cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/57413346
I played Nine Sols recently and it had a transformative effect on my gaming experience. I’ve found myself no longer getting mad at fairly structured games and deeply enjoying the personal refinement of my skill set in pursuit of a goal. Suddenly this shift in perspective has allowed me to see difficulty in a new light and truly savor the victory that comes after significant effort. With this new perspective, I decided to try the game that had made me hesitate the most with its reputation for difficulty: Sekiro
Its been truly eye opening to realize that my nervousness has only kept me from a good time. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for it…
Following that trend, I started Celeste for the first time even though I never play pure platformers, and it has blown my socks off. Do I suck? You bet your ass I do. But I know it’s from a lack of detailed platforming, and developing that skill has been very fun and satisfying.
Now, I’d love to hear from others. What games made you regret waiting so long to try them?
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Outer Wilds. Took a lot of time to start and then a lot a time to actually click. Now it is one of my all time favorites.
Persona 5.
Wasn’t the biggest fan of RPGs but 5 is as easy as Chrono Trigger, with a cozy life sim and anime stapled ontop. A fun ride if you enjoy any of these. Though drop the difficulty to easy if you aren’t the biggest fan of RPGs
Nine Sols was amazing!
I played it after I finished Silksong when I just didn’t get over the difficult but fair 2D itch yet.
I’m glad I played it, the story, the gameplay, level design, and the music were all great.
And I really loved the Tao + Cyberpunk + Cat people lore and setting, it was really creative.
A couple years ago, i found a video about a rhythm game with a cool story named vivid/stasis. Since i was curious about the story and it was free, i added it to my steam library
It took me a while to actually start playing game and its amazing
It semi-counts, but I’d also add Space Station 14 to the mix. Semi, because 14 is prety recent, but it is a modernized mostly 1:1 rewrite of Space Station 13, which is the game that I’d consider myself sleeping on.
It’s my current obsession, that game is just so much fun. A disaster simulator where you throw 100 people into a ~2 hour long shift on a space station, and ask them to keep it afloat. From people doing engineeirng, atmospherics, science, medical, security, cargo and command, janitor, barkeep, etc. It’s a great roleplaying experience.
The core design is that most of what you can do can fail spectaculary. Engineering powers the station with a contained black hole or a ball of tesla, better hope they keep the containment maintaned. Science is doing research on artifacts by doing randomly chosen stuff (touch, spill something on it, look at it, etc), which has a random associated effect from “create a monkey”, “get radiactive”, to “a thermonuclear explosion”. Better hope they did scan the artifact before they touched it.
And to add to that, you also have a lot of different antagonist roles you can randomly get, from a blood cult that kidnaps and converts people to spill enough blood to summon their diety, through thiefs, terrorists that want to arm the nuke and destroy the station, to changelings or sleeper agents that are tasked with killing specific crew.
It’s loads of fun, and the community is amazing, especially on medium RP server.
Songs of Conquest. Had a weird relationship with it at first, almost like I wanted to dislike it, not sure why. I would think “this is so plainly gamified, the map is cartoonish in its resource implementation, the building feels constrictive…”
That said I’ve kept coming back to it. Something about the high fidelity pixel art, the clarity of its gameplay, the choices it forces, all of it started to really hook me. Even the combat, which first came off to me as insanely swingy, now just feels much more intensely tactical. Sure there are ways to abuse it, but all in all, even the AI is pretty decent (though the autoresolve logic is complete trash).
With the community mods and honestly solid gameplay even with the base factions, I have to say I really recommend it at least for a try to everyone.
Insurgency Sandstorm. Loved the previous game but my PC at the time couldn’t run it. I’ve had a better PC for years now but I only just picked it up and all my local servers are empty (Australia problems).
Believe it or not, GTA V. I don’t own a copy but my friend does, and I like it ok.
I’ve recently started and got through Death Stranding in the past month, and it was an amazing experience. I have not played a AAA game for a looong time, and having an actual motion-captured movie and animations to go along with your game, instead of indie animations and cutscenes, is pretty sick. Plus the game is gorgeous.
I also had no idea how cool the lore and setting is, from what I’ve randomly heard about the game, all I knew is it’s about delivering packages and hooking people in remote areas up to Wifi, I didn’t know
(only minor spoilers, it's in the first 20 minutes, so basically the first cutscene)
that you also have a rain that rapidly ages anything it touches, unburned corpses turnin into invisible monsters that eat people, which you can only see by hooking a fetus in a pod to yourself, and if the monsters eat anyone alive it literally nukes everything in 50 miles radius to a crater.
Which makes deliver packages a lot more exciting than I assumed.
Some of the parts of the story were a little bit weird and a lot of people don’t like it, but I like weird, and this had some pretty sick ideas. And the gameplay is also fun!
Recently it was Balatro that I played for the first time 2 months ago.
The SGDQ run of Balatro is amazing if you wanna see how crazy it can get.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Go7IXlYLg&pp=ygUMU2dkYyBiYWxhdHJv
That was amazing. Can’t believe how far people can take the game.
I love that game because I’ll step away for months, come back, play another deck and it’s a whole new problem.
Few things match the rush of Balatro switching to scientific notation
Baldurs Gate 3. Seemed expensive, complicated, and not my type of game at the time.
Oh, how wrong I was.
it’s possibly my favorite game of all time. i wasn’t expecting that. I’m an elder scrolls girlie at heart.
It’s sitting in my library collecting dust. Someone had bought it for me as a birthday gift… I should get to it!
Dark souls. I tried it a few times and dismissed. I returned to DS2 when DS3, at the request of a fanboi friend.
Accepting defeat, dusting myself off and surpassing all odds changed my mentality and patience with gaming forever.
Fuck me big bad boss? No, fuck you
This happened to me. It was Sekiro that was the one that finally sank it’s teeth into me. Still my favorite video game of all time.
Pretty much the same, I went DS2, then DS1R, then DS2:SotFS and then DS3. I don’t normally enjoy replaying games but SotFS was fine because enough had changed.
Still can’t get into Sekiro or Elden Ring, but I did finish Nioh and I’m sure Nioh 3 will be nice in a year or so when all the expansions have dropped.
Funny, I dropped Seiko 3/4 of the way through. Elden ring has been on the wishlist, never bought it.
I guess it’s hard to beat the best, all the co-op and troll-invade glory that was DS.
Elden Ring is like getting the gameplay of Dark Souls, but all encounters are on your own terms as the hard progression walls you get in linear dungeons don’t apply to most of the game. I wouldn’t call it easier, but I would describe it as more accessible.
They definitely turned up the dial on combat challenges for bosses, but I agree, it’s more accessible. There are so many ways to trivialize the combats, and you can even skip a lot of the bosses. It’s so much easier than ever before to come back later with a significant power increase and easily defeat any boss.
Probably the thing that helps accessibility the most though is making it clear there are other paths, and you can come back to a boss later. That was always the intention of the Souls games, but people often slam their head against a wall until it breaks, and they think the games are (too) hard. The tools were always there to make the game easier, but a lot of people didn’t take advantage of them in the older games. ER makes the alternatives so much more obvious.
I highly recommend spending some time with Sekiro. It is arguably their best game. It learns most of the lessons from the Souls series, innovates on that, but also doesn’t lose anything, in my opinion.
Elden Ring is good, but I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the older games. Yeah, the combat has been perfected, but that’s a relatively minor part of the gameplay, all things considered. DS1 has the perfect world to explore, with corridors that are crafted to perfection. It’s open enough to feel like you’re choosing where to explore while being closed enough to have good encounters. Elden Ring is so open that it loses a lot of control, which essentially means the only encounters that matter are in the dungeons. Those are a small fraction of the game, so it feels like a lot of time and effort spent to make something that’s experientially worse than the simpler older style. It’s still a master class in open world design, but I feel the game would be stronger if they focused on the classic design.
I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)
I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).
It was frustrating to start. I agree. It requires such a different skill set than the Souls games but it feels like you should be good at it already, but you won’t be.
One key to the game is in a quote a character says fairly early on: “Hesitation is defeat.” The way to play is to put constant pressure on the enemy. In the Souls games you’re encouraged to back off and take time to recover when you need to. In Sekiro, you need to keep the pressure up to break their posture. If you back off then they recover and progress is reset. It’s tough, but it’s one of the best combat games once it clicks. It’s why almost every game since has added a posture bar, but they don’t go all the way to the logical end that Sekiro did. Even ER took the posture mechanic, but watered it down.
undertale and deltarune. i kinda always dismissed those games as youtuber fandom shit, if that makes sense… stuff made to appeal to fandoms who love to pull nonsense out of their asses to make the games deeper than they really are. game theory bait. and i’ve heard so many horrors about the utdr fandom, it made me want to steer clear of the games. and i figured, since i already got spoiled a ton of stuff from undertale through cultural osmosis, what would be the point of playing it?
but they still interested me somewhat, since i heard from more people that they were actually really good… and i got spoiled one more thing i didn’t know, and i figured if i want to play these games someday, i have to do it now so my enjoyment of them isn’t ruined more by just existing on the internet
so i did! i played undertale twice in a row (i didn’t do everything needed to get the pacifist ending the first time), and the first 2 chapters of deltarune right after that (only those were released then). and oh my, i’m glad i did because these are some of my favourite games now. tho i still think I would’ve enjoyed undertale so much more if i hadn’t been spoiled a bunch about it…
don’t judge games by their fandoms. things are often popular for a reason, and fans of something often lack the creative experience of the original creators (which is not to say that there isn’t good utdr fan content, there is, a ton! but there’s also a lot of crap)
i still dislike the gaster theorists tho
I tried starting Undertale but it doesn’t work well (or at all I can’t remember) with a controller, maybe I should try using good ol AntiMicroX to translate controller inputs to mouse and keyboard. The first few images left me with an impression of very low effort so with that and the hardware issue I didn’t push further. You’re saying I should ? 😁
yea undertale’s graphics are pretty bad lol, in many cases literally on purpose! thankfully deltarune (especially the later chapters) looks much better. but imo, where the game really shines is its characters and battles, they’re really fun! that’s where you’ll feel the effort that went into the game. the music too is excellent imo
for the controller, if it’s not a problem you can just play with the keyboard, it works very well.
Cheers, I’ll give it another go ! yea keyboard should be fine I’ll make the effort heh
Pacific Drive
It was hitting my suggested sections for almost two years, all my game searches, tags, and algorithms. I brushed it off as some wandery nothing indie game.
It came out in 2024, but then this year 2026 a few months ago, I finally decided to give it a ahot and it was NOTHING like I thought it was. Also, a lot more blatantly queer first and deeply queercoded, which is an extremely refreshing change.
I’d been playing games like snowrunner and expeditions, and waiting for the steam frame to come out to play a bunch of vr games, so a cozy horror survival driving game that feels kinda like gta meets raft meets forza or snowrunner or something was not in my expectations.
It’s technically a roguelite extraction survival crafting story adventure rpg, kind of. Horror-lite, fantastic fresh soundtrack, based in an alternate timeline 1990s USA Washington State Olympic peninsula. It’s done quite well and I don’t want to finish it, though I’m close. It has some mods through Nexus mods, but most are primarily to make things easier balance-wise. No workshop support, doesn’t run great on steam deck but does run okay if you turn the graphics down all the way. Has probably the best dualsense controller integration I’ve played in a game, though, I generally don’t play many that have native support for dualsense features because they all look boring to me.
Anyway, if you like Washington State, driving, crafting, music, and you’re gay, give it a try. It’s only single player, though, and expect to put 40-60 hours in it. I’ve got about 90 so far without the expansion and am avoiding finishing it because I like it. Most of the bad reviews are from two camps: homophobes and people who this niche game doesn’t quite fit. But if what I’ve described to you sounds attractive, seriously give it a try. It goes on sale for about ten bucks USD. You don’t need any dlc, there are a few skin packs that give you infinite usage uniques, the soundtrack, and an actual expansion that seems like a totally separate gamemode that I plan on playing after I beat the story.
I do strongly suggest using a dualsense controller if you have one.
Pacific Drive was so goood
Undertale/deltarune. I played a demo for one of them (I forget which) and I found it too handholdy with not enough happening. Of course the games get a lot more fun after the tutorial section, but for me at the time it just felt too dragged out, so I didn’t properly play them until a few years later
I’m in the middle of my first Undertale play through right now. I’ll say some of the dialogue and situations that come up are just really funny and that has made it worth it to me so far.
