I’m a casual gamer who’s been largely inactive for the past few decades, and so I’m looking for some some good game recommendations. I don’t mind if they’re old as long as they came out after 2003 (because that’s when graphics of many games really started improving), maybe between 2008-2019. I’m also quite a picky gamer.
Here is a list of games that I’ve played before and that I liked (in no particular order):
- The Stanley Parable
- Counter-Strike: Source
- Counter-Strike Global Offensive
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- Grand Theft Auto V (just started playing this one)
- Freeways
- The Wizard’s Pen
- Need for Speed: Most Wanted
- Need for Speed: Heat
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Game Collection
- Minecraft
- Hamsterball
- Sifu
- Tekken 6
- SuperHOT
- Papers Please
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
- Accelerator (by TenebrousP)
- The Professional
- Paraopticon
- Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher
- ir:rational
- Viewport
- Lyxo
- Shadowess (by playchilla)
- Duet (by Kumobius)
- Chain Reaction
- Gumslinger
- Intersectiion Controller
- Little Alchemy
- Magic Survival (by Leme)
- Spy Tactics
- Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil
- Cyclomaniacs 2
- Learn 2 Fly 2
- Piano Tiles 2
- The Sims 3
- Plants vs. Zombies
- Tetris (on Facebook)
- Solitaire on Windows 7
- Space Cadet Pinball
- Purble Place
Here are games that I’ve played that I didn’t like:
- Quake II RTX
- Doom (1993)
- Counter-Strike 1.6
- Left 4 Dead
- Half-Life
- Speed Dreams
- Assault Cube
- Terraria
- Minetest
- Xonotic
- Piano Tiles
- Geometry Dash
- Payback 2
- Touchgrind Skate 2
- Pixel Wheels
- NBA 2K11
- Defense of the Ancients
- Dota 2
- Sim City 2000
- OpenRCT 2
- OpenTTD
- The Sims 4
- Doki Doki Literature Club
- Tetris (any other implementation I’ve tried)
- Solitaire on Windows XP
Here are games I would like to avoid:
- Battle Royale / Deathmatch- style games (Fortnite, PUBG, etc.)
- MOBAs (League of Legends, Mobile Legends, etc.)
- Hero shooters (Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, etc.)
- Games with fantasy-based elements (Skyrim, The Witcher, Souls games etc.)
- RPGs
- Side-scrollers / Shoot-em-ups / Top-down games
- Platformers
- Horror/supernatural games (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.)
- Management games (Civilization, Cities: Skylines, etc.)
- Artillery games
- Outer-space/post-apocalyptic games (Halo, Fallout, etc.)
- Cookie clickers / Walking simulators
- Rhythm games
- Sports games
- Game adaptations of existing media (Star Wars games, Arkham games, etc.)
- Board/card/gambling/collectible/gacha games\
- Games that have microtransactions/required DLCs
- Text adventures / Visual novels
- Trivia games
- VR games
Other than that, everything is fair game. I don’t have any aversion towards graphic language/gore/sex.
My tastes might be too specific, but I hope someone here may be able to provide me with a recommendation!
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So you want to avoid most of the good games? Wow
Good games? He’s excluding pretty much all games!
I can kinda see why they’ve been out of gaming for decades. I’m also a bit confused by their qualifiers… They say they don’t want top-down games, but listed liking pinball… Is that not a top-down pinball game?
Well, Pinball is a top-down game, but I’ve included it in the games I like because it’s one of the first games I’ve played. If I played it now without any preconception or nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t like it.
Have you tried any of the suggestions yet? I’m curious to know if you liked any of them :)
The Outer Wilds.
Probably in the top ten games I’ve ever played. Story focused, lite reading, almost no action, maybe some scary elements depending on your personality.
Seems interesting, even though it has space/fantasy elements, it looks more like an outdoor survival game. I’ll try to check it out.
It’s not really a survival game. More of an exploration puzzle game. It doesn’t explicitly tell you where to go or what to do. You’re pretty much on your own to find clues and figure out what happened and how to end the time loop you’re stuck in. It really is a fascinating game. I haven’t played anything else quite like it.
Disco Elysium
Ehhh, that one is kind of reading-heavy, as well as being top-down. It might not be what OP is looking for.
All dialog is voiced and the OP excluded most games so I’m just recommending a banger game.
I agree with the rec here. I think at this point OP is just going to have to roll the dice on the recent hits and see if it can change some of their tastes. Or just drop the medium altogether.
Maybe it’ll help a little that Disco Elysium is isometric, not top-down. Though it’s an RPG. And text-heavy. 🤷♀️
Yeah, being isometric does help. Though the thing that steers me away from Disco Elysium is not the text-heaviness (which I don’t really mind), nor the RPGness (since it seems that it’s been implemented quite uniquely in this game), but that there may be some kind of alien insects (?) in the game.
I damn near guarantee the “alien insect” is not what you’re imagining, and even if it were, it’s less than 1% of the game.
It’s one element of a larger setting, the kind of original idea that we rarely see in RPGs. It’s not your typical fantasy tropes. I’m being vague here because discovering the nature of the world you’re in is a big part of the game.
Oh really? Then I’ll take a look.
Fair enough
If you enjoyed Papers Please, you might enjoy Lucas Pope’s other major work, Return of the Obra Dinn. It’s a “solve the mystery” game, possibly the best one I’m aware of. It’s very engaging, it’ll make you feel like a genius, and it has basically no replay value.
One of my very, very favorite games is Subnautica. It is a survival game set on an ocean planet, and few games have captured me the way Subnautica did. I think you should go into Subnautica as blind as possible, but I will reveal a few things about it so you can decide if it’s for you: Unlike most survival games it is not inherently open-ended; it has a story that has an end, there is a victory condition to work toward. I would not call Subnautica “a horror game” because horror/scariness isn’t the point of the game, but it does have some scary things in it. By its nature it is also a trigger for thalassophobia aka fear of deep water.
You might enjoy Infinifactory by Zachtronics. It has Minecraft-like block placing gameplay, but you are given fixed immutable environments in which to build little assembly lines out of conveyors, welders, pushers, grinders etc. Of the Zachtronics games I think this is the most accessible, though like many of their games I think the difficulty curve is a little steep.
Among the three games you listed, Return of the Obra Dinn seems most interesting. Subnautica and Infinifactory still looks a little too sci-fi/alien-y for my tastes. Though regarding Infinifactory, I may seem to have played something like it before (which I forgot to include in the first list): 7 Billion Humans. I guess Infinifactory is more of a mechanical version of that…?
The framing device for Infinifactory is you were abducted by aliens and they make you build little assembly lines. The story is very unimportant to the gameplay, it’s an excuse plot you can safely ignore. I’m not familiar with 7 Billion Humans, looking up a let’s play real quick…no Infinifactory isn’t much like that. First Infinifactory is first person 3D, it controls a bit like Minecraft. You have solid blocks, conveyors, rotators, welders and other such blocks you place in a 3D grid. When you press Run, ingredient blocks start popping out of dispensers, and there’s a goal that shows you what shape you need to make them into; and you have to build an assembly line that will continuously run; aka it’s possible to make an assembly line that works the first time but jams itself and can’t make the second one; to beat a level your factory has to produce ten correct samples in a row.
Subnautica is set in a future universe where humans have space travel, your player character is a crewman on a space ship that crashes on an alien ocean planet. It is a bit Sci-Fi but it is an incredibly good game.
ObraDinn was really engaging but the graphics gave me a helluva headache, which is a shame because it seems like a great story with a lot of potential. I would recommend RoadWarden if you like games like this. It was so addicting. Its short but I fell in love with it.
Its kind of a tough list you’ve made here friend. I am going to recommend outliers and games that break genre rules instead.
You seem to be split on card games but check out Inscryption and slay the spire to see what you think.
Cult of the lamb was also pretty good by the same publisher.
StarDew valley or my time at Portia or Palia (in beta) are nice casual games.
Hades is challenging and hack and slash roguelite but very good with a neat story. Bastion was really engaging but a platformer slash Action RPG and isometric.
Valheim might scratch an itch. It has a bit of fantasy but its mostly Norse mythology based. Survival and base building.
Strange horticulture was nice if you liked the potion master style of games.
Wildermyth is kind of a write your own story adventure and one of my most played, games but its kind of an RPG, just not in the classic sense.
Death and Taxes is kind of like papers please, but also very short.
Tails Noir is a bit if a linear story game. Less text heavy than Disco Elysium and I enjoyed the journey more than the destination but good game.
Anyway if any seem interesting shoot a reply
tetris
Tetris Effect
If you liked the Stanley parable, I feel like spec ops: the line would be up your alley. Quite different games with a common narrative method.
Based on the puzzle games and games with character on your list, it seems like psychonauts would be a good choice. (Its technically a platformer, but so is tomb raider)
The Scribblenauts series is a fun puzzle game that’s sort of unique, though it’s a side scroller.
Beaming is a racing game that’s heavy on the physics simulation side of things.
Judging by the name, I thought Spec Ops: The Line would be a Counter-Strike ripoff, but since it has The Line™ in its name, then surely it must be a The Stanley Parable ripoff./jk
Psychonauts seems to have a bit of cartoon/fantasy elements to it.
I’ve played a bit of the OG Scribblenauts way back, it was a bit fun.
I’ll be checking out Spec Ops: The Line and BeamNG.
From the looks of your lists of what you like and what to avoid I think you’d like games like the Dishonored series, Bioshock, and the System Shock remake.
No, Dishonored seems to have supernatural elements, while Bioshock and System Shock seem to have some sci-fi elements.
CounterStrike 2 came out last Wednesday. Basically the same game as CSGO but with some quality of life and graphical updates. Might be worth taking a shot at getting back into it.
There’s some platforming but Hollow Knight is an excellent game if you enjoy metroidvania types.
If you have someone to play with you may want to give local couch games a try. I’m ignoring a few of your thematic dislikes because they aren’t really a critical part of most of these games.
Games like:
Lovers in a dangerous space time
Boomerangfu
It takes two
Untitled goose game (single player is also fun if you enjoy harassing people as a goose)
Unravel
Duck game
Portal 2 (single player is great)
Cup head (single player is also great)
Seeing as you liked The Stanley Parable you might want to give Antichamber a try. It’s also in the mindfuckery category of games. And I didn’t see Portal 1/2 on your list, they are in roughly the same area of games, but focused more on the puzzle side of things.
I would just recommend you to refer to metacritic and see the best games of all time for PC if you’re using PC. My personal recommendation is certainly Baldur’s Gate 3. If you prefer multiplayer but would like to avoid the toxic community, then I suggest Deep Rock Galactic.
Rock and stone !
Rock and stone to the bone!
Rimworld
Since Dishonored and System Shock was already mentioned, I’ll also recommend the Thief trilogy (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief 2: The Metal Age and Thief: Deadly Shadows). Thief along with System Shock is one of the series which started the Immersive Sim genre, which Dishonored belongs to also. The third game came out in 2004 but I also recommend the first two because despite a lot less detailed graphics they imo have a lot better atmosphere and objectively better gameplay (a lot of the gameplay depth was cut in the third one to make it more playable on consoles, but it’s still a good game).
Another one I always tell people about is INFRA. It’s a pretty unknown puzzle/exploration game with excellent atmosphere and very high on my top of all time list. Highly recommend if exploring crumbling or long forgotten urban environments sounds like your thing.
I’ll be checking Thief and INFRA out!
Enjoy!
Dredge is a pretty good casual game. Lots of fun to explore and really best played in short sessions.
So it’s basically like Subnautica, but with less sci-fi and aliens? Hmmm…
It’s basically like a top side water exploration game with supernatural and Monster elements.
However the horror elements are optional and monsters attacking you and spooky shit can be turned off.
I love Dredge! But I think I finished the whole game in 4 or 5 sittings over a weekend. That’s not a comment on the game’s length per se and more on the fun I had. I just didn’t want to stop playing!
If you liked red-alert you might like other RTS games such as Age Of Empires 2 (remaster came out in 2019, very active community) or starcraft2.
