Shout out to Fishery (309 reviews). It’s pretty niche as an aquarium simulator, but very relaxing and well made.
Also, Ozymandias (770 reviews) is a great strategy game that manages to squeeze the feeling of a full game of civilization into less than one hour.
If you’re interested in classic board games, The Conquest of Go (397 reviews) is a great entry point into Go, with nice tutorial features and a campaign mode that scales difficulty as you win games.
Depending on your puzzle solving abilities, Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds!) should only take around 15-20 hours.
Extra bonus, it can be played in very short sessions very easily and has a great in-game log of events in case you have to put it down for a little while.
I can recommend NEO Scavenger (slightly under 4k reviews). It’s hardcore survival game in post apocalypse world. I haven’t finished it yet, 'cause I always die in the process. Still very enjoyable if you’re into post-apo.
If you’re interested in games that aren’t MMORPGs, Path of Exile fits your criteria for monetization. You can only purchase cosmetics and bank storage upgrades. It’s an online ARPG but it’s mostly single player.
It is pretty much unplayable without the bank storage upgrades though. Given the amount of time they can save you, you may as well say that they are power.
Guild Wars 2 basically makes it impossible to buy power – once you’ve purchased all the expansions, at least. Which is incredibly impressive considering there’s an official way in-game to trade real-world cash for in-game gold.
That’s one of the benefits of having gear be horizontal, you can get a build geared from a fresh account in a few days, and then there’s only minor optimizations you can make (there’s a gear rarity that’s higher than the readily-accessible exotic gear but basically you have to earn it, and then there’s legendary gear which is there for fashion and qol because you can change the stats on it at any time).
Space Tyrant is a 4x space conquest game, but it plays like a fast paced solo board game or adventure. Fun balance between strategy and random space goofiness.
This is a good list! I’ll be checking some of these out for sure. I also have some overlooked games of my own I’d like to list. No links since I’m on mobile, but I may edit them in later.
Qbqbqb (30): Simple arcade game with nice animation and catchy music.
Goetia (496): Spooky point-and-click with some very good puzzles in my opinion.
Under Leaves (530): Relaxing hidden object game with a nice art style. Great game to play when you’re stressed and want to turn your brain off.
Year Walk (1197): Horror adventure game with an off-putting atmosphere and interesting art style.
The Last Door (1541): Horror point-and-click adventure game with a lovecraftian feel.
+1 to Year Walk, I remember playing that on an iPod Touch when it first came out. I love Simogo, with games like Device 6 and Sayonara Wild Hearts, they make really unique games.
Thanks for bringing out Goetia. I bought it back when i had to have any sounds as a distraction, Goetia being very silent at times drove me off almost instantly.
Just seeing that you mentioned good puzzles was enough to give a real go. 3 hours later i’m loving it.
Not me, but a friend’s mom, this was back in 97-98 and I had been playing the Diablo demo for hours and knew the mechanics quite good and the two first levels.
So I visited my friend and his mom had bought the game and was playing a lot, and she was quite deep down, I think like 15 levels down… that’s when I asked why she hasn’t placed here last level up points… Turns out, she hadn’t placed any point at all 😱🤔🤣.
shipped a local multiplayer naval game Overall Reviews: Overwhelmingly Positive (523 reviews) : I had a lot of fun playing this game with my sist er and cousin.
seems like my previous comment didn’t get posted
Pathologic 2 is a game that makes you feel like the entire world is against you. From the moment you start the game you’re presented with a scenario in which you’ve already failed to stop the deadly plague infecting the city, and you get a chance to do it all over.
You are Artemy Burakh, a surgeon coming back home to his home in the Russian Steppe at the request of his late father. From the moment you arrive in town, things are off. You are quickly branded as a criminal and must hide away or risk being attacked by citizens. Slowly but surely, you keep encountering strange things in the town: an impossible spire stretching into the heavens, a building where an infection has seemingly taken over the walls, a band of children who have broken away to form their own gamg, and the plague itself speaks to you - warning you about the devastation to come.
The game is brutally tough. It has difficulty settings if you struggle too much - but the intended difficulty is meant to crush your will to continue. While fighting off the plague you must manage your own hunger, thirst, and health. Which becomes increasingly harder to do as the plague grows in strength. In addition - at the end of every day the game randomly rolls who in the town gets infected with the plague and for those already infected they could possibly die. Everyone, including you, and I mean everyone in the town has the potential to die. You are tasked with keeping them alive.
On top of that the game is an excellent journey into the psychology of those you meet, and comments on the blend between the supernatural culture of the steppe and the growing industrialization of the city. There’s so much stuff there in the game (mind you there is some jank), and its the kind of game I think about all of the time. Also the soundtrack is beautiful and haunting, with the perfect emotion for each scene.
Just in case you weren’t aware, The Oregon Trail is on Steam as a remake now, but I haven’t read much about it. I like the colorful style they chose for it though. There’s also the still unreleased Journey Express which looks very similar. Anyway, here’s some other stuff:
Organ Trail is the closest to Oregon Trail I think you can get on Steam. Players control a group in the zombie apocalypse instead of journeying to the western frontier.
Death Road to Canada captures the same sort of travel with small events interspersed that Oregon Trail had, but plays quite a bit differently…
To be honest I only just stumbled across it when writing up my original response. Made a quick check on steampeek.hu to see if there was any game I didn’t know about or was forgetting and it popped up.
I’d be happy to show you Death Road to Canada at no cost to you through Steam Remote Play with my copy! The only catch is that you’d need a gamepad since it doesn’t take multiple players on one keyboard.
I made a choose your own adventure that’s been called Oregon trail like bigbossbattle.com/the-away-team-review/ I don’t know if it truly embodies Oregon trail though.
I played through a fair amount of Sniper Elite 2 before a friend saw some of my gameplay footage and was like “Damn dude, you don’t even zoom your scope in?”
bin.pol.social
Aktywne