feel with digitally scanned, sketched and inked designs for characters and enemies, choppy ragtime and jazz samples, old diagrams and fliers with a sense of decay to them through how they've been put into RPGMaker. Flowery language, eerie prose, this strange hollowness to everything around you that is so desperately trying to mimic staying alive and vibrant, its beautifully made. There are a lot of puzzles that would definitely require a pen and paper to pass through, and a few that were very cheeky and fun, the way in only an old RPGMaker game made for fun could. A handful of secrets too. I played on what was intended to be the definitive English translation, 3.0, though I hear some like 2.0 better for one reason or another. Check it out! (psst! there's also a fan sequel called HOME)


6- Yumi Niiki and Fangames
There's already a dedicated thread for these in here, but I'd thought to mention them anyway because they're just neat. I've had some good fun messing around and getting taught the ropes in Yume 2kki in Yumi Niiki Online. Sharing little secrets people have taught to each other about the dreams and how to navigate them is so unbelievably special.

7- Sonic Robo Blast 2 (and mods!)
Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a fanmade 3D Sonic game, made by modding Doom 2. Its changed several hands over the past 25 years it's existed, and still survives to this day. I'm a pretty casual sonic enjoyer, who sucks at playing Mania, so I wasn't expecting to like it too much, but it was a fair bit of fun running around the starting level, though I should have probably started off as Knuckles or something because I couldn't control sonic very well. However, since SRB2 is already a mod built off an engine that is famously very malleable and has a consistent mod creation scene, SRB2 has a few notable mods of its own! The most popular is Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, which changes the game into a very well made racing game, with tons of mods on top of mods on top of mods you can install to have evn more custom tracks and characters! Another really impressive one is Sonic Robo Blast 2 Persona, which is a shockingly well made recreation of how the Persona side of the SMT series handles it's turn based combat. It seems to take most of its mechanical inspiration inside battle from Persona 5, but is very clearly recreating the Tartarus dungeons from Persona 3, which I think is pretty neat You can have prominent members of the sonic cast as party members, each with their own Personas and elemental affinities. Also did i mention that both SRB2Kart and SRB2Persona support online multiplayer? You can race against others in Kart, and crawl dungeons with up to 4 parties of 4 players in Persona Open source development can really do some awesome things I swear...

8- Celeste Classic and Celeste 2 Lani's Quest
The original version of Celeste, developed for the Pico-8, is completely free to play on itch.io! (You can also unlock it to play at anytime within the 2018 game, if you can find it within Chapter 3.) Its a fun and challenging little platformer, and its fun to see the concept really reach so far back, and seeing how far its come. Interestingly enough, on the third anniversary of Celeste 2018, some of the lead devs got together and made a sequel to the original Pico-8 title! Instead of having an airdash, Lani is given a grappling hook, leading to some new and interesting ways to approach platforming. All these games and most of Maddy Thorson's back catalogue is available on her website for free!!! (Just her alone could take up a lot of entries here, I'm a big fan of Celeste 2018 and I cant wait what happens when the next game that the EXOK team is working on, Earthblade, is released.)
https://www.mattmakesgames.com/

Honorable Mentions: Lonely Wolf Treat, WindowKill
I'm putting these both here because while they seem really interesting, I haven't touched them yet. Lonely Wolf Treat and its sequels are very short and sweet gay romance stories with what seems to be a very innocent tone, but I've got a feeling that there might be some darker theme's it'll explore, from what I've heard about it. I'll hopefully be ble to come back once I've finished playing them and give you my thoughts. I've also seen demonstrations for a game called Windowkill, a shoot em up rougelike that plays around with the windows it's open in. The player having to perform actions like shooting the sides of the window for it to expand on that side, for greater visibility of oncoming enemies, and so the constantly shrinking window doesn't close in on them. its hard to explain, so I hope this visual will help. https://youtu.be/23QzZEI9wI8?si=_EtwROelpGGp7qUX


9- Where to keep looking, and Closing Remarks
If none of these really grab your attention, you can always try browsing websites like GameJolt, itch.io, and rpgmaker.net. Coolmathgames and Newgrounds did what they could to preserve Adobe Flash on their sites, and the preservation quality of said games on Coolmath can be not great, they do have a few html games too. Newgrounds can be really overwhelming with the site's history of general shock value gore and bigotry type sludge (among other problems), but they've managed to future proof a large section of internet history and are very proud of that legacy of being a creators first space online, which is kinda respectable. I really enjoyed playing the Henry Stickmin games there, and you could also find the original versions of stuff like The Binding of Isaac. If you're still really hungry for flash games, the Flashpoint Archive Player gives you a huge swath of old flash games preseved and emulated very well! Using that collection, I love to go back and play the stuff I used to earlier on in my life, like Crystal Story 2, or the tie in games for Slugterra and Splatalot that were hosted on the ABC 3 website. Otherwise, look around for game jams, demo collections, and other fun places to find something you think you'd enjoy! I hope this forum can be used in future to give more recommendations and reviews, as well as looking at events and projects that could give you a lot to chew on. This post blew massively out of proportion from just wanting to talk about UT Yellow, so i really hope this can be the start of something cool on this forum.

I hope you all are having a fantastic holiday!


Thank you for reading!
Signed, lexi :3

awesome post !!!! also looking forward to other reccomendations people have  

also, to people who dont have a pc (like me) if you want to play RPGMaker 2003 games on your phone (android, dont know if theres one for iphone) theres an rpgmaker emulator called EasyRPG!! it was a little tricky to set up, but nothing i couldnt figure out without a couple tutorials

ok FINALLY writing a response to this post. this is so cool!!!!!!!!!! as you said in the end of the post, i really hope this forum can become a good place for people to have a community and find stuff to play and talk about. you gave lots of good recommendations, and some i hadn't seen before! the metroid remake is so cool, i cant vouch for the gameplay but just from screenshots this looks so well made. Also those sonic games are crazy!!! the persona one looks good, id never expect a combination of SMT and sonic. people clearly put so much work in to this

thank you for mentioning rpgmaker.net, i completely forgot about that place! just having a quick look i already found something interesting, it's called Omega Genesis, it looks like a web horror-type game and people seem to be saying its good in the comments. - https://rpgmaker.net/games/12541/

and I have some places to find games! theres videos i found recently by a guy named "Lute", called playing on the computer. the first one is just about free games, but the 2 after include both free and games you pay for. but theres some real games that seem pretty amazing and are not very well known at all, so theyre probably good to check out (most of them are probably good to play on low hardware too). hes kind of crass and i dont agree with everything he says, but the games he talks about are cool. as an example of a game talked about is Dead Seater, which is an old style survival horror game in the veins of old resident evil with fixed camera angles, free to play. (looking at this it seems to actually require an i5 procesor which is surprisingly high given the graphics of it, but since its free you could give it a try anyway and see how it goes.) - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1570080/Dead_Seater/

Nitro Rad also might be good for finding games, he has videos on a lot of indie platformers and old games that would easy to emulate on low hardware (SNES - PS2 era type thing.) this might not be the perfect fit for this thread, but there must be something people here will like. (theres also playlists of videos for specific types of games like RPGs or platformers).

i hope this forum stays alive to become a community like you were saying in your post, spreading the word about places like this is probably the really only way to get more users and get a more solid community. i partially feel to blame this forum hasnt been more active/bigger cause ive been dealing with mental health stuff that makes a space where youre knowingly more directly interacting with users, as opposed to something like tumblr which is just social media, but i want to keep trying. guess ill just have to keep being vocal about its existence then!

benni Admin_104 wrote:ok FINALLY writing a response to this post. this is so cool!!!!!!!!!! as you said in the end of the post, i really hope this forum can become a good place for people to have a community and find stuff to play and talk about. you gave lots of good recommendations, and some i hadn't seen before! the metroid remake is so cool, i cant vouch for the gameplay but just from screenshots this looks so well made. Also those sonic games are crazy!!! the persona one looks good, id never expect a combination of SMT and sonic. people clearly put so much work in to this  

thank you for mentioning rpgmaker.net, i completely forgot about that place! just having a quick look i already found something interesting, it's called Omega Genesis, it looks like a web horror-type game and people seem to be saying its good in the comments. - https://rpgmaker.net/games/12541/

and I have some places to find games! theres videos i found recently by a guy named "Lute", called playing on the computer. the first one is just about free games, but the 2 after include both free and games you pay for. but theres some real games that seem pretty amazing and are not very well known at all, so theyre probably good to check out (most of them are probably good to play on low hardware too). hes kind of crass and i dont agree with everything he says, but the games he talks about are cool. as an example of a game talked about is Dead Seater, which is an old style survival horror game in the veins of old resident evil with fixed camera angles, free to play. (looking at this it seems to actually require an i5 procesor which is surprisingly high given the graphics of it, but since its free you could give it a try anyway and see how it goes.) - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1570080/Dead_Seater/

Nitro Rad also might be good for finding games, he has videos on a lot of indie platformers and old games that would easy to emulate on low hardware (SNES - PS2 era type thing.) this might not be the perfect fit for this thread, but there must be something people here will like. (theres also playlists of videos for specific types of games like RPGs or platformers).

i hope this forum stays alive to become a community like you were saying in your post, spreading the word about places like this is probably the really only way to get more users and get a more solid community. i partially feel to blame this forum hasnt been more active/bigger cause ive been dealing with mental health stuff that makes a space where youre knowingly more directly interacting with users, as opposed to something like tumblr which is just social media, but i want to keep trying. guess ill just have to keep being vocal about its existence then!

I'm glad to have you respond, especially now that you made it through your struggles enough to write this. I'm so glad you enjoyed the recommendations, and even brought your own!! (maybe if we organize it right, we can play Sonic/Persona together sometime!!) . I totally get the feeling of enjoying a YouTube video but not being 100% sure on how i feel about the person who made it and how they've written it tho, ill check him out still. Nitro Rad is Awesome!! he was kind of the push for me that got me to play off for the first time, and I enjoyed it greatly. He's so cool.

As for your recommendations, they both look really spooky! Emulating PS1 horror is a very tricky thing to do, and the idea that the game you're downloading is a cursed puzzle being passed around on old forums is super intriguing, will have to give that a look. My computer is a potato that can barely run Source games, so ill have to pass on Dead Seater
I have a recommendation right back at you though!
The Water is Wide is something i wish i talked about when bringing up rpgmaker.net, but funnly enough the download page on it went down on rpgmaker.net, but theres still an itch.io upload. It seems to me a more episodic type of thing, set on an island where you join a marine biology society and doument all the fish in the surrounding area. There's said to be some mature themes, but there's a full trigger list in a text file with the download. and it's on mac!
https://toninadev.itch.io/the-water-is-wide



I wonder if i could also promote the forum to other people I know, but kinda wanted your permission first, as well as thinking about if they would actually have a fun time here. It's nice to have this secluded corner of the net to be made our own, but it would be cool to have more users here. I really did appreciate you thinking the post was good enough to share on tumblr

awesome reccomendations! Omega Genesis and The water is wide seem really cool, ill have to check these out some time.

another one i just remembered is the lain psx game (not really sure what else to call it, since it isnt exactly a game but whatever) you can play it on your browser! they even fan-translated it into multiple different languages, not just english!
https://3d.laingame.net/#/

another cool free browser game ive heard good things about is corru.observer which, according to the game's wiki is "a mixed media experience revolving around investigating a fragmented alien biocomputer" i think its kind of like a web-mystery visual novel, seems pretty awesome!
https://corru.observer/

oh woah both of these replies have very good stuff, water is wide and the observer one look interesting!

although, i tried clicking the link for the water is wide and it gives me a 404 page? i tried looking for it generally and i cant find any working download for it i wonder where it's gone, cause if you were able to get the link for your reply i feel like it mustve been taken down recently.

and i love the lain psx game!!!!! i've been meaning to go through it properly but ive gone through a couple levels of the sound files, just recently i finished the anime so i should. it also has a way to play it offline if you dont have internet access all the time. if i haven't posted it somewhere else already theres a good video essay talking about it, and games released at a similar time that have as large of a creative scope -

also yes feel free to advertise this forum anywhere!! you have my full permission lol.

benni Admin_104 wrote:oh woah both of these replies have very good stuff, water is wide and the observer one look interesting!

although, i tried clicking the link for the water is wide and it gives me a 404 page? i tried looking for it generally and i cant find any working download for it i wonder where it's gone, cause if you were able to get the link for your reply i feel like it mustve been taken down recently.

and i love the lain psx game!!!!! i've been meaning to go through it properly but ive gone through a couple levels of the sound files, just recently i finished the anime so i should. it also has a way to play it offline if you dont have internet access all the time. if i haven't posted it somewhere else already theres a good video essay talking about it, and games released at a similar time that have as large of a creative scope -

also yes feel free to advertise this forum anywhere!! you have my full permission lol.

the water is wide got taken down???? i saw that its rpgmaker.net page was deleted, but the whole itch.io page being down is very concerning. it seems that the developer's tumblr page is gone too. for all i know i have the last copy of this game, and that's kinda scary. i did manage to snag a download so i can email the files to you if you all wanna give it a go, flick me a discord dm and ill do my best to send it to you. im more concerned about the other games of the dev's that i dont have, like it's sequel SOLIEL and a game which looks like their take on alice in wonderland.

very worrying that all of that stuff got deleted! tell me if you find anything further, i hope theyre doing ok it might be worth it uploading your copy of the game to archive.org, but it might also be good to wait until you see something from the dev about it. either way, very unfortunate.