brad emoji

@meadow

"any” “pronouns”

Illustrious, venerable, renowned, decorated - thirties - computer person

brad emoji @meadow6/4/2023, 1:20 AM

My wife is getting into video games and I’m trying to gently introduce them to new titles as they develop their own tastes, but so far they tend to enjoy CRPGs with lots of reading, deductive reasoning, etc. rather than the combat-oriented action games I gravitate towards so my ability to provide recommendations is limited. They were blown away by Disco Elysium, and also really enjoyed Papers Please and Obra Dinn. They expressed an interest in eventually trying Elden Ring since that’s the game I never shut up about but they are intimidated by the combat and “death is inevitable” aspect which I know can be really frustrating for beginners (as Souls games were to me for a long time until ER), so I want to stick to other titles they’re more likely to enjoy until they feel ready for that.

Anyone got any recommendations for games they’d like? Any CRPG with controls that are easy to grasp and is light on real-time action or combat sequences in general would probably be a good candidate

#video games #crpg

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @meadow's post:

mint @mintexists6/4/2023, 2:27 AM

They might enjoy Life is Strange if they want something more story based! It's one of my favorite games ever

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/4/2023, 2:30 AM

Shadows Over Loathing is an... adventure game with RPG stats and JRPG combat but in a paper mario style. and Very Online sense of humor, in a good way. "What if dril's vibe was that of half the characters, except it was a lovecraftian horror story set in the 1920s. also everyone is stick figures."

there's a prior one, West of Loathing. they're both based on kingdom of loathing, but they show a lot of growth between West and Shadows, because the parts I thought were ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh in West aren't there in Shadows

✨🌱rosie the lil bean 🌱✨@rowie3246/4/2023, 2:32 AM

not a crpg but 'what remains of edith finch' is a masterpiece

mint @mintexists6/4/2023, 2:34 AM

I second this

Belarius @belarius6/4/2023, 3:16 AM

Planescape: Torment (1999) has a recent remaster that runs on modern systems and is a baffling jumble of writing a generation ahead of its time and systems mired in the incoherence of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. For our purposes, it's a strong candidate because many, many of its problems can be solved through non-combat means (while others can be solved simply by running past or away from enemies). In order to turn the game as fully as possible into a dialogue-driven puzzle game, some non-spoilery hints prove essential (max INT and WIS are key); you might review these to provide your wife some advice on starting builds to keep their experience well within their preferred gameplay wheelhouse without tipping any hands. While Torment: Tides of Numenera (2017) bills itself as the spiritual successor to P:T, and certainly has many things going for it in its own right, I'm inclined to call it more of an acquired taste than its timeless forebear.

80 Days (2014) is nearly pure Interactive Fiction, with just enough illustration to give it a quiet, crepuscular mood that makes it feel like a breeze to replay in search of its troves of content and multiple endings. A game like this can be a gateway to more hardcore text-based gaming, and if that seems appealing, the peerless Emily Short is probably someone worth knowing about. The logical endpoint of such a journal is probably Hadean Lands (2014), the work of what I can only assume is an actual dyed-in-the-wool wizard.

Heaven's Vault (2019), from the same leads as 80 Days, is nominally an adventure game mostly because "linguistics" is not a category of activity normally associated with video gaming. While clearly not for everyone, I'm willing to wager that it's very much something for someone who loves both language and solving tricky problems.