Tunic is incredibly unique and I can’t say I’ve played anything like it. On the surface it’s a classic dungeon crawler zelda inspired thing, but once you play… Really any amount of it, you start to see past the veil and the real game is revealed to you. Even after completing the entire game and all achievements, there is technically more of the game available to be explored.
Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Obsidian’s Outer Worlds) will be an absolute bliss for anyone who enjoyed portal or superliminal. It may be the single greatest puzzle/exploration game ever made, with no exaggeration.
Return of the Obra Dinn was a game that I could not put down. I played it in one sitting beginning to end. I was enthralled and I felt like Sherlock fucking Holmes. It is a very unassuming game but by God, you will be gripped. It stands up there with Outer Wilds as being a game that absolutely propelled itsself up to one of the best of its genre (this one being Mystery/Puzzle)
If you haven’t played either of the other two games I mentioned, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy them. All 3 of the games are absolute masterclasses in how to hand the player knowledge that transforms their experience of the game, over and over again.
I’ve heard great things of outer wilds, just wishlisted it. I hadn’t heard of Obra Dinner but it’s Lucase Pope! The Papers, Please creator. Instant buy from me.
Thanks for the suggestions, my SO and I are stoked to delve into more mystery and confusion
Okay! I’m not sure anyone else will see this but Obra Dinn was fantastic.
Music was down and has been stuck in my head since. It’s a cool murder mystery with such amazing imagery/creepy depictions of sea monsters. I really enjoyed how subtle some of the hints were and we felt like geniuses when we got something right
The recently deceased Benjamin Brynn is on his way to the afterlife. The player must interact with Brynn’s memories through an eye-tracking webcam to progress, as the game reads and responds to the player’s eye movement and blinking - from Wikipedia
It tries to emulate life flashing by your eyes as you are dying. I haven’t gotten around to play it but, the concept is cool nonetheless.
I’ve never played such a unique big budget game. The core mechanic is terrain traversal to make deliveries, and the game continues to give you tools throughout it to accomplish that.
I loved the traversal mechanics in Death Stranding. Kind of made me realise that in all other games the characters are actually gliding and not walking.
I didn’t however like that the game gets a bit too actiony toward the end. And the MULEs and the terrorists stop being a threat when you get upgraded weapons, and the BTs once you have that golden handcuff thing.
I hope they address that in the sequel. The BTs should have been a lot scarier and the stealth a bit more refined.
Still an amazing game. I loved just doing the deliveries. There’s a meditative quality to it that I only previously saw in Shadow of the Colossus.
Well, if you want to try again at some point, I can tell you they get progressively less scary as the game goes on because you’ll get a bunch of tools to deal with them. In the last third of the game even getting caught by one is nothing because you’ll have blood grenade launchers that can easily kill them. And for those who like the stealth way better, you’ll get a special tool to sever the BTs umbilical if you get near them (the game is very liberal in what it counts as near).
Battlezone '98: One of the first notable RTS/FPS hybrids. You drive hovertanks and you build bases and you command other tanks. Set in a secret live war on the Moon, Mars, and Venus between the USSR and the USA during the cold war.
Life is Strange - At least the original, the sequels are not quite as unique. It’s an interactive story (though still in 3D) where you can rewind time to redo conversations, effectively making “save scumming” a core mechanic. The designers use the fact that you deliberate on your own actions quite well. The story is also pretty unique, but unfortunately there isn’t a good way to explain why without spoiling any of it.
Inscryption - On the surface, this seems like your run of the mill card game. But once you get familiar with the mechanics, some other genres start blending with it.
Edit: Should also add:
A Normal Lost Phone - The premise is that you find a phone that someone has lost, and you can use it to slowly uncover the story of the person who lost it and why.
Ancient Art of War. Really old RTS where food, morale and exhaustion are all-important. You’d think it’d be a micro-management nightmare but it plays smoothly. Unfortunately not multiplayer and never remade or even imitated, for some reason.
I’ve been on Silverblue (well, Kinoite) for quite a while now, and the only issue I remember having was that I had to use flatseal once to give steam access to an external drive when adding a new library folder.
Everything seems to work fine. I’ve never been prevented from playing a game when I wanted to due to immutability or flatpak issues.
Poppy Playtime (2021) : controls the extendable arms separately and solve puzzles that way
Older games:
Psychonauts (2005) : some of the scenes toy around with gravity
Half-life 2 (2004): the gravity-gun was groundbreaking.
Serious Sam (2001) : just a shooter, but the quantity of enemies is so huge that you need to figure out different strategies. It’s sort of like geometry wars only in first person view and with gory graphics.
Glover (1998) : it’s a 3d platformer, where you control a glove, which needs to get ball through the level.
Head over heels (1987) : control the 2 characters Head or Heels separately or together to solve puzzles.( It was recently released on steam. I haven’t tried the remake, but the original can also be found on emulators or online)
I was going to say that Serious Sam isn’t terribly unique. But you’re right about the scale of the battles being far larger than anything else like it. Good call.
It's a zachtronics-like, but in a side-scroller? I like coding games but am not sure the combination works just like that. Personally, I'd expect the coding to be relevant to the world, not an unrelated theoretical exercise. Project Euler randomly tacked onto Mario would be a nope for me, but using coding as a meaningful part of the game, so it does visible, tangible, useful or just cool things? Sign me the fuck up.
If you haven't tried playing Zachtronics games, I'd give them a try. They're a major subniche of "coding games" and could be good for some inspiration. They're all basically coding either in spirit (SpaceChem, Magnum Opus) or directly (TIS-100, Shenzhen IO, Exapunks...), usually with some twist. Their languages tend to be "fake assembly", simplified and stylized.
Personally I've rarely had as much fun coding as in my early ComputerCraft days (computers/robots in Minecraft) because it... did stuff. I was already a coder, but was not used to seeing it translated into "physical" actions. Like the difference of learning/teaching Python with text-based UIs and exercises, vs a "robot" that drives around in the room and does things.
I've had some ideas along these lines myself, borrowing a lot of Zachlike inspiration, but I was going to go topdown or just omit the "overworld" entirely.
+1 for computercraft. It was super satisfying getting them to do even trivial things, but a huge reward when you pushed them beyond that.
Though I did find, in order to retain sanity, that I had to remote into the minecraft server and use an IDE rather than the somewhat awful experience of writing lua in game without any IDE tools.
Factorio - its a logistics rts but the pollution mechanic is different. Instead of just gather resources to build things which build bigger things, you also make pollution as a side effect. This feeds the native monsters and also evolves them. Managing your pollution cloud is a strategy. That or build massive defensives for when they come to eat you.
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