The timing couldn’t be better for me. Just last night I found I couldn’t be bothered play my current game anymore. Never played DD1, but I’ve never much bothered with stories in games.
There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.
Uh… I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another… oh well… :)
Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it’s an exploration game, but what you’re exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.
Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that “huh?” factor where right until the end you’re not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?
Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.
Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).
Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you’re a robotic loader than can put down dots. That’s all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You’re attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.
Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you’re the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you’re up against and that all the corpses stay. It’s not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.
Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It’s 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You’re an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the “freaky alien attack” recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?
Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you’re digging underground for metal and for “lumen.” To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.
Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.
Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You’re a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the “SCP” universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won’t spread again.
Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you’re bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn’t grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.
Space Run - 2D base building. You’re a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don’t do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.
Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you’re just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species “gift” to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.
i’m not saying you didn’t run into quality posts on reddit, but this is the kind of post i see way more often here and it makes these spaces way more enjoyable.
nice work, definitely going to try a few of these out!
this is a great post. I do think the outer wilds description is a smidge spoilery. I know, people figure that out pretty quickly but it’s still a neat experience if going in blind
AliExpress, ale sprzedawcy oznaczeni jako Choice — wtedy masz lepszą ochronę kupującego; szybszą (nawet 7 dni), zazwyczaj darmową wysyłkę; darmowy zwrot i jako-taką gwarancję, że nie zostaniesz zeskamowany podkoloryzowanym opisem. Chyba lepiej pilnują wiarygodności zdjęć, opisów i jakości towaru oznaczego tym znaczkiem. Niektóre z tych zamówień są wręcz realizowane z magazynów centralnych Aliexpressu.
Trochę w tym siedzę, jak coś konkretnego szukasz to może jestem w stanie doradzić sprzedawców lub marki, także pisz śmiało pomogę się w tym zorientować
Spoko, dzięki za info. Generalnie to szukam przenośnej lodówki na leki, najlepiej z baterią, co by wytrzymała bez zasilania zewnętrznego trochę. Coś widzę, że jest, ale bez szału.
I’m replaying subnautica after a few years since my first playthrough. I thought that it was more of a one-time experience than a replayable game but enough time has passed that my memory is more of a general feeling than remembering specifically where everything is, so it’s been surprisingly engaging. Without even trying, I’m pretty sure the way I’m going through everything is different from my last playthrough, too.
i finished the game without hatching eggs so that’s something I’d do on my next play, i also missed the large strider crab creatures on my first play. going into the spinoff game, I’m taking advantage of all the new tech before progressing the story because i managed to get halfway through the first one without crafting a proper base
Yeah, the one achievement I’m missing is hatching a certain egg so I’ve been collecting eggs this time around. Just got the alien containment, so I guess it’s time to start at that.
I’ve just built my second base. I only had one in my first playthrough, but I built more for sub zero and realized there’s nothing really stopping me from building a ton of them other than how much time I want to spend gathering the resources for it.
I’m considering trying to go to the end without a Cyclops sub since I’ve already got the max depth for the seamoth, though I need to find those deep mushrooms again for the defense shock that would be essential for that. Though now that I think of it, the Cyclops was probably why I didn’t build a second base and the lack of Cyclops was probably why I ended up building more bases in sub zero.
Oh wow, are there any non-fish foods other than the nutrient blocks and those trees on the surface? Can you fabricate the blocks at any point? I can’t remember if the first one has the indoor grow plots for surface plants like sub zero does.
I guess the main question I’m getting at is if you can do this without having to travel to the surface to stuff your face with trees or being very strategic with the nutrient blocks you find?
So, the first 30 minutes go like this. Find the stuff to make and craft the knife, scanner, fins, air tanks, and building tool.
You can eat kelp and make bleach>water w salt and coral to stay alive, though it’s a LOT of kelp.
Then head straight to southern island to scan the multipurpose room, indoor and outdoor grow beds, and grab lantern fruit and marble mellons.
You can then build a base and grow all the food you will ever need. I stock up on a ton of bleach and make water as needed, though the food also restores some hydration.
I usually have this done before the Aurora explodes.
Once you have the cyclops you can plant in there as well. Three lantern fruit trees per base is all the food you will need in the game, and marble melons have a lot of water.
The only thing you miss out on really is the emergency air bladder, as that requires a fish. To make up for it I carry a second air tank when diving deep or exploring wrecks. I also build outdoor grow beds w brain corals in strategic places as emergency air supplies.
Honestly, I started it as a lark, and found it so enjoyable because I never get distracted chasing down and catching fish.
I highly recommend Amid Evil. I wasn’t even a big Hexen/Heretic fan, but it’s fantastic. It has the record for highest screenshots->playtime of any game I’ve played on steam.
I refuse to spoil anything, but I think I took a screenshot every 30 seconds on the last map. It helps you manage to traverse every single square foot of space in the map over the course of completing it.
Over 600 games so there’s not much I don’t have but I grabbed that new ratchet and clank to throw at my 4090, and I got some stupid idle game I’m addicted to. Thinking of grabbing the halls of torment/brotato combo
I have so many Steam Sale games in my library that I haven’t played yet that I don’t know if I could justify buying more. My backlog is just too long. By the time I get around to playing any purchases for this dale, 2 more Steam Sales could have already passed.
I started playing each game in my library for about 10 min and then moving on. Some games catch me playing longer but otherwise I check them off as played. With recent Steam sales I’d buy 5-6 games, immediately install them all, and play each right away. Feels good man.
How the hell do you find fulfillment in that (unless they’re super small games)? I don’t think I could speedrun something like Cave Story in 10 minutes, much less roguelikes - Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon, Balatro etc, where the gameplay loop takes hours and hours.
Haven’t seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building
Undertale. I was blown away by the soundtrack and the cleverness of it all. The twist was good too, but I hated the total completion grind a bit. But it is optional.
Crypt of the Necrodancer. Again, blown away by the soundtrack and how confidently it pulled off the idea of a rogue-like rhythm game.
Insurgency: Sandstorm. This might be stretching the concept of “indie” a bit, but its predecessor was definitely an indie game. This is an excellent arcade/realistic FPS shooter.
+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.
Last summer I got one year of gamepass for free with the MS rewards program (before it was nerfed into oblivion), and I played a grand total of… Three games on it. Maybe four? Gaming doesn’t excite me like it used to. It’s not that good games aren’t released anymore. I guess I just got older and my taste changed.
I bought Golf with Friends and gifted another copy to a friend of mine, just to spend some good time with them. Nothing else really excites me.
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