Asked “sell me on your favorite game” to a group of friends, they said it made for a great discussion, so maybe copying it to here might make a nice discussion too.
If it’s about saving money? Minecraft. It’s been around for an age, but it has so many variations through modding, you get years of play for the one price.
If it’s about mechanical quality? Spelunky. It’s smooth and nearly completely glitch-free. It’s elegant in its simplicity to enjoyability ratio. It has enough variation to make every run a bit different, but not so much that every run is just wild blind choices and (un)lucky draws.
If it’s about story quality? Pacific Drive. It goes on sale fairly regularly and goes below $10 on steam. The story and gameplay are nicely intertwined, well written, and well voice-acted.
Gothic 1 got overshadowed - especially in the west - by The Elder Scrolls, but to this day it remains the most immersive RPG I’ve ever played.
- Before Oblivion’s “radiant AI” it had full schedules for every NPC. They sleep, eat, go to work, sit around the campfire talking, …
- It has a full open world (admittedly smaller than Vvardenfell) with no loading screens except when going underground. That includes houses: everything is one world.
- NPC reactions that make sense: start to sneak and they’ll ask what you’re doing. Draw your weapon and they’ll draw theirs and tell you to put it away. Enter their home and they’ll chase you out.
- Animals in the wild are not just there for you to get XP. They eat, scavenge, hunt, and sleep.
- Speaking of animals, they’re also not constantly in a “must murder the player” mode. Non-aggressive species will warn you not to get close, and only attack if you don’t back up. Others may stalk you, seeing you as prey. They just make sense.
- Stealing also makes sense: if nobody saw you do it, you don’t get in trouble. No loot ever gets a red “don’t buy me I was stolen” mark on it.
- And so much more.
If I sound like I’m picking on The Elder Scrolls, I kind of am. I actually do like TES, but I wish more games took inspiration from Gothic.
There’s also a remake, which is too recent for patient gamers (and for me), but it’s getting good reviews. And there are sequels and spinoffs, some more liked than others.
EXAPUNKS
Your body has been infected by a Phage that turns your flesh into random bits of circuitry. Left untreated, you’ll gradually lose bodily function as your nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and organs turn into useless computer parts. There’s a drug that halts the progress of the disease. And it only costs 300 dollars.
A day.
For the rest of your life.
Don’t like that deal? Then print out a copy of the underground hacker zine that’ll teach you to all of Alternate Universe 1997’s technology to your will. Including your own body.
Hope you like writing Assembly code.
Detroit Become Human goes on sale for $4 once in a while, and is great. It’s a cinematic, episodic, story based game where you play as different androids that are struggling with ideas about what separates intelligent machines from humans. It has racism, immigration, political action, and genocide themes. Also the android that greets you at the loading screen makes comments about your game progress, sings to you, tells you random facts, and will get upset if you let main characters die. It’s totally worth $4.
Not even really a patient element because it’s free, but it’s been getting progressive additions.
If you like Ace Attorney, playing as a lawyer to solve crimes by pointing out contradictions and shouting “Objection!”, then fangame Gyakuten Live has that in spades. When it first came out, it was mostly a silly one-case concept of “What if the characters from my favorite school anime held a class trial for fun”. But it’s been going for 4 cases now, each one escalating in size and stakes, up to the current one that deals with a genuine murder. There’s been no laziness of reuse, with pretty much every case having a new prosecutor, new soundtrack, various case-relevant incidental artwork, etc.
Its one doom in popularity is you need to get it from Itch.io - it’s murky enough in copyright that it likely can’t go up for sale.
I thank you for your contribution to my collection ʚ♡⃛ɞ(ू•ᴗ•ू❁)
I tried to make a resolution this year to not buy any new games when I have all these demos, ROMs (and ROM hacks!), fan games, and otherwise free games so it’s nice getting a recommendation like this.
A lot of games wear “lovecraftian horror” on their sleeve - they borrow some squid monsters and a wobbly screen effect for a sanity meter and call it a day.
Darkest dungeon does not do this - its mechanics are all geared towards creating tense moments of player fear; the slowly unwinding story played blind gives a feeling of genuine cosmic unease. It embodies Lovecraftian horror in a videogame - not the cheap jumpscare, but that ever lingering unease at a universe that cares not (the rng in this game specifically hates you, but will rarely surprise you with a genuine miracle).
This is a game heavily refined over years with outstanding visuals and audio - the storytelling has a genuinely organic feel. It even runs on a potato; there is only one bit of bad news really…
Ruin has come to our family.
Thanks to this comment I have spent time browsing the TVTropes page for Darkest Dungeon, a game I’ll never play because I’m super squeamish, bad with horror, and at this moment in time averse to media that’s super dark in theme. Enjoyable TVTropes page, probably great art, even if it’s super not for me.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (plus DLCs): Nothing else comes close to the item variety and more importantly the item combinations and synergies you get in this game. Sure, there are a bunch of items that are just stat boosts, many other games stack these. But in Isaac you also get stacking and synergies on weird weapon and item effects that can sometimes lead to almost game breaking outcomes. And then you still manage to die.
Because of this Isaac excels at the “just one more run” style replayability.
Interesting question. I’m struggling to think of a lot of other patient games, but that’s not a problem, because Theme Hospital is all you need! These days the best way to play is through the wonderful source port called CorsixTH.
What are you waiting for? There are bloated heads to cure!
for the other kind of patient: gridworld & ai learns to drive
You should play Morrowind! We’ve got:
- A handcrafted, in depth alien world to explore with surprises literally around every corner
- divine apotheosis disease that turns you into a zombie shambler
- catgirl booba
- self-appointed divinity and all around man of mystery Vivec whose main claim to fame is that he canonically, as an in-game Elder Scrolls character, managed to access the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and assign himself the ‘deity=true’ variable
- The Pain Glove ™
- Furry fulfillment fantasy where you can become a big buff wolfman and run off into the wilderness
- Wizard fulfillment fantasy where you can rack up all your stats into the millions by abusing loopholes in magic research, and then craft the potion seller’s strongest potions concentrated to a point that they could knock out God
- “I cast Everyone In This Town Dies Instantly”
- being sexually propositioned by a Daedra
- being sexually propositioned in order to recieve a promotion
- leaping sixty miles in a single mighty bound and then splattering yourself across a rock face in one shot because you forgot to account for landing your mighty leap
- Selling swords to a crab
- selling a merchant an enchanted shirt of “Fire Damage 1pt per second, constant effect” and then waiting for him to keel over dead so you can loot his store with impunity
- an entire province full of rogue wizards where “I’d like to see you stop me” is the whole of the law
- dream daddy Dagoth and his castle-stomping giant robot
- caves made out of meat
- trying to fight the luckiest man of all time and being literally unable to land a hit on him without abusing the actual fabric of reality
- The Boots Of Barry Allen
- “That’s a good argument. Unfortunately,” Weakness to Magic 100%, 10 seconds. Weakness to Fire 100%, 10 seconds. Fire Damage 100pts, 10 seconds.
- lockpicking your way inside the government treasury and making off with all the contents
- The Corpse of Peke Utchoo
- “Listen, this is very important. I need you to stab me in the face.”
- ‘mines’ full of bugs where the ‘miners’ harvest the bug eggs in order to eat and sell (this is the primary food source of the region)
- smuggling Dwarven artifacts
- smuggling drugs
- radical abolitionists as a joinable faction
- lizard people
- “Yeah so, to complete this pilgrimage you need to go drown yourself in the sewers. God says so.”
- the joys of property ownership
- having enough strength score that you hit someone once with a longsword and the weapon instantly shatters in your hands, but it’s okay because their entire skeleton exploded
- having 100% magic resistance and watching enemy spells just ping off of your shiny pecs with zero effect
- skill trainers that are sometimes actively hostile to you. The greatest enchanter in the land is a daedra worshipper that lives in an old Dunmer stronghold. He ain’t gonna be happy to meet you. You want to learn his secrets? Do something about that.
…and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it’s peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000’s gaming in general.
It’s a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I’m going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.
“The combat sucks! I can’t hit anything!”
The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn’t expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn’t expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it’s cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the “Fortify Attack” effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc’s Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn’t add any damage though.
By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.
“The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!”
Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you’ll be totally okay.
One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)
“I don’t know where to go!”
Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don’t have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.
There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you’re looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I’ve been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I’ve run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I’ve never seen before each time.
For new players:
- It’s not hard and it’s safe to pick whatever you want. Some games can fuck you up or limit you based on mistakes at DND-alike character creation, but there you just choose some weapon type, e.g. long blades as your primary skill, and you are good to go - and can skill up on everything else later, or conpensate it elsehow as you go.
- This game reeks of exploits. Everything, inculding slowness of going A-to-B, can be circumvented by spells, teleports, insect taxis or other game mechanic. Once you feel some aspect of it can be done better, usually there’s a way to optimize it, and it doesn’t hold your hand at it.
- OpenMW is the better way to play it today. It doesn’t change the vanilla experience at all, just makes it less buggy at times and supports Linux at modern resolutions without a question. I played it since it became viable and I had no problems like in the OG game.
…
- If you get cursed to have a reduced carrying capacity in some entry level dungeons, just reload. Fuck that spell. That’s one thing I’d be happy to delete entirely from the game.
This game reeks of exploits.
This, I think, is the primary thing to remember about Morrowind. This game was intended for you to exploit it. It wants you to break it. It hands you four different ways to become stupendously overpowered within fifteen minutes of game start, it just doesn’t tell you in detail about them and lets you find it out. Some of those ways abuse bugs, but many of them are 100% completely intended by the devs. You’re intended to be a monstrous god-beast by the end. I’m the fucking Nerevarine, I’m here to chew ass and kick bubblegum and I’m all out of ass.
- If you get cursed to have a reduced carrying capacity in some entry level dungeons, just reload. Fuck that spell. That’s one thing I’d be happy to delete entirely from the game.
Agreed, it’s manageable, but only if you know it’s coming. Every “Restore X Stat” potion is worthless except Restore Strength, and no n’wah worth his skooma is going to walk around without a couple of those. For everything else, there’s religion (when you get back to town). But a hefty strength debuff is going to make it real difficult to get back to said town.
For what it’s worth, I think the greater bonewalkers doing permanent strength damage is a bug. I think it’s also one of the handy toggle tweaks in OpenMW. But since you all learned about them in Dungeoneering 101 today, you know to pack some restore strength potions next time you go crypt diving so you don’t have to teleport back home stark naked because your strength score got debuffed to zero and you can no longer lift your clothes.
I bought and installed Morrowind this week, added Tamriel: Rebuilt mod, and have been exploring a bit.
It’s growing on me, but very challenging.
Also, people keeping creating expansions with all this weird stuff tenfolded, so the game will never die and you will be condamned to play it few almosta every year
- catgirl booba
Sorry if this comes off as creepy but I feel the need to ask due to my own disappointing searches lately: do you mean this in like “100% serious the devs let you sex up a catgirl” kinda way, or just a “we have catgirls, everybody loves catgirls” kinda way?
Also, I’m curious how much Morrowind differs from the ones before and after. Because I remember playing many hours of a friend’s Oblivion and ending up souring on the open world enough that I legitimately never want to play Skyrim despite it being the most popular one, and I have Daggerfell and Arena on my GOG account but have never touched, either (I think those may have come free on the account?).
Naw, it’s nothing like that, thankfully. Everything I listed there is in the game in some manner or another, but some of them I’ve taken a hair of creative license with.
For that one in particular, Khajiit are playable cat-people, and many NPCs are also Khajiit.
In a town called Pelagiad, there exists A Khajiiti NPC named Ahnassi. She has a short quest line for a male Nerevarine and is notable for being (as far as I know) the only technically “romanceable” NPC in the game, though it doesn’t go into any particular detail.
This quest line does also lead into the “robbing the government” bit though, which is fun.
Cyberpunk 2077 was probably my biggest patient gamers win… I usually practice just to wait for a sale because my backlog is big enough already, but giving this one time to cook, drop the dlc, and then go on a steep sale? I think I got it for like $20 USD and it got close to 500 hours in it by now…
Runner up would be No Man’s Sky…another one that just keeps getting better the longer you wait. Only downside is they keep announcing new stuff…so it’s almost like they keep resetting the clock.
I have recently picked up Tactical Breach Wizards again. If you like turn based strategy games but XCOM’s percentages and imperfect information makes you rage quit then Tactical Breach Wizards is the game for you.
It presents all the information to you and allows you to undo your moves within each turn so there are absolutely no surprises and missing a 99% shot. It makes it feels more like a puzzle game and there are optional challenges to keep things interesting. I personally like the art style and the writing isn’t too shabby either. Pretty funny.
Got to say, Hyper Light Drifter, if you are into Zelda-like open world endtimes sword fighting.
What I loved most about it how the style just fit the game so well. Especially the sound design. One part of the game is finding those hidden “computerchips” in the ground and you get hints on where they are by listening to them humming softly in a rhythm. Then pulling them out of the ground makes a real satisfying sound effect.
The guns also mostly have really great sounds, shooting and reloading the laser sniper rifle felt awesome, but the best one is that tiny pistol you get beating this samurai boss.
Sorry, don’t recall the right names of things anymore, hopefully it is clear what I mean.
Just replayed it again - I usually do it since a year. Just advise not using the Linux version and it crashes frequently and will never get fixed. Use it with wine/proton.
This is on my phone and I haven’t played it in years. Might as well start up a new save file and give it a go!
Damn, they released it for phones? I think you’ll need a controller for that though, cannot imagine on screen controls would be sufficient.
I mean, my controller’s good enough to get me this far since I made that first comment saying I should start a new save file.
And since I’m usually traveling out and about for photography and comedy and stuff, my phone is my main gaming console. Lots of really really good stuff on it.
Depends on how patient you truly are. I can recommend Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines from the heart. I don’t even like vampires, nor do I like noire, but this game… It somehow sticks together and it’s a masterpiece. Not the most polished or bug free, but the story, world building, characters, music, atmosphere, everything’s serves the game so well it’s still on my recommend list even some 20 years from its release. Not a small feat.
It’s also a good patient gaming example, actually, because it was completely unplayable at launch and is only in a decent state now thanks to the Unofficial Patch.
VTM:B was my first introduction to VTM in any capacity and boy was it an introduction. I am now the world’s hugest WOD nerd. The game is janky as all hell but the characters drive it so forcefully that I barely cared… for most of the game. The end parts of it are… rough. But up until the last few hours of the game the characters and atmosphere carry it all magnificently.
It’s still one of my very favorite retro games now, though. First time through the Ocean House Hotel was an experience to remember, and the Malkavian dialogue trees are some of my favorite fourth wall breaking of all time.
There are so many games i want really everyone to experience like Beyond Good & Evil or Psychonauts.
But i’m a racing game enjoyer at heart. So i’m going to namedrop NFS 3, 4 and the Test Drive Unlimeted PS2 version. The last name drop is no joke. Its the very best PS1 racing game physics which happen to be on a PS2 i ever experienced but on a ridiculously big map.
But the ultimate arcade racing game is imho Midnight Club 3. I grew up with the NFS games on PC. Through the years i went hardcore on racing sims. Have been an elitist. But this game pulled me back to the fun(complete lie, but i was told to sell the game to you, but i truly believe it would have been good enough to actually do that). But seriously i never had a PS2 when MC3 was relevant. Emulation of the PS2 took a really long time to render MC3 flawlessly. But now in 2026 its just great. You should really check it out if you have any itch to play a great arcade racer. It does so many things which feel so fresh to this day. So many events have unique scripted things happening. Its crazy that this still stands out over 20 years later.
This is the guide i followed a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-GHRo49XJcMidnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix for the PS2 was a mainstay fixture of my teenage years and might still remain my favorite racing game. I never had any of the N4S games, personally. But this one did me just fine, I played that game for years and years.
Runs great on the steam deck via emulation these days! I set up my collection through Retrodeck and it was one of the easiest drag-and-drop setup operations I’ve ever done.
