Outer Wilds changed my life then Tunic changed it again
Edit: Game Recommendations by the people in the comments:
- Disco Elysium - @[email protected]
- Kingdom Come Deliverance - @[email protected]
- Fez - @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist - @[email protected]
- Noita - @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]
- The Witness - @[email protected]
- Lingo - @[email protected]
- Bad End Theater - @[email protected]
- Celeste - @[email protected]
- Fear & Hunger - @[email protected]
- minit - @[email protected]
- The Forgotten City - @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]
- Deathloop - @[email protected]
- The Soulsborne games - @[email protected]
- Void Stranger - @[email protected]
- Baba Is You - @[email protected]
- Roguelikes as a genre - @[email protected]
- The Long Dark - @[email protected]
- Who’s Lila? - @[email protected]
- Cultist Simulator - @[email protected]
- Sorcery! - @[email protected]
And some game recommendations by me to add on to the post:
- Taiji
- A 2D puzzle game where you slowly unravel how to solve each different element of the puzzles, eventually culminating in a massive puzzle gauntlet. Basically identical in concept and execution to The Witness, but still very much its own unique and fun game.
- The Golden Idol
- A puzzle game where each level you must examine a scene to figure out exactly what happened, eventually piecing together the full story over several levels. Don’t let the art style put you off, it’s an incredibly well done game. Most similar to Return of the Obra Dinn in concept.
- Stories: The Path of Destinies
- an action RPG with a branching choice-driven storyline, but not every story has a happy ending… You’ll piece together the true story over multiple playthroughs and eventually find the one true path. It wasn’t a particularly life-changing game but it was still a lot of fun and worth checking out if it sounds interesting!
Toki tori
I almost feel like you’re describing a job.
I’m always having to learn new practical skills for work, and getting into things I know nothing about and having to learn them to be successful.
The difference is that the skills you learn from playing games usually are not transferable to the rest of your life. There’s some exceptions to this but most of the stuff you learn from complex games are completely fabricated for the game and have very little bearing on real life… Though, am argument can be made in many cases, such as kerbal. I haven’t played kerbal, but I understand there’s some reasonably accurate orbital mechanics and rocket science involved. This is just one fairly obvious example that I know of. Not to be confused with a comprehensive list of games with practical educational value.
For me though, I usually don’t want to learn anything useful while playing a game, since that’s basically what I do for work. So any game, like our example of kerbal will, in all likelihood, feel like more work to me, which is decidedly not the objective I’m going for by playing a game.
I dunno. Different games for different folks or whatever.
I don’t think that’s what they meant. More like where the game doesn’t hold your hand or suddenly give you knowledge of things that you don’t learn through playing. Like in outer wilds where the game really gives you almost nothing to direct you at first, you have to learn what’s happening and how to progress. But once you know it, you could technically finish the whole game in only a few minutes as it’s entirely deterministic and won’t gate you from content just because you didn’t do an arbitrary condition to reach it.
Fair enough.
I’ll mention Fez since I think people forgot about it in the wake of all the Phil Phish drama.
Excellent game that I think fits this bill.
I still think about the Heart Cube puzzle with the observatory and red stars in that game sometimes.
Outer wilds is soooo good, so thank you for reminding me that tunic exists, I’ll get that one now.
do it do it do it do it do it it’s so good
I just got it and wow it’s real interesting. I got that one big golden thingy to spew out magical lines and stuff, and I got my sword, currently seeking that shield.
Good luck, and remember: always read the manual!
deleted by creator
You know how metroidvanias gate progression by having, for example, a jump you can’t make without an upgrade, or a poison area you can’t survive passing through without a way to be immune to poison, and so on? That, but instead of it being an upgrade your character gets, it’s knowledge. You find a clue somewhere in the game that allows you to solve a puzzle elsewhere. You were always able to take the actions needed to solve it, you just had to learn that you could.
These are games where a major portion of the gameplay involves learning about the game. In Heaven’s Vault and Chants of Sennaar this manifests as learning languages. In Return of the Obra Dinn this is figuring out what happened on the ship. In Tunic and The Outer Wilds this is based around knowledge checks, or mechanics that are present from the start of the game but you only learn how to exploit them much later.
There’s also Roguelikes where most of the progression is just getting better at the game and knowledge on things to do.
Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds are about unveiling a mistery.
Heaven’s Vault is about deciphering an ancient lost language.
Actively trying to lobotomize myself so I can play Obra Dinn for the first time again
“Huh so apparently she got killed by a falling ship mast? Alrighty.”
<- clueless
“The Long Dark”. Knowing the maps by heart and being able to navigate by landmarks is key to survival.
For anyone that has last played the game 2 or more years ago, go and revisit it. The game has had continuous improvements that make it worth a revisit.
noita
Noita’s genre may as well be Trial and Error.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance fits this bill, I think. I haven’t played any of the games listed yet, so I can’t compare.
Not particularly.
Also, Tunic really shouldn’t be on the list.Games like Tunic or Kingdom Come, you get better at the game as you learn more. With total knowledge of the game comes mastery of the gameplay.
The rest of the games on this list, there’s effectively no gameplay once you know everything about the game. With total knowledge of the game comes an end to the gameplay, because knowledge literally is progression in the game. None of those more so than Outer Wilds, in which a casual replay would literally let you skip to the end of the game with no tricks, because the entire game has no progression mechanics at all. Once you know how to finish the game, you can just do it.
edit:
I stand slightly corrected about Tunic.Tunic absolutely does have tons of knowledge based progression. You can skip through massive chunks of the game simply because you have knowledge the game withheld from you. As you collect manual pages throughout the game you learn new mechanics that have always been there from the start, you simply didn’t know how to access them. A big example of this is accessing the hub, which is a massive game changing discovery halfway through the game that you can access in the first 60 seconds.
Lots of knowledge-based progression, sure, but not “render the gameplay redundant” levels of knowledge-based progression. Still, I retract my statement that it shouldn’t be on the list.
The Forgotten City is good
You fool
YOU are the fool because I am harvesting this thread for game recommendations and you have fallen right into my trap! Muahaha!
Tell me what you think about it when you get the game. I’m eager to know.
It’ll likely be a long while yet before I end up getting around to it but I’ll keep you in mind
You’re both fools because I am harvesting lols and game recommendations >:)
I hear you’re taking reccos. May I suggest The Forgotten City? It’s not quite the same, but has a very similar “learn wtf is happening* as you go” mechanic. Also it’s one of my favorites.
Another comment recommended that as well, I’ll add that to the list! I always love a good “wtf is going on” type mystery.
I have some suggestions that fit this category with varying degrees so I will include some justifications so you can decide if you want to include them in your own playlists
- Her story/the stanley parable :: fit the category perfectly
- subnautica :: Survival game with heavy exploration. Unusually for this genre it has a story which you can only progress by finding some clues and piecing them together
- the witness :: This one has been mentioned already but I just wanted to reiterate that although it may seem like a simple puzzle game it’s a good fit for this category. Here’s an excellent analysis of it that you can watch after playing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
- The talos principle :: the main part of this game is just a puzzle game so it seemingly doesn’t fit very well. However, along with those there are some characters which ask you some philosophical questions which you unintentionally end up mulling over while solving the puzzles. By the end of the game you have understood some things that can make the ending very meaningful and emotional.
- antichamber/gorogoa/superliminal/baba is you :: Simple puzzle games but they are solved by lateral thinking where you’re constantly pushing the boundaries and rules of the puzzle itself
- into the breach :: rougelike tactics game. Someone else mentioned how roguelikes in general fit this category and this is my honorable mention
- hacknet :: You are given some tools that can open some doors but you have to learn how to exploit those doors to open the remaining ones
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
YYEEAAAAAAHHHH outer wilds!!! FUCK that game just absolutely slaps, top tier experience.
Tunic was incredible, what they did with the manual was just, great.
It was so unique! I found myself getting extremely excited whenever I would see that glowing page because it was always a treat to see what new knowledge they would give me next!