What I absolutely love is the specific, mysterious revelation of “How is he doing this, this shouldn’t be possible”.
Spec Ops: The Line touches this a little bit - with some actions and messages leaning toward incredulity that 3 soldiers have been destroying an entire battalion.
The movie Willie’s Wonderland also aims for this. The lite mystery is how the animatronics became possessed, but the big mystery is who/what the hell the Janitor that wandered into town is.
On a similar note, you get a bit of that feel in Half-Life 2 from Dr. Breen’s angry message to the Nova Prospekt soldiers for them missing you at Black Mesa East; “This is not some agent provocateur or highly-trained assassin!! Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist!”
I’m deep into Blue Prince right now. Not loving all the randomness for this kind of puzzle game but the puzzles and lore are good enough to keep me going. Always a weird feeling to think “I love this, I just wish its core premise wasn’t part of it.”
I typically do use my Steam Deck as a Steam Deck and not a GOG Deck, but every time I’m on the go, forgot to explicitly put my Steam Deck in offline mode, and get hit with a license that needs to be reauthenticated, I wish I’d stuck to GOG instead…or that GOG offered the game I’m playing at all. Also, BioShock Infinite is fantastic, and whenever you hear about it now, it tends to be from people who really want you to know that they didn’t like it.
Lately I’ve been playing the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance still, and this one is via GOG. I got to a point where I can do some side quests, so the main story is taking a back seat for a little while. I am enjoying the story and characters, but I do wish they’d made different choices in things like the combat and some of the “realism”-related tedium.
I just beat the base game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel last night, before moving on to its DLC in my attempt to play through this entire series ahead of Borderlands 4. There are some good levels and bosses, and I liked how my class that I selected works, but the writing is just atrocious. It definitely tried to be funny but rarely had anything that could even be classified as a punchline, as though they’d never actually heard a joke before but heard about jokes.
And then my wife and I are still playing through Blue Prince. We’re making good progress, but I do find myself agreeing with the criticism that the RNG is bringing down the experience. I think if you could draft from 5 rooms at a time instead of 3, it would do wonders for the experience.
I found KCD II made huge improvements over the first. I mean, that’s natural and kinda stupid to say…but it felt more ‘complete’ to me. The first actually had me a bit overwhelmed - there were too many options, too much to do and see. The second while actually expanding that aspect…well it just felt a bit more focused. To me, anyway.
I did install a lot of mods also, to remove some of what I find tedious, but others adore.
It’s weird, because even though I support the idea of modding as you the customer doing what you want with the product you bought, I also usually refuse to do it for a first playthrough, because I want to evaluate the thing that the developer actually delivered when I have an opinion on it. So even if some mod out there removes the tedium, I want to see what the game is like, start to finish, with the tedium included.
I just love these posts so much man, they’re so random but so authentic. AND YES GOD DAMMIT IT IS JESSE FADEN I will not be lied to god dammit I recognize my favorite Remedy girl. And yes Crow Country is dope, if you like retro survival horror I cannot not recommend Signalis!
I have two favorite warlocks from destiny 2. My wife’s obviously. But the number one spot goes to a nameless warlock. Only because I forgot to record the whole thing.
We were thrown into a 3v3 except our third never loaded in. Me a titan, and my warlock had a mission to survive. I needed this win because of a exotic upgrade I wanted. But it looked bleak. The enemy team was good. But magic happened. The warlock and I shared a moment of clarity. We weren’t outnumber and out gunned. We had more targets and more ammo. We moved as a perfect unit, watching each other’s backs,boost jumps and popping heads, perfect supers. Finally about halfway through, the game still neck and neck, when one of the other enemy quit. Wether out of pity for us, or to give his team a better chance I don’t know. The warlock was an absolute tiger. I may have gotten the last kill, but that warlock straight up got MVP. The best part? I got my exotic upgrade. I haven’t really played since. The warlock set a bar so high that I fully expect all my teammates to be as good as them. Some are, a lot aren’t. Wherever that warlock is, they are kicking ass and chewing gum. And they are all out of gum.
Called it quits on Blue Prince last week. 20-30h in and I hit the main goal of the game of reaching the 46th room. I started scratching at some of the deeper puzzles and mysteries to solve but I think the combination of some frustrating mechanics (drafting the right rooms, running out of resources, etc…) along with time being a premium, I had to stop myself. I just realized my excitement for “one more run” just wasn’t there and rather than sour my opinion on it, it was better to move on and appreciate the depth that’s there for people getting into it. Super impressed by everything that I’ve seen in it and definitely recommended if you’re a fan of puzzles and taking notes to piece a lot of things together.
And on what feels like the other end of the spectrum, I started Skin Deep and am having a blast. It’s such a weird, stylistic immersive sim where you’re rescuing these low-polygon cats from pirates taking over their spaceship. The humor is good and the systems interact really well. Everything telegraphs what it can do, how it can be used, and the game seems to reward experimentation. I’m trying to be stealthy but there’s no penalty to breaking stealth, and some rewarding per-mission objectives that encourage you to check everything out.
You also get to flush heads down toilets which is pretty cool (and definitely something missing from Blue Prince)
I get that on Blue Prince. Even with the RNG control you’re afforded late game you’re still heavily affected by the luck of the draw. I still think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.
If you’re looking to see the rest of the game through someone else’s eyes to get a glimpse of the remaining puzzles I thoroughly recommend Luckless Lovelocks playthrough on YouTube. It’s still ongoing but I’ve really enjoyed his note taking and puzzle solving.
Definitely good to know. I don’t think I’d call it one of the best I’ve ever played but it was certainly awesome as pieces started clicking into place and I could see the outline of how it would go. I’m curious to see what else is really in there (I’ve spoiled some bits and pieces to it) and may go down that path. Thank you!
All the detail, the world building and the little pieces of narrative, the puzzles within puzzles and the constant feeling of the game just opening up under you and always throwing things at you making you go “wait, how big is this game?” was just so cool.
I might be high on recency bias in my praise but I was thoroughly enamoured with it.
I think I’ve sunk 200 hours into tetris this year alone, I have it on like 4 systems including my SP handheld clone
Edit: my phrasing here was unclear, there effect connected has not been ported to portmaster or the ports collection, I use Tetris RR, a custom patched og GB tetris to have all the same amenities (hold, hard drop) as modern tetris.
If you like tetris and want tetris RR, find a GB tetris ROM and patch it yourself
A link to the Romhack (for the mods, this is a link to the patch, not the rom, i know VL has pirate content but this aint it, it does however have a link to their archive, where the rom does exist) vimm.net/romhacking/hacks/5813
The obvious answers are the games we endlessly replayed historically: Mario Kart, Goldeneye (VS mode), Halo (VS), Smash Bros.
If you specifically want ones on PC, I’d suggest Starcraft, Age of Empires, and probably Counter Strike (I wasn’t into that one, but it had a huge following).
Many board games fit the bill as well. Codenames (physical or online at horsepaste.com) comes to mind, and another commenter also mentioned chess.
Basically any games that were made before endlessly grinding became a thing (yep, that’s only been a thing for a decade or two).
Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.
I guess it counts because you are not grinding, the factories are grinding for you. The problem is that it’s a niche game and not many of my friends would play it
It’s the defacto automation game, and can get pretty wildly funny with multiplayer co-op. Players slot into niches and ted to focus on building out X or Y and when these things meet can be hilarious.
It also has a versus mode where you race to build bases on a shared map and kill your opponents first.
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