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.
Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita’s world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone’s offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.
The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy (after applying community bugfix mods) is better; with ZRP, Shadow of Chernobyl was bug-free except for the ending.
Then again, I played the original biggest known as Metro 2033, not the Redux ver. I still think there is more interesting stuff in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., though, overall. The environment is incredible in its natural, unscripted interactions and not… manufactured.
It had a giveaway on Android, and I think iOS, 5 years ago. It’s certainly one of the most creative minimalist games out there, but I just couldn’t figure out how to get up to higher scores.
Portal 2 was way better than Portal, which felt like mostly a really extended tech demo or proof-of-concept. Portal 2 felt like an actual, full, fleshed-out game.