cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/57413346
I played Nine Sols recently and it had a transformative effect on my gaming experience. I’ve found myself no longer getting mad at fairly structured games and deeply enjoying the personal refinement of my skill set in pursuit of a goal. Suddenly this shift in perspective has allowed me to see difficulty in a new light and truly savor the victory that comes after significant effort. With this new perspective, I decided to try the game that had made me hesitate the most with its reputation for difficulty: Sekiro
Its been truly eye opening to realize that my nervousness has only kept me from a good time. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for it…
Following that trend, I started Celeste for the first time even though I never play pure platformers, and it has blown my socks off. Do I suck? You bet your ass I do. But I know it’s from a lack of detailed platforming, and developing that skill has been very fun and satisfying.
Now, I’d love to hear from others. What games made you regret waiting so long to try them?
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Nine Sols was amazing!
I played it after I finished Silksong when I just didn’t get over the difficult but fair 2D itch yet.
I’m glad I played it, the story, the gameplay, level design, and the music were all great.
And I really loved the Tao + Cyberpunk + Cat people lore and setting, it was really creative.
Songs of Conquest. Had a weird relationship with it at first, almost like I wanted to dislike it, not sure why. I would think “this is so plainly gamified, the map is cartoonish in its resource implementation, the building feels constrictive…”
That said I’ve kept coming back to it. Something about the high fidelity pixel art, the clarity of its gameplay, the choices it forces, all of it started to really hook me. Even the combat, which first came off to me as insanely swingy, now just feels much more intensely tactical. Sure there are ways to abuse it, but all in all, even the AI is pretty decent (though the autoresolve logic is complete trash).
With the community mods and honestly solid gameplay even with the base factions, I have to say I really recommend it at least for a try to everyone.
A couple years ago, i found a video about a rhythm game with a cool story named vivid/stasis. Since i was curious about the story and it was free, i added it to my steam library
It took me a while to actually start playing game and its amazing
Outer Wilds. Took a lot of time to start and then a lot a time to actually click. Now it is one of my all time favorites.
Persona 5.
Wasn’t the biggest fan of RPGs but 5 is as easy as Chrono Trigger, with a cozy life sim and anime stapled ontop. A fun ride if you enjoy any of these. Though drop the difficulty to easy if you aren’t the biggest fan of RPGs
It semi-counts, but I’d also add Space Station 14 to the mix. Semi, because 14 is prety recent, but it is a modernized mostly 1:1 rewrite of Space Station 13, which is the game that I’d consider myself sleeping on.
It’s my current obsession, that game is just so much fun. A disaster simulator where you throw 100 people into a ~2 hour long shift on a space station, and ask them to keep it afloat. From people doing engineeirng, atmospherics, science, medical, security, cargo and command, janitor, barkeep, etc. It’s a great roleplaying experience.
The core design is that most of what you can do can fail spectaculary. Engineering powers the station with a contained black hole or a ball of tesla, better hope they keep the containment maintaned. Science is doing research on artifacts by doing randomly chosen stuff (touch, spill something on it, look at it, etc), which has a random associated effect from “create a monkey”, “get radiactive”, to “a thermonuclear explosion”. Better hope they did scan the artifact before they touched it.
And to add to that, you also have a lot of different antagonist roles you can randomly get, from a blood cult that kidnaps and converts people to spill enough blood to summon their diety, through thiefs, terrorists that want to arm the nuke and destroy the station, to changelings or sleeper agents that are tasked with killing specific crew.
It’s loads of fun, and the community is amazing, especially on medium RP server.
Insurgency Sandstorm. Loved the previous game but my PC at the time couldn’t run it. I’ve had a better PC for years now but I only just picked it up and all my local servers are empty (Australia problems).
I only recently played Portal 2 & 1 (in that order lol). Really enjoyed them, I totally see why they’re considered a classic!
Oh man, Portal’s release (as well as the rest of the Orange Box) was incredible to experience
It’s a special game that I’d recommend to just about everyone
Believe it or not, GTA V. I don’t own a copy but my friend does, and I like it ok.
GTA San Andreas. I still have a dent in my forehead from that case.
I’ve recently started and got through Death Stranding in the past month, and it was an amazing experience. I have not played a AAA game for a looong time, and having an actual motion-captured movie and animations to go along with your game, instead of indie animations and cutscenes, is pretty sick. Plus the game is gorgeous.
I also had no idea how cool the lore and setting is, from what I’ve randomly heard about the game, all I knew is it’s about delivering packages and hooking people in remote areas up to Wifi, I didn’t know
(only minor spoilers, it's in the first 20 minutes, so basically the first cutscene)
that you also have a rain that rapidly ages anything it touches, unburned corpses turnin into invisible monsters that eat people, which you can only see by hooking a fetus in a pod to yourself, and if the monsters eat anyone alive it literally nukes everything in 50 miles radius to a crater.
Which makes deliver packages a lot more exciting than I assumed.
Some of the parts of the story were a little bit weird and a lot of people don’t like it, but I like weird, and this had some pretty sick ideas. And the gameplay is also fun!
Persona 5 Royal. And with it the entire Persona series. This shit is amazing.
From Software Souls-like games.
In fact, I’m still technically sleeping on them as I don’t know where to start. Assuming I can only play on a PS3 or Steam Deck - where would be the best jumping in point?
I suggest starting with Dark Souls 1 and playing them in order. DS1 is slower and clunkier than the sequels, but will introduce you to the mechanics and playstyle of the series. That clunkiness is especially obvious after playing the sequels. DS2 is the one most people like the least, but it’s still pretty decent, and plays somewhat faster than the first. DS3 is the smoothest experience, and probably hardest of the three.
Bloodborne is a more action-oriented experience, definitely a faster pace than the Souls games, and arguably harder because of it.
If you still want more, check out Demon’s Souls. Some of the mechanics are tedious and can easily be ignored, others are main parts of the game and have been simplified somewhat in the later games. I haven’t played the remake, but apparently it’s as close as possible to the original experience, only with upgraded graphics and sound. I read that even the game’s timings are exactly replicated.
I was expecting you to recommend Elden Ring, honestly!
Willing to tackle the series chronologically, if that’s what you think would be the best way to familiarise myself with the genre.
Elden Ring is a fantastic game and by far my favorite in the Soulsborne series. It’s also at the same time both the hardest and the easiest in the series. If you explore and make use of the tools at your disposal, it can be the easiest. But you can also simply bang your head against every challenge, and then it can be the hardest. Don’t get me wrong; that can also be very fun.
Also, Elden Ring is just incredibly beautiful. Every frame looks like it is straight out of a fantasy novel. The music is fantastic. The story is a bit cryptic, but I personally enjoy that kind of storytelling, and the world-building in Elden Ring is my second favorite in the Soulsborne series - barely behind Bloodborne.
Should you start with Elden Ring? I’m not sure. It’s pretty long and complex. If you just want to play one, I would say play this one. If you simply want to play one of them to see if you like the series, I would say play Bloodborne, which is an excellent teacher. But you said you only have a PS3 and Steam Deck, and Bloodborne is a PS4 exclusive. It can be run with an emulator, but that’s pretty resource intensive.
I would argue against starting with Dark Souls 1 unless you plan to tackle the whole series from the get-go. The combat is pretty clunky when compared to the other titles, and the second half is notoriously rushed.
Dark Souls 2 has a special place in my heart, but the RPG mechanics are the most obtuse in the series. Not beginner-friendly.
Dark Souls 3 would be my recommendation to start if you can’t play Bloodborne. The combat mechanics are mature, and the RPG mechanics are relatively understandable. DS3 is also pretty linear, which I personally view more as a negative, but as a newcomer, you are never confused about where to go. Also, Dark Souls 3 is just a pretty fun game.
And yes, you can definitely story-wise play the Dark Souls games out of order. Dark Souls is more about lore and worldbuilding than a story in the strictest sense.
I also want to give a shout-out to the c/Soulslike community here on Lemmy. If you have a question regarding Souls games, you can always ask there.
undertale and deltarune. i kinda always dismissed those games as youtuber fandom shit, if that makes sense… stuff made to appeal to fandoms who love to pull nonsense out of their asses to make the games deeper than they really are. game theory bait. and i’ve heard so many horrors about the utdr fandom, it made me want to steer clear of the games. and i figured, since i already got spoiled a ton of stuff from undertale through cultural osmosis, what would be the point of playing it?
but they still interested me somewhat, since i heard from more people that they were actually really good… and i got spoiled one more thing i didn’t know, and i figured if i want to play these games someday, i have to do it now so my enjoyment of them isn’t ruined more by just existing on the internet
so i did! i played undertale twice in a row (i didn’t do everything needed to get the pacifist ending the first time), and the first 2 chapters of deltarune right after that (only those were released then). and oh my, i’m glad i did because these are some of my favourite games now. tho i still think I would’ve enjoyed undertale so much more if i hadn’t been spoiled a bunch about it…
don’t judge games by their fandoms. things are often popular for a reason, and fans of something often lack the creative experience of the original creators (which is not to say that there isn’t good utdr fan content, there is, a ton! but there’s also a lot of crap)
i still dislike the gaster theorists tho
I tried starting Undertale but it doesn’t work well (or at all I can’t remember) with a controller, maybe I should try using good ol AntiMicroX to translate controller inputs to mouse and keyboard. The first few images left me with an impression of very low effort so with that and the hardware issue I didn’t push further. You’re saying I should ? 😁
yea undertale’s graphics are pretty bad lol, in many cases literally on purpose! thankfully deltarune (especially the later chapters) looks much better. but imo, where the game really shines is its characters and battles, they’re really fun! that’s where you’ll feel the effort that went into the game. the music too is excellent imo
for the controller, if it’s not a problem you can just play with the keyboard, it works very well.
Cheers, I’ll give it another go ! yea keyboard should be fine I’ll make the effort heh
I don’t really have fomo with games. Im fine playing them later as long as I enjoy them. I only have so much game playing time so im rarely playing something I don’t enjoy.
