Aby game that you heard about and thought “meh it’s just another xyz style game. How good can it be?” But you gave it a go anyway and it turned out the game was really good.
Westerado: Double Barreled
It has a good charm and humor. Easy to play on a whim and easy to stop and come back to (like at work :p ). Is fairly short but has decent replayability.
I played on Deck.Spiritfarer
Was not ready for that emotional rollercoaster from a “cozy” game.
I looked it up and wasn’t all that excited by it, but figured I’d give it a try anyway based on this thread Yep, thanks, I’ve not got a hope in hell in doing anything else for while now. :D
A thousand times this. There were a lot of stories that made me cry, but Alice had me sobbing. When you had to walk slowly to stay with her, I felt like I was walking with my grandmother towards the end.
Incredible game.
I had lost my grandad a few years prior and never really dealt with it. My Grandma was already declining and only had months to go. I went in 100% blind to Spiritfarer and started it because I wanted something laid back, and I enjoyed the art style. Talk about a gut punch.
That game, at that time, had the same effect that watching Grave of the Fireflies had back in the day. It still sticks with me to this day.
Minecraft.
I usually hate creative builder games with a passion, I joined fairly early in the alpha process and fell in love with the blocky design.
Then when i thought the game couldn’t get more engaging, forge was released for it and mods started being made and it opened a whole new universe that I’m /still/ playing today.
Also was Minecraft for me, but different story.
Back in 2011 or so someone told me it was a game where you could do anything: build anything anywhere, craft, fight, explore an unlimited world… But without mentioning the graphics and that it was made with cubes. I was a kid back then, so I believed it would be realistic graphics. Imagine my disappointment when they showed it to me.
But I actually watched some videos after and tried it myself and absolutely loved it.
I picked it up on sale cause it looked like something I would like. It sat in my steam library for years before I played it on a whim.
What I didn’t expect was an incredible story that would have me gripped till the end. Absolutely an awesome game.
It’s not a game I ended up playing a lot, but during the pandemic one person I know gifted me a copy of Among Us, and kept insisting I play with him and his friends. I was reluctant at first because I’ve never had good experiences with multiplayer games, but I ended up having a great time. They were on Discord with mics, but I was text-only, and it was funny hearing them when I was the Impostor. When they all went to bed, I continued playing with some randoms for a few more hours, and also had a great time, some were sad when I decided to finally leave.
Funnily enough Hollow Knight. I saw the release of the Grimm Troupe DLC on GOG and was interested by the art style. I thought, hey a metroidvania, it’s been a while since I played one and 15 €, that’s nothing. The rest was one of the best gaming experiences I ever had, precisely because I didn’t expect anything.
That would be my one also. I thought it to be another platformer, but the story and progression had me hooked
Second this. I shout from the rooftops how much I love HK.
Silksong is proving a touch less perfectly balanced, and as a sequel a smidge of the novelty has worn off, but still, extremely good.
Mad Max
Could have been just movie tie-in garbage but is a solid top 20 game from last gen.
That game was so much more fun than reviewers made it out to be.
The whole “don’t look anything up before playing it” genre of cryptic puzzle-ish games where saying nearly anything about it is a spoiler. There’s not all that many of them, but somehow they’re all games where people go in with no expectations and either love it or bounce off of it really fast. The entire internet can scream at you to play Outer Wilds, but nobody wants to tell you why.
Out of the ones I played, I had the lowest expectations/highest payoff for Void Stranger; on the surface it looks just like a pretty average sokoban with gameboy-styled graphics and a surprisingly good soundtrack. And that’s pretty much what it is, except the sokoban isn’t really why you play it, even though you’re gonna be playing a lot of it.
Space Engineers. Little space ship building game, why not.
1500 hours later…
Die Hard (for the NES)
Warning: You MUST read the manual!
At first glance it might look like a simple top-down scrolling shooter like Commando or The Chaos Engine, but it’s so much more. It’s very free and open, with seven floors to explore, and once the in-game timer ends you must go to the 30th floor for the final showdown. The thing is that there are a few ways both to pick off the terrorists singly or in pairs, and to extend the time limit. If you just hide in some corner of the building and wait for the timer to run out, you’re going to get mown down by 30 armed terrorists in a fairly small space. But if you’re good you can use that time to wipe out almost all of the terrorists, leaving only the leader Hans himself to face you, which is much more manageable.
Die Hard wasn’t high on my list at all when I first played it in the 1990s, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s still one of my all-time favourites. But ever since AVGN did a video on it, it’s become popular to dump on it.
Most “complaints” that I see about this game either show that the person hasn’t actually played it for themselves at all, or are solved by reading the manual. Funnily enough, in that AVGN video he even says something like “Maybe this would make sense if I read the manual, but f*** that, who reads manuals?”
The only negative thing I have to say is that IMO the “foot power” meter, which affects movement speed, runs out a bit too quickly even when you walk everywhere instead of running. That being said, I’ve only noticed it on later replays, and I don’t recall it being a problem the first time I played it all those years ago.
who reads manuals?
In the 90s, everyone who wanted a shot at understanding what was going on. Games didn’t have a ton of text, so the manual was the way to learn the controls, get backstory, and even some hints for obtuse puzzles.
If you’re going to play an old game, you need to embrace the way people played back then, which was the manual and sometimes a paid guide book.
And social media wasn’t a thing, nor YouTube, nor forms for sharing it really known. Reading the manual on the way home, getting excited to play it was part of the experience.
Super Mario 64 was, by memory, one of the first to have tutorial-like directions and informational instructions in game with more in the first few levels. Even then reading the manual still helped. I was genuinely shocked when Skyrim just omitted a manual entirely compared to the thick booklet Oblivion came with.
Thomas Was Alone.
I suck at platformers, and don’t like playing them. But this game, and most especially its narration, made me fall in love with quadrilaterals.
I won’t say more, but if you haven’t tried it please give it a chance.
Ixion
Thought it was another generic fun little city builder.
And it is only it has some absolutely unique mechanics that are fun, a really good approach to unlocking through research, and a genuinely beautiful setting.
Seriously, the music, the story and the voice acting make it a genuinely rich experience.
I churned out on my first attempt to pay the game on release,but am really glad I gave it a second try after it got a few patches.
Fields of Mistria.
Saw it recc’d here on the indiegames community as a new version of Stardew Valley. I figured it would be fun as I’m a fan of cozy games, but I didn’t realize how fun it was going to be.
It’s still in early access and Ive got 100s of hours logged and I’m eagerly awaiting the next update. The characters and idle dialogue is fantastic, and it solves a lot of the things that frustrate me about SDV (as a SDV lover of course).
I was a teenage exocolonist
I thought it was a pretty cute narrative game but the amount of love, story, mechanics and possible outcomes blew my mind and no week goes by that I don’t wish I could play it again for the first time.
Strange Horticulture.
I expected some entertaining puzzles for an afternoon, but I really liked everything about it.
I played it with my partner but then we took a break and came back to it a while later. Forgot who we were helping and ended up with an ending we weren’t aiming for. Fun gameplay for a pair otherwise.
