If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
definitely scratches the same itch more than games like the talos principle. there’s like one group it completely fails to properly tutorialize imo, and one that kind of falls short (although having played the witness will make your assumptions more accurate i think). other than that it’s a brilliant game.
Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.
XCOM 2 came out in 2016. Let’s get another XCOM game. Maybe humanity pushing into space and creating a colony which then comes under alien attack. You have to defend the colony, cut off from earth, and take out the alien menace.
I want to like Chimera Squad but every mission feels the same. I love the character based approach though. Also it was fun having aliens on the team for once.
Xcom 2 and Chimera Squad both had some annoying UI problems but luckily they were fixed (for the most part) by mods.
The 2d platforming world and top-down world have smashed together. You control one hero from each dimension, who share the same space in the levels. You switch between platformer and top-down modes and must get both characters to the goal. The boss levels are hard but very cool, combining action and puzzles.
Also features local 2-player co-op and a generous assist mode.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
A large part of what’s wrong with Concord is the development time that it took, and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to try to make game development leaner and more sustainable.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
Adding one more to the Ace Attorney spinoff block:
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is a well-written fan spinoff of the AA formula, taking place in a fantasy universe where magic is real, but mostly the domain of the nobility. Trials are a form of theatre, where the nobility knows how to tip the scale, but your mentor knows how to tip them back.
It introduces some very enjoyable mechanics, in which knowledge of each spell’s effects and conditions constitutes its own evidence. Tyrion bears his own magical ability that lets him view the thoughts of witnesses. He is also accompanied by the defendant of his first case, a mercenary-mage named Celeste, who gets a lot of investigation banter with Tyrion, much like Maya and Phoenix.
Five cases in all, and none of them are shortened crapshoot cases, nor is there a downer ending; all the major threads conclude with satisfying endings, and the developer hopes to make a sequel from the world they’ve built.
Oh, and as is common for AA games, take a listen to “Eye of Horus”, the game’s equivalent of the “Objection!” theme when Tyrion nails a contradiction. The game’s soundtrack as a whole has some real bangers, for both the high points and the emotional pulls.
The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It’s top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It’s a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.
To be honest, I lost interest in Minecraft about 10 years ago, and never played with mods. I’ve seen some hilarious playthroughs on YouTube though, I really enjoyed the custom animations RubberRoss made.
But how about the Infinity matter dominator sword mod? It contains some of the most convoluted and basically unachievable crafting recipes Ive ever seen, just scroll down and enjoy the ride
Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
Spectrobes, spent a ton of time in all 3 games as a kid. Apparently the 3rd game sold pretty poorly even though I would argue it was probably the best of the 3. It had just about everything one would want from a pokemon rpg, it even allowed for 2 players! Super upset that Disney killed it :(
New entry should absolutely follow the footsteps of the 3rd game (origins). Only thing I would hope that is improved is some of the terrain paths were kinda narrow and hard to accurately maneuver the horse-like mount around. That super frustrated me as a kid as it was much faster than walking, but all the time you ended up losing from getting caught on terrain, having to dismount/dismiss the mount, turn around, then resummon/remount made it more efficient to just walk.
The combat was fun enough on the 3rd, but my absolute favorite part was the excavation of fossils. Trying to go as fast as I could while also being super careful to not damage the fossil and having that linked to better stats for spectrobes was SO much better than breeding/catching new pokemon to me. It felt much more engaging than hoping for good rng.
If they won’t make a new one, the least they should do is remaster the games for switch. Which they also probably wouldn’t have to do much for the remaster as I would argue even the original version looks the same/better graphically than the latest pokemon releases for switch.
I didn’t play the one on the Wii, but from what I’ve seen, I think I’d prefer a mix of all 3 games. I feel like the combat had slightly more depth on the DS games, but Origins did more in 3 dimensions and had a Spectrobe follow you in the overworld.
I don’t remember much about the combat from the ds games other than the enemy ai could be cheesed by running around the perimeter of the battle arena while waiting for abilities/geos to cool down. If they had a better ai or higher difficulty I would take any of the combat options though!
Edit: found old ds and first game, played for a bit and the combat is alright, would definitely benefit from a lock onto enemy feature, and better enemy ai. The circling the perimeter works even better than I remember and allows for easy battles. The movement in combat also has some drift to it which I remember disliking alot back in the day. Also the using geos as an ultimate weapon in battle is still satisfying, upon using one you get a sick cut scene of the ultimate spectrobes you used and brings back lots of memories of using them in tough battles to turn the tide! Forgot about how you level 3 separate stats which each can add levels to the spectrobes which made building specific stat based spectrobes super engaging. Also the incubator rooms (4 of them!) allowed you to feed the minerals you excavated to the spectrobes. Also the excavation mini game is lightyears ahead of what pokemon implemented in Gen 4 and way more engaging! Using the ds mic to blow away debris brought a smile to my face all these years later. This honestly should have been the pokemon killer it was made out to be.
Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.
The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.
Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)
This sounds really interesting. I'm gonna put this on my wishlist in hopes it goes on sale or something. Can't justify $25 right now due to circumstances.
If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!
A first person scifi FPS-RPG. Developed in Ukraine. Very unique experience wrapped inside of a concept that’s been done before. High slavjank tolerance required.
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