rRootage

Legendary bullet hell from 2003. Thank you Kenta Cho

Path of Exile has you clearing out the entire pantheon. Then the main campaign is over and you begin the post-game part, which is what actually matters.

I’ll suggest Vertigo 2 as a worthy followup.

It really impressed me with its detail and scope as a mainly solo effort, by a developer who worked at Valve for a while. It’s a big, cinematic shooting adventure, like Half-Life, so the game calls itself a half-like! There are cool bosses, memorable characters, and wildly varied environments. The story is pretty much a flipped Half-Life: you’re the alien who got teleported in after a big science disaster and you’re fighting your way back home. Compared to Alyx, which takes places around a handful of city blocks, Vertigo 2 throws you around a much larger-scale setting, so it’s more like the Half-Life 2 kind of linear gallery of wild shit.

In the years since I finished Antichamber, my opinion of it has cooled somewhat with hindsight. The early game and some of the mid-game are full of dazzling, logic-defying spectacles, which is what draws you in, but the magic fades later on and you get a lot of puzzles with the block gun until the ending. The teaching style mostly works.

I hate the name “immersive sim”. What is being “simmed”? Why is it immerisve? Isn’t Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it’s simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It’s such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for “character action game”. Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it’s “character action”, that means nothing.

Genre names also annoy me. But there’s no authority to define a taxonomy of gameplay styles, so the vocabulary is built informally. I likewise dislike MOBA, metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike. In the end, we just need the right sequences of letters to accurately represent the gameplay.

In the case of immersive sim, I believe it came from Warren Spector trying to portray how Deus Ex was different from pure action, RPG, and stealth games.

More action and environmental storytelling:

• If you want to play more Portal, try community-made campaigns! I recommend in particular Portal: Revolution, a prequel to Portal 2 that features a few new mechanics, and Portal Stories: Mel, which has basically no new mechanics but turns up the difficulty by making you combine mechanics in clever ways.
• Bastion — Action RPG with a rich story and lush art. A humble narrator tells the story of a place literally torn apart by war, and you play the kid trying to rebuild. This was the debut game from Supergiant Games, which later made Hades.
• Tunic — Mysterious, exploration-focused adventure. A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It’s like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.

More “genre pushers”:

• Puzzle games
  • Mosa Lina — It calls itself “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. It’s an aggressively random puzzle platformer where the levels are random and the tools you have to solve them are also random. Mosa Lina is a puzzle game that wants you to be clever, not smart.
  • Viewfinder — First-person “photography” puzzles. The featured mechanic has a “wow” factor that rivals Portal’s: Take a picture of the level, then hold up the photo and click to copy the photo back into the level. The plot is pretty meh, but like the original Portal, it’s pretty damn short.
  • Baba is You — Push blocks and break rules. Blocks with words written on them define the rules of the game: Baba is you, wall is stop, flag is win. The rules themselves are puzzle pieces. If you can’t solve the puzzle, change the rules!
• Inscryption — You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It’s an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be. You want one-of-a-kind experiences? This is one of them.
• The Stanley Parable — Comedy walking simulator. You enter a room with two doors in front of you. The narrator says, “Stanley entered the door on his left.” What will you do? The Stanley Parable has many endings and it questions what video game narratives are really for.

The audio in the game is bonkers. Distant footsteps or floor creaking can really get you.

Does Half-Life 2 count? I played it years ago but fully replayed it over a couple of days to hear the new developer commentary. I never thought Valve would get around to making one for Half-Life 2, so I’m glad they did.

Now this is the real internet funeral

• Assault Android Cactus
  • Slick arcade-style twin-stick shooter with a pumpin’ soundtrack. Lots of characters with unique playstyles. Local co-op.
• Crypt of the NecroDancer
  • Bring rhythm to the classic roguelike. There’s local and online co-op and lots of mods.
• Just Shapes and Beats
  • Rhythm bullet hell with a large EDM soundtrack. Local and online co-op.
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  • This is a stretch of the “couch” part of couch co-op. One player must defuse a bomb. The other players have a bomb defusal manual and must help the first player without being able to see the screen.
• Moving Out 2
  • Work together to drag and throw furniture into a truck. Chaotic co-op with physics, local and online.
• Gauntlet: Slayer Edition
  • 2014 revival of an 80s arcade classic. Co-op dungeon crawling action. Warrior needs food. Badly! Local and online co-op.
• Pizza Possum
  • Very soft stealth game about stealing and eating lots of food. Local co-op.

Neon White

(Neon White good)

Also check out the deals thread on !games@lemmy.world

Joke’s on you. Slay the Spire is having a sequel!

Imagine being a smelly h*man who doesn’t know about Yokos