If your looking for a shooter with a flow state, give Neon White a look. It’s a FPS platformer where you pick up gun cards and you choose if you want to use the card as a gun to shoot demons, or throw it away for a movement ability (double jump, dash, etc.) as you try to get to the end of the level as fast as possible.
If the platforming and racing doesn’t sound like it’s for you, I saw someone else brought up Ultrakill and I wanted to recommend that as well
Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.
Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find Neon White but I’m glad someone mentioned it! It is pretty much the flow state shooter, should be perfect for OP.
Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.
That is to say, not at all.
There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.
People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.
It can be charitably described as above, and uncharitably described as “Hold down S and LMB for an hour at a time”. I kind of bounced off these. They aren’t bad games, in fact they were pretty popular but most of your gameplay loop is going to revolve around getting the attention of a horde of goons and then backpedaling while you whittle the group down from 80 dudes to none.
I mean, I played several other horde shooters. Firing continually while backpedaling is the most vintage of infantry tactics, after all. I get that these games are old and simpler, but their base gameplay must still be fun if they were so popular back in the day. I’ll at least give it a shot, since I already have them anyway…
Gunfire Reborn does that for me, even though I have to play with a controller. Roboquest looks like it’s kind-of between Gunfire Reborn and Borderlands, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Absolutely second the recommendations of Doom and Quake here in the thread. Boomer shooters in general. Even if the movement can be really fast, playing them on your own can be extremely cozy. Just get into the rhythm of circle strafing, shooting and weaving in and out of cover and you’ll be in the zone very quickly. Bonus point, that both Doom and Quake have 30 years of EXCELLENT quality player created content that can keep you playing fresh new levels for as long as you want to. You could play them for the rest of your life, at your own pace and preferred difficulty.
The new rereleases of both games even bundle a mod browser that you can access with zero knowledge of modding, just hop on.
Depends on what you consider “cozy”. OP listed Medal of Honor and CoD, I think Doom is super cozy. If shooting Nazis or demons is our comfort activity, anything can be cozy. I still desperately need to play Boltgun, too.
I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.
The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.
I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
*sigh.*Not everything must be GZDoom and Brutal Doom. The new port is perfectly fine if they’re going to play mostly vanilla. There’s no need to be this angry at everything you don’t understand in the internet.
The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.
Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.
You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.
I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?
spoilerLike, the shoot-the-switch secret on Legacy of Rust MAP10? Forget it. Yeah, you can hit it like 3% of the time if you ride the elevator up and down and pick at it with the pistol until you get it. I’m quite certain it was intended to be shot from either of the windows left and right of the elevator, the leftmost one lining up with it perfectly, and the elevator thing is only just in case someone is playing in some kind of purist mode.
I know exactly what you are looking for and the classic Doom games are perfect for this, because they are simple, yet they still feel good to play.
Not too fast, not too slow. No jump scares, only some light puzzles if you want to hunt secrets. There is almost a rhythm to the combat, especially if you play with the shotgun. Try them.
I’d say Eternal actually fits the bill more. Once you get all the mechanics down every encounter becomes this deadly ballet of high speed chess where you really can enter a flow state of just reacting and acting.
2016 can be like that but it’s a little bit more forgiving, funnily enough managing to keep your brain more in the foreground.
Depending on your definition of cozy 2016 could win, because it is not as taxing as Eternal. At least I could manage 2016 much better than Eternal with my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But if you manage to stick with Eternal I think it’s more conducive to get you into a meditative state.
I played through Sigil recently and the whole time there was a gaping super shotgun sized hole in my enjoyment of it. I get that Romero fine tuned it to play without it but for me I realized that I can’t feel totally cozy playing doom without the ssg.
Maybe check out Roboquest? I was looking for a mindless FPS a few weeks ago (my usual go-to is UT2004, I’m old :]) and the Roboquest demo scratched the itch pretty well. Planning to pick up the full version when I see it go on sale
Roboquest actually kind of kicks ass. It’s a way better game than I expected it to be when I picked it up. I think those guys deserve more attention than they’ve been getting.
Also, shout out to Gunfire Reborn as well, I’ve been a big fan of that one for a couple years. Similar style to Roboquest. It’s a Chinese game and some parts of it are a little poorly translated but the gameplay is very fun and solid.
Came here to say Roboquest. Replaced Destiny 2 for me when I finally ditched windows for Linux. Though I would love a harder difficulty coop PvE shooter that has similar feel to Destiny. Roboquest has coop but I will always of raiding with my team.
Super cool photo, but does this technically count as astronomy? Isn’t astronomy “a camera on (usually) on earth, pointed up into space”, not the other way around?
The science which treats of the celestial bodies, of their magnitudes, motions, distances, periods of revolution, eclipses, constitution, physical condition, and of the causes of their various phenomena.
A treatise on, or text-book of, the science.
From the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
Test Drive Unlimited 1 (2006) - but not the flashy “next-gen” version for PS3, Xbox 360 or PC. Instead, I’m replaying the somewhat obscure PS2 port, using an emulator this time around. TDU was a remarkable achievement at the time, having a full-scale recreation of the entire island of Oahu, with the entire real-world road network to be explored online with other players at the time. There’s nothing scaled down here, unlike in most videogames, which means you get about 1600 km or 1000 miles of roads, from city streets over coastal straights to twisty mountain roads. It’s not just the quantity that is amazing, but also the quality, with tons of elevation changes keeping these roads interesting. Buildings and other track-side detail are less close to the real world, but since I’m here for racing, not sightseeing, this isn’t bothering me too much.
You would think that having such an enormous world world would make this exclusive to the then most powerful systems at the time, but they actually managed to port all of Oahu, with no reduction in size, to both PS2 and PSP. Sacrifices had to be made, for obvious reasons. Visuals suffered the most, but you still get an enormous draw distance, far beyond what would have been necessary at the original resolution, cars with 3D interiors (not on PSP), tons of geometric detail and realistic reflections that look better than in most other PS2 games. The landscape is very sparse though, especially in terms of geometric and texture detail (and on top of that, most non-car textures aren’t just low-res, but also terrible from an artistic standpoint), but the game still throws just enough detail at the player that it looks remarkably close to the big version, especially when you’re racing past things at high speed. There are other cuts that were likely made due to a lack of time instead of hardware restrictions, like a few missing cars here and there, all motorcycles, some minor event types, walking around interiors and all character customization, most of which is fairly inconsequential however. Really the biggest issue this version has is that the GPS is persistently trying to send you into oncoming traffic during free-roam due to it not taking one-way streets into account, which can lead to both frustration and fun, depending on your mindset.
If you’re still reading, you might be asking yourself why I would torture myself with PS2-era visuals when I could instead play the much prettier PC version that also runs at more than 30 fps without hacks and has more content and immersion. The reason is simple and it’s not nostalgia (since my first contact with this game back in 2008 was with the PC version): For some reason (likely because they are running on entirely different engines), the handling model is completely different and actually better on PS2 and PSP. It’s a bouncy, yet believable simcade model that feels remarkably close to Gran Turismo 2 (if not quite as good - it’s 90% there). Since that game is still the pinnacle of simcade handling in my opinion, this is just about the highest praise I can think of for a racing game. The way cars grip the road, how vastly different front and mid-engine cars behave and the way vehicles react to sudden changes in elevation in particular is night and day between the two. The big version’s most glaring issue in my opinion and one that carried over to the fascinatingly flawed sequel is that its handling never achieved a similarly comfortable compromise between simulation and arcade as the otherwise downgraded ports.
TDU 1 PS2, even with its remarkable online features long gone, remains a fun, accessible racing game with lots of meaningful content in short, accessible bursts, with the majority of races are less than five minutes long. Fun driving, fast and logical progression (unlike whatever the hell Solar Crown is torturing players with) and a neat variety of licensed vehicles in a believable real-world location keep it relevant even today. I can’t recommend it enough. If the main appeal of TDU is the fantasy of owning cars and houses all over Hawaii though, I would recommend playing the big version instead (and the sequel), since they are simply more immersive in this regard. They almost feel like games that in this day and age would be perfect for VR.
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