Edit: While I'm at it: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Open source roguelike game. You can play in a browser, or download it. Tile sets or no tile sets. You can play it on a fuckin' potato, I can sit here with my PC rendering 4k video and still smoothly play this game, I ran it on a netbook, just download it and play it lol https://crawl.develz.org/
Have you heard of the obscure indie gem Witcher 3?
But in all seriousness, Ctrl Alt Ego. It’s a fun and unique “immersive sim” style game (think System Shock or Deus Ex) developed by two people, with the new mechanic of being able to possess some objects and enemies in the environment.
I’m honestly shocked that it’s not more popular, it stands alongside the greatest indie games of all time in my opinion.
Gameplay is a perfect blend of fast paced, tough as nails combat, lengthy and challenging puzzle dungeons, and rich, emotional storytelling. The music and visuals are dialed in perfectly as well.
To be clear the game is hard hard, but, it does have assist and accessibility features built in, including stuff like slowing down some of the time sensitive puzzles.
The game is currently 70% off on steam (only $6!), so at that price I encourage everyone to play it. Runtime is probably like 40 hours for the base story. My 100% run is over 100 hours including the dlc
I need to try this again. I really wanted to get into it but I bounced off it after about 8-10 hours. I seem to remember feeling it was a bit grindy and dragged in places. I played on PS4 then PS5 and don't recall tweaking the assist mode. Will need to look at that again. I'm getting a bit long in the tooth and have mild arthritis so don't have the dexterity I used to have in my 20s - assist modes are great for this. I wish more developers would include them rather than insisting on one level of difficulty. Some of us already have an in-built hard mode!
In terms of grinding, there is a little bit for sure. Both for XP and also for loot drops.
The thing is though, and I never really see this talked about anywhere online for some reason, “grinding” in this game actually has a really incredible system built around it.
Your health regenerates between combat encounters, but it’s actually possible to sprint through the open world zones and chain groups of enemies together without leaving combat. As you do this, your “rank” increases.
When you reach S rank, first of all, the music and visuals go nuts haha. Extremely satisfying. But it also increases the drop rate for rate items as long as you maintain it, and it also decreases the respawn rate of enemies (which massively increases the rate you can earn XP)
It’s fun to figure out a route that lets you reach S rank, and then it’s fun to try and maintain it as long as you can before you absolutely need to break out of combat to heal. I found that one or two sessions of this between the main towns was more than enough to stay ahead of the xp curve/farm items for armor.
And the assist mode is great too, in addition to slowing down a few things in the game there’s a damage slider that lets you drop enemy damage down to 20%. So if it would feel better for your hands, you could simply lower the damage down to 80% or so instead of grinding for armor to achieve the same effect. Can also reduce the frequency of enemy attacks if dodging/blocking too often is an issue.
Anyway sorry, I could gush for hours about CrossCode. It’s entirely valid too if the game isn’t for you in the end! I love the pacing, but you really need to buy-in to each aspect of the game to fully enjoy it I think. Some reviewers love the combat but think the puzzles drag, others love the puzzles but think the story sections drag. If you love all three, then CrossCode will almost certainly be your favorite game I think
Thanks for the in depth comment. It's great and much appreciated. I'll definitely go back to it. Currently about 2/3rds through a playthrough of FF6, so once that's done I'll get back to Cross Code!
I always enjoy the early Daedalic games like Edna & Harvey, a Whispered World or Deponia. Fun gameplay, great story and Edna & Harvey: the Breakout in particular has a hilarious concept which allows you to interact with anything and get unique dialogue.
Rusted Warfare is a good and cheap mobile game. No ads, otp, and it has LAN/WAN connections (not the most user friendly)
Rain World used to be a small game. Its rising in popularity now but is all around amazing. It doesn't offer the most guidance but is extremely rewarding for those who stick with it.
And a classic is Castle Crashers if that happens to be before your time or you never got the chance to play it.
Risk of Rain 2 is an amazing, highly addictive 3d roguelite, which is currently on Steam for $12.49. It's also available on Switch but it tends to struggle with the graphics at later stages, and also doesn't have all the cool mods people made for PC.
Not "everyone", but Ion Fury and Streets of Rage 4.
For both - the gameplay is perfect, the art is beautiful, and the music is amazing. Both games are masterworks that accomplished exactly what they set out to do.
I think my last foray with side-scrolling brawlers was River City Girls. The artsy charm was fun, but then it seemed like there was no decent defensive mechanics to avoid getting hit, and the only significant source of healing was getting a game over and starting a section again. It ended up just feeling mechanically stinted compared to modern action games.
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