MadmanEpic

This game might capture the fantasy journey feeling the best of anything I've played, and is maybe the most "better than the sum of its parts" feeling on every level. No one part of it is particularly good on its own but it just comes together so well. Even the visuals are like that, even though the individual assets mostly look pretty rough you get some really dang nice vistas. It's a real shame it never gets talked about.

This thread isn't dead until people stop posting, dang it! Just about every game in the Ace Combat has incredibly good music, 7 being the most recent. You can find downloads for all of their soundtracks at Khinsider. (In particular I'd recommend also looking at the soundtracks of Ace Combat 04, Ace Combat 5, and Ace Combat Zero, all of which are on that site as well.) On an unrelated note, Boneworks also has a great synthy soundtrack. As far as I'm aware, you can only download it by buying it through Steam, but I'm sure you can work something else out if need be.

when the horde appears

I'm surprised Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead isn't on the list. It's the open source zombie (and everything else) roguelike survival game. If you want to take on the apocalypse as a failed cyborg, a wilderness man rejected from society and living off of the land in the forests of New England, or a schizophrenic alcoholic trucker who only knows Tai-chi and knitting, there's no contest. It takes a bit to learn, but compared to other "hard" roguelikes, it's fairly approachable, since the controls make relative sense and the launcher comes with a really nice tileset. It still may be a bit confusing initially if you're not familiar with these sorts of roguelikes at all, but you'll probably be adjusted to the controls within a few hours. Don't underestimate the wildlife. If you can see the coyotes, it's already too late.

I'd say this one is worth it on sale. It's easily one of the best looking games I've ever played, and the investigation aspect is fun, but they're right about how short it is.

It's free, so you may as well give it a go if you have half an hour or so free. Also, it's not GaaS, so it gets brownie points on that front.

If it tells you anything, it took me about three minutes to remember I had already played this.

Very fun with friends. Truly embraces glorious dwarven culture.

I liked it. It has some big issues, but it does some pretty interesting things. I particularly liked the murder mystery sidequest that you're left to solve entirely on your own and which changes the ending based on whether you got it right (or at all). A sequel to this is in development that carries on with the outcome of the first game and plays more similarly to Deus Ex. I've heard you can talk your way through the entire game, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Heads up, this is definitely not an exploration game. It's very much focused on deathmatch and objective modes, just with a similar setting to STALKER. I made a video about it a while ago as well. Is linking that allowed? I guess it isn't not allowed.

This one is a lot better than I expected. It's kind of like the Dead Space to Darkwood's Silent Hill, with more action while still retaining some spookiness. A sequel is also in development!

This game is great. If you don't want to buy it before giving it a go, a demo version is available on the developer's itch.io page.

This game is a bit of a mixed bag for me, since I do like it, but I liked the old closed alpha and beta versions a lot more. The issue is that this game makes you way too overpowered with melee. When swinging a melee weapon, you can dash a few meters (or much, much farther with some weapons) instantly to score a hit, and cycle through multiple weapons instantly to counter the cooldown. This is opposed to the earlier versions, where there was no pausing and no dashing, meaning the melee combat just felt like Hotline Miami in space, which was way better in my opinion. The result of that change is that running in and meleeing everyone is usually the right call if possible. That's an issue because it means the developer had to then dramatically increase the number of shields and armor that enemies have to counter it, and those are more annoying than fun to deal with. I wish there was just an option to decrease those and disable dashing/pausing, because in either case, there's pretty much a "correct" way to go about things. There are a lot of ways you could complete your objectives, but most of the time, they won't be nearly as practical. the exception to this is just stealing another ship and using its missiles to make a new front door.

This one is a pretty great time. There are some performance issues and a bit of jankiness but it's a really fun and occasionally thrilling game. I'd say it's more of a stealth game than raw exploration, though.

It's surprisingly easy to go really, really fast in this game. Feels nice.