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.
Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.
Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.
Exapunks is a programming puzzle game set in a retrofuturistic cyberpunk world with early '90s aesthetic. The tutorial is in a form of an in-world zine. For me it was very immersive.
Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality
What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.
Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.
Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.
In a similar vein, Not For Broadcast. Pick what camera feed to show, what to censor, etc. Will admit I haven’t played it myself and am going off the Steam description page, but it seems pretty unique mechanics-wise.
I have this game and it looks to be amazing, but OMG I can’t keep up with the pace of dealing with the cameras and censoring stuff. I want to love it but I’m just not quick enough.
It definitely fits the criteria that op wanted tho, good call
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