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Looking for games with unique core mechanics

I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:

  • Superhot: Time only moves when you do
  • Viewfinder: Convert 2D pictures seamlessly into interactive 3D environments
  • Superliminal: Change size of objects by working with perception
  • Portal: Portals
  • Scribblenauts: Summon objects by describing them in a notepad

I am not focused on the story, no. of hours of playtime, date of release or its popularity. It just needs to be playable and be enjoyable (and be available in PC).

myfavouritename , (edited )

Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality

What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.

Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.

Adramis ,

Some of the CW Warnings for What Remains of Edith Finch (spoilers obviously):

spoilerDrowning, child death, divorce / arguing, pregnancy, child birth complications / death

myfavouritename ,

Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.

ram , (edited )
@ram@lemmy.ca avatar
  • Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
  • Katamari: A giant ball gets rolled around and collects stuff forever
  • Baba Is You: Movable text is rules to the game
  • Untitled Goose Game: You have to piss people off the right way
  • Billie Bust Up^[unreleased]^: Musicals tell you upcoming platforming challenges
  • Celeste: every time you die you quickly reset on the same “page”/small tile of map
  • Splatoon: you shoot at the ground to go faster, hide, and/or win
  • Odama: real-time tactical wargame pinball
  • Golf Story: Golf-based fetch quests
  • Astral Chain: asynchronously control a companion in combat
  • Okami: paint skills on-screen in combat
  • Astro Bears: Snake but in 3D
  • Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime: Up to 4 players pilot parts of a ship together
  • Pokemon Ranger: draw circles around monsters to catch them
  • Viva Pinata: breed pinatas to create new species
  • Spore: create and evolve a creature
Shilkanni ,

Katamari Damacy is a great example, built around a very simple but satifying mechanic snd good controls.

Natanael ,

Okami plays extremely well on Nintendo Switch with the ability to paint with your fingers on the touch screen

Schadrach ,

Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back

As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:

The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.

Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.

Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.

12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.

myfavouritename ,

Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.

The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.

Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.

This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.

You_are_dust ,

I have a couple kinda unique things to suggest. There is a small indie game called Eversion that you can find on Steam. The core mechanic is about shifting to these different planes of existence to finish levels. You can only shift at certain places and shifting opens up pathways that weren’t there before. Its retro style graphics and otherwise very simple controls. The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games. Catherine. Catherine is a game in a few styles. You spend part of the time at a diner/bar interacting with people. Then you go to sleep and in the dream world you ascend towers using moveable blocks that you must climb. Sometimes you are chased up the tower by a boss enemy. There is no combat in the game. It’s about ascending the tower as fast as possible at night and progressing the story by day.

Schadrach ,

The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.

Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.

And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.

You_are_dust ,

The Talos Principle is fantastic. Probably my favorite puzzle game. The sequel is finally happening as well.

TheLongPrice ,

Death Stranding

I’ve never played such a unique big budget game. The core mechanic is terrain traversal to make deliveries, and the game continues to give you tools throughout it to accomplish that.

amazing2 ,

I loved the traversal mechanics in Death Stranding. Kind of made me realise that in all other games the characters are actually gliding and not walking.

I didn’t however like that the game gets a bit too actiony toward the end. And the MULEs and the terrorists stop being a threat when you get upgraded weapons, and the BTs once you have that golden handcuff thing.

I hope they address that in the sequel. The BTs should have been a lot scarier and the stealth a bit more refined.

Still an amazing game. I loved just doing the deliveries. There’s a meditative quality to it that I only previously saw in Shadow of the Colossus.

Comment105 ,

The BT’s were scary enough that I couldn’t keep playing, I got to a bit after the part where you get the exo legs.

amazing2 ,

Well, if you want to try again at some point, I can tell you they get progressively less scary as the game goes on because you’ll get a bunch of tools to deal with them. In the last third of the game even getting caught by one is nothing because you’ll have blood grenade launchers that can easily kill them. And for those who like the stealth way better, you’ll get a special tool to sever the BTs umbilical if you get near them (the game is very liberal in what it counts as near).

nightmareofahorse ,

Its retro and really rough around the edges (and QTE heavy) and is more of a life sim than a traditional adventure game, but Shenmue I & II introduced day/night cycles with NPC schedules, has a fun martial arts combat system, and the story is kind of like an 80s martial arts film with a detective kick. There’s also gambling, drinking, a little bit of working at the docks, darts, retro arcade games, and some sleuthing to progress the story. Your progress from Shenmue I carries over to II

But again its rough around the edges and sometimes referred to as QTE simulator (or Dock Worker Simulator, as I jokingly call it). But somehow, all these elements blend together well to create a unique game. Not going to be for everyone but I really enjoyed it

Final note: I highly recommend using a controller. I ran into issues with KB+M, especially after remapping keys. It broke some of the QTEs.

Shilkanni ,

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

jjagaimo ,

Qube and anti-chamber if you’re a fan of superluminal

bermuda ,

In Return of the Obra Dinn you play an insurance claims investigator. You can magically view the moment of somebody’s death and hear the audio prior to it to aid in your investigation of a ghost ship.

pemmykins ,

Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.

Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.

Adramis ,

Gosh Impossible Creatures was the coolest game as a kid. I wish we’d get a remaster.

Adramis ,

Snake Pass - “What does a platformer look like without jump (or a regular walk for that matter)?” It’s really fun and unique.

stagen ,
@stagen@feddit.dk avatar

Against the StormRogue lite city survival builder with gorgeous art, awesome game mechanics and a fantastic dev team whom have basically built the game in collaboration with the community that’s risen around the game.

AceFuzzLord ,

I don’t know how many other games have done this (or if anyone actually cares), but Me And My Shadow. It’s a 2D puzzle platformer where you have to record your movements to move the shadow version of you in order to reach the end of each level.

It’s a discontinued open source game that can be found on SourceForge and has a couple different level packs available for when you complete the ones already included.

Hawk ,

I really love Terra Nil.

You basically have to restore a wasteland back to lush, green nature.

Much like a city builder, this is achieved by putting down buildings. The twist is that at the end, you can’t leave a trace so you need to demolish everything again.

It’s not a long game, but I thought it was very satisfying. A relaxing puzzle/city builder with soothing music.

CrazyEddie041 ,
@CrazyEddie041@kbin.social avatar

Cultist Simulator is pretty unique... not necessarily in a good way. It's a storytelling/puzzle game with some great writing if you can power your way through the gameplay. The mechanics are deliberately very obtuse, with no tutorial, to emulate the fact that diving into the occult is confusing and dangerous. The end result is that the game is very unique and cool, but it's absolutely not for everyone. TL;DR on the basic mechanics: you have a handful of verb boxes, such as Talk or Research, as well as various cards that you can slot into them. Each card has a variety of tags on it. Depending on which cards with which tags you put into the various verb boxes, you get different results.

Suppoze ,
@Suppoze@beehaw.org avatar

Cultist Simulator somehow made me feel the same fanaticism as I assume a cultist would feel. It can be very addicting, chasing the endgame, driven by curiosity and desire for power. Not for everyone though.

Pxtl ,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Battlezone '98: One of the first notable RTS/FPS hybrids. You drive hovertanks and you build bases and you command other tanks. Set in a secret live war on the Moon, Mars, and Venus between the USSR and the USA during the cold war.

wombatula ,

I don’t see a unique core mechanic in that, there are lots of RTS / FPS hybrids, both single and multiplayer.

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