I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.
My value for gaming is less of a simple equation, but my examples of games that are “undoubtedly worth the price” are going to consist a lot more of shorter games that are absolutely spectacular for their shorter playtime with a £30ish price tag.
Think:
Outer Wilds
Tunic
Hollow Knight
Journey
The Witness
Portal (1&2)
Celeste
Undertale
To The Moon
Ori and the Blind Forest/Will o the Wisps
The Witcher 3
I have no strict criteria for this, but I can say I’ve had far, far more than my money’s worth from those games in terms of the value they brought to my life.
If you do want to look purely at the number of hours you’ll get out of a game vs its price, look no further than Guild Wars 2. You can get all the content for under £100 I beoieve, and I’ve spent 6000+ wonderful hours playing it. It’s not the same kind of enjoyment though.
Beta tested it on android and played the snot out of it for a few months before i got tired of how much they had to limit the graphics (despite still being beautiful) in order to get it running reasonably well on mobile. Super super excited for the steam release, will definitely play more then
I’m down with that bit for sure - would prefer the cyber psycho or just finding him as a corpse with a letter or something and some environmental storytelling. Nothing too high effort, mind. But it’d be nice to at least virtually know he fucked himself
If you haven’t played either of the other two games I mentioned, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy them. All 3 of the games are absolute masterclasses in how to hand the player knowledge that transforms their experience of the game, over and over again.
I can’t believe I typed out a whole recommendation about tunic and outer Wilds, and then scrolled down and saw your exact same recommendations. Lol. I guess excellent games are universal
Tunic is incredibly unique and I can’t say I’ve played anything like it. On the surface it’s a classic dungeon crawler zelda inspired thing, but once you play… Really any amount of it, you start to see past the veil and the real game is revealed to you. Even after completing the entire game and all achievements, there is technically more of the game available to be explored.
Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Obsidian’s Outer Worlds) will be an absolute bliss for anyone who enjoyed portal or superliminal. It may be the single greatest puzzle/exploration game ever made, with no exaggeration.
Return of the Obra Dinn was a game that I could not put down. I played it in one sitting beginning to end. I was enthralled and I felt like Sherlock fucking Holmes. It is a very unassuming game but by God, you will be gripped. It stands up there with Outer Wilds as being a game that absolutely propelled itsself up to one of the best of its genre (this one being Mystery/Puzzle)
I think if you enjoyed the beauty in Hyper Light Drifter, then you will be entranced by Tunic. Bonus points for being one of the best puzzle exploration games of all time.
Spiritfarer is very, very pretty as well. It is dripping it atmosphere and I often found myself just afk breathing it all in.
Yes! I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I didn’t like the way the NPC AI worked. That specific aspect felt less like a “horror” experience and more like a “will the jank fuck me this time?” fest. Everything else was excellent, though.
Main game was a 10/10 without question DLC was a 9.5/10 and would have been a 10 if not for that.
I still got a lot of “Outer Wilds moments” in the DLC. Very few games have given me that kind of “oh, you’re kidding, that’s awesome” feeling when you figure something out.