These days I play a lot of The Long Dark. An unforgiving survival experience in the Canadian North. It can be very stressful and intense, but also very relaxing and calming.
Another great game I played recently is Subnautica. More exploration/crafting than survival, but still great. That's the one game I wish I could erase from my memory to start over.
Some odd ones: Euro/America Truck Simulator. Very relaxing games.
I also have a fairly big library on GoG, my all-time favorites:
* The Tomb Raider series (up to the 5th). The Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy is also not bad, but I really don't like the latest reboot.
Portal 2 is my all time favourite game and the most fun I've had playing multiplayer.
All the aspects of the games gel together so wonderfully to make a really immersive experience. I just loved how the backstory was unveiled as you went through the game (especially Portal 2). Plus Stephen Merchant as Wheatley is iconic.
Three top single-player story action games: Prey (2017), Horizon Zero Dawn, and Control. Each of those three is a masterpiece of worldbuilding, a deep touching story, and has awesome feeling gameplay.
I'd add Dishonored and Deathloop to that list. It helps that they too have somewhat open worlds, cleverly gated. So there's a feeling of progression without feeling like you're on rails.
1. I find it satisfying to build a large self-sustaining empire.
2. I love programming, this game is like development but without the annoyances. I prefer the top-down 2D over Satisfactory/Dyson Sphere Program's 3D, you get a nicer overview of what's going on
3. Dealing with heat/gas/fluid dynamics and logistics in this game is so fun.
4. I enjoy conquering the world from time to time.
But my all time favorites are : All of the Zelda games. The lore, the music, the story, the gameplay, just perfect.
Not much of a gamer but I absolutely loved playing Inside a few years ago. It's a platformer that takes place in an apocalyptic setting and you should solve interesting puzzles in the form of clearing obstacles to move forward. I thought the sound design really captured the mood well.
If you like that, try Limbo, built by the same indie studio. Similar concept but I liked Inside better.
I guess I'll post what I call my 'top 5'[0], because the term 'favorite' is difficult to apply to anything so broad as all of games. They are presented here in no particular order.
- X-COM: UFO Defense [aka Enemy Unknown] (Strategy and Tactics)
- Outer Wilds [with Echoes of the Eye DLC] (Space exploration, micro edition)
- DOOM (The FPS that broke the world)
- Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (Interactive essay on the nature of frustration and difficulty)
- Subnautica (The only good Survival Craft-em-up)
- Undertale (90s Kid RPG: The Movie: The Game)
I've recently sunk a lot of time into Slay the Spire. It's a deck-building rougelike that's fairly simple to get into but has a lot of depth. No two runs are the same and once you start learning how enemies attack you can plan your moves more strategically. I'm not the fastest, my runs take at least an hour, but I'm slowly getting better. Third most-played game of mine, after Rocket League and Fallout 3.
- Persona 5 Royal: a turn-based JRPG with an incredible soundtrack and great story. I like the art style, too. Currently only available on PlayStation 4, but many expect a PC port to come soon.
- Yakuza 0: an action-adventure JRPG, with a really good story. It's a prequel to the well-known series, but 0 is the best in my opinion. It was actually my favorite game before I played P5R.
- Final Fantasy XIV: an MMORPG. I haven't followed the story, but it's considered to be one of the best FF story in recent years. If you have an MMO itch, go for it!
- Dead Cells: a rogue-lite made by an employee-respecting company. Try, die, get good. It's like Dark Souls but in 2D.
- Crusader Kings II or III: strategy game and dynasty simulator where you can conquer the world.
- Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel: coop FPS shot'n'loot.
Phase 10 and Five Crowns. Card games. They both have defined lengths, as opposed to set scores for a game to end, which is nice for the pacing of a games night. And they are both engaging enough to be fun, while simple enough to focus on the people you are playing with.
I like the old Tomb Raider games. Have a dedicated box just for playing them. Partly nostalgia, partly just for tinkering with them, trying out new custom levels, using downloaded savegames where I can jump to my favorite parts of the game. I'm talking TR1, TR2 & TR3. TR4 for the ability to create custom levels using the TR4 level editor. Modern Tomb Raider games bore me to death. I think the old TR games by Core Design are the best, and they're hackable too. Plenty of mods can be done, like changing textures, and some tools even allow you to customize Lara and give her new attire.
Have you actually played the reboot of tomb raider made in 2013? Having played the original games when I was younger, the reboot is indisputably better in almost every respect: graphics, exploration, storyline, camera, controls, etc.
Like all games that attempted photo realistic graphics to approximate the real world, the original tomb raider has aged about as poorly as the graphics in goldeneye for the Nintendo 64.
They're all reasonably good IMO. Though honestly I find the controls from the mid-oughts and later much more approachable. Original engine games required so much anticipation, timing, and pixel perfect execution they feel sluggish and tedious now. Still the original was a tech marvel, running reasonably well when on Saturn.
I like reasonably-paced RPGs and strategy games. Some of the recent good ones I've played:
1. Civilization 5 (I know it's not too recent but I haven't gotten around to trying Civ 6 yet.)
2. Pillars of Eternity 1&2 - a party-based RPG with a great storyline and several hours of gameplay.
3. Darkest dungeon - turn-based RPG with really challenging and very different gameplay. Mindless slashing and magicking won't get you through this one.
Sometimes I also go back to the console-era classics of the RPG genre. My favourites - Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger and the Shining Force series.
The Witness - a masterpiece of puzzle and level design. Nothing in that game is frivolous. Might be a little confusing at first, but if you explore and experiment its rules will become clearer to you.
The Outer Wilds - a technical masterpiece and a game where you can beat the game very quickly if you know what to do, but you have to put in about 10-15 hours of exploration all across a solar system to gain the knowledge of what you need to do in order to beat it. An excellent creepy, puzzly, and deadly mystery.
Persona 5 Royal - The combat can get a little samey in this game, but the style, soundtrack, and world is amazing. Also love how you have to decide what activities you spend your free time on, as you can only do a few at a time.
Danganronpa series - Bonkers murder mystery graphic novel that stretches across multiple games with an extremely creative story.
Civilization series - masterpiece of 'just one more turn' gameplay. I don't play it too many times in a year, but whenever I do sit down to play it again, I tend to lose a weekend to it.
Baba Is You - clever puzzle that requires you to change your thinking entirely to solve its puzzles, as by pushing together and breaking apart pieces of sentences you can change the rules of the level in very surprising ways.
Super Mario Odyssey - tons of fun with lots to find and collect, and figuring out for the first time what all you can possess with Cappy and what new creative abilities it grants you is super fun.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - a huge world to explore that just barf a bunch of icons on the map and tells you to go there to do some minigame thing like Ubisoft does. You see something that looks different and interesting in the distance? Go there, and you will likely be rewarded. Also tons of interesting physics puzzles.
God of War - great story, feels like you're playing a movie at times, gorgeous visuals, super fluid combat (actually tried going back to breath of the wild after a playthrough of this and BOTW's combat felt pretty boring in comparison), and even some clever puzzles thanks to being able to throw an axe that freezes things that you can recall from anywhere.
Into The Breach - Clever tactics game that helped refresh the formula by telling you exactly what the enemy is about to do on their next turn, so it becomes a puzzle in figuring out how to minimize or redirect their targets/movements and/or who needs to be eliminated most this turn.
Hades - clever rogue-like game where the story advances between runs, and people react to how far you progressed in that run. and within the run, you're given lots of choices of how to grow and expand your character each level, by choosing from multiple exits that tell you the type of reward you'll get for clearing it, and even the rewards themselves giving you multiple options within each type. I do wish it had a bit more variety in the level structure itself, though, but it's fun enough to play I still managed to sink 20 hours into it, which is probably the most I've ever put into a rogue-like.
Nier Automata - amazing soundtrack I listen to in the background all the time (even went to the concert), interesting mash up of ideas and genres and multiple perspectives storytelling together.
I cannot recommend Outer Wilds enough. It is a game-defining game. There's a little caution in the recommendation: some people complain a bit about the controls (they're a bit realistic and therefore unforgiving), and it's playable with keyboard and mouse but a controller makes things a lot easier.
A lot of the value in this game comes from discovering things for yourself, and it is easy to get spoiled. If an exploration game (in the true sense of the term--not the "we have a big world and will send you on pointless fetch quests" you see often) where the only inventory you have is your own knowledge sounds anywhere near interesting to you, you should play and also not spoil yourself with reviews that might tell you critical concepts that are best to discover yourself.
> and it's playable with keyboard and mouse but a controller makes things a lot easier.
I actually disagree with this. There is exactly one way in which a controller is better in Outer Wilds[0] and it isn't, in my opinion, enough better to make up for its shortcomings everywhere else.
[0] People who have played the game know where and why, and it doesn't actually help that much.
I've been playing Hades the last few weeks. Easily one of the best games in its genre.
I just wish the boons weren't mutually exclusive so that you could get more interesting, emergent kits like you can in The Binding of Isaac.
With Binding of Isaac, there's always a more ridiculous kit out there which makes it addictive to play again and see what unfolds. You can pick up lasers, bouncing bullets, and homing upgrades, and now you have homing, bouncing, lasers. (The code to make every upgrade synergize with every other upgrade must have been a real feat.)
With Hades, you just get to choose between the same few boons that don't stack with each other, so the game never really changes.
Your attack causes frost damage or it crits or it pushes enemies away or it reflects projectiles or it weakens enemies, but—dual boons aside—you never get to have fun mixing them together.
Factorio is great. Too great, I can't play it any more because it sucked up all my free time. If you're stronger than me and like the idea of a factory game where you build progressively more complicated or simple machines (your choice) then you may like this game.
If I had to choose a favorite among the 20 or so contenders, for me nothing matches the original X-Com: UFO Defense. The graphics and UI were utter trash even for the time, but the tension created by that game was unreal.
My favourite is The Staring Game, that I used to play with total strangers in public transport as a young man. It sounds a little aggressive and scary but in the few years I played it, there was never any kind of altercation, or really any other exchange, than the game itself.
It is a kind of emergent game where you can only know the rules by playing the game and by an unspoken, but somehow mutual agreement with the other players.
Here are a few of the rules that I learned:
1. It's a two-person game. You can only play with one other player at a time.
2. You challenge an opponent by looking them in the eyes and not looking away at the point where you would be expected to do so. The other player accepts the challenge by not averting their gaze. If they don't want to play, they will look away or ignore you. In either case, they will make their intention clear very quickly. It takes maybe a couple of seconds for all this to transpire.
3. You win if you keep your gaze fixed until the other player looks away.
4. The game is a draw if the other player is forced to look away, for example because it's their stop, or another passenger demands their attention etc.
5. If eye contact is interrupted, for example because people come and stand between the players, the result is undefined. If contact is re-established, a new game must be initiated by one of the players challenging the other all over again.
6. If the other player behaves aggressively, tries to ridicule the opponent, or otherwise tries to disrupt the opponent's gaze, they are disqualified. The only contact between the players must be gazing into each other's eyes.
7. Blinking is allowed, but excessive blinking may be cause for disqualification.
8. It is fine to challenge a player after losing a first round. I found that in that case there is a heavy psychological penalty, though and I usually lost again in that situation.
9. It is a game played by men. A man staring at a woman's eyes can be creepy or scary and so it is hard to make a fair challenge. I've never seen two women play. On the other hand, I also never saw two men play when I wasn't one of them.
Those are the rules I remember. This was a long time ago, and perhaps the rules would have changed now that I'm not a young man anymore.
I became quite good at the game, although I was not undefeated. I played for a couple of years, primarily on long train rides that lasted half an hour or more.
I keep a small constantly in-flux list of games that I think are both excellent and that I think are particularly valuable for game designers (specifically designers who focus on smaller, single-player indie games) to both play and seriously study. These are games that I think get a lot of things right, have solid core design principles, and importantly, are also so consistently good and so transparently good at what they do that you can just kind of study them and dig into them and find a lot of design lessons the more obsessively you pick them apart.
- Shovel Knight: is a wealth of information about solid level design, specifically about how to use and reuse mechanics in interesting ways, and how to make levels accessible using multiple mechanics/strategies. A good resource to use when thinking about how to reuse and adapt mechanics and mash genres together.
- Undertale: Games as narrative and using mechanics to reinforce narrative/philosophy. Undertale is a master-class in how to approach meaningful, artistic game design through a technical lens where you're not just saying that your game is art, you're backing that up with smart design choices that effectively communicate and reinforce your theme.
- Baba is You: Puzzle design and using systems to build puzzles, how to build puzzles that feel creative and that don't feel like busywork. Baba is You is also really hard, and there's some good lessons here about how having systems that feel playful as well as having ways to branch out and go in different directions and do different puzzles out of order can help alleviate some of the frustration that comes from really difficult puzzles -- also some of the areas where that falls slightly flat. Compare the systemic design in Baba is You and Spelunky and figure out how the design philosophies here overlap.
- Spelunky: Systemic design and how to do randomization/generation well. Spelunky does a great job of teaching the difference between breadth of content and depth of content in randomization. I think Spelunky is also a really great example of how making all of your numbers (health, inventory, etc) smaller and can make individual actions feel more impactful and can make each choice feel more meaningful. Compare with Noita, which I think goes in the opposite direction to its detriment, it's a higher-res destructible terrain that somehow feels more samey in part because of the higher granularity of destruction and stats. It is possible that Spelunky 2 should be here instead of 1, but I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, and I've avoided spoilers so I don't know anything about it (waiting on a Linux/Non-Steam release).
- Rayman Legends: Flow state in games, level design as a communicative act with the player. When you play a lot of this game, you start to internalize how the level designers think and what motifs they use while designing levels. After a while, playing the game feels like you're just following a conversation with the level designer, you can start to predict what they're going to throw at you, and when you get into this flow state during daily challenges or endless modes, it's almost like you're dancing with the designer, you learn these "moves" and you're just endlessly executing them and trusting that the designer will act predictably. See if you can figure out how to play through the music levels where the screen gets all screwy (note that these levels are not deaf-accessible). Take a step back and think about how Rayman Legends uses consistency and repeated sections in levels to help mitigate issues like blind/unknown jumps in endless mode.
- Terraria: Terraria on its surface shouldn't be good, because it's grindy and has really broad mechanics and a ton of mini-systems that don't seem like they strictly need to be there, and the controls aren't particularly tight, and you basically need a wiki to play it well, and yet Terraria is excellent and it's worth trying to figure out why the game works so well when other games like it don't to the same degree. Terraria has a massive breadth of just... stuff. And it all kind of works because the sheer quantity of content kind of covers up the fact that you're doing random loot drops and that most of the game's systems are optional. It took me a while to start enjoying it, when I first played it I bounced off really hard. But I regularly go back to it because it breaks a lot of rules that I have and yet I still love it, so it's a good reminder that a lot of design isn't set in stone, and it's a good example of how to break design rules well. I mention that Slay the Spire below feels "generous", Terraria is also a game that feels generous: you have a bunch of rare items that are annoying to get, but there are so many of them that you're still constantly finding cool things. Pull out the systems that it has and look at how they interact with each other: most of them are optional, but many of them still have benefits or intertwine with each other in weird ways. Contrast with Starbound: why does Terraria feel like it's bursting at the seams with content vs Starbound feeling kind of samey? Revisit Spelunky and think about randomization again.
An incomplete list of other games that I've played recently or had on my mind recently that I think are good for similar reasons to the list above:
- Loop Hero: There's a lot of really smart design in this game, in particular I love the way that it approaches difficulty where players kind of organically shape how difficult they want their run to be. The whole game feels really unique and is worth digging into and exploring, it's closer to an idle game than a roguelike.
- Ring of Pain: One of the best "deck-builder-roguelike" games I've personally played in that whole weird genre. Really good difficulty balancing, what I love about Ring of Pain is that the line between being dead and OP is really thin, and you can have great runs that you just lose in two turns because you aren't paying attention. At the same time, the game isn't so intensely hard that it requires you to expend a ton of mental energy constantly thinking 10 moves in advance while you play. Ring of Pain is a good game to deconstruct because it feels "tighter" than many other games in the genre, it's easier to pick out the really solid mechanical choices that it makes.
- Slay the Spire: Somewhat rough, and has a lot of flaws, but also has a lot of good stuff. I think Slay the Spire is a good lesson in what it means to make a game that feels "generous", there's so much stuff going on and so many modes and stats and things you can play around with that it overwhelms the flaws. It's a game where as soon as you open it up you feel like you have your money's worth; it's scratching a weird psychological itch in that way. It's also a good example of how a game doesn't need to be perfectly balanced, you can have runs that get so OP that it's absurd, and it doesn't really detract from the game in any way that this can occasionally happen -- I think having some OP builds/outcomes is something designers in single-player games sometimes get too frightened about. Contrast with Ring of Pain or Spelunky though, both of which do a much better job of blurring the line between overpowered and about to die (although there are still OP outcomes you can achieve in both of those games).
- Portal: If you've never gotten around to it, Portal is still a masterclass in puzzle accessibility, with the caveat that you can then go to games like Portal 2 and start to see where Valve's philosophy about player signaling in puzzles starts to break down a little bit. Valve has a lot of ingenious tricks to get players to look at important puzzle elements, to signal what's to happen and what mechanics to pay attention to. The problem is that as they lean more and more into those tricks, as a player you start to rely on them. You can get into puzzles near the end of Portal 2 that are solvable purely by looking at what lights are flashing or where subtle lines on the walls are pointing. So you have this really brilliant set of rules (the commentary in Portal goes into those rules in more detail), but there are also weaknesses here because like a dog learning to read human tells, you realize that you don't necessarily need to have a great grasp on the mechanics if you just look around each puzzle and wait for Valve to signal the solution to you.
- Breath of the Wild: In my opinion the most creative Zelda game that Nintendo has made since Majora's Mask, and also a better game than Majora's Mask because Majora's Mask is experimental and clumsy, and BotW is experimental and well executed. It isn't the lack of tutorials or the environmental interactions that make Breath of the Wild special, it is the weapons degradation system and the way the world levels up around you and how that encourages a kind of flow to how the player traverses the overworld and interacts with the environment. I think that Breath of the Wild did something really special with that system, and then didn't communicate it well, and a lot of the criticism of the game has come from people not really knowing how to engage with a system that wasn't communicated well and that was meant to be played in a different way than most other open world games. There are intuitions players have about how open world systems work and what they're supposed to do inside of them and about how resource management works, and BotW breaks those tropes and doesn't really tell the player that it is breaking them. It doesn't do a good enough job of teaching the player that hording resources and good weapons is literally unoptimal play that makes it harder to progress in the world. I think the game has some significant flaws, I vaguely predict that if other games take lessons from it and start exploring this idea of having a world that levels up rather than a player that levels up, it'll end up being eventually talked about in the same way that Demon's Souls is talked about: an important game that wasn't really understood when it came out, but that nevertheless pushed gaming in a certain direction and that was later eclipsed by other games that better executed the core ideas without any of the flaws. But short version of all of that, BotW is genius and their biggest mistake was not making the weapons break even faster and more often, and I hope the sequel doubles down on it, bite me.
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Not going to take the time to write them up more but:
- Hollow Knight (good Metroidvania with good lessons about worldbuilding and world-design, particularly around branching paths)
- Order of Ecclesaia, Portrait of Ruin, Dawn of Sorrow: mechanically solid games that do a great job of scratching this collector's itch and being generous about throwing a lot of content at you, even just in the variety of enemies and environments.
- Crystal Clear (Pokemon Crystal ROMHack): fun deconstruction of Pokemon Crystal into an open world that puts solid effort into making the game actually work as an open world. If you like ROMHacks and you like deconstructing old games, also mess around with Link to the Past randomizers, they're a fun way of showcasing how connected the world is, and it's fun to try and break down what makes LttP work so particularly well as a randomizer.
- Oracle of Seasons/Ages: by far the best 2D Zelda games, and a really good example still of how to build worlds that feel interconnected and alive and vibrant and busy while simultaneously keeping that world easy to navigate and reason about. Also, the pixel art is good at being both engaging and (importantly) extremely visually clear and easy to read at a glance.
- probably other stuff that I'll be upset I didn't think about later.
Another great game I played recently is Subnautica. More exploration/crafting than survival, but still great. That's the one game I wish I could erase from my memory to start over.
Some odd ones: Euro/America Truck Simulator. Very relaxing games.
I also have a fairly big library on GoG, my all-time favorites:
* The Tomb Raider series (up to the 5th). The Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy is also not bad, but I really don't like the latest reboot.
* The Broken Sword series
* The Myst series up to Revelation