True Gaming

I recently played an indie game called Iron Danger that allowed you to rewind time.

It was a party based real-time-with-pause tactical RPG. So you'd pause, command your 2 party members to use their skills and then rewind if things didn't go exactly right.

It led to combat being a really interesting puzzle where you're playing with the timing of skills to block a hit at the right moment, get a knockdown off before an enemy hits you, or trying to position your characters just right.

It's a nice twist on the typical tactical RPG combat that sort of merges turn based and RTWP combat. Timing matters, where normally in a RTWP combat you wouldn't have the ability to fine tune your actions, and in turn based timing doesn't matter at all.

I got kinda hooked for a bit on Potionomics. The card-based haggling "combat" system isn't anything revolutionary, but it just works very well and is fun to play. I also found the side "activities" to gather materials engaging. And on top of it the presentation is super polished. Love it.

Ctrl Alt Ego is a recent indie immersive sim built around the mechanic of jumping into and controlling various robots and objects, which opens up so many possibilities and paths to progression. You can fight enemies yourself, sneak past, take them over, get them to attack each other, even skip entire sections if you're clever. It's chock full of whimsical British humor and charming writing, very clearly a labor of love and passion. The entire plot revolves around the idea of yeeting yourself into things though, so taking that out would certainly change the experience entirely. It's a fun twist on the imsim genre and well worth checking out.