Submitted 1 year ago by FireTower@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rouge like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play.
Are there any titles that might not have been commercially successful that you feel everyone should give a shot?
Jazzpunk, everyone should play Jazzpunk.
Far: Lone Sails is a beautiful art piece with unusual gameplay, and the sequel is great too.
Bedlam is kind of a love-letter to 90s and 00s FPS games. The gameplay isn’t amazing, but if you spent a lot of time in games like Quake, Unreal Tournament or Halo CE back in the early days of online multiplayer, this game is for you.
Kairo is weird.
Sable is an interesting adventure with a really nice art style.
Interplanetary is an excellent strategy game about firing weapons at other planets.
Neon Drive is a fun rhythm game with 80s aesthetics.
Bastion is well worth your time.
Bastion was huge when it came out. It definitely got forgotten after a couple years though.
3M over is lifetime. Hardly huge.
I still have it on several devices, like the old iPhone, an iPad and a PS Vita, I haven’t got to play it yet :(
Love Bedlam! Picked it up on some dirt cheap sale a while ago and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was.
The Talos Principle It’s not just a puzzle game.
Good timing, too, Talos Principle 2 was just announced
No it wasn’t… It was announced two years ago, they did announce the release date three days ago though.
Needed more crates.
Nice, that’s one I have in my library not yet installed. Bought it when there was a cheap bundle with others by that company, but was mainly looking at The Place which kinda turned me off of those style games. I’ll have to be sure to give it a shot now.
It’s also 90 percent off on steam right now. Just grabbed it for $4.40 Canadian after tax.
Hardspace Shipbreaker. You’re a wage slave (literally) in a space dock, taking apart ships and throwing the bits into the right bins. Doesn’t sound super fun, but it is. 1) You’re chopping up ships but you get to use LASERS!!! and the energy grappling hook. So satisfying. 2) The physics is 90% spot on. You’re in 3d, but it’s not purely inertial. There’s a dampening field that slows things down, so it doesn’t get too outta hand. There are a couple of other quirks, but they’re not hugely impacting. 3) The soundtrack is perfect. It’s a very bluesy, banjo style for a very bluecollar type job. 4) The voice acting is amazing. Every line from Weaver is just perfect. You hate Hal with a passion (you’re supposed to). The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games It’s also on PC and game pass.
I’ve played it thru twice. The first time as-is, but the 2nd time I shut off the “15 minute shifts” option. I think that breaks things up too much. I think open-shift is better. I bought the vinyl soundtrack. I’m not a huge fan of vinyl, but this is the right style of music that would benefit from it.
The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Which annoyingly, is the reason I bounced off the game. Breaking down ships is fun. That’s literally the whole reason I want to play the game. The story wants me to hate playing the game and won’t let me play until I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
Capitalism is pretty bad, so it didn’t bother me. It was refreshing to hear it in a narrative. Game devs don’t usually get to say stuff like that, so it was nice.
Underappreciated for sure, but to be fair, it’s super repetitive. If they’d added a secondary component or loop where you could black market trade or participate in the economy of the game some how to drown out the monotony of breaking the same ships over and over, I’d have played it more.
I remeber playing Jedi fallen order and seeing ships being broken down like that during the opening mission. I thought that I would rather be doing that and then hardspace showed up on steam a few days later. It’s been on my wish list for way too long, definitely going to pick it up for my next game
I’ve just recently said that on Lemmy - I said to a friend I wanted a game where you broke down and accepted star wars ships, and they pointed me towards this game. It was recently on sale so I picked it up. It’s been an absolute blast and exactly what I was looking for (though I still wish I could do it with SW ships). I also agree about the shift timer, so thankfully there’s an option for that.
No Mans Sky. It used to suck, but now I find it quite fun
TBF, it kinda sucked on release. I still remember the monoliths of Hydrogen…
still, I use it as one of gamings biggest comeback stories because it is.
I like the part about how it reminds me of Minecraft, but in space and with tools/weapons that never break and the ability to add more inventory slots. (There are less material options for building player housing though, but at least this limitation has led to some very creative community bases.) That, and I always find it rewarding to discover as many of a planet’s plant and animal species as possible to earn those chip things you can learn crafting recipes with, and many of the planets’ terrain looks pretty awesome since while it is all procedural copypasta, there are countless possible combinations of available ores, rock models/colors/usefulness, terrain color, animal appearances/traits, plant products, hazards, etc. I also like how after coming back to that game after more than a year, I found that unearthing the buried tech things gives you 4 of that data thing you need to complete all the tech-trees in the early game instead of just 1. And unlike many games, they update all platforms at the same time, which is great since I find the console controls on the Switch edition easier to remember than the PC controls.
But I do wish the planets had more than just one climate and biome so they’d be more realistic and those 2 undiscovered rare polar animals keeping you from earning lots of nanites would be less painful to track down. My current home planet is a swamp world that has Florida-like temperatures even at the poles and on mountains.
Bomberman 64
Eternal Darkness
The Conduit
Halo Reach
Eternal Darkness is one of my favourite GameCube games. I feel like it might be long enough ago that they could do a remake with modern sanity effects.
And Halo Reach is my favourite Halo game, loved it.
Nightdive Studios (they, among other titles, remastered System Shock, which has received pretty good reviews) wanted to remaster Eternal Darkness, but Nintendo - who owns Eternal Darkness - doesn't want that to happen.
Also, the original developers of Eternal Darkness want to create a spiritual sequel, but that seems to be... an eternal project. Check out Shadow of the Eternals, if you want to follow that project. There's a gameplay video from like 2013 or 2014.
I really wish we could get a port of Eternal Darkness. I know it’ll never happen, but one can dream.
Can I go with a game from the 90s? Because the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the best games I ever played. Ellison himself voices the “evil” computer, AM and instead of trying to win, you have to make the correct moral choices so your character can finally be allowed to die. You play multiple characters (not concurrently), so you have to do this multiple times. It’s brutal but so good. I know very few people who even know it existed.
Games of any time period are valid. The two reasons I made the post were:
I actually heard about that game for the first time the other day in a YouTube video on philosophical questions in video games that I had playing in the background while doing other things.
It’s on archive.org if you ever want to play it. Not sure if it’s DOS or Windows, but either way, an emulator will take care of that issue.
Hands down, Devotion by Red Candle Games. It was only on sale for a week when it came out, and was getting well-deserved rave reviews, but was pulled because an idiot put in an art asset that said “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh moron,” and Red Candle’s Chinese partner lost their business license and pulled the game from Steam. GOG was going to carry it, but they wimped out because Cyberpunk 2077 was about to come out in China, and they didn’t want to risk their sales, so they claimed “gamer voices” for why they were backtracking on carrying it, and refused to answer anyone asking them for details. The game is available, but only on Red Candle’s website.
It takes place in 1980s Taiwan, and is an amazing domestic horror - you play as the father, Du Feng Yu, cycling through three different years of his family falling apart, trying to figure out what happened to his young daughter. Some parts of it just hit way too hard, like this screaming argument between Du and his wife, when you’re playing as the daughter listening to it from her bedroom. It gets heavy. And then there’s the tongue thing. IYKYK.
I absolutely love this video by Jacob Geller, An Uncanny Really, looking at how Silent Hill 2 and Devotion handle the uncanny. Devotion available deserves to be compared to Silent Hill 2.
Titanfall 2
Definitely didn’t get the appreciation it deserved on launch. I seem to remember it was launched right after that year’s Battlefield and right before that year’s CoD. Terrible decision. It definitely stood the test of time though and is very highly regarded now.
Titanfall definitely got a lot of appreciation.
It needed more.
Bought the game at Dollarama in Canada for $4 a few years ago. Still haven’t played it.
The campaign has some absolutely wild parts of it. It’s worth playing through that if nothing else
Aww man, I loved Heat Signature and Gunpoint both. They definitely deserve some more love.
Both games are by Tom Francis. His new game Tactical Breach Wizards is ‘coming soon’ as well
A lot of the games people have mentioned here are either obscure games I’ve never heard of or newer titles in niche communities. But Gun Point is an obscure game I have actually played, I think they could have picked a better name for it though for a game where most combat isn’t firearms based it’s slightly misleading and probably deterred some people.
House of the Dying Sun was one of my first oculus rift games and so so good
Hylics 1 & 2. There’s actually a sorta sleeper cult around the games where it seems like a lot of people know of them or have played them, but no one ever talks about them.
Cruelty Squad. Amazing immersive sim. Looks like trash, best gameplay I’ve encountered in a while. That game goes hard.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I thought this was more popular, however considering how many people give me a “what’s that” when I mention it, it makes me think it wasn’t as popular as I thought. It’s a very well made spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future. Even has JSRF’s composer on a few tracks.
QT deserves more eyes on it for being an incredibly cute and wholesome parody of PT. There’s a free “demo” version on Itch.io, and if you like that then I’d highly recommend buying the full version on Steam.
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. This game is… hm. Basically it started off life as a Warhammer 40k game, but got released as something else due to the studio failing to secure the licenses they needed for WH40K. It’s a much older indie game from back when Valve had standards regarding what made it onto steam. It’s also kinda special because it’s one of the few times the Source engine was used commercially outside Valve. It’s also pretty jank, but overall pretty fun. It’s got some pretty decent RPG mechanics on top of a first person shooter, complete with classes. You can hack basically anything but also anything can hack back. A door can hack you.
Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and tactical combat. My only significant gripe is that I want more of it: More tales, more character customization… just more. (Although I now see that an expansion is available; I’ll have to check it out.)
Gigantic caught my attention when I was looking for an Overwatch alternative, because of the art and the praise from fans. I wish development hadn’t shut down before I had a chance to play it. (I hear there’s an unofficial client and server out there somewhere, though, so maybe I’ll have a chance to at least try the work-in-progress that was never finished.)
Wildermyth is just so endearing I loved my time with it.
Taking the same character through each campaign was pretty fun like I was making a serialised demi-god: Doofus and the mountain horde, Doofus and the ancient threat etc. Because characters age though the campaign, it has interesting implications in the world lore. Like we’re an archivist document the various legends of Doofus, acknowledging where they contradict and maybe speculating on how the differences in each culture’s legend of Doofus reflects back.
Downside is I optimised the fun out of the combat in always having Doofus at the center of the strategy, each encounter then played out the same.
Now I’m wishing I’d gotten the chance to play Gigantic! If you discover a playable client and server, lemme know, because I’m loving how that looks
Uplink - A hacking sim game that’s actually quite addictive in a playthrough. Will make you feel like you’re in the movie Hackers.
[Spycraft: The Great Game] (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycraft:_The_Great_Game) - An adventure game that had as consultants CIA director William Colby and KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin.
I don’t know a lot of people that have played these, but they definitely rank up there for me as some of the more interesting and unique games I’ve played over the decades.
Shoutout to Uplink! Not something you look to for realism, but it’s a really well designed hacker sim. Lots of fun!
Played Uplink as a kid, later learned about fragmentation for computer memory. Was cool to find out the inventory system wasn’t just a cool game mechanic but was based off how actual memory works.
Heyyy time to see if the benefit of 10 years helps me complete Uplink.
DOA2. It unfortunately turned into the fighting playboy bunnies with huge jugs series, but the second one was actually a really solid fighting game
I still have this on my steam deck via dreamcast emulator.
Earthbound
Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and Earthbound are the holy trinity of SNES era RPGs
*cries in FF6*
Agreed on the holy trinity. But even though you’re devout to the holy trinity, sometimes there are temptations.
Illusion of Gaia is that cool friend you haven’t seen in a long time who shows up, and you bond and reminisce like you haven’t been separated at all. Then you discover Illusion of Gaia has friends you haven’t met, and they roll together in a cool club called The Soul Blazer Trilogy.
bruh if final fantasy isnt on the list, that list is wrong.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. Everybody loved the first game, but nobody played the second game, including me for a good few years. But once I decided to try it I realized how much I had been missing out. It’s really good. Making it open world really works. There is fast travel but I never once used it because just running around is so fun. If you liked the first game, please try Catalyst!
For me right now, Shadows of Doubt. It is an early access game and it’s got a fair bit of jank, but it’s crazy how unique it is. It had a week or so of popularity and then it fell off. The devs just released an update for it too!
If you like the immersive sim genre, might I also recommend Cruelty Squad and Gloomwood. Those two have very unique aesthetics and really cool mechanics.
I feel this way about so many indie games.
If you can handle dying a lot while learning the ins and outs of the world, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Anomaly is a wonderful package completely for free. Especially if you add the G.A.M.M.A. modpack to it, makes the game play significantly deeper, much harder (in some bullshit and also fair ways), but also just crazy immersive; makes you feel like the actions you take do matter, but if you were to die, you’d just be another loot bag for some other Stalker to come across
Mad Max. Not the best game ever, but much better than I expected.
As the first of these is a platformer and the second is a topdown shooter, third one is a match 3, so commercial success was not that expected anyways, but I really thing they excel at what they were set out to do.
My big one, because I am playing the successor right now would be the Commandos-reinvention line of games by Mimimi Software:
They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.
Those are the two I got for now.
Are visual novels allowed? If they are I strongly recommend you:
Hotel Dusk and its sequel, Last Window. Time Hollow.
All these three games are for the Nintendo DS.
Everyone talking about Starfield reminded me to go back and play Outer Worlds again. I had forgotten how good that game was.
Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.
That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:
NOVA DRIFT is easily the best SHMUP if have played in my life and it´s on a 60% discount right now. From the tight controls to the artstyle and the gameplay, everything about this game is perfect and the dev is listening to the community.
Brute Force for the original Xbox. 4 player squad based gameplay, with different squads full of characters with unique abilities. It was a ‘platinum hit’ but I’m pretty sure anything that sold more than 500 copies was
Navar4477@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I feel like Outer Wilds was drowned out by Outer Worlds, and the two often get mixed up, usually to Outer Worlds’ favor.
One of my top 10 games.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Seems to me like Outer Wilds outshone Outer Worlds if anything. I never hear anyone talking of Outer Worlds anymore, but Outer Wilds is still brought up as one of the greatest indie games out there.
Navar4477@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
In a way, yeah! But I stand by the fact that a lot of people bought Outer Worlds thinking it was Outer Wilds.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Outer Worlds is an actual work of art that still manages to play and feel great.
beefcat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
the PC version is pretty fucked in the “feel great” department. the engine itself renders frames at arbitrary framerates just fine, but the animations (including the camera) only update at up to 60 FPS, with no in-game option to cap the frame rate to that animation rate. vsync doesn’t work properly, and external framerate limiters aren’t able to get a good match either. it’s basically impossible to get this game to feel smooth with proper frame pacing, even with a vrr display.
tuna_casserole@programming.dev 1 year ago
Mannnn. Outer Wilds is so freaking good. I had put it off for a while, but then last year I decided to go through it. It managed to be the perfect game at the perfect time. Raw intrigue and fascination turned into somehow helping me cope with the loss of my sister and dad who I had lost very recently at the time.
Frogster8@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Best game ever made, really is. First I’d played in years that felt like a fresh new experience.
Navar4477@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It really did
FireTower@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Really unfortunate they both came out around the same time. Although I think the actual target markets were different.
Navar4477@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yeah, completely different markets. My friend bought the wrong one and for months he wouldn’t try outer wilds because it “wasn’t his sort of game” when it totally was.
Kyoyeou@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I’ve never heard about Outer Wolrd, however, have been recommended Outer Wilds and it was supposed to be my summer game (but I forgot)