I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:
- Superhot: Time only moves when you do
- Viewfinder: Convert 2D pictures seamlessly into interactive 3D environments
- Superliminal: Change size of objects by working with perception
- Portal: Portals
- Scribblenauts: Summon objects by describing them in a notepad
I am not focused on the story, no. of hours of playtime, date of release or its popularity. It just needs to be playable and be enjoyable (and be available in PC).
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)
Bump for Outer Wilds. Genuinely an amazing and unique game. I’ve never seen another “found knowledge” game mechanic like this.
@Spood_Beest@lemm.ee @frank@sopuli.xyz
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’ve heard great things of outer wilds, just wishlisted it. I hadn’t heard of Obra Dinner but it’s Lucase Pope! The Papers, Please creator. Instant buy from me.
Thanks for the suggestions, my SO and I are stoked to delve into more mystery and confusion
If you remember me when you’re done with the game(s) I’d love to hear what you think! Have fun!
Thanks! Playing through Return of Obra Dinn now. Really enjoying it so far. What a cool concept and it’s so pretty!
Oh man, you weren’t kidding about getting right on that shit! Glad you’re enjoying!
Okay! I’m not sure anyone else will see this but Obra Dinn was fantastic.
Music was down and has been stuck in my head since. It’s a cool murder mystery with such amazing imagery/creepy depictions of sea monsters. I really enjoyed how subtle some of the hints were and we felt like geniuses when we got something right
So glad you enjoyed! Did you 100% everything/get the “true” ending?
The music is SO good! And yes, 100% agree on feeling like a genius when you connect the more subtle dots!
I so wholeheartedly agree with Tunic. It absolutely blew my mind to complete. I’d love to experience that again.
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Also the story is one of the best in the entire history of gaming (IMO).
The other of course being To the Moon.
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Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
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Katamari: A giant ball gets rolled around and collects stuff forever
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Baba Is You: Movable text is rules to the game
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Untitled Goose Game: You have to piss people off the right way
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Billie Bust Up[unreleased]: Musicals tell you upcoming platforming challenges
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Celeste: every time you die you quickly reset on the same “page”/small tile of map
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Splatoon: you shoot at the ground to go faster, hide, and/or win
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Odama: real-time tactical wargame pinball
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Golf Story: Golf-based fetch quests
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Astral Chain: asynchronously control a companion in combat
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Okami: paint skills on-screen in combat
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Astro Bears: Snake but in 3D
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Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime: Up to 4 players pilot parts of a ship together
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Pokemon Ranger: draw circles around monsters to catch them
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Viva Pinata: breed pinatas to create new species
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Spore: create and evolve a creature
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
Okami plays extremely well on Nintendo Switch with the ability to paint with your fingers on the touch screen
Katamari Damacy is a great example, built around a very simple but satifying mechanic snd good controls.
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In Return of the Obra Dinn you play an insurance claims investigator. You can magically view the moment of somebody’s death and hear the audio prior to it to aid in your investigation of a ghost ship.
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Also, there’s a Steam achievement you get by not playing it for 10 years.
Wasn’t that 4 or 5 years?
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Ah, but that’s a different game technically
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Heaven’s Vault
You play a space archaeologist, and the big central mechanic of the game is translating things written in the Ancient language.
Ancient is written using ideographs, and more complex ideas are represented by combining glyphs that describe the concept, like ever more complex compound words. There are art of speech markers, glyphs that describe how other glyphs in a word relate to each other, intensifiers, and even a few cases where super common words are just the combination of other basic glyphs into a single composite like a Norse bindrune (for example the symbols for creature and knowledge overlap to make person, an intelligent creature). 46 base ideographs, but that includes digits, so it’s only 10 more than English.
So for example, a word that reads NOUN-person-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-NOUN-knowledge-person means “Emperor”, because noun-knowledge-person means “law” and thus the result is a person who the law belongs to, aka a ruler or in the context of an empire the emperor. Replace that noun marker glyph at the beginning with the adjective marker glyph and you would have “imperial”, the quality of being emperor-like.
One of the longest words to appear in the game translates as “mouse” and it’s 21 letters long and is literally something like creature-CONNECTOR-many-many-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-NOT-ADJECTIVE-CONNECTOR-many-creature-CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-ABSTRACT NOUN-person-CONNECTOR-light-NOUN-plant-CONNECTOR-rock, which is several words stitched into a compound word, where some of those words are themselves compound words (the idea is something like “creature like a very small pig”, but the word I’m calling “pig” means “creature that is happy in the soil” where happy is something like “the quality of a person who is metaphorically full of light” and “soil” is “plant-earth”). Those CONNECTORS are letters that are used to build compound words.
Donut county, you’re a hole in the ground growing as you consume the environment.
Katamari damacy, you’re a ball rolling over and collecting items in the environment and steering is like steering a canoe.
Octodad, be an octopus in a suit pretending to be human who can’t control his limbs properly. I am bread is similar.
Qube and anti-chamber if you’re a fan of superluminal
Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.
Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.
Fez: a 2D plateformer in which you can change the perspective to create ways to unreachable plateforms
Baba Is You: a puzzle game in which you move blocks with words written on them, combining them to create small phrases which become new rules of the game.
BABA IS WIN
Super Paper Mario for the Wii also has a mechanic like that. You’re in a 2D paper world (obviously) but you have the ability to temporarily turn 90°; walking through enemies and opening the possibility to i.e. pass some walls.
I have a couple kinda unique things to suggest. There is a small indie game called Eversion that you can find on Steam. The core mechanic is about shifting to these different planes of existence to finish levels. You can only shift at certain places and shifting opens up pathways that weren’t there before. Its retro style graphics and otherwise very simple controls. The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games. Catherine. Catherine is a game in a few styles. You spend part of the time at a diner/bar interacting with people. Then you go to sleep and in the dream world you ascend towers using moveable blocks that you must climb. Sometimes you are chased up the tower by a boss enemy. There is no combat in the game. It’s about ascending the tower as fast as possible at night and progressing the story by day.
The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.
Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.
And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.
The Talos Principle is fantastic. Probably my favorite puzzle game. The sequel is finally happening as well.
Crypt of the Necrodancer: Roguelike to the beat! Dance pad compatible.
Death Stranding
I’ve never played such a unique big budget game. The core mechanic is terrain traversal to make deliveries, and the game continues to give you tools throughout it to accomplish that.
Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality
What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.
Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.
Some of the CW Warnings for What Remains of Edith Finch (spoilers obviously):
spoiler
Drowning, child death, divorce / arguing, pregnancy, child birth complications / death
Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.
Before Your Eyes
The recently deceased Benjamin Brynn is on his way to the afterlife. The player must interact with Brynn’s memories through an eye-tracking webcam to progress, as the game reads and responds to the player’s eye movement and blinking - from Wikipedia
It tries to emulate life flashing by your eyes as you are dying. I haven’t gotten around to play it but, the concept is cool nonetheless.
Found about it from this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTI1WCopTsg
When I saw this thread I thought of the exact same game, which I heard about in the exact same video
