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?
“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.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel. A pretty interesting JRPG+resource management game about animal kids in a giant tank from a lost civilization, fighting in a war to save their families.
CyberConnect2 has been making games for this setting since the PS1, though the previous games were more of 3D puzzle actiion games. But these games never sell as much as they deserve, Their commitment is amazing to keep trying anyway.
If you like Soulslikes The Surge is a really good sci-fi take on the genre. It succeeds in the vagueness, the atmosphere, and the combat. It has a bit of a gimmick with how you obtain parts by targeting and dismembering limbs which is really fun. However the story kinda goes off the rails near the end and the last few areas of the game are arguably the worst designed levels of the game. Plus the boss fights can be a PITA despite being super cool design wise.
I don’t see it brought up as often as things like Nier or Mortal Shell though, and IMO it’s better than both of those.
Hardspace Shipbreaker. You’re a wage slave (literally) in a space dock, taking apart ships and throwing the bits into the right bins. Doesn’t sound super fun, but it is. 1) You’re chopping up ships but you get to use LASERS!!! and the energy grappling hook. So satisfying. 2) The physics is 90% spot on. You’re in 3d, but it’s not purely inertial. There’s a dampening field that slows things down, so it doesn’t get too outta hand. There are a couple of other quirks, but they’re not hugely impacting. 3) The soundtrack is perfect. It’s a very bluesy, banjo style for a very bluecollar type job. 4) The voice acting is amazing. Every line from Weaver is just perfect. You hate Hal with a passion (you’re supposed to). The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
I’ve played it thru twice. The first time as-is, but the 2nd time I shut off the “15 minute shifts” option. I think that breaks things up too much. I think open-shift is better. I bought the vinyl soundtrack. I’m not a huge fan of vinyl, but this is the right style of music that would benefit from it.
Underappreciated for sure, but to be fair, it’s super repetitive. If they’d added a secondary component or loop where you could black market trade or participate in the economy of the game some how to drown out the monotony of breaking the same ships over and over, I’d have played it more.
I remeber playing Jedi fallen order and seeing ships being broken down like that during the opening mission. I thought that I would rather be doing that and then hardspace showed up on steam a few days later. It’s been on my wish list for way too long, definitely going to pick it up for my next game
I’ve just recently said that on Lemmy - I said to a friend I wanted a game where you broke down and scrapped star wars ships, and they pointed me towards this game. It was recently on sale so I picked it up. It’s been an absolute blast and exactly what I was looking for (though I still wish I could do it with SW ships). I also agree about the shift timer, so thankfully there’s an option for that.
The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Which annoyingly, is the reason I bounced off the game. Breaking down ships is fun. That’s literally the whole reason I want to play the game. The story wants me to hate playing the game and won’t let me play until I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
Capitalism is pretty bad, so it didn’t bother me. It was refreshing to hear it in a narrative. Game devs don’t usually get to say stuff like that, so it was nice.
Yeah, but you don’t need to tell me that in an unskippable cutscene (the fact that it’s unskippable is the part I have an issue with) and ironically, the gameplay is so compelling that I absolutely do not mind just wasting my life away toiling under these ridiculous work conditions.
Edit: Let’s be real here, the game didn’t need a story. Just set me up with a ridiculous amount of debt and let me just break down ship after ship. They could have just added more ships and systems than make a story that people actively would work against.
Major studios pander to current sentiment but don’t seek to resolve the issues. For example the cyberpunk genre is an indictment of many things including the reckless pursuit of technology and corporate super powers. Yet Cyberpunk 2077 with partner with Amazon Prime gaming and let the man leading Neurolink voice a character in their game.
That’s not to disparage 2077 just an acknowledgement of the reality of triple A game development. They’re making products most of the time rather than art. Their worms can still be enjoyable but rarely get to make scathing statements.
Major studios pander to current sentiment but don’t seek to resolve the issues.
Lol, seek to resolve issues? They’re not the government. They’re art. Art critiques things and suggests people to change things. It came write laws.
Yet Cyberpunk 2077 with partner with Amazon Prime gaming and let the man leading Neurolink voice a character in their game.
The devs and writers don’t make the business decisions. Wish they did, they’d have a better product, imo. The marketing is done by someone else who the devs, usually, have no control over.
It still is a little lib-ish. The game goes to great lengths at showing Silverhand (and anyone blaming capitalism) as being a bit too harsh or off their rocker, with V explicitly mocking his leftist opinions in dialogue many times (replaying the game, once during an elevator ride, another after dealing with the chapel in pacifica). The game is very on the nose about blaming corporations but spares the rod when talking about the system.
From my perspective producing art can be pivotal in impacting change, good or bad by swaying public sentiment. I’m not claiming that they can pull out the old quill and ink and pen up some statues, but that voicing distaste is the first step in enacting change.
Voicing thought alone doesn’t impact change, but neither does enacting laws, you also require enforcement. But laws enforced without public support don’t last forever.
On the last paragraph I think we had a disconnect, I had assumed you said devs in reference to an entire studio. But it seems you were strictly speaking about the individual of that occupation in a larger studio.
Thanks for pointing out the rogue typo, I use swipe texting on my phone so I occasionally get stuff wrong and I tend not to proof read as much as I aught to. Either way it’s fixed now.
Figment. I’m not sure how much attention this one got, but I hadn’t heard about it until I was searching the Nintendo store for deals. It’s a short puzzle/action game with a good story that felt compelling.
I love the outer worlds, it has such a unique style to it, very much fallout humor in space with a little bit of arcanum thrown in for good measure. IMHO outer worlds > Starfield, when I saw that neon was just one long hallway with a few neon lights and signs, I knew what I was getting into and just stopped playing. Starfield has no identity, it’s bland, space combat is annoying at best, and it’s just an unoptimized mess. Outer worlds is unique, and when I see it I know exactly what it is, I can’t say the same for Starfield.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
Everybody loved the first game, but nobody played the second game, including me for a good few years. But once I decided to try it I realized how much I had been missing out. It’s really good. Making it open world really works. There is fast travel but I never once used it because just running around is so fun. If you liked the first game, please try Catalyst!
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.
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The Way is a fantastic adventure with a surprisingly rich story. Totally flew under the radar and exceeded every expectation I had for it.
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
House of the Dying Sun was one of my first oculus rift games and so so good
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.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel. A pretty interesting JRPG+resource management game about animal kids in a giant tank from a lost civilization, fighting in a war to save their families.
CyberConnect2 has been making games for this setting since the PS1, though the previous games were more of 3D puzzle actiion games. But these games never sell as much as they deserve, Their commitment is amazing to keep trying anyway.
If you like Soulslikes The Surge is a really good sci-fi take on the genre. It succeeds in the vagueness, the atmosphere, and the combat. It has a bit of a gimmick with how you obtain parts by targeting and dismembering limbs which is really fun. However the story kinda goes off the rails near the end and the last few areas of the game are arguably the worst designed levels of the game. Plus the boss fights can be a PITA despite being super cool design wise.
I don’t see it brought up as often as things like Nier or Mortal Shell though, and IMO it’s better than both of those.
Hardspace Shipbreaker. You’re a wage slave (literally) in a space dock, taking apart ships and throwing the bits into the right bins. Doesn’t sound super fun, but it is. 1) You’re chopping up ships but you get to use LASERS!!! and the energy grappling hook. So satisfying. 2) The physics is 90% spot on. You’re in 3d, but it’s not purely inertial. There’s a dampening field that slows things down, so it doesn’t get too outta hand. There are a couple of other quirks, but they’re not hugely impacting. 3) The soundtrack is perfect. It’s a very bluesy, banjo style for a very bluecollar type job. 4) The voice acting is amazing. Every line from Weaver is just perfect. You hate Hal with a passion (you’re supposed to). The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it’s really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it’s very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don’t play it.)
Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games It’s also on PC and game pass.
I’ve played it thru twice. The first time as-is, but the 2nd time I shut off the “15 minute shifts” option. I think that breaks things up too much. I think open-shift is better. I bought the vinyl soundtrack. I’m not a huge fan of vinyl, but this is the right style of music that would benefit from it.
Hardspace Shipbreaker - OST Full
Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Americana Beats to Chill to
Underappreciated for sure, but to be fair, it’s super repetitive. If they’d added a secondary component or loop where you could black market trade or participate in the economy of the game some how to drown out the monotony of breaking the same ships over and over, I’d have played it more.
I remeber playing Jedi fallen order and seeing ships being broken down like that during the opening mission. I thought that I would rather be doing that and then hardspace showed up on steam a few days later. It’s been on my wish list for way too long, definitely going to pick it up for my next game
I’ve just recently said that on Lemmy - I said to a friend I wanted a game where you broke down and scrapped star wars ships, and they pointed me towards this game. It was recently on sale so I picked it up. It’s been an absolute blast and exactly what I was looking for (though I still wish I could do it with SW ships). I also agree about the shift timer, so thankfully there’s an option for that.
Which annoyingly, is the reason I bounced off the game. Breaking down ships is fun. That’s literally the whole reason I want to play the game. The story wants me to hate playing the game and won’t let me play until I listen to the entirety of why capitalism is bad.
Capitalism is pretty bad, so it didn’t bother me. It was refreshing to hear it in a narrative. Game devs don’t usually get to say stuff like that, so it was nice.
Yeah, but you don’t need to tell me that in an unskippable cutscene (the fact that it’s unskippable is the part I have an issue with) and ironically, the gameplay is so compelling that I absolutely do not mind just wasting my life away toiling under these ridiculous work conditions.
Edit: Let’s be real here, the game didn’t need a story. Just set me up with a ridiculous amount of debt and let me just break down ship after ship. They could have just added more ships and systems than make a story that people actively would work against.
The main point of criticism Yahtzee had amounted to “just play the audio log over gameplay. Let me listen to it while I break hard space ships”
You know, it seems that several of the games I play has some element of “corporations bad” to it. Subnautica’s Alterra, Satisfactory’s Ficsit…
Major studios pander to current sentiment but don’t seek to resolve the issues. For example the cyberpunk genre is an indictment of many things including the reckless pursuit of technology and corporate super powers. Yet Cyberpunk 2077 with partner with Amazon Prime gaming and let the man leading Neurolink voice a character in their game.
That’s not to disparage 2077 just an acknowledgement of the reality of triple A game development. They’re making products most of the time rather than art. Their worms can still be enjoyable but rarely get to make scathing statements.
Lol, seek to resolve issues? They’re not the government. They’re art. Art critiques things and suggests people to change things. It came write laws.
The devs and writers don’t make the business decisions. Wish they did, they’d have a better product, imo. The marketing is done by someone else who the devs, usually, have no control over.
It still is a little lib-ish. The game goes to great lengths at showing Silverhand (and anyone blaming capitalism) as being a bit too harsh or off their rocker, with V explicitly mocking his leftist opinions in dialogue many times (replaying the game, once during an elevator ride, another after dealing with the chapel in pacifica). The game is very on the nose about blaming corporations but spares the rod when talking about the system.
From my perspective producing art can be pivotal in impacting change, good or bad by swaying public sentiment. I’m not claiming that they can pull out the old quill and ink and pen up some statues, but that voicing distaste is the first step in enacting change.
Voicing thought alone doesn’t impact change, but neither does enacting laws, you also require enforcement. But laws enforced without public support don’t last forever.
On the last paragraph I think we had a disconnect, I had assumed you said devs in reference to an entire studio. But it seems you were strictly speaking about the individual of that occupation in a larger studio.
Yep, there’s a reason for that!
removed by mod
Thanks for pointing out the rogue typo, I use swipe texting on my phone so I occasionally get stuff wrong and I tend not to proof read as much as I aught to. Either way it’s fixed now.
Figment. I’m not sure how much attention this one got, but I hadn’t heard about it until I was searching the Nintendo store for deals. It’s a short puzzle/action game with a good story that felt compelling.
Vintage story
Everyone talking about Starfield reminded me to go back and play Outer Worlds again. I had forgotten how good that game was.
Man i thought that game was so boring lol
Agreed. It seems to be very polarized.
I love the outer worlds, it has such a unique style to it, very much fallout humor in space with a little bit of arcanum thrown in for good measure. IMHO outer worlds > Starfield, when I saw that neon was just one long hallway with a few neon lights and signs, I knew what I was getting into and just stopped playing. Starfield has no identity, it’s bland, space combat is annoying at best, and it’s just an unoptimized mess. Outer worlds is unique, and when I see it I know exactly what it is, I can’t say the same for Starfield.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. Everybody loved the first game, but nobody played the second game, including me for a good few years. But once I decided to try it I realized how much I had been missing out. It’s really good. Making it open world really works. There is fast travel but I never once used it because just running around is so fun. If you liked the first game, please try Catalyst!
Titanfall 2
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.
Bought the game at Dollarama in Canada for $4 a few years ago. Still haven’t played it.
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.