They’re oldies, but both of the Soul Reaver games and the Raziel parts of LoK: Defiance have a two tiered death system. (Minor spoilers going forward, but I’m talking spoilers for the opening cutscene from Soul Reaver, so I’d argue not real spoilers.) See, after having his physical vampire form thrown into the well of souls and falling through an endless abyss for several hundred years, Raziel exists first as a structurally sound spirit in a world where most things don’t maintain any resemblance to their corporeal forms after death. After being salvaged from the well of souls and set on a quest, he gains the power to create a corporeal form that resembles wretched wraith he has become in spirit. But that new corpse isn’t him, and destroying it doesn’t kill him. It just releases him back to the spirit realm, where he can regain his strength and manifest a new corporeal form. You can be killed in the spirit realm and sent back to a checkpoint, but the spirit realm is by and large far less dangerous than the physical. Very few threats can follow you, and the soul scavengers who populate most the spirit realm are little more than fodder for a creature like Raziel to slay and eat at his leisure. So you regain your strength, find a nexus between the worlds, and manifest a new body. It’s probably my favorite unconventional handling of death or failure in a game because of its comprehensive and essential connections to the story and lore of the series. Raziel is the beating black heart of the mythos of the series.
I've only played through it twice, but iirc Detroit: Become Human is like this. Even if you have a main, playable character die, the story just keeps going, and there a good amount of paths to take depending on the choices (and QTEs, bleh) that you make for the characters. On my second playthrough, I may or may not have repeatedly and purposely got a character killed just to see how much it would affect an certain NPC. 😬
In every game in Suikoden series, you’d have to recruit 108 characters in total to get the true ending.
Around half of these are part of the story, so you’d get them whatever you do, but the rest you’d have to do some sidequest to get them, a lot of them are missable.
Also, you can get some characters killed, dooming you from ever getting that true ending.
Suikoden 1 and 2 in particular have very precise soft-locks.
In Suikoden 1, Pahn has to win a battle that seems to be a scripted loss.
Suikoden 2 (my favorite RPG of all time) is actually beyond brutal. There’s a 3-5 second timed input that doesn’t even make much sense and if you get it wrong, nothing predictable changes except you don’t get the 108th star (just one person having a private word with the strategist that only makes sense later)
I dunno which of the two is worse. I fell for the Pahn one in S1, but managed to guess right in S2 by sheer luck (it’s between a default “Watch Out!” and “Nanami!”. You have to pick “Nanami!” or you lose out on the good ending. And you automatically say “Watch Out!” if you don’t pick fast)
I recently beat Antimatter Dimensions after coming back to the Reality update after a long while. There’s a lot of depth, especially in the new additions. I appreciate all the layers and addition of QoL upgrades.
Bitburner was fun as an incremental hacking sim. I haven’t played it for a while, but I find it really unique.
I have heard great things about NMS, but I like generally games with ending, even with arcade game, I enjoy them more if there is some goal you can work towards. So, I feel maybe I won’t like it much.
Baldurs gate 3, just beat the game and now I’m going for a tactician run. The wife and I have also been playing pit people co op. We hooked up her steam deck to the living room TV and have been looking for more couch co op games!
I don’t know FFT too well, so i did NOT read through your spoiler post. Just wanted to say that Remap is planning on doing a retrospective podcast sometime soon, so that might be a cool place to hear some deeper analysis and discussion on the game. They’re doing it under their Remap 101 series, which is a continuation of the Waypoint 101 series from before Vice dissolved Waypoint.
That said, only one of their crew seems genuinely hyped about the podcast (Cado, who has been streaming their playthrough for the upcoming pod), so it might not hit as hard as the Waypoint/Remap 101 podcasts usually do.
Xmen on Sega genesis. At one point you have to literally reset the console. I was 10 and didn’t understand that’s what it was telling me to do. No game had ever done that, and prof x was breaking the 4th wall telling the player to do that. The game never broke the 4th wall otherwise. I didn’t understand until a decade later when I read it on some listicle.
If you’re interested in playing FF14 (an MMORPG), some of the optional raids are set in the far future of FF Tactics story. The raid series is called “Return to Ivalice” if you want to google it.
Btw, I think there’s a rumor that there’ll be a remake of FFT
I played some FF14, but got lost in the sauce of the seemingly never-ending story quest. The minute-to-minute gameplay wasn’t exciting for me, so I was trying to hold out for the super duper awesome raids I heard about, but those raids seemed to get further and further away every time I played.
I’m not sure whether to be excited about a remaster or scared. I played the PSX version instead of WotL already, and skipped the out-of-world tie in characters (Cloud / better Mustadio guy). I’d be interested to see what they do with it, but I might not end up playing it even though I’d love to see new Ivalice Alliance content.
Sierra adventure games, like King’s Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn’t know, so you don’t get it and then several hours later when you’re at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can’t. Because you didn’t get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.
I like the Unstable Ordinance from Space Quest IV that you can pick up near the start of the game. It’s entirely useless, you can’t ditch it, and if you have in your inventory near the end of the game, it blows up and kills you. Everytime. You have to restart nearly the whole game and resist the adventure game urge to grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
I thought it blew up when you went into the sewers which isn't long after you pick it up. But still, it's a trap you don't realize is a problem right away and really sucked :)
Those games didn’t give a fuck about your feelings. I remember some of those point and clicks had zero chill. I played one where all I wanted to do was cross the street. My character was immediately run over by a car and I had to start over. The typing games could be even worse. Oh sorry this bees nest is attacking you, here’s hoping you grabbed the bug spray under the carpet on the 3rd floor and are quick enough on your feet to type out the exact sequence of words necessary to get your character to use it. ‘Use bug spray’ sorry can you please be more specific. Oh never mind your character is dead, no saves, heres the worst 8 bit death audio anyone has ever created.
That’s the exact game that came to mind. At least a few years ago there was a website where you could play all those games , I don’t know if it’s still up.
Outward! A relatively low budget but very enjoyable action RPG with surprisingly non-annoying and actually fun survival elements.
Whenever you die in Outward, a random "defeat scenario" occurs. Sometimes you wake up rescued by a stranger, sometimes someone brought you to the nearby town. And sometimes you wake up as a prisoner in a local thug camp and need to figure out how to escape.
Is there any scaled/linear progress in it? For example, I loved Subnautica because I loved the gameplay loop of finding a new resource, which let me craft a new item, which let me explore a new area and find new resources to craft more powerful items.
I wanted to like No Man’s Sky for similar reasons, but it’s too sandboxy, and there’s no sense of purposeful progress and growth.
Not exactly linear, but the progress is apparent. There are no character levels. Instead you improve your equipment, learn new food recipes (powerful and very important buffs) and learn new skills. The various types of magic are particularly interesting. One of my favorite magic systems in games ever.
Nice, I was looking at this a while back but got turned off by references in reviews to poor combat and general lack of polish. Sounds like the definitive edition may have smoothed the edges enough to push it across the line. I’ll add it to my list!
The combat is... unusual. Yes, "unusual" would be the best word. Not exactly great but it has its nice quirks. Things like traps and magic really shine. Melee is workable, but nothing amazing. It can be played in coop making traps and magic even more interesting, but it's perfectly viable as a solo experience (that's how I played it 90% of the time).
In terms of the polish I'd compare it to how the Gothic games felt back in the day. Low budget but with lots of heart. In addition to that, at first it felt weirdly empty, especially compared to the behemoths like The Elder Scrolls, but in the end I don't mind having only these 8-10 dungeons per map (there are 4 maps in the base game with 2 more in the DLC) with each one being memorable. Doubly so considering the limited resources of this developer.
Vault hunters is a blast, it’s almost a completely different game set inside Minecraft. I got playing it when they updated the early game and only just put it down for a bit to play baulders gate.
I especially like making farms for a materials that the mod asks for, even if it’s not necessary yet. Just infinite amounts of nearly everything one could want.
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Aktywne