I can think of a handful of games that, despite being games that I’ve enjoyed, never really became part of a “genre”. Do you have any like this, and if so, which?
Are they games that you’d like to see another entrant to the genre to? Would you recommend the original game as one to keep playing?
I’ve got a couple games that maybe fit this category.
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Kerbal Space Program. This had a sequel coming out that apparently wasn’t going very well and was cancelled, so right now, the possibility of a complete additional game isn’t that great. Spaceflight simulator, where one can design and craft spacecraft and amospheric craft, as well as space bases. One can fly to other planets, set up bases, set up satellite networks, etc. There are some “build your own vehicle”-type games, but not as much of a hard sim as this. I believe that X-Plane can handle atmospheric craft modeling, though the scope of that game is much smaller and it focuses more on flying the aircraft. Has a campaign to progress through, where one performs discoveries and conducts research. I’d recommend this to someone who hasn’t played it and likes sim games.
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Kenshi. There’s a sequel coming out, so maybe it won’t be unique at some point. They player controls a squad that moves around the world in real-time – there isn’t an “overworld map”. The squad can be split up into multiple squads. One can build outposts and defenses and such and have something of an automated economy. There’s a tech tree. The world has various factions and dynamic control of regions, something like Mount & Blade: Warband. There are unique biomes to travel through. A fair bit of the world is placed. The world starts out in a mostly-hand-crafted, fixed state, but evolves over time. Character progression isn’t based on point allocation, but on specific experience; have a character get hurt, and over time his ability to take damage will rise, and so forth. I think that this is still worth playing, though it’s by no means a beautiful game and possibly (hopefully) will be surpassed by its sequel.
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Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. A real-time colony sim that can mostly run itself. One has indirect control for the most part; one directly controls upgrades, certain spell and structure abilities, and can spend money to create “incentive flags” to create missions for characters to fulfill. I don’t know if it’s right to call it a single-game genre – it’s a colony sim, and other colony sims exist, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and such. Populus and some god games have direct control over spells. But I don’t know of any other colony sim that plays much like it – most of the focus is on upgrades and on countering waves of invaders, and the gold economy is ununusual. The same developer tried making a sequel, but eliminated the “sandbox” mode, and turned it into more of a puzzle game, and that game didn’t do very well. One builds a colony in real time. There is no direct control over the individual characters, but for certain actions, one can spend money to incentivize them to do certain things. Characters level up and purchase equipment using gold they earn and that you expend on them to purchase items. Some of your control comes from things like building inns to cause them to spend idle time in particular locations. Building construction and maintenance is carried out automatically by peasants. As adventurers spend gold at buildings, it comes back to your control. I think that I’d have a hard time recommending today due to its age (you’re going to have 2d pixel graphics that are going to be tiny on a current computer).
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Pinball Construction Set. This is a video pinball game where the player can use premade elements to easily put together their own pinball board. Very elderly now, dates back to the early 1980s. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this back in the day. Since that time, there have been many video pinball games, as well as some systems that permit some level of authoring capability (e.g. Visual Pinball can run user-created pinball boards), but these require a lot more effort and expertise and “real” authoring tools to put together a pinball board; one can’t just drop in in-game and start throwing elements together. I don’t think that I can recommend this, as it’s absolutely ancient today.
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Noita. It’s based on Liero, but really not at all like it. It’s an action-roguelite (well, that’s a genre, but nothing really similar beneath that level of specificity) that has side-scrolling over an open world. Various materials interact and have their interactions simulated at a per-pixel level, something like the “falling sand” genre. However, there are enemies running around, and the player controls a character that walks and floats through the world. One can find various containers of substances; one can try and mix things together to manipulate the world. One finds wands with spells; one can combine spells and various spell modifiers on wands to create all sorts of custom magic weapons that can range from utility to offensive. The aim, as with many many roguelites, is to try to use some luck and synergies between various items to come up with truly game-breaking combinations. I can definitely recommend this game; I found it to be very good value-for-money.
Honorable mention:
- Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. This is not a single-game genre, but there have only been two successful games in the genre, and one, Carrier Command, is from the 1980s (and which I’ve never played). You control a carrier (strictly speaking, an amphibious assault ship) that moves along an island chain; it can create surface, amphibious, land, and aircraft and weapons for these. One has a limited number of AIs that can control some vehicles automatically; one can give general orders to these, control the vehicles directly. One can capture more resources from the islands to expand one’s abilities. There was a remake of Carrier Command, which flopped, and a sequel, Carrier Command 2, a relatively-recent game, but unlike Hostile Waters, is really intended to be played cooperative multiplayer; playing single-player places a very heavy workload on the player…so I have a hard time placing it in the same genre, even if it has many similarities and was inspired by the same game. While I enjoyed Hostile Waters and I think that it could still be enjoyed, it’s getting a bit long-in-the-tooth graphically, and I recall it being a bit unstable even back in the day.
I always hurt inside when I remember Majesty. It’s such a cool concept that could be expanded much more today.
Rise to Ruins is maybe the most-similar game in terms of gameplay that I can think of. You initiate construction of buildings. You have automated characters build them (kind of like Majesty and Settlers). You can upgrade them, and they can provide equipment to characters. It has the same ramping difficulty of attackers. It doesn’t start with a map populated with monster generators the way Majesty does – instead, they show up over time. It has spells. You can build “defensive buildings”. It starts with the map covered with a fog of war. Your colony’s NPCs level up over time. You can put beefy, non-critical structures to act as something like a tank to absorb attacks while your characters make their way over to deal with a threat, kind of like Majesty.
It’s got some major gameplay differences, though:
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It’s one of the “unwinnable” games – absent some ways to kinda cheese the game and win, you’re just expected to survive for as long as possible. There’s a – I forget the term, but “corruption” – that spreads around the map, making terrain more-and-more hostile, and eventually overwhelming you. Majesty is about surviving the most-unpleasant bit, but if you can overcome that, you’ll win a round.
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No gold economy or NPC incentives. Well, IIRC one can create a “golem attractor” that will tend to make a that particular type of NPCs show up in an area, and you can create structures that NPCs will frequent to tend to make them hang out in a given area.
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A strategic map (which some may like).
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Survival aspects, like needing water and food.
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Path efficiency and building roads and such matters.
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The NPCs do get more-durable, but not to the extreme level that they do in Majesty, and they don’t quite work together in the same sorts of ways.
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It’s got more of a maze-building tower-defense aspect.
The Majesty Gold HD Edition is currently on sale at GOG btw.:
Noita.
The main section of the game is the tip of the iceberg. Everything is hidden and blocked off, you got to make game breaking combos to start picking up the threads. Finding the mystery/puzzles feels like you no clipped out and found more content that’s not supposed to be seen. You feel like a crazy investigator hinging threads at a cork board once you got game play down.
There’s also a similar discussion on Reddit, some months back, that lists some interesting “unique” games:
https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/14tqdqv/completely_unique_games/
Yeah, I agree with most of those. Some of my favorite mentions from that thread:
- SUPERHOT
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Baba is You
- Pony Island - and by extension Inscryption (haven’t played The Hex)
- Katamari Damacy
I’ll add:
- Perspective
- Manifold Garden
- The Bridge
And kind of the opposite, but I’ll list a couple of abstract genre games:
- 140 - platformer
- THOTH - twin stick shooter
I’m not familiar with Pony Island, but I’d say that Inscryption – which I quite liked – has got other games like it, as it’s a (good) deckbuilder. If I understand aright from skimming the description, what’s in common is really thematic – simple game with an “upgrade game” aspect tied to a horror theme. The plot gets gradually unfolded as you upgrade and has fourth-wall-breaking aspects, like the game starts to act differently, pretend to malfunction, etc.
Yeah, Katamari Damacy is definitely a “I wouldn’t have played it from the description” game that I found to be a lot of fun. One runs around pushing a growing sticky ball that keeps having objects attach themselves to it. The game has enormous scale change as the ball grows. Simple – almost a tech demo – but surprisingly fun, and I can’t think of anything like it other than games in the series itself.
Inscryption
Yeah, it’s technically a deck builder, and that’s the gameplay loop throughout, but it’s not a rogue like deckbuilder like Slay the Spire (well, it kind of is at first). But it plays more like a puzzle game than a deckbuilder, but it’s not quite a puzzle game either.
But yeah, that’s the weakest of the bunch, and I only added it because Pony Island by the same dev is on there (which is technically a run-and-gun?).
Both have a popular genre at the forefront, but the game really wants you to look past that at what’s developing behind the game. And that’s what I think makes them unique. Labeling them as “deck builder” and “run-and-gun” don’t feel appropriate, despite that being the core gameplay loop.
Dino Crisis, was the world’s only game in the “Panic Horror” genre AFAIK. It was similar to a survival horror game but enemies were much faster and could follow you into different rooms if you left them alive. There were also a few other mechanics that made it different from Resident Evil, which was made by the same people.
Absolutely would recommend the first two games. Which are the ONLY Dino Crisis games. They never made another Dino Crisis game after 2.
EVE Online AKA Spreadsheets Online, back when I played it in 2009. No idea if it’s the same now. Almost entirely player driven economy and factions (outside of hi-sec).
Elite Dangerous, sort of. No other Space Sim is on its scale (I wouldn’t really call something like Space Engine a space sim). Unique, but mixed recommendations because it’s a very shallow game in a lot of ways, but it’s got a cool vibe. Speaking of which…
Space Engine. Not really a game, so much as a universe-simulator. It is unknown to this day how a mortal could create something of this grandeur. Maybe the source code will be released eventually.
Someone else already mentioned Noita :(
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.
Minecraft is hardly unique now, but when it came out it was one-of-a-kind.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.
There are some other games that I’d call somewhat-similar. There’s that old Finnish game, whatsit called, is kind of similar in that it’s a wilderness survival roguelike. An innawoods run in Cataclysm can play kind of like that, though Cataclysm as a whole is a lot larger.
kagis
It never quite grabbed my interest the way Cataclysm has, but a lot of people like it. Huh. Apparently it’s not that old, though it goes for a Win95-era appearance.
Cataclysm, for those who haven’t played it, is a very complex open source open-world roguelike. The modeling of a lot of things, as the game has grown over the years, has become remarkably sophisticated, from local weather systems to things like very extensive (realistic, not like Borderlands guns) gun modding, vehicle (land, sea, air) creation and modeling, farming, NPC camps, cybernetics, mutation, sound/smell/sight tracking enemies, martial arts including weapons forms, skills, proficiencies, various types of real-world (and supernatural) diseases and parasites, brewing, modeling of fires, modeling of pain, temperature…it’s a bit of an organically-grown mishmash, but it’s become a game with an enormous amount of mechanics, albeit a very graphically-simple one. I would definitely recommend it to someone with the time and willingness to explore the game’s systems, which is not for everyone. You can just download builds yourself, or there’s a commercial version on Steam, if you want to support the developers.
Project Zomboid is very similar thematically to Cataclysm (zombie apocalypse, loot world for supplies to stay alive), but is far simpler in every respect, is real-time rather than turn-based, plays on handcrafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, has its zombie infections be incurable, and has combat that I really don’t like (though Project Zomboid also has a much gentler learning curve and a loveable raccoon mascot). I’m not sure if one could reasonably put it into the same genre. Maybe.
To be clear, that’s Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead or CDDA. It’s quite removed from the original cataclysm by whalesdev, and is more focused on strict realism. There is also Cataclysm Bright Nights which is closer to the arcadey feel of the original. Both are great and are open source.
Outer Wilds
If you’re a naturally curious person, the odds are you will probably enjoy Outer Wilds. No other game I’ve played has ever had quite the same blend of mystery, conquering the unknown, and semi-realistic space exploration.
Could someone make another game like it? Not impossible, I suppose, but I think you would be hard pressed.
Should you keep playing the original? You really can’t, one time through is all you get. Once you have discovered all the secrets and uncovered the mysteries, that is your journey through it. Still fun to visit every once in a while, though
Echoes of the Eye does at least give you a sort of second playthrough
I think Tunic is probably the closest feeling to Outer Wilds I’ve gotten so far. The moment-to-moment gameplay is quite different, but the broad scale feels close
My best recommendation for “replaying” the game is to get the mod “Quantum Space Buddies” and play it alongside a friend. I did this and it allowed me to play it vicariously through them, letting them make all of the decisions and just offering up tiny tidbits of assistance where necessary.
The mod has some bugs, but it’s way more full-featured than I was expecting, and it’s frequently updated to iron out more bugs
