For me, Tunic. Well, it’s a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.
I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.
Oh, but what’s this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.
spoiler
I knew it was an English cipher from the beginning. Nobody ever goes full conlang, as much as I would love that. I got as far as deducing it was phonemic, as the same glyphs kept appearing before cleartext words, which I assumed were “a/an” and “the”, and the way “the” was written made me think it was two glyphs, one for the <th> and one for <e>. The last thing I got before giving up and looking it up online was one of hte ghosts standing next to the well in the village and repeating the same word three times. Of course he’s saying “well well well”.
Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don’t think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.
Timberborn. I’m pretty into *-builder games, and I thought this would be cute and simplistic and my kid could watch and play and love it. But I’m in so deep now, great game. Can’t put it down. Plan to learn to mod it.
Pippistrello and the Cursed Yo Yo. A top-down metroidvania with Startopics combat? Oh, maybe fun. That game was excellent, cool combat mechanics that kept expanding. Only like 2 or 3 tedious battles in the whole thing.
Tunic fucking rules but I put it down for too long and now I have no idea what I was doing. I don’t wanna start over!
Since i follow a lot of big games i normally can figure out what i would like since i am easy to please. I can only think of one game that i picked up that got me hooked and surprised me which was Cat Quest. I probably am thinking about it because im now playing the 3rd one which was free on psn for members.
BG3. Never played the first two, and I find some games like that have bad writing (like every bit of dialog feeling like it’s overstaying it’s welcome, being way to chatty and/or dull). I think I saw Cohh playing it (pretty sure that was my introduction to him) and I was blown away by the early access writing and mechanics. I bought the early access right away and was enthralled in it’s writing, the plot, the dynamic choices based on class, race, or deity choice, and the music. There used to be a lady sitting next to the waterfall in the grove that had a whole sob story and a music box. Seeing the thralls on the nautiloid and the implications of what it all meant… I was really sad the release was so different. Still very good, but wasn’t as good. But as it stands it is one of the few games I’ve actually completed, and I think it’s the only game I’ve actually completed multiple times. Needless to say I’m very looking forward to Divinity.
Then Expedition 33. When I first saw gameplay I really thought it was just another Persona clone. I thought that due to the menu layout in combat. Day it released, saw some gameplay and decided to take a risk and bought it. Before I even left for the expedition… I already told my friends it was GOTY, it just dethroned KCD2.
- Slay the Spire. I have played quite a few roguelikes before StS but I never played much card-based games at all, due to me never playing boardgames or TCGs… so this was obviously a new experience for me. Almost 1000 hours on record now with the game, cleared A20H with every base game character (and did A20H on almost every Packmaster pack)… which should speak for itself
- Dancerush Stardom, that funny shuffle game. This is Konami’s attempt at making a beginner- and normie-friendly rhythm game… which never quite caught on (aside from random YouTube recordings having several million views). I wasn’t particularly fit & never knew about this game before at all, so it was a pleasant surprise to me that I liked it so much. I have 5-star cleared many of the hardest songs in this game so
Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I don’t consider myself a Metroidvania fan at all but both Ori games are so good.
The biggest surprise were the Death Stranding games. I had no idea it would scratch itches I didn’t know I had.
Most recently, Slay the Princess. It’s a VN, and I typically do not play VNs, but wow. It’s actually quite amazing and I can’t actually tell you why because it’d spoil it.
I get pleasantly surprised all the time though, since I like to use a randomizer to choose my next game sometimes. I think one of the other experiences was the Rusty Lake games. I got them in a bundle and since it was a puzzler, I had my friend join me in comms and it was… very strange. But we will use references from those games as insider nods to one another.
Planet Crafter. I may have hyper-fixated on it for a good few weeks to finish it. I don’t know why, but it was very addicting to me.
Also, not a game, but the Mekanism mod for Minecraft. Trying to setup automated resource production in as little space as possible is a very fun challenge. Plus the annoying sounds from each running machine is very satisfying to hear together.
These three jump out at me. I went blind on all three.
- Portal 2 - I genuinely had no idea what it was about when I started, and I certainly did not expect comedy.
- Titanfall 2 - Bought it on release because I wanted a solo FPS game. Amazing. I wish I could experience it for the first time again.
- Spiritfarer - I cried. A lot.
I always up vote Spiritfarer.
Horizon Zero Dawn - From what I saw from the marketing seemed just odd. Relatively primitive looking humans fighting animal shaped robots. It just looked a bit too gimmicky. Several years after it’s initial release I saw that it was on sale and gave it a shot. I was genuinely surprised by the depth of the story. It was much more emotionally impactful than I expected and the story now feels almost prescient.
This is the one I was going to say - I got it second hand somewhere, on a whim because I had a voucher to spend. Had never even heard of it before, but boy oh boy, what an amazing decision that turned out to be!
Funny you mention HZD, I just fired it back up a couple weeks ago and completed the main story last weekend.
I had the opposite experience. I was looking forward to it and disliked it. I still haven’t completed it yet.
If you don’t mind me asking, what specifically didn’t you like about the game?
I found it a bit confusing. It wasn’t really explained what the optional weapons were. I found a few guides online but really hoped the game would guide a bit better. Also the fact that you need to blow bits off the enemies to make them weaker wasn’t fully explained.
Also didn’t really gel with the story. I put it on easy to make progress and got bored.
Not saying it’s a bad game. Just not for me.
Fair enough. There were a lot of weapons and variations of the weapons and I’d agree that some things weren’t explained well or at all. But for me part of the fun was experimenting and figuring out what worked and what didn’t.
As for the story, it really didn’t click for me either until later in the game when the how and why of that world became clearer. Prior to that it felt like just another derivative (post-post-)post-apocalyptic story. But from that point on I was fully invested, which made the ending all the more impactful for me.
Subnautica, I thought it was just minecraft under water, which sounded ok. Didn’t expect it to have a story, absolutely didn’t expect it to have an interesting story. The audio logs had some charming characters, ham and cheese had me cracking up whilst trying not to die. BUT, the exact moment I realized this game was special was the translated message you get after getting your arm poked, suddenly hours of environmental story telling snap into place as you realize what is about to happen. 11/10 would buy again.
Subnautica is the fastest 75 hours I ever put into a game. I blitzed it over the course of a week. The end of every play session felt like the most satisfying workout of my life. I’m not a horror gamer at all but Subnautica hits every aspect of survival horror so we’ll that I, pun intended, really submerged myself in the world of that game.
Bro it was so good! I expected to not give a shit about it. I really enjoyed it throughout and felt soooo epic at the end.
Real shame that the next one is queued up to be mess
People with thalassophobia should DEFINITELY stay away, or maybe just play in the shallows.
Inscryption, I went in expecting a short card based escape room with a lil bit of meta story. I found so much more, by the end the risk investment was great!
elden ring. was expecting to quite at any point because of how bitching it could be. ended up getting through it between sorcery and tasty cheese.
This I was hyped for but it was much better than I thought.
To add to this for me - breath of the wild and the Witcher 3
If you liked deciphering script, check out Chants of Sennar. I played it with my gf who doesn’t game much but we loved it.
Played the demo. Liked it but haven’t gotten around to buying it.
God of War 2018. I had never played any of the GOW games and I tried this one on a whim.
I fell in love with it immediately.
Control. I’ve always had a fondness for SCP-related stuff so when I saw Control on sale for $3 or $4 it was an instant mindless purchase. Bored a few days later I decided to give it a go, and then I went and beat the entire game and the DLC. Great power fantasy, great lore, great voice acting, fun moment to moment gameplay balanced between exploring, upgrading, story beats, and boss fights. Also ties in to their other games like Alan Wake; I haven’t played that one, but I’ve strongly considered it just because of Control and wanting more of that universe.
I bounced off of that one for a while. Bought it on sale and was kinda digging it until I hit the first boss and just couldn’t beat him. I tried a few times until I noticed that I was losing some not -yet-defined currency with every death and found that very antagonistic. I can’t remember if they’d implemented the invincibility toggle and I was too bull headed to use it, or if this was before that update.
Put it down for a few years, then came back to it when I heard enough people raving about how much they had enjoyed it. I think Alan Wake 2 was out by that point. Picked it up, used invincibility to get past that boss, turned it off, and fell in love with the rest of the game like everyone else
