And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
Master Of Orion. Both the original, it’s sequel and the modern remake. It’s nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game’s progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.
Salt and Sanctuary (more for it being unpopular vs bad hivemind).
I love Metroidvanias, but combined with Souls-like elements makes for a very fun concoction. This one in particular I have so much fun exploring. The story telling and world building adds to the mystery and the fun of unraveling the story. It has a very good variety of enemies/bosses/items. It also oozes so much atmosphere. One of the better Metroidvanias (I played a fair number of them).
Another one is Dark Souls 2. I get it being disliked; can’t be helped as it had a lot of departures from the first. But out of all 3, this one I played x3 as much. I absolutely love the sheer variety of locations (it’s ridiculous); exploration is super fun and rewarding.
Is Salt and Sanctuary not a popular game? It’s one of the better and well reviewed 2D souls-likes. Salt and Sacrifice did get dunked on for being Epic exclusive and worse than Salt and Sanctuary though.
I love Metroidvanias
Give Ender Lilies a try if you didn’t play it yet by the way. Really good Metroidvania and one of my favorites (besides the obvious ones like Hollow Knight and Ori).
It’s the impression I get, I rarely hear it discussed or people just haven’t heard of it when Hollow Knight comes up.
I actually gave Ender Lilies a shot. I have to admit it didn’t grab me for some reason. I don’t remember what problem I had with it exactly. BUT it does have a phenomenal soundtrack (Awakening, North).
Have you played Aquaria? I should’ve mentioned this one instead (slipped my mind) because it feels even more obscure than Salt and Sanctuary.
Have you played Aquaria?
Nope, but I do have it in my Steam library for some reason so I’m gonna check it out soon.
Completely agree on Dark Souls 2, I’ve played almost all of the Souls games, yet I keep finding myself coming back to Dark Souls 2, I’m not sure what it is about the game, because there are definitely things I don’t like about it (Mainly adaptability and hollowfication reducing your health) but it’s still easily my most replayed Souls game. I especially love the early game, where you have 4 different paths you can take from Majula, it lets me leave if I am struggling with an area and come back to it later after playing a different path for a while
I’ve been meaning to play salt and sanctuary for a while, but haven’t done it yet. I might pick that game up next time my bank account is a bit more full, because that sounds right up my alley
I also keep wanting to come back to DS2 for the long journey with so many cool locations.
Salt and Sanctuary really holds a special place for me. The atmosphere is absolutely top notch; we’re talking Hollow Knight levels in my opinion. The map design is also phenomenal along with tons of secrets and shortcuts. Not sure if the recent patch fixed it, but the combat is kinda unbalanced from what I recall. Heavy armor is more or less useless so you might as well go fashion-souls. And 2-handed strength weapons are king.
Idk where the DS2 hate came from, before DS3 released i remember DS2 being quite well regarded, i put in well over 300 or so hours just replaying the game over and over again trying to create OP builds and beating the game as fast as i could. while DS3 felt super polished with a really impressive map design, it just wasn’t as fun as DS2 for me.
I think most of the hate was from the initial release. At this point blatant hate is undeserved and it might be a meme at this point or a bandwagon to hop on where everyone knows “DS2 bad”.
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first “real” PC and being amazed by how it looked.
It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.
Nobody can hate that game. Damn that was gold. I believe it’s well beloved, tho not widely remembered
I loved this game! The humour was my favourite part - very dry and very British. A fun shooter with a lot of variety. Amazing soundtrack by Jeremy Soule. I found the game very difficult, though - I doubt I ever got close to finishing it. How about you?
When I first played it I didn’t get very far into it. But I came back to it a few years later and finished it. The Multiplayer was also suprisingly fun on LAN-parties.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. The game was a commercial and critical bomb, but it’s the only cover shooter I’ve ever enjoyed. It’s just such an unrelentingly visceral, disorienting, harsh game, with one of the main aesthetic gimmicks being that it emulates the look and feel of a late 2000s amateur video. It’s hard to describe without seeing it in action, but it was audacious as shit for what was meant to be a big budget, AAA title.
Pretty much any of the Zachtronics games. Shenzen I/O, ExaPunks, Opus Magnum, and Last Call BBS are all fun “puzzle” games for programmers and people with programmer brains.
Metroid other m. Far from best game in the series, a lot easier than the other games, but i found the presentation really fun.
The dodging and kill moves i found satisfying and the boss fights were. The cut scenes were a bit too long buy i enjoyed the game
Yeah, this really is a game that the story killed. The gameplay is tight and fun, and overall it’s a fun experiment in the series that was ruined by the creator of the series completely misunderstanding why people like Samus as a character.
Well part of my unpopular opinion is that the story isn’t that bad. To me the flashbacks arent so bad, it makes sense that samus was rebellious, she was young at the time and going through a phase but it also explains why she is a rogue hunter.
The part that is annoying is the present timeline where samus has completely abandoned the rebelliousness and will risk her own life in order to not disobey orders from someone who A) isn’t her commanding officer and B) she disobeyed in the past
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 :)
They really did this game dirty by teasing it as Banjo-Kazooie 3. Probably the biggest reason why it failed, even though it was a pretty cool game.
Would really love a PC version of it as well.
Totally agree. I figured all of Rare Replay would have come to PC by now but maybe someday…
Every game releases on PC at some point, whether through emulation or not is up to the developers/publishers. :D
I enjoyed Spore when I was a kid. It was legit fun evolving and designing your creature.
I played SO much spore back in the day. I even created a sort of OC in the game with a whole backstory and cast of characters and everything. Totally just had a blast from the past looking at my creations on the “sporepedia” (it still exists!)
Spore was really cool… Until space stage which was just too boring!
I was extremely invested in spore pre release and with how much was cut, it could never live up to my expectations…
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.
Nobody ever says this but Halo Infinite isn’t that bad if you ignore the battlepass
any arena shooter in the style of Quake, Halo, or Unreal Tournament. It’s a shame they aren’t more popular
I appreciate overwatch, because the sequel cured my videogame addiction (it’s so much worse)
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Watch_Dogs was my first platinum on PS3. Everyone was shitting all over the game due to the PC port controversy, but I really enjoyed it. Huge city, different environment, actually good on-foot movement unlike in GTA games, and toooooooons of side stuff to do.
And oh dear, all the hacking stuff was such fun. Yes it was all just one button, but everything was well implemented. The amount of personal details you could pull from phones was amazing. I kept doing it all the time and it wasn’t until near the end of the game that they started repeating.
And the trademark unique Ubisoft multiplayer. Shame it didn’t have full-blown online mode, I can see myself getting lost in it.
Yea great game. Didn’t deserve all the hate unrelated to its actual accomplishments.
The DLC… Bad Blood I think? Was even better.
I can’t emphasize enough how cool some of those VR side-missions were. Some would qualify as fun standalone indie games on their own.
I really liked Watch_Dogs. And it is the only game in which the invading player thingy clicked for me. No other game ever pulled that off again. (the new Sniper elite came close though, but it messed up the frequency of it)
Sadly the second game never clicked for me, so I didn’t tried Legions.
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.
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3D platformers are seeing a bit of a resurgence on the indie level at least which is pretty exciting. In particular I’d recommend the Spark the Electric Jester series (although the 1st is 2D) and Lunistice in particular
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Sword Art Online: Lost Song.
Total weeb game with a whisper of a story and super grindy, but it has some of the best flight and 3d mobility controls I’ve ever seen.
Sooo, story-wise, are we talking season 1 “lots of angst and weird time skips” or season 2 “incestuous love triangle plot” or season 3 “we have lightsabers now and I remember literally nothing else?”
I guess it doesn’t matter except that I was able to enjoy (somehow) season 1 and 3, despite their very many issues, but I just couldn’t with 2.
Hm, It’s set in Alfheim Online (season 2), but the story is original. It was actually decently not cringe, but it was also pretty unremarkable. There’s no character development, no “romance”, so every character is reduced to a stereotype of themselves. IIRC each major character got a short story arc. I think there may have been a few side quests that paralleled some events of the story from Season 2.
