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Lord Wiggle @lemmy.world

I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game

So, I've spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it's all junk, as far as I'm fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources, satisfactory etc. I'm having a lot of fun with split fiction when I play with a friend, but I need a proper singplayer game. Anything I could get which isn't a total ripoff due to lack of gameplay or it being a bug simulator or dlc purchase mania?

EDIT: I'm a bit overwhelmed by all reactions. Thank you all so much! I have a lot of amazing recommendations to check out!

178 comments

  • Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid. Yeah it may look like the Sims (which oddly is where TIS got their art influence from), but it's pretty darn unforgiving. Hell, I lost my last character without realizing how, chalking it up to some strange drug interaction (aka don't drink and take sleeping pills, kids). Resource management, while not a direct focal point for PZ, is still important as you are watching every aspect of your character's health and wellbeing.

    The latest beta build 42 has incorporated some new mechanics and a nicer lighting system so things feel proper spooky when slinking around in the darkness. And don't even get me started on the modding community. Infinite possibilities and a constant influx of new content, some which gets so popular it's adding into the base gameplay. Look up Week One if you want more than just a zed simulator.

    I also second Stardew if you are also looking to scratch that cozy gaming itch.

    • Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid.

      It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar "zombie survival" genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it's got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn't hit you with too much at once, but...

      • The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It's very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.
      • The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm's got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.
      • I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don't have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.
      • To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill. Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in

      .223 (and that's by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it's possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can't fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, tube magazine, detachable magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you're temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game's martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.

      And that's before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.

      • I will say that CDDA has piqued my interest, but I'm not a huge fan of turn based anything, although weirdly I will get into some of them. May have to give this a shot myself... once I have time.

        I think I've been spoiled by the massive modding community with PZ, as I feel there's always something that's added that feel right within the game world. Sure, there are plenty of non-lore friendly mods, but stuff like adding all the classic consoles into the loot pile, or real world foods keep the immersion up quite well.

    • Also Barotrauma

    • Project zomboid was a lot of fun, but single-player it gets boring after a while. I don't feel like playing on a public server and I don't have friends willing to play it.

      • You aren't wrong about the SP getting boring at times. I'll usually find myself kitted out after a week in game and bored and then asking "what next?", and then I'll either create a new character in that same world but on the other side of the map, and see how far they can get. Still waiting for mods like RV Interiors to be released, as they are holding out until a proper stable beta of B42 is released... so that could be some time. Granted I've also been using Week One as a baseline mod for PZ, as it revitalizes the baseline start to be more in line with "how does this apocalypse truly go down?". Is it perfect, far from it, but it adds just enough plausibility to make you feel immersed even further. As for MP, I'm not a fan at all. I tend to play most all games SP, as I'm a very patient gamer and usually jump onto the MP bandwagon too late to feel included.

  • Hmm, how about mindustry (its open source and free outside of steam)? It's like factorio with tower defense. Note: after playing for few hours you might get access to many more stuff in game which might feel overwhelming

  • I liked ksp2

    If you're saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.

    On the "factory" side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned Rimworld. That's got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. Oxygen Not Included is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation/physics side; I think that you'll get a lot of hours out of that.

    Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.

    I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren't going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there's also a commercial build on Steam.

    I have not played Elin, the successor to Elona, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for a game with both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.

    • Wups, that was a typo. I liked ksp1, 2 was a massive disappointment and shitshow and they scammed me out of my 40 euros.

  • Based on your enjoyment of management and strategy, Paradox's grand strategy games might be something you enjoy. Same publisher as Cities Skylines. There are four main series of them, each with their own mechanics but enough broad-scale similarities that knowing one helps with the others. They are:

    • Crusader Kings, set in medieval Europe, North Africa, and about half of Asia. This one is the most roleplay-heavy, as you play as a succession of characters within a feudal dynasty rather than a country
    • Europa Universalis, set from the European Renaissance up to the end of the Napoleonic wars. The whole world is playable, and exploration is a big mechanic
    • Victoria, which covers the world through the rise of industrialism. This one is the most simulation-heavy, focusing gameplay around economic development and the diplomatic manoeuvring of great powers
    • Hearts of Iron, which is the Second World War game. This is the one to go for if you want to play the military side of things

    What distinguishes them from strategy games like Civ and Age of Empires is the greatly-reduced abstraction. There's no expectation of every starting point or playable country being balanced; if you start as Belgium in Hearts of Iron, you're going to have to do something clever to not get steamrolled by Germany. There's also no win condition beyond what you set for yourself. When I start a game of Crusader Kings, I'm not trying to win the game, I'm saying to myself "let's see if I can unite all of Britain and Ireland under a Gaelic ruler"

    All Paradox games have quite a lot of DLC, but the base games are solid (often now including several of the earlier DLCs for free, in the case of older games) and they go on steep sales pretty often. If there's not a specific time period or mechanic that sways you towards one of the games, I recommend Crusader Kings 3 for the best new player experience

    • I played almost all of them. I like them, kinda, but they are games which are hard to master and I get frustrated when suddenly everything goes wrong and I can't find out why. Like with HOI4, my logistics are perfect, my army hyper modern and trained, mixed infantry, special units and armor. Yet they fail battle against a few weak infantry. I spend hours and hours on YouTube tutorials but in the end it's just a bit too much for me.

  • Endless Sky. Open source and crowd developed. Its story lines, assets, and general size have only increased with age. Active Discord server as well (but it's only single player, for now anyway).

  • Stellaris is a great realtime 4x strategy game. They have a lot of paid DLC, but you can pick and choose which modules you want. Some are purely cosmetic options while others make gameplay changes, and they go on sale pretty often. Worst comes to worst, you can usually find the DLC on key sites as well for pretty cheap. Paradox also started a subscription based service that gives you access to the DLCs, maybe you can subscribe for a month and try out which DLCs you like.

    Project Zomboid is an incredibly hard resource management survival game. It is also very detailed, meaning you need to maintain everything about your character from their hydration, to their weight and fitness. Its a slow burner type game, but when the action picks up, it gets tense. Its also a "forever" game, in that theoretically, if your character never dies, the game never ends. The map is huge, big enough to feel different pretty much every time you play. Its also multiplayer, which is pretty fun.

    Farming Simulator can be a fun, chill game to play. Its not as resource management intensive as a game like Project Zomboid, but it can be a good game to relax with.

    Ragnarok Online is an older (2003) MMORPG that I recently discovered, and while I am not much of an MMO Enjoyer (I hate the "Disneyland" or theme park feeling most have where I have to wait in line at NPCs and bosses), Ragnarok Online's player population is consistently low enough to not feel like that while also being high enough to feel like the game is not dead. Just don't play on the official servers from the Steam client. Use a client that connects to private servers, the economy is really bad in the official servers.

    King Arthur: Knights Tale is a pretty fun Strategy RPG. I haven't been able to play that much of it, but what I have been able to play was pretty fun. Check it out, it might be interesting to you if you liked Divinity and games with combat like XCOM or Fire Emblem.

  • If you liked BG3 and Divinity 2, I'm obligated to mention the Pathfinder games: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. The graphics are a touch simple, but the writing is great and the detailed character building scratches an itch for me. As far as I'm concerned, Owlcat is currently the only real competition Larian has.

  • Some further suggestions I haven't seen mentioned in all these comments yet, surprisingly:

    And maybe a little more casual, but still similar vein as city management:

    Out of all of these, I think I've played Mini Motorways three times as much as the rest, combined. I dunno why, I just love it.

  • You might enjoy Sid Meier's Civilization games. I'm partial to Civ 6, but they're pretty much all in the same vein of management games.

  • So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.

    Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).

    For finding games on Steam, I've had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I'll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it's led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I'll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.

    Sometimes I've had luck with looking at "similar games" to a game, which are shown on that game's store page.

    But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.

    • I basically do the same, searching overwhelmingly positive games. But most I haven't tried are poorly looking indie games or weird Asian games. I played several really good indie games, I'm not against that, but what I see generally doesn't catch my interest. And I have over 600 games in Steam alone, so many good ones I already played.

      Now it's just a sea of junk, having to find a needle in a haystack. And user reviews aren't a gold standard anymore. I've seen amazing reviews of mediocre games, as young people don't have standards anymore as most games these days are empty of story, full of bugs or both.

      The game dev community was outraged by bg3, warning people they shouldn't see bg3 as a new standard. While back in the days when you still bought physical games in a store, it indeed was a standard to sell you a proper product for the price you pay.

      These days I illegally download triple A games to check them first, if they are good I'll buy them. I haven't bought a triple A game for a long time. Often 2h of playtime for a refund on steam isn't enough, when you want to see all the storyline videos and conversations. Not enough time to experience the gameplay.

      Indie games I often buy immediately, they really put in effort to make something worth playing. Big companies however just put in effort to make it look really good to make a lot of pre-orders, then to abandon it after a few minor bug fixes while gameplay is poorly written and just a few hours. As long as you peek the interest for just over 2h so people aren't eligible for a refund anymore. This is scamming people, I don't understand why they keep getting away with it.

      In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

      • In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

        looks at my own Steam library, adds a shelf sorted by Release Date, looks for notable games

        Satisfactory was released in 2024. It was in Early Access for some time before that. You mentioned that you liked it.

        Ditto for Caves of Qud and Nova Drift, games that I've played quite a bit --- 2024 release following time in Early Access.

        Dominions 6 is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven't played 6 much, but I've played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that's up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there's a lot going on.

        I liked Balatro, a roguelike deckbuilder, quite a bit.

      • In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

        Oh man, there's so much. My top 10 from last year would be:

        1. The Rise of the Golden Idol - puzzle/deduction game, sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol
        2. Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age - fighting game that gracefully handles 4 players at once and has all the good feels of the Xbox Live Arcade era
        3. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - lite immersive sim and action game that captures the spirit of the best parts of those movies
        4. Metaphor: ReFantazio - a political metaphor in JRPG form
        5. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - a beefy expansion pack to one of the best games ever made
        6. Dread Delusion - a lite RPG with fantastic exploration
        7. Indika - a very interesting cinematic story game with some puzzles
        8. UFO 50 - 50 unique games designed to replicate the 80s
        9. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - a giant escape room, and the puzzles are HARD
        10. The Thaumaturge - an RPG inspired mostly by Persona and The Witcher, but you almost certainly haven't seen a setting like this in a game before

  • I'll go with some classics if you haven't tried them yet. Planescape: torment is a really engaging crpg if you don't mind old graphics and dig lots of lore and dialogue. Morrowind if you prefer first person for another old school rpg with lots of stuff to discover in a weird surreal environment. Dwarf fortress sounds like another older one you might be into too.

  • Kenshi.

    If you can get past the kind of... weird control scheme...

    The game is basically a single player mmorpg.

    You start off as an absolute weakling, and there is no ... scaling, the way most other rpgs either generally have certain levelled enemies in certain areas, that you progress through linearly or unlock sequentially, or just an outright whole world spanning dynamic level matching kind of system.

    You can be battling a small beast... and then a herd of very, very much more dangerous beasts, or slavers, will just happen to pass by, and royally fuck up your day.

    Every character in the game, including you, plays by the same rules.

    All major NPCs can be killed, the game is also full of varying factions with varying alignments towars other factions, and they will treat your character differently based on your race, the kinds of actio s you do, your reputation with other factions.

    The storytelling is ... a sandbox/emergent approach. Not in the sense of 'there are no story lines or quests'... but in the sense of... a whole lot of stuff is out there, but you have to self direct yourself to go out and find it, or randomly encounter it.

    Also, you can gain allies, make your own faction, and control a small army... and you can even build your own settlement, and economically interact with the rest of the world.

    ... Its... kind of hard to describe.

    There really aren't any other games quite like Kenshi.

    Its got a good sized modding scene, and it incorperates at least some elemenrs of... every game you mentioned.

    If you use a mod to up your max follower/faction member count... you can basically play the game as an RTS (with pause). Build a settlement, recruit followers (or enslave them), arm them, fees them, train them up, and go take over a city if you want.

    ... Or play basically solo, just you and your bonedog, maybe as a bounty hunter for hire, or a hashish smuggler, or get a pack animal and run a trade caravan.

  • Have you tried Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? It’s really good and difficult. It’s a history simulator with a really kick ass story and the hero is just a guy. I really like it a lot.

    • Yeah but I'm stuck after 2 hours. I got into a battle through a quest I stumbled upon, but there's an enemy I fail to win from. I seem to be unable to get out of the quest. I played 1, which was really nice although I didn't completely finished it due to bugs.

      • I would suggest to load up an earlier save. The beginning is the hardest part of the game (like brutally hard combat sometimes) and if you don’t train Henry up (either find Tomcat or Captain Gnarly, they are trainers) you’ll just die. Or you can do what i did and just brute force the fight with save scumming. The combat is not intuitive until you practice for a bit.

178 comments