Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
For those who fondly remember FTL and think they got everything out of it; I highly, HIGHLY, recommend getting the Multiverse mod. It’s essentially FTL 2 and adds an absolutely insane amount of content. Seriously, it’s like 10x bigger than the base game. Dozens of new ships and equipment, several new races, hundreds of new events, new paths, new victory conditions. It is amazing and has really breathed new life into such an awesome game.
Definitely do! If anything, I’m underselling just how much content it adds. It’s even set a few decades after the base game so it really is like a full sequel.
I’m thrilled that Into the Breach is available on Android, massively disappointed that I cannot purchase it. But at least that means patched APKs exist…
They annoyingly have some proprietary licensing. Cozy Grove 2 was Netflix only. I only have it because my spouse’s comfort show is on Netflix, otherwise it’s going to be gone
I’ve been recently playing Kingsway which is a pretty unique roguelite RPG where the entire game takes place in a fake operating system inspired by the Windows 95 interface. Only on Steam though iirc.
Pretty fun, though I wish there were mods to increase the amount of content in the game.
If you enjoy Slay the Spire and are interested in more rogue like deckbuilders, I’m a big fan of Griftlands.
It’s pretty small in scope but it has some fun ideas and three base characters/decks with their own stories you follow. It does have some meta-progression if you care about that. I find making builds in it really fun and it’s incredibly satisfying to see a deck come together and just destroy everything in your path.
Yeah I wasn’t sure if the art is for everyone so I didn’t mention it but I love the entire style, as well as the addition of the fake languages that the audio is done in. It really enhanced the immersion.
I have generally found roguelikes to be too difficult, so if you want a turn-taking, strategic one that leans into the easier side while letting you set up many ridiculous combinations, I enjoy “Backpack Hero”. You get a Resident Evil 4 styled inventory screen, and must arrange/place items for an optimal build. You generally get rewarded for stacking similar items.
The Bazaar is a similar game releasing soon. It’s still primarily focused on developing synergies between items in your build, but there’s more varied events between pvp fights and configuring your pack is simpler because it’s on a line rather than a grid, if that makes sense. It will be releasing as free to play probably in February or March.
Dead cells and rogue legacy 1/2 were a lot of fun. Check out nethack if you want something more casual for mobile or in a terminal, it’s a classic. Switch specific I’d say check out dead cells or Isaac. If you want something casual without a big story or learning a bunch of RPG systems you might want to check out donut county, goose game, or golf story.
The Dead Cells devs have been putting in work on their multiplayer rogue lite Windblown, which is super fun. Hades 2 is in a great spot and will keep getting better Risk of Rain (1+2) both fantastic
But for really obscure and interesting mechanics and a true rogue like experience: Noita. It’s pixel graphics but every foreground pixel is simulated and there are a craft huge number of interactions between substances and spells. There’s deep lore that you have to be very dedicated to decipher. There’s an actual alchemy system that changes depending on map seed. Oh, and it’s really hard.
You can set it up fairly easily the Steam version of DX and the Revision Mod, which at this point is basically all the most popular DX mods, reconfigured to play nice with each other and be as mutually compatible as possible.
Someone already mentioned Caves of Qud, that one is amazing, Noita is really good, also StarSector is functionally a roguelike but in space.
Also No Mans Sky is basically a rogue like if you turn on permadeath, kick the difficulty up.
If you’ve got interest in deep simulation mechanics you can check out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It’s FOSS and, last I checked, still has an active developer community.
Yeah they gave up announcing new release dates for it like half a decade ago if not longer lmao, but now they’ve started again. Hopefully it’s true this time.
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
I bought myself into sf before you got a hangar, i only had that one person race ship and after a while they added a hangar where you could spawn and walk around it.
After a while i noticed loads of reviews so i tried playing it, but always ran into issues making it unplayable. So i got really fed up with it for a while.
Then a couple years later i could actually run it with some issues, ended up buying a better ship and i’m now basically waiting for it to release and computer parts to be affordable once again.
I would love for star citizen to be my jam, but i doubt i’ll ever be able to put enough time into it. The most i ever managed to do consistently was diablo 4 season 1 to 3 before i dropped it completely.
I mean, they kind of do. It’s just not driven by cut scenes or NPC interaction. Have to read the news and be involved in the off game communities to get into the lore that’s happened in game.
That’s why a lot of people didn’t engage with the lore of Destiny - you had to go to a website totally separate from the game, link your account old-school Bungie style, and could only access the grimoire cards from said site after you went through the hoops. There was nothing in the game giving you more aside from the NPCs and the few cutscenes themselves. Not even a link to take you to the site from the game itself.
Almost every other game has an in-game lore/info screen talking about the world and characters of the game.
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