A certified Sony moment

They didn’t win an award for capturing lots of pixels

• Tunic — You need to figure out the game’s manual to know how to play. Souls-style exploration and combat.
• Papers, Please — If you liked Rocket Shop, you’ll like this. You are a border guard, checking people’s documents and choosing if they can enter. The rules change every day as international tensions grow. Great plot with multiple endings, expressed with just your green and red stamps.
• Hypnospace Outlaw (kind of) — You are a moderator in a fictional version of GeoCities in the last months of 1999. Your training is web pages and crusty point and click CD-ROM slideshows. It’s heartfelt story about the impact of technology on society and a loving funeral for that era of the world wide web.

As even further stretches, there is TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, both Zachtronics games that have you do programming. The tutorial for TIS-100 just opens a PDF that looks like a crusty scan of an ancient computer manual, like you were learning to program on a C64 or something.

WRONG those are provincial trade barriers that will be gone by Canada Day

Monday Night Combat, and especially its successor, SMNC, had such good potential. It was a damn shame the developers bet on a different project of theirs instead. And now over a decade later, Valve picks up the formula to make Deadlock.

I’ve tried a related game, BallisticNG, in VR. It was worth doing… once.

If you like that kind of game, also check out SEUM and Neon White.

ODDCORE (939 Steam reviews, Early Access)

Roguish boomer FPS where you travel to liminal spaces to shoot all the monsters. They’re not scary if they’re dead! Instead of having a map of encounters, you get 5 minutes to do as much as possible. Once you’ve cleaned out a space, you jump to the next world… unless your teleport gun glitches out and takes you someplace very weird. At any time, even during combat, you can jump to your home base to buy upgrades or extra time credit.

WORMHOLE (51 Steam reviews)

WORMHOLE is next-level Snake. I’ve written about it before! There are powerups, wormholes (obviously), and increasingly complex and cramped levels. The game’s graphics and music get more intense over time and it becomes an oddly hypnotic action game.

I’m glad to see these threads again! They’re fun.

Ash & Adam’s GOBSMACKED (37 Steam reviews)

This is a single-player arcade FPS. You battle robots in a series of arenas with a set of wacky weapons, with shops in between. At the start of each run, you have to buy yourself a starting loadout using the money you got from previous runs, but you can’t choose the same items as your last run. Buying an item for the first time at a shop unlocks it so you can choose it as a starter in a future run.

The balls must glow

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Robust kart racer with advanced mechanics that reward good driving and still-working online multiplayer!

There’s the fan theory from the Pokémon Black/White series that N, the half-rival/half-enemy, is secretly a Zoroark. He has a similar hairstyle and it would explain his backstory as a wild child and why he somehow has the ability to understand Pokémon. There’s also a chase sequence where you follow a Zoroark around, but you reach the dead end of a cave and it’s just him there.

Where has this been all of my life?

Quebec.

That’s definitely one of the things that grabs my attention when I browse for games!

I would say that as well about WORMHOLE and Hypnospace Outlaw.

I personally didn’t feel any issue with the game being small. Besides, a bonus of fast travel not being necessary is that it’s not necessary! I’m assuming that in the JRPG tradition, it’s more about a “large” story than a large playable area.

Yeah but cassettes were still around. Unless you had mini CDs, cassettes were the way to go if you wanted music in your pocket.

It would just be Golf.

Just like the video trimmer Video Trimmer, metadata cleaner Metadata Cleaner, and icon library Icon Library.

I was hyped for this game until I saw it uses Denuvo. That killed my excitement for a proper successor to Sonic Racing Transformed.

How about Hyperbolica and 4D Golf? Both are by the same developer and show you exotic geometry by putting you in there.

Hyperbolica is set in a world in hyperbolic space, where there’s more “space” in your space. Parallel lines curve away from each other and six squares can share a corner instead of four. You learn about the properties of hyperbolic space by trying various mundane tasks like hiking and serving dishes at a restaurant.

4D Golf is mini golf in four spatial dimensions. You build up an intuition for navigating the courses. There’s even a level editor!