If you’re able to get a good internet connection, you could run anything on Geforce Now’s list. Not the most optimal gaming experience, but it can be satisfying enough.
To give something more specific I enjoy, try Backpack Hero. It’s a roguelike on the easier side, built around making absurd combos.
I think let’s game it out did one of his satisfactory abominations on gforce now, seemed pretty good from the video (could have been someone else like imkibitz/kibitz but iirc it was lgio)
Emulators for any game console from before the 3D era. NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis would all be good candidates. You’ll have a ton of good games you can play any time.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did this really well just this year. Largely a story about contrasting a desire for adventure with the horrors and realities of war, it also has quests that are full of comedy. You can try to attract a pack of wolves using what the shepherd refers to as his absolute dumbest sheep; you can get blackout drunk with a band of mercenaries who may or may not have killed your childhood friends; you can clean up and decorate a crypt full of loose bones for a man who speaks only in rhymes, poorly, and might be a ghost.
I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and I think it fits the bill perfectly. I laughed, I cried, I raged, I celebrated, I was in awe. Really a beautiful story and deep take on life and existence. I went into it blind and highly recommend that kind of experience as well.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 became my favourite entry in the series because of how it still has light, silly moments, improbable vistas and absurd world building, but when it tries for dark, it hits hard (and to be honest it’s generally a good deal darker than the other games even from the beginning).
Previous episodes had their emotional moments, but nothing comes close to one particular scene in 3.
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
Japanese developers tend to excel at this because Eastern culture/media is much more willing to acknowledge emotion and moral ambiguity. The West likes misty eyed men whereas East Asians are all about that former boyband member sobbing. And The West only allows a Bruce Willies level character to beat on an abuser. It’s why Hank Hill humorously kicking Jimmy in the ass after… almost getting Bobby run over by a dozen Nascar Cars sticks with us. Or Dan Conner making sure his sister-in-law is okay before wordlessly grabbing his jacket to beat her abuser half to death.
A couple days back Aftermath posted an excellent blog on Kamen Rider that kind of exemplifies it aftermath.site/kamen-rider-kuuga-tokusatsu. But the quick summary: There is a meme clip going around of a sentai character beating the ever loving hell out of a monster. And the context is that the hero of that series is a super happy man who loves children who was faced with a villain who murders children in a way that maximizes suffering for everyone around them. So he just completely snaps and crosses every imaginable line while unleashing all of his powers with no wind up or ceremony. And, most importantly, there is no moral hand wringing about how “Yes, he deserved it but what is this doing to you?”. Mother fucker was unquestionably evil and got what was coming to him. And while it does tie into the overall themes of Yusuke being worn down and broken by the weight of the suit, it also acknowledges that… somebody needs to be. Which is a theme common in the Gundams and so forth.
Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.
As for games that pull this off? I’ll contribute Dust: An Elysian Tale. Most of it is happy go lucky as the amnesiac protagonist and his cute and cuddly and obnoxious companion fight against the evil military with some good laughs. But it also touches on the theme of “you can do everything right and still people get hurt” which works REALLY well in the video game space where you are conditioned to believe the golden ending will always be happy and perfect.
How much are you willing to dig for it? I’m playing through hollow knight atm and have been shocked at the emotional depth that hides in the margins of the world. If you plow through the game and only touch the required content then all you get is the overall somber vibe. But if you turn every stone, talk to every npc, complete every side quest, you might be surprised at how much love and loss and joy and pain there is in the story.
Overall it is about picking through the ruins of a dead kingdom. You can engage with that as much or as little as you want. IMO they do an outstanding job of rewarding you for the effort.
Minecraft: Super chill sandbox building game, but when you are lost 150 blocks deep in the mines, just found your first diamonds in the dark after you ran out of torches and you hear that hissing sound just behind you…
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