Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. You will work together with an increasing team of friends and allies to survive ridiculous circumstances.
The story is incredible, but the character building is excellent. Great fast paces action RPG with party switching, so you’ll always have 2 playing with you. The story really shows deep friendship development, especially if you ensure to do all side quests and talk to characters at various story points.
I like a lot of singleplayer games, but I also play games that can be played multiplayer (open world survival crafting games).
Borderlands is pretty good imo. You can play alone, but you never really feel alone with all the characters constantly asking you to do stuff for them.
Someone else said Kenshi, which is strictly singleplayer but you can build up your party and have multiple squads running around, taking care of things. And there are generated conversations between them. And there’s tons of mods that can change or add things to the game; personally I’ve added a couple new subraces to the vanilla ones, a couple new whole races of characters to play with, new building and weapon types and such.
Edit: Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here, or even any cozy game really.
The new Star Wars: Jedi games like Fallen Order and Survivor are great singleplayer games without making you feel alone. Mostly cause of BD-1.
I keep seeing aa lot of neat things about Kenshi, but when I tried it out I felt completely lost and lost interest before I really figured anything out.
I don’t like when games baby you, but I do like a little hand-holding to get me started.
Maybe I’m just a big dum and turned off the tutorial/tips/skipped something I shouldn’t have? Not sure but your comment definitely makes me want to give it another go when I have a couple of days free.
I guess you’re looking to spend time with interesting characters.
Endearing party of playable characters:
Bug Fables — A big tiny adventure of three cute insects, with Paper Mario-inspired turn-based combat
Cassette Beasts — Creature-collecting with heart. You bring one of several interesting companions with you.
Moonlight Pulse — A metroidvania set on a planet-sized creature. You play as a team of planet-creature denizens fighting off a parasite infestation.
Encountering interesting NPCs:
A Short Hike — A very small but dense open world game. You encounter characters on your way to find a cell signal in a remote mountain park. With no quest tracker or minimap, you just wander and do what you want.
Inscryption — Card game with an immersive, spooky atmosphere. The game is hiding secrets from you, though, and you’ll meet plenty of shady characters before you can get the truth.
CrossCode — Action RPG set in a fictional VR MMO of the distant future. You wake up as a player character with no memories of real life, unable to log out. You quickly make friends, go do MMO stuff together and get to the bottom of why you’re stuck in-game.
Parasocial weirdness:
Hypnospace Outlaw — You are a janitor on a Geocities-like service in a simulated 1999 internet. You learn about all the users through their personal websites. This game expresses a large emotional range with just website updates (or the lack of them).
I was going to suggest CrossCode, it has some great characters. And while the game is balls-hard on default settings it has many adjustable options to bring it in line with whatever your skill level may be.
Honestly, my issue with it is that it gets mired in real MMO tedium when it didn’t need to simulate that. Stuff like running between NPC traders to trade your supplies up for good equipment and other stuff like having a gigantic pile of consumables.
And of course, I finish the final boss with all the best consumables still in my inventory. The game never pressed me to use them, so I always saved them for something more important. “Oh, that was the final boss. Guess I should have been eating more sandwiches.”
The plot and worldbuilding are still really cool. Just don’t get into MMOmaxxing.
Rimworld on low difficulty is very enjoyable. My colonists become like my family and I want to care for them and protect them. It is very fulfilling to build them amenities and make their lives more comfortable.
i mean sure, but we’re actually approaching the edge of what can even be considered a game.
i don’t call those games personally. they are vaguely interactive novels. imo a physical choose your own adventure book has more “gameplay” than most of these virtual novels.
i honestly don’t think game is the right term here. these are books with an odd format.
It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.
Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don't have very much choice at all, that's a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.
The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.
Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.
Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.
There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.
These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.
I very disagree. How much writing is there in Chess? Can you think of any writing in Quake? You can definitely consider Quake great without the being any writing involved at all.
I think writers should stick to writing and game makers should go picking and choosing stories that would suit their game.
Yo, holy moly! They basically did with quake how I just suggested by making a game and slapping a story on afterwards!!! How TF did I come up with quake as my example for this!?!?! It’s either pure luck or actual shared vision!
I never understood why people bitch about reading in games. Like, you do know people read books for fun, right? JRPGs are some of the most beloved games ever and a good chunk of them are pretty much just reading a ton of dialogue and descriptions.
idk, i kind of can’t stand this format of visual novel.
i love books. i love story driven games. virtual novels like this somehow manage to capture the worst aspects of both. like, it’s a book that forces you to read it slowly, or at least at a somewhat fixed pace. i hate being locked to a computer to read, i hate having to either continuously click to advance to the next slids after every 2 sentences or less or have to read at a fixed pace, i honestly hate having low quality badly mixed sounds effects in my ear while I’m trying to read.
these aren’t low gameplay games. these are just extra tedious books. I’d so much rather just read a manga every time.
As a counter I find the fact that VNs sidestep having to describe all sorts of setting and character related things by just showing you them instead with beautiful art work and at times voice acting.
To me that actually increases the pace instead of slows it down, if you think about what you're not having to read. I do also dislike reading VNs at a computer, though, so I'll only get them on portable systems unless it's REALLY good, like Slay the Princess, and that game would simply not be the same if it were a book, it's extremely reliant on choice.
eh, I’d rather choose either art or voice. manga ot audio book. i tend to lean towards Audio books because it leaves my eyes and hands free to do other things.
for me it’s just a struggle. it requires me to give it all of my senses, like a movie, but it does so little to hold them. a single still image that changes once ever like 20 lines holds my interest for maybe 2 seconds if it’s a good one. then the dialogue goes on for 5 minutes. it’s almost always bottom of the barrel voice acting. I’ll admit, having been completely put off by the biggest mainstream ones having no choices and just being shitty books, so i haven’t tried any with choices, but the fact that the most popular ones don’t really have choices… you just can’t avoid a medium being defined by its biggest representatives. those are the ones that draw people in and hook them. clearly the choices aren’t the thing fans of the medium like.
again, i just can’t imagine having anything but an infinitely better time reading a manga. fate had me frustratedly dragging myself through it by the end. I’ve never actually managed to finish any others. if was so many hours of me begging it to be less slow. even with all the modern mods and fixes to make it as customizable of an experience as possible. it made me want to pull my hair out at times because of how tedious it was. like maybe if i ate 1000mg thc gummy i could melt into enough, but it’s just so painfully slow otherwise.
You are correct in some ways, such as dedicating all your senses while giving you less on average to engage them, but are also over generalizing by saying it's always terrible voice acting, which just isn't true, it can be anime hammy, but I happen to really love well done over the top anime voice acting, which is a whole different style compared to something extremely realistic like The Last of Us. And if you don't like that style, that's okay, but it's not terrible.
I feel like biggest representatives could go to things like Danganronpa, Phoenix Wright, or Persona, which all feature choice and gameplay, and I'd say Danganronpa and Persona have good voice acting, with Persona's as excellent. I feel like generalizing that fans of the genre don't care about choice is just not correct for all fans, I personally dislike most of the choiceless VNs because they then rely extremely hard on story, for example I disliked House in Fata Morgana because that's a "reading a linear book" style of VN with no voice acting, and it's really long, and the soundtrack was not super amazing (compared to Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa, and Persona, which have OUT FUCKING STANDING soundtracks, and with a manga you're not getting a soundtrack that emotionally engages you and brings you back to listen to them long after completing the games as I have with those series.
i would consider persona to be a different genre. it’s closer to Pokemon with a lot of dialogue. i guess I’m defining visual novels partly as things that don’t have much gameplay. if there is a significant other portion of gameplay with complex mechanics outside of dialogue that’s just a different thing in my book.
I… don’t love persona, but that more because i can’t get into the teenage highschool drama. the number of times i felt myself internally screaming “holy shit i don’t care, you won’t even remember this in 5 years” made me eventually realize I just wasn’t having a great time. liked the Pokemon fights though. I could see myself loving a different game that plays similar with a more mature story.
I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.
That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.
Gameplay really is about how much agency you have. Visual Novels are usually not games, as plenty of them have zero user agency. You’re just reading a comic book at that point, not playing a game.
I’ve been reading a ton of these things the last few weeks. I can’t bring myself to say “I’m playing these games” over “I’m reading these novels.” Because most of them have had literally no choices to make, or the choices you make have zero effect on anything and are just there as a joke.
It’s absolutely not subjective. A game is literally pursuit of a definite objective. All the color and flavor that isn’t a mechanic in itself is just extra.
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