Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
To be honest, I lost interest in Minecraft about 10 years ago, and never played with mods. I’ve seen some hilarious playthroughs on YouTube though, I really enjoyed the custom animations RubberRoss made.
But how about the Infinity matter dominator sword mod? It contains some of the most convoluted and basically unachievable crafting recipes Ive ever seen, just scroll down and enjoy the ride
The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It’s top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It’s a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
Adding one more to the Ace Attorney spinoff block:
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is a well-written fan spinoff of the AA formula, taking place in a fantasy universe where magic is real, but mostly the domain of the nobility. Trials are a form of theatre, where the nobility knows how to tip the scale, but your mentor knows how to tip them back.
It introduces some very enjoyable mechanics, in which knowledge of each spell’s effects and conditions constitutes its own evidence. Tyrion bears his own magical ability that lets him view the thoughts of witnesses. He is also accompanied by the defendant of his first case, a mercenary-mage named Celeste, who gets a lot of investigation banter with Tyrion, much like Maya and Phoenix.
Five cases in all, and none of them are shortened crapshoot cases, nor is there a downer ending; all the major threads conclude with satisfying endings, and the developer hopes to make a sequel from the world they’ve built.
Oh, and as is common for AA games, take a listen to “Eye of Horus”, the game’s equivalent of the “Objection!” theme when Tyrion nails a contradiction. The game’s soundtrack as a whole has some real bangers, for both the high points and the emotional pulls.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
A large part of what’s wrong with Concord is the development time that it took, and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to try to make game development leaner and more sustainable.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
The 2d platforming world and top-down world have smashed together. You control one hero from each dimension, who share the same space in the levels. You switch between platformer and top-down modes and must get both characters to the goal. The boss levels are hard but very cool, combining action and puzzles.
Also features local 2-player co-op and a generous assist mode.
XCOM 2 came out in 2016. Let’s get another XCOM game. Maybe humanity pushing into space and creating a colony which then comes under alien attack. You have to defend the colony, cut off from earth, and take out the alien menace.
I want to like Chimera Squad but every mission feels the same. I love the character based approach though. Also it was fun having aliens on the team for once.
Xcom 2 and Chimera Squad both had some annoying UI problems but luckily they were fixed (for the most part) by mods.
Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.
If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
definitely scratches the same itch more than games like the talos principle. there’s like one group it completely fails to properly tutorialize imo, and one that kind of falls short (although having played the witness will make your assumptions more accurate i think). other than that it’s a brilliant game.
This one isn’t super new, but Druidstone. It’s a story based tactics game with some RPG elements and it’s just excellently done. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it and I think more people should know about it.
It was pretty good, but I got stuck on an annoying mission and dropped it. Really wish that dev had just made grimrock 3, but I respect not wanting to do the same thing over and over…
Splinter Cell, specifically picking up where Chaos Theory left off. Use it to showcase Unreal Engine 5 lighting and make it a proper, spectacular stealth game again with Spies v. Mercs multiplayer.
Oh man, just made my own comment on black and white, and I assumed I was the only one. Black & White 2 is still the best God game out there for me and it was so much fun.
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