I never completed that one but had explored most of the mainland. I really need to go back and go through it all again. I loved the small details throughout the world. The wilderness and countryside was so well done, with little shrines along the roads here and there and so many lived-in places throughout. I spent 75% of my playtime with Roach set to a slow trot just so I could really absorb the world and feel like I was making a journey on those old roads. There’s something so profoundly Witcher about quietly riding dark paths at night and stopping to hear a monster in the woods. You climb off Roach and draw your silver sword, then make your way into that decrepit forest to deal with whatever is going on out there.
“Return of the Obra Dinn” is the best Detective-type game I have ever played. Pure inductive, yet always logical reasoning. The setting of an Victorian ship, the 1-Bit artystyle, excellent ost and memorable story really elevate this recommendation to a must-play.
On something from this decade, Balatro is great if you like cards and rouge-likes. But it’s been so popular I don’t think anyone interested hasn’t heard of it yet.
Oh, and as others have pointed out and I’d hate myself for not mentioning it, Tunic is great as well. It’s a love-letter to the instruction book, and makes one really feel like playing an old game and relying on an instruction book, while not being all that great at reading, like some may remember from their childhood. But with modern game design and what others call Dark-soul mechanics (idk, I have never played a Fromsoft game).
I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.
Baldurs Gate. There is so much content. I’m 150 hours in the game, I play split screen coop with my wife. We each have our characters customized to how we like it. It’s AAA quality. Came at a AAA price, but it’s absolutely worth it.
And I say this as a FPS/simulation gamer. Totally different genre but they’ve made this game accessible to all. It’s the only game I’ve ever purchased at full price and my steam account is 12 years old.
The “you died” text on it makes me wonder if it was some kind of special Dark Souls thing. But I don’t remember any special Dark Souls release on Xbox.
It could have been custom made back when they were doing that if you bought directly from MS. Not sure if they still do that, but I rememeber it being a thing back in, I think, the XB360 days.
Yeh it was the text that was throwing me. I’ve customised my own controllers with different coloured buttons etc before so that part was easily explainable but the text is professionally added and I never knew that was a thing people did (seems like a waste of money to me)
Turns out it is a design labs custom one as per the other responses though. Learn something new every day!
Cheers man for the reply. Yeh it seems like this is the case I just didn’t know that it was a thing.
I’ve bought coloured buttons and modded my own controllers before but it was the text on the bottom that was throwing me as it has been professionally added! I didn’t know that design lab was a thing :)
The Last Campfire is delightful, and feels like being read a bedtime story. God, it’s good. I could listen to the narrator read the back of a shampoo bottle.
Planet of Lana is a drop dead gorgeous side scrolling puzzle platformer with a beautiful soundtrack and world building.
Beacon Pines isn’t technically linear, in that you can complete some stuff in an order of your choosing. But the overall experience is quite linear. Its an exquisite experience, I can’t recommend it enough.
If you enjoyed Undertale, play OneShot. No question. Its splendid.
Night in the Woods is a joy as well, it makes me nostalgic for a childhood I never had. Must-play.
Stray - you are a cat doing cat things in a broken future. Splendid experience.
Mirror’s Edge is a game I think everyone should experience at least once. It’s beautiful.
Celeste - it has the best tuned difficulty curve I’ve seen in any game, and it wants you to succeed. It also tells a really beautiful story. God the platforming is good. Its so good. By the end of it, you are doing things you never thought you’d dream of doing. You’ll feel like a speedrunner with all the little movement tricks you’re able to do.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a thought provoking masterpiece and a little spooky.
I’m currently playing through this game. At one point, it totally hit me that the non-linear structure and even the way secrets are scattered throughout the world is very reminiscent of Super Mario 64.
You are not wrong… I guess in both instance they came from the desire never to break the immersion through any kind of loading.
The weirder think to me is that it was made by the guys behing “Serious Sam”, that basically mastered the open field shooter genre, which is kinda like the opposite of this game?
Yes, exactly! Coming from one of the best-made mindless game series to essentially gaming high art is quite the transformation. There has always been a lot of talent at Kroteam, but I’m glad they have finally found their true calling.
The small handful of nods to Serious Sam in The Talos Principle are quite amusing, by the way. I almost got a heart attack from suddenly hearing the sound of the headless kamikaze…
Portal Pro I remember being great. So good that Portal 2 was a disappointment for me when it landed.
I needed to cheat (watch the YouTube solution video) on a few solutions, iirc, too; not because they’re badly designed, just because I couldn’t wrap my head around the solution.
It should be noted that a couple of the portal solutions need reasonably quick portal placement, so I don’t think it would be as good without KB+mouse. It took me a few tries to nail one of the techniques.
And here I am just making my motors by hand like a chump. You know, maybe it’s time I get off my ass and build something cool like this. Iron and coal processing and smelting on the first level, ingot splitting to wire on the second, pipe making on the third, have a vertical line that’ll start pumping out rotors from processing, then a bank of assemblers at the top floor to churn out motors and to line them back down.
So I’m not sure what might make you not feel lonely or anxious. Things like how directly you control the characters with you could he factors I imagine, so I’m just going to list a bunch of things:
A shorter one, but Star Wars Republic Commando. You’re a commando unit and work as one.
Dragon’s Dogma, either Dark Arisen or the new sequel.
Mass Effect series.
I don’t know if Earth Defence Force would be like that or not, at the end of the day your NPC allies could be hit or miss (literally, depending on the weapons you use).
Not sure how you feel about party-based RPGs, but there are tons of them.
I’m wondering if RTS games with campaigns would feel right as well. StarCraft’s campaigns have a lot of people constantly talk to/around you.
The Lego games?
Stardew Valley?
Can’t really think of indie games at the moment.
Games I haven’t played so I don’t know if they apply: Persona? Space Marine games?
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