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.
The first two games that came to mind are unfortunately only available on PS4. I’ll mention them anyway, just in case they come to PC in future or someone else that has a PS4 is interested: Tearaway Unfolded is a really sweet game in a paper craft world. You manipulate paper scenery to help with platforming and really customise your character in creative ways. Just a unique and charming game. And Gravity Rush 1&2. These games let you alter gravity to fly around a beautiful open world - I’ve never played something with a traversal and combat system like this.
I agree with Obra Dinn and the Witness as mentioned by others!
This is probably a weird suggestion, but you could emulate Metal Gear Ac!d 2 (PSP game). It’s a stealth game (like the rest of the MGS series) mixed with a deck builder, so your actions are dictated by the cards that you play. The second one in particular perfects the formula IMO. It’s super satisfying and I’d love to see more games of this type!
I have a HTPC setup for steam gaming using Micro OS. I haven’t touched it in a few months, but for the earlier parts of this year I frequently played Dead Cells, Art of Rally, Bloodstained, Vampire Survivor, Stardew Valley, games like that.
I used a couple of PS4 controllers via Bluetooth, just using the touchpad on the controller for if I needed to use a mouse cursor on the desktop or something.
One gripe was that I couldn’t get MicroOS to auto login, so I had to keep a keyboard next to the tv so I could sign in everything I wanted to play a game.
Faster than light - manage crew in a 2D strategy environment and jump around in space. Pretty unique gameplay which only recently got some clones.
Teardown - Work as criminal stealing stuff, but the clue is you can destroy everything and you need to create smart parkour to steal stuff right in time before the cops arrive. Also you can sandbox play it if you get bored.
Terra Nil - Bring back nature to a destroyed earth, with relaxing and calm mechanics. Highly recommend.
Others: FEZ, solve puzzles. Deep Rock Galactic, because dwarfs being this much dwarf is just dwarftastic. Rock and Stone!
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