This sounds like a fun project! :) I’ve only played one game in this genre, Cave Noire for Game Boy. It has randomly generated dungeons. It’s turn based. There’s no stats to level up, instead the player just has to improve their own gameplay strategy. There’s 40 stages (to put it simply), each getting a little harder. After you beat a stage the game saves and you never have to play that one again. How would you classify it?
Any taxonomy that doesn’t include the Berlin interpretation or consider it’s existence is missing an important piece of roguelikes history and elements imo
It’s a bit rough around the edges, but you (or someone else) might enjoy Genesis: Alpha One
You fly a space ship (well, mine usually look more like stations that can also move), across different life-infested solar systems. The main gimmick is that you build the station yourself out of different modules.
So when your scientists come back from planet surfaces, with some spores on their suits, you might find pockets of ewww hiding in the vents of the station you made yourself. You have/unlock multiple times ways to make sure that the infestation stays relatively isolated to, say, the landing bay. But even with those, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of first-person vent-crawling to figure out where that disgusting crab-thing just came from.
Plus, it’s a rogue-lite with some permanently unlockable progression. There are multiple player factions you can unlock and there’s a NG+ mode, but I found myself not replaying it too much (even though my one played campaign was quite fun). Still, I sunk a good 16-20 hours into it, I think.
Workers and Resources is an interesting one. It focuses on the material reality of running a planned economy without internal money supplies. Also a very good city/industry builder.
You can usually pick up Terraria when it’s on sale for about $5. I haven’t played it in forever but I enjoyed it at the time and apparently it’s only improved since.
Yeah, definitely Stardew Valley with some mods. It’s pretty close to endless things you can do in that game. Thinking of Stardew Valley have me wondering about the state of the Haunted Chocolatier game.
Titanfall 2 was so good, I miss it. A lot of it’s slick movement mechanics show up in some of those modern “movement shooters” like Ultrakill for example.
I really love sunless sea and sunless skies. They are so beautiful and story rich. Extremely simple game mechanics. You basically explore an unknown map, uncover the story, make choices and allegiances and do your best to survive.
I personally found Sunless Sea to get boring after a while to the point of giving up on it. I think DREDGE might be more appealing, though I haven’t played it: store.steampowered.com/app/1562430/DREDGE/
DREDGE is great, and does overlap with Sunless Seas in some ways, but is nowhere near as story driven (or weird). That said, it’s a lot easier/more forgiving, and has a simpler (and potentially more engaging) main gameplay loop.
I love the Sunless/Fallen London setting, and really wish Seas had some of the improvements of Skies, as I think I prefer the setting of Seas, but I’ve found it hard to go back to, having played Skies.
Oh wow, kudos for sitting down and writing this piece out. Damn, that’s a long post.
But seriously though, all I could think of when I “skimmed” through the text was that you got too obsessed with the building blocks of a story and realised that you are critical towards that they’re all the same shape and/or made by the same material. So you stand very close to the wall and squint instead of backing up a few paces to get a good view of the actual construct in it’s entirety.
Relax and just be happy that we have the luxury in this day and age to appreciate gaming as a medium. Or don’t, whatever makes you happy :)
I really like this point. If you look closely most churches are built with bricks and wood, but still create beautiful structures. As I was reading through the list I was thinking a lot about games that did points good and badly. Tropes are tropes for a reason (check out OSP trope talks if you want break down on how specific tropes can be used well or poorly)
bin.pol.social
Aktywne