Hey all, I’m on the hunt for games that really suck you into their world, the kind where you look up and suddenly three hours have gone by.
Games I’ve loved and couldn’t put down:
- Plague Tale
- Horizon
- Subnautica
- Mass Effect
- Expedition 33
- Homeworld
Doesn’t matter the gente, as long as it’s got that vibe where you just exist in the atmosphere and forget about everything else.
What are your go-to games when you want to disappear into another world? Bonus appreciation if it’s something underrated or off the beaten path.
Edit: Thank you all. I will definitely keep this thread bookmarked. You all dwarved what I found on Reddit ir any other platform! Well done!
There were so many moments where I got lost in the environmental details. One of the more memorable ones was finding an office environment where almost everybody is emailing each other about how much they hate a guy because he’s too hardworking and overzealous.
When you actually find that guy’s desk, it’s obvious that he’s been given no resources to do his job… and that he’s only trying to contribute any way he can. Even worse, he’s got a whiteboard that if you flip it around, you find that it’s got mathematical equations on it, hinting that he might have been a lot smarter than people gave him credit for.
EDIT:spelling
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I am the world’s biggest Qud stan and will always up vote it in the wild
It’s a very weird game, but if you can pierce the surface of it, it has such an incredible amount to offer you.
CoQ is an example of a game that gives you so much when you invest time in it. If you’re into that, I would also recommend Cogmind. It’s similar in that the world has so much texture, both in lore and mechanics. We’re lucky have so many great roguelikes to choose from!
Cogmind is my favorite game that I’m absolutely garbage at, I’ve been following the development cycle of it for probably over 10 years now and it’s a huge component of why I love roguelikes as much as I do.
But fuck me that game is hard. I have a fairly comprehensive, wide and deep pool of knowledge about a semi-majority of the content in the game, but… I just can’t stay alive. The attrition kills me, every time, I don’t think I’ve ever made it past -06 or so on my best run. Pro advice always consists of “Oh just don’t get into fights” but that’s a lot easier said than done when you’ve got half a dozen swarmers on your tail that are faster than you are, are all busy calling backup, and are peppering you with 18 shots a round as you fruitlessly attempt to seek cover.
Anyway, yeah, great game. Love it to death. I’m real bad at it. It seems like probably most people are real bad at it, and there are just a couple of mega wizards that make the game look easy in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Especially doing things like wheel or leg builds, in my experience that’s just slow suicide that is locked in the moment you decide to commit to it, they’re just outright too slow to manage. I find that this is a game where you have to be faster than your opponents, no matter what, it is a hard requirement of survival - therefore, I do not survive unless I equip flight units. So I equip flight units and then I can’t carry anything because their carry weight smokes dong, so I die to attrition because I get my parts shot off and don’t have backups. So I get frustrated and do a legs build that’s strapped down with four shotguns and then I die to active combat because I can’t escape anyone.
Point being, if you’re any good at Cogmind, I’d love some pointers or some advice on how you play. I’ve dabbled in this game for nearly a decade and I’m tired of being so straight up bad at it. I feel like I’ve been misunderstanding some fundamental principle of how you’re supposed to play the game, and reading pro guides on the internet hasn’t really filled me in on much other than a) try to avoid fights when possible (okay, fair, but this definitely isn’t always possible) and b) other people always seem to find cooler loot more consistently than I do. Guides will start off right out of the gate like “okay, first thing’s first, find a datajack and some hackware and get some flight” and I’m like, brother, I’m in -07 and I’ve found one datajack and two flight units in the whole game so far. You want a [Lgt. Assault Rifle]? I got those. Not much else.
So I don’t know where you’re at, so I’m just going to info dump a few things that have increased my scores recently:
Materials
The first few floors are all about giving you time to prep a starting build. Even if you intend to go flight, start with some storage and clear these floors completely to gather any good loot. You don’t have to kill everything, but check everywhere for any good items and get some hacks going. Fill up your storage with your entire flight build before switching to flight, and honestly, it’s good to try and keep the storage after transitioning so you can keep extra flight units and armor.Hacks
Swarmers are a pain, but if you manual hackanalyze(swarmer), then you get +5% accuracy towards them and they get -5% towards you. There are only 3 main models of swarmers, so any time you seen the next level of swarmer, hit this hack. Really,analyze(...)everything! It’s like having a free reaction control system and target analyzer on at all times. There are also some seriously usefultrojan(...)hacks.Armor
Always try to carry some armor to switch on if you’re getting shot at. It absorbs all overflow damage, protecting all your vital bits. I was massively undervaluing armor, assuming I was never supposed to get shot at as a stealth-flight build, but it’ll happen, and armor can let you get away clean.Other than that there’s chopping through walls with melee weapons, standing inside doorways to minimize enemy fire, knowing when to hit side branches for good loot, scanning your equipment for little bonuses, checking enemies when you see them for damage resistances. The dev puts out videos of him playing (and streams), and watching him do the first few floors really showed what important factors I was missing.
Appreciate the input.
Turtling down in materials and then transitioning to your proper build later makes sense, that’s a strategy I haven’t actually tried. I’ll look into that.
As for the manual hacks, I knew those existed, but I had been refraining from just looking them up. Is there somewhere in game that teaches you any of those? I’ve never found one.
I definitely have been underappreciating armor based on its weight. I’ve put on some medium armor and/or energy shields on some of my more combat oriented runs and they seem like they soak up a lot of abuse. They’re just so bulky and heavy, I never feel like I have room for it among my other necessary parts.
The manual hacks mostly (maybe all?) come from talking to npc’s in the branch areas and the computers you find there. You can check how many you’ve found in the records/lore menu.
As for armor, I need to do the math, but I think even one small piece will have a large effect on capturing overflow damage and preventing critical hits.
Good luck!
Oh, something else I thought of to ask. Say I’m looking for a side branch. Is there any way to know where an exit leads to before you take it? The stairs aren’t labeled, so… it feels like a matter of luck more than anything to actually find side areas or not. I expect it’s probably optimal to visit all of the side branches that you can before moving up a level?
Fallout NV
While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea there’s something about playing NV with radio NV running and running around the emptier parts of the map, then I get jumped by a bunch Romaboo larpers.
Arcanum
While it’s immesian is a bit different it’s music and story telling can drag me in easily.
Outer wilds
Death is inevitable, so you may as well enjoy some music with your pals.
Just from videos alone, if you have friends who can play it with you for hours, that Big Walk is atmospheric enough I would play it if my friends were more interested in it. Hell, I’d play it singleplayer, but it looks to be built around multiplayer.
Edit:
Just saw the part where it says your go-to atmospheric games. Well, in that case, mine used to be Borderlands 1 ( the original and not the crummy remake/remaster(?) with the abhorrent microtransaction lootbox and minimap replacing the compass ).
I used to play that game and could easily get lost for hours just questing and grinding. I just don’t play it as much now.
Similar thing could be said for Audiosurf 2, so long as I’m on a device that has a lot of my music on it.
Red Dead Redemption (both games) would get my vote. Easily in my top 5 games.
First time playing RDR2, I waved at a dude on a carriage and asked him to stop. Next thing I knew I was being shot at by the sheriff. No idea why that would be considered bad or a punishable offense. Lost all interest in playing after that sadly. And it was like in the first town you get to visit in the game too.
Stage coach robbery.
I feel the game is not the issue here.
Ah yes, the game definitely isn’t the issue. I should have just known that hitting the prompt to wave to a passing by stagecoach twice in a row was against the law somehow. In a game I just started playing. Yep, definitely a skill issue.
Howdy stranger. Are you just waving down random stagecoaches wearing a gun in order to say hi and be friendly-like, or is your intent to draw your weapon and deprive us of our property and/or our lives? Because if you’re going to rob us, I am afraid to inform you that I will be taking defensive action that might include running away and/or killing you. It’s fine either way, but I just want to be crystal clear about your intentions and I want you to be crystal clear about the consequences of your each and every action beforehand so there are no untoward surprises.
Absolutely gripping gameplay and dialogue.
Look, on one hand I see your point, but on the other it’s a fuckin game and tutorials are a thing. Except apparently when they aren’t. It’s the wild west, by the amount of people that were shooting at me afterwards it’s clear just about everyone carries a gun so…not sure what your point there is either. Contrary to popular belief, you can indeed be carrying a gun without the intent to use it on every person you have an interaction with. My intention? New town. Talk to NPCs. Stage coach rolls by and button prompt pops up to wave? I do. It pops up again? I do it again to see what happens, to see if the dialogue changes. Chaos ensues followed by a quick death that didn’t make sense to me right off the bat. Games can be flawed. I don’t have to love a beloved game just because people think I should.
I think people are objecting because you are asking it to be something it isn’t.
An open world game is something you immerse yourself in and you learn as you go. It is 100% incompatible with strict “win conditions” for every instance. Example: I was playing Fallout: New Vegas and ran into a character who was trying to collect bottlecaps. I offered her some of mine, but, discovering I had bottlecaps, she wanted all of them and IMMEDIATELY started shooting. That was a fun experience, not quite emergent game play, but at least surprising. That is the fun of open world games, they can be unpredictable and context-dependent, and sometimes you only know the context by getting shot at. Your job is to learn the rules of the world as best you can. Though I do understand why you get frustrated, I think it just indicates that open world games are just a genre that you don’t enjoy, or at least there are aspects of them that rub you the wrong way.
It would be like if I said, “I don’t like tetris because it doesn’t have a story. Like, where are the cutscene animatics? Where is the character development?”
Edit: Might be better to say “A to Rob Stagecoach”, but that is kind of implying your intent, when all your character is doing is waving it down to stop it, and the response depends on the context… like now every prompt has to predict what the response of the action will be.
An open world game is something you immerse yourself in and you learn as you go. It is 100% incompatible with strict “win conditions” for every instance.
I don’t see how this is about win conditions. The game communicated the consequences of your action poorly. That is on the game, not on the player. There is a reason why one of the first type of mods coming out for Fallout 4 were mods that replaced the often times misleading 3-word response prompts with the actual lines that are behind those prompts; because in a game where you need to interact a lot with NPCs, it is crucial to be able to predict how your attempt at interacting is going to be received. Vanilla Fallout 4 failed at that and as it seems, RDR2 fails at this as well.
The first game that came to mind after reading your post is Subnautica, such a great game!
I’m going to recommend 3 smaller games that I found to be very atmospheric.
The Invincible: A scifi walking simulator based on an iconic novel. The music and the graphics suck you in and the voice acting helps keeping you interested. I recently replayed it and loved it again.
Gris: A small platformer on the easier side with beautiful hand-drawn graphics and (IMO) great music. It tells a sad story without words, so good.
Oxenfree: A scifi thriller in the form of a side-scrolling platformer. I played it years ago so I don’t remember much of it (my memory is crap like that) but I know it left a very good impression, especially its atmosphere.
Honorable mention to Valheim, which I see mentioned in the thread ore than once. Great atmosphere and gameplay loop, although for me it lost some of its charm in the later biomes they released afterwards.
I hope you find any of these to your liking.
I completed Subnautica thrice. A normal, a vegetarian and a speed run. 😄 So awesome!
I will check out The Invincible. Thanks.
Gris is done and dusted. Hot recommendation. Such a great game. Thanks for reminding me.
Oxenfree… I saw it many times. Never have it a chance. Maybe now…
Kinda late but astrometica is like subnautica but in space. It’s still in early access and needs a bit of work, but I couldnt stop playing for about a week
Dishonored and BioShock come to mind.
They’ve likely already been mentioned.
Bioshock… couldn’t stop until all three were binge-played.
