Years / Decades:
70s , 80s , 90s , 00s , 10s , 2020
Genres:
2D Platformers, Board Games, Bullet Hell / 2D Shooters, First Person Shooters, Flash, Horror, Indie, Metroidvania, MMOs, MOBA, Point and Click , Racing, Real Time Strategy, Roguelikes, RPGs (Turn Based), Simulation, Sports, Stealth, Tabletop RPGs, Visual Novels
Welcome back. This part of the series will be primarily focusing on genres. So far I have [Action RPG, Arcade Game, Third person shooter, Action, 4X (Civilization-like), 3D Platformer, Dungeon Crawler, Card Game, Text dungeon, Souls-like, Rhythm, Survival, Sandbox, Shoot/beat 'em up, City Builder, Adventure, Fighting, Turn Based Strategy, Real Time Tactics, Grand Strategy, Handheld, Walking simulator, Tower Defense, Miscellaneous, and Casual] as available genres. Let me know if I missed something, and I will try to get it added.
This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other consoles and genres will come in sporadic subsequent threads. Please contribute to previous threads if you missed them. This is meant to be an exhaustive list.
Expanding on your choice(s) is definitely a plus. Not everyone knows about or has played non-mainstream titles.
All the Zachtronics games are amazing (but hard and brain-hurty): Spacechem, Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory, Exapunks are the ones that I can vouch for
They're particularly cool cos there's always multiple ways to solve them so the solution always feels like it's truly yours
Edit: The Talos Principle is great as well. And as tired as the memes are, Portal 1 and 2 have some really clever puzzles
Portal
Yeah came here to say I don't really like puzzle games but portal is a huge exception to the rule. Especially portal 2, it's one of my favorite games of all time.
TIS-100 is a good Zachtronics game if you like programming
Portal, Portal 2 and all their goofy offspring, Superluminal, The Unfinished Swan, Antichamber, Manifold Garden.
I've been playing Baba Is You for the last year or so, and it's really something special. Before that I played The Witness. It's also great but it can be a little dry and at times it felt like I was solving the puzzles on the back of cereal boxes.
Does Myst count?
At the time it was one of the best games I ever played
Into The Breach is great. Turn based, Same dev as FTL but you control a squad of mechs on a grid and have to position them / use them to reposition enemies so that you avoid damage and enemies blow each other up. Is good fun.
I started playing into the breach the other day and it's great. Like Advance Wars but with all of the bullshit cut out and more strategic.
Puzzle Pirates, a mid-late 2000s puzzle-based MMORPG. It’s still around but it’s definitely past its prime, in the “multiplayer” sense (the puzzles still hold up).
The game centers around manning a ship, with several roles needing to be filled, each having 1-2 different puzzles, for a total of 7 I think. Sea battles were also fought via 1-2 different mass puzzles, with everyone on the ship sword fighting or brawling as a group.
There was a whole economy of labor that was used to craft ships, cannonballs, rum, swords, clothing, and other things. Eventually most of these labor activities got their own puzzles.
Players banded together into crews, and crews into flags, culminating in server-wide blockades every weekend over who controlled specific islands. These battles, or PVP between warring flags, could result in sunken ships and various cosmetic injuries (hooks, eyepatches, peg legs).
The player base has drastically shrunk from its peak, leading to too many servers with too few players, with much of the wide-scale interpersonal competition fading away. For example, nobody seriously cares about blockades any more. They used to be enormous events for the most active islands, with gigantic sums of in-game money spent hiring recruits as “jobbers” for flags, manning dozens of ships to attack/defend islands.
Also Talos Principle is a great game. Sorta similar to Portal, but with lots of philosophical musing on top (centered on the boundary between human and artificial intelligence, sorta, what it means to be human more generally. Lots of other stuff, I thoroughly enjoyed it). The puzzles are pretty great, and the writing is even better.
One of the main writers, Jonas Kryatzes, is a Greek comrade who was on an episode of Aufhe Bunga Bunga somewhat recently. He said it was probably the only video game that quotes trotsky lol
Tetris for the NES is an easy recommend. Classic tetris gameplay great for beginners or experts - there is even a competitive scene with tournaments. NES emulators run on literally everything and the rom is easy to find on google.
There are like a million good versions of tetris too so hopefully others will chime in with their favs
Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 are probably the best recent ones.
Antichamber was great fun. It's first-person, and often the puzzles not only involve solving them, but recognizing what is and isn't a puzzle.
