Steam's Greenlight now up and running

Steam is great for big name games on the PC, but without a publisher backing them many popular indie games fail to get picked up by Valve and put on the platform. Recently however, Valve decided to change that by putting the decision of which games get picked up straight into the hands of consumers, with Greenlight - a system through which developers can show the masses their titles, letting the community decide if they want the game available through Steam. And as of a couple of hours ago, Greenlight is now up and running.

There are a heap of titles up already - way too many to go through, especially with Steam's incredibly finicky and tabless browser. Some people don't seem to understand the point of Greenlight either - Wizardry 8 and Wolfenstein are listed, because apparently some people just think it's a 'tell Steam what games you want' thing - although Valve appear to be on top of taking stuff like that down. Titles in the list frequently appear several times too, which is confusing and annoying - have they been listed twice, or does Greenlight randomise which items appear in each list? Given that the first page of Greenlight has had different items every time I've looked at it, I'm leaning towards the second option - which is just baffling.

There is also a huge amount of just plain awful looking titles too - just how many 'comedy' JRPGs do we need, really? To that end and as your faithful servant, I have scoured the list to find a few (definitely not all) of the gems you might want to put your vote towards. I've put all of them into a Collection so you can check them out through Steam and below I've included links to each of them with a short description of what I think.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch - If you haven't played the first Octodad game, you should go do so now - it's free and totally ridiculous.

Routine - A space-based horror game with an eighties aesthetic, though thankfully not eighties style graphics. Check out the Gamescom teaser trailer in our videos library - it looks pretty interesting.

Edge of Space - Blugh. Edge of Space is not being made by Re-logic. While I can see how I came to that conclusion, I should have known better what with backing the Kickstarter and all. Nevertheless, it looks like an awesome time.

Gnomoria - Gnomoria began life as a sort of 3D Dwarf Fortress clone, but since then it has grown into its own thing, with more City Management elements - though retaining a great deal of depth.

Kinetic Void - This freaking game is beautiful. A space-sim, Kinetic Void features a robust ship builder and physics engine and it looks brilliant.

The Real Texas - An outstanding Zelda/Adventure game mashup I have talked about before - and you should play, because it's great.

Incredipede - A 2D puzzle game, Incredipede follows the adventures of Quozzle - a wormy type creature with the ability to grow arms and legs anywhere on her body as she attempts to rescue her sisters. I want to buy it for the art-style alone, but the game will feature 60 levels across 3 different worlds and it sounds excellent.

99 Levels to Hell - 99 Levels to Hell is a 2D shooter with roguelike elements you say? YES.

Miner Wars 2081 - We have covered Miner Wars 2081 before, it's a freeform 6DoF game set in a fully destructible environment. Who couldn't want such a thing? Chumps, that's who.

Waiting For Horus - The team behind Waiting For Horus were disappointed with the lack of twitch shooters available these days. So they made their own. The cel-shaded design looks really nice too.

Parapaxis Foundations - This is a bit of an odd one - according to the description "Parapraxis Foundations is a completely free public prototype of the engine, art, music and gameplay that will eventually be used to build a storydriven 2D-action trilogy." Which doesn't sound like a good fit for Steam really. But watch the trailer - listen to that music and see that gorgeous art and tell me you don't want to play this game. EXACTLY.

Project Zomboid - Finally, Project Zomboid. I almost missed this one, as it never appeared in the 16 pages of Greenlight projects I went through. Nevertheless, you no doubt heard The GAP discuss Project Zomboid at length - and it has continued being developed since then - and it's still bleak and addictive as heck.

As I said, it's not an exhaustive list - I have my biases towards particular genres as you can tell. So if you think there is a game worth voting for that I haven't mentioned, tell us in the comments below!

Update: Fixed Edge of Space.