What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved?
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?
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.
If you can handle dying a lot while learning the ins and outs of the world, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Anomaly is a wonderful package completely for free. Especially if you add the G.A.M.M.A. modpack to it, makes the game play significantly deeper, much harder (in some bullshit and also fair ways), but also just crazy immersive; makes you feel like the actions you take do matter, but if you were to die, you’d just be another loot bag for some other Stalker to come across
Marvel’s Midnight Suns. It wasn’t a huge flop, but not successful enough to get a sequel, which makes me very sad. I think it failed because it had a useless ingame shop, which made the game look like another cashgrab, when in reality those who bought the Legendary Edition have every skin included. Legendary edition has often been on sale for 50€ and that’s definitely worth it. I enjoyed the game a lot and both the base game and DLC offer great characters that are both fun to talk and to play with.
Mad Max is honestly probably one of my most replayed and enjoyable games that I own. If it wasn't for Sims 3, it would have the most hours in my Steam library. For me there's something just so cathartic about driving around the wasteland looting scrap and beating up warboys lol. And then getting some mods/trainers involved and exploring the dev areas out in the Big Nothing is great too. I've gotten some really great screenshots out of that game.
I picked it up on sale after watching Fury Road, which in turn I put off watching for years because I really like the first trilogy and did not want to have that memory tainted by some cash grab Hollywood sequel. Boy was I wrong about the film, and I was equally blown away by the game, to a point I felt really guilty getting it for 10 bucks or so. I really, really wish there was a multiplayer, though.
My biggest disappointment in it is that my favorite zone of the map only has one mission, but that mission is great. Apart of that its cool riding cars in the desert.
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.
Environmental Station Alpha is a good metroidvania IMO, and it has just over 1000 reviews on Steam. It has good platforming, combat, sound design, and chunky pixels. Not the most expansive or complex metroidvania, but it’s surprisingly polished and costs less than $10.
I’ve been interested in Soulslike games and got Code Vein on sale recently. I think I’m about halfway through and it’s pretty good. Playing at the 2nd hardest difficulty, dying here and there but also one or two shotting most bosses, which suggests it’s found a good sweet spot for difficulty where it’s not overly punishing but also not trivial, though I kinda wish I had started it on the hardest difficulty. I’m not sure how popular the game was but I suggest it.
The ultimate anime waifu creator. I’d also recommend giving it a try for any souls fans out there. Also don’t be ashamed if you look up a guide on the cathedral.
Haha walking into the cathedral was a cool gaming moment. I get there and am looking around, wondering who could have even built this, and then Louis asks “How is this even possible?”
They did a pretty good job with the follower conversations. Yeah, the random ones can get repetitive, but it added a bit more depth when Louis voiced what I was thinking. In another (annoying) area, as you get to the end, he says he hopes we’re done here soon.
I like the part about how it reminds me of Minecraft, but in space and with tools/weapons that never break and the ability to add more inventory slots. (There are less material options for building player housing though, but at least this limitation has led to some very creative community bases.) That, and I always find it rewarding to discover as many of a planet’s plant and animal species as possible to earn those chip things you can learn crafting recipes with, and many of the planets’ terrain looks pretty awesome since while it is all procedural copypasta, there are countless possible combinations of available ores, rock models/colors/usefulness, terrain color, animal appearances/traits, plant products, hazards, etc. You can use all of this to determine which planets near your spawnpoint are useful and which ones are useless, out of millions of possible planets. I also like how after coming back to that game after more than a year, I found that unearthing the buried tech things gives you 4 of that data thing you need to complete all the tech-trees in the early game instead of just 1. And unlike many games, they update all platforms at the same time, which is great since I find the console controls on the Switch edition easier to remember than the PC controls.
But I do wish the planets had more than just one climate and biome so they’d be more realistic and those 2 undiscovered rare polar animals keeping you from earning lots of nanites would be less painful to track down. My current home planet is a swamp world that has Florida-like temperatures even at the poles and on mountains.
If you want a true “Minecraft in space” experience, I recommend Space Engineers. Not as broad as NMS, but much deeper (especially with mods like WeaponCore, MES, and Aerodynamics).
Uplink - A hacking sim game that’s actually quite addictive in a playthrough. Will make you feel like you’re in the movie Hackers.
Spycraft: The Great Game - An adventure game that had as consultants CIA director William Colby and KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin.
I don’t know a lot of people that have played these, but they definitely rank up there for me as some of the more interesting and unique games I’ve played over the decades.
Played Uplink as a kid, later learned about fragmentation for computer memory. Was cool to find out the inventory system wasn’t just a cool game mechanic but was based off how actual memory works.
They were supposed to have a whole series IIRC, but the contract got cancelled because the initial offering didn’t sell very well. It didn’t help that the marketing didn’t really know how they wanted to talk about the 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.
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