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?
Definitely didn’t get the appreciation it deserved on launch. I seem to remember it was launched right after that year’s Battlefield and right before that year’s CoD. Terrible decision.
It definitely stood the test of time though and is very highly regarded now.
Eternal Darkness is one of my favourite GameCube games. I feel like it might be long enough ago that they could do a remake with modern sanity effects.
And Halo Reach is my favourite Halo game, loved it.
Nightdive Studios (they, among other titles, remastered System Shock, which has received pretty good reviews) wanted to remaster Eternal Darkness, but Nintendo - who owns Eternal Darkness - doesn’t want that to happen.
Also, the original developers of Eternal Darkness want to create a spiritual sequel, but that seems to be… an eternal project. Check out Shadow of the Eternals, if you want to follow that project. There’s a gameplay video from like 2013 or 2014.
They have tried twice. And yes, they still want to make it happen. But last time I heard the team made a game they need to support for few years (some kind of online game), so it’s going to take some time before they can try again.
As the first of these is a platformer, the second is a topdown shooter, and the third one is a match 3, so commercial success was not that expected anyways, but I really think they excel at what they were set out to do.
I feel like Dustforce got decent buzz when it came out. I imagine it was helped by its phenomenal soundtrack. The game was too hard for me to really enjoy. But that soundtrack, I still listen to it occasionally.
The same artist did the soundtrack to Tunic, and while not as good to listen to outside the game, it adds so much to the ambiance of the game and elevates it.
They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.
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.
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.
Brute Force for the original Xbox. 4 player squad based gameplay, with different squads full of characters with unique abilities. It was a ‘platinum hit’ but I’m pretty sure anything that sold more than 500 copies was
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.
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.
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.
“A Robot Named Fight is a Metroidvania roguelike focused on exploration and item collection. Explore a different, procedurally-generated labyrinth each time you play and discover randomized power-ups to traverse obstacles, find secrets and explode meat beasts.”
It’s such a good game, almost everything is perfect IMO, I have over 200 hours in it and still go back to it every now and then.
The lone developer also made the source code public a while ago, so there are mods, forks, spinoffs etc. being worked on.
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.
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DOA2. It unfortunately turned into the fighting playboy bunnies with huge jugs series, but the second one was actually a really solid fighting game
I still have this on my steam deck via dreamcast emulator.
Fly’n, it’s a brilliant platformer from like ten years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UECUVRWpFM
Titanfall 2
Bought the game at Dollarama in Canada for $4 a few years ago. Still haven’t played it.
Definitely didn’t get the appreciation it deserved on launch. I seem to remember it was launched right after that year’s Battlefield and right before that year’s CoD. Terrible decision. It definitely stood the test of time though and is very highly regarded now.
Titanfall 2 definitely got a lot of appreciation.
It needed more.
Bomberman 64
Eternal Darkness
The Conduit
Halo Reach
Eternal Darkness is one of my favourite GameCube games. I feel like it might be long enough ago that they could do a remake with modern sanity effects.
And Halo Reach is my favourite Halo game, loved it.
Nightdive Studios (they, among other titles, remastered System Shock, which has received pretty good reviews) wanted to remaster Eternal Darkness, but Nintendo - who owns Eternal Darkness - doesn’t want that to happen.
Also, the original developers of Eternal Darkness want to create a spiritual sequel, but that seems to be… an eternal project. Check out Shadow of the Eternals, if you want to follow that project. There’s a gameplay video from like 2013 or 2014.
Haven’t they tried to get the spiritual successor off the ground on a bunch of different occasions? Are they still trying?
They have tried twice. And yes, they still want to make it happen. But last time I heard the team made a game they need to support for few years (some kind of online game), so it’s going to take some time before they can try again.
I really wish we could get a port of Eternal Darkness. I know it’ll never happen, but one can dream.
As the first of these is a platformer, the second is a topdown shooter, and the third one is a match 3, so commercial success was not that expected anyways, but I really think they excel at what they were set out to do.
I feel like Dustforce got decent buzz when it came out. I imagine it was helped by its phenomenal soundtrack. The game was too hard for me to really enjoy. But that soundtrack, I still listen to it occasionally.
The same artist did the soundtrack to Tunic, and while not as good to listen to outside the game, it adds so much to the ambiance of the game and elevates it.
My big one, because I am playing the successor right now would be the Commandos-reinvention line of games by Mimimi Software:
They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.
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
I have good news for you:
https://www.polygon.com/24074441/gigantic-game-relaunch-rampage-edition-steam-release-date
Woohoo!!! Well I’ll be looking forward to this, thank you!
The Dream Machine.
The Talos Principle It’s not just a puzzle game.
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.
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
Needed more crates.
It’s also 90 percent off on steam right now. Just grabbed it for $4.40 Canadian after tax.
Brute Force for the original Xbox. 4 player squad based gameplay, with different squads full of characters with unique abilities. It was a ‘platinum hit’ but I’m pretty sure anything that sold more than 500 copies was
I wanted that game so hard but never played it. It looked so cool to me as a teenager.
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.
Love Bedlam! Picked it up on some dirt cheap sale a while ago and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was.
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.
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.
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 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
A Robot Named Fight! https://www.arobotnamedfight.com/
“A Robot Named Fight is a Metroidvania roguelike focused on exploration and item collection. Explore a different, procedurally-generated labyrinth each time you play and discover randomized power-ups to traverse obstacles, find secrets and explode meat beasts.”
It’s such a good game, almost everything is perfect IMO, I have over 200 hours in it and still go back to it every now and then. The lone developer also made the source code public a while ago, so there are mods, forks, spinoffs etc. being worked on.
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