I can think of a handful of games that, despite being games that I’ve enjoyed, never really became part of a “genre”. Do you have any like this, and if so, which?
Are they games that you’d like to see another entrant to the genre to? Would you recommend the original game as one to keep playing?
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Outer Wilds
If you’re a naturally curious person, the odds are you will probably enjoy Outer Wilds. No other game I’ve played has ever had quite the same blend of mystery, conquering the unknown, and semi-realistic space exploration.
Could someone make another game like it? Not impossible, I suppose, but I think you would be hard pressed.
Should you keep playing the original? You really can’t, one time through is all you get. Once you have discovered all the secrets and uncovered the mysteries, that is your journey through it. Still fun to visit every once in a while, though
Echoes of the Eye does at least give you a sort of second playthrough
I think Tunic is probably the closest feeling to Outer Wilds I’ve gotten so far. The moment-to-moment gameplay is quite different, but the broad scale feels close
Yeah, Tunic is a great game. I’ve also heard Return to the Obra Dinn is supposed to be similar.
You might like Fez and Animal Well too.
My best recommendation for “replaying” the game is to get the mod “Quantum Space Buddies” and play it alongside a friend. I did this and it allowed me to play it vicariously through them, letting them make all of the decisions and just offering up tiny tidbits of assistance where necessary.
The mod has some bugs, but it’s way more full-featured than I was expecting, and it’s frequently updated to iron out more bugs
That is exactly what I ended up doing! It was a blast, definitely would also recommend
I reaallly need to play this game
Outer Wilds spoiler
Deathloop is the same genre
I’ve got a couple games that maybe fit this category.
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Kerbal Space Program. This had a sequel coming out that apparently wasn’t going very well and was cancelled, so right now, the possibility of a complete additional game isn’t that great. Spaceflight simulator, where one can design and craft spacecraft and amospheric craft, as well as space bases. One can fly to other planets, set up bases, set up satellite networks, etc. There are some “build your own vehicle”-type games, but not as much of a hard sim as this. I believe that X-Plane can handle atmospheric craft modeling, though the scope of that game is much smaller and it focuses more on flying the aircraft. Has a campaign to progress through, where one performs discoveries and conducts research. I’d recommend this to someone who hasn’t played it and likes sim games.
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Kenshi. There’s a sequel coming out, so maybe it won’t be unique at some point. They player controls a squad that moves around the world in real-time – there isn’t an “overworld map”. The squad can be split up into multiple squads. One can build outposts and defenses and such and have something of an automated economy. There’s a tech tree. The world has various factions and dynamic control of regions, something like Mount & Blade: Warband. There are unique biomes to travel through. A fair bit of the world is placed. The world starts out in a mostly-hand-crafted, fixed state, but evolves over time. Character progression isn’t based on point allocation, but on specific experience; have a character get hurt, and over time his ability to take damage will rise, and so forth. I think that this is still worth playing, though it’s by no means a beautiful game and possibly (hopefully) will be surpassed by its sequel.
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Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. A real-time colony sim that can mostly run itself. One has indirect control for the most part; one directly controls upgrades, certain spell and structure abilities, and can spend money to create “incentive flags” to create missions for characters to fulfill. I don’t know if it’s right to call it a single-game genre – it’s a colony sim, and other colony sims exist, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and such. Populus and some god games have direct control over spells. But I don’t know of any other colony sim that plays much like it – most of the focus is on upgrades and on countering waves of invaders, and the gold economy is ununusual. The same developer tried making a sequel, but eliminated the “sandbox” mode, and turned it into more of a puzzle game, and that game didn’t do very well. One builds a colony in real time. There is no direct control over the individual characters, but for certain actions, one can spend money to incentivize them to do certain things. Characters level up and purchase equipment using gold they earn and that you expend on them to purchase items. Some of your control comes from things like building inns to cause them to spend idle time in particular locations. Building construction and maintenance is carried out automatically by peasants. As adventurers spend gold at buildings, it comes back to your control. I think that I’d have a hard time recommending today due to its age (you’re going to have 2d pixel graphics that are going to be tiny on a current computer).
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Pinball Construction Set. This is a video pinball game where the player can use premade elements to easily put together their own pinball board. Very elderly now, dates back to the early 1980s. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this back in the day. Since that time, there have been many video pinball games, as well as some systems that permit some level of authoring capability (e.g. Visual Pinball can run user-created pinball boards), but these require a lot more effort and expertise and “real” authoring tools to put together a pinball board; one can’t just drop in in-game and start throwing elements together. I don’t think that I can recommend this, as it’s absolutely ancient today.
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Noita. It’s based on Liero, but really not at all like it. It’s an action-roguelite (well, that’s a genre, but nothing really similar beneath that level of specificity) that has side-scrolling over an open world. Various materials interact and have their interactions simulated at a per-pixel level, something like the “falling sand” genre. However, there are enemies running around, and the player controls a character that walks and floats through the world. One can find various containers of substances; one can try and mix things together to manipulate the world. One finds wands with spells; one can combine spells and various spell modifiers on wands to create all sorts of custom magic weapons that can range from utility to offensive. The aim, as with many many roguelites, is to try to use some luck and synergies between various items to come up with truly game-breaking combinations. I can definitely recommend this game; I found it to be very good value-for-money.
Honorable mention:
- Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. This is not a single-game genre, but there have only been two successful games in the genre, and one, Carrier Command, is from the 1980s (and which I’ve never played). You control a carrier (strictly speaking, an amphibious assault ship) that moves along an island chain; it can create surface, amphibious, land, and aircraft and weapons for these. One has a limited number of AIs that can control some vehicles automatically; one can give general orders to these, control the vehicles directly. One can capture more resources from the islands to expand one’s abilities. There was a remake of Carrier Command, which flopped, and a sequel, Carrier Command 2, a relatively-recent game, but unlike Hostile Waters, is really intended to be played cooperative multiplayer; playing single-player places a very heavy workload on the player…so I have a hard time placing it in the same genre, even if it has many similarities and was inspired by the same game. While I enjoyed Hostile Waters and I think that it could still be enjoyed, it’s getting a bit long-in-the-tooth graphically, and I recall it being a bit unstable even back in the day.
I always hurt inside when I remember Majesty. It’s such a cool concept that could be expanded much more today.
Rise to Ruins is maybe the most-similar game in terms of gameplay that I can think of. You initiate construction of buildings. You have automated characters build them (kind of like Majesty and Settlers). You can upgrade them, and they can provide equipment to characters. It has the same ramping difficulty of attackers. It doesn’t start with a map populated with monster generators the way Majesty does – instead, they show up over time. It has spells. You can build “defensive buildings”. It starts with the map covered with a fog of war. Your colony’s NPCs level up over time. You can put beefy, non-critical structures to act as something like a tank to absorb attacks while your characters make their way over to deal with a threat, kind of like Majesty.
It’s got some major gameplay differences, though:
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It’s one of the “unwinnable” games – absent some ways to kinda cheese the game and win, you’re just expected to survive for as long as possible. There’s a – I forget the term, but “corruption” – that spreads around the map, making terrain more-and-more hostile, and eventually overwhelming you. Majesty is about surviving the most-unpleasant bit, but if you can overcome that, you’ll win a round.
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No gold economy or NPC incentives. Well, IIRC one can create a “golem attractor” that will tend to make a that particular type of NPCs show up in an area, and you can create structures that NPCs will frequent to tend to make them hang out in a given area.
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A strategic map (which some may like).
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Survival aspects, like needing water and food.
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Path efficiency and building roads and such matters.
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The NPCs do get more-durable, but not to the extreme level that they do in Majesty, and they don’t quite work together in the same sorts of ways.
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It’s got more of a maze-building tower-defense aspect.
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The Majesty Gold HD Edition is currently on sale at GOG btw.:
Noita.
The main section of the game is the tip of the iceberg. Everything is hidden and blocked off, you got to make game breaking combos to start picking up the threads. Finding the mystery/puzzles feels like you no clipped out and found more content that’s not supposed to be seen. You feel like a crazy investigator hinging threads at a cork board once you got game play down.
That first time when you look at a world map and scroll out.
And scroll out
And scroll out.
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The Stanley Parable doesn’t really have a genre, and I don’t think you make another entry into that genre without being derivative. There’s a couple games I can think of that have themes of player agency, Bioshock and to a lesser extent Spec Ops: The Line. Just some ramblings.
ICEY comes to mind, worth a try
The Beginner’s Guide (also by Davey Wreden), One Shot, Undertale and Deltarune, Omori, and SOMA all deal with putting player agency to question.
While it’s a series, it’s really the only franchise like it, so it kinda is its own genre: Katamari.
Dawww doodooodoodo dodooo daw daw daw daw dawww.
I feel it! I feel the cosmos!
I have that one in the alarm library on my phone.
Its not good as a daily driver - if you use it every day you will end up with the song stuck in your head. But its great as a sometimes tone, I think I have it set for Wednesdays at the moment.
I haven’t heard it in years and it got stuck in my head true second I read the name above.
I’ve been meaning to try that game where you play a hole that gets bigger by devouring everything.
If it’s the same game I’m thinking of (but can’t remember the name of), I remember it feeling like a much more shallow version of Katamari. You never realize how important the rolling physics truly are to the Katamari experience until you take them away. It was a pretty neat idea, but just didn’t capitalize on it very much.
EVE Online AKA Spreadsheets Online, back when I played it in 2009. No idea if it’s the same now. Almost entirely player driven economy and factions (outside of hi-sec).
Elite Dangerous, sort of. No other Space Sim is on its scale (I wouldn’t really call something like Space Engine a space sim). Unique, but mixed recommendations because it’s a very shallow game in a lot of ways, but it’s got a cool vibe. Speaking of which…
Space Engine. Not really a game, so much as a universe-simulator. It is unknown to this day how a mortal could create something of this grandeur. Maybe the source code will be released eventually.
Someone else already mentioned Noita :(
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.
Minecraft is hardly unique now, but when it came out it was one-of-a-kind.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.
There are some other games that I’d call somewhat-similar. There’s that old Finnish game, whatsit called, is kind of similar in that it’s a wilderness survival roguelike. An innawoods run in Cataclysm can play kind of like that, though Cataclysm as a whole is a lot larger.
kagis
It never quite grabbed my interest the way Cataclysm has, but a lot of people like it. Huh. Apparently it’s not that old, though it goes for a Win95-era appearance.
Cataclysm, for those who haven’t played it, is a very complex open source open-world roguelike. The modeling of a lot of things, as the game has grown over the years, has become remarkably sophisticated, from local weather systems to things like very extensive (realistic, not like Borderlands guns) gun modding, vehicle (land, sea, air) creation and modeling, farming, NPC camps, cybernetics, mutation, sound/smell/sight tracking enemies, martial arts including weapons forms, skills, proficiencies, various types of real-world (and supernatural) diseases and parasites, brewing, modeling of fires, modeling of pain, temperature…it’s a bit of an organically-grown mishmash, but it’s become a game with an enormous amount of mechanics, albeit a very graphically-simple one. I would definitely recommend it to someone with the time and willingness to explore the game’s systems, which is not for everyone. You can just download builds yourself, or there’s a commercial version on Steam, if you want to support the developers.
To be clear, that’s Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead or CDDA. It’s quite removed from the original cataclysm by whalesdev, and is more focused on strict realism. There is also Cataclysm Bright Nights which is closer to the arcadey feel of the original. Both are great and are open source.
Project Zomboid is very similar thematically to Cataclysm (zombie apocalypse, loot world for supplies to stay alive), but is far simpler in every respect, is real-time rather than turn-based, plays on handcrafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, has its zombie infections be incurable, and has combat that I really don’t like (though Project Zomboid also has a much gentler learning curve and a loveable raccoon mascot). I’m not sure if one could reasonably put it into the same genre. Maybe.
It’s important to note that Project Zomboid uses partial procedural generation, primarily to handle building interior furniture and loot spawning.
I also love spaceships. They’re the greatest symbol of freedom!
Death Stranding. One of my top games of all time. Atmosphere, gameplay, music, Kojima wackiness. It’s loosely in the “transportation” category of games, but it’s not quite a trucking sim, not quite a walking sim, it is story driven, it’s at least half survival-horror, there’s some stealth-action in there. It’s single player and also kinda multiplayer. We laughed at Kojima when he called it a “strand-type game” but it really is a wholly unique experience. The absolute closest you can come to another game like it is Snowrunner, but that isn’t story driven, you never leave your trucks, there are no enemies, etc.
Death Stranding is how I discovered Low Roar. They’re one of my favorite artists now, although I’m extremely sad they won’t be releasing any more music.
Yeah, I’ve have a few games that I’ve really enjoyed the bands from.
This is kind of diverging from the topic, but…one of my annoyances in video games is that that there are a number of video games that I play to the point of getting tired of the music, but don’t have the option to buy more music tracks for. There are mods for Stellaris to add more music tracks – people clearly want more music – but even though Paradox is a game publisher that specializes in putting out games with huge amounts of DLC, they don’t sell additional audio for the game, which just seems bizarre to me. I really wish that Fallout: New Vegas had commercial DLC radio packs in the same genre, but nope – though there are people who have made enormous free “radio” mods for the Fallout series, like Old World Radio and Old World Radio 2 for Fallout 4, so there are clearly a considerable number of players who’d like more music to be available.
This doesn’t work for games that you play through once and are done with, but I kind of wish that when a band creates audio for a game that one spends a lot of time playing, that the game developer would at least provide the option to buy more audio from the band for it, as long as it fits. The amount of developer time required to incorporate additional audio tracks seems very limited, and if the band is still producing audio in the same style, it seems like it’d be a sensible fit.
What’s even odder is that it’s become extremely common for game publishers on Steam to go the opposite direction and sell access to the game’s soundtrack to play independently of the game. So they’re basically acting as a music vendor already. That’s also very low developer-effort. But they very rarely have DLC to add more audio from the band back into the game.
Cities: Skylines is the only game that I can think of off the top of my head where the game publisher sold additional DLC music.
I don’t understand why either game publishers or music labels wouldn’t love that kind of relationship. If you’re a music label, have a bunch of IP, I’d think that getting royalties from your audio getting wider play is almost always worthwhile, and if it’s in a game, it’s not competing with non-game use; if anything, it probably promotes it. From a game publisher’s standpoint, the cost to incorporate more music in many games is minimal, so the risk is very low. From a player’s standpoint, it makes the game more-playable; the music doesn’t wear on you.
From a roleplay/world building perspective, I really like the fact that Fallout New Vegas has an extremely limited radio and I do think the atmosphere would be seriously damaged if they had added more songs. I haven’t played the other Fallout games but I reckon this is probably applicable there too. I understand that people get bored of the same songs over and over again, but that’s a feature not a bug. If you were living a hard scrabble life a post-apocalyptic wasteland where no one has the means or resources to be writing, recording and distributing popular songs, yeah you’d probably get bored of listening to the same music over and over again. And then when you turn the radio off, all you can hear is the creepy horror sounds of the Mojave and suddenly listening to Jingle Jangle on repeat doesn’t seem so bad after all. The repetitive, upbeat soundtrack is super effective at making you feel like you’re stuck between two not so great choices, one awful and one somewhat better but severely lacking. And that really reflects what it’s like to live in the Mojave–you often don’t have the luxury of a completely satisfying choice because you and everyone else is fighting for survival. Specific to FoNV, it really drives home the political climate of the harsh, brutal Legion versus the comforting but stale and ineffective NCR. Honestly FoNV is the first game that really made me think in depth about the music choices in a video game and I’m really really glad they made this choice.
I am pretty sure though that the Big Mountain DLC added a new radio station.
Pyre. Guess where my username comes from.
It’s a supergiant game so the usual is there: Great characters, interesting story, great dialog, fantastic art… very touching and inspirational all around. To this day it is the only game that has actually made me feel conflicted about playing well.
At a certain point in the story I just couldn’t, and it felt like my hands were sabotaging my game independently. Weird ass feeling. And purely for character reasons, nothing really to gain from it mechanically.
What I love about it was that this wasn’t really presented as a typical videogame dilemma. Nothing in the gameplay was different. It was just another “game” that I was expected to win, but one of my characters was desperately hoping to lose.
Well I lost that time and felt good about it. No game has made me make a decision that completely ignored the gameplay implications.
“Do you want to save this little girl or literally torture her and suck her life force? The evil option will give you immediate rewards but the good option will give you better rewards a little later and also the good ending!” Wow Bioshock, really tough choice there, thanks for putting my noodle to work.
I love Pyre, its the only game I’ve ever 100%'d. A lot of people consider it supergiant’s worst game, but it’s my #1 favorite game. If only the multiplayer had online play, I’d consider it perfect.
the custom song at the end alone makes the game worth playing
Hardspace shipbreaker. You are a wage slave in orbit, disassembling and salvaging ships and binning the components. It’s very dystopian. Essentially it’s a puzzle game, to maximize profit and completion rate, but with physics and lasers.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a great and very unique game in my opinion. A fun investigation game that makes me feel smart for solving it. I wish I could replay it, but once you’ve solved how everyone has died aboard the Obra Dinn, there’s not much reason to replay.
Pacific Drive is weird but really fun. It’s like DiRT meets CONTROL.
I don’t think it needs another. It stands alone as a testament to an interesting game design that shouldn’t be watered down.
I have yet to find another game that plays like Inscryption. It’s a deck builder, but wow, it has a story. Interestingly good game that I want more of.
While Elite Dangerous is part of a genre, it is a rare game that is actually meant for lots of controller/J HOTAS methods and has shockingly deep gameplay. You can tell it was really meant for adept players, a rare style of games these days. I doubt we will see one like it for awhile, just due to the needs of consumers, the game engine, and the capital required to build a game of that size again.
I personally though ED was quite shallow. Deeper than e.g. No Man’s Sky but still very “fake”. The economy is just a bunch of RNG, nothing real. I recently got into X4: Foundations which is much better IMHO. It really simulates the entire economy and production chains. You can carry out supply chain attacks on your enemies. It’s like a cross between ED and Stellaris.
Maybe SimEarth.
This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.
1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.
I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.
I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.
EDIT: Liquid War. This is open-source and part of the GNU project. One has a map with some areas closed off and some open space that liquid can flow through. There are two or more “blobs” of liquid of different color; each is attempting to destroy the other. Your blob is attracted to your mouse cursor. “Moving into” a pixel of the other color eventually converts it to your own. If two liquids meet in a bottleneck, they tend to stalemate. One wins by getting liquid on multiple sides of the opponent’s liquid, so that one can move one’s own liquid from multiple directions into it. Maybe a bit closer to a tech demo than a full-on game. I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but it is free and as far as I know unique, and I had fun with it.
I almost forgot about SimEarth. For some reason I was allowed to play it in grade school computer lab. I wish they would remake it so I can recreate my sentient cephalopod uprising, except with graphics that aren’t complete ass.
I never played SimLife. But no, Spore is really not like SimEarth at all. As the other person said, Spore is disappointingly shallow on all levels.
I never went very far into SimEarth (I remember getting a bunch of maxis’s simstuff in the 90s, and not having the patience to really get into some of them back then).
However, I did play Spore during its prime. It’s very shallow, on all levels. Don’t expect any kind of simulation in there, especially not physics or even basic biology and evolution really.
Its whole gameplay loop : design a beast, eat or make friends, be a tribe, fight or make friends, design a town and vehicles, fight or make friends, design a spaceship, fight or make friends and try to reach the center of the galaxy because I don’t know.
You can manipulate planet atmospheres in the space phase, but there are no variations : you can basically make planets “suitable” for life, and all life in the game needs the exact same parameters. There is zero room for experimentation and everything is basically just as efficient as everything else.
Liquid War was awesome. One of my favorite things about it was that you could make your own maps using black and white bitmaps.
Is it fair to mention Undertale? It’s kind of an anti-RPG.
Diary of a Spaceport Janitor is a slice of life/poverty simulator in which you scrape by earning pennies, dreaming of escape and adventure. Full of charm!
Miasmata is a horror/cartography game where you have to triangulate PoIs in order to fill out your map as you search for a cure to your disease on an uninhibited tropical island.
Yoku’s Island Express is a metroidvania/pinball game in which you traverse the world vis flippers, chutes, and as a bug rolling a ball.
Terra Nil. It’s an anti city builder. Land in a polluted wasteland, clean the soil, plant seeds, set up ecosystems, make sure they can persist without you, and recycle all your structures before you leave. Appreciate the beauty of the natural ecosystem you restored as you fly away.
I want more games like this.
I just started playing Terra Nil today, on your recommendation; I had a craving for a crafting type game, and remembered I had saved this comment two weeks ago. I’m really enjoying it, so thank you — I wouldn’t have known of it if not for you.
Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It’s a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you’re managing a very bad situation. In one, you’re holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you’re wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there’s a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.
