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!

  • 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.

  • Super Tux Kart - Literally Mario Kart.

  • Super Tux - Literally Mario

  • 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.

  • Veloren - An open MMO, still very much in alpha development

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • @Jesus_666English
    4•1 month ago

    Well, there’s the odd hybrid that is OpenTyrian. The code is GPL2 and the assets are separately available as freeware (ie. gratis but not free-as-in-speech). That puts it in the same boat as e.g. OpenXcom (free engine, nonfree assets) but makes it slightly cheaper.

    Tyrian is a bit unique as a shmup; you don’t immediately die when you get hit and you get to customize your ship. Development of the open source engine has been extremely slow (the last release is two years old) but then again the project just aims to be a modern implementation of one specific MS-DOS game and it does that job just fine.

    • Clay_pidginEnglish
      3•1 month ago

      Tyrian is great fun, and open tyrian works fine. I recommend them.