It’s distressingly easy to disregard any game with simplistic visuals. Steam has poisoned the well, so to speak. Take a gander at the new release page at any given time and your eyes will be assaulted by low-effort asset flips and a disturbing amount of hentai. The thing is, there are some gems buried in that rubbish, but few people are willing to shove their hands into that sewage to fish them out.
Hardspace Shipbreaker falls under the category of a game that essentially emulates a job that would be horrible in real life, but is for some reason fun to play. As a kid, adults could not fathom why I was playing Harvest Moon, a game about growing crops and taking care of farm animals. I had no explanation to give in return. I sometimes feel that way about Shipbreaker as well, and it’s literally my job to explain why I enjoy games.
Dome Keeper takes several common game mechanisms to form something that feels fresh and familiar in equal measure. Nothing about it is particularly innovative. It’s simply a rogue-lite where you mine resources and defend your dome from waves of attacking creatures. But it’s how Dome Keeper executes those mechanisms that give it a unique flavor.
Blacken Slash is an abstract minimalist rogue-lite that takes place in a corrupted retro computer system. Some folks may be tempted to dismiss Blacken Slash due to its simplistic visuals. But it has been my experience that very talented solo developers often hide Narnia in the Wardrobe, so to speak. Blacken Slash certainly lends credibility to that theory.