I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:
- Superhot: Time only moves when you do
- Viewfinder: Convert 2D pictures seamlessly into interactive 3D environments
- Superliminal: Change size of objects by working with perception
- Portal: Portals
- Scribblenauts: Summon objects by describing them in a notepad
I am not focused on the story, no. of hours of playtime, date of release or its popularity. It just needs to be playable and be enjoyable (and be available in PC).
Hey, I might have a few for you!
-
Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don’t command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.
-
Ronin - a stealth/platformer. Combat is turn-based. No, combat is not mechanically separate from the stealth OR the platforming. Relatively short but very fascinating.
-
Pawnbarian - Roguelike, but movement and combat is done by chess rules.
-
Exanima. Combat is based entirely around physics/momentum and positioning. It’s hard to get the hang of, but is immensely satisfying once you get your “He’s starting to believe” Matrix moment and successfully block a few attacks in a row.
-
Crusader Kings 3. You know those map-painting Grand Strategy games, where the goal is to conquer other territories? One of those, but you’re running a noble dynasty whose fortunes rise and fall, even passing between the overlordship of different countries and kingdoms. A lot of personality. I guess it’s not as innovative as it once was, since it’s spawned imitators at this point. Hm.
-
Ring of Pain. It’s… hard to describe.
-
Phasmophobia. Multiplayer only. You hunt ghosts. Not like, ‘combat’ hunt ghosts, like ‘You need to find evidence of ghosts’ hunt ghosts. But the ghosts definitely hunt you back - in a much more malicious way.
-
Death Stranding. Walking simulator. No, not like ‘You don’t do anything but hold down the walk button’, like ‘You need to keep your balance while carrying things’ walking simulator. Immensely weird.
-
Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.
-
Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.
I strongly object to the characterization of Death Stranding as a walking simulator. Walking place to place is core to the experience for maybe one quarter of the game. Once you get to the largest area and continue unlocking new tools and features, you spend very little time walking. It also dismisses combat, which I felt was considerably more prevalent than I expected.
Cool picks though.
I feel like I spent a good portion of my time walking and finding ways across rough terrain even after all the fancy gear was unlocked. The motorcycle could get you maybe half the way, usually.
I mean, at least until the zip-lines. Those ruined the game. Honestly, the rebuildable roads were a bad inclusion as well. Sitting on top of a hill, looking down at the streams and terrain around you, figuring out the best route with your tools, was peak satisfaction in that game.
Yeah, that’s fair. The first time you go to any new site there is walking involved along with everything else, but I still think calling it a walking simulator is reductive, since it just one tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.
Maybe it’s better to call it a scifi delivery simulator (including factions of delivery addicts you have to fight because they keep trying to take your things).
-
-
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
-
Katamari: A giant ball gets rolled around and collects stuff forever
-
Baba Is You: Movable text is rules to the game
-
Untitled Goose Game: You have to piss people off the right way
-
Billie Bust Up[unreleased]: Musicals tell you game upcoming platforming challenges
-
Celeste: every time you die you quickly reset on the same “page”/small tile of map
-
Splatoon: you shoot at the ground to go faster, hide, and/or win
-
Odama: real-time tactical wargame pinball
-
Golf Story: Golf-based fetch quests
-
Astral Chain: asynchronously control a companion in combat
-
Okami: paint skills on-screen in combat
-
Astro Bears: Snake but in 3D
-
Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime: Up to 4 players pilot parts of a ship together
-
Pokemon Ranger: draw circles around monsters to catch them
-
Viva Pinata: breed pinatas to create new species
-
Spore: create and evolve a creature
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
Katamari Damacy is a great example, built around a very simple but satifying mechanic snd good controls.
Okami plays extremely well on Nintendo Switch with the ability to paint with your fingers on the touch screen
-
Fez: a 2D plateformer in which you can change the perspective to create ways to unreachable plateforms
Baba Is You: a puzzle game in which you move blocks with words written on them, combining them to create small phrases which become new rules of the game.
Super Paper Mario for the Wii also has a mechanic like that. You’re in a 2D paper world (obviously) but you have the ability to temporarily turn 90°; walking through enemies and opening the possibility to i.e. pass some walls.
BABA IS WIN
Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.
Great soundtrack too
Tunic and Outer Wilds
Both have a heavy focus on using knowledge as your core resource in the game, and obtaining new knowledge as a primary gameplay loop.
I had a moment in Tunic where I realized what the references in the manual to the [HOLY CROSS] were talking about, but I don’t think my revelation was the typical.
I’d actually figured out the [HOLY CROSS] really early on, solved a bunch of puzzles using it, got some manual pages I probably wasn’t supposed to have yet, but didn’t know that the thing I was using was the [HOLY CROSS] because I lacked the context of a certain page that spells it out and based on some comments and videos elsewhere is the point where a lot of people first figure out how to use it.
It probably didn’t hurt that I was fresh off The Witness and my brain was subconsciously looking for tricks of perspective and environmental puzzles, which Tunic is absolutely full of.
I feel like Tunic leans too much on the LttP format to be called unique but it is a delight
Ah yes, LttP… Obviously, I know what this means, but for others who don’t maybe you could elaborate?
I think it’s a Link to the Past.
Maybe Antichamber? It‘s a first-person puzzle game like Portal, but based on the idea of the „rooms“ changing as you go through them, so each room basically has its own mechanic to figure out
It’s Portal on acid, a great game. Also Manifold Garden by the same guy.
I remember ‘Braid’ being very good. A number of different time manipulation mechanics throughout the different levels of the game. Puzzle platformer.
There’s an anniversary edition planned so maybe stick it on a wish list for now.
About that anniversary edition, is there any information? Since the tralier release, it’s radio silent.
I don’t know, sorry. Just saw that detail on the wiki page but didn’t want to link a page of spoilers.
Faster than light - manage crew in a 2D strategy environment and jump around in space. Pretty unique gameplay which only recently got some clones.
Teardown - Work as criminal stealing stuff, but the clue is you can destroy everything and you need to create smart parkour to steal stuff right in time before the cops arrive. Also you can sandbox play it if you get bored.
Terra Nil - Bring back nature to a destroyed earth, with relaxing and calm mechanics. Highly recommend.
Others: FEZ, solve puzzles. Deep Rock Galactic, because dwarfs being this much dwarf is just dwarftastic. Rock and Stone!
Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.
Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.
Return of the Obra Dinn.
Was gone be one of my suggestions. This game is powerful good. It is a true mystery with you in the drivers seat in a way no other game can touch.
Getting Over It - the controls themselves are your enemy. A different take on the same concept: Octodad / Manual Samuel.
Cultist Simulator is pretty unique… not necessarily in a good way. It’s a storytelling/puzzle game with some great writing if you can power your way through the gameplay. The mechanics are deliberately very obtuse, with no tutorial, to emulate the fact that diving into the occult is confusing and dangerous. The end result is that the game is very unique and cool, but it’s absolutely not for everyone. TL;DR on the basic mechanics: you have a handful of verb boxes, such as Talk or Research, as well as various cards that you can slot into them. Each card has a variety of tags on it. Depending on which cards with which tags you put into the various verb boxes, you get different results.
Prison Architect is pretty cool and unique.
Portal reloaded adds time portals ontop of the normal portals.
Splitgate is an FPS that adds portals on top of Halo style combat. Very fun but may be hard to find a game these days its kinda dead.
Age of empires 3 is an RTS that adds shipments. These shipments increase the pace of the early game and allow for way more personalized play as well as allowing players to react to different things without shifting their entire build order.
GTFO is a horror fps where you and 3 other human players take on raids and these raids are changed each season. When the raids are retired they are gone. You must beat the lvl 1 raids to unlock lvl 2 and so on.
Radio Commander. Its an RTS where you sit in a tent in Vietnam and give and recieve orders via radio. You have a map that you can mark where things are based on the info you get.
I hadn’t heard of a few of these and they sound really enjoyable. Thanks for sharing!
Factorio - its a logistics rts but the pollution mechanic is different. Instead of just gather resources to build things which build bigger things, you also make pollution as a side effect. This feeds the native monsters and also evolves them. Managing your pollution cloud is a strategy. That or build massive defensives for when they come to eat you.
Qube and anti-chamber if you’re a fan of superluminal
