For me it was minesweeper clones. I got frustrated one day and decided to learn how to be good at minesweeper. After beating the medium and large boards a couple times I looked on Steam for minesweeper versions, and turns out there’s a whole genre of clones. Some of them are direct clones of the game, while others are very heavily inspired by minesweeper. The two best I played were Hexcells and Tametsi. Hexcells is stylish and is only hexagons (as opposed to the minesweeper squares), while Tametsi has squares, rectangles, and hexagons and is a lot more barebones. However I found Tametsi to be much harder. There were some levels on there that took me an entire day, and I think there’s like 500 levels.
Sounds like hexagons would be easier as you can only have up to 6 adjacent tiles as opposed to 8 with squares.
Besides that, what do they do differently?
Well hexagons are the bestagons
Well with tametsi some of the boards don’t have homogenous shapes. Some of them do, but with others you might have a mix of rectangles and squares, triangles and hexagons, or octagons and rhombuses. I actually misremembered the amount of shapes there are. I had to go on google images to confirm how many shapes are in the game.
They’re pretty similar, but Tametsi has less rules than Hexcells, apart from one rule where the tiles have different colors and it’ll tell you the total amount of mines as well as the mine counts for each color. Hexcells and its sequels have some brutally difficult levels themselves, but the thing with Hexcells is it uses its “rules” a lot more frequently, and it does allow room for error. In Tametsi you can make errors in the levels, but you cannot make a single error if you want to actually mark the level as complete. IIRC in Hexcells you can make three errors.
Plus in the end levels of Tametsi, there’s not really any clear jumping off point for solving the puzzle. There might be some mines that look really obvious, but you might mark those and not have anywhere obvious to go from there. With Hexcells, that can also be the case sometimes, but more often than not the path sort of “reveals” itself as you solve more and more mines.
It has a lot of different mechanics. It’s more of a combination of minesweeper with nonograms (aka picross) where the idea is that there is that you can solve all puzzles without any guessing. Check out the Steam page
I’ve been loving the surge of reverse bullet hells/vampire-survivor-likes that have been coming out. Between feeding my addictive personality and being able to play on the couch while watching tv with my partner, they’re perfect for some weeknight relaxing. Brotato and 20 Minutes Til Dawn are two of my favorites but Halls of Torment is a new one with OG Diablo-inspired visuals that I’m excited to see grow.
16 bit RPGS. Not a genre I’m typically a fan of, but I’m playing Chained Echoes on Steam Deck and now I can’t get enough and I’m sitting here waiting impatiently for Sea of Stars.
Steam Deck is so good for these kind of games. Also having a look at Sea of Stars, looks pretty cool.
Sea of Stars is jumping straight to the top of my To Play list once that drops. I’ve heard great things about Chained Echoes too. I should make some time for it.
Antimine on F-Droid is good for a mobile fix.
I’ve always been convinced that I’m too wimpy to play scary games, even though I got a decent way through Alien: Isolation.
After hearing rave reviews for the Resident Evil 4 remake, I thought I’d give it a try, and I’m super glad I did. It’s probably one of my top 5 games of all time. I immediately beat it in New Game+, then played the Dead Space remake, and am currently working through RE Village. I’m having an amazing time.
I too, am too scared for Alien Isolation. May check out the other ones you listed though
I definitely think Alien: Isolation is the scariest of them all. Resident Evil 4 is more of an action/adventure game with some scary bits sprinkled in. Only one section really got me spooked, and by that point you’ve sort of developed some calluses.
I would recommend that RE4 demo. It’s a great place to start IMO.
I’ve been almost exclusively playing immersive sims and metroidvanias, from all of Arkane’s titles and the System Shocks to Haiku the robot and Lone Fungus. In both these genres there’s a very satisfying loop of exploring everything, collecting items/looting, having some sort of abilities and in the case of imm sims, extensive lore through notes and audio logs. Feels like I can’t play most other genres anymore.
City/settlement builders have been in heavy rotation. Cities Skylines, Frostpunk, Foundation and Timberborn all scratch a specific itch for me.
You gotta try Anno 1800. I think it’s the best the genre has to offer
I have tried some of the Anno series, including 1800. I’ll admit they’re not my favorite, but still fun if you’re trying to get into the economics a bit more.
I just got into Timberborn. Its very chill, i like it a lot
Been very addictive to traditional roguelikes for some time now. Enjoy the learning and mastering experience.
Do you have any favorites? I love roguelikes, I recently have been really enjoying Tape to Tape which is a Hockey roguelike which sounds weird but it’s the most fun sports game I’ve played in ages.
Roguelite. :)
Have a great many traditional roguelike that I like a lot.
to name just a few. :)
I’ve always heard the terms roguelike and roguelite interchangeably… Thanks for the list, I will be looking into them!
From an admitted non-expert, the way I understand it is this: A roguelike is turn based, procedurally generated to some extent, has some form of time/turn crunch tied to a carried resource (food/hunger is pretty common), and has leveling involved as part of the core gameplay loop. The idea being that you try to balance out luck (with the items/equipment you find, enemies that spawn, how well you’re doing in a particular combat, etc) with skill (knowledge of the game systems, knowing how to build, knowing when to cut your losses and run, when you have enough resources to gain some levels, etc.). There is also perma-death: Once you die, your run is over and you have to start fresh.
A roguelite involves some of these aspects, but plays things much looser. Typically there’s some level of perma-death in that a run is over when you die, but there’s also a meta-currency to allow for progress/power upgrades between runs (like increasing starting health per run by using items that have a chance to drop during a run). They are often not turn-based, and don’t necessarily have the same time crunch. The similarities lie in the fundamental idea: balance luck introduced by randomization/procedural generation and skill from game mastery, and if you fail then you have to start a new run. Different folks will have different criteria for the two terms (I saw a purist say that it’s not a real roguelike if it has anything other than ASCII graphics), but that’s how I summarize them.
Great list! Thanks
Soulslike (well the souls game itself), After playing Nioh last year and Dark souls 1 a few months ago, currently trying to finishing up Dark Souls 2 DLCs
Apparently ‘peggle-like rouge-likes’ are a thing. So thats been a fun time for me
Ooh, could you share a couple examples? Very intrigued.
It’s such a random genre for there to be more than one game in.
I got a VR headset recently and have been having a ball with VR modded games (Subnautica w/ submersed, Gunfire Reborn, Deep Rock Galactic, Fallout 4, etc).
Deep Rock Galactic has a VR mod?? Woah
How’s Gunfire? That game seems like it would be nauseating in VR because of the fast pace and amount of effects.
It’s fantastic! My biggest gripe about the flat version is how rigid movement feels, which is completely remedied by motion tracking controls.
Just picked up Subnautica so I could play VR! What’s this submersed mod? Is it suggested?
I greatly recommend it! For referencre I discovered most of these from this discord. (Flat2VR)
When I was stuck in bed for 2 months straight in 2014 from a broken neck, I got a couple of Sudoku books and did every puzzle in the books. Now I just play Open Sudoku on my phone. Ever since then I kinda measure my pain/mental/overall sleep quality state by checking how fast I can solve the hardest puzzles that have real solutions without guessing. Anything over 5 minutes is bad for me.
I started watching cracking the cryptic’s sudoku videos a few years ago, and have been addicted to variant sudoku since.
Really enjoying roguelikes right now; picked up Hades and Cult of the Lamb when they were on sale and really enjoyed the gameplay. Nothing’s the same every time, which definitely keeps me from getting bored.
Looking into branching out into horror/horror-adjacent games, but I have to pick ones without frequent jumpscares. I’m very, well, jumpy, so I’m leaning towards something more heavy on dread than shock factor. Already looking at getting The Stanley Parable during the summer sale.
Hades was really good. Also Bastion from the same developers.
My last few adventures have been: J-RPG > Farm sim > City Builder.
It’s been really fun to explore genres and games that I had not really touched before, both new and old games. It made gaming a lot more fun again
After many years I’ve gone back to Assassin’s Creed games. Got some of the classic ones on sale and whoops…several hours gone again.
On the topic of minesweepers, you’ve probably already seen Hexceed on Steam. That one has gobble up a chunk of my time in the past as well.
