Picked up two games this week, both of which I would recommend.
Undertale
Undertale is pretty much this year's indie darling, a role played previously by Papers, Please, Braid, Super Meatboy, Minecraft, etc etc. As is usual for this particular honor, the game is very very good. Undertale is a experimental RPG that toys with gamer expectations, so though it appears to be a standard pixel graphics Earthbound-inspired RPG (perhaps even RPGmakerish), it is not. The experience is perhaps best described as 'whimsical and charming,' at least those are the words I would choose. It is also well written, funny, surprising, emotional, slightly disturbing... and excellent. For 10$ (or less on sale) it is one of the best games I'll play this year. My only regret is I didn't play it on release... and also that the game is not particularly long, lasting less than 10 hrs for most players. Any actual description of the gameplay or story would be a disservice to you. Suffice to say I am a jaded, monstrous old man at this point and it gave me feels.
ARK Survival Evolved
ARK is this year's big crafting and survival title, apparently; the other big one I guess is 7 Days to Die, the zombicaust crafting/survival game, which I also own but have not really played. ARK's big gimmick is that it's full of dinosaurs and looks pretty great and yeah, both those things are true and are pretty awesome. The dinosaurs are probably the best I've seen in gaming, and you get to tame the bastards and ride them too. It runs at about 30fps on my aging i7 with gtx960 on high, which really means I should drop the settings, but damn it's pretty. The gameplay itself is good, as well, though a bit too grindy for me in general. It takes long enough to get anything done in these types of games without artificial barriers to progress like level caps and such. Still, I loaded it up thinking I'd screw around for 30 minutes and 4.5 hrs later I realized I'd be getting 3 hrs of sleep before work. In that time I fashioned some simple tools (pick, axe, slingshot, torch, and spear), built a couple fireplaces and a sad little thatch hut, made a crappy set of clothes out of plant fibers, and killed the hell out of a series of progressively larger dinosaurs ranging from the tiny compys from Jurassic Park up to a duckbilled Parasaur and even a Styracosaurus, to say nothing of dozens of dodo birds and trilobites and coelecanths; I'll admit I may have taken advantage of some creatures getting stuck in trees but hey, that's life.
ARK is in Early Access on Steam, which means Beta, which means it has plenty of issues (my primary ones are related to optimization and controller support, which is good but imperfect), but there's already enough content to recommend the game, to say nothing of the multiplayer content (that I ignore). It's normally 30$ but is the 'teaser' game for the March Humble Monthly Bundle, which costs 12$; the value was good enough for me at that price to give it a shot, and I still get 6 or so other games come next Friday. I wouldn't spend 30$ on the game in its unfinished state but 12$? I arguably got my 12$ worth last night.
