Hey all, I’m on the hunt for games that really suck you into their world, the kind where you look up and suddenly three hours have gone by.
Games I’ve loved and couldn’t put down:
- Plague Tale
- Horizon
- Subnautica
- Mass Effect
- Expedition 33
- Homeworld
Doesn’t matter the gente, as long as it’s got that vibe where you just exist in the atmosphere and forget about everything else.
What are your go-to games when you want to disappear into another world? Bonus appreciation if it’s something underrated or off the beaten path.
Edit: Thank you all. I will definitely keep this thread bookmarked. You all dwarved what I found on Reddit ir any other platform! Well done!
No Man’s Sky. Take advantage of the custom game rules to tweak to your preferred gameplay. Personally, I skip all the tutorial stuff and boost resources as I like flying around/upgrading my ship more than the core gameplay loop.
Outer Wilds
Space puzzle exploration game. It’s the kind of game where it’s best to go in as blind as possible. I will say no more.
I tried it. I think I’m not smart enough for the puzzles. I go to a place and don’t seem to be able to complete much. It says there’s something left, and I can’t find it. It gets frustrating. I still have it installed because I love the atmosphere so much.
One thing to be aware of is that you can’t just go to a location and “complete it”… It’s not like normal video games where you just grind until there’s nothing left to do in a specific spot. Many times you don’t have the necessary knowledge to complete a location, and you must go and explore elsewhere to learn how to proceed in your previous locations.
If you want a more tailored nudge to proceed, feel free to DM me with what you have discovered, and preferably a screenshot of your computer in “Rumor mode”
The game is very nonlinear. If you can’t solve a puzzle in one place, you should go to another. Some puzzles require hints from elsewhere.
I had to look up a few solutions when I was done with exploration. That was a little bit unsatisfying but it didn’t ruin the game for me.
They’ve been making games like that since FOREVER. The original Myst is like that. It can be extremely frustrating and I’d just give up on recommending games like that to people if they push back. It can be very anxiety inducing to walk into an area and wonder obsessively if there is some clue you missed or object you need to pick up to combine with another object and if there is a puzzle where the solution lies…
Ah, I see. I love these kinds of games so I’m a bit ignorant to how others perceive them. If that’s how you feel then of course the game’s just not for you.
I want to play Myst one day. Everything I hear about this game says me I’m gonna love it.
I’ve got this problem too. I played a bit more than you, but now I’m stuck and don’t know how to proceed. It’s more frustrating than engaging. I feel like I already looked for every hint the game provides.
Also I never experienced the much hyped revelations or what everyone talks about.
The revelations come later… The early game is mostly driven by an “oh that looks cool” exploration. You start seeing some puzzle pieces. Then as you explore for the sake of exploring, you find a few patterns but can’t see how they interact. This is where the game starts to get frustrating, you don’t know where to go, and the knowledge you have gained doesn’t make enough sense to be able to start piecing things together, this ms where most people get stuck. But if you persevere, then at some point you will discover a piece that connects some of the patterns you found before, and suddenly you can start exploring in a more focused fashion. Only well into this section you start experiencing the revelations.
If you want a more tailored nudge to proceed, feel free to DM me with what you have discovered, and preferably a screenshot of your computer in “Rumor mode”
Thanks, I’ll need to get back to the games some time.
I could check a guide. But am too stubborn to do that. Checking a guide feels like falling. 😄
I bought it two years ago, still haven’t played past the first little cave thing. I suppose I’ll find my way back to it this winter.
I bought it specifically because its soundtrack was absolutely amazing (not knowing anything about the game itself).
Unfortunately, it did not play as well as it sounded 😿
If you’re willing to hunt for a 2009 oldie, I have a guilty love for The Saboteur.
GTA/Assassin’s creed esque where you play a race car driving Irishman helping the resistance in WWII, Nazi occupied Paris.
Gameplay can be repetitive, but free roaming Paris was a lot of fun. Plus, when I finally travelled to Paris IRL, I had a few “I know this place!” moments that felt really cool as a first-time visitor.
Cyberpunk 2077. It had a lot to build on with the IP being decades old with a lot of worldbuilding done already. Such a huge, intricate, and alive world. My first playthrough took 200 hours just from exploration, and there’s a TON i never got to. Over 1k hours later, there’s still connections i haven’t made, secrets i haven’t found. I honestly haven’t found a more immersive game for me.
Runner up: Red Dead Redemption 2. Again, the world is so alive and detailed that my immersion goes off the charts. Another 200hr first playthrough. NPCs have lives and schedules, the voice acting is fantastic, and the overall world building is immaculate. Tiny details that 0.01% of players would ever notice are carefully constructed (Lemat cartridges, looking at you). Wildlife interacts realistically with other wildlife and other stimuli. Cats in cities will search for, find, and hunt mice. I never fast traveled because just riding across the landscape and looking around was a better time. Could not recommend more highly, but watching or playing the first one first is advised.
Disco Elysium. I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned yet. There was also legal drama with the original creators, so feel free to pirate. Not that Lemmy needs convincing of it.
I can’t get it to run with Linux. Must check again…
https://www.protondb.com/app/632470
You should as lots of folks say it works straight away.
- Subnautica
>“Atmospheric” game
>Looks inside
>Water.
There were so many moments where I got lost in the environmental details. One of the more memorable ones was finding an office environment where almost everybody is emailing each other about how much they hate a guy because he’s too hardworking and overzealous.
When you actually find that guy’s desk, it’s obvious that he’s been given no resources to do his job… and that he’s only trying to contribute any way he can. Even worse, he’s got a whiteboard that if you flip it around, you find that it’s got mathematical equations on it, hinting that he might have been a lot smarter than people gave him credit for.
EDIT:spelling
✅ Arkane Studios, hot off Dishonored 2
✅ Spiritual Successor to System ShockThat’s enough for me. Wishlisted!
I have had this on my steam wishlist for a while. I’ll definitely pick it up the next time I buy a game :)
Firewatch was a good game for me to get immersed in for an evening. It involves hiking around an isolated open world park. It follows a linear story which is pretty interesting, but I think there’s an option to wander freely after completion
Noita.
Just be prepared to die. A lot.
Fallout NV
While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea there’s something about playing NV with radio NV running and running around the emptier parts of the map, then I get jumped by a bunch Romaboo larpers.
Arcanum
While it’s immesian is a bit different it’s music and story telling can drag me in easily.
Outer wilds
Death is inevitable, so you may as well enjoy some music with your pals.
Cyberpunk 2077 and the DLC. Just, so preem.
I’m on my third playthrough. Mods to add immersion, nothing more
Turned the hud and mini map off and walk everywhere within the city. For the first time in hundreds of hours, I’m actually learning the city instead of following lines.
This is by far my favourite playthrough. Maxed out street cred before meeting Panam.
I heard someone say how amazing it was to turn off all the visual clutter and they were so right.
What a game!
Had to look up “preem.”
Learned something I won’t be able to use much.
Cyberpunk has a whole layer of simplified English and futuristic slang that just kinda makes sense
Don’t let your dreams be dreams, choom
Red Dead Redemption (both games) would get my vote. Easily in my top 5 games.
First time playing RDR2, I waved at a dude on a carriage and asked him to stop. Next thing I knew I was being shot at by the sheriff. No idea why that would be considered bad or a punishable offense. Lost all interest in playing after that sadly. And it was like in the first town you get to visit in the game too.
Stage coach robbery.
Thank you for actually giving me an answer to the mechanic behind this. Legitimately had no clue.
I feel the game is not the issue here.
Ah yes, the game definitely isn’t the issue. I should have just known that hitting the prompt to wave to a passing by stagecoach twice in a row was against the law somehow. In a game I just started playing. Yep, definitely a skill issue.
Howdy stranger. Are you just waving down random stagecoaches wearing a gun in order to say hi and be friendly-like, or is your intent to draw your weapon and deprive us of our property and/or our lives? Because if you’re going to rob us, I am afraid to inform you that I will be taking defensive action that might include running away and/or killing you. It’s fine either way, but I just want to be crystal clear about your intentions and I want you to be crystal clear about the consequences of your each and every action beforehand so there are no untoward surprises.
Absolutely gripping gameplay and dialogue.
Look, on one hand I see your point, but on the other it’s a fuckin game and tutorials are a thing. Except apparently when they aren’t. It’s the wild west, by the amount of people that were shooting at me afterwards it’s clear just about everyone carries a gun so…not sure what your point there is either. Contrary to popular belief, you can indeed be carrying a gun without the intent to use it on every person you have an interaction with. My intention? New town. Talk to NPCs. Stage coach rolls by and button prompt pops up to wave? I do. It pops up again? I do it again to see what happens, to see if the dialogue changes. Chaos ensues followed by a quick death that didn’t make sense to me right off the bat. Games can be flawed. I don’t have to love a beloved game just because people think I should.
I think people are objecting because you are asking it to be something it isn’t.
An open world game is something you immerse yourself in and you learn as you go. It is 100% incompatible with strict “win conditions” for every instance. Example: I was playing Fallout: New Vegas and ran into a character who was trying to collect bottlecaps. I offered her some of mine, but, discovering I had bottlecaps, she wanted all of them and IMMEDIATELY started shooting. That was a fun experience, not quite emergent game play, but at least surprising. That is the fun of open world games, they can be unpredictable and context-dependent, and sometimes you only know the context by getting shot at. Your job is to learn the rules of the world as best you can. Though I do understand why you get frustrated, I think it just indicates that open world games are just a genre that you don’t enjoy, or at least there are aspects of them that rub you the wrong way.
It would be like if I said, “I don’t like tetris because it doesn’t have a story. Like, where are the cutscene animatics? Where is the character development?”
Edit: Might be better to say “A to Rob Stagecoach”, but that is kind of implying your intent, when all your character is doing is waving it down to stop it, and the response depends on the context… like now every prompt has to predict what the response of the action will be.
This has been the best take I’ve seen on my issue with the game so far. Cuz you’re right, I’m not super hot on open world games. Saying that, I did indeed take the whole experience as a learning moment but the game in general just didn’t keep my interest afterwards. That was just the most memorable part of the game in my brief time trying it out.
And look, while I completely understand that not every game is gonna hand hold (I honestly prefer they don’t), I do expect some sort of in-game example or…hell, even some side dialogue saying that could happen that could still be fully in-world and immersive. The game is huge, it’s gonna have some flaws here and there, and at the end of the day it just wasn’t for me. And me having an issue with a small part of the game has clearly rubbed some people the wrong way, and me the wrong way in their response.
And you decided to stop playing because of that one event. Definitely not the game at fault here.
I do believe I said it definitely isn’t the games fault for not telling me about a mechanic that would have me shot at and killed. We’ve already established that it’s absolutely my fault for not knowing something I wasn’t taught in-game before it happened. The game is without flaws. Perfect. 10 out of 10. Impossible for someone to have a bad time in without it being their own fault.
Isnt rdr2 just wild west gta? Why not just shoot back or reload and avoid him? I’m just curious
I did try a few times, died each time. So moved on for a bit but quickly lost interest in it sadly. I’m sure I’ll give it another shot down the road somewhere and get better enjoyment out of it then.
Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Amazingly beautiful and realistic world with incredible detail. The forests, pastures, meadows and towns are incredible to just walk around in and lose yourself in the atmosphere.
Also the game(s) are very, very, good.
Medieval realistic role playing. You stay as a peasant who can’t pretty much do anything. Fight, sneak, or even read. You have to learn everything and you decide what you want to learn by doing it untill you get better.
Medieval realistic role playing
“Realistic” is used very favorably in this case… I get what you mean: Henry’s story feels plausible enough to suck you in and I don’t mean this as a critique. But it is in no way realistic: Henry starts as a smiths son and is pretty useless at everything but he becomes a proficient fighter in the story and as far as I remember pretty influential. This is extremely unrealistic for his timeline because social mobility in the late middle ages was very much on existent.
To be fair there are some examples from the middle ages where common people achieve great power in times of trouble.
Freelancer was such a game, it’s old though. Wish there was anything like it.
Obvious TES 3-5, bg3, Cyberpunk, Gothic 1-2, Elden Ring.
Tainted Grail.
Keep an eye on “Underspace”. Could be your thing.
Not op, but thank you! I’ll check this out. Freelancer + eldritch sounds amazing!
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These games definitely are not for everyone, but they fit the ask in my opinion:
I am the world’s biggest Qud stan and will always up vote it in the wild
It’s a very weird game, but if you can pierce the surface of it, it has such an incredible amount to offer you.
CoQ is an example of a game that gives you so much when you invest time in it. If you’re into that, I would also recommend Cogmind. It’s similar in that the world has so much texture, both in lore and mechanics. We’re lucky have so many great roguelikes to choose from!
Cogmind is my favorite game that I’m absolutely garbage at, I’ve been following the development cycle of it for probably over 10 years now and it’s a huge component of why I love roguelikes as much as I do.
But fuck me that game is hard. I have a fairly comprehensive, wide and deep pool of knowledge about a semi-majority of the content in the game, but… I just can’t stay alive. The attrition kills me, every time, I don’t think I’ve ever made it past -06 or so on my best run. Pro advice always consists of “Oh just don’t get into fights” but that’s a lot easier said than done when you’ve got half a dozen swarmers on your tail that are faster than you are, are all busy calling backup, and are peppering you with 18 shots a round as you fruitlessly attempt to seek cover.
Anyway, yeah, great game. Love it to death. I’m real bad at it. It seems like probably most people are real bad at it, and there are just a couple of mega wizards that make the game look easy in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Especially doing things like wheel or leg builds, in my experience that’s just slow suicide that is locked in the moment you decide to commit to it, they’re just outright too slow to manage. I find that this is a game where you have to be faster than your opponents, no matter what, it is a hard requirement of survival - therefore, I do not survive unless I equip flight units. So I equip flight units and then I can’t carry anything because their carry weight smokes dong, so I die to attrition because I get my parts shot off and don’t have backups. So I get frustrated and do a legs build that’s strapped down with four shotguns and then I die to active combat because I can’t escape anyone.
Point being, if you’re any good at Cogmind, I’d love some pointers or some advice on how you play. I’ve dabbled in this game for nearly a decade and I’m tired of being so straight up bad at it. I feel like I’ve been misunderstanding some fundamental principle of how you’re supposed to play the game, and reading pro guides on the internet hasn’t really filled me in on much other than a) try to avoid fights when possible (okay, fair, but this definitely isn’t always possible) and b) other people always seem to find cooler loot more consistently than I do. Guides will start off right out of the gate like “okay, first thing’s first, find a datajack and some hackware and get some flight” and I’m like, brother, I’m in -07 and I’ve found one datajack and two flight units in the whole game so far. You want a [Lgt. Assault Rifle]? I got those. Not much else.
So I don’t know where you’re at, so I’m just going to info dump a few things that have increased my scores recently:
Materials
The first few floors are all about giving you time to prep a starting build. Even if you intend to go flight, start with some storage and clear these floors completely to gather any good loot. You don’t have to kill everything, but check everywhere for any good items and get some hacks going. Fill up your storage with your entire flight build before switching to flight, and honestly, it’s good to try and keep the storage after transitioning so you can keep extra flight units and armor.Hacks
Swarmers are a pain, but if you manual hackanalyze(swarmer), then you get +5% accuracy towards them and they get -5% towards you. There are only 3 main models of swarmers, so any time you seen the next level of swarmer, hit this hack. Really,analyze(...)everything! It’s like having a free reaction control system and target analyzer on at all times. There are also some seriously usefultrojan(...)hacks.Armor
Always try to carry some armor to switch on if you’re getting shot at. It absorbs all overflow damage, protecting all your vital bits. I was massively undervaluing armor, assuming I was never supposed to get shot at as a stealth-flight build, but it’ll happen, and armor can let you get away clean.Other than that there’s chopping through walls with melee weapons, standing inside doorways to minimize enemy fire, knowing when to hit side branches for good loot, scanning your equipment for little bonuses, checking enemies when you see them for damage resistances. The dev puts out videos of him playing (and streams), and watching him do the first few floors really showed what important factors I was missing.
Appreciate the input.
Turtling down in materials and then transitioning to your proper build later makes sense, that’s a strategy I haven’t actually tried. I’ll look into that.
As for the manual hacks, I knew those existed, but I had been refraining from just looking them up. Is there somewhere in game that teaches you any of those? I’ve never found one.
I definitely have been underappreciating armor based on its weight. I’ve put on some medium armor and/or energy shields on some of my more combat oriented runs and they seem like they soak up a lot of abuse. They’re just so bulky and heavy, I never feel like I have room for it among my other necessary parts.
A lot of zombie games try to be realistic, but Project Zomboid is the only one that genuinely feels like reality. It uses zoomed out isometric graphics and is still miles more immersive than any first person zombie survival game out there.
