Heaven’s Vault, Hardspace Shipbreaker, and both Subnautica games.
Heaven’s Vault is a puzzle game where you have to learn to translate an unknown language. Haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, but I picked it up because I liked Chants of Sennaar, which has a similar premise. Chants is 25% off right now, so I think that’s a decent recommendation
Hardspace Shipbreaker is a casual game where you break down spaceships for parts. It seemed fun, and I wanted to have something casual to balance out my library, which currently has more intense games than I would like.
Subnautica is a survival game where you’re stuck on an ocean world. I’m honestly not too sure if I would like this one too much, since I’m not too much of a fan of survival games. It just seemed unique enough from the other survival games, and it had a decent deal, and it was in my wishlist for a while. So I acted a bit on impulse and bought both games (Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero)
If you liked these, you can check out the other games by Larian - Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2). There’s also Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic (very old game though). Also, Never winter nights 2. I’m sure there’s a bunch more.
Last Epoch and Grim Dawn are probably most in line with Diablo, I think.
People have mentioned Path Of Exile, and I've played a lot of it, but I don't think it feels particularly like Diablo any more, even though it started out that way. It's quite unforgiving, and even a lot of experienced players feel like they need to follow build guides rather than work things out for themselves. Its learning curve is hundreds or thousands of hours long. Of course, the reason for that is that it has incredible depth, variety and complexity, which may be a selling point or a deterrent depending on what you like! I definitely like the complexity of it myself, but it's very overwhelming when you're new. The reason I don't think it's all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you're not really sure what killed you.
Path Of Exile also heavily revolves around its trading economy. Item drop rates are balanced around players being able to trade for them, which makes trading somewhat mandatory (unless you're a bit of a masochist). The economy is fairly complex, with there being a lot of different currencies, and quite a lot of factors that can affect the value of an item. I'll let you decide whether you find this appealing or not - some people do, some people don't! I do think it causes some issues with the balance and progression of the game, but it's interesting to say the least, even if you wish you didn't have to engage with it.
Grim Dawn feels a little mechanically dated at this point but it's still solid. It's got some good builds, the dual-class system and constellations system make for some interesting variety. It's got an offline mode, as well as online co-op play. Its real selling point, though, at least for me, is it's absolutely soaked with atmosphere. It's very, well, grim, but the world is really immersive and it has a great setting in general with a solid story and some great lore. It also has quite a lot of mods available (including the Reign Of Terror mod I mentioned in another comment in the thread that adds the entire Diablo 2 campaign and all its classes to Grim Dawn).
Last Epoch is more mechanically interesting than Grim Dawn, I think, but it's lacking in the story and world-building. It's still in early access, although its full release is next week. It has quite a lot of depth and complexity, but it's all done in an intuitive way that means you can jump into the game blindly and work things out for yourself fairly easily. It has a good variety of skills, and the fact that each skill has its own fairly comprehensive skill tree means you can play the same skills in very different ways. It has a wonderful itemisation system that does a great job of making you actually engage with the loot you find on the floor (which is an issue in other loot games), and some of the best crafting I've ever seen in a game. The dev team also manages to come up with some really creative and somewhat intuitive solutions to things they perceive as issues in other ARPGs.
Last Epoch's biggest drawback is that its endgame is currently a little lacking in comparison to POE (which has a very rich and deep endgame, but is also a ten-year-old game that's been updated constantly). It's still far, far better than Diablo 4's, though, and will obviously only improve as more is added. Last Epoch has some truly brilliant systems in place for the devs to build off - and frankly, I still think it's great now - but it'll only get better as more content gets added over time.
I love all three games I've talked about for different reasons, and honestly, they're all well worth playing!
The reason I don't think it's all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you're not really sure what killed you.
Yeah, that's why I don't care for POE anymore these days.
This War of Mine. Honestly can't believe nobody else has mentioned it.
You play as a group of civilians in a war torn country. By day you craft things needed for survival like a stove for cooking, guns for protection, barricades to prevent raiders. At night you send one person with a backpack to scavenge an area of your choice for things like food, medicine, supplies etc. The others will either sleep or guard the property. Things you do while scavenging have real effects on your characters. Decided to rob an elderly couple? Your characters will react based on their personality.
Things become grim fast if you decide to start robbing supplies or get attacked. Your players get sick, become depressed, starve, get hurt etc. I've never made it to the end.
It's a great way to understand the struggles of being a civilian in a war. The Polish government actually recommends it for educational purposes and the devs have donated a lot of proceeds to charities serving people impacted by war, including Ukraine most recently.
I was a bit aggressive on like my second playthrough and ended up killing a couple people to get their medicine. The guy that killed them was too depressed to scavenge and killed himself. Then another person got depressed because of that and wouldn't do anything. Then she got sick and died shortly after. I was too sad to play for awhile after that one.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
Trying to desperately survive in a world that’s upside down, fighting the hopelessness and trying to survive just one more day and slowly realising the you’re just one day closer to death…
Man, it’s a really great game, but I can’t play it again anytime soon.
I have two steam accounts, and I was not able to see anything related to a game marked private from my second account except when family sharing was enabled between the accounts. With family sharing on I could see all private games from my primary account on my secondary (including games which were not installed on the local system).
If you have family sharing on, hold off. Otherwise as far as I know it works as intended.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Mmm yess. Recently did a play through, and luckily I played most of it with a fellow pilgrim. IMO Journey will always be gorgeous. The graphics are perfectly balanced between realism, performance and art. To me, it’s a timeless classic.
Hate: disproportionately excessive penalties for falls (usually found in platformers).
If you get shot in the face by an enemy, you lose your shield, lose a life, whatever. In a bad platformer, if you don’t time a difficult jump exactly right, you lose a life, lose everything in your inventory, get sent back to the very beginning of the level, get audited, and have to mow the developers lawn for an entire summer.
Platformers are “guilty until proven innocent” - I won’t play one until I know it won’t destroy my will to live.
I honestly can’t even remember the one that first set me off. It’s been a while. I just remember realizing that gravity was more punishing than any of the enemies, and thinking “oh, to hell with this.”
For platformers, maybe. But for certain genres – like battle royale – the risk of losing it all after one mistake is part of the thrill. It all depends on the game.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?
Just be thankful they haven’t followed inflation of both the value of money, and their budgets. A $40 NES game would be $120 in todays money and it was probably made in a month by three people in a shed, meanwhile something like CoD Black Ops Cold War credits over 9000 people and had a budget of $700 million. GTA 6 has already blown past a billion.
Most games today are cross platform and sell substantially more copies that old console games. Mega Man 3 for example sold just over 1 million copies and was a great success. GTA V, crossplatform AAA, sold almost a quarter of a billion copies.
It’s not just that. It’s also that the second hand market is really not there anymore. There are a lot of games that I know I’m only playing once, in this case it makes sense to buy it, then resell it. But it’s not really feasible on PC.
In this situation, a rental market does make sense. And it also allows more easily to test games you probably wouldn’t have bought. I played Persona 3 this way for example.
No, you’re right. And combined with the easy refund you get from Steam for example, which would make it basically a trial period, there are a lot of possibilities.
I was thinking more about very long games that you’re not sure you really will be convinced after only 2 hours. On a Persona for example, 2 hours is nothing, you’re not even going to pass the tutorial.
Of course a demo is not forced to be at the start of the game, but some games are hard to showcase 😅
On the other hand, I’m just realizing that we are talking about an actual rental model, which we don’t really have at the moment. Gamepass is a subscription model, which is quite different (and not in a good way)
So yeah an actual renting model could be cool, depending on its pricing of course.
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