I’ve been discovering that despite what I originally thought - there exists a small collection of high quality games which are not only free but also developed openly. I’ll list the ones I have found to date, I wouldn’t mind seeing any recommendations!
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Mindustry - Essentially a fully complete indie game. You can buy it on steam to gain access to a few other features but nothing game changing.
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Super Tux Kart - Literally Mario Kart.
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Super Tux - Literally Mario
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Luanti formerly Minetest. - A voxel game engine, you can add hundreds of mods to make the game into what you want, including into just straight up Minecraft.
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Veloren - An open MMO, still very much in alpha development
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Thrive - Spore on steroids, still in development although I’ve spent a good 20 hours having a lot of fun with where it’s at, at the moment - with the bacteria stage mostly complete and the multicellular stage taking shape.
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Unciv - just civilization.
One thing you probably notice with this list is there are a lot of games which are clones or essentially clones of other games. So I wonder if anyone knows of games which have their own unique style and ideas?
I’ll probably post some reviews of each of these games and any more I find out about in separate posts.
Here’s a Wikipedia list, but if anyone has any favorites rather than me just dumping a list of varying quality games on to this post.
Endless sky is really fun, and might scratch the same minmax itch as thrive.
Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to the classic Escape Velocity series. Explore other star systems. Earn money by trading, carrying passengers, or completing missions. Use your earnings to buy a better ship or to upgrade the weapons and engines on your current one. Blow up pirates. Take sides in a civil war. Or leave human space behind and hope to find friendly aliens whose culture is more civilized than your own.
One of my favourite games out there - not just open source ones specifically, but like all games included.
There’s HyperRogue, a very fun and interesting game both on PC or mobile
Yeah I’ve actually played that before, never played to completion mind you, I ought to get round to finishing it sometime.
Not sure if Pixel Dungeon (and its derivatives) fit in this. They’re released under GPLv3. But it’s a complete game, and not a clone (though it follows the traditional roguelike genre).
In the same genre, check out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
