Matewis: Cool, you've rekindled my interest in the game :)

Matewis: It was the reviews that scared me off at first.

Matewis: As for reaction fire, is it that you can only react after an attack, or is it like the original 1994 XCom where reaction stats duked it out to determine who fired first when you came across an alien, or vice versa?

WCardskeeper: Wow, thanks for pointing out Serpents in the Staglands, that one definitely looks interesting! I'll look into it, thank you very much.

awalterj: Your squad members have 2 action points and it costs 1 action point to put them into retaliation mode. So you can e.g. move to a new position and then activate retaliation. It only gets triggered when an enemy attacks you, not when an enemy just pops around the corner. Retaliation isn't a skill in itself, it relies on the "aim" skill of each member and the hit chance is calculated the same as if you had taken a 1 AP shot at an enemy during your turn. 1 AP shots are way less accurate than 2 AP shots and therefor most often miss so I didn't even use retaliation much, only when there was no other choice and I had an enemy turd who kept popping out from behind a corner and kept going into hiding again before it was my turn. Retaliation mode at least gives you a chance to hit that corner hugger while he's out of cover without going after him up close where you might get slaughtered by something else that lurks there but you didn't see it. If you're behind cover, the enemy will miss you very often even if the cover bonus is only 15% for half cover and 30% for full cover. If you're behind hard cover then they can't hit you at all - unless the enemy is in retaliation mode in which case they get to fire back at you when it's you doing the pop around corner move. If you kill the enemy then they naturally can't retaliate but towers and strong enemies usually won't fall after one hit, especially not in hard mode.

awalterj: Wait, you still haven't bought it despite all my elaborate propaganda attempts? Maybe I should just take out the Persuadertron instead!

Matewis: ...
It seems difficulty and balancing can be a bit wonky with these indie titles. Case and point Revenge of the Titans : awesome awesome game, but it becomes nearly impossibly difficult towards the end, with some intermittent easy-ish levels.

awalterj: Ugh that reminds me, I still have to finish Syndicate Wars. Can't get past the blasted glass space station level :P

awalterj: ...

hyperagathon: So. Whenever this sort of topic comes up, I never can stop debating what is "unpopular". In the interest of amusing myself somewhat, I've decided to adopt the following methodology: look up how many reviews a game has on Steam.

But before you take a look at the list below (copied the one in OP and added the two games mentioned since the last edit), ask yourself: at what number of reviews would you say a game still counts as "unknown"? Never mind "underrated", as that particular issue cannot be solved by adopting any simple procedure such as this. For me, it's a nice round hundred or below.

Without further ado:

Serpents in the Staglands - 60. Yep, unpopular is right. The audience for hardcore indie RPGs is small. And this is why it took a new funding model to bring back RPGs worth playing. Reading this text legally obliges you to buy ten copies.

Sunless Sea - 1627. No.

Race the Sun - 3670. Hell no.

Her Story - 1105. Nyet. Though I'll admit my surprise at this outcome. But then again, that's why I opted for this approach.

Halfway - 240. Well, compared to the rest of the list, 240 is a pathetic 1.4 times over the limit. Approaching unpopularity? Good job? :)

The Cat Lady - 1887. Nope. Same goes for basically any recent-ish AGS game, I think.

La Mulana - 1202. No, and the only reason it doesn't have ten times as many is its age. This is one of earliest indie hits (2005), usually mentioned in the same breath as Cave Story (2004).

One Finger Death Punch - 8210. Not very far from as many as all the previously mentioned games together.

Elminage Gothic - 93. Congrats, you co-win the thread. I expected even less reviews, but I guess some Skyrim fans found themselves in a strange neck of the woods one drunken evening?

Ziggurat - 1549. For something that's been out under a year if you count early access on Steam. Perma no.

Matewis: Lol yes, I also couldn't stand going back to non 3d accelerated graphics after my first 3d card, which was a 8mb Voodoo2 (sounds like you had a voodoo as well), and I also had a pentium 200 at the time, and it too was my first upgrade from from my 486 :) I didn't start of with a 3d card though, but that didn't matter. Going from a laggy 400x300 tomb raider 2 on my 486 to a totally smooth 640x480 tomb raider 2 on my pentium 200 was enough to completely blow my mind

WCardskeeper: I love your analysis and really appreciate posts that show statistics/sales numbers for reference, but I am actually also interested in what people subjectively perceive to be underrated/unpopular games.

WCardskeeper: So yeah, I wanted to ask all of you if there are any Indie games here on GoG that you really liked and that catered to your tastes...

hyperagathon: Well, I certainly hope a hundred reviews or so translates into (at least) thousands of sales, or I'll be very sad for Whalenought Studios (ie, the very nice couple who made Serpent in their apartment on a rather thin Kickstarter budget). It's entirely possible it's too low a number and RPGs, especially the "hardcore" ones, are an exception.