looking for games that feel the way that Minecraft felt in its early years, or at least how i remember it: big, weird, empty, a little mournful, full of secrets but almost completely lacking in direction. games that encourage you to sit within them.
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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:
i kinda felt that way about launch-day No Man's Sky and really enjoyed it, but i imagine that's not a super popular opinion lol - not sure if there's any way to (legitimately) acquire it
I remember early NMS giving me some absolutely wild Calvin and Hobbes (well, spaceman spiff) ass canyons on a lonely planet, it was gorgeous
Highly recommend going into Noita with no tutorials or understanding of the game at all. It really rewards fucking around and finding out, and the goals and progression of the game aren't even necessarily obvious until you've had a solid hour with it at least.
highly recommend the minecraft beta 1.7.3 'better than adventure' mod
Eidolon is a vast game with a history to discover just by wandering a big landscape. It aims for a lonely, lost and desolate experience.
The survival mechanics can get in the way of experiencing it a bit, I probably missed something that would have made it easier. Fall damage can be mean too.
It is a pretty obscure game and it doesnt seem to have cheats, it might even be worth to savescum a bit (backing up save files manually) since it can be unexpectedly mean if you get lost somewhere with little food.
I can't really recommend watching a playthrough, even though it would be nice to see all the points of interest, which can be difficult on your own. Walking around alone for hours with the slight pressure that your food is running out, hoping there is something over the next hill is kind of core to the desolate experience.
Bennet Foddy is also making what looks like an open world QWOP. I'm not sure to what extent either of these games are going to be directed or undirected however.
Vintage Story seems specifically designed to reverse engineer a Minecraft with that vibe. Possibly mixed with that Primitive Technology youtube channel
Strongly recommend switching off the "temporal storms" in the worldgen settings if you try it, one part of the game that's a little uh undercooked
Second vintage story, and suggest adjusting the settings to make your life easier the first go. The bears do not fuck around either.
I know exactly what you mean. Not a lot of good answers to this question, unfortunately, but I can throw the closest I've personally experienced:
-Heat Signature but you're gonna want to listen to the Modest Mouse album "This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About", followed by Ex:Re's self titled album, and only after you've gotten a good grip on the mechanics of the game and settled firmly into its gameplay loop. Once you stop being extremely impressed by the mechanics, that's when you're gonna want to start playing these songs. Oh and disable the fast forward button.
-TerraTech, kinda
-Jalopy, also kinda
-NaisanceE, at parts.
-Weirdly enough I'm gonna suggest Beam.NG drive. At some point you get into the habit of just, like, actually driving the cars instead of smashing them and watching them break and it immediately becomes that. Wreckfest, the other car game with softbody physics deformations, never gets like that. It's a racing game. Beam.NG drive seems to not want to be a racing game and that confused identity seeps into the game in a way that makes it feel lost, and the maps are inexplicably huge and gorgeous with not a goddamn thing to do in them. I think there's a campaign maybe but ignore it, go into the Sandbox mode.
-Any game that's an unfinished or otherwise not "fun-optimized" indie sandbox is gonna have this once it has enough content, because ultimately that's what you're picking up on. So like, Cube World, Kerbal Space Program, Space Engineers, Rodina, The Powder Toy arguably. But stuff like Terraria or Factorio that are too polished with obvious direction miss the mark even though they're very good. They're, counter-productively, too good to elicit that specific feeling.
-This one's gone, you can't play it, but I'm sorta obligated to put it here. Feel free to skip it, I'd just feel like shit if I didn't talk about the main game I played when I was a kid. My Roblox account is from 2011 and in 2011 there were a lot of, like, semi-unfinished or bizarre Roblox games made by mostly children. Generally sparsely populated, and far too large for what they were. These were things like "tycoon games", which were essentially like Cookie Clicker but everyone had to have this huge area because of how they worked so everyone was sort of innately very far apart. Some of these were just a sparse baseplate with very little on them, a house, maybe, a descent into void. A lot of dead worlds created by people who didn't know what they were doing back then, it's not like it is now. I remember by the time I got into it the default map was this huge map, and the player cap was something like 12 or maybe 16 so it was just complete overkill, it was always destined to never be anything but empty, and because everyone was children, a massive chunk of Roblox games were just slight modifications to the default map. Like, there'd be a thing that gives you a rocket launcher in the center or maybe they'd've built a terrible house next to the default house, which was also uncomfortably large since the smallest unit of building block with that tool went right up to the player's neck. But otherwise it'd be unchanged and therefore a completely empty and aggressively uncanny world for you to drive around in using the single car that Did Not Work Correctly most of the time. It actually had that vibe you're describing far stronger than Minecraft ever managed, at least for me, and it's the first game I remember making me feel legitimate overwhelming melancholy. Even moreso when it sort of died, which is to say got popular and good in a traditional sense but also uninteresting in a traditional sense. I guess maybe nostalgia is always sad, though, I was 9 in 2011. Point is I exclusively remember this ostensibly multiplayer game through the lens of inexplicable pervasive loneliness and giant worlds with absolutely no specific purpose to them whatsoever and sometimes literally nothing to do at all in particular. The lack of group-oriented gameplay was inadvertently isolating if you didn't do roleplay games (which I didn't) and didn't do the fighting games (which I also didn't), and that's a function of incompetent design done by unpaid and mostly forgotten child laborers more than it is a function of anything deliberate.
-PAGAN: Autogeny, which elicits the same vibes but done on purpose. It is my favorite video game.
-Any game with public lobbies where the server can set custom rules is gonna sorta have this, actually. Like, TF2 idle servers and shit. Especially the various massive Mario Kart maps on a mostly empty server, if they still exist, which have that vibe despite clearly and obviously not wanting to have that vibe.
-Overgrowth. But not the campaign. Overgrowth maps that are way too big and way too empty is what you're looking for.
-Same with Gmod. Anything that's just a huge city for no reason is good for that. Or, like. If you've never actually explored gm_construct go do that immediately. Just walk around. Fuck around with some mods. I'm working under the assumption you already own Gmod, honestly it would be very strange if you didn't.
-Microsoft Flight Simulator. Any version, but the new one is very pretty.
That's all I've got. If you only play one of these make it PAGAN: Autogeny.
"my summer car" is a pretty neat game where you could build a car and race it in a rally, or you could just wander around this really weird finnish town. buy a computer and download weird little indie games, do jobs, go to the bar, crash a moped into a train, sell a man homemade sugar wine, die from wasps, talk to your grandma, die from dehydration, dance in a weird little dance hall, punch a man and steal his watch...
and that's just some of the stuff i've seen people do in it
I'm not sure if it's quite what you're looking for, but I'm throwing a hat in the ring for Project Zomboid. There's no real direction other than to survive when you first drop in, and in singleplayer the game is quite mournfully empty- the only word you get of other people is early game TV & radio dialogues hastily speculating about the infection, and one by one they go silent as the days progress. I think you can even catch the final signoff from the TV News crew.
Exploring you can find survivor houses, boarded and full of canned food but ultimately futile, houses people were still moving into when SHTF, houses that went up in flames because the person died with the stove on or holding a cigarette or whatever, a half-naked fratbro zombie locked in the bathroom of a house covered in beer cans.
The map's also fucking huge, if that helps.