sunsofold

If it’s about saving money? Minecraft. It’s been around for an age, but it has so many variations through modding, you get years of play for the one price.

If it’s about mechanical quality? Spelunky. It’s smooth and nearly completely glitch-free. It’s elegant in its simplicity to enjoyability ratio. It has enough variation to make every run a bit different, but not so much that every run is just wild blind choices and (un)lucky draws.

If it’s about story quality? Pacific Drive. It goes on sale fairly regularly and goes below $10 on steam. The story and gameplay are nicely intertwined, well written, and well voice-acted.

Got my first win in Noita recently by stopping attempts to do more interesting variations and just going to the ending boss. Now to figure out New Game +, the metaprogression of the orbs, the suns, parallel worlds, and the myriad ‘lesser’ bosses.

I looked at a description of what had been figured out so far and some of it is just wild to even have figured out. I don’t know if I ever would have spotted the idea of having them as trigraphs.

Noita

It’s a hell of a game. It’s essentially utterly fair, but brutal. It’s technically a rogue-lite because there are a handful of things that are unlocked on runs for use in later runs, but those elements are so unnecessary for completing the game you can ignore them. It has the ‘knowledge is power’ addage built into its bones, rewarding you for knowing how to play rather than just chipping out meta-progression, and containing such mysteries that some of them are still unsolved, despite people’s attempts to data-mine the game to find its secrets. It’s fun too.