Indie games are absolutely killing it these days, I love em. In Stars and Time, Animal Well, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, so many are fantastic.
Please recommend me your favourite story games. This is me and I’m in need of a good ‘book.’ :)
I have played “The Invincibles” recently. It’s a beautiful walking sim.
Disco Elysium
The only run I haven’t done is the fascist run because I cannot be a dick to Kim.
Sea of Stars.
I’m listening to the soundtrack right now and it’s awesome. The story is decent and the graphics and design are top notch. It was so captivating that I pretty much didn’t play anything else while I was working through the game.
I have to say is this is clearly the closest gaming has come to a sequel to Chrono trigger
Favorite point and click adventure: Sam and Max. They recently remastered the first season. Funny/silly game.
Story first games: Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life Is Strange, Botany Manor(more puzzle than story), Open Roads, Lake, Deliver Us The Moon, Firewatch, Kona, Day of the Tentacle (The remaster is incredible)
For more standard shoot or action games with good writing/story I love the remedy games, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control.
I was never a huge fan of Telltale style story games that much, but I really enjoyed the Back to the Future one that came out years back. Not sure if that’s still available anywhere though.
Spiritfarer, To the Moon, Gris (no words in this one but still a good story imo), anything SuperGiant has ever made with my favorite being Transistor.
Definitely anything SuperGiant. Bastion, Hades, and Transistor are some of the only games I’ve actually finished, and the sound tracks are incredible.
Star Wars Fallen Order has a great story and really fun gameplay.
Tales of Vesperia. I like the combat system most, but the story’s pretty good, and there’s a lot of optional content.
I recently got “Yakuza Like a Dragon” from my Humble Choice bundle and it’s so good it’s made me want to check the rest of the series.
Yakuza 0 was absolutely fantastic, kiwami 1 was ok and kiwami 2 was also good
I picked up “Yakuza 0” on sale not too long ago, and I’m enjoying it so much that I picked up the rest of the remastered series while it was on sale. Based on how long I’m spending mucking around in the first one, It may take me the rest of my life to get through them all. I don’t know how “Like a Dragon” compares to the earlier games, but I really enjoy the narrative, combat, sub-stories, and mini-games in “0”.
As an aside, I really enjoy a well-done pool mini-game. I probably spent more time playing pool in the various space stations in “Rebel Galaxy Outlaw” than doing anything else. Likewise, Kiryu spends a lot of time in the pool hall, as well as hanging around the batting cages, and fine-tuning his pocket racers.
It’s maybe my fav series in gaming. Kiryu is so much better than ichiban
Nier automata, nier replicant, Yakuza like a dragon, FF7R, Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity Original Sin 2, Control, star wars fallen order/survivor
‘Outer wilds’ don’t look it up. The most fun is play ing it for the first time. It doesn’t hold your hand though.
I’ve read that comment a lot and it makes me feel like there’s something big that I might spoil if I ever Google about it. But like I’m a couple dozen hours in at this point… After how many hours of playtime would you say the “don’t look it up” advice expires?
I think there are guides that gently point you in the right direction, without too many spoilers.
I definitely got stuck on a few things.
YouTube started recommending Outer Wilds videos, intermixed with my Minecraft: Create mod videos and I was very confused what mod it was
Seconding this, and its a great game but only if you do like games where there is a story line, but its up to you to find it.
Thirding lol
Fourthing, my absolute favourite game.
In Stars and Time is especially appropriate for Pride Month!
Disco Elysium is phenomenal as well.
The Blackwell series, West of Loathing, Talos Principle II, To The Moon series.
Seconding the Blackwell series, with a caveat. The earlier games can be a little rough around the edges, resulting in a few Guide Dang It! moments. Walkthroughs are your friends.
I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.
The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.
Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.
Mostly in alphabetical order going down my steam list:
Great stories great games: Tales of Symphonia and Vesperia, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, Metal Gear Solid, 2, and 3, Subnautica, Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Hollow Knight, Spec Ops: The Line, A Hat in Time, Hades, Doom, Deus Ex, Eternal Sonata, F.E.A.R., FF6, FF13-2, Nier Replicant & Automata, Sleeping Dogs, Undertale, Valkyria Chronicles (admittedly haven’t beaten it though).
Mindless fun simple stories: Ys (almost any of them), My Time at Portia or Sandrock, Resident Evil games, Rune Factory 4 and 5, Harvest Moon 64 and Friends of Mineral Town, Stray, Amnesia, Armored Core 6, Have a Nice Death, I am Setsuna, Life is Strange, Neon White, Cyberpunk 2077.
If you had to twist my arm I’d give you these variations of top recommendations.
Best typical JRPG: Tales of Symphonia
Best Metroidvania: Hollow Knight
Best where choices matter: Undertale
Best fps: Spec Ops: The Line
Best comfy story: My Time at Portia
Best environmental storytelling: Subnautica
Best simple stories in stories: A Hat in Time
Best story with a bajillion endings and things to keep playing for: Nier Automata (play Replicant too!)
Have you tried Triangle Strategy?
Witcher 3. The story is insanely good, just remember: your decisions matter (but don’t look anything up).
Some people say it’s hard to get into it and to be fair it is a bit complicated first but you don’t have to use all mechanics, and it’s well worth getting into it.
It just got an official mod creator (yes, that game from… 2015? (graphics from 2022 since there was a huge graphics update) still got a new update in 2024) and the community still is strong so it’ll get even better over the next years.
Bastion will make you feel like you’re reading a book. It’s one of my all-time favorites, by the developers now best known for Hades.
“Proper story’s s’posed to start at the beginning…”
“Kid just rages for awhile.”
That game is still fantastic.
Oh sweet nobody’s mentioned it yet! One of my personal favorite “book-feeling games” is an FPS series.
Linear, tightly focused, and feels like a novel because it’s based on one:
Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light. (Haven’t played Exodus yet)
You play a young fella named Artyom. Living in formerly-Russia’s metro tunnels with other survivors after a nuclear apocalypse devastates the surface.
Your settlement comes under threat from seemingly psychic creatures called “the Dark Ones”, and you’re sent on a quest to go get help.
Across the way is a bit of a “coming of age” adventure. You run across really interesting and well-acted characters, sneak past hostile factions, contend with scary (and diversely behaviored) mutants, and risk dangerous excursions on the surface. This is a dark world where gasmask filters are precious and bullets are literally currency, but somehow it’s still beautiful and fascinating.
(That intro guitar melody will stay with me forever.)
Like any good hero, Artyom finds himself in one bad situation after another, and along the way if you pick up on the hints, may even come to understand the world around him and the role he plays in it.
There’s a morality system that’s more subtle than “be boyscout or be a villain”, and “ranger difficulty” is an amazing way to play because it makes gunfights feel tense and realistic.
You can only take a few hits in this mode, but unlike in most games, so can your enemies! It makes things feel much less “bullet spongey.”
Everyone begged for an “open world” experience and we got Exodus which is supposed to be awesome, but something will always stay close to me about this post apocalypse story that takes you on a focused, well paced, and at times emotional ride to save a transformed world.
And that’s just the first title mostly.
You won’t be running between towns for hours or making rubber bands and glue into machineguns. You’ll still feel like you’re surviving, but know exactly where you’re supposed to be going.
They go for super cheap on GoG and Steam all the time. Well worth the experience. :)
Pillars of Eternity. I’ve owned the game for 8 years but finally sat down recently to learn how to play a classic CRPG. I haven’t been this engrossed in a game since Mass Effect 2 or Skyrim.
“To the moon”, it will take you 4h to finish and the story is awesome, it’s worth playing in a single playthrough. I wish I could forget and play it again.
It never went away.
Yeah, single player games are nowhere near dead. If they ever did go the way of the dodo, I would probably stop playing altogether, because for the most part I just don’t like multiplayer games.
Was gonna say, nobody took shit, lol
$3000 setup just to play a game from 2010
Modding. And you can play others with it too.
I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that’s cool, but it’s also rarer now that we’re all older.
As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn’t matter in single-player games.
To me, multiplayer video games should be about having fun with friends. Couch co-op, LAN parties, online multiplayer work for different genres and depending where your friends are. I don’t care if they’re older games, newer games, as long as it’s fun and interesting.
Yeah I don’t really care to play with strangers and none of my friends have ever asked to play so I also stick to single player games when I do play.
not a big gamer but saw the civ 6 was discounted to 2 usd had to get it ofc and enjoying the single player life
I fucking love civ 6 and I’ll fight anyone who tries to tell me it’s bad. I tried playing 5 as my first civ game around the time it came out but I don’t think I had the attention span for it and I never got into it. Got 6 as part of a humble bundle thing and didn’t touch it for years, randomly decided to give it a go and gyatdamn.
Civ 5 sunk it’s teeth into me deep. I could never stand 6. I only managed about 41 hours into 6, but 5 I have well over a thousand in (even if steam only reports 600 of it)
I just hate the pathetic effort they put into the quotes. Sean Bean was a weird choice anyway (“what do people universally and forever like? Game Of Thrones I suppose!”) but then they had him read quotes from literal blogs and often quotes that shat all over the technology you’d just researched. Oh! I completed a wonder! I definitely want to hear a quote about how it’s obsolete now and its abandonment caused immense poverty in the Ruhr valley.
That and the movement towards nations instead of, yknow, Civilizations. Sorry Australia, you are not a Civilisation. Nor is Canada. Nor Scotland. How do we have Scotland - an independent country for less than 300 years - and not the fucking Celts.
“$3,000 setup to play a game from 2010.”
I have an RTX 4070 that I’ve been using to play Half Life. I’ve owned my copy for a while, but have never played it.
I upgraded to a 3070 from a 1080 just to play grim Dawn. Good games are good games
You can play it at “accurately model the thermal vibration of molecules” framerates.
Gimme dat visible Brownian Motion!
Isn’t there an RTX Version?
There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe
I know that Nvidia released a Portal mod, so the Source Engine is already done. No idea how much effort is needed between games.
$5 Black Mesa brother. It looks phenomenal now.
If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).
New Black Mesa is Half Life…
You are saying the third party remake in another engine from 2020 is the same as the original from 1998?
Black Mesa is literally just better looking Half-Life approved by Valve. I can really only say the same thing so many times before you understand that what I’m saying is what it is lol.
And you’re saying there’s no difference between playing Black Mesa today vs playing Half life today, and therefore he might as well start out with Black Mesa? Or what is the meaning of your reply?
Hard disagree. Games like Half life have a huge historical value for their impact. Playing the original is worth it. Especially if one takes the medium itself seriously. You wouldn’t say an original movie and a 22 years younger remake are “the same”, right? I think you’re playing dumb with me.
Love the Wikipedia link btw. I’ve played Black Mesa in its early access phase already and then later on again when they released Xen.
No, I just think you’re kinda dumb now looking for a pedantic fight on Lemmy of all places trying to argue that Half-Life and Black Mesa aren’t the same story and essential game lol.
Single player is the best.
10 year old games on a 4k OLED with maxed out settings is the best. Especially if it’s a game you can run above 60 fps.
100% Online gaming is pretty toxic and I love being able to play at my own pace.
Only exception to this for me was stardew with my wife.
Toxicity is one thing for sure but I don’t like how the commercialization of MP has shaped it.
Indie games have a very different feel in their online gameplay compared to “commercial” games.
Even way back, HL1 online and those online experiences felt so different because it was designed to be about the group experience rather than level up and get a skin, buy a weapon, our skill tree is massive. Sure technology was holding it back but I wish I could see what it would’ve been without the massive push for $$$.
yes but i do miss co-op gaming.
Couch co-op, split-screen, hotseat; Kingdom Two Crowns is nice. So is Darksiders Genesis, For The King, Moon Hunters, Trine, etc.
Always on the lookout for other good co-op couch games, especially with a good story, but I feel that they are few and far between. :(
Brothers, It takes two and A way out.
A way out I really liked.
Powerwash Simulator.
A few games that are great single player can also be played with friends such as Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio and Minecraft.
Deep Rock Galactic.
Rock and Stone, Miner!
And people wonder why I still play Factorio, Parkitect, ATS, or RCT. People suck and being able to ignore them is great.
Here I am playing games from the 90s and 00s. Crazy that Quake III and Unreal Tournament are still active.
When they’re good, they’re good. Good gameplay beats good graphics every day
I often use UT, Q3 and CS 1.6 as examples of how long a game can stay active when players are given tools to setup their own servers, as opposed to companies handling multiplayer themselves (and often killing it off in a few years).
I’ve been playing Planet Crafter waaay too much. Check it out if you like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc. It’s fun and super addictive. At least to me.
Dyson Sphere Program
I’ve played DSP, it’s a great game too. I’ll probably jump back to that when I burn out on Planet Crafter. The thing I don’t like about it and Satisfactory is conveyor belt management. The constant battle to rewire the spaghetti.
DSP recently got localized small distribution drones, you can convert any storage box into a tiny logistics station now. It’s pretty sweet, really reduces the spaghetti early on in recent playthroughs
I absolutely love rollercoaster Tycoon. There really isn’t a game like it.
Have you tried Planet Coaster? Might be up your alley.
bruh factorio is literally in active development and has a huge active community, who would even think twice seeing someone playing it.
Gaming goals
I want to play my character, not just play towards whatever the optimal setup is
I strive to ultimately be able to tank enemies and kill them with weak weapons like forks.
If you want to be the Cutlery Colossus then you can
Don’t forget the needless implementation of always-online single player games. Even for single/multiplayer games like PoE or anything Diablo, there’s literally no technical need to have a connection. It’s just fancy DRM for Blizzard and an excuse to milk you more microtransactions for PoE.
And before anyone regurgitates Blizzard’s BS about anti-cheat, it’s very possible to keep multiplayer characters on the server and single player on your computer and never have them interact or permit single player loot to be sold on their marketplace. Not to mention their regular online check for D2R. Blizzard has ALWAYS used aggressively hostile DRM. If they could virus bomb thieves’ computers then they absolutely would.
- Just avoid AAA slop from big publishers, problem solved.
- Quite ironic you’re using an AI generated image for it considering the same AAA publishers are considering using it. I really hope you don’t think “DEI” and “wokeness” are responsible for these AAA publishers pushing multiplayer-first games on us.
You’re making many assumptions over a meme.
Yeah this dude is an idiot.what the actual fuck is his reasoning here?
Typical multiplayer enjoyer
And then you play Xcom 2 and realize that Dota 2 was meditative by comparison
99%? Are you sure?
What did they take from us? I haven’t played an online game in years now.
I’ve been hmming and hawing in answering this. But I’m out for dinner and bored. So alot games original vision is to be a single player experience but then online features or an online overhaul is shoved by the aboves. IE SimCity was considered unplayable by thr online features, anthem was originally designed to be single player but was completely redone, etc etc.
Yeah I see that. I remember the disappointment of sim city.
It could be I don’t follow games close enough to see what I’m missing. I find more SP games popping up in my feeds / friend recommendations than I could ever hope to play.
I definitely feel like mainstream AAA/AAAA and even iii to a certain extent have been progressively enshittified. But I’ve been at this a while, so I’ve seen how it’s gone this way as more and more money got brought to bare on games.
The moment someone who wasn’t involved in actually making some part of the game was expecting a fat return on investment was the moment the wheel of shit started to turn.
