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!
So you want to avoid most of the good games? Wow
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.
Outer Wilds and Return of The Obra Dinn are two that I would recommend. The latter was made by the creator of Papers Please.
Both are basically “solve a mystery by gathering clues and exploring” type games.
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 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.
It’s supposed to work on mobile without vr, maybe there’s a non vr version?
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.
Disco Elysium
Ehhh, that one is kind of reading-heavy, as well as being top-down. It might not be what OP is looking for.
All dialog is voiced and the OP excluded most games so I’m just recommending a banger game.
I agree with the rec here. I think at this point OP is just going to have to roll the dice on the recent hits and see if it can change some of their tastes. Or just drop the medium altogether.
Maybe it’ll help a little that Disco Elysium is isometric, not top-down. Though it’s an RPG. And text-heavy. 🤷♀️