I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play.
Are there any titles that might not have been commercially successful that you feel everyone should give a shot?
I feel like Outer Wilds was drowned out by Outer Worlds, and the two often get mixed up, usually to Outer Worlds’ favor.
One of my top 10 games.
Seems to me like Outer Wilds outshone Outer Worlds if anything. I never hear anyone talking of Outer Worlds anymore, but Outer Wilds is still brought up as one of the greatest indie games out there.
In a way, yeah! But I stand by the fact that a lot of people bought Outer Worlds thinking it was Outer Wilds.
Outer Worlds is an actual work of art that still manages to play and feel great.
the PC version is pretty fucked in the “feel great” department. the engine itself renders frames at arbitrary framerates just fine, but the animations (including the camera) only update at up to 60 FPS, with no in-game option to cap the frame rate to that animation rate. vsync doesn’t work properly with high refresh rates, and external framerate limiters aren’t able to get a good match. it’s borderline impossible to get this game to feel smooth with proper frame pacing, even with a vrr display.
best i could get was to use external tools to force the game to set my monitor to 60 hz, then turn on vsync in game, but this added a ton of input lag
Ah that’s too bad to hear, it felt just right on PS4
Mannnn. Outer Wilds is so freaking good. I had put it off for a while, but then last year I decided to go through it. It managed to be the perfect game at the perfect time. Raw intrigue and fascination turned into somehow helping me cope with the loss of my sister and dad who I had lost very recently at the time.
Best game ever made, really is. First I’d played in years that felt like a fresh new experience.
It really did
Really unfortunate they both came out around the same time. Although I think the actual target markets were different.
Yeah, completely different markets. My friend bought the wrong one and for months he wouldn’t try outer wilds because it “wasn’t his sort of game” when it totally was.
I’ve never heard about Outer Wolrd, however, have been recommended Outer Wilds and it was supposed to be my summer game (but I forgot)
The Talos Principle It’s not just a puzzle game.
Good timing, too, Talos Principle 2 was just announced
No it wasn’t… It was announced two years ago, they did announce the release date three days ago though.
Ah, details…What M137 said
Nice, that’s one I have in my library not yet installed. Bought it when there was a cheap bundle with others by that company, but was mainly looking at The Place which kinda turned me off of those style games. I’ll have to be sure to give it a shot now.
It’s also 90 percent off on steam right now. Just grabbed it for $4.40 Canadian after tax.
Needed more crates.
Hardspace Shipbreaker. You’re a wage slave (literally) in a space dock, taking apart ships and throwing the bits into the right bins. Doesn’t sound super fun, but it is. 1) You’re chopping up ships but you get to use LASERS!!! and the energy grappling hook. So satisfying. 2) The physics is 90% spot on. You’re in 3d, but it’s not purely inertial. There’s a dampening field that slows things down, so it doesn’t get too outta hand. There are a couple of other quirks, but they’re not hugely impacting. 3) The soundtrack is perfect. It’s a very bluesy, banjo style for a very bluecollar type job. 4) The voice acting is amazing. Every line from Weaver is just perfect. You hate Hal with a passion (you’re supposed to). The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games It’s also on PC and game pass.
I’ve played it thru twice. The first time as-is, but the 2nd time I shut off the “15 minute shifts” option. I think that breaks things up too much. I think open-shift is better. I bought the vinyl soundtrack. I’m not a huge fan of vinyl, but this is the right style of music that would benefit from it.
Underappreciated for sure, but to be fair, it’s super repetitive. If they’d added a secondary component or loop where you could black market trade or participate in the economy of the game some how to drown out the monotony of breaking the same ships over and over, I’d have played it more.
I remeber playing Jedi fallen order and seeing ships being broken down like that during the opening mission. I thought that I would rather be doing that and then hardspace showed up on steam a few days later. It’s been on my wish list for way too long, definitely going to pick it up for my next game
I’ve just recently said that on Lemmy - I said to a friend I wanted a game where you broke down and scrapped star wars ships, and they pointed me towards this game. It was recently on sale so I picked it up. It’s been an absolute blast and exactly what I was looking for (though I still wish I could do it with SW ships). I also agree about the shift timer, so thankfully there’s an option for that.
The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Which annoyingly, is the reason I bounced off the game. Breaking down ships is fun. That’s literally the whole reason I want to play the game. The story wants me to hate playing the game and won’t let me play until I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
Capitalism is pretty bad, so it didn’t bother me. It was refreshing to hear it in a narrative. Game devs don’t usually get to say stuff like that, so it was nice.
Yeah, but you don’t need to tell me that in an unskippable cutscene (the fact that it’s unskippable is the part I have an issue with) and ironically, the gameplay is so compelling that I absolutely do not mind just wasting my life away toiling under these ridiculous work conditions.
Edit: Let’s be real here, the game didn’t need a story. Just set me up with a ridiculous amount of debt and let me just break down ship after ship. They could have just added more ships and systems than make a story that people actively would work against.
The main point of criticism Yahtzee had amounted to “just play the audio log over gameplay. Let me listen to it while I break hard space ships”
You know, it seems that several of the games I play has some element of “corporations bad” to it. Subnautica’s Alterra, Satisfactory’s Ficsit…
Major studios pander to current sentiment but don’t seek to resolve the issues. For example the cyberpunk genre is an indictment of many things including the reckless pursuit of technology and corporate super powers. Yet Cyberpunk 2077 with partner with Amazon Prime gaming and let the man leading Neurolink voice a character in their game.
That’s not to disparage 2077 just an acknowledgement of the reality of triple A game development. They’re making products most of the time rather than art. Their worms can still be enjoyable but rarely get to make scathing statements.
Major studios pander to current sentiment but don’t seek to resolve the issues.
Lol, seek to resolve issues? They’re not the government. They’re art. Art critiques things and suggests people to change things. It came write laws.
Yet Cyberpunk 2077 with partner with Amazon Prime gaming and let the man leading Neurolink voice a character in their game.
The devs and writers don’t make the business decisions. Wish they did, they’d have a better product, imo. The marketing is done by someone else who the devs, usually, have no control over.
It still is a little lib-ish. The game goes to great lengths at showing Silverhand (and anyone blaming capitalism) as being a bit too harsh or off their rocker, with V explicitly mocking his leftist opinions in dialogue many times (replaying the game, once during an elevator ride, another after dealing with the chapel in pacifica). The game is very on the nose about blaming corporations but spares the rod when talking about the system.
From my perspective producing art can be pivotal in impacting change, good or bad by swaying public sentiment. I’m not claiming that they can pull out the old quill and ink and pen up some statues, but that voicing distaste is the first step in enacting change.
Voicing thought alone doesn’t impact change, but neither does enacting laws, you also require enforcement. But laws enforced without public support don’t last forever.
On the last paragraph I think we had a disconnect, I had assumed you said devs in reference to an entire studio. But it seems you were strictly speaking about the individual of that occupation in a larger studio.
Yep, there’s a reason for that!
Jazzpunk, everyone should play Jazzpunk.
Far: Lone Sails is a beautiful art piece with unusual gameplay, and the sequel is great too.
Bedlam is kind of a love-letter to 90s and 00s FPS games. The gameplay isn’t amazing, but if you spent a lot of time in games like Quake, Unreal Tournament or Halo CE back in the early days of online multiplayer, this game is for you.
Kairo is weird.
Sable is an interesting adventure with a really nice art style.
Interplanetary is an excellent strategy game about firing weapons at other planets.
Neon Drive is a fun rhythm game with 80s aesthetics.
Bastion is well worth your time.
Bastion was huge when it came out. It definitely got forgotten after a couple years though.
I still have it on several devices, like the old iPhone, an iPad and a PS Vita, I haven’t got to play it yet :(
3M over is lifetime. Hardly huge.
No, they’re right. Everyone was talking about it when it came out. It’s also the first Supergiant Games game and really put them on the map.
Love Bedlam! Picked it up on some dirt cheap sale a while ago and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was.
Can I go with a game from the 90s? Because the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the best games I ever played. Ellison himself voices the “evil” computer, AM and instead of trying to win, you have to make the correct moral choices so your character can finally be allowed to die. You play multiple characters (not concurrently), so you have to do this multiple times. It’s brutal but so good. I know very few people who even know it existed.
Games of any time period are valid. The two reasons I made the post were:
- I was watching Nocllip’s documentary on the production of Prey & for a game that has possibly the best first 15 minutes of any game it got middling reviews & it really disappointing the devs that they work was overlooked. So I figured that perhaps some people here might enjoy it who had overlooked it or simply never heard of it.
- I thought it’d be a great spring board for everyone who has that one game they love that they can’t ever talk about.
I actually heard about that game for the first time the other day in a YouTube video on philosophical questions in video games that I had playing in the background while doing other things.
It’s on archive.org if you ever want to play it. Not sure if it’s DOS or Windows, but either way, an emulator will take care of that issue.
https://archive.org/details/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream-usa
No Mans Sky. It used to suck, but now I find it quite fun
TBF, it kinda sucked on release. I still remember the monoliths of Hydrogen…
still, I use it as one of gamings biggest comeback stories because it is.
I like the part about how it reminds me of Minecraft, but in space and with tools/weapons that never break and the ability to add more inventory slots. (There are less material options for building player housing though, but at least this limitation has led to some very creative community bases.) That, and I always find it rewarding to discover as many of a planet’s plant and animal species as possible to earn those chip things you can learn crafting recipes with, and many of the planets’ terrain looks pretty awesome since while it is all procedural copypasta, there are countless possible combinations of available ores, rock models/colors/usefulness, terrain color, animal appearances/traits, plant products, hazards, etc. You can use all of this to determine which planets near your spawnpoint are useful and which ones are useless, out of millions of possible planets. I also like how after coming back to that game after more than a year, I found that unearthing the buried tech things gives you 4 of that data thing you need to complete all the tech-trees in the early game instead of just 1. And unlike many games, they update all platforms at the same time, which is great since I find the console controls on the Switch edition easier to remember than the PC controls.
But I do wish the planets had more than just one climate and biome so they’d be more realistic and those 2 undiscovered rare polar animals keeping you from earning lots of nanites would be less painful to track down. My current home planet is a swamp world that has Florida-like temperatures even at the poles and on mountains.
If you want a true “Minecraft in space” experience, I recommend Space Engineers. Not as broad as NMS, but much deeper (especially with mods like WeaponCore, MES, and Aerodynamics).
- Heat Signature
- House of the Dying Sun
- Thumper
- Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
- Gunpoint
Aww man, I loved Heat Signature and Gunpoint both. They definitely deserve some more love.
Both games are by Tom Francis. His new game Tactical Breach Wizards is ‘coming soon’ as well
An another one to add in the defenestration trilogy :D
Maybe I should replay gunpoint sometime
A lot of the games people have mentioned here are either obscure games I’ve never heard of or newer titles in niche communities. But Gun Point is an obscure game I have actually played, I think they could have picked a better name for it though for a game where most combat isn’t firearms based it’s slightly misleading and probably deterred some people.
House of the Dying Sun was one of my first oculus rift games and so so good
Titanfall 2
Bought the game at Dollarama in Canada for $4 a few years ago. Still haven’t played it.
The campaign has some absolutely wild parts of it. It’s worth playing through that if nothing else
Uplink - A hacking sim game that’s actually quite addictive in a playthrough. Will make you feel like you’re in the movie Hackers.
Spycraft: The Great Game - An adventure game that had as consultants CIA director William Colby and KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin.
I don’t know a lot of people that have played these, but they definitely rank up there for me as some of the more interesting and unique games I’ve played over the decades.
Shoutout to Uplink! Not something you look to for realism, but it’s a really well designed hacker sim. Lots of fun!
Played Uplink as a kid, later learned about fragmentation for computer memory. Was cool to find out the inventory system wasn’t just a cool game mechanic but was based off how actual memory works.
Heyyy time to see if the benefit of 10 years helps me complete Uplink.
Hylics 1 & 2. There’s actually a sorta sleeper cult around the games where it seems like a lot of people know of them or have played them, but no one ever talks about them. Pretty standard action-rpg but everything’s claymation. Oh, and the second game changes genre multiple times.
Cruelty Squad. Amazing immersive sim. Looks like trash, best gameplay I’ve encountered in a while. That game goes hard.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I thought this was more popular, however considering how many people give me a “what’s that” when I mention it, it makes me think it wasn’t as popular as I thought. It’s a very well made spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future. Even has JSRF’s composer on a few tracks.
QT deserves more eyes on it for being an incredibly cute and wholesome parody of PT. There’s a free “demo” version on Itch.io, and if you like that then I’d highly recommend buying the full version on Steam.
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. This game is… hm. Basically it started off life as a Warhammer 40k game, but got released as something else due to the studio failing to secure the licenses they needed for WH40K. It’s a much older indie game from back when Valve had standards regarding what made it onto steam. It’s also kinda special because it’s one of the few times the Source engine was used commercially outside Valve. It’s also pretty jank, but overall pretty fun. It’s got some pretty decent RPG mechanics on top of a first person shooter, complete with classes. You can hack basically anything but also anything can hack back. A door can hack you.
Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and tactical combat. My only significant gripe is that I want more of it: More tales, more character customization… just more. (Although I now see that a cosmetic pack is available; I’ll have to check it out.)
Gigantic caught my attention when I was looking for an Overwatch alternative, because of the art and the praise from fans. I wish development hadn’t shut down before I had a chance to play it. (I hear there’s an unofficial client and server out there somewhere, though, so maybe I’ll get to at least try the work-in-progress that was never finished.)
Wildermyth is just so endearing I loved my time with it.
Taking the same character through each campaign was pretty fun like I was making a serialised demi-god: Doofus and the mountain horde, Doofus and the ancient threat etc. Because characters age though the campaign, it has interesting implications in the world lore. Like we’re an archivist document the various legends of Doofus, acknowledging where they contradict and maybe speculating on how the differences in each culture’s legend of Doofus reflects back.
Downside is I optimised the fun out of the combat in always having Doofus at the center of the strategy, each encounter then played out the same.
Now I’m wishing I’d gotten the chance to play Gigantic! If you discover a playable client and server, lemme know, because I’m loving how that looks
For me right now, Shadows of Doubt. It is an early access game and it’s got a fair bit of jank, but it’s crazy how unique it is. It had a week or so of popularity and then it fell off. The devs just released an update for it too!
If you like the immersive sim genre, might I also recommend Cruelty Squad and Gloomwood. Those two have very unique aesthetics and really cool mechanics.
I doubt that. (Get it? Shadows of doubt? I’ll see myself out.)
It’s so great. One time, I threw a bin at a bar’s window and the next time I came around, it had been covered in plywood.
The game feels responsive, it just needs a bit more variety in cases, mod support would be great, too.
Just started on SoD today. Pretty wild how free form it is. Fantastic.
Mad Max. Not the best game ever, but much better than I expected.
I picked it up on sale after watching Fury Road, which in turn I put off watching for years because I really like the first trilogy and did not want to have that memory tainted by some cash grab Hollywood sequel. Boy was I wrong about the film, and I was equally blown away by the game, to a point I felt really guilty getting it for 10 bucks or so. I really, really wish there was a multiplayer, though.
I almost gave up in the beginning because I had never played a game that relied so much on hand to hand combat. I’m so glad I pushed through.
Mad Max is honestly probably one of my most replayed and enjoyable games that I own. If it wasn’t for Sims 3, it would have the most hours in my Steam library. For me there’s something just so cathartic about driving around the wasteland looting scrap and beating up warboys lol. And then getting some mods/trainers involved and exploring the dev areas out in the Big Nothing is great too. I’ve gotten some really great screenshots out of that game.
The lighting and weather is so good in that game.
My biggest disappointment in it is that my favorite zone of the map only has one mission, but that mission is great. Apart of that its cool riding cars in the desert.
Hands down, Devotion by Red Candle Games. It was only on sale for a week when it came out, and was getting well-deserved rave reviews, but was pulled because an idiot put in an art asset that said “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh moron,” and Red Candle’s Chinese partner lost their business license and pulled the game from Steam. GOG was going to carry it, but they wimped out because Cyberpunk 2077 was about to come out in China, and they didn’t want to risk their sales, so they claimed “gamer voices” for why they were backtracking on carrying it, and refused to answer anyone asking them for details. The game is available, but only on Red Candle’s website,
but they were only able to get a store up and running after people had forgotten about the game.It takes place in 1980s Taiwan, and is an amazing domestic horror - you play as the father, Du Feng Yu, cycling through three different years of his family falling apart, trying to figure out what happened to his young daughter. Some parts of it just hit way too hard, like this screaming argument between Du and his wife, when you’re playing as the daughter listening to it from her bedroom. It gets heavy. And then there’s the tongue thing. IYKYK.
I absolutely love this video by Jacob Geller, An Uncanny Really, looking at how Silent Hill 2 and Devotion handle the uncanny. Devotion absolutely deserves to be compared to Silent Hill 2.
This video, by Super Eyepatch Wolf, Devotion: The Most Disturbing Game You Can Not Play, is also really good, and opens with a lot of history for understanding Red Candle’s first game, Detention, which is also really good and takes place in a high school in Taiwan in the 60s during the White Terror.
