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.
I can’t believe I typed out a whole recommendation about tunic and outer Wilds, and then scrolled down and saw your exact same recommendations. Lol. I guess excellent games are universal
I had a moment in Tunic where I realized what the references in the manual to the [HOLY CROSS] were talking about, but I don’t think my revelation was the typical.
I’d actually figured out the [HOLY CROSS] really early on, solved a bunch of puzzles using it, got some manual pages I probably wasn’t supposed to have yet, but didn’t know that the thing I was using was the [HOLY CROSS] because I lacked the context of a certain page that spells it out and based on some comments and videos elsewhere is the point where a lot of people first figure out how to use it.
It probably didn’t hurt that I was fresh off The Witness and my brain was subconsciously looking for tricks of perspective and environmental puzzles, which Tunic is absolutely full of.
The World Ends With You (DS): Asymmetric action RPG where your left hand and right hand are playing different games in parallel, which is deeply connected to the game’s themes of individual experience and semiotics. The switch remake unfortunately ditches the core gameplay to make it more widely accessible but the original game is worth getting into.
Fez: a 2D plateformer in which you can change the perspective to create ways to unreachable plateforms
Baba Is You: a puzzle game in which you move blocks with words written on them, combining them to create small phrases which become new rules of the game.
Super Paper Mario for the Wii also has a mechanic like that. You’re in a 2D paper world (obviously) but you have the ability to temporarily turn 90°; walking through enemies and opening the possibility to i.e. pass some walls.
Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.
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.
This was what I was going to add. It’s basically just walking around and finding panels that have small 2d mazes on them, and solving the mazes. Sounds simple and honestly quite boring, but it quickly becomes far more special and ends up being so good.
Some of the solutions made me feel like my brain was folding in on itself before clicking into place
I am not sure if it qualifies but Paradise Killer is pretty unique all-around. It may seem walking-simulator-ish but the presentation and the overall game-design are definitely a stand out. You’re trying to solve a murder mystery and it’s completely up to you as the player to decide when you’ve gathered enough information to make a conviction. There is practically no hand-holding either which is quite rare for a mystery solving/detective game. I know it might not exactly be what OP asked for but I think the game is worth being recommended more.
There is really something very different about this game. If you point to any individual part of it, there are other games that do that thing. But all together, it’s quite unique. And it’s a pretty fun game.
Patrick’s Parabox: Push blocks around to activate switches and reach the exit but the blocks can be pushed into and out of each other recursively, it’s awesome
Fez: Already been suggested so +1 for this, lovely game
Cultist Simulator is pretty unique... not necessarily in a good way. It's a storytelling/puzzle game with some great writing if you can power your way through the gameplay. The mechanics are deliberately very obtuse, with no tutorial, to emulate the fact that diving into the occult is confusing and dangerous. The end result is that the game is very unique and cool, but it's absolutely not for everyone. TL;DR on the basic mechanics: you have a handful of verb boxes, such as Talk or Research, as well as various cards that you can slot into them. Each card has a variety of tags on it. Depending on which cards with which tags you put into the various verb boxes, you get different results.
Cultist Simulator somehow made me feel the same fanaticism as I assume a cultist would feel. It can be very addicting, chasing the endgame, driven by curiosity and desire for power. Not for everyone though.
Portal reloaded adds time portals ontop of the normal portals.
Splitgate is an FPS that adds portals on top of Halo style combat. Very fun but may be hard to find a game these days its kinda dead.
Age of empires 3 is an RTS that adds shipments. These shipments increase the pace of the early game and allow for way more personalized play as well as allowing players to react to different things without shifting their entire build order.
GTFO is a horror fps where you and 3 other human players take on raids and these raids are changed each season. When the raids are retired they are gone. You must beat the lvl 1 raids to unlock lvl 2 and so on.
Radio Commander. Its an RTS where you sit in a tent in Vietnam and give and recieve orders via radio. You have a map that you can mark where things are based on the info you get.
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