Seconded, though particularly the Royal version. The extra semester (and related content) and quality of life upgrades are completely worth it, and the best way to experience the game.
I love NMS but I’m so afraid to log in. I’ve had a huge underground base (max terrain manipulation) for like 5 years even though people say never to dig out a base because eventually it will get filled in. So I feel like I’m rolling the dice every time I load in. I have hours of videos of me just running around my base across the different patches, where the flora/fauna in the connected cave system changed each time.
The only thing that would really need to happen desperately to make it accessibly is to either have a fun and easy to digest primer or to make the language much more layman friendly to start and introduce technical or slang terms as you go.
“There is a sequence of N unsorted and unknown numbers. You can compare, whether any number is greater than any other one by specifying their positions in the sequence. You can swap two numbers, save copies of them on a stash, and replace any number in the sequence with stashed ones. Try to sort the sequence of unknown numbers with as little operations as possible.”
I know what this means, but I had to read it 6 times to get there. Though I think this wouldn’t be task 1.
I literally bought No Man’s Sky while waiting for Starfield. I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky for two weeks now and I just can’t put it down because it’s so good.
Now I’m planning to wait to buy Starfield for at least 6+ months until the developers iron out the bugs.
Trying to get to the center of the universe in Perma Death mode was one of the best gaming experiences I can remember. It took so much dedication and patience to finally get to the end (hit, play the main quests).
Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don't command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.
Ronin - a stealth/platformer. Combat is turn-based. No, combat is not mechanically separate from the stealth OR the platforming. Relatively short but very fascinating.
Pawnbarian - Roguelike, but movement and combat is done by chess rules.
Exanima. Combat is based entirely around physics/momentum and positioning. It's hard to get the hang of, but is immensely satisfying once you get your "He's starting to believe" Matrix moment and successfully block a few attacks in a row.
Crusader Kings 3. You know those map-painting Grand Strategy games, where the goal is to conquer other territories? One of those, but you're running a noble dynasty whose fortunes rise and fall, even passing between the overlordship of different countries and kingdoms. A lot of personality. I guess it's not as innovative as it once was, since it's spawned imitators at this point. Hm.
Ring of Pain. It's... hard to describe.
Phasmophobia. Multiplayer only. You hunt ghosts. Not like, 'combat' hunt ghosts, like 'You need to find evidence of ghosts' hunt ghosts. But the ghosts definitely hunt you back - in a much more malicious way.
Death Stranding. Walking simulator. No, not like 'You don't do anything but hold down the walk button', like 'You need to keep your balance while carrying things' walking simulator. Immensely weird.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.
Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.
I strongly object to the characterization of Death Stranding as a walking simulator. Walking place to place is core to the experience for maybe one quarter of the game. Once you get to the largest area and continue unlocking new tools and features, you spend very little time walking. It also dismisses combat, which I felt was considerably more prevalent than I expected.
I feel like I spent a good portion of my time walking and finding ways across rough terrain even after all the fancy gear was unlocked. The motorcycle could get you maybe half the way, usually.
I mean, at least until the zip-lines. Those ruined the game. Honestly, the rebuildable roads were a bad inclusion as well. Sitting on top of a hill, looking down at the streams and terrain around you, figuring out the best route with your tools, was peak satisfaction in that game.
Yeah, that’s fair. The first time you go to any new site there is walking involved along with everything else, but I still think calling it a walking simulator is reductive, since it just one tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.
Maybe it’s better to call it a scifi delivery simulator (including factions of delivery addicts you have to fight because they keep trying to take your things).
Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don’t command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.
I loved that you could build temples and get specialty priests for 5 different gods, but never more than two in one level, because some of the gods were opposed to others, including the one I never used because they were monotheists and I didn’t want to give up all other types of priests.
Also that every hero type had their own priorities and preferences and would do what they preferred barring a significant bounty on something else. Also that Rogues could fuck you over if a hero died and you wanted to use the resurrection spell on them because a rogue near where they died might just rob their grave.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator did it before that, in 2010. ST: Bridge Crew is more or less “Artemis but with Star Trek branding”. Artemis just released a remake/sequel-sort-of-thing a bit over a month ago (called Artemis Cosmos, though it’s had a…rocky…launch so far) that’s a complete rewrite from the ground up.
And when I say they did it first, I mean to the point that some of the reviews describe Artemis by likening it to being a member of the bridge crew on the Enterprise, because there wasn’t a game like that on the market.
Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.
The recently deceased Benjamin Brynn is on his way to the afterlife. The player must interact with Brynn’s memories through an eye-tracking webcam to progress, as the game reads and responds to the player’s eye movement and blinking - from Wikipedia
It tries to emulate life flashing by your eyes as you are dying. I haven’t gotten around to play it but, the concept is cool nonetheless.
Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality
What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.
Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.
Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
There’s an Expedition going on for the next 6 weeks in NMS. It’s like a self-contained mega-questline. Start a new single player game and choose “Expedition”. They give you lots of upgrades along the way and you’ll see bases and messages from other players along the same path.
This one doesn’t usually get mentioned when people talk about good story: Borderlands 2. (1 is dry, 3 is stupid)
It’s light-hearted so I think people don’t take it seriously, but if you look past the fart jokes, and really pay attention. You get one of the BEST villains ever, and some real emotional moments.
As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.
I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.
I have a couple kinda unique things to suggest. There is a small indie game called Eversion that you can find on Steam. The core mechanic is about shifting to these different planes of existence to finish levels. You can only shift at certain places and shifting opens up pathways that weren’t there before. Its retro style graphics and otherwise very simple controls. The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games. Catherine. Catherine is a game in a few styles. You spend part of the time at a diner/bar interacting with people. Then you go to sleep and in the dream world you ascend towers using moveable blocks that you must climb. Sometimes you are chased up the tower by a boss enemy. There is no combat in the game. It’s about ascending the tower as fast as possible at night and progressing the story by day.
The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.
Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.
And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne