Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
For me it‘s Darkest Dungeon. I just don‘t enjoy „scraping by,“ I like to take care of and connect with my party, and that‘s just not the kinda game it is. It‘s just bleak everywhere, by design and fully intentional; and just not my thing. Saw a lotta friends play it and thought I should try it.
Yeah, I was put off by about everything in that game.
Yeah that game was just too much of a grind for me. I really wanted to like it but there was just something that didn’t catch me about it. Super popular, highly recommended by my friends, just not my bag, baby
I got one! The very first Assassin’s Creed when it came out!
My childhood friend would NOT shut up about it! He would talk over and over again about the lore, show me extended cutscenes, videos, sent me lore theories, it was a whole thing!
Years later I finally get to play it and holy shit, what a disappointment… the entire game is just the same 3 missions over and over again… like no effort into hiding anything… literally the same 3 missions copied and pasted ad nauseum with different enemy names. I’m still shocked he sat through all of this bullshit to get to the awesome lore he went on and on about for weeks.
Bonus story with the same friend: we were talking about Devil May Cry and he said “I wish I could find another game like it…” and I noticed he said “game” and not “games” or “franchise” so I asked “Did you play the sequels? DMC3 is incredible!” and he goes “What sequels? I’m sure it’s only one game…” and I swear I screamed at the realization he’s talking about the reboot DmC: Devil May Cry and had no clue the original franchise even exists 😂 That was right after DMC5 came out too, which’s wild.
I recommended starting with DMC5 because the story isn’t great anyway and DMC1 or even DMC3 may feel a little dated. He ignored my advice because he wanted to experience the story from the beginning, picked up the HD collection, hated both DMC1 and DMC3 because they felt too stiff, and never touched the franchise again.
I agree, but the main problem is the “years later” part of your experience. Assassin’s Creed had many gameplay innovations with (for the time) amazing graphics that shaped certain game mechanics for years to come, but gaming has evolved…
That’s why many of these former “innovations” have lost their shine and sometimes even became annoying (e.g. climbing a tower to unlock parts of the map).
“years later” does not matter in my case because it wasn’t that many years later—l probably played it only 3 or 4 years after release, and I don’t play western action RPGs or stealth games. I think the first Assassin’s Creed is the only Ubisoft game I played, for example, and it surely did not influence any of the games I actually play: Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101, Hellsinker, or Guilty Gear.
Pretty sure I would’ve had a problem with it on release because it’s shitty repetitive design.
Yep it absolutely was a problem on release.
I enjoyed playing ac1 back then but it was very repetitive.
Time was cheap back then.
Don’t crucify me, but Control.
I absolutely love creepy atmospheric games that aren’t outright horror. If you’ve ever played the Playdead games (Limbo and Inside) you know what I’m talking about. BioShock does it a bit too. Anyway, due to this being my absolute favourite type of media to consume, and not at all knowing how to find more of it, I made a post on here a couple years ago asking for advice, as well as a few friends and other communities, and Control was the overwhelming majority suggestion. So obviously I gave it a shot, but I just didn’t enjoy the way it, ahem, controlled. Not sure how well to describe it other than that, but movement just felt off to me. Maybe I’ll have to give it a try again in the future, but I couldn’t put in more than an hour or two without getting annoyed. It looked pretty neat, and I’ve seen screenshots of later points in the game which look pretty awesome, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get past the movement. It’s not an issue I’ve had in any other game and I’m not sure why it bugs me so much in this one.
This is sort of how I felt about Pikuniku. The controls pissed me off into not gaming for an entire year.
This is probably my pick too, and it frustrates me. Because like, look. I love Remedy games. I love Alan Wake 1 and 2 to death. I just bought a 200 dollar book about Alan Wake. I really vibe with Control’s aesthetic and setting. Ahti is great. I have beat Control before, but ever since then, whenever I think “oh, I should go back and replay Control” I get about five hours back into the game before I just sit there and think man, I am not having any fun. Just about all of these characters feel like cardboard cutouts with neutral faces drawn on them, the plot is kinda dull, when it bothers to show up, and if the game can’t really get excited about itself I’m not sure how I’m supposed to. I’ll always love launching a forklift at some Hiss at 200mph but it doesn’t take me far enough.
That being said, yes, I will still be playing Control 2 day one. Even if it’s garbage, Remedy will always deserve the chance for me.
I found the combat to be incredibly repetitive, and the story was unsatisfying to me. Have you tried Soma? That sounds like it would scratch your itch, but I haven’t played it.
I haven’t. It’s on my wishlist though, so maybe on the next sale I’ll pick it up.
Dragon’s Age Origins. Had a friend tell me how it was their favorite franchise and that specifically was the best game, such amazing lore, gameplay, etc.
Couldn’t even make it past the first quest before I hung it out.
I never made it out of the first zone. I was honestly shocked by how little I cared for it considering I made it through Jade Empire, but Origins just felt like Knights of the Old Republic and that game bored me too.
When did you play it? I liked the game when it came out, but I tried to replay it recently and the mechanics did not age gracefully. It’s pretty clunky by modern standards.
I’m sure that to a lot of people this is likely sacrilege lol
Hi, me, I’m a lot of people.
I cannot agree with it being clunky, at least not any more clunky than any other game in the genre. What are you referring to specifically? The combat or something else?
I enjoyed it but the character arc resolutions were extremely rushed.
I’m your reverse. Friends with some big Dragon Age fans, they wanted me to join, it worked for me too! The Dragon Age train crashed when I had to free up space on my PC for more important real life things sadly, but when I finish that I’d like to finish my playthrough and maybe replay with fight-skipping cheats, or hit up the rest of the series.
I was the main marketer for “weird, different games” to my friends, back in school. I was the one that first found out about Harvest Moon on PSX and recommended it to another friend, he loved it - mind you, this was back in 2004. In 2006, I got 3 into World of Warcraft, I even printed a “beginners’ guide” I made myself just to help them understand the game.
Two games that I experimented from word of mouth were Tibia and Ragnarok Online. The former I gave up the same day - there were like 10 players for each rat in the sewers, the respawn took forever and you were supposed to grind them until you reached level 7, which would take over a week of real playtime at that rate.
RO was an interesting situation, the dude who first started it was bragging about having lots of hours to play, when I disdainfully replied “Why pay when you can just play for free”? He didn’t like the reply, but we didn’t get along anyway, so I took every chance to jab him, and he did the same to me. Anyhoo, I went online, looked around for a private server and started playing, free of charge. The others didn’t join in.During school and college, none of my friends were interested in RTS or even turn-based strategy games. I already knew about Civilization thanks to my dad. In the internet years, I always lurked around some talks about strategy games and that’s where I found Supreme Commander, which is still one of my favorites. Total Annihilation is still on my “to-play” list.
Time for some more word of mouth (potentially): have you tried Beyond all Reason? It’s more or less a modern open source remake of Total Annihilation. Runs like a dream even with tens of AI players and tens of thousands of units in-game.
Compared to SupCom I would say there is more unit diversity but less wacky experimentals, and the commander unit cannot be upgraded. There are currently only 2 factions, that basically map to UEF and Cybran from SupCom (or rather SupCom derived those two from the 2 in Total Annihilation). The dev team is currently working on a third faction that, from the previews, seems to me to be a mashup of the Aeon and Seraphim from SupCom: Forged Alliance.
I have, both it and Zero-K ;)
My cousin’s talked me into giving CoD ‘one more try’ like three times now. It’s never worth it. The game is always worse and my cousin also tends to just not play for months after a handful of gaming sessions, so I don’t even get the benefit of hanging out.
Generally stopped trying to game with him anymore. Just too flaky.
I got several, I’ve found that some people really think about what I like in a game and nail a recommendation and some people just recommend things they liked, regardless how I feel on them.
The big ones would be Breath of the Wild and Helldivers 2.
Friend of mine who doesn’t play much recommended this poker game called Balatro to me. Damn is it fun. This was well before all the hype around it.
Take a look at Ballionaire and Cloverpit if you enjoy Balatro.
Thanks! I’ll have a look!
I tried really hard to like Fall Guy for the sake of one friend a few years ago, but it’s just so bad and monetised.
Dark Souls
It’s not for me, honestly. I want to feel freedom from a game, but Souls-like games make me feel trapped.
Some people are saying DS is free. I agree with them, but also there are issues.
For example, early players who are struggling should go down into the catacombs, because they can unlock The Rite of Kindling, allowing you to get even more estus at a bonfire if you’re having a hard time. However, almost every guide will say not to do this, and I agree. It’s at the bottom of a giant pit with enemies that are more annoying than you’ll have faced before. If you get a divine weapon than it’s probably fine though, but getting back out will still not be trivial.
Dark Souls is all about giving players options, and giving them the tools to deal with problems. The issue is you need to pay attention to the world and read. The problem with the example above is the necromancers revive enemies, unless they’re killed by a divine weapon. This isn’t obvious though, and it also isn’t obvious where you might find a divine weapon, or where to unlock the ability to upgrade a weapon down the divine path.
There are just too few signposts to guide new players who are getting frustrated. There’s plenty for people enjoying their time, reading, and exploring. For the people who are slamming their head into a wall on a boss trying to brute force it, like most games would require you to do, there’s not enough to guide them out of this tactic.
I’ve played many Soulslikes, and found pretty much all of them fun…EXCEPT for the ones by FromSoftware. All others branch out into a lot of exploration, they just don’t put 8 paths square at the beginning of the game and then slap you down for 5 of them.
That is kind of wild to me because Souls game are some of the most free-form action games I know. You can often tackle areas in an order of your choice, use a build of your choice, even kill NPCs if you so please.
Interesting. How far in did you get? I think maybe if you looked up a getting started guide you might be able to assuage that trapped feeling, because Dark Souls and Elden Ring manage to feel like some of the most “free” games in my experience. But there’s definitely a crushing learning curve.
If I looked up a getting started guide, I’d feel constrained by its arcane instructions. “Go this way, take the third door, but DON’T talk to that NPC yet…”
Fun games are open to the player exploring, without massively disproportionate punishment for it.
I mean, dying in Dark Souls just isn’t very punishing at all. Idk, not every game is for every person, after all.
That is…ABSOLUTELY false.
People frequently point to the idea that if you collect an item like a Soul of Lost X, or a weapon, and then die, you get to keep the item. But the game also has consumable items used to make tons of options easier within the world. Things that enhance your weapon temporarily, give an extra health boost, or give you souls. Players that use these without making much use of them, or even misuse them due to nebulously archaic descriptions, will have nothing given back to them later on, making a venture even harder than the first few go’s.
Plus, you’re likely not to get as many level ups due to lost souls, meaning you’re going to get even more of a difficulty ramp than other players.
I’m sorry - it’s just juvenile the way people who obsess over this game will defend every issue with “it’s not for every person” - especially when indie devs that have TWEAKED the formula, and FIXED the issues, end up making for very fun games. No one is playing them and complaining “Man, I wish I’d accidentally spent an hour going the wrong way at the start!”
Lol you called me juvenile because you personally don’t like one of the most objectively popular games of all time? Yeah… anyway, sorry. Skill issue. Get good.
The games can certainly be punishing in key areas, and it’s better that newer entries and other soulslikes make an effort to make learning the games be more friendly. Death is punishing, sure. Losing consumables, fighting through the same enemies again, or even just having to run back to a boss - these are all sources of friction in this genre. Up front, I do wish these games had accessibility options, I do want more people to experience what they have to offer. But death really just isn’t as punishing as a lot of people make it out to be. Dark Souls isn’t that hard, in most cases. There’s certainly bullshit, and it takes time to learn enemy patterns, and dying can be bad feeling. I think that without the friction, if you could overcome every location and boss on the first or second try, these games would just kind of suck. So it’s a balance.
What exactly do you see as a punishing death? Erasing someone’s save file? The only other thing I can think of besides permanently taking consumables that won’t be restocked is sending you back a long distance to redo a bunch of fights again - and DS does literally that. DS2 even lowers your max HP as an additional Fuck You.
You’re not the first person to say dying is “not so bad” in those games and I still can only view those as the ritualistic statement of an insane person. Every other action game I play, I rarely die, and when I do it just has me retry the singular thing I was attempting in that past minute. Even other hard games, like Super Meat Boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, don’t force large area repetition, or take away items as punishment. The mastery of completing 18 tasks perfectly in succession is for speedrunners - it’s not something I or most players are interested in, and it’s solely a source of stress, not excitement.
Heck, Tunic had the money-loss system during development. The dev took it away before release (you just lose a paltry amount and can still get it back) and the game was still great.
Dark Souls 2 gives you a very large amount of human effigies that can restore your max HP, and in a very early game area there is a ring you can wear that limits how low your max HP can go. It’s in a chest in a very early game area that you will walk by and see guaranteed in order to progress. What I think is more interesting is how you think it’s the norm and expected that you should be able to play through an action game and rarely die. It’s okay to enjoy power fantasy games, where dying means you fail - and you just get to retry the part you failed. But that doesn’t mean that enjoying the process of learning an enemy patterns and overcoming adversity is insane. Those games are not power fantasy action games, you are supposed to feel weak. Because when you feel weak and then you kill that damn boss anyways, it’s one of the best feelings ever in gaming. On top of that, a lot of the consumables that you’re talking about you can buy infinite of. Like I said, the games aren’t that hard, enemy patterns are usually pretty simple with only a few attacks, and as you move through areas you learn what gimmicks the enemies are going to abuse and can just adapt to them. Most enemies can be easily parried, or you can kill problem enemies with poison arrows or magic from a distance. Often I think that the people who are convinced that souls games are brutal and not fun are people who try to play them like they are some kind of action hero instead of taking advantage of the tools the games give you to use, especially the summons.
Everyone kept praising Baldur’s Gate 3. I even watched gameplay of it.
It was buggy on the supposed release, especially with a quest that had been part of the beta FOR YEARS rendering itself incompleltable and stealing my items in the process.
Then I got sucked into a party wipe, and a fight I had beaten earlier suddenly became an impassable slogfest.
$90 AUD for 3 hours of gameplay and a piss poor character creator. Because orcs had fuckall compared to the other races.
I am never trusting popular opinion again.
My friend said it was the best D&D experience he ever had. I love D&D and also had hundreds of hours in Solasta. I immediately bought 2 copies of BG3 so I could play with my SO. BG3 sucked for me. It’s like pretend D&D, with the whiniest, most burdened companions they possibly could have created, and a terrible UI to boot. We tried it again after the ‘final’ patch (still buggy, but better). Ended up pretending it’s not D&D and tried to ignore all the terrible nonsensical gameplay mechanics. Made it all the way to Act 3 before giving up again.
I love the studio for their behavior towards players, but I hate their games and their terrible combat mechanics. Every goddamn inch is some kind of trap or environmental hazard designed to ruin your experience
I love BG3; used to love D&D as well.
Anyone that says it’s like playing D&D is just not correct. It’s a fun game that can simulate some of the rules and mechanics pretty well, but never does it feel like actually playing D&D.
This is kind of tangential to the question, but an incredibly irritating former friend would not shut the fuck up about Elden Ring for months after it came out and kept telling me to get it. I told him I didn’t like souls-like games and he said ER was “different” without explaining how. I still haven’t played it, even with recommendations from other people I trust. Same guy ensured I’ll never play Death Stranding, too.
I personally see Elden Ring as the second-most “Dark Souls” game after Dark Souls 1. It’s the first of the FromSoft soulslikes with an open world afaik, and while Dark Souls 1 doesn’t have an “open” world, exactly, everything is so well-connected that it feels like an open world to me.
I don’t understand why people keep saying Elden Ring is so different from Dark Souls, because it’s really not different at all. I say this as someone who enjoys these games: if your issue with Dark Souls was the base gameplay loop and not the map, Elden Ring will not fix that.
Both of these games are very well made, but they both cater to a special type of gamer.
Elden Ring being incredibly well designed as an introduction to souls-likes, it still has the mechanics and difficulty like most of From Software’s games, with slight variation. If you’re not a gamer who likes overcoming a challenge, the game is likely not for you.Death Stranding I think is quite the unique game, but much thanks to its weirdness. It has a lot of curious elements to it, but its incredibly story heavy. With different difficulty options you can make it a very casual experience, but it can be quite slow at times still. If you don’t like several dozen hours of cutscenes, the game might not be for you.
Deus Ex.
… the original.
Kid at middle school just burned it onto a CD-R, gave me a post it note with the install key.
He kept saying this game wasn’t like anything else, it was a ‘roleplaying shooter’.
I just had to provide him the blank CD-R to burn, and I think a brownie, or cookie, at lunch.
I never even owned a legit copy untill it came out on Steam like a decade later.
So uh yeah, that’s how I originally played ‘the most important videogame of all time’.
Beyond the gameplay and game mechanics, uh, we are currently now more or less living in a world that more and more resemble’s its canon storyline everyday.
Back in 2001, pre 9/11, it was a wild sci-fi/cyberpunk concept for… the entire internet to be routed through a centralized system for surveillance and archiving, for digital privacy to be wholly nonexistent.
Now that building just exists in Utah and is run by the NSA, and… well you have to be exceptionally tech savvy to maintain any kind of what was 25 years ago the norm of digital privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
It was a wild concept to imagine the US being defined by external and internal terrorism, both real and as a widespread rhetorical accusation against your political opponents, to imagine the US basically being a dystopian economic nightmare defined by homelessness, paramilitarized police, openly and brazenly corrupt governments, corporations nakedly and obviously superseding the government.
Now uh… well, uh, yeah.
It was a wild concept for a prototype AI to tell you:
“The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.”
“God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.”
“The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.”
“You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.”
So uh, yeah, that’s… basically currently happening, we sure are at least really trying to build a true, general intelligence AI, and more and more people are falling in love with AI bfs/gfs, tiktok/instagram/facebook/social media are the precursor data-mining algorithms that most people these days are addicted to, to feel observed and be judged, more and more people relinquish their cognitive abilities to some kind of ‘AI’ to just do all their thinking, their critical evaluating for them, their judgement formation.
Anyway, 9/10 game, pretty good but kinda janky in spots, lol.
Deus Ex and the Metal Gear Solid series both have some shockingly prescient plot points. In 2025 playing these is a trip.
Yes, particularly MGS 2 was absurdly prescient with the entire concept of… the vast majority of the internet being unordered and uncontextualized noise and chaos, and… there needing to be a way to structure it, but also, there is essentially no way to do that that is not also going to manipulative/exploitative.
We also now do pretty much live in PMC world, it just isn’t as… stylish? I’m gonna use that word.
Our world is agruably at least as absurd as the MGS plotline, but in different ways.
Basically… our technology has indeed surpassed the ability of the average person or government to understand it and use/regulate it responsibly, we are now addicited to it more so than intentionally using it, and that is all being driven by the capitalist machines that profit from it, and every day, they more and more overtly oversee the maintenance and direction of the torment nexus.
EDIT:
i will also throw in as a sort of esoteric lore detail:
Shadowrun particularly predicted that coffee would become an unaffordable luxury good, as economies and climate collapse.
Uh yep, thats happening, coffee prices are up 40% in the US, just this year.
I am glad I quit my coffee addiction a few years ago.
Hotline Miami. Frustrating and tedious.
I generally don’t take gaming recommendations from people I know because I’ve been burned too many times.
I loved the fast and rather unique gameplay but it definitely isnt for everyone. For me personally I didnt mind the trial and error and really liked how the Game presentation.
Last of Us.
When the first one came out everyone was ranting and raving over it so I picked it up for my PS3. Granted the beginning of the game was an absolute gut punch and I thought I was hooked, I was not. I found the rest of the game so damn boring. I didn’t like the story, I felt it was forced fed to the player, and honestly I just never bothered finishing it. for me it wasn’t fun.
For me is suffered from “show, don’t tell” problems. There are numerous weeks long skips between scenes and you’re just supposed to understand that Joel and Ellie became close during that time. But as a player, you’re basically being asked to babysit someone you’ve known for 10 minutes. It was basically one long escort mission and the “OMG SO AMAZING SCENE” is… giraffes walking by. Like really? That’s what it takes to wow people? Some giraffes walking outside the building???
The world was a generic apocalypse setting, the “story” can be described in a few bullet points, and the big “emotional gut punch” at the end is so cliche.
I’ll die on the hill that it didn’t do a single groundbreaking thing. Nothing about the game wasn’t already done before and better. It’s the equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie: a fun mindless take on an idea but otherwise generic.
I ended up giving up at one of the clicker sequences.
The game lore says they’re blind and navigate by hearing. The game code does not.
