I want to see pokemon red/blue/yellow absolutely fully maximum modernised. I want to go through the world in VR. I want to throw the poke balls into battle for real stashed on my belt. I want to be able to yell commands to a living, breathing pokemon dancing around in the arena.
I love an open world game that is done well - Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But so often it is just done because thats what they think is the hot thing, and it does not work
It’s a bit awkward, because I liked HZD, I completed it, DLC and all, but I don’t consider it a good open world. I learned after a few hours that exploring is almost never rewarded, and you’d way better follow the few very obvious threads the game is setting up for you.
Going into a hidden path before you’re sent there by a quest is just wasting time, you’re going to struggle a lot, you’ll get nothing at the end and you’ll often even have to go back the way you came. Going outright off-road, even a little, spams you with “turn back now or I reload your save” messages. Which is baffling, I’ve never seen a game trying such a bad way to keep you inside the playing area. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game border that’s such a mess to begin with.
Great story, great characters, fun battle mechanics. But as an open-world game, I don’t think it works.
Yeah, Horizon’s big issue is that it only rewarded exploration with materials. The only reason to actually explore was to gather more crafting materials. Which is fine in a game like Minecraft or Terraria, where the game is heavily focused on crafting… Materials unlock new things to craft. But HZD isn’t heavily focused on crafting; You simply need to find increasingly obscure parts to be able to make stronger end-game weapons, which largely do the exact same thing as your current weapons, but slightly better. And once you have the better weapon, there’s no reason to continue gathering those materials. Which means there’s no reason to continue exploring.
There were only a few quests which could actually be discovered through exploration… And even those were just short fetch quests, kill quests, or were close enough to the main story’s locations that you reasonably would have stumbled across them during normal gameplay anyways.
The issue with HZD is that virtually all of your exploration-related unlockables happen via the main story. It means you can unlock every single new shiny exploration aid without actually exploring.
It’s a game by French company COWCAT Games that is describes as a point and click beat’em-up game. Has lots to do because there are multiple endings. It has a free visual novel made to essentially showcase a vn engine that can be used to make BTI fan games or your own creations and has an upcoming DLC (apparently only gonna be $9.99) that focuses more on the combat side of the game.
It’s currently available on PS4/5 (vita planned but scrapped), xbox (don’t know if they mean one and series x/s or just series), switch, steam, itch(dot)io, and even epic if you hate yourself.
Thanks for posting this, we need more people on the Fediverse putting out original content like this. Nice overview of the game for anyone who wants to know what it’ll be like.
If my mother or in-law would ever give my children anything religious I would A replace it with a real gift for the kids and B have a long discussion with grandma about indoctrinating children into a cult.
But if you are curious about the history of bible games and the multiple game knockoffs that were produced, I can highly recommend the AVGN videos about the bible games. Very entertaining and informative.
Only with modern bootlegs. Back then, games were written on mask ROMs, meaning the chips were literally manufactured with the data already written to it. They are non-rewritable.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is a magical experience that can’t be described honestly. On difficult stages, it engages all your senses and you’re just 100% inside, enthralled by the visuals, music and rhythm. This is probably the most focused and most precise game ever, everything it has, works. It’s not just my favorite indie game, it’s one of my favorite games ever.
Also, Night in the Woods and Keep Driving. Both resonated with me emotionally in a lot of ways, touching the things I care about. Keep Driving also has a really fun gameplay loop and an incredible music selection (which works as a boost for that emotional factor).
Honorable mentions: What Remains of Edith Finch (it made me uncomfortable and scared at some moments) and Firewatch (nice way to tell a story, and the characters feel real).
Sayonara Wild Hearts is such a good weekend game. Really cheap, really short, really good and with a soundtrack that you’re going to listen to long after finishing the game.
Fun fact: I discovered the soundtrack first, listened to it, checked out the game on YouTube and decided it’s not worth it. Only after something like two years of listening to the soundtrack did I get the game.
The Binding of Isaac is already a famous title that has influenced so much of the roguelike/twin-stick-shooter genre. This game has permanently altered my taste in video games.
The game I’ve enjoyed as much as TBoI is Tiny Rogues. It’s much smaller, but still fantastic with rich build variety while never losing the need for skill and good reactions.
Stolen Realm is a turn-based tactical RPG that takes place in procedurally generated dungeons that play like little roguelike runs with overarching character progression. It’s multiplayer, but you can also just control up to six characters on your own too. It does eventually feel pretty repetitive and there are points that seem impossible to win, but it’s a unique game where you continually build that roguelike power fantasy and just progressively become more powerful to the point of it feeling game breaking.
Going Under is an adorable roguelite where you fight through various levels themed around a blend of corporate stereotypes and fantasy creatures like a crypto company run by skeletons or a delivery company run by goblins. The combat is a vaguely souls-like with an emphasis on weight and timing, but your weapons are office items found in each room that break down very quickly.
Webbed is a cute puzzle/platformer where you play as a little spider on a quest to save your spider boyfriend. The main gimmick is that you can shoot webs to create platforms, pull things, attach things to each other and more. It’s a short and sweet game that’s still decently challenging. It’s the only non-roguelike indie I recommend and it’s that good that I love it despite it being in a genre I rarely play and almost never finish.
I really hope the sequel does more with dungeons than just ricochet/geometry puzzles. CrossCode’s incessant use of those in dungeon after dungeon was what made me stop playing.
Not a sequel, just their next game! Combat and UI look similar so far. They’re doing dev streams on their discord
I thought crosscode had the best puzzles haha. The way they built it out with the elemental system, the enemies that required puzzle mechanics you had learned, the tight timing where you had to send a ball flying and then race it to various objectives, the myriad of subtle environmental puzzles in the overworld. Could go on and on, but yeah the VRP is the game’s central mechanic so if you simply don’t enjoy lining up your shots then I imagine the game would be pretty rough lol
Not sure what “VRP” is unless you just mean ricochet puzzles, but mind you, I did play 95% of the game. It felt just too same-y after long enough (it was the plot and environment that had kept me going), and then I just gave up and finished through some YouTuber’s play-through and I confirmed that I had apparently quit at the start of the final dungeon, because it just felt like… more of the same timing-&-angling annoyances with no more originality. Zelda was far, far more creative and I think the game just could have done more with items or different weapons, or something, though I know much of it is based on your character being a specific class that was fixed pre-game… It just ultimately wore me down, sadly.
It’s the game’s in-game (Crossworlds) terminology for the charged shot that bounces around, yeah. They cover it in the tutorial but the main cast basically ‘nerd emoji’s’ Sergey and they simply refer to it as “balls” for the rest of the game lol
timing-&-angling annoyances
But yeah, like I said, you just don’t like the central mechanic. It’s valid. This is the main point of contention for the minority of people who don’t click with the game, as is evidenced by filtering for negative reviews on steam
But imagine if you didn’t find it to be an annoyance, and instead found it to be inherently satisfying? One of my favorite parts about Crosscode is how unafraid they are to present you with puzzles that are not only difficult to solve in the typical sense, but also difficult to perform once you know what to do. It’s a rare treat, most games instead lean hard only into one direction (purely cerebral puzzling or purely focussed on action)
It’s a game that just gives and gives, and to the contrary of your experience, I found the constant innovation of the puzzles throughout the game is what brought it from A to S tier. I finished the final dungeon wishing there was more game to play. Imagine my delight when the DLC dropped and added another 20 hours of timing & angling goodness. Replayed the game 3 times over the years.
And yeah, frankly we should compare it to Zelda, the most celebrated and beloved puzzle adventure series of all time developed and supported for 40 years by one of the largest and most influential video game companies of all time. No joke, I think this is actually exactly where Crosscode stacks up. It’s up there for me with my favorite Zelda titles
Oh. It’s been literal years so I totally forgot that initialism, but while we’re at it, the second “C” in “CrossCode” is also capital.
It’s smooth as butter, yeah, but I think I would prefer a game focused on a different character class/weapon. I remember some progression of concepts but I guess didn’t really connect the dots (even though I don’t think I looked up a guide more than once or twice briefly).
Yeah plenty of people develop these feelings about laser focussed games. Sekiro is a good example. Not gonna be your game if you don’t like parrying. Lots of comments online from such people who write the game off as “spam parry to win” as tho there’s no depth to it.
Huge parry fan on the other hand? Probably your favorite game, and you’re bewildered by those comments because you feel like you could write a novel about how interesting the system is and how rewarding it is to master all the way into your seventh charmless NG+ run.
I think at the end of the day, when the gameplay is simply not catered to our preferences we’re not really going to appreciate what makes it so great at what it is
Digimon World on PS1, made worse by the fact that it’s a tamagotchi roguelite RPG. I never played DW3, but I heard it can easily become a “where the fuck do I go now?” because of obtuse/asshole time sinking designs here and there
The problem with Daggerfall is that the dungeons are procedurally generated. I have spent hours digging through a dungeon, hugging the right wall and spam clicking on every surface for a hidden door, to eventually give up and hotkey through all the spawn spots, to find the quest target in a disconnect glitched out dungeon segment.
I would love to see a complete remake of Daggerfall with the same randomly generated dungeons; I’m not sure that the random landscape and dungeon generation would work with the way games are programmed now though.
Come to think of it, re-doing Morrowind, Arena, Battlespire, and Redquard would be neat, too.
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