Been playing Enderal for the last three weeks or so. Downright impressive RPG, blows Skyrim out of the water easily. Made by indies, but AAA quality, and free of all things!
Minimetro and Cultist Simulator are my go to “comfy” games, but cultist simulator really does get you feeling like you’re chasing a mad eldritch horror when playing at times. It’s deliberately obtuse and odd, and then a revelation of the truth takes you over and you push on beyond your wildest expectations.
Slay the Spire and Hollowknight have both been mentioned enough in other posts in case anyone reading this is somehow unaware of either of them.
Faster than Light and Into the Breach are both excellent games. FtL is rng mitigation and crisis control par excellence. ItB is basically chess, and you play out the turns as best you can. It’s rewarding, but once you get good you need to ramp up the difficulty somewhat to keep it fun.
I want to like Into the Breach but it’s too stressful. Like, when I fuck up in FTL and the crew dies it sucks, but when I fuck up in Into the Breach and all those civilians die? Oof. They were counting on me!
But once you’ve finished a run once or twice, you’ll get more options and be able to turn it essentially into Sudoku or some other solitaire puzzle and do most levels perfectly once you know what’s going on and having a few more options.
Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta… Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.
Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.
Surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything… and everything in it is immaculate. It’s still free for the original version as well.
Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out… also goes on sale really cheap.
Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you’re from the PNW, it will hit even more.
Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.
OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.
If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).
If you want a game that’s beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af… definitely check out Rain World.
Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It’s how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.
Rusty’s Retirement… isn’t so much a game… sorta… but yeah… check that out.
+1 for Frog Fractions. I finished in about an hour. Cannot tell you much without spoilers, but I can say it’s not one of those surprise horror games. It looks like a kid-friendly game and at least content-wise stays kid-friendly.
Monster Sanctuary was so good. I tried it when I had Game Pass, and I loved it so much I bought it outright for Xbox, and then again on Steam. Also got the hardcover monster journal.
Aethermancer, made by the same folks, is looking really good from their demo. Clearly lots of inspiration from Monster Sanctuary but very much its own sort of game
Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don’t find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!
Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.
Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers’ solidarity and union struggle type of plot.
Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.
Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.
Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.
Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.
Dwarf Fortress. It’s Dwarf Fortress.
WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.
ExanimaUnique physics-based isometric dungeon crawler also featuring an arena career mode.
Moddable.
Really slow development cycle, though.
Severed SteelFuturistic 3D shooter with maybe the best movement system I’ve tried, with wall running, full 360 air movement, sliding and more.
Weapons have only one magazine, so you’re constantly sourcing them from your enemies while blasting holes into the fully destructible levels.
Very replayable.
But seriously I’m a real sucker for platformers, and so A Hat In Time is my most favorited one. It brought back this sort of charm I haven’t felt since the n64 days and I love it!
Stray and Kena: Bridge of Spirits are pretty awesome too, would be my second and third favorites
I really hope the sequel does more with dungeons than just ricochet/geometry puzzles. CrossCode’s incessant use of those in dungeon after dungeon was what made me stop playing.
Not a sequel, just their next game! Combat and UI look similar so far. They’re doing dev streams on their discord
I thought crosscode had the best puzzles haha. The way they built it out with the elemental system, the enemies that required puzzle mechanics you had learned, the tight timing where you had to send a ball flying and then race it to various objectives, the myriad of subtle environmental puzzles in the overworld. Could go on and on, but yeah the VRP is the game’s central mechanic so if you simply don’t enjoy lining up your shots then I imagine the game would be pretty rough lol
Not sure what “VRP” is unless you just mean ricochet puzzles, but mind you, I did play 95% of the game. It felt just too same-y after long enough (it was the plot and environment that had kept me going), and then I just gave up and finished through some YouTuber’s play-through and I confirmed that I had apparently quit at the start of the final dungeon, because it just felt like… more of the same timing-&-angling annoyances with no more originality. Zelda was far, far more creative and I think the game just could have done more with items or different weapons, or something, though I know much of it is based on your character being a specific class that was fixed pre-game… It just ultimately wore me down, sadly.
It’s the game’s in-game (Crossworlds) terminology for the charged shot that bounces around, yeah. They cover it in the tutorial but the main cast basically ‘nerd emoji’s’ Sergey and they simply refer to it as “balls” for the rest of the game lol
timing-&-angling annoyances
But yeah, like I said, you just don’t like the central mechanic. It’s valid. This is the main point of contention for the minority of people who don’t click with the game, as is evidenced by filtering for negative reviews on steam
But imagine if you didn’t find it to be an annoyance, and instead found it to be inherently satisfying? One of my favorite parts about Crosscode is how unafraid they are to present you with puzzles that are not only difficult to solve in the typical sense, but also difficult to perform once you know what to do. It’s a rare treat, most games instead lean hard only into one direction (purely cerebral puzzling or purely focussed on action)
It’s a game that just gives and gives, and to the contrary of your experience, I found the constant innovation of the puzzles throughout the game is what brought it from A to S tier. I finished the final dungeon wishing there was more game to play. Imagine my delight when the DLC dropped and added another 20 hours of timing & angling goodness. Replayed the game 3 times over the years.
And yeah, frankly we should compare it to Zelda, the most celebrated and beloved puzzle adventure series of all time developed and supported for 40 years by one of the largest and most influential video game companies of all time. No joke, I think this is actually exactly where Crosscode stacks up. It’s up there for me with my favorite Zelda titles
Oh. It’s been literal years so I totally forgot that initialism, but while we’re at it, the second “C” in “CrossCode” is also capital.
It’s smooth as butter, yeah, but I think I would prefer a game focused on a different character class/weapon. I remember some progression of concepts but I guess didn’t really connect the dots (even though I don’t think I looked up a guide more than once or twice briefly).
Yeah plenty of people develop these feelings about laser focussed games. Sekiro is a good example. Not gonna be your game if you don’t like parrying. Lots of comments online from such people who write the game off as “spam parry to win” as tho there’s no depth to it.
Huge parry fan on the other hand? Probably your favorite game, and you’re bewildered by those comments because you feel like you could write a novel about how interesting the system is and how rewarding it is to master all the way into your seventh charmless NG+ run.
I think at the end of the day, when the gameplay is simply not catered to our preferences we’re not really going to appreciate what makes it so great at what it is
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Aktywne