For me it was noita. I’m not having much time for it nowadays, but I was in the middle of a “godrun” last time I’ve played, mainly focusing on killing the most bosses. When I’ve first dropped it I just managed to get to Kolmi once (and died soon after killing it) and spent most of my runs in the mountain (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I want to love it because it checks so many boxes but I just end up building suicide wands or polymorph some rando to a demon or something.
Not gonna lie, most runs are really difficult to evolve into good runs, if you don’t know or don’t have the right tools: the game is extremely punishing.
What made it click for me was looking at furyforged/dunkorslam informational (and entertaining) videos and in the end albino runs were the spark that pushed me in the right directions. If you don’t mind spoilers. The noita community is great :)
Yeah I hear that it’s almost impossible without spoilers. My kid is getting good at it though and it’s getting me interested.
Factorio and Minecraft. Which is now my top played games of all.timr. Probably 8000 hours each
At first I didn’t know how to play, no good tutorial and just sat there for years tell something somewhere reminded me and I decided to actually look up the wiki and look up guides and now I’m addicted.
Yup! I gave up on Minecraft pretty quickly the first time because I just opened it and started playing, no idea what I was doing and it was no fun. Tried again years later playing co op with a friend who explained things and I have loved it ever since!
I still cannot get into Minecraft, but Vintage Story is an amazing voxel building game. If you play it enough, you may even discover that there’s lore there as well as being a better looking MC clone.
Rimworld. Played it really early into development and it was just confusing the hell out of me. Picked it back up about 4 months later and fell in love. 12,500 hours later…
It took time for me to enjoy as well but I always feel burned out after a long running colony goes sideways.
But if I’m not there automating human leather cowboy hat production, who will?
Stardew Valley and Dark Souls.
Black and white
Dark Souls.
Just couldn’t get into it at all. Hated the loss of stuff when dying. Hated the clunky combat.
Then I played Bloodborne which for some reason clicked. It’s probably the health regen for more aggressive play that got me more into that one.
There I learned the main progress wasn’t levels, but shortcuts and knowledge.
After that I went back to DS and found it much easier. Plus you can cheese most enemies by shuffling to get behind them and stabbing them in the back.
Deep Rock Galactic. When I first played it I got bad motion sickness but later on (after a PC upgrade) I tried it again and was able to get into it without it being intolerable (although it still can trigger motion sickness sometime).
The number one culprit of motion sickness is a setting called ‘Motion Blur’ and it is a crime against humanity. If you haven’t already, turn that shit off. The second is an improperly set FOV. You might need to increase it, depending on your screen and how far away you sit.
I always turn off motion blur immediately in games that have an option for it. And recently I have started applying the same policy to TAA because it results in an effective motion blur effect as well.
I don’t remember off the top of my head what my FOV for DRG is. I usually set it to 90 when I have the option to, but it’s not always an option I can set.
Usually when I have issues with a game that cannot be resolved by setting changes, it is because of camera shake effects that I can’t disable. I think in DRG’s case, I was mostly able to disable the artificial camera shake, but there is a decent amount of natural camera shake from the engine/game physics. It’s worse when there are modifiers that make me move faster. Those still trigger my motion sickness.
Also, something that’s fairly unique to DRG is that it seems that complete darkness (like, where I can’t see at all) can trigger my motion sickness as well. The vast majority of games don’t have complete darkness in them, but it’s a major element of DRG. I think that part of what made it bearable for me was getting decent enough at the lighting mechanics. Some mission modifiers that mess with the lighting still make me feel sick, though.
The original Rogue Legacy.
Yeah I’m with you on that one. I played it for a couple hours, thought it was okay but put it away. Then like a year or two later I came back and put like 40 hours into it or something.
Oh I liked it right away, I was just terrible at it. Came back a year later and, IDK, I just suddenly understood what I was doing wrong and how to do it right. Started ripping through it after that.
Hollow Knight. It should’ve been love at first sight genre-wise, but for some reason I dropped it within the first 20 minutes the first time around and hadn’t felt the pull to come back, but after learning about the impending Silksong release date I gave it another shot and I was hooked. Finished it in 2 weeks (which is super speedy for me, I have a job and a family lol)
fallout new vegas. I had enough of immersive sims or RPGs when I went into it, and had some costume problem that got rid of a long amount of progress. Gave up. Went back to it last year and played it for a few months, fantastic.
FTL, had to play on easy mode and read some guides … Bot of a cop-out but was so very frustrating to never get anywhere!
The first dark souls. Wasn’t in the right head space and hadn’t yet accepted its lessons of “dying doesn’t matter” and “you don’t have to find everything”.
Now it’s one of my favorite franchises.
Dragon Quest 9. When I tried it when it was released on the Nintendo DS, I didn’t like the low-res 3D graphics, and I hated the rotatable camera.
I preferred 2D pixel art or pre-rendered graphics for my JRPG at the time.
Tried it again 15 years later, now I love it. The graphics has unique charm, the rotatable camera isn’t required. The gameplay is amazing! It improved upon my previously favourite entry DQ3. The job system is fun.
SOMA
Tomb Raider, the original one. Everything I hated about it as a kid when it was new, twenty years later those exact same features made me love it.
Bloodborne. Played a little, couldn’t figure it out, my bro bought me DS3, I played that a little and couldn’t figure it out, went back to Bloodborne once I realized it and DS3 were both made by From Software (I was literally like what happened to those kick ass Armored Core games). Still couldn’t figure it out, went back to DS3, beat it like 3 times, went back to Bloodborne, got the BFS Ludwig’s holy blade, beat it, then logged like 1400 hours on that sumbitch. Was my primary covid game, found some cool people to coop with, favorite game of all time.
I think I technically logged slightly more hours in destiny 2 during covid lockdowns, but like, its destiny 2, I hated every minute (honestly it was cool when I had cool people to play with.
Still fire it up once a year around Halloween
Armored core is still alive and well. I was very pleased to see the popularity of AC6 when it came out. Unfortunately, once people figured out shotgun meta, Mainstream attention subsided quickly.
I’ve never liked the darksouls, bloodborne, or elden ring games. But man, Armored Core has been a guilty pleasure since Silent Line. Shout out to Chromehounds too, the OG build a bot.
I played ac6 a lot, I think I double platted it, ps4 and ps5. One of my favorite build in pve is a “bloodborne mech” double pistols, double sweet16s / one s16 and a laser dagger. I’ll drop a pic later. DM me if you wanna go a few rounds
