Thirty-one people. That’s how many concurrent players were running CD-ROM on Steam at last check. Three reviews total — all positive. This is the kind of game that Steam’s algorithm buries before breakfast.

monoclelord’s CD-ROM, released May 9, is a steganography puzzle box dressed in 1990s CD-ROM nostalgia. Ten themed discs, ten 8-digit passwords. You hunt for hidden messages, decode text, analyze images, and claw your way to the next one. At $7.99 — currently 20% off the $9.99 base price — it costs less than a cinema ticket and hits harder than most big-budget puzzle games bother trying. One player logged 90 minutes and called it “brilliant,” praising the challenge and the retro interface. Another put in 8.5 hours and highlighted both the brain-bending puzzles and the developer’s direct engagement with the community. That’s the indie grift in reverse — a dev who actually shows up.

Then there’s Between Stops, released May 8 by Too Tired Dev. Free to play, 100% positive across 11 reviews, and players are making the comparison that actually sells copies: Undertale and Deltarune. It’s a story-driven turn-based RPG with bullet-hell combat where your choices permanently alter the narrative. Only Chapter 1 is available so far, and one player already called it a “very good Deltarune inspired RPG” and handed it a 10/10. Another wrote that they could feel the “soul and emotion” in the project. Nine concurrent players at last count, down 25% from the previous snapshot.

Here’s the scoreboard: two games, zero negative reviews, a combined 40 people playing at any given moment. Steam drops roughly 40 new titles a day. Most vanish. CD-ROM and Between Stops are exactly the kind of small, strange, genuinely crafted projects that deserve to beat the odds — even if the numbers say they probably won’t.

Sources