Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?
Best examples I can think of are:
- Outer Wilds
- Doki Doki Literature Club
- The Stanley Parable
What are yours?
(please no spoilers)
Tunic.
The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:
Tap for spoiler
If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!
I also second Outer Wilds.
I just finished playing tunic (good ending). A friend and I were playing it at the same time. If I didn’t have that friendly competition I would have dropped it so many times. There is way too much manual work in this game that you often times aren’t playing a video game anymore.
At the end of it all I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment just relief that I’m done with the game. Only to find out after doing the secret puzzle is just more meta puzzles outside the game.
Outer Wilds on the other hand is fantastic and not having to use a pencil and paper to advance in the game is A+.
i bounced off tunic super hard. i love the puzzle aspects, the cryptic manual pages, and figuring things out, but the combat was way too brutal, even on the easier setting. the bigger white ghost enemies at the very start killed me so many times i no longer want to go back to it.
I thought the reward for the puzzles was not good enough, either. When you play Outer Wilds, you figure things out, unlock a wonderful story, and learn tricks for other puzzles. When you play Tunic, you (eventually) figure things out and get a bad ending for a game that barely reveals anything, story-wise.
I also thought that requiring a web app or a bunch of paperwork to figure out the language was far too inconvenient for a game made in the 21st century. They borrowed the wrong lessons from Fez.
I’ve gotta remember what those ghosts are.
I’ve slowly acclimated to Soulslikes since Tunic, and a common theme is that they make you think you need to be pressing more buttons, when they’re often teaching specialized bits of patience. In Tunic’s case, a lot of people expend their stamina too quickly.
Still don’t like FromSoft’s games
Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.
it’s especially wild in a cutesy game like tunic where it just bodies you ten minutes in. it made me feel like i had been tricked.
