Oh! Can’t believe I forgot, but you should also play Under a Killing Moon, and then when you’re done and completely in love with it, move on to The Pandora Directive, Tex Murphy: Overseer, and Tesla Effect. They’re a series of hilarious retro-sci-fi gumshoe detective comedy puzzle adventures. It’s like Maltese Falcon, Blade Runner, the X-Files, and Young Frankenstein got put in a blender. They’re amazing.
The Longest Journey. It’s my favorite point and click of all time. Epic, beautiful, and fun. A couple of Babel fish-level puzzles, but otherwise a steady and engaging story with a very likable lead. The much-delayed sequel, Dreamfall, tried some things and mostly failed, but was still a pretty interesting story extension. I haven’t played the last episodic entry, Dreamfall chapters, because I’m slowly working my way through the first two again first.
Literally everyone alive should download and play this game. The music slaps harder than ya mama and it’s one of the best open world games ever made while having come out in nineteen-ninety-goddamn-two.
I might disagree on that point because any force that hurls a fridge that far will turns its occupants to jelly (much like the first Iron Man suit catering in the desert with Tony inside), but it doesn’t change the fact that realism has never been the point.
Yeah honestly I could never figure out why people were all up in arms about aliens. Heart ripping mystics, the holy grail, and god exploding Nazis were all realistic enough for you, but aliens were a bridge too far?
No it’s definitely enjoyable, I’m just kidding around. It’s that it’s the complex kind of enjoyable that is fueled by adrenaline and harmless anxiety. I’m a big horror fan, so it feels familiar to that fandom.
If you want more cinematic games, the Quantic Dream portfolio has a couple. Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are both notable examples. I remember having some serious anxiety playing Heavy Rain, in the best way.
Generally agreed. But it shocks me just how many games out there are making crazy amounts of money just selling cosmetics. I still remember horse armor! It was a scandal!
Gotta love dropping $100 on a free game before it’s even out, then drip-feeding it thousands more over time when the game intrinsically provides nothing more than a highly engineered dopamine drip. No story, no meaningful progression, no value or benefit to you as a human, just obsessively learning and mastering a skill that has literally only one purpose on the planet: playing that game.
As a gamer who grew up in the 80’s, lots of games that have any significant online component at all feel like this now. If you don’t pick it up in the first couple months, forget it. It’ll be full of people who play 9 hours a day and it’ll have so many layers of systems and currencies it feels like an absurdist satire. Seasons and prestige and lore and so much baggage. I get so tired of asking “wait, can I earn the blue triangles by playing, do they cost real money, do I trade orange circles for them…?”