Im tired of having to spend thousands of hours to stand a chance against others, im tired of video games turning into a second job. Im tired of playing against sweatlords who systematically abuse every single exploit they know of to ruin servers and destroy people’s fun. Im tired that every new game has to be an esport now. Im tired.
So yeah im fully done with mp games. However i still like games, and recently i realised i basically only enjoy singleplayer games. So yeah, Anyone got good/niche/unknown singleplayer game recommendations?
EDIT: im an idiot i didnt specify what sort of games i enjoy lol. Sadly ive already played disco elysium, i actually got 100% on it on steam, hah.
Recently I played Control, and i consider that title to be one of the best games ever made, so i really enjoy that kind of game but oddly the RE4 remake that resembles Control bored me so bad I turned it off 2 hours in. Basically I really enjoy shooters and games woth very strong narratives.
But my favorite game by far has to be RE:Village, that game blew my tiny mind, everything about it was amazing, the impeccable art direction, the gunplay, the enemies and the story, just 
. But by far the greatest thing about that game was the winter mood, i played it in the dead of winter and love the season, it genuinely shaped my expectation of what video games should be like. I also had a lot of fun hunting treasures and prizes down.
I was having a big argument with someone last night. They were defending all the "progression" bullshit and I was just yelling "BACK IN MY DAY THE ROCKET LAUNCHER AND QUAD DAMAGE WEREN'T TIME GATED AND IT WAS BETTER" over and over again.
It's all bullshit now. You used to be able to just jump in to a server with a community you liked, play a few rounds, chat with your friends. No one was keeping score, no one was grinding to unlock anything, the game wasn't shoving advertisements in your face every twelve seconds. Instead of having to spend several minutes in matchmaking between every round the game just loaded the next round, in the same server, with the same people.
Nothing was "unlocked" because the concept was bad and anti-competitive and would give some players mechanical advantages so why would any game ever do something like that? You could just use whatever you wanted.
Bllelegh
"BACK IN MY DAY THE ROCKET LAUNCHER AND QUAD DAMAGE WEREN'T TIME GATED AND IT WAS BETTER" over and over again.
Yeah the quake management of weapons is the best one imo. You want a better gun? Alright bucko, go grab one over there.
Meanwhile bf2042: uuuh just spend 6 hours grinding bots in an empty boring map! Easy dude!
The first game I remember with "progression" was BF2, where htere was an alternate weapon for each class. I was totally befuddled as to why it was there and why you'd want to "unlock" them. I've already got the gun that is good for my class, what am I going to do with two guns?
Alas now every game has 8,000 nearly identical guns and miserable balance. : p 
I prefer the rs2 approach where the best gun is an early ww2 rifle made out of wood lol, Mas49 for life
30-06 solves every problem except lower back pain from carrying 30-06.
No one was keeping score,
I hate this shit the most. All the stat tracking bullshit plays right into my neuroses. If I play "for fun", the experience is always hampered by the nagging voice in my head going "this will lower your W/L and you might get judged". Ugh, fuck off.
One of the annoying things about playing MP games is seeing the racist usernames and getting misgendered constantly. Like the communities always just suck
Oddly enough the most progressive community i was a part of was bf4 server i uses to play on that had a massive slur filter which automatically booted you permanently if you typed one in chat. since it was popular, it had a discord, where chuds would come to try and haggle with the owners to get unbanned. I started playing and seeding when the server has just started, and eventually got a trusted role and became a mod and friends with the owner and staff. That was probably the best gaming community i interacted with, eventually misgendering also became bannable when the owner added a pronoun script. Unfortunately bf2042 release broke custom server scripting for bf4, so the owner decided to shut down.
Aww that sucks, that sounds like it would've been fun to play in
It was, we had very strict farming limits to cut down vehicle kills and people leaving, and we also had what we called Pentagon budget cut nights, conquest maps without vehicles. Well, actually each team had one jeep to their name and otherwise all you had were your two legs. This made us extremely popular since most people would get frankly really tired of vehicle tryhards amassing kills (although im guilty of this, I had thousands of hours in helicopters), and driving like a maniac in a jeep with two friends in the middle of panicking enemy infantry was hilarious, even more so when the enemy jeep eventually chased you down. Fuck i really miss that server.
The best balance vehicle-wise was BF1942. Helicopters fucking suck to fight vs.
Me and my mate shooting down Blackhawks with our support mgs on lost village (desert combat mod). Good times
You could fight them very easily if you had 2/3 friends by constantly harassing them with lock ons and soflam, even the best pilots can’f do shit against those, but doing this solo in a random lobby is pretty much impossible.
currently playing through control, I'm loving the atmosphere and the story so far but I'll be honest, getting tired of all the combat 😅 kinda wish there was more puzzle solving or more moments of downtime, considering some of the fights are just frustrating
but I'm a sucker for all things spooky government conspiracy so I'm still playing, albeit with modified difficulty so the combat goes by a bit quicker haha
no clue if its up your alley, but I'll always take a chance like this to plug Outer Wilds, some of the best written gaming I've ever had a chance to play honestly, albeit not quite as direct in its narrative focus as something like Control
Outer Wilds
One of the best games ever. It's a shame you can only truly play it once.
i wish Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was real but you can only erase the memory of playing Outer Wilds for the first time
Control has a damage reduction slider in options, just crank it all the way up. The combat is very tiring and I cranked it so I could enjoy the world rather than get frustrated at the same 5 combat encounters.
Yeah im saving outer wilds for a vacation so I can slowly play it and enjoy it over a few days. I hope I enjoy it as much as others seem to.
I admit I also used the cheats to skip annoying combat encounters sometimes lol, however I actually really like the combat, the gunplay feels really good (the charge modification is probably one of my favorite game’s gun)
In case you haven't tried them, "semi-realistic" multiplayer shooters are a good middle ground. Games like Rising Storm 2 or Hell Let Loose (haven't tried that one, but it looks good).
They have no esport interest, so people only play them to have fun, and the people playing are usually older. They have a lot of depth to them too, since the gameplay can be very asymmetrical.
As far as singleplayer game recommendations, try Prey (2017). I bounced off it at first, then came back later and it became one of my favorite games of all time.
I had a lot of fun on RS2. None of that bullet sponge bullshit. One lucky round to a torso and it doesn't matter if your target is the top enemy player on the score card. He's fuckin toast.
Unfortunately on rs2 vietnam the top players fucking memorize spawn points, prone in a bush and mow you down 30 times in a row while you struggle to guess what bush theyre in while your team loses the round. Fuck that shit.
Yeah, by now that's definitely the case. There was a real nice period when the community was pushing out a ton of custom naps that kept the experience fresh because those types hadn't memorized all the good spots. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
I just can’t handle the level 99s with 300 ping who somehow manage to rush you and whip out a shotgun in a second and a half after traversing half of a section of the map were supposed to have taken 5 minutes ago.
Like call me bad or whatever, but i fail to see how I’m supposed to get on that level in a 10 year old game that struggles to get past 500 players daily?
Yeah I feel you, there's a reason I stopped playing a couple years ago. Same reason I never got into counter strike. How dudes like that have fun at the expense of everyone else's fun I will never understand. The best games I have played from board games to real sports to video games were the nailbiters where it comes down to the wire and nobody knows who is going to win until the final play. I'm weird like that, I guess.
I mean the worst part of all this is i actually participated in competitive events in the past,I was that dude. I was a sniper main and competed in silver highlander for some time in tf2, I was a global for a year in csgo, I also participated in bf4 attack heli tournaments for a while so I can be good at mp game, i just simply fail to see the appeal or the fun in doing that because not only did I completely lose the skill i spent all those hours building, but the memory of those moments is a massive blur for me. On the other hand i dont have any trouble recollecting vacations with my family from a decade ago.
I sunk 300 hours in rising storm 2 vietnam, I did love that game for a while but alas I found it still suffered the same woes of more traditional fps games: sweaty nerds, casual racism and insufferable rat playstyles designed to snuff out fun and maximise score.
I was legit glad to uninstall that game because it got absolutely insufferable to play for me after a while.
and insufferable rat playstyles
this is a scrub mentality
Seriously, the whole point of realistic shooters is that it requires tactics
try Prey (2017)
strongly seconding this recommendation, particularly since OP enjoyed Control.
the only "realistic" modern MP shooter I can think of rn that's any good is Insurgency which is still banging last I checked
If you like control, have you played Alan wake and Alan wake 2? They’re in the same universe.
Planning to play AW2 soon, will skip AW1 since ive gotten a good enough recap of the first thanks to the control expansion
I really like factory games. Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Modded Minecraft, and Mindustry all are basically endless entertainment because you can always keep expanding. There's also Factorio which is the OG but I can't recommend it because I haven't played it.
I also enjoy roguelikes when I don't have the time to sit down and play a factory game for hours. Noita, Hades, Slay the Spire, One Step From Eden, and Enter the Gungeon are my favorites but there's essentially an endless number of roguelikes, each with very different mechanics and varying levels of difficulty. Some you can play for thousands of hours looking for secrets to trying to create the perfect build, like Noita, but generally they're all a lot of fun even if you don't play them to that extent.
Another genre that I think doesn't get a lot of attention outside of Rimworld are management sim games. There's Dwarf Fortress, which kinda has a reputation for being incredibly deep with simulation mechanics that make every fortress come alive. You can really get lost in the game just trying to get a very efficient fortress that makes your dwarves happy, but it's also open for you to do anything you like, so you could try taking over the world in 10 years or making a giant soap factory complex. There's another pretty notable game in the genre, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, that is a little tough to get into because it's a Chinese game focused on Wuxia fiction, with a lot of references to Chinese culture. However, once you get over the initial difficulty spike, and read a couple guides, it's also a lot of fun. You can make a sect of dragon slaying demigods, pushing your characters' power level to infinity with a thousand different mechanics, each one a little more esoteric than the last.
Edit: Just saw you said you don't really like management games like Cities Skylines, but you really love Planet Coaster because you like placing the bushes one by one. If so, I think you might actually enjoy Satisfactory the most out of all the games I listed. It's incredibly relaxing and therapeutic to connect conveyor belts. You also said you liked narrative stuff and enjoyed Control. You might enjoy Bioshock, they're pretty classic games and despite some pretty questionable parts in Infinite, they have solid narratives that a lot of people enjoy.
DSP is goated. I've started Satisfactory and it just isn't grabbing me like DSP did. The absolute scale of that game and how it turns into a logistics hybrid after you get the towers is just so fucking good.
Glad you enjoy DSP. Satisfactory suffers from early progression just being way too slow and tedious (biomass generators
) but it does get a lot better when you unlock trains. They let you decouple factories from one another, and scale your production a lot higher. They also make building factories a lot less time consuming since you can just make common components in mass in their own factories and simplify the factories of higher tier parts. For example, produce motors and stators in their own factory, so your modular engines, smart plating, turbomotors, etc all can reuse those components and you don't have to make them from scratch in each separate factory. Modularity is king in factory games.God this is giving me flashbacks of the "from raw vs intermediate component" convo for DSP lol. This is part of what draws me to these games is that there is no wrong way to play them. I think my mall isn't in the best position but I did set it all up in a way that I think I can run trains by the storage containers. Not sure how that all works yet tho.
I haven't gotten to motors and such yet but yeah I def wanna avoid making those in house then?
Also biomass was anxiety inducing becuse the Internet says plants don't grow back. I think they do tho? I still felt stressed trying to rush coal and putting my starter factory in the absolute worse spot.
Oh it is true that there is no wrong way to play, of course. Doing things in the way I said is gonna mean you'll have to thing harder about logistics because you'll have more (smaller) factories. It's just what I found to be a much easier way to play so I didn't need to make 13 different recipes happen in each advanced factory, instead I could frontload making basic components in simple factories, and export them. Is it ideal? It's still up to you.
And the plants don't grow back, but it is basically impossible for you to run out of biomass unless you actively go out of your way to use biomass power for hundreds of hours. And don't worry too much about where you place your factory, everything you build in the first couple Space Elevator phases is gonna be much smaller than the factories you'll build later. Think of it like the starting planet in DSP, it basically doesn't matter what you did in it once you branch out.
It's funny because on my second playthrough of DSP I made my starter planet also my science and logistics hub with my rockets on the inner planet in that system. I basically stayed at home unless I needed to go set up like a spin farm and I would bring that home. Dang I need to set my mods back up and play that again lol.
I do have coal set up on Satisfactory though so I have 600mw to play with. I'm using half right now. So the stress isnt there and I can focus on starting to do research and such.
It's on Steam. If you want to get started, I'd recommend going in blind and playing until you lose (might take less than 3 hours of play time, maybe 8 hours if you're particularly lucky/make good choices). Then, join the game's discord server and read through the foundation guide and start over. I'll warn you, though, if you don't like games like Cities Skylines you might find the non-combat parts of the game pretty boring (you can fast forward at 10x speed though, and pause whenever something bad happens).
Never played cities skyline so I’m going in blind, wonder if i’ll enjoy it or not
We need more games that are mp co-op - just not against other people. Serious Sam on insane difficulty with a bunch of friends is damn good fun.
if you do want to play a multiplayer shooter wait around for an actual new one (tribes 3 in a couple years maybe) so that everyone is on a more level playing field and you'll want to play a bunch. when you have a foundation you can maintain it playing 1-2 times a week for a few hours, just ignore all that "season pass" shit.
Tribes 3
Wait what the fuck really? I thought Tribes was dead buried, this might actually get me interested again
Be warned that the studio making it was spun off from Hi-Rez. They could very easily follow the monetization strategy that killed Ascend. It won't be out for years at any rate though.
yeah idk much about it, there was a gameplay preview out of nowhere pretty recently
Just throwing some titles out here, if you want a take on any in particular, I'd be happy to provide. These aren't really niche tho
The Dishonored series (and Deathloop)
The new Wolfensteins
Citizen Sleeper
The Pale Beyond
Return of the Obra Dinn
Pentiment
NorcoHavent played dishonored since i sadly decided as a stupid kid to self spoil myself by watching playthroughs on youtube. Same with deathloop, watched the dunkey video and got spoiled too.
But will absolutely check those other titles out, thanks!
Alan Wake 2 is just as much of a sequel to Control as it is to Alan Wake. Its weird and goofy and creepy as fuck, though some of the goals can be confusing. Highly recommended, my personal GotY, behind BG3 of course.
Speaking of BG3 is near perfect.
Im planning to install a fitgirl repack of AW2 actually, I never played the first one but ive got a good enough grasp on the story thanks to control’s AWE expansion.
The plot itself isn't deep, so yeah, that and maybe the wiki read is more than enough info.
Depends on what you like? I don't have a lot of obscure or niche games, but I've got plenty of good ones!
If you want an excellent narrative experience, we got stuff like Disco Elysium :evrart:. And, I'm not much of an RPG guy, but Earthbound and Mother 3 are my personal reccomendations for a slightly odd, sometimes bizarre adventure of trying to defeat the ultimate evil, and capitalism. :pigmask-parodied: Something more, fps oriented we got Fallout New Vegas, a bit clunky but it works well and has a butt-load of quests and narratives.
If you're more management minded, maybe something like Cities: Skylines (It has a sequel I haven't played yet) for cities, and lately I've been playing Rimworld which is focused more on creating schedules for individual people and designing a base smooth enough to survive/escape the planet. The Tropico series is good too, Tropico 4 is the best one IMO, a little dated but it is fun to try to get everything to click together in a game where nearly everything is working against you.
There is also the matter of Paradox grand-"strategy" games, of which I am an addict of. EU4 is good in itself (with all the DLC, so say goodbye to your moolah unless it's a sale) but also has an excellent fantasy mod called Anbennar, which is chock-full of content. But games like these have a large learning curve, not a hard one (pressing buttons on screens/map) but a long one (a bajillion things to keep track of).
The Total War series is a bit hard for me to recommend nowadays, as in my opinion, the newer titles lack what made the older ones special. But if you want to play some large-scale battles in rts with turn-based management of your realm? I'd say play Shogun 2, especially the standalone dlc Fall of the Samurai for some firearm focused action with sharpshooters and naval bombardments. Of the old-older titles, Medieval 2 is also really good, very charming, but has a very clunky control scheme that still befuddles me after 250+ hours. And my personal favorites, based purely off nostalgia and my undying love for the early-modern period, Empire and Napoleon are a fun time. Empire, albeit buggy, holds a special place in my heart. (Darthmod recommended after a few hours of gameplay for AI and graphical improvements + quite a few more units to mess around with.)
Also, don't forget Subnautica, a sure-fire way to make you afraid of the ocean as you explore an alien world, with both it's wonders and terrors. Of course, Minecraft is good for this also, Caves and Cliffs update made exploration so much fun. Another exploration and survival game I nearly forgot to mention is Project Zomboid, a zombie survival game (shocking), it is isometric where you have to manage your characters stats such as food, water, boredom and happiness while avoiding being bitten by the titular zomboids. It is fully customizable, so if the default gamemodes prove too easy or hard, you can simply change it.
Now, if you want to completely relax while doing some puzzling, Dorfromantik is a hit, a little hexagon-based matching game where you create a nice landscape as the game goes on. On the more intense side however, there's Teardown, which is a resource intensive game simulating a near entirely destructible physics based world. The thing doing the destruction? You, as you try to complete unique challenges, often timed ones, creating optimal routes to steal paintings by simply creating your own route through some richoids bedroom with a pipe bomb.
And for shooters... look up Cruelty Squad, there's actually a niche game for you. :john-cruelty: :cruelty-handler:
So, there you have it, my honest list of actually-good singleplayer games. I could write more, but that's a lot of Bideo James to get through. And some of them, especially the Paradox grand-strategy games, should be "loaned from random strangers on the internet" at first to make sure you actually like them (Cause DLC is expensive as hell.).
300 hrs in disco elysium haha, wish i could play that gem again…
Yeah sadly im utterly uninterest in most types of management sims and RTS games, JRPGS and the likes also bore me to hell, i think that might be due to the fact the only game i could run on my parents computer before i got my own was HL2 and its episodes, it really kind of shaped my expectations and taste in games.
I do love Planet Coaster though, that game is such a joy to play.
I just remembered Ravenfield, basically Battlefield with bots only and a large workshop on steam. Still in Early Access however, but I've had a lot of fun with it.
Oh hey that looks like a lot of fun im def gonna look into it
second cruelty squad, it's just that good
the shooting is so smooth and then there's like, the rest of the game as well
What genres do you normally play? Plenty singleplayer games that are amazing.
RE:Village and Control are some of my favs, HL2 and Black Mesa too. i also enjoy Planet Coaster quite a bit, placing individual bushes by hand tickles my ocd nicely lol. Im interested in flying sims but I’m not sure i want to sink money into HOTAS sticks and pedals… I also used to love War Thunder, back in 2014 before they added tanks and started to go full steam into micro transactions and feature creep.
So yeah basically narrative games, prefferable fps likes, with emphasis on action.
Some mainstream games worth trying:
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Armored Core 6
- Ace Combat 7
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Spec Ops The Line
- The Last of Us 1
- Outlast
- Amnesia
Amnesia
Oh god I actually tried playing the latest one, I think I lasted like, an hour. I was so shaken I actually had to go outside and smoke a few cigs to calm down
, idk why but horror games fucking destroy me even though i know its all fake.same.. I can watch horror movies all day long and be bored to tears but drop me into Chicken Feet for 5 minutes which seems like a comically dumb horror game, and I start sweating and having mini-panic attacks until I terrorquit the game
I would rather walk across cinders than sit down and play any kind of horror game again, maybe i could tolerate playing with friends or something but alone? Nuh huh
Its crazy to you that some people dont like grinding meaningless bullshit? Ok lmao.
You also didnt recommend any games so take your attitude somewhere else, thanks.
IDK if OP was talking about unlocks, leveling up, paywalls, low freetime, or actual skill (abliesm). But those are all annoying yes.
I was mostly whining that modern mp games all try to be an esport without consideration for fun or game design, or even the fact 99% of people dont have the time to sink in thousands of hours in a game to become something approaching good. So mostly free time, I can be good at video games, I simply no longer have the time or motivation to be.
I also agree about ableism, a lot of people simply cannot play those games which is something the asshole above conveniently forgot, real
moment huh
I feel the same way. I used to play lots of COD, Rocket League and eventually Fortnite, and I was burnt out because I never cared to devote enough time to actually get really good. Now I play primarily single player games. It's sad in a way because games were the only thing keeping me in touch with my high school inner circle, but games are supposed to be fun
