A bit of a weird title, but basically what’s a game that’s more than a year old but still considered “modern” that you love? There’s no real strict definition for modern, I’d just like to see some discussion around great games that aren’t quite classics yet (but probably will be one day).
The nature of this community typically attracts discussion around decade-old games (which is what I mostly play too), but I’d like to see some newer (but not too new) games on this post.
Trying not to pick titles with sequels/franchises
Slay the Spire
Returnal
Stardew Valley
Elden Ring
Death Stranding
Honorable mention : Overwatch 2 (I honestly can’t see it as a true sequel, just an update)
Joke’s on you. Slay the Spire is having a sequel!
Titanfall 2. I could keep playing that all evening. Its just a shame its not as popular as it was in its heyday.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t 4-8 times longer! I could have kept going for a very long time
Obligatory Fuck EA for the bullshit they pulled.
They buried the game launch intentionally behind Battlefield 1.
Dredge.
A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.
Honorable mention: Ronin.
Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved “go until you die, then try something different” gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.
Honorable mention: Valley.
Smooth and thrilling first-person mechanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.
Vampire Survivors isn’t that old yet, right?
It’s such a good Robotron clone.
Control
Cyberpunk 2077 (with phantom liberty)
Control is a really special game. I only got around to playing it last year but it was a wild ride!
I hope Alan Wake 2 goes on sale later this year so I can scoop that up. I got about halfway through AW1 (after getting it for ~£2 on steam) but the gameplay was too repetitive for me in the end.
Definitely second both of these. Cyberpunk 2077 post 2.0 is very solid, with an engaging, 100+ hour story. Similarly, control is a spectacular single player narrative, easily 20-30 hours of mindfuckery and atmospheric storytelling.
got death stranding when it was free for a day on epic a while ago, been playing it for the last few weeks pretty nonstop and just finished the story. i’ve always been a kojima fan for mgs but oh my god this is magnificent. an absolute masterpiece, imho. i get it’s not for everyone but i’ve had a blast and may immediately do a very hard offline second playthrough. definitely recommend, especially if you can grab it free or heavy discount.
It’s the game I would have hated as a young adult but absolutely love as a… less young adult.
How have the “interactive” features been now that there are fewer players? Is it a wasteland, or does the game still randomly place in user generated content from when the game first released?
I played it like a year ago and there were still a ton of active users showing up my list. I think it could surprise you.
online stuff smattered everywhere. plenty of people still playing and i imagine a good handful also snagged it like i did when epic gave it away for a day. there’s also older stuff like well placed safe houses and joke bridges on flat land or mountain peaks that have an insane number of likes so they must’ve been there for years.
also there’s a page where you can see the players you’ve interacted with, your likes for them and their likes for you and it also shows last login date, and most of mine are online recently like me with some maybe last logged in in january, or late last year. i did see one who hasn’t played since '22 but they’ve still got stuff in my world, too, so i think there’s some playtime syncing where a bridge or whatever might actually be destroyed in their game if they logged in today but since it was there from hour 5 to 25 of their playthrough you’ll get it at hour 5 and will stay if you repair it unlike they did. but that’s a guess.
edit: for quick reference when you log in you get a summary of people liking your stuff and yesterday i saw “75 players are pleased with you, 7328 likes”. so definitely still active. also no spoilers but there are a game mechanic or two that affects how many other players you are connected to, so your actions in game can determine how many people’s stuff shows up, as well.
Can you confirm which game mechanic gives you more player stuff? I don’t remember since it’s been a year since I last played. I think this game is old enough for spoilers, ha. So it’s okay.
yeah sure. there’s the connection level of each knot itself, with higher levels giving you more chiral bandwidth and i’m pretty sure gives you higher numbers of online structures in that area too, but i’m not certain about that.
other than that tho there’s bridge contracts which state they give you a stronger connection to that player so you both share more of your structures with each other. i actually forgot about that until the last few days and after adding the max 30 contracts i def have more structures.
i also suspect that if you like online structures actively rather than just letting it get a like when you use it the game gives you more other players and structures as well, but i’m not certain on that one either. it makes sense to me what with the ‘likers get liked’ sign mechanic and how the amount of likes you can get overall is a skill to improve as well as your time to give likes increasing with skill as well.
There were so many levels of mechanics in that game that I probably didn’t even know about. For example, I never did any contracts. The online component in general fit so well in the game though. Seeing useful items or structures left behind by other players was so cool.
Every 2-3 years I’ll fire up Terraria again
Me too, thinking I’ll finally have some enlightenment as to how to kill the first night or twos zombies without getting killed and rage quitting.
I’ve even watched “beginner tutorials” on that game game, and conveniently they ended the first video just after nightfall of the first night, and started the second video during the second day, but that’s not how it friggin works, you need to murder the enemies lest they murder you, and in 5 different starts of the game, across 3 different devices, I’ve yet to kill the first or second nights horde without them breaking down my doors and wrecking my shit.
That game is one of my biggest regrets, I bought the 4 pack when it first came out thinking my friends and I would all have a great time, it makes me feel like I’m old and disconnected that I can’t enjoy that stupid (supposedly fantastic) game.
If you dig a 2x3 pit immediately adjacent to your door outside the zombies can’t break in
…
Thank you for that! Maybe it’s that time of the decade again.
Why couldn’t any of the tips for noobs have given that advice? (I watched at least half a dozen, many years ago though)
Also if you have an entrance on the ground and build the rest of the base above it you should be set for the early game stuff. (see the first picture on the bases wiki page)
I hope it works for you. I think I’ve played it more than any other game. The wiki is a fantastic resource if you’re feeling stuck.
The Witcher 3. It’s not far from being 10, but got a very nice graphics update for free and has 2 DLC. The game and the DLC and the free graphics update and a very recent mod kit, all for around 10-15 USD right now on GOG . it’s a steal! I highly recommend it. It became my favorite game of all time, very fast. And it will offer around 100h, and it will also offer replayability. What is there not to like?
Edit link
Superliminal, very well done puzzler with a good narrator.
LOOOOOVED that game. Had such a fun time playing it. 100% with you on that.
Rimworld.
I just wish it was multithreaded so that i could maintain a colony for more than a week without slowing to potato speeds.
My n00b theory on it, with the proviso that I am not a developer and only have a basic understanding of multithreading, is that you would break up the map into regions, and have each regions pawns and environment handled independently by separate threads/cores while one master thread handled interactions between regions and kept them all in sync.
Regions could dynamically scale depending on how computationally intensive they are, such that when the master/watchdog thread has to wait for one thread significantly longer than any of it’s adjacent region threads, it remaps the boundary iteratively until it acheives minimal wait-time and the load is evenly balanced.
As it stands, I’ve got one core maxed out and the game running slower than realtime while my 15 other cores sit at idle like suckers.
Definitely a classic.
Minecraft believe it or not. Every few years I come back and install a mod pack and it’s like an entirely new game almost. Plus I love the factory and automation mods. The game just never seems to die.
Kerbal Space Program
I’m not sure if this counts because it’s >10 years old, but also still developed:
Europa Universis IV
It’s like this game was built exactly for what I like most in games.
But for something more in the spirit of your question, I’ll go with Manifold Garden. I love M. C. Escher, and this feels like a puzzle game in one of his worlds.
I wouldn’t expect to see EU4 here, but I must vouch for it—once it clicks it is engaging, thrilling, and addictive. I just wish there was a better way to get all the dlc. And a better UI lol
No Man’s Sky dragged me back in again recently. There’s an expedition going on for another few weeks that was lots of fun. I’ve also started a permadeath save that I’m really enjoying.
Subnautica
