I’m a casual gamer who’s been largely inactive for the past few decades, and so I’m looking for some some good game recommendations. I don’t mind if they’re old as long as they came out after 2003 (because that’s when graphics of many games really started improving), maybe between 2008-2019. I’m also quite a picky gamer.
Here is a list of games that I’ve played before and that I liked (in no particular order):
- The Stanley Parable
- Counter-Strike: Source
- Counter-Strike Global Offensive
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- Grand Theft Auto V (just started playing this one)
- Freeways
- The Wizard’s Pen
- Need for Speed: Most Wanted
- Need for Speed: Heat
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Game Collection
- Minecraft
- Hamsterball
- Sifu
- Tekken 6
- SuperHOT
- Papers Please
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
- Accelerator (by TenebrousP)
- The Professional
- Paraopticon
- Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher
- ir:rational
- Viewport
- Lyxo
- Shadowess (by playchilla)
- Duet (by Kumobius)
- Chain Reaction
- Gumslinger
- Intersectiion Controller
- Little Alchemy
- Magic Survival (by Leme)
- Spy Tactics
- Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil
- Cyclomaniacs 2
- Learn 2 Fly 2
- Piano Tiles 2
- The Sims 3
- Plants vs. Zombies
- Tetris (on Facebook)
- Solitaire on Windows 7
- Space Cadet Pinball
- Purble Place
Here are games that I’ve played that I didn’t like:
- Quake II RTX
- Doom (1993)
- Counter-Strike 1.6
- Left 4 Dead
- Half-Life
- Speed Dreams
- Assault Cube
- Terraria
- Minetest
- Xonotic
- Piano Tiles
- Geometry Dash
- Payback 2
- Touchgrind Skate 2
- Pixel Wheels
- NBA 2K11
- Defense of the Ancients
- Dota 2
- Sim City 2000
- OpenRCT 2
- OpenTTD
- The Sims 4
- Doki Doki Literature Club
- Tetris (any other implementation I’ve tried)
- Solitaire on Windows XP
Here are games I would like to avoid:
- Battle Royale / Deathmatch- style games (Fortnite, PUBG, etc.)
- MOBAs (League of Legends, Mobile Legends, etc.)
- Hero shooters (Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, etc.)
- Games with fantasy-based elements (Skyrim, The Witcher, Souls games etc.)
- RPGs
- Side-scrollers / Shoot-em-ups / Top-down games
- Platformers
- Horror/supernatural games (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.)
- Management games (Civilization, Cities: Skylines, etc.)
- Artillery games
- Outer-space/post-apocalyptic games (Halo, Fallout, etc.)
- Cookie clickers / Walking simulators
- Rhythm games
- Sports games
- Game adaptations of existing media (Star Wars games, Arkham games, etc.)
- Board/card/gambling/collectible/gacha games\
- Games that have microtransactions/required DLCs
- Text adventures / Visual novels
- Trivia games
- VR games
Other than that, everything is fair game. I don’t have any aversion towards graphic language/gore/sex.
My tastes might be too specific, but I hope someone here may be able to provide me with a recommendation!
You must log in or register to comment.
also if you’re liking gta V you may like Red Dead Redemption 2
If you liked red-alert you might like other RTS games such as Age Of Empires 2 (remaster came out in 2019, very active community) or starcraft2.
How bout some Naughty Dog games? The Last of Us us more thriller (not horror), and while it has some scary moments, it happens to be post-apocalyptic, so naturally, the scary thriller aspect is there.
The whole Uncharted series is also great. It’s essentially a playable movie with dope character development and direction.
Delayed response, but based on you liking Minecraft, survival type genre might be good.
Valheim and Project Zomboid are great games. Subnautica is very immersive. Stardew Valley is a lot of fun.
BTW, have you tried MineClone2 on Minetest. It’s a Minecraft clone so much more fun than Minetest.
The Outer Wilds.
Probably in the top ten games I’ve ever played. Story focused, lite reading, almost no action, maybe some scary elements depending on your personality.
Seems interesting, even though it has space/fantasy elements, it looks more like an outdoor survival game. I’ll try to check it out.
It’s supposed to work on mobile without vr, maybe there’s a non vr version?
There is definitely a non vr version lol. You can play it on PC or consoles with a controller.
Edit: oh heck, I think your response is showing up to the wrong comment, sorry, disregard!
It’s not really a survival game. More of an exploration puzzle game. It doesn’t explicitly tell you where to go or what to do. You’re pretty much on your own to find clues and figure out what happened and how to end the time loop you’re stuck in. It really is a fascinating game. I haven’t played anything else quite like it.
So you want to avoid most of the good games? Wow
Good games? He’s excluding pretty much all games!
I can kinda see why they’ve been out of gaming for decades. I’m also a bit confused by their qualifiers… They say they don’t want top-down games, but listed liking pinball… Is that not a top-down pinball game?
Well, Pinball is a top-down game, but I’ve included it in the games I like because it’s one of the first games I’ve played. If I played it now without any preconception or nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t like it.
Have you tried any of the suggestions yet? I’m curious to know if you liked any of them :)
Oooo once I have my dedicated VR machine set up, I’ll give this a shot. I won’t run Facebook code on my main machine though lawl
deleted by creator
Eh we have a dedicated machine for it. Just been lazy.
VMs will always have a performance hit.
deleted by creator
Not saying ya do, just saying an identical system would run at a higher framerate and more even frametimes if Windows was running natively.
I get you, but the device can only render at its max frame rate, I don’t personally get satisfaction out of higher numbers than optimal.Either way I’m not worried about the less than 5% frame difference Ive got in testing. If I do, I can dual boot into my VM.
Totally fair! I’m just saying, none of my devices can surpass 144FPS on an Index, so it’s definitely better to boot native. It’s a lot more than 5% when you’re trying to hit as high of framerate as you can on an index hahaha
You could buy a VR headset from another company?
I have an Index, I would never touch an Oculus.
The game is Facebook code. I uninstalled Beat Saber when FB bought it, I don’t touch anything Facebook…. I miss Beat Saber so much though.
Wow! This would have been right up my alley if it wasn’t for the need of a VR headset! I’ll try to revisit this game in a few months once I get myself some gear.
Not exactly the same, but I get similar vibes (if slightly more adult) from Squirrel With A Gun.
This looks fun, let’s wait for it to be released.
Yeah, I’m slightly miffed there’s no release date yet…
deleted by creator
Its kind of a tough list you’ve made here friend. I am going to recommend outliers and games that break genre rules instead.
You seem to be split on card games but check out Inscryption and slay the spire to see what you think.
Cult of the lamb was also pretty good by the same publisher.
StarDew valley or my time at Portia or Palia (in beta) are nice casual games.
Hades is challenging and hack and slash roguelite but very good with a neat story. Bastion was really engaging but a platformer slash Action RPG and isometric.
Valheim might scratch an itch. It has a bit of fantasy but its mostly Norse mythology based. Survival and base building.
Strange horticulture was nice if you liked the potion master style of games.
Wildermyth is kind of a write your own story adventure and one of my most played, games but its kind of an RPG, just not in the classic sense.
Death and Taxes is kind of like papers please, but also very short.
Tails Noir is a bit if a linear story game. Less text heavy than Disco Elysium and I enjoyed the journey more than the destination but good game.
Anyway if any seem interesting shoot a reply
Seeing as you liked The Stanley Parable you might want to give Antichamber a try. It’s also in the mindfuckery category of games. And I didn’t see Portal 1/2 on your list, they are in roughly the same area of games, but focused more on the puzzle side of things.
I would just recommend you to refer to metacritic and see the best games of all time for PC if you’re using PC. My personal recommendation is certainly Baldur’s Gate 3. If you prefer multiplayer but would like to avoid the toxic community, then I suggest Deep Rock Galactic.
Rock and stone !
Rock and stone to the bone!
If you enjoyed Papers Please, you might enjoy Lucas Pope’s other major work, Return of the Obra Dinn. It’s a “solve the mystery” game, possibly the best one I’m aware of. It’s very engaging, it’ll make you feel like a genius, and it has basically no replay value.
One of my very, very favorite games is Subnautica. It is a survival game set on an ocean planet, and few games have captured me the way Subnautica did. I think you should go into Subnautica as blind as possible, but I will reveal a few things about it so you can decide if it’s for you: Unlike most survival games it is not inherently open-ended; it has a story that has an end, there is a victory condition to work toward. I would not call Subnautica “a horror game” because horror/scariness isn’t the point of the game, but it does have some scary things in it. By its nature it is also a trigger for thalassophobia aka fear of deep water.
You might enjoy Infinifactory by Zachtronics. It has Minecraft-like block placing gameplay, but you are given fixed immutable environments in which to build little assembly lines out of conveyors, welders, pushers, grinders etc. Of the Zachtronics games I think this is the most accessible, though like many of their games I think the difficulty curve is a little steep.
Among the three games you listed, Return of the Obra Dinn seems most interesting. Subnautica and Infinifactory still looks a little too sci-fi/alien-y for my tastes. Though regarding Infinifactory, I may seem to have played something like it before (which I forgot to include in the first list): 7 Billion Humans. I guess Infinifactory is more of a mechanical version of that…?
The framing device for Infinifactory is you were abducted by aliens and they make you build little assembly lines. The story is very unimportant to the gameplay, it’s an excuse plot you can safely ignore. I’m not familiar with 7 Billion Humans, looking up a let’s play real quick…no Infinifactory isn’t much like that. First Infinifactory is first person 3D, it controls a bit like Minecraft. You have solid blocks, conveyors, rotators, welders and other such blocks you place in a 3D grid. When you press Run, ingredient blocks start popping out of dispensers, and there’s a goal that shows you what shape you need to make them into; and you have to build an assembly line that will continuously run; aka it’s possible to make an assembly line that works the first time but jams itself and can’t make the second one; to beat a level your factory has to produce ten correct samples in a row.
Subnautica is set in a future universe where humans have space travel, your player character is a crewman on a space ship that crashes on an alien ocean planet. It is a bit Sci-Fi but it is an incredibly good game.
ObraDinn was really engaging but the graphics gave me a helluva headache, which is a shame because it seems like a great story with a lot of potential. I would recommend RoadWarden if you like games like this. It was so addicting. Its short but I fell in love with it.
If you can get Saints’ Row 2 or 3 working you may like them.
I know you don’t like management games but you might still enjoy Frostpunk as it’s a bit more like an RTS since it’s about build order when you really get down to it. It is apocalyptic but it’s hopeful rather tgan depressing (for the most part) or “haha you can do anything cus no laws”.
Man your list of nos really eliminates most of my repertoire… :P Have you considered XCOM, XCOM 2 or XCOM Chimera Squad?
Oh! Prey (2016) is a good immersive sim you might- oh it’s set in a space station, nvm…
Ah! Okay, this is a space game, but since you liked Stanley Parable you might be okay with this… Outer Wilds. Don’t look it up, you’ll spoil it. Just get it and play it, seriously. Get it on steam and use a timer so you can refund it if you hate it, but you really really really need to give it a shot.
Since Dishonored and System Shock was already mentioned, I’ll also recommend the Thief trilogy (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief 2: The Metal Age and Thief: Deadly Shadows). Thief along with System Shock is one of the series which started the Immersive Sim genre, which Dishonored belongs to also. The third game came out in 2004 but I also recommend the first two because despite a lot less detailed graphics they imo have a lot better atmosphere and objectively better gameplay (a lot of the gameplay depth was cut in the third one to make it more playable on consoles, but it’s still a good game).
Another one I always tell people about is INFRA. It’s a pretty unknown puzzle/exploration game with excellent atmosphere and very high on my top of all time list. Highly recommend if exploring crumbling or long forgotten urban environments sounds like your thing.
I’ll be checking Thief and INFRA out!
Enjoy!
Please play the souls games.
Dark souls 1,2, and 3. And sekiro.
They are all super good
No microtransaction, good difficulty, and just fun af to play
