If it’s at an Internet cafe where everyone is in attendance, I seriously strongly suggest “The Ship”. In my experience, probably the ultimate LAN game. Screen peeking allowed but not encouraged.
The game is effectively a game of assassin—but you have to upkeep your player’s needs (food/water/shower/bathroom/sleep). Your character needing to take a shit is stressful—very often you begin the process only to have your murderer pop open the door with a fire axe.
It used to have a “viral” gift copy thing on Steam where 1 purchased copy generated 2 gift copies and those copies generated 1 copy each. So in theory, you could only require 3 copies for 15 of you if that’s still active.
Deep Rock Galactic. Lots of fun, easy to adjust difficulty, plays on lower-end machines. 1-4 person teams (the levels scale with team size).
I also hear 100% Orange Juice is really fun with friends and approachable for non-gamers, but I’ve only played single player, and the computer players cheat. I can’t say for certain if this is a good choice or not.
Deep rock galactic looks like a lot of fun but I’m hesitant about the small team sizes. With 4 player teams we would have to have 4 parallel games going at the same time.
With a set of mods natively supported by the game through mod.io, you can get as many as 8 people in a spacerig (lobby) without the game crashing, and in theory up to 16 if they join after the drop pod has landed. I’d recommend the following set of mods if you go that route:
Downside of this method is you have to log into mod.io through your Steam account, and I’d personally be too paranoid to do that at an internet cafe, but it would get y’all down to 1-2 parallel games. In addition, if you turn up swarm sizes, the game basically becomes Starship Troopers: Space Dwarf Edition.
I haven’t tried it yet, but A Little to the Left looks like a fun organizing game. It was just added to Game Pass if you have that. I also see my daughter playing Power Washer Simulator sometimes, which I haven’t tried, but it looks like it could be satisfying to play.
I’m a big fan of Don’t Nod games (Life is Strange, Tell Me Why) for atmospheric storytelling. Life is Strange: True Colors is from Deck Nine games, but falls in the same category. Detroit: Become Human is also kind of similar, but it occasionally throws in sections where you have to quickly react with button pushing that I don’t enjoy. One thing I find interesting about all of these is that you can play them more than once with different choices to get different paths, but so far I haven’t replayed any of them because I felt like the path I took was meaningful and I don’t want to change my story yet.
An MMO could be a good way to go. My wife isn’t really into gaming, but we played WoW together on and off for years. I haven’t played them much, but if I were to recommend one to start with now I’d probably check out Final Fantasy 14 or Elder Scrolls Online.
Solasta is one of my current favorite games :)
It’s (imo) better than bg3 for dnd mechanics, combat is good, and the story is ok (it lacks the vastness of choice you get in bg3).
I recommend using the Unfinished Business mod (you can find it on nexusmods) as it adds lots of species and classes and some QoL improvements.
It’s the only game I’ve got my wife to play that she enjoyed. It’s cute with simple controls. But there’s enough there to keep her entertained for awhile.
Dragon Age: Origins is pretty gory (for an RPG from that era.) Their whole marketing campaign was basically “look how bloody this game is—even our logo is made out of blood.”
Edit: I would recommend Wildermyth as a whimsical, party-based RPG that doesn’t include stuff like this.
If she would like to get in to more action games, one with a strong story, like the last of us could be a pathway, played on easy/story mode.
Id also second casual games as a pathway to more involved games. Overcooked is white hectic and introduced a few gaming mechanics from others. It’s essentially crafting against a timer. To progress, she’ll need to get better at controls, but the learning curve is gradual enough that she’ll.have fun.
Rayman (legends?), I play coop with my kid. He dies often ,but it’s not an issue as you only lose progress when you both die.
This will be the real challenge. No matter what game is picked, with 15 people someone will feel meh about it. So plan on having a few options, and everyone should agree to at least give them a shot even if it’s not their first pick.
This does only assume by setting you mean “fantasy.” If you just mean Forgotten Realms, there are tons of fantasy turn based tactical RPGs. Owlcat has a bunch of good shit like Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous.
Shout-out to Shandowrun Returns! OP start with 1, then 2 then 3. If you do any other order the mechanics of 1 will disappoint you, despite the story being great!
Quake 3 if you wanna go old school. Pretty much anything will run it these days and you can easily spin up a local server for it. You can do FFA or play on teams.
Rocket League is always fun IMO. Good to blow off steam and not have to focus on story.
To blow off steam without focus on a story is very much inline with what we are after.
The downside with rocket league is that if we create tournaments, it is elimination rounds. What do the eliminated people do while the tournament completes. Or maybe I’m overthinking it, they could just play local matches until we decide to start a new tournament.
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