Wired from the ashes of twin stick Shooters, Arksync evolves the genre with breakneck player movement and combat. Survive and buy weapons, utilities, and upgrades; then risk it all as you fight to survive, and take a toy bear home.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828800/Arksync/

Unusual game, not without charm though. It also has a demo.

Go back to your hometown and tear it down with a sledgehammer in this narrative exploration game. Confront your past in a devastating story about feeling like you no longer belong in the place you grew up.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3743260/Virtue_and_a_Sledgehammer/

You are Marie, a cyborg mercenary dropped into the rot of a post-Soviet city of corruption and opportunity. Shoot, sneak, hack, climb or talk your way through alt-history cyberpunk Poland in an immersive sim where every problem has multiple solutions and every rooftop is reachable.

Shodanon has been fairly consistent in his statements that Peripeteia devs will never support a product that uses genAI.

• https://steamcommunity.com/app/1437760/discussions/0/598520132336151346/#c598520270912751126

So boring... can't wait for people who b1tch about AI not being able to tell the difference 18 months from now.

except we'll be able to tell and will never support any product that uses it.

• https://steamcommunity.com/app/1437760/discussions/0/598520132336151346/#c598520270912757785

Go consoom your slop somewhere else.

Hi! We are making a cozy organizing game. You play as a novice Witch, who's Grandpa has gone on a vacation and left a his Alchemy Shop at their care, but experiment at cauldron went not quite as planned and now whole shop is a mess. So your task is to tidy up the place and sort 3338 potions, alchemy ingredients and Books and, also - brew potions to do it faster and better! The game is called Magically Sorted.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4622320/Magically_Sorted/

We do not use gen AI and we also didn't use any assets for items you are going to sort. Eveything was handcrafted by us with lots of attention to details and visuals. For example, designs of the potions reflect their category and effects. For example, the potion that makes you speak backwards looks like an upside down bottle :) We put lots of care into each single item and everything in the game is intentional ^_^

Many alchemy ingredients featured in our game are real (we also have some fictional ones) and many of them have descriptions and flavour texts based on folklore and witchcraft.

We also have fictional alchemy-related books with witty and whimsy titles with references to some classic or famous literature that a player also needs to sort. And, of course, the game features potions brewing mechanic to discover power ups!

We used our personal savings to hire an illustrator and she drew stunning pictures of ingredients that we use for the labels and we also used personal savings to hire a composer and localizers, none of them use gen ai :)

If you are interested, please wishlist/follow it on steam :) It will help us a lot! Thank you for your attention and have a wonderful day <3

Esoteric Ebb is a single-player CRPG inspired by the freedom of tabletop adventures. Unravel a political conspiracy with your goblin sidekick. Roll dice in tense encounters. Become a cleric of legends or completely ruin the campaign.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2057760/discussions/0/759556695324396337/#c759556695324400125

we will not be using AI.

First, thanks for the community, it was really needed after the slop hell that was the Steam Next Fest.

I have a lot of weird games but if I posted them all I would get kicked out for too much self-promotion, so I decided to show the one that's more fun to play, and free: Sayonara Sigil Sentry.

This game is a bullet hell boss rush with a twist: instead of shooting, you have to draw a magic rune by marking points on the battle arena:

You know that moment on bullet hell games in which you find a sweet spot you can camp on safely and mash the "shoot" button? That doesn't happen in S3. You will have to be moving constantly and planning ahead to get the rune right.

The insanity doesn't end at the gameplay. Screw high-end Unreal Engine graphics, we have collage art made from free stock images. The game also has a bizarre lore mashing up Costa Rican and Galician folklore with eldritch horror, conspiracies... and a subtle, elegant critique of genAI itself...

Ok, maybe it's not that subtle.

Who the hell am I kidding, this is straight up Luddite Midwest Angelica.

Available for free on Steam and Itch.

it's become one of my favorite roguelikes in the past few years. the third entry is in beta, it's been super fun.

My wife and I recently released our first game, a short point and click time loop mystery, all made by hand. (It's open source too!)

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated seeing this community come up in my feed. I don't post much on lemmy, but recently my brother gave us feedback after trying out our game.

He felt like we could have made a much better game if we "embraced AI tools"

Two direct quotes: "I think it is an insane time to try to make a video game a success unless you are embracing current AI tools. The market is about to be flooded with 100x as many games as before, and yeah sure 90% of them will be slop, but the 10% of 'real developers' who start use modern AI tools will make games that are 10x better than they could have a year ago"

"our generation was given the idea that if you follow your dreams, and do what you love, and put something out there that you are proud of, that people will buy it, and that is just not how the world works"

It was heart breaking. We hadn't even asked for feedback or anything, we just shared a key with him because we wanted to share the joy of having made something.

Anyways, I won't rant more but I wanted just to share my recent experience and I look forward to seeing more human games