I can think of a handful of games that, despite being games that I’ve enjoyed, never really became part of a “genre”. Do you have any like this, and if so, which?
Are they games that you’d like to see another entrant to the genre to? Would you recommend the original game as one to keep playing?
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Space Station 14!
There’s no other game like it. It’s so absurdly in depth! You can play super hardcore with loads of knowledge and be next to a total casual in the same shift both enjoying your time together!
It’s in early access on Steam right now. Ask and you shall receive!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/420840/BLARP/
BLARP! I suppose it’s a physics game but I’m not aware of anything else quite like it. It’s incredibly simple, addictive, and could only really exist as a VR game.
Shout out to Superhot and Noita, already mentioned in this thread.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a great and very unique game in my opinion. A fun investigation game that makes me feel smart for solving it. I wish I could replay it, but once you’ve solved how everyone has died aboard the Obra Dinn, there’s not much reason to replay.
Basically Mario 64 mixed with a metroidvania with awesome vibes. Never played anything else like it.
Hardspace shipbreaker. You are a wage slave in orbit, disassembling and salvaging ships and binning the components. It’s very dystopian. Essentially it’s a puzzle game, to maximize profit and completion rate, but with physics and lasers.
Diary of a Spaceport Janitor is a slice of life/poverty simulator in which you scrape by earning pennies, dreaming of escape and adventure. Full of charm!
Miasmata is a horror/cartography game where you have to triangulate PoIs in order to fill out your map as you search for a cure to your disease on an uninhibited tropical island.
Yoku’s Island Express is a metroidvania/pinball game in which you traverse the world vis flippers, chutes, and as a bug rolling a ball.
Terra Nil. It’s an anti city builder. Land in a polluted wasteland, clean the soil, plant seeds, set up ecosystems, make sure they can persist without you, and recycle all your structures before you leave. Appreciate the beauty of the natural ecosystem you restored as you fly away.
I want more games like this.
Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It’s a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you’re managing a very bad situation. In one, you’re holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you’re wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there’s a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.
Team Buddies for the ps1. Small team rts game, lots of unique units and the bright style is a great contrast to the fighting
“Giants: Citizen Kabuto”
It was a hillarious mix of everything. Super funny characters/story, great telling, fps, rts, asymetrical… All being super casual. Still on gog and still a joy.
“battlezone”
Best blend of rpg/rts/Story. So far i never saw one coming close that gameplay.
I agree with many that have already been said, but I’ll add braid, dust force, and prison architect
I recently got hooked on Twinkle Star Sprites, a Neo Geo versus shmup. Chaining enemies on your screen sends attacks to the opponent’s screen. Those attacks can be bounced back, and reversing a reversal can create special attacks or even a boss summon. There’s a lot going on and it’s tragic that no spiritual successor ever tried to recreate this formula.
It did get a JP-only PS2 sequel, but it looks to just be largely the same game, just with a different cast of characters and the lovely spritework replaced with a much worse low poly 3D.
Pyre. Guess where my username comes from.
It’s a supergiant game so the usual is there: Great characters, interesting story, great dialog, fantastic art… very touching and inspirational all around. To this day it is the only game that has actually made me feel conflicted about playing well.
At a certain point in the story I just couldn’t, and it felt like my hands were sabotaging my game independently. Weird ass feeling. And purely for character reasons, nothing really to gain from it mechanically.
What I love about it was that this wasn’t really presented as a typical videogame dilemma. Nothing in the gameplay was different. It was just another “game” that I was expected to win, but one of my characters was desperately hoping to lose.
Well I lost that time and felt good about it. No game has made me make a decision that completely ignored the gameplay implications.
“Do you want to save this little girl or literally torture her and suck her life force? The evil option will give you immediate rewards but the good option will give you better rewards a little later and also the good ending!” Wow Bioshock, really tough choice there, thanks for putting my noodle to work.
I love Pyre, its the only game I’ve ever 100%'d. A lot of people consider it supergiant’s worst game, but it’s my #1 favorite game. If only the multiplayer had online play, I’d consider it perfect.
The game is worth playing if only to hear the custom song at the end.
Maybe SimEarth.
This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.
1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.
I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.
I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.
EDIT: Liquid War. This is open-source and part of the GNU project. One has a map with some areas closed off and some open space that liquid can flow through. There are two or more “blobs” of liquid of different color; each is attempting to destroy the other. Your blob is attracted to your mouse cursor. “Moving into” a pixel of the other color eventually converts it to your own. If two liquids meet in a bottleneck, they tend to stalemate. One wins by getting liquid on multiple sides of the opponent’s liquid, so that one can move one’s own liquid from multiple directions into it. Maybe a bit closer to a tech demo than a full-on game. I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but it is free and as far as I know unique, and I had fun with it.
I almost forgot about SimEarth. For some reason I was allowed to play it in grade school computer lab. I wish they would remake it so I can recreate my sentient cephalopod uprising, except with graphics that aren’t complete ass.
I never played SimLife. But no, Spore is really not like SimEarth at all. As the other person said, Spore is disappointingly shallow on all levels.
I never went very far into SimEarth (I remember getting a bunch of maxis’s simstuff in the 90s, and not having the patience to really get into some of them back then).
However, I did play Spore during its prime. It’s very shallow, on all levels. Don’t expect any kind of simulation in there, especially not physics or even basic biology and evolution really.
Its whole gameplay loop : design a beast, eat or make friends, be a tribe, fight or make friends, design a town and vehicles, fight or make friends, design a spaceship, fight or make friends and try to reach the center of the galaxy because I don’t know.
You can manipulate planet atmospheres in the space phase, but there are no variations : you can basically make planets “suitable” for life, and all life in the game needs the exact same parameters. There is zero room for experimentation and everything is basically just as efficient as everything else.
Pacific Drive is weird but really fun. It’s like DiRT meets CONTROL.
I don’t think it needs another. It stands alone as a testament to an interesting game design that shouldn’t be watered down.
I have yet to find another game that plays like Inscryption. It’s a deck builder, but wow, it has a story. Interestingly good game that I want more of.
While Elite Dangerous is part of a genre, it is a rare game that is actually meant for lots of controller/J HOTAS methods and has shockingly deep gameplay. You can tell it was really meant for adept players, a rare style of games these days. I doubt we will see one like it for awhile, just due to the needs of consumers, the game engine, and the capital required to build a game of that size again.
I personally though ED was quite shallow. Deeper than e.g. No Man’s Sky but still very “fake”. The economy is just a bunch of RNG, nothing real. I recently got into X4: Foundations which is much better IMHO. It really simulates the entire economy and production chains. You can carry out supply chain attacks on your enemies. It’s like a cross between ED and Stellaris.
