Asked “sell me on your favorite game” to a group of friends, they said it made for a great discussion, so maybe copying it to here might make a nice discussion too.
Asked “sell me on your favorite game” to a group of friends, they said it made for a great discussion, so maybe copying it to here might make a nice discussion too.
Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds!) is a brilliant game that is hard to advertise without spoiling stuff. It is from the genre sometimes called metroidbrainia, where finding the puzzle solution through in game hints to progress is the game mechanic. So its possible to finish the game in 20 minutes, if you know what to do. But getting there usually takes you 20 hours.
Now to why its great:
Planescape Torment walked so that Disco Elysium could run. PT plays in the planescape setting of D&D, a world where belief is the foundation of everything, so with high enough stats, you can debate somebody into believing they don’t exist and they will vanish immediately.
You are in Sigil, the central city of the multiverse, directly in the middle of neutral. Neutral between the planes of Good and Evil but also between those of Chaos and Lawful. This neutrality needs to be enforced of course, which is the job of a nice woman called the Lady of Pain, which has the iron throne as headdress and cutting you down on the spot is the nicer treatment for offending her.
And I didnt even tell you of the protagonist, the Nameless One. You wake up in a morgue, update your journal all the time and try to find out why you can’t die. A former You was smart enough to try and give you some instructions via tattooing them onto your skin. So you take your wisecracking flying skull buddy and start looking for answers.
Yes, this game is weird and a lot of text with bad battle mechanics, but the good kind of weird and you don’t play PT for the fights, you play it for the world, the stories and the characters. For example the chaste succubus with a brothel for intellectual debate and no that is not an euphemism but 100% what it is. Play the game if you don’t believe me! This is sneakily a recommendation for Disco Elysium as well, but PT is the more patient game, so I wanted to highlight that one more.