A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
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I'd say Hitman III (now called World of Assassins) or No Man's Sky. Both are really great values for their price.
I think I'm mostly done with the Hitman franchise for now, but I'll probably come back to NMS next time Starfield has some big update and I need to scratch that exploration itch.
Theme Hospital
Rain World is absolutely amazing. I'm hopelessly addicted to it. Highly recommend if you like unique games.
Doom Eternal, Team Fortress 2
Probably Omori, although I haven't gotten to two of four endings just yet. Its vibes naturally resonated with me over time, even at its darkest moments.
Metro Exodus EE
Perfect Vermin. It takes only 15 to beat, it's fun, and it has a cool theme/concept/story
FF7 Remake and Celeste are my favorites so far.
Child of light Had it on my radar for some years, then in my Steam library for many more. Finally played it. Really nice vibe and combat system with amazing art direction and narrative.
It's early access so I don't think it counts, but I played the demo some time ago: Gloomwood
Volcanoids is a fantastic co-op game that I keep going back to. Also just started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker, interesting so far.
Final Fantasy XIII-2, modded with HD upscaled textures, community fixes, and Reshade. 2K Resolution w/ Improved AA + Color Correction + Motion Blur + Ray Tracing made this game look modern af 😎
And for the best game this year part, the developers really said "so FFXIII was linear? Well how about time is not linear!" Jumping back to old locations surprised me in that I actually wanted to go back to them and do optional content. And beneath the extra ass music (lol), is some of the most down right horrific/sad stuff shown in a FF game. Like the straight up Zombie apocalypse-like C'eith outbreak in the future that Serah even being near causes people to turn, she apologizes to them in battle as the turned enemies try to use remedy on theirselves to no avail. Being the last human alive and having to deal with seeing the last people alive dying off till it's just you on the planet. The cruel fate of some characters and the risks taken storywise and gamewise really surprised me.
Probably Nier: Replicant, though I have some I'm just starting that could possibly beat it:
Honorable mentions to (all great):
Probably Manifold Garden. I just finished it last week and it was a consistently good experience. Highly recommended.
Bloodborne, Sifu or Hyper Light Drifter.
I don't really want to pick between the three, but I'll go with Sifu, because it's got a little of that super tough, Fromsoftiness built in.
Runs like a dream on my Steamdeck too, and has some genuinely really impressive moments of beauty that I wasn't expecting from a super-hard-beat-people-up-with-a-pipe game.
I opened up Bloodborne again a few weeks ago. Performance isn't good, but it's a lot less miserable than the time I played before that. I definitely like the mechanic of dual mode weapons. The chain-cane is pretty fun to approach enemies with.
I wish it was on PC for steam deck though. I'm not in front of the console as much.
Same. I ended up playing it on my partner's PS5, and it ran well enough (30FPS be damned). Put that on my Steamdeck though, please.
Last time I tried it was a slide show. I never got past the first area because it was just such a choppy piece of shit, on the original PS4 and with/without boost on the pro. So not that is a big step forward.
But it's still stuck to a TV or bad streaming and I don't really want either.
Edit: finally pulled the trigger on a PS5, killed the boss I'd been stuck on on the actual first try running it on there. So maybe performance was still an issue.
Gravity Rush.
I have been enjoying on and off Immortal Redneck.
Inscryption
The King's Field Trilogy on PS1. These games bounced off me hard back in the day, but I got curious about them after reading about their influence on Souls. These were games that were waaaay ahead of their time, and so satisfying now that I have the patience to really appreciate what From Software were trying to create. Also: definitely play the translated version of the first Japanese one.
Xenoblade chronicles X. I finally got a beefy pc that can emulate it with all the graphical upgrades the Wii u can't even fathom, and this game is so much less of a slog now that I'm an adult with a finer appreciation for menus stacked in menus sacked in menus