For me, Tunic. Well, it’s a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.
I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.
Oh, but what’s this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.
spoiler
I knew it was an English cipher from the beginning. Nobody ever goes full conlang, as much as I would love that. I got as far as deducing it was phonemic, as the same glyphs kept appearing before cleartext words, which I assumed were “a/an” and “the”, and the way “the” was written made me think it was two glyphs, one for the <th> and one for <e>. The last thing I got before giving up and looking it up online was one of hte ghosts standing next to the well in the village and repeating the same word three times. Of course he’s saying “well well well”.
Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don’t think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.
Hadies.
I dont typically like rougelikes in any form. But the story, gameplay loop, and music is some of the best.
Hadies 2 just made everything better.
Old-school example: Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. I didn’t know much about it other than it was an RPG when I got it, but I enjoyed it more than it probably deserved, given all the problems it has.
Newer example: Dragon Quest Builders 2. I don’t like Minecraft at all, but DQB2 was like crack to me. I even platinumed it, which I very rarely do. Very sad that there’s no announced DQB3.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 1 and 2
I had an odd, roundabout way to getting into these games. Last year KCD2 showed up on GOTY lists, and it’s a series I just hadn’t paid any attention to. But over the holiday break, I noticed I had a copy of KCD1 on Epic because they give away free games during the holidays, and I just happened to get it at some point (probably years ago).
So on a whim I downloaded it and tried it out, and damn was it good. Right up my alley. I’m a little sad I played it before this new patch dropped a recently.
So I blasted through KCD1 so I could get into KCD2, and that’s where I am currently, 100 hours into the story and still happily trucking along.
These are some of the best open world RPGs BY FAR. There’s no magic, no dragons, no bullshit. Henry isn’t a superhero. He’s just a guy. But it all feels so good. You want to go down huge dialog trees because it’s all interesting. The only bad part about these games are that you want to play for hours at a time and often can’t because real life exists.
Animal Crossing New Horizons
At first, my partner got it for herself. I figured I’d maybe watch a bit, maybe do something else.
I am now something of an expert on flower breeding, bug catching and determining if art is real.
Hellblade. Senua’s sacrifice
I don’t particularly like “medieval” games. Which I thought this was. It isn’t. But I played it because I heard somewhere it was a psychological game. It is.
It also was cheap when I bought it. Like $10.
I really like it. I ended up watching all the dev log videos on it. I have a background in psychology and was rather impressed by how many things in the game are based on the perception distortions common in schizophrenia.
Like the mask thing is part of that too. The pattern matching from perspectives. Seeing faces in trees or rocks (paraedolia). That’s all part of the condition.
The story itself was also very good and it is a personal story of her journey.
However that said. Hellblade 2 was awful in every way that made the first one good. Bad puzzles. No real personal journey. Story was garbage. And very little player autonomy. No exploration. Fixed speeds and at the start of every single enemy encounter, the enemy, a man, beats the piss out of you.
Almost to the point it felt exploitive, and for people who like watching men beat up women.
Sad to see the 2nd so terrible. But the first is brilliant. It’s also the perfect length. Not too long.
The first game was a trip. Played it in a pitch black room with noise canceling headphones. It’s wild how quickly I got used to hearing Senua’s voices. World felt empty when I stopped playing. I still go back and listen to that one cutscene every couple months
Talos Principle 2. It’s a solid chamber puzzle game like Portal, but the philosophy audio logs were so good that they shifted my real world views into a less nihilistic place.
They just released an updated version of the first one. Few extra puzzles and some other updates. I bought it recently. Haven’t played it or the 2nd one. (But plan to). But just letting you know. It might be worth checking out.
Thanks!
My biggest complaint with TP2 is that, between the two games, they added forced TAA like so many other games. TAA introduces blurring that drives me into a rage. The original came out before all that and was great, so I’m not super excited to try the modified version, though I might grab it just to support them a little more.
What is TAA. ? I’m not sure what that is. Do you mean motion blurring or depth of field blurring ?
Temporal Anti-Aliasing. It’s a cheap and effective way to get rid of the jagged edges of a rendered image, but temporal effects like TAA and all of the other tools derived from it, like a lot of other AA options and most frame generation techniques, introduce blurring and shadow smearing.
I tried posting a three second clip from TP2 showing it clearly, but Voyager didn’t seem to like it. This post is an extreme example, but you can see it in most modern AAA games. Cyberpunk had it bad (another game I adore).
Horizon Zero Dawn - From what I saw from the marketing seemed just odd. Relatively primitive looking humans fighting animal shaped robots. It just looked a bit too gimmicky. Several years after it’s initial release I saw that it was on sale and gave it a shot. I was genuinely surprised by the depth of the story. It was much more emotionally impactful than I expected and the story now feels almost prescient.
I had the opposite experience. I was looking forward to it and disliked it. I still haven’t completed it yet.
If you don’t mind me asking, what specifically didn’t you like about the game?
I found it a bit confusing. It wasn’t really explained what the optional weapons were. I found a few guides online but really hoped the game would guide a bit better. Also the fact that you need to blow bits off the enemies to make them weaker wasn’t fully explained.
Also didn’t really gel with the story. I put it on easy to make progress and got bored.
Not saying it’s a bad game. Just not for me.
Fair enough. There were a lot of weapons and variations of the weapons and I’d agree that some things weren’t explained well or at all. But for me part of the fun was experimenting and figuring out what worked and what didn’t.
As for the story, it really didn’t click for me either until later in the game when the how and why of that world became clearer. Prior to that it felt like just another derivative (post-post-)post-apocalyptic story. But from that point on I was fully invested, which made the ending all the more impactful for me.
Maybe I’ll give it another go. And if I can find this thread again in 5 years when I finish it… I’ll let you know :)
Thanks for the feedback.
This game was a real rollercoaster for me. I had low expectations for HZD and became obsessed with completing it. I was then totally hyped for HFW and gave up halfway through, utterly disapointed.
Haven’t played the sequel yet. Waiting to get it on sale if/when it shows up on GOG. That said, I don’t have big expectations. Sequels rarely live up to the original.
I, on the other hand from the person above, really like both games. I don’t really know why some folks hated Forbidden West. Even if it is a little “worse” than the first game (and I don’t really subscribe to that), that still makes it one of the best action/adventure games out there. I ended up getting the platinum in both games by the end.
I agree with you. I don’t get the hate. I preferred the first one but that’s not because of anything wrong with the second one. Both really good games.
Funny you mention HZD, I just fired it back up a couple weeks ago and completed the main story last weekend.
Yeah I was similarly VERY skeptical by the premise but was pleasantly surprised when I discovered what was actually going on.
This is the one I was going to say - I got it second hand somewhere, on a whim because I had a voucher to spend. Had never even heard of it before, but boy oh boy, what an amazing decision that turned out to be!
The saboteur
Picked it up randomly back in the day with 0 expectations . I loved playing this game. The way it uses black and white to express the despair of ww2 France , slowly transforming to colour as you destroy nazi infrastructure and the tide of the war changes is so satisfying .
It’s tremendously fun and the aesthetic was amazing. I think I got it for free, and I’ve never met anyone else who has played it!
I went back and played it on my ps3 during the pandemic, I thought it really held up. So disappointed there won’t be any more of them.
Ghostwire: Tokyo
I got it free on Epic. I was in a slump without anything I was excited to play so I fired it up. Loved exploring Tokyo. The quests were great. Gameplay was fun. Main story kept me interested. Looked awesome. Was really pleasantly surprised by it.
Final Fantasy XV
I’m a huge FF fan, but felt there was a dip after the golden era of 7-10. 13 was middling for me, 14 was an MMO which is not my area of interest.
FF15 took a long time to come out. And then we find out that you are manually controlling the main character like a hack’n’slash. It just no longer sparked that joyous wonder.
I waited ages before I got a PS4 and then got the Royal Edition. Slowly as I played it a fell in love with the characters. They are flawed, thrust into a journey they didn’t get to choose, and instead of a toxic male fantasy it was a story about brothers, fathers and sons, about love, loss, and sacrifice.
I bawled my eyes out at the ending. The game definitely suffers from feeling like it’s not quite a finished product, but the characters are the star of the show.
Try XVI if you’ve not yet. I think it’s a marked improvement on action combat in FF, if you found to love XV you’ll adore XVI in my opinion.
I’m playing 16 now.
It’s ok. The battle is a touch better, but honestly if you’re going to do a DMC mimicry do it all the way. I’m pretty disappointed that a game about collecting different eikons has zero elemental stat effects. I’m vaguely enjoying it but so far it’s ranking pretty low on the list of FFs that I’m emotionally attached to.
Yeah to me the combat is both fun and disappointing because it could’ve been way better. But the story, characters and acting kept me going. Ended up 100%ing and done all of the boring (gameplay wise) side quests just because they did so much with story and character progression.
For me with XV after the first third, I had pretty much fully checked out when it came to its story and gameplay, but for XVI the story kept me going strong the whole way. Even as a die hard VII fan, Clive has easily become my favourite FF character, and it’s Cid is the best Cid by a country mile in my opinion. Both voice actors absolutely killed it and elevate the characters so much.
I suppose it didn’t help that I played Stranger of Paradise first, which has a very fun and varied battle system. If that feeling of battle was in ff16 I think I’d rank it much higher.
Tainted grail Fall of Avalon.
Adastra. I am not that into VNs (I prefer actual games with more player agency and this particular VN has basicslly no choices to make; it is purely a story) but this one got me to check out the developer’s other VNs and they are all hella good (especially Circles and Echo which actually have multiple story lines based on your choices).
Now I am waiting for the sequel, Khemia, to finish being written. I’ve played through what there is twice (the first time being before the first chapter was completely rewritten) and I am finding it very hard to be patient and wait for the whole thing.
Control. I’ve always had a fondness for SCP-related stuff so when I saw Control on sale for $3 or $4 it was an instant mindless purchase. Bored a few days later I decided to give it a go, and then I went and beat the entire game and the DLC. Great power fantasy, great lore, great voice acting, fun moment to moment gameplay balanced between exploring, upgrading, story beats, and boss fights. Also ties in to their other games like Alan Wake; I haven’t played that one, but I’ve strongly considered it just because of Control and wanting more of that universe.
I bounced off of that one for a while. Bought it on sale and was kinda digging it until I hit the first boss and just couldn’t beat him. I tried a few times until I noticed that I was losing some not -yet-defined currency with every death and found that very antagonistic. I can’t remember if they’d implemented the invincibility toggle and I was too bull headed to use it, or if this was before that update.
Put it down for a few years, then came back to it when I heard enough people raving about how much they had enjoyed it. I think Alan Wake 2 was out by that point. Picked it up, used invincibility to get past that boss, turned it off, and fell in love with the rest of the game like everyone else
No shame on playing games on story mode or “easy”.
It’s more important to me I enjoy the game than impress an invisible audience with playing on normal or hard.
Plus typically the only difference is how much damage you do or take.
So you spend less time fighting enemies. And more time progressing the games story. Which is what I play for.
I’ve heard a few people say they put this game down cause of the difficulty.
I’m like…then lower the difficulty settings? Why not?
This is actually my all time favorite game. I’m so excited for the 2nd one. I’m trying not to get my hopes up or I’ll be disappointed. But. I am looking forward to it.
God of War 2018. I had never played any of the GOW games and I tried this one on a whim.
I fell in love with it immediately.
The Walking Dead (Telltale’s version). I expected zombies, and a bit of action and tension from trying to escape them and survive. What I didn’t expect was the emotional rollercoaster, and the genuine emotional reaction it got from me. One of the most powerful gaming experiences I’ve had.
I liked it the first time I played it, but then I decided to play it again to choose different things and realized the horrible truth that it’s all magicians choice. Who do you save A or B? You choose A then A survives and B dies and A is angry that you let B died, you choose B then you fail to save them but A saves themselves so A survives and B dies and A is angry that you tried to save B instead of them. It doesn’t matter much what you choose, the game will do the same.
Similarly, The Wolf Among US was a pretty fun story. Could have gone without the quick time events though, but I really enjoyed the Fairy Tale characters on the big city environment.
One of the quick time events in Wolf Among Us is my favorite gaming moment.
Tap for spoiler
Beast attacks you thinking Belle is cheating on him, doesn’t listen to reason. Quick time events to defend yourself turn into quick time events to kick his ass. The game keeps going “Press A! Hell yeah, punched him in the head. Tap X for a flurry of blows!” That’s your only guidance, no paragon or renegade binary choice how to handle it.
If you nail all of the quick time prompts, you beat him nearly to death and Belle is horrified. Or, if you are thinking critically, you can opt to purposefully fail the prompts and stop as soon as the fight leaves him. You would think you’re failing based off of the prompts and noises, but he’s not a puddle of blood and you didn’t lose your sanity, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a much better outcome.
