We all play the same games most of the time. From the classic FPS grandfather’s to the Point 'n Click adventures that never really got any traction past the 90s.
What are your favorite hidden gems? Games that few people know, but should know?
I’ll start. Ascendency. A strategy space game where you pick an alien race, and try to take over, or befriend, the entire universe. Getting spaceships, going to planets, building bases and diplomacy. The time can be sped up, but do it at your own risk, because the AI does not wait.
Does interactive fiction count? Then Advent / Adventure / Colossal Cave. I still have my map of it around somewhere.
And I’ll ask here because I haven’t turned it up anywhere else: there was another interactive fiction game, probably around the late 80’s. It might’ve been called something like Stranded or Survival? You were in a spaceship that had crashed on the moon and you needed to do various tasks to repair it and take off. At one point, your oxygen runs out; to get more, you had to do the whole “maze of twisty little passages, all alike”, which I think led to a vending machine? There were some other repair tasks; I think one of them was replacing the battery. Also, if you took too long in completing the tasks (like you took a wrong turn in the maze and took too long to recover) then, even if you did everything else correctly, the ship blew up!
Anyway, if anyone happens to know the game I’m talking about, I’d love to find it again. And again, this was text-based interactive fiction, not video.
Try to look at the exodos collection. It has a lite version where you can pick the games to download. This way you can look at all the text based adventures, and you might find what you are looking for.