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.
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.