Stonehearth was eventually abandoned, unfortunately, but the game is very much playable. The devs didn’t just ghost the playerbase but had a kind of transfer of knowledge with the modders and the game lives on.
What’s great about Stonehearth is it’s multiplayer. A multiplayer colony management sim where two players can build an interconnected city (technically 2 separate colonies) and command an army to fend off increasingly difficult waves of goblin raids.
I’ve had so many fun games with my wife, we’ll settle next to a cliff side, she has hearthlings (i.e. hobbits) and me as dwarves. I’d take care of mining and build all into the mountain, make us the best weapons with world-class smiths and she’d take care of the food, amazing cooks, animal husbandry, etc.
I do like 4x and GSG titles for their complexity but I miss the strategy games where you see the actual units moving around. Even better if you are one of those units! Real time action also always ends up being reflex /speed / micro oriented rather than depend on slow strategy so I’m not sure if this is one of those cursed problems and they can’t coexist…
Explore a world with cute graphics and build a team of creatures to be the very best or whatever story someone comes up with, but you actually have to fight the creatures to capture them.
Basically Dwarf Fortress, but sci-fi, with space travel and with really good 3D graphics.
An overly complicated simulation of an entire universe where I can do anything that the game’s laws of physics allow me to do. Particularly, I dream of a game where you can fulfil Star Trek fantasies of solving convoluted problems with equally convoluted solutions; but without it being a pre-programmed option. (“Reconfigure the deflector dish to output a neutrino wave to counter act the tachyon field!”)
Fake physics that allow for real fake science and engineering.
Close, but RimWorld’s mechanics are nowhere near the complexity, even with mods. And I don’t just mean with how many different types of rocks and trees exist. I’ve gotten as close to a DF-like experience + the space travel part, but it’s still like 1/4 of the full experience.
Although it’s moddable, which boosts it’s playability a bit more. I’ve played more RimWorld than DF at this point.
I'm not sure how successful it was, but there's a fun horror (mostly) walking sim called Apsulov: End of Gods. It's based on Norse mythology and has a refreshing take on Loki, especially if you're tired of everything Marvel has put out. The visuals are great too.
There's another one called Close to the Sun that's essentially, "what would happen if Nikola Tesla built a giant fucking cruise ship for the world's smartest minds at the time and then everything goes wrong?". The story is really interesting, and I've been hoping for a sequel.
I don't think Murdered: Soul Suspect did very well from what I remember when it came out, but I had a ton of fun playing that game. They could have done way more as far as mechanics go, and some aspects are pretty cheesy, but I'm a sucker for detective games and trying to piece together information.
Speaking of which, The Painscreek Killings is so good. You play as a reporter who's tasked with invesigating a cold case in a tiny abandoned town. I really liked this one because there is absolutely no hand holding when it comes to playing detective. You absolutely have to figure everything out yourself. Back when I used to stream, I had a regular viewer tell me it was their favorite game that I played, because listening to me trying to figure out the story and my next step was like listening to one of those old crime radio shows. It's one of the few games I wish I could play again for the first time, since I know the outcome now and how everything fits together. The developer is supposed to be making another similar game, so I'm eager to see how that goes.
The year this was being shown at E3, I got my best friend in as my ‘photographer’ for the show under a press pass, and set up a bunch of private gameplay demos of games (by this point nothing interesting was shown on the show floor anymore).
When we went to our appointment at the Square Enix booth, they immediately ushered us into a room with nothing but two Japanese guys, and were like “ok, go ahead and ask your questions.”
Apparently they thought we’d sat through an earlier gameplay demo which they never set up, and we were suddenly sitting with the game director and their translator for a half hour interview about a title I hadn’t even seen or knew anything about - and an interview conducted through a translator on top of that (and I’d intentionally been trying to avoid ending up in interviews in the first place).
It was one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had in life, and very much reminded me of the times I’d be in a book discussion in high school for a reading assignment I hadn’t done, frantically grabbing on to any thread that seemed legit and running with it.
I love the outer worlds, it has such a unique style to it, very much fallout humor in space with a little bit of arcanum thrown in for good measure. IMHO outer worlds > Starfield, when I saw that neon was just one long hallway with a few neon lights and signs, I knew what I was getting into and just stopped playing. Starfield has no identity, it’s bland, space combat is annoying at best, and it’s just an unoptimized mess. Outer worlds is unique, and when I see it I know exactly what it is, I can’t say the same for Starfield.
Not necessarily, but there's some correlation. Games widely praised either are quality games or they resonate with their audience in some particular way, which can be itself an indication of value. Conversely a game that is widely panned might have some significant flaws or be lacking in some fundamental way.
Sure, there is always the odd Garfield Kart meme and some controversy skewing that. But because lists of reviews are easily available on the store page you can look at what is it that the other customers are praising or criticizing, and make your mind based on whether you see merits in these opinions.
Overall, even if you don't trust popular opinion, it's still a very useful tool. Frankly, often more useful than mainstream game reviews that tend to be overly lenient with triple-A publishers, and neglect indies.
An individual review does not matter too much (unless it has good text), but an overall score can give a hint. In example if a game gets a lot of flag from the users of recent reviews, than something is going on. It's always good to have a way of user reviews alongside the media outlets. You can even see if the game got for free (on paid games) and how long the guy played it at the time of writing the review. And it should incentivize developers to work on the game. Better than having nothing, like on Epic Games. User/Player opinions are not welcome there at all.
Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.
That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:
Distance: Mostly a “beat the clock” style racing game in the vein of trackmania, although the synchronous MP with collision is a great time at a party. But it also has a weirdly good singleplayer campaign with both a narrative and some solid mechanics and set pieces. Also a ridiculous steam workshop presence
Tales of Maj’Eyal probably doesn’t belong here as I think it has been ridiculously successful for a game made by a small team and consistently comes up in discussions by anyone who is aware of what “the berlin interpretation” is. But it feels like it is almost completely ignored in the overall cultural zeitgeist when roguelikes/lites comes up. Which is a shame since TOME is very much a roguelike (technically lite, but… meh) with some solid design concepts. The vast majority of runs feel like they were “worth it” and even the early leveling has enough variety and wrenches that it feels less like you lost an hour of your life when you wipe and more like you get to do the Sand Worm again. Some of the unlocks are complete bullshit (although, I want to say the special magic trees were just made “free” because everyone hated it?), but it is generally the kind of game where you can work toward something with every run.
UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock (fuck Afterlight). Back in the dark ages between Silent Storm (WOOO) and the 2012 nu-XCOM, there were a lot of eurojank games in the genre. And while I don’t think UFO Aftermath was “good”, I do think it was competent. But mostly? It is probably the best Stargate SG1 game ever made. Because the devs were trying to cash in on that Jagged Alliance craze and made the human weapons stage a lot longer. So you might find yourself in an endgame with a few G36s backing up your plasma rifles as you fend off the obligatory base invasion. Aftershock, and especially Afterlight, lost a lot of this charm (because they are years later timeline wise) but were still fun
Silent Storm. Sorry, Silent Mother Fucking Storm, if we want to be specific. Alternate history WW2 where you play as a special organization for the Allies or Axis that are investigating a third party who have the potential to turn the war itself and blah blah blah. Mostly it is probably one of the best balanced JA2 style AP-based strategy games out there (just… get a save editor because the leveling/training is broken) with an emphasis on line of sight, trajectories, and full destruction of terrain. The kind of game where you might spend six “turns” getting your scout into position so that you can have your sniper plug a person from behind a wall, your machine gunner unload on people sleeping in a barracks, and your grenadier to… make the guard tower not exist anymore. All without ever directly targeting an enemy because you are fully operating based on magic radio commands or whatever. Again, this probably doesn’t belong here since anyone who liked JA2 back in the day was talking about this but it more or less fell off the face of the earth in favor of nu-XCOM. And I feel like the genre would be pretty revolutionized if people remembered this existed.
Thanks for pointing out the rogue typo, I use swipe texting on my phone so I occasionally get stuff wrong and I tend not to proof read as much as I aught to. Either way it’s fixed now.
NOVA DRIFT is easily the best SHMUP if have played in my life and it´s on a 60% discount right now. From the tight controls to the artstyle and the gameplay, everything about this game is perfect and the dev is listening to the community.
I really wanted to enjoy doom 3, but even 20 years later I haven’t finished the main campaign. Too many cheap jumpscares and the switching to the flashlight just to see, really put me off in the end. However, it was a pretty game for the time.
Amnesia is great, I haven’t finished that one either but it’s the good kind of horror, much more creepy and slow-burning.
Mad Max for me. Story and stealth is better in DG, but the driving, vehicle combat and hand-to-hand combat is sooo much better in MM.
The car is basically a second character you upgrade throughout the game.
DG for me was too … Last of us-esque, without the memorable characters. Just an ok cover shooter with lots of stealth plus a vehicle, which was not very fun to drive or care about.
The combat is basically AC/Arkham/Shadow of Mordor, but holy shit do the animations make it satisfying. There's this gritty desperate quality to it I haven't seen anywhere else.
Days Gone is much better than Mad Max, which was still a good game. It’s a shame Days Gone launched with so many problems because the final product is so so good. Yeah the story is a just ok and the acting can be hammy and a little uneven. But the gameplay is great and I actually enjoyed the story.
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