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?
For me right now, Shadows of Doubt. It is an early access game and it’s got a fair bit of jank, but it’s crazy how unique it is. It had a week or so of popularity and then it fell off. The devs just released an update for it too!
If you like the immersive sim genre, might I also recommend Cruelty Squad and Gloomwood. Those two have very unique aesthetics and really cool mechanics.
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.
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!
Praey for the Gods - Obviously inspired by the classic, Shadow of the Colossus
The Upturned - A horror-comedy game with a great sense of humor
Your Spider - A great indie horror game with puzzles like Silent Hill. Plus it has an adorable spider. This is one of my favorite indie horror games.
Exanima - Looks at first like a normal dungeon crawler, but its physics-based combat controls and enemy AI make this a very unique and interesting game, even if it’s been in early access for ages.
Withering Rooms - Great, creepy atmosphere and an interesting story.
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.
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
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
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.
I'm not sure how successful it was, but there's a fun horror (mostly) walking sim called Apsulov: End of Gods. It's based on Norse mythology and has a refreshing take on Loki, especially if you're tired of everything Marvel has put out. The visuals are great too.
There's another one called Close to the Sun that's essentially, "what would happen if Nikola Tesla built a giant fucking cruise ship for the world's smartest minds at the time and then everything goes wrong?". The story is really interesting, and I've been hoping for a sequel.
I don't think Murdered: Soul Suspect did very well from what I remember when it came out, but I had a ton of fun playing that game. They could have done way more as far as mechanics go, and some aspects are pretty cheesy, but I'm a sucker for detective games and trying to piece together information.
Speaking of which, The Painscreek Killings is so good. You play as a reporter who's tasked with invesigating a cold case in a tiny abandoned town. I really liked this one because there is absolutely no hand holding when it comes to playing detective. You absolutely have to figure everything out yourself. Back when I used to stream, I had a regular viewer tell me it was their favorite game that I played, because listening to me trying to figure out the story and my next step was like listening to one of those old crime radio shows. It's one of the few games I wish I could play again for the first time, since I know the outcome now and how everything fits together. The developer is supposed to be making another similar game, so I'm eager to see how that goes.
The year this was being shown at E3, I got my best friend in as my ‘photographer’ for the show under a press pass, and set up a bunch of private gameplay demos of games (by this point nothing interesting was shown on the show floor anymore).
When we went to our appointment at the Square Enix booth, they immediately ushered us into a room with nothing but two Japanese guys, and were like “ok, go ahead and ask your questions.”
Apparently they thought we’d sat through an earlier gameplay demo which they never set up, and we were suddenly sitting with the game director and their translator for a half hour interview about a title I hadn’t even seen or knew anything about - and an interview conducted through a translator on top of that (and I’d intentionally been trying to avoid ending up in interviews in the first place).
It was one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had in life, and very much reminded me of the times I’d be in a book discussion in high school for a reading assignment I hadn’t done, frantically grabbing on to any thread that seemed legit and running with it.
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.
Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.
That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:
Distance: Mostly a “beat the clock” style racing game in the vein of trackmania, although the synchronous MP with collision is a great time at a party. But it also has a weirdly good singleplayer campaign with both a narrative and some solid mechanics and set pieces. Also a ridiculous steam workshop presence
Tales of Maj’Eyal probably doesn’t belong here as I think it has been ridiculously successful for a game made by a small team and consistently comes up in discussions by anyone who is aware of what “the berlin interpretation” is. But it feels like it is almost completely ignored in the overall cultural zeitgeist when roguelikes/lites comes up. Which is a shame since TOME is very much a roguelike (technically lite, but… meh) with some solid design concepts. The vast majority of runs feel like they were “worth it” and even the early leveling has enough variety and wrenches that it feels less like you lost an hour of your life when you wipe and more like you get to do the Sand Worm again. Some of the unlocks are complete bullshit (although, I want to say the special magic trees were just made “free” because everyone hated it?), but it is generally the kind of game where you can work toward something with every run.
UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock (fuck Afterlight). Back in the dark ages between Silent Storm (WOOO) and the 2012 nu-XCOM, there were a lot of eurojank games in the genre. And while I don’t think UFO Aftermath was “good”, I do think it was competent. But mostly? It is probably the best Stargate SG1 game ever made. Because the devs were trying to cash in on that Jagged Alliance craze and made the human weapons stage a lot longer. So you might find yourself in an endgame with a few G36s backing up your plasma rifles as you fend off the obligatory base invasion. Aftershock, and especially Afterlight, lost a lot of this charm (because they are years later timeline wise) but were still fun
Silent Storm. Sorry, Silent Mother Fucking Storm, if we want to be specific. Alternate history WW2 where you play as a special organization for the Allies or Axis that are investigating a third party who have the potential to turn the war itself and blah blah blah. Mostly it is probably one of the best balanced JA2 style AP-based strategy games out there (just… get a save editor because the leveling/training is broken) with an emphasis on line of sight, trajectories, and full destruction of terrain. The kind of game where you might spend six “turns” getting your scout into position so that you can have your sniper plug a person from behind a wall, your machine gunner unload on people sleeping in a barracks, and your grenadier to… make the guard tower not exist anymore. All without ever directly targeting an enemy because you are fully operating based on magic radio commands or whatever. Again, this probably doesn’t belong here since anyone who liked JA2 back in the day was talking about this but it more or less fell off the face of the earth in favor of nu-XCOM. And I feel like the genre would be pretty revolutionized if people remembered this existed.
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.
NOVA DRIFT is easily the best SHMUP if have played in my life and it´s on a 60% discount right now. From the tight controls to the artstyle and the gameplay, everything about this game is perfect and the dev is listening to the community.
Add comment