Noita never reached the levels of fame and notoriety that it deserves. It should be mentioned in every “Best Roguelike” game list.
Now, it’s definitely rated high by those who play it, with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, but it never got its mainstream spotlight.
I love me some noita, but I feel like it is maybe a little too hard and inscrutable to have huge general appeal, even amongst roguelikes
Yeah, I got it because it looked cool and I liked the concept. I like to play it, but it’s really hard and some situations feel unfair. If you get rolling, its a spectacle, though
It’s just that the game doesn’t fuck around. You could be a literal demigod: have every immunity perk, have multiple force fields, have infinite health, wand that can kill literally everything(harder than it seems), soar literally through the world with your black hole teleportation wand - and die because you stepped into chaotic polymorphine that turned you into a fish.
That’s why you need to trip on mushrooms until all polymorphine, chaotic or otherwise, is turned to something harmless. Then if I recall correctly there is really only one enemy that can polymorph you, and you can be pretty much guaranteed to be safe.
There’s more than one enemy and more than one boss who can polymorph you.
Practicing with Respawn+ installed from the Steam Workshop (or elsewhere) is quite for learning, but not necessary for people who want the challenge. I went from mods that decrease difficulty to ones that add new bosses, secrets, and ways to die unfairly in an instant, and I don’t regret my time investment.
11/10 game
You’re speaking blasphemy. Fungal shift is the devils work, it never works out like you want (at least it never does for me).
But seriously, fungal shift is pretty random and I think it can’t shift chaotic polymorphine away, it can shift only regular or unstable polymorphine.
If I recall correctly, fungal shift has a 75% chance of putting a material you have in a held flask on one side of the equation. Chaotic polymorphine isn’t on the inital materials table, but you can get it to shift by carrying it. It is on the results table, and that 75% chance can put the material in a held flask on the results side, just as easily transforming all water into chaotic polymorphine, instead of all chaotic polymorphine into water.
I haven’t played for a while, but fungal shift was one of my favorite parts of the game, and I would recklessly trip pretty much every chance I got.
Age of Mythology is one that I very rarely see talked about anywhere, it has a pretty good single player campaign. I also think more people should try out Caesar 3, albeit using one of the more modern fan made patches for reasonable zoom distances and other quality of life features.
I was thinking about AoM just the other day, decided I’m gonna play the campaign again for my next game to play
I think most people look at AoE and AoM as the same, but AoE is more popular so that gets all the attention.
AoM is one that’s in a little subgenre with games like Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends and total war Warhammer. Fantasy versions of strategy games otherwise strictly rooted in reality. Usually they’re great but left as one-offs forced to wallow in relative obscurity, but every now and again one shines through.
The 2008 Prince of Persia.
What was expected to be a start of a series revival, flopped and ended up with a kinda messy PC port, platform exclusive DLC epilogue and eventually abandonment in favor of return to sands of time mythos.
Meanwhile it is my favorite entry in the series - with amazing art direction, and lovely character development and vocal performances by two main characters. The gameplay is a cross of guitar hero and parkour - it’s much more rhythm based and perhaps less expensive, but pulling off a perfect run feels soooo good.
I love the game so much that even though I’m not a YouTuber, I created a full playthrough and published it - just so I can stop wanting to play it again every few years.
And a quick, lore-correct “quick-load”. Ut feels really good to try again without gaving to explicitly reload.
I had a game breaking bug that prevented me from getting into the end game boss area. I was disappointed. The rest of the game was fun from what I remember
Dyson Sphere Program. Factorio and Satisfactory tend to get all the press, but DSP is AMAZING.
- They learned a lot of quality of life lessons from older factory games and built them in, e.g. you get bots right away.
- The visuals can be breathtaking: not because it’s raytracing/whatever fancy tech, but simply the scale of the game: giant gas planet rises at the horizon, etc. – and you can fly to just about everything you see. Star 5 light years away? You can fly to it and visits its planets and moons, and then ship stuff between your home system and the new system
- It does power exceptionally well: there are a ton of power sources (https://dsp-wiki.com/Energy_Sources#List_of_Fuels), and a lot of depth in figuring out how to power your mega factories. You can even charge up a battery and ship it by spaceship to another moon/planet. Going back to Factorio’s simplistic steam/solar/nuclear power feels like a let down (of course, Factorio has its strengths, like trains and extreme polish).
It’s in early access, but it’s one of the most polished early-access games you’ll find. They’re currently working on a large combat update that should drop in December. Price-to-value ratio is ridiculous. It’s $20 and I have 155 hours in the game.
I played it a year or two ago and found it really lacking in interface. It was really difficult for me to understand what was going on. Has that improved any?
Nihon Falcom games made since 2000, all of them. Ys games are so much fun and the Trails series has the most expansive world-building I’ve ever seen. Imagine something like a Bethesda game, but instead of every character basically just having one quest-line and ten lines of dialogue, they are constantly changing throughout the entire game, reacting to world events and progressing their own particular arc
there might be hundreds of side characters in each game that all have their own arc throughout the game, or maybe multiple games
The series really does ruin a lot of other games for you though, you come to expect this and then you play a game that doesn’t’ focus as much on narrative or world-building and everything just feels so videogamey as a result. Oh this character only talks about their Bar? and their dialogue doesn’t change at all? and they have one quest and then you’ll never speak to them again?.. okay.
I don’t have much experience with JRPGs. What’s the gameplay like? Action or strategy, or something of a hybrid? Are they hard to get started with? I see Ys Nordic just released back in September. Would that be a good starting point, or would I be confused from missing prior games in the series?
Ys Nordic hasn’t come out in the west. Just pick up ys 8. It’s everyone’s favourite, it’s on sale all the time, and it’s on all the platforms.
The story doesn’t matter, you can play them all in any order. Just endless fun action rpg with amazing music
Ys is mostly action RPG. Trails is turn-based. This site can help you pick a good place to get started with the Ys series.
Ys Nordic is only released in Japan yet as far as I know.
Ys 8 is a good starting point.
The stories aren’t that connected besides some characters and a lot of Easter eggs / references so you can play them in pretty much any order you want.
Ok this isn’t an answer from me but I’m hoping it’s somebody else’s answer because I’ve had this game in my library for like eight years and haven’t played it: Transistor. It seems like it got really really good reviews and then nobody ever talked about it again.
The reason people forget about Transistor might be the game Hades -from the same studio- which was/is such a huge hype. Got them both in my library, played a lot of Hades but never really got into Transistor because in my opinion it really pales in comparison to Hades.
Got it installed before I checked my replies and I didn’t even realize it was them till I started playing! But yeah it’s pretty awesome so far, loving the Turn() mechanic, gives me way less anxiety than Hades
Enjoy, gl hf!
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Play it. It’s fantastic. The soundtrack is chefs kiss.
Tbh listen to all of supergiant’s soundtracks. They always hit it out of the park.
Best Supergiant game. But I wouldn’t call it underrated: it was a big hit when it landed. I has also aged really well with some very creative mechanics.
Evoland 2: A game paying homage to the history of rpgs, and has a fairly solid set of main characters.
Lenna’s Inception: A 2D Zelda clone about the world glitching out and you taking the place of the main character.
Bastion: First game from Supergiant Games (makers of Hades). Fantastic music and voice acting. Fairly good story too.
I feel like Bastion is probably appropriately rated, given that it is very popular, and I think made it onto atleast a few game of the year lists when it was released.
As someone who replayed it recently, I also feel like it did not age gracefully.
That’s a bummer to hear, what stuck out to you as aging badly?
I feel like I remember it not seeming super replayable, because of the whole narrator doesn’t repeat lines schtick.
The gameplay. Aesthetically the game is fine. But the actual hack and slash elements feel very barebones. It almost feels like a mobile game. And the vibrant chunky isometric graphics, level design, and town building lite elements kinda sell that feeling further.
I think it’s worth noting that Lenna’s inception is procedurally generated, for better or worse.
It’s somewhat randomized, but not procedurally generated in the typical sense. There’s a set number of dungeons that will appear in the same general regions each time. Along with a set order of doing the dungeons.
Lenna’s Inception: A 2D Zelda clone about the world glitching out and you taking the place of the main character.
I will be checking that out, thank you for the tip.
I hope you enjoy it! Fair warning ahead of time it does have multiple endings, and the good one will probably take a second play through, though it’s not particularly long.
Days Gone. Biker in post Zombie Apocalypse. Fucking love it. It was killed by a few bad reviews that obviously only played for a few minutes. The reviews were so wrong it is impossible that it was an accident.
Yes. The bike you get at the very start IS ugly, doesn’t handle well, breaks easily, and runs out of gas. That’s why you upgrade it.
The map is small? Because you haven’t explored anything yet. The map is HUGE. It just isn’t fully accessible at the beginning. You know what other game is like that? All of them.
There’s no fast travel? Liar. Fucking liar. There is fast travel once you get more than 1 location. Which happens about 20 to 30 minutes in. Literally the second mission is go find the settlement.
The gun is terrible? No shit Sherlock. It’s the first gun. Every starting weapon in every game is terrible. Name one, just ONE GAME, that gives you the best final weapon at the very start.
No alternative weapons? Fucking asshole. What do you think all those empty slots on the weapons wheel are for? You have to go get them.
Giving a bad review because your starting gear isn’t good is absolutely underhanded willful ignorance hit piece bullshit.
You sound very passionate but also very aggressive. It’s almost uncomfortable to read 😅 Will check it out though, thank you.
Yeah. It still makes me angry. A few hit piece reviews from people that didn’t play the game, and were just making things up, scared Sony so they canceled the sequel.
But the game is so good and the story is so fantastic that there are serious talks about a movie. Primarily due to the success of Last of Us. If that happens a sequel is possible, maybe even probable.
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I think most of the reviews panned it for having a very generic and cliche-ridden plot, but I agree with you, that game is fucking great, the hordes and horde tech are awesome, and I’m sad Bend can’t make another one.
Great game, probably the best zombie hordes you’ll face for sometime because the game apparently wasn’t good enough for a sequel despite selling practically identical numbers to Ghost of Tsushima (which is also great btw).
Snowrunner. A great combination of both chilled-out & stressful, driving massive diesel trucks at 5mph through woods and rivers delivering logs or girders.
The fact there’s no big story and almost zero dialog, just assignments and map markers mean it’s a superb ‘podcast’ game - something you can put it on while you listen to some podcasts / audiobooks.
Not that the game is boring or just a distraction. It’s incredibly satisfying finding the best way to navigate through a horrendous woodland or swamp and get all your cargo through safely.
Plus, it has some of the best landscape physics out there. Rushing water really feels accurate. Mud paths get distorted so that it’s harder to get through on your way back than before you churned it all up.
A great game. 100s of hours I’ve sunk into that thing.
Their upcoming game looks absolutely amazing by the way.
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Love SnowRunner, and i do play it mostly with podcast or stream open on second screen. Wish I could have a real manual transmission with clutch and all, chassis flexing and better asphalt friction. These would make it even more amazing
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It’s a free, classic-style roguelike that has a massive amount of options. The game takes place in the near-future following an apocalyptic event that has turned most people into zombies. There’s also Lovecraftian horrors, Fallout-esque military installations guarded by robots, the ability to be a furry (like, with a full costume. Or you can get mutagens and transform yourself into an animal hybrid.), vehicle and structure building, and you can even milk cows. It’s updated daily if you want to play the latest test builds, or you can stay with the latest stable build. There are various overhaul mods and loads of single-feature mods. It’s one of my all-time favorite games, and I tend to go back to it every few months.
I replay EV Nova (Arpia plugin, of course) every few years and just absolutely love it.
I’ve been playing Endless Sky recently which is a FLOSS clone of EV. it’s good but I really can’t get the hang of the combat.
This one is a real lost gem for me, I haven’t thought about that game for probably 15 years.
It’s still around! And there’s a little discord full of super nice people who still play it and mod it and maintain a new forum.
Could you give some details? Maybe an invite link? I can only seem to find expired links to any EV Nova discord that google turns up.
Nova Drift, I just can´t stop playing it. It is a roguelite space shooter, based on Asteroids. The game has stylish 2D visuals, huge number of builds, responsive and precise controls, plus a nice dev, who listens to the community. It happens to be on sale right now too.
STALKER - Or at least in North America, anyway. While the vanilla games can be a little clunky and difficult at times, they offer one of the most unsettling and atmospheric experiences around.
There is nothing quite like tucking your tail between your legs and hurrying back to the safety of numbers, or a lonely campfire after realizing the sun is rapidly setting and you’re still out there with the shadows. Once you reach that camp or relative safety, there is this strange, mixed feeling of simultaneous security and insecurity as you listen to your temporary companions converse with each other in the glow of a crackling fire in a decaying village or industrial lot, while distant creatures howl in the night, and the Zone itself creaks and groans around you like great metal in the sky.
Those feelings are intensified when conversation abruptly halts and the men around you go on alert, and you remember that nothing stopping those things in the night from wandering right into your camp, or whether/whoever that distant flickering flashlight belongs to from getting a little too close.
And then there is that feeling that follows, after the sun finally rises and you head back out into the strange, abandoned beauty of the world. Never completely safe, always on the edge, but a little more confident after having survived another haunting night in the Zone.
Tales of Maj Eyal is a roguelike that is on the scale of an epic adventure rather than a single dungeon delve. It has some of the most unique class design I’ve seen in a game. It has great automation features that let you set trigger conditions for skills. The game has received persistent updates for over a decade now.
Crystal Project is a relatively new JRPG that features some of the best exploration I’ve ever seen in a game. Also like ToME it has interesting class design. The end game bosses are fun, and actually make you think about your team design, they are generally not brute forceable.
Both games are well received but have less than 10k reviews on Steam, where indie darlings such as Cuphead or Hades have over 100k.
ToME is amazing! One of my favorite games in my library
I’ve been meaning to pick up Crystal Project (that price, wow!) But I learned it’s coming to Switch so have held off on it. After Sea of Stars, I need me some new JRPGs!
Broforce
Extremely fun game … for an evening but are you really playing it seriously?
