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.


  • felsiq
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    1 month ago

    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.