My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.
Mechanically - both games are puzzle games in the same rough 3d-platform-puzzler vein as Portal. Instead of solving puzzles with teleportation however, you’ve got laser beams and force fields.
On a more metaphysical level, the first game is a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human - to be alive and an individual.
The sequel is a meditation on what makes societies succeed or die.
Both games are fun, the puzzles are just hard enough to be interesting with a sprinkling of well-hidden secrets. But the real reason to play The Talos Principle is if you’ve got an interest in philosophy - the storylines are deeply interested in asking some very big questions. … and they don’t provide answers either - the game poses questions and allows you to answer as you see fit.
It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.
The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.
Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.
As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.
It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.
Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven’s Vault as well.
I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.
The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants’. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.
Also - there’s no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn’t find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it’s no problem.
Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.
I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.
The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.
If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.
That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.
Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.
It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.
… but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.
As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.
Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there’s a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.
I don’t know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.
I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.
I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.
I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.
I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.
Though… I’d be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.
I’m hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise… but I kinda doubt it.
It’s always been a muscle man soap opera with stupid hair. (Though, in the realm of fighting games it still has one of the most fleshed out storylines.)
Visually, Tekken 8 is definitely for the fans of “bitchin van art”. Admittedly not everybody’s cup of tea.
But… if you like that sorta thing it’s got some pretty badass moments. Lightning, lava, giant demons - it’s the whole package!
I’m quite enjoying it. I like the addition of the Heat systems, both giving an opportunity for special attacks without waiting to be nearly dead first and giving (healable!) chip damage. Making it timed - but triggered - adds a layer of strategy for when to kick it off.
It’s fun!
Whether it’s the “best” in the series is gonna be a matter of taste, but this is definitely a stronger game all around than 7.