I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:

  • Superhot: Time only moves when you do
  • Viewfinder: Convert 2D pictures seamlessly into interactive 3D environments
  • Superliminal: Change size of objects by working with perception
  • Portal: Portals
  • Scribblenauts: Summon objects by describing them in a notepad

I am not focused on the story, no. of hours of playtime, date of release or its popularity. It just needs to be playable and be enjoyable (and be available in PC).

  • Schadrach
    10•10 months ago

    Heaven’s Vault

    You play a space archaeologist, and the big central mechanic of the game is translating things written in the Ancient language.

    Ancient is written using ideographs, and more complex ideas are represented by combining glyphs that describe the concept, like ever more complex compound words. There are art of speech markers, glyphs that describe how other glyphs in a word relate to each other, intensifiers, and even a few cases where super common words are just the combination of other basic glyphs into a single composite like a Norse bindrune (for example the symbols for creature and knowledge overlap to make person, an intelligent creature). 46 base ideographs, but that includes digits, so it’s only 10 more than English.

    So for example, a word that reads NOUN-person-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-NOUN-knowledge-person means “Emperor”, because noun-knowledge-person means “law” and thus the result is a person who the law belongs to, aka a ruler or in the context of an empire the emperor. Replace that noun marker glyph at the beginning with the adjective marker glyph and you would have “imperial”, the quality of being emperor-like.

    One of the longest words to appear in the game translates as “mouse” and it’s 21 letters long and is literally something like creature-CONNECTOR-many-many-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-NOT-ADJECTIVE-CONNECTOR-many-creature-CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-ABSTRACT NOUN-person-CONNECTOR-light-NOUN-plant-CONNECTOR-rock, which is several words stitched into a compound word, where some of those words are themselves compound words (the idea is something like “creature like a very small pig”, but the word I’m calling “pig” means “creature that is happy in the soil” where happy is something like “the quality of a person who is metaphorically full of light” and “soil” is “plant-earth”). Those CONNECTORS are letters that are used to build compound words.