What I mean is… sometimes people are very loyal to a videogame franchise or a company because they loved a game they released years ago (Silent Hill/Konami with Silent Hill 2, Blizzard/Bethesda with their respective golden eras, some could argue this happens too with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, etc). Ethical/consumer reasons aside to stop supporting certain companies, sometimes some franchises/companies aren’t necessarily creating the best examples of games of those specific genres anymore, yet many fans are loyal to them (and a chunk of them also seem to suffer/complain with every new release).
Meanwhile some people that explore less known titles and different niches occasionally pop-up and say stuff like “the last Pokémon games are formulaic and uninspired, there’s actually this and that incredible examples of somewhat recent monster collecting games” or “the last FF wasn’t actually bad but if you want turn-based RPGs that’ll remind you of your old favorite FFs then check Chained Echoes or whatever” or “don’t look for something like Silent Hill 2 with Konami, instead I recommend these survival horror games”.
So the idea of this thread is for people to recommend alternatives to franchises. Especially if they’re standalone instead of other alternative franchises and especially if they’re indie (since most of my enjoyment these last few years has been from indies like Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper, Darkest Dungeon, Celeste, Slay the Spire, Tacoma, Hellblade).
Cassette beasts is a great pokemon like with some fun twists and great sounds track
Coromon has a similar vibe. Such good games.
Congratulations on your excellent taste!
Let’s go with some good non-AAA games that were not sequels and never got one either.
Single player:
- Baba is you
- Brothers
- Mark of the Ninja
- SUPERHOT
- Vanquish
Better in co-op:
- Astroneer
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Nine Parchments
- Outward
- Renegade Ops
Rock and stone, brother!
Rock and Stone!
If you don’t rock and stone, you ain’t coming home.
SUPERHOT has a sequel
Sustained ! Although I thought SUPERHOT Mind Control Delete was more of a roguelite spinoff than a sequel (did not play it).
Vanquish was beautiful.
Huh. My siblings and I love the Trine games, and wanted to like Nine Parchments, but found it to be one of the worst games we’ve ever played. I don’t think we could find a single redeeming quality, and it just seemed like a total misstep.
So seeing it here on this list makes me think maybe there’s something that was okay about it? I’m curious what people liked…
(all the rest of these seem like good games, though, which honestly makes me even more confused about Nine Parchments’ inclusion…)
It’s okay not to like it of course. As you have seen it’s nothing like the Trine games, sharing only a bit of lore with them.
It’s basically a very pretty arena-based top-down shooter reminiscent of Magicka (which I also loved), with a good difficulty curve. There is not much of a story to carry the game forward, so it hinges on whether you like the gameplay and the challenge it offers or not. I for one really enjoyed Nine Parchments, doing multiple runs in single player and co-op with friends (even a “hardcore” one, which we usually never touch).
Right, yeah… It was definitely reminiscent of Magicka. Maybe even a little too reminiscent, since I feel Magicka was a much stronger game.
OK, interesting! It’s nice to know the game wasn’t objectively bad, and was only just “not for me”, since I like the devs!
Thumper is the best rhythm game I’ve ever played, and it was made by two ex-harmonix employees who were disappointed by the direction of rock band and similar titles. It throws away all the wish fulfillment and commercial stuff and the result is amazing.
I can second Thumper. I bought it on a whim, and have since bought it several more times for more devices. It’s such a satisfying game to play. I had no idea about the Harmonix connection, but it makes total sense now that you’ve said it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I’ve found to be actually good.
I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:
- Foreign (Non-American)
- Indie
- Small studio
Basically all of the good games that I’ve liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I’m sure if you think about it, the great games you’ve played have also been this way.
Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won’t have fun, and it’ll be expensive.
Go play EDF5 with some friends. It’s jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.
Raft is great, too.
Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.
And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.
Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it’s been solid.
But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.
It’s like the loss of a union, except it’s industry wide.
There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don’t have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.
Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn’t that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you’re voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.
It’s ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn’t be supportable.
Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn’t be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.
Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they’d: “be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all.”
But remember:
- Foreign
- Indie
- Small Studio
These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.
I have wasted a significant part of my life on two amazing games from (I’m pretty sure) indie developers: Factorio (Wube) and Satisfactory.(Coffee Stain) Both of these games have a lot of depth, and both are stable which is interesting becuase Satisfactory is still Early Access.
Just here to plug Captain of Industry if you like factory games.
I’ve played Captain of Industry, about 50 hours in it, and it just doesn’t grab me like Factorio or Satisfactory.
Fair enough, I’m hooked but it is different in some fundamental ways.
so aren’t all indies small? and the non-american thing is just taste.
Why cant you just say you only like either:
- non american games.
- small studios.
Larian (baldurs gate 3) is massive for being indie. I think where your misconception comes from is the term indie. The term comes with a lot of predetermined expectations and definitions, but in spite of this fact very large studios can be indie.
Of course it feels weird to label a studio as large as larian indie when compared to the likes of supergiant(hades) or two brothers of bay 12 who created dwarf fortress. None of the three are technically any less indie, but one certainly feels more indie, doesn’t it?
oh, i guess most of the times of heard indie, it was refering to small studios, where as i have never heard anyone call a large studio indie even if they are. thanks for the correction.
Valve is an independent company.
cool.
For anyone that likes horror, I can’t recommend Red Candle Games enough.
Detention takes place during the White Terror in Taiwan in the 1960s, and is about a student trying to get out of the school after a typhoon, but it turns into something so much darker and sadder as the story unfolds.
Devotion is probably the best PT-esque horror game out there, taking place in a Taiwanese apartment during three different years in the 80s, and is about a script writer trying to create his “perfect future” while he’s trying to figure out what happened to his young daughter. It is one of, if not the, best domestic horror I’ve ever played. And anyone against censorship should definitely get it, because the game was pulled from Steam because of an art asset that got left in by accident that called Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh, and then GoG said THEY would sell it, but it seems CD Projekt worried China might retaliate and not allow CP2077 to be released in China and backed out a day or two after they said they would carry it (they claimed it was because of “gamer response,” but refused to respond to anyone asking for more details).
Detention, you can get anywhere - it’s even on iOS and Android along with PC, PS Store, and Switch, but Devotion, you can only get from Red Candle’s website, and it is more than worth the $17 bucks: https://shop.redcandlegames.com/
These look and sound great, thank you!
I need to go back to Detention. I was really enjoying it but I think something spooked me too close to bedtime and I hadn’t picked it up since.
Do you have steam? Click on a tag (preferably a more descriptive one, but multiple can be selected on the next screen) of a game you enjoy, but think the soul has been lost from, sort by user review, find something you haven’t heard of before, enjoy the next entry in your preferred genre!
Alternatively go to the games store screen, at the bottom, after “more from this developer” is “users who enjoyed this game also enjoy”
Steam makes it very easy to expand your library, like it’s their business or something.
Edit to add Missing the point of let’s get some community involvement in here rather than turning to our benevolent monopolistic overlords.
Although it looks like you’re mainly focusing on single player games, Titanfall 2 is a great alternative to Call of Duty. Its movement is insane, it’s fanbase isn’t toxic and it’s actually fun.
Its single player campaign is well regarded too if relatively short.
Just beat it a few weeks ago, it was a great time. The set pieces are jaw-dropping at times.
Multiplayer def has a learning curve, but it’s fantastic.
if you enjoyed diablo 2,grim dawn feels like a spiritual successor to that game specifically, whereas d3 didn’t really.
And if you enjoy Grim Dawn, don’t forget Titan Quest. Grim Dawn was meant to be the spiritual successor to that. It’s very dated but a great game.
Titan Quest is pretty great with mods
You mean like it’s game where you could rush/grush and mass level, make mfer, farm stuff and make your pvp characters with skill trees and skill synergies?
Yes to all of that. In fact the synergies that you can pull off in GD make you feel godlike.
Awesome! Added to watch list.
CrackFactorioManagement games like Software INC, Startup Company, Big Ambitions, Sim Airport and SimCasino.
Don’t forget Cities Skylines and the recently released sequel. They’re both a lot of fun but for the sequel they really listened to the community. It’s a bit of a performance hog. There are performance patches coming but in the interim there area lot of settings one can change to make it run better on lower end hardware.
I am giving CS2 a year or so to clean up the performance issues and wait for the workshop to kick into gear.
I’ve got a decently beefy machine but it’s not top of the line or anything (Radeon RX 6950 XT, Core i7, 16GB memory) and with a few tweaks it runs pretty well. Definitely looking forward to the performance updates, though, because it’s a truly beautiful game.
That’s still a fairly beefy GPU though.
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Counterstrike 2 has great performance
I wouldn’t know. We were talking about Cities Skylines 2
Unless it’s something that you are a super uber fan, avoid buying a game before it comes out.
It saves a lot of heartaches and headaches.
Plus, in today’s world… why pre order? It’s not like a game will run out of copies…
“When you pre-order a game, you’re just committing to paying for something that some assholes in California haven’t even finished working on yet. You know what you get for pre-ordering a game? A big dick in your mouth.” -Eric Cartman, Black Friday
Outer wilds, tunic, a short hike, fez,
Tunic was shockingly good. Looks like its for little kids but there is a lot of surprises and neat puzzles tucked away in there. Absolutely worth checking that out
Second this. Tunic is a masterpiece.
Outer Wilds is amaaaaazing
what are these alternitives for?
Yup, I did not answer the question, I just put some personal recommendations
nevermind then. guess i dont care.
a short hike reinvigorated my love for indie games! it’s such a beautiful game with a cute little story and fun things to do, and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
If you want something that feels like Pokémon but was created by someone who isn’t just trying to shit out a new game every year, check out Casette Beasts!
Also if you really just want the same pokemon but better, check out rom hacks. Many of the pokemon community rom hacks are way better than they have any right to be
I guess I may suggest my all time favourite RPG. It’s Disco Elysium. A brilliantly written and crafted gem. You will find an amazing storyline, crazy dialogues and choices, psychedelic visuals. Such a gem must not be forgotten. What a pity the company almost dissolved after the release and the original authors won’t have a part in the sequel.
why is nobody here saying what the game is an alternative for or what ki d of game play to expect?
I haven’t played the beta yet but I’m hoping that The Finals, which is made by ex-Dice devs, will be a good alternative to Battlefield and COD. I just miss destructible environments so badly. Bad Company 2 was so so good back in the day.
I really, really hope that it doesn’t get overrun with cheaters like warzone did. I have really high hopes for the game because I’m having a blast with the beta. Not often does a game come along out of nowhere and just tick all the boxes with having such a solid formula. Last game I felt like this with was Alex Legends. Pls devs don’t screw this up 🙏
Saw an article on that game recently that they’re using AI voices in that. I don’t think it’s for everything, but if you happen to be an opponent to AI, that’s something to know. If not, well, carry on 😅
I honestly think it’s a good application of AI. It really sets the “tournament” vibe
I mean, you could make an argument that AI announcers have an in-game reason to be a thing.
I feel like the Sonic franchise’s last great game was Adventure 2. There’ve been a couple good ones since then, but not great.
Anyone got a good replacement?
Lunistice
It’s relatively short, and there’s no chao garden. But it’s got a lot of soul. With a sequel on the way.
Above but the chao garden is required to be in the replacement.
You could check out Freedom Planet. It didn’t quite do it for me, but it has a decent fanbase
