Ask Lemmy

Mount & Blade. It’s not unpopular per se, but somehow I never saw anyone mentioning it around here in Lemmy.

Right at this moment it's Civilization 7. I've never seen it mentioned here, just on CivFanatics forums and mostly negatively on Reddit. It had a botched/way too early release. My personal theory is that 2K knew that GTA was getting delayed so they said no delay for Civ.

New giant patch inbound any day! I swear it's fun. Best combat in Civ so far, and I have played every mainline game for the past roughly 30 years.

The Fatal Frame series (maybe the second one here and there) and Kunitsu-Gami. The second one surprised me since it's relatively new, but I thought it was a great surprise. I loved the hell out of that game.

Flashback.
I played it on SNES, but it was on a few consoles. I heard they are making a sequel so that's cool. It's science fiction with flavours of total recall, they live, and running man. I just really enjoyed the prince of Persia style gameplay but cyberpunk.

Parasite Eve
More specifically number 2, because the first one never officially came to pal regions. It's like resident evil but SciFi/body horror. The third game was shit because they lost the rights to the novel it was originally based on. If there's any game sequel that I wish for it would be a proper PE3.

One of my favorite games is a hidden gem that I never see people mention. It's called Out of Space and it's a couch co-op game similar to Overcooked with two major differences, it's less frenetic so you can play it to chill out, and it's procedurally generated so you have lots of replayability. For me and my wife it's the perfect game of "let's play a round of something", yet I never see it mentioned anywhere.

luanti https://www.luanti.org/

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

I have been playing this game my entire life on/off, and have the most hours in, but I have never beaten it. I came close 1 fucking time, and I will forever remember the one dumb mistake I made that lost it for me just on the cusp of victory.

One day...

https://crawl.develz.org/

Definitely Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, an RTS in the Star Wars universe that uses the Age of Empires 2 engine and has very similar gameplay.

Thing Thing series

Pocket Tanks

Black Ice

Mortal Sin, a Melee - Roguellike with great visuals and a dev that cares a lot.

ΔV: Rings of Saturn, a hard-scifi 2d asteroid mining game. Great to relax to, a nice community and a great dev, linux native!

Deadlink, a Roguelike arena shooter, tight controls, pretty hard for an aging man like me, but i still like it, even if it puts me in my place regularly lol

Gun. (2005) So fun.

There's a bunch on the PS1 that got lost in the mix.

Ape Escape was really fun and novel, it was the first mandatory dual-stick release, and it did initially sell really well! It got two sequels on the PS2 but then drifted into spin-offs and party games. It's been two decades since the last proper installment.

Tomba! is delightful nonsense, a 2D adventure platformer that presented non-linear quests and tight controls. It's a cult-classic and the digital Special Edition on PS5 looks like it was done well.

Now for something truly forgotten: Running Wild. It's a kart racer but instead of karts it's a bunch of furries in a footrace. The announcer yells a lot, some of the character designs are lazy stereotypes, the graphics are muddy, but the track design is solid and it really feels fast when you get going. Very rewarding to learn the best lines and get into a clean flow.

The Thief series. I LOVED the first one especially, Thief the Dark Project. Medieval (low magic fantasy?) stealth shooter. The more valuable you pick up directly translates to what you can buy as a load out for the next level so you're encouraged to explore, though even the low level enemies can kick you ass so you have to be sneaky. Actually great stealth mechanics even for an old game. The world building is amazing, with it's own lore, culture and slang. The plot of the games are also great.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a game I've played almost non-stop since about 2003. Web based and free, it's based off of old text based games. But it's fun. Really fun. And hilarious. The currency is meat. The classes are goofy. Saucerer? Disco bandit? Seal Clubber? A lot of games deal with things like power creep or inflation, or how the heck to get people to actually help pay for it. This game solves problems like these elegantly. The user base is fun and friendly and corporative, there's always new stuff coming out to try, they do a holiday special every year, and all the pictures are crudely drawn stick figures.

The original Master of Magic for DOS. It's STILL being actively modded 32 years post release and has never quite been duplicated.

The Age of Wonders series does a fairly good job with the feel, but it's just not the same.

Armadillo Run

Robot Alchemic Drive (R.A.D.)

The Saboteur

The legend of dragoon.

The Void by Ice-Pick Lodge, the makers of Pathologic.

This game taught me that actions have consequences and that I should be more humble and think twice about the environment before exploiting it like I'm playing a game.

Yes, it's that kind of game.

Legend of Legaia. It’s a JRPG from the PS1 golden era, but it had a relatively small launch and basically zero marketing. It was completely overshadowed by other games like FFVII and Legend of Dragoon. It has a sort of cult classic following now. The story starts off as a fairly basic “world is awful, kid gets a magic weapon to beat the big evil thing” type of plot, but has a surprising amount of twists and turns.

The combat system is interesting, and hasn’t really been replicated since. You string together a series of small attacks, to make larger super combos.

Fair warning, the US release is significantly harder than the JP and EU versions. For some reason, the devs multiplied all the enemy stats by 1.25, and slashed their exp/gold drop rates by 50% for the US release. So you need to grind twice as long to be properly geared/leveled, and the grinding is 25% more difficult.

Fahrenheit/ Indigo Prophecy, an early David Cage/ Quantic Dream game from the same people who made Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human

I haven't played it in forever so I'm not sure how well it holds up (if at all) and I also have a love/hate relationship with it.

It has one of the single worst/ cheap levels of any game I have ever played*, and in the very last level the story really shits the bed. On the other hand it was doing things at the time that I still haven't seen in other games. (I haven't gotten around to playing his other games so he might be doing similar things in them). In terms of attempting to evolve the way stories are told in games it was truly groundbreaking and unique for its time.

I still have fond memories of playing it despite it's flaws. I'd say it's worth playing for anyone interested in a older game that does some really interesting things from a story telling perspective and/or people who are fans of the later games and are curious to see where it started. As long as you can make it through the QTE level with your sanity intact and are prepared for the story to get stupid right at the end- it's worth a playthrough imo

*Even though I hate the level, the concept behind it is actually pretty cool. A malevolent force tries to kill the player character by throwing his apartment at him. The problem is it's a 4 1/2 minute QTE sequence that requires precise timing and you can't mess up even one time or you have to start the entire thing over from the beginning. You also have plenty of time to wonder why the force never varies it's strategy of throwing one object at a time. Good idea, terrible execution.