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I do enjoy game mechanics that interact in emergent ways that weren’t fully planned out by the developer in games like Dwarf Fortress.
Parry and riposte mechanics make me happy. Idk why exactly, but something about timing a parry and making the enemy entirely helpless for the followup is just great.
I love anything with a tech tree or a skill tree or items that improve based on usage. The ratchet and clank games have such a great mix of all of those things, I end up spending a bunch of time just leveling up the guns!
Inventory Tetris
Project Zomboid with the Tarkov inventory mod is essential for you then
Diablo 1 and 2 for the simplest, RE4 for one that really takes your time
Backpack Heroes?
Ew, please no. I’m pretty much the exact opposite, I’d rather have little or no need for inventory at all. As in, more Zelda, less Diabo.
I could go on a 6 paragraph rant about Breath of the Wilds inventory system.
Oh yeah, I meant pretty much everything before BOTW (Echoes of Wisdom’s echo selection also sucks). When you only have like 10 things, there’s no need to organize anything.
Among plenty of the other things mentioned, I enjoy “diagetic interfaces”. Ways of interacting with a game’s systems that stay grounded in the reality of the setting of the world. Dead Space is a prime example, but I’ve been enjoying a lot of the crafting in Vintage Story for this reason. The smithing in particular has had me hooked for a while. Hammering out my armor and weapons voxel by voxel made finally suiting up and feeling ready to take on a boss that much more satisfying.
Vintage Story is massively underrated!
Roguelikes and roguelites tend to be my favorite. Ones where each run is new and you can toy with different builds and usually get pretty OP toward the end (or get cut down early because luck wasn’t in your favor or you made a mistake).
If you are at all (or were ever) into pokemon, have you played through Pokerogue.net already? Game is hard!
Puzzles, traditional or unique, as well as physics and spatial-heavy thinking.
Have you played Antichamber?
Also a big recommend for Manifold Garden for special thinking in a fractal space
And just a really nice aesthetic. I love the art style.
Amazing game. I finished it once, tried to finish a second time one or two months afterwards and I got stuck before getting the red cube upgrade. Felt like my success was a fluke
I like most game mechanics to some extent. Creativity in combining game mechanics is key to making an outstanding game imo.
However, I don’t like things that force a time limit. I play games as an escape. I don’t like feeling stressed by a clock while I’m off the clock. These can be literal timed missions or things like a food/water meter. Escort missions also suck for similar reasons.
I think difficulty in a game should come from overcoming a foe, traversing harsh terrain, or solving a puzzle. If the game is hard because I have to stop what I’m doing to feed myself, or I have to rush to complete an objective on a timer, it just becomes work.
Same deal with making shit absurdly difficult and relying on trying over and over until you manage to do the correct timing/sequence/whatever 28934928x in a row. Games like Dark Souls or Cuphead intrigue me, but I will never ever play them again because I have shit to do in real life. Also, fuck any single player game that doesn’t have cheat codes.
Intricate character building with multi-class synergies. Is. My. Shiiiiiit!
Small wonder I love BG3 and Owlcat’s Pathfinder games.
Save anywhere
I like systems that allow for outrageous combos, whether unintentionally or by design. Roguelikes and roguelites usually have them, but it’s almost entirely luck based. Dynasty Warriors 8 allows for plenty of OP combos if you manage the right weapon attributes. Skyrim and its
broken as fuckperfectly balanced enchanting + alchemy (or Morrowind’s even more perfectly balanced permanent fortify attribute magic)Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.
Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.
Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.
I’ve had plenty of experience with Dwarf Fortress, but never managed to fully weaponize magma before the FPS death killed my fortress. Using bridges to atom smash raids was always funny as hell.
I know Rimworld is a lot more expansive in some areas but, much like Factorio, is a game I’m avoiding because I don’t need yet another addiction 😅
Peaceful exploration
More floaty, less realistic platforming. Thugs like double jump, or somehow your character has less gravity when they jump, stuff like that. Stuff like that. As a general platformer lover, I really enjoy more fictional cannot be done IRL physics in games.
Thugs like double jump
Every time I’m out in the hood or in a sketchy area of town I’m constantly seeing these MFers running around double jumping.
Games with high mobility mechanics like titanfall, echo point nova, doom eternal, destiny 2 strand hunters.
Let’s not leave Mirror’s Edge off of this list.
All great games, you missed Xonotic tho :P
I’m an absolute sucker for a hidden traitor mechanic. Boardgames like Battlestar Galactica, Werewolf, and Secret Hitler (the latter of which might be my absolute favourite board game). More recently I’ve just started playing Among Us (I never got into it during its ~2020 peak) which is the first time I’ve seen the hidden traitor translated well into video games (unless you count that one minigame from Jackbox Games).
You might find the game Gnosia interesting then. It’s a visual novel with a hidden traitor mechanic mixed with a time loop, which is partly there to narratively explain how and why the hidden traitor changes each time.
If you haven’t heard of the game Blood on the Clocktower, you should definitely check it out! It’s a bit more involved than the other games on your list, but it’s become my holy Grail of social deduction games
You might enjoy Town of Salem then!
