Games

I feel like Outer Wilds was drowned out by Outer Worlds, and the two often get mixed up, usually to Outer Worlds’ favor.

One of my top 10 games.

Jazzpunk, everyone should play Jazzpunk.

Far: Lone Sails is a beautiful art piece with unusual gameplay, and the sequel is great too.

Bedlam is kind of a love-letter to 90s and 00s FPS games. The gameplay isn't amazing, but if you spent a lot of time in games like Quake, Unreal Tournament or Halo CE back in the early days of online multiplayer, this game is for you.

Kairo is weird.

Sable is an interesting adventure with a really nice art style.

Interplanetary is an excellent strategy game about firing weapons at other planets.

Neon Drive is a fun rhythm game with 80s aesthetics.

Bastion is well worth your time.

The Talos Principle It's not just a puzzle game.

Hardspace Shipbreaker. You're a wage slave (literally) in a space dock, taking apart ships and throwing the bits into the right bins. Doesn't sound super fun, but it is. 1) You're chopping up ships but you get to use LASERS!!! and the energy grappling hook. So satisfying. 2) The physics is 90% spot on. You're in 3d, but it's not purely inertial. There's a dampening field that slows things down, so it doesn't get too outta hand. There are a couple of other quirks, but they're not hugely impacting. 3) The soundtrack is perfect. It's a very bluesy, banjo style for a very bluecollar type job. 4) The voice acting is amazing. Every line from Weaver is just perfect. You hate Hal with a passion (you're supposed to). The writing is a little hammy, but they have to rush it bc it's really a minor bit of the game. (Spoiler, it's very pro-labor and anti-capitalist, so if that triggers you, don't play it.)

Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games It's also on PC and game pass.

I've played it thru twice. The first time as-is, but the 2nd time I shut off the "15 minute shifts" option. I think that breaks things up too much. I think open-shift is better. I bought the vinyl soundtrack. I'm not a huge fan of vinyl, but this is the right style of music that would benefit from it.

Hardspace Shipbreaker - OST Full

Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Americana Beats to Chill to

Can I go with a game from the 90s? Because the adaptation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the best games I ever played. Ellison himself voices the "evil" computer, AM and instead of trying to win, you have to make the correct moral choices so your character can finally be allowed to die. You play multiple characters (not concurrently), so you have to do this multiple times. It's brutal but so good. I know very few people who even know it existed.

No Mans Sky. It used to suck, but now I find it quite fun

Bomberman 64

Eternal Darkness

The Conduit

Halo Reach

Hands down, Devotion by Red Candle Games. It was only on sale for a week when it came out, and was getting well-deserved rave reviews, but was pulled because an idiot put in an art asset that said “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh moron,” and Red Candle’s Chinese partner lost their business license and pulled the game from Steam. GOG was going to carry it, but they wimped out because Cyberpunk 2077 was about to come out in China, and they didn’t want to risk their sales, so they claimed “gamer voices” for why they were backtracking on carrying it, and refused to answer anyone asking them for details. The game is available, but only on Red Candle’s website,
but they were only able to get a store up and running after people had forgotten about the game.

It takes place in 1980s Taiwan, and is an amazing domestic horror - you play as the father, Du Feng Yu, cycling through three different years of his family falling apart, trying to figure out what happened to his young daughter. Some parts of it just hit way too hard, like this screaming argument between Du and his wife, when you’re playing as the daughter listening to it from her bedroom. It gets heavy. And then there’s the tongue thing. IYKYK.

I absolutely love this video by Jacob Geller, An Uncanny Really, looking at how Silent Hill 2 and Devotion handle the uncanny. Devotion absolutely deserves to be compared to Silent Hill 2.

This video, by Super Eyepatch Wolf, Devotion: The Most Disturbing Game You Can Not Play, is also really good, and opens with a lot of history for understanding Red Candle’s first game, Detention, which is also really good and takes place in a high school in Taiwan in the 60s during the White Terror.

Titanfall 2

• Heat Signature
• House of the Dying Sun
• Thumper
• Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
• Gunpoint

Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and tactical combat. My only significant gripe is that I want more of it: More tales, more character customization... just more. (Although I now see that a cosmetic pack is available; I'll have to check it out.)

Gigantic caught my attention when I was looking for an Overwatch alternative, because of the art and the praise from fans. I wish development hadn't shut down before I had a chance to play it. (I hear there's an unofficial client and server out there somewhere, though, so maybe I'll get to at least try the work-in-progress that was never finished.)

Uplink - A hacking sim game that's actually quite addictive in a playthrough. Will make you feel like you're in the movie Hackers.

Spycraft: The Great Game - An adventure game that had as consultants CIA director William Colby and KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin.

I don't know a lot of people that have played these, but they definitely rank up there for me as some of the more interesting and unique games I've played over the decades.

Tyranny

Hylics 1 & 2. There's actually a sorta sleeper cult around the games where it seems like a lot of people know of them or have played them, but no one ever talks about them. Pretty standard action-rpg but everything's claymation. Oh, and the second game changes genre multiple times.

Cruelty Squad. Amazing immersive sim. Looks like trash, best gameplay I've encountered in a while. That game goes hard.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I thought this was more popular, however considering how many people give me a "what's that" when I mention it, it makes me think it wasn't as popular as I thought. It's a very well made spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future. Even has JSRF's composer on a few tracks.

QT deserves more eyes on it for being an incredibly cute and wholesome parody of PT. There's a free "demo" version on Itch.io, and if you like that then I'd highly recommend buying the full version on Steam.

E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. This game is... hm. Basically it started off life as a Warhammer 40k game, but got released as something else due to the studio failing to secure the licenses they needed for WH40K. It's a much older indie game from back when Valve had standards regarding what made it onto steam. It's also kinda special because it's one of the few times the Source engine was used commercially outside Valve. It's also pretty jank, but overall pretty fun. It's got some pretty decent RPG mechanics on top of a first person shooter, complete with classes. You can hack basically anything but also anything can hack back. A door can hack you.

Earthbound for the SNES.

It had a rough launch, rough reviews at the time, but the best RPG I've ever played, period.

Mad Max. Not the best game ever, but much better than I expected.

For me right now, Shadows of Doubt. It is an early access game and it's got a fair bit of jank, but it's crazy how unique it is. It had a week or so of popularity and then it fell off. The devs just released an update for it too!

If you like the immersive sim genre, might I also recommend Cruelty Squad and Gloomwood. Those two have very unique aesthetics and really cool mechanics.

DOA2. It unfortunately turned into the fighting playboy bunnies with huge jugs series, but the second one was actually a really solid fighting game

Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Everybody loved the first game, but nobody played the second game, including me for a good few years. But once I decided to try it I realized how much I had been missing out. It's really good. Making it open world really works. There is fast travel but I never once used it because just running around is so fun. If you liked the first game, please try Catalyst!

I feel this way about so many indie games.

• Praey for the Gods - Obviously inspired by the classic, Shadow of the Colossus
• The Upturned - A horror-comedy game with a great sense of humor
• Your Spider - A great indie horror game with puzzles like Silent Hill. Plus it has an adorable spider. This is one of my favorite indie horror games.
• Exanima - Looks at first like a normal dungeon crawler, but its physics-based combat controls and enemy AI make this a very unique and interesting game, even if it's been in early access for ages.
• Withering Rooms - Great, creepy atmosphere and an interesting story.

As the first of these is a platformer, the second is a topdown shooter, and the third one is a match 3, so commercial success was not that expected anyways, but I really think they excel at what they were set out to do.

• Dustforce
• Assault Android Cactus
• Tidalis

If you can handle dying a lot while learning the ins and outs of the world, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Anomaly is a wonderful package completely for free. Especially if you add the G.A.M.M.A. modpack to it, makes the game play significantly deeper, much harder (in some bullshit and also fair ways), but also just crazy immersive; makes you feel like the actions you take do matter, but if you were to die, you'd just be another loot bag for some other Stalker to come across

Brute Force for the original Xbox. 4 player squad based gameplay, with different squads full of characters with unique abilities. It was a ‘platinum hit’ but I’m pretty sure anything that sold more than 500 copies was

My big one, because I am playing the successor right now would be the Commandos-reinvention line of games by Mimimi Software:

• Shadow Tactics (feudal Japan)
• Desperados III (Wild West)
• Shadow Gambit (undead pirates)

They're very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.

• The old Thief games (succeeded by Dishonored)
• Condemned: Criminal Origins

Those are the two I got for now.

I'm not sure how successful it was, but there's a fun horror (mostly) walking sim called Apsulov: End of Gods. It's based on Norse mythology and has a refreshing take on Loki, especially if you're tired of everything Marvel has put out. The visuals are great too.

There's another one called Close to the Sun that's essentially, "what would happen if Nikola Tesla built a giant fucking cruise ship for the world's smartest minds at the time and then everything goes wrong?". The story is really interesting, and I've been hoping for a sequel.

I don't think Murdered: Soul Suspect did very well from what I remember when it came out, but I had a ton of fun playing that game. They could have done way more as far as mechanics go, and some aspects are pretty cheesy, but I'm a sucker for detective games and trying to piece together information.

Speaking of which, The Painscreek Killings is so good. You play as a reporter who's tasked with invesigating a cold case in a tiny abandoned town. I really liked this one because there is absolutely no hand holding when it comes to playing detective. You absolutely have to figure everything out yourself. Back when I used to stream, I had a regular viewer tell me it was their favorite game that I played, because listening to me trying to figure out the story and my next step was like listening to one of those old crime radio shows. It's one of the few games I wish I could play again for the first time, since I know the outcome now and how everything fits together. The developer is supposed to be making another similar game, so I'm eager to see how that goes.

Everyone talking about Starfield reminded me to go back and play Outer Worlds again. I had forgotten how good that game was.