Gaming

Vintage Story. It's a minecraft-mod turned game that focuses on slow progression through the ages. You need to survive winters and they just had a lore update recently. I play it with my SO and it's definitely a slower paced game, but the progression feels more rewarding.

Imperator: Rome actually. I think I've been seeing a bit more appreciation for it recently (or maybe I'm just imagining it), but the launch was really rough and none of the updates, which changed quite a lot, really got the player counts up until Paradox just decided to abandon it. It's definitely flawed, but I have kind of a soft spot for it and still enjoy the occasional game. For me the army automation was really nice, since microing stacks has always been one of the most annoying things for me to do in these games, the pop migration and stuff helped it feel like my cities were really growing more organically, and where the basegame falls short there are still some pretty decent mods to improve things (one major mod is actually still being regularly updated years after the game was axed by the devs).

Dear Esther is a beautiful piece of art that communicates its story and themes through visual, environmental and interactive symbolism, both random and scripted prose, and movingly composed music. At worst, I think anyone can at least appreciate the beauty in this world they created, the use of symbolism in the environment, and/or the music.

I think of it as the video game equivalent of a Terrance Malick film where you are basically driving the camera and triggering the narration. I totally get if you don't have preferences for that type of thing, but I think it's extremely healthy for the medium to have works like it. Few games scratch the kind of itch this one does.

Additionally, the act of moving and investigating a 3D, digitally-realized island constitutes interactivity and, thus, marks it as something inherently different from a movie or book. Modern "games" do not have to have deep or challenging mechanics to utilize interactivity artistically.

I've played and beaten plenty of difficult, mechanical or systems focused video games, including most the modern From Software games, Hollow Knight, and old NES games so my appreciation for it isn't some kind of aversion to challenge or mechanical depth.

I wouldn't call this unpopular because it's disliked, just unknown to a lot of people because I don't think it was marketed much in the US. One of my all time favorite games is Dragon Quest Builders 2. It's got just the right difficulty for me where it's mostly easy with a few challenging boss fights that might take a few tries to master. It's got a nice balance between questing, building, and farming. It's a bit silly, but it gets to be cute and endearing. I love the graphics. You're building in 3D with blocks like Minecraft but it's actually pretty, Minecraft was always too ugly for me to get into it.

I only know about this game because Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games were my boyfriend's favorite growing up and it's still his favorite series.

The Risen games. Sure they’re janky, miss polish, look meh. But there’s just something so charming about these games that I prefer them over many polished triple A rpg’s.

For all its flaws, I loved Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a fun one to play.

I loved Stuntman on the PS2. In it, you play a stunt driver across a series of movie sets. You drive the car while a director barks orders into your ear. If you complete all the set pieces in a scene, you move on to the next (more difficult) one and then onto other movies.

I love the process of refining the run over and over until you get it just right. The worst thing about the game is the load times. I don’t remember how long they were, but I remember they were very long. This is tough in a game that’s asking you to do something over and over until you get it right. Super Meat Boy handled this aspect much better years later, but I enjoy the premise of Stuntman more.

I've always believed that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts deserves way more love than it got. I can understand it may have been just a the wrong time (and not what fans were hoping for with a BK revival at the time) but the core vehicle building gameplay and physics are so much fun to play around with.

I've beaten the game a few times over now, and each time I try to challenge myself to make wilder vehicles than before. Or sometimes avoid making a vehicle entirely and attempting to make some sort of contraption machine. The music is some incredible work from Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland, bringing in a more modern but still very Banjo sound to the game.

I think now with the game being nearly 15 years behind us now, if you have GamePass please do yourself a favor and give it a try with an open mind! It may not be for everyone, but the building mechanics were pretty ahead of their time for 2008! You may just find a new favorite game :)

Most of the Dark Pictures Anthology games have pretty mediocre ratings, but at this point my friends and I look forward to each release. It's like a 10 hour long horror movie night. They're just long enough to start right after lunch on a sat, and play late into the night, passing the controller around.

Their last release The Devil In Me is rated around 5/10, yet it might be my favorite one to date. It's not uncommon for them to have a rocky release with bugs, so sometimes we give them a few months to patch it up. But honestly, one of the best local coop experiences I've had. Definitely recommend if you have some friends over.

I appreciate overwatch, because the sequel cured my videogame addiction (it's so much worse)

SCRAPS Modular Vehicle Combat. It's so much fun building epic guncars and battling with your friends LAN or over the internet. So sad to see the development abandoned though.

Although the entire game has kinda become a meme in recent years, I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its a really charming game, and although people like to rag on it for being "generic lotr fantasy" I dont think thats a bad thing. Sometimes you just wanna play a run of the mill fantasy game and explore some dungeons. Plus it still had enough weird and bizarre things to keep it interesting, like the Shivering Isle dlc. I have fond memories of playing the game all the time back in school. One time I beat the entire Knights of the Nine dlc in a single sitting. It can be really clunky, weird, and downright broken but I still love it. Morrowind is still better tho

I liked Balan Wonderworld. i didn't love it, but i certainly don't understand the hate- I haven't ran into any bugs, some of the powers were neat, the music was phenomenal, and the simple controls were a selling point for me. it was like playing a new Dreamcast game in 2023 for better or for worse, another Billy Hatcher or something.

I played both Fable 3 and Assassin's Creed 3 and enjoyed them immensely. I don't always finish games, but I finished both of them. Then I went online and found out at the time both of them were considered the worst of their franchises. Shrug I still had fun, dangit.

i don't know if this really counts, as they were super-popular in their day, but I like re-playing several PC games from the 90s that most people today wouldn't know of or, perhaps, remember.

• the Myst series
• The Ultima series, including Ultima Underworld I & II
• I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
• The Journeyman Project

a few others

It never really caught on, but I stumbled upon an indie game called Ctrl Alt Ego on PC and I had a really fun time with it. It's an RPG with some problem solving where your consciousness can jump to different robots and objects. You have a main body (an Ant) that you can jump into where you can add upgrades and powers to it. It's really fun and pretty unique. The only thing I didn't care for was the ending, it didn't make a lot of sense. But still it's worth trying out