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This post is prompted by Ben's gemcast about gaming on linux, which concentrates on the rise of commercial gaming on linux.
gemini://kwiecien.us/gemcast/20200828.ogg
This is an interesting phenomenon, but I think there's also more to say on the free software side. There are a fair few high-quality libre games, many of which aren't nearly as well-known as they deserve to be. So, here's a short list of some personal favourites.
I'm (mostly) restricting this to games which
Liberation Circuit by Linley Henzell
A programming RTS game, in which you design and code the behaviour of your units. Really unique game.
System Syzygy by Matthew D. Steele
Lovely narrative puzzle game inspired by Zarf's "System's Twilight", but very much its own thing. Some innovative puzzles, effective gentle storytelling, and a good length.
ASCII rendition of Portal; it's the inventive community-contributed puzzles which made this interesting. (The default mode isn't actually pure ASCII, but there's a commandline option to fix that.)
Unusual Asteroids-like with a distinctive aesthetic.
This would be a traditional roguelike if it weren't played on a hyperbolic plane. Luckily this changes the game completely. I find it genuinely works both as a game and as an intuition-building way to explore hyperbolic geometry.
Permadeath two-stick shooter, derivative of The Binding of Isaac. I didn't expect or want to like this; somehow it's much more fun than it ought to be.
Magic-like. I'm not sure about this one. It seems it had momentum for a while, but development petered out some years ago. What's left is a seriously well-designed core game, a cards-with-rules duel which adds tactical depth to the Magic formula by introducing positioning, presented with lots of nice artwork and (excessive) visual and sonic polish, but with some play-to-win crap layered on top which feels like it doesn't belong in the free software world, and lots of bugs. I'm including it here because it's probably more obscure than it deserves to be.
Not obscure, but since I arbitrarily excluded Rohrer's more recent non-gratis free software games, I'll include this. Play it if you haven't, it takes 5 minutes.