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.
Hollow Knight and by extension, Elden Ring.
I was always rather nervous to play Souls games, and these games are challenging as hell.
I’m not very far in either game — having just beaten the first boss in HK and I just beat Margit in Elden Ring.
But god, that rush when you beat a boss in either game is amazing. Took me about 8 tries to beat Margit and I was so excited when I won.
I can see why people love this genre now.
Careful! Elden Ring is a dangerous gateway drug… :V Join us junkies at !soulslike@lemmy.zip
Hehe yeah, I was always put off on souls games because people described them as being hard, then when there wasn’t alot of choice early on in VR games, I picked up a souls-like since it was the closest I could get to a long-form right at the time. And it wasn’t that hard at all, but people were still complaining about how hard it was all the time… so I tried other souls games on desktop, and they were fine too. So I picked up the actual dark souls… this is what people were complaining about? It’s like, not even megaman difficulty?
That was when I learned that it’s a good thing there wasn’t much internet yet back when I was playing megaman games, or I might have never tried them either. And also it turns out I like “hard” games, to me that is like the whole point of games. If you finish something first try, then you didn’t get better at anything.