cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/57413346
I played Nine Sols recently and it had a transformative effect on my gaming experience. I’ve found myself no longer getting mad at fairly structured games and deeply enjoying the personal refinement of my skill set in pursuit of a goal. Suddenly this shift in perspective has allowed me to see difficulty in a new light and truly savor the victory that comes after significant effort. With this new perspective, I decided to try the game that had made me hesitate the most with its reputation for difficulty: Sekiro
Its been truly eye opening to realize that my nervousness has only kept me from a good time. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for it…
Following that trend, I started Celeste for the first time even though I never play pure platformers, and it has blown my socks off. Do I suck? You bet your ass I do. But I know it’s from a lack of detailed platforming, and developing that skill has been very fun and satisfying.
Now, I’d love to hear from others. What games made you regret waiting so long to try them?
You must log in or register to comment.
Nine Sols was amazing!
I played it after I finished Silksong when I just didn’t get over the difficult but fair 2D itch yet.
I’m glad I played it, the story, the gameplay, level design, and the music were all great.
And I really loved the Tao + Cyberpunk + Cat people lore and setting, it was really creative.
undertale and deltarune. i kinda always dismissed those games as youtuber fandom shit, if that makes sense… stuff made to appeal to fandoms who love to pull nonsense out of their asses to make the games deeper than they really are. game theory bait. and i’ve heard so many horrors about the utdr fandom, it made me want to steer clear of the games. and i figured, since i already got spoiled a ton of stuff from undertale through cultural osmosis, what would be the point of playing it?
but they still interested me somewhat, since i heard from more people that they were actually really good… and i got spoiled one more thing i didn’t know, and i figured if i want to play these games someday, i have to do it now so my enjoyment of them isn’t ruined more by just existing on the internet
so i did! i played undertale twice in a row (i didn’t do everything needed to get the pacifist ending the first time), and the first 2 chapters of deltarune right after that (only those were released then). and oh my, i’m glad i did because these are some of my favourite games now. tho i still think I would’ve enjoyed undertale so much more if i hadn’t been spoiled a bunch about it…
don’t judge games by their fandoms. things are often popular for a reason, and fans of something often lack the creative experience of the original creators (which is not to say that there isn’t good utdr fan content, there is, a ton! but there’s also a lot of crap)
i still dislike the gaster theorists tho
I tried starting Undertale but it doesn’t work well (or at all I can’t remember) with a controller, maybe I should try using good ol AntiMicroX to translate controller inputs to mouse and keyboard. The first few images left me with an impression of very low effort so with that and the hardware issue I didn’t push further. You’re saying I should ? 😁
yea undertale’s graphics are pretty bad lol, in many cases literally on purpose! thankfully deltarune (especially the later chapters) looks much better. but imo, where the game really shines is its characters and battles, they’re really fun! that’s where you’ll feel the effort that went into the game. the music too is excellent imo
for the controller, if it’s not a problem you can just play with the keyboard, it works very well.
Cheers, I’ll give it another go ! yea keyboard should be fine I’ll make the effort heh
Outer Wilds. Took a lot of time to start and then a lot a time to actually click. Now it is one of my all time favorites.
I only recently played Portal 2 & 1 (in that order lol). Really enjoyed them, I totally see why they’re considered a classic!
Oh man, Portal’s release (as well as the rest of the Orange Box) was incredible to experience
It’s a special game that I’d recommend to just about everyone
Recently it was Balatro that I played for the first time 2 months ago.
I love that game because I’ll step away for months, come back, play another deck and it’s a whole new problem.
The SGDQ run of Balatro is amazing if you wanna see how crazy it can get.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Go7IXlYLg&pp=ygUMU2dkYyBiYWxhdHJv
Few things match the rush of Balatro switching to scientific notation
Baldurs Gate 3. Seemed expensive, complicated, and not my type of game at the time.
Oh, how wrong I was.
it’s possibly my favorite game of all time. i wasn’t expecting that. I’m an elder scrolls girlie at heart.
It’s sitting in my library collecting dust. Someone had bought it for me as a birthday gift… I should get to it!
Persona 5.
Wasn’t the biggest fan of RPGs but 5 is as easy as Chrono Trigger, with a cozy life sim and anime stapled ontop. A fun ride if you enjoy any of these. Though drop the difficulty to easy if you aren’t the biggest fan of RPGs
I just made it to Act 2 of Baldurs Gate 3. I’m obsessed.
I’ve just made it to the city! I’m at about 250 hours so far, but TBF I am a very slow gamer. Yeah, it just keeps getting better and better as you go.
I actually feel like I might be missing out on a lot, because I pretty much stick with the same party. I could see myself finishing and wanting to start a completely new playthrough with different companions and making different choices.
i have a couple playthroughs and they have all been different. i have hundreds of hours and I still keep finding new things that I had no idea were there.
its kind of nice to know there’s other things I might find out in more playthroughs to come.
I gotta be honest I couldn’t get very far in cause the game was just too difficult. And I’m not a stranger to crpgs. I dunno if it’s just the d&d system or what. And the more people I knew who were getting into it and talking about how some later sections felt almost impossible, it just killed my interest entirely. Like is there something I’m missing or is it just that punishing and that’s what people like about it?
I started and stopped playing it a couple of times before I really got hooked. What worked for me was watching the YouTube channel Many a True Nerd start his playthrough. Watching somebody else use the controls and navigate the UI and stuff really helped me get over the “fire hose of information” you’re bombarded with at the start. But that’s just me.
Dark souls. I tried it a few times and dismissed. I returned to DS2 when DS3, at the request of a fanboi friend.
Accepting defeat, dusting myself off and surpassing all odds changed my mentality and patience with gaming forever.
Fuck me big bad boss? No, fuck you
This happened to me. It was Sekiro that was the one that finally sank it’s teeth into me. Still my favorite video game of all time.
Pretty much the same, I went DS2, then DS1R, then DS2:SotFS and then DS3. I don’t normally enjoy replaying games but SotFS was fine because enough had changed.
Still can’t get into Sekiro or Elden Ring, but I did finish Nioh and I’m sure Nioh 3 will be nice in a year or so when all the expansions have dropped.
I highly recommend spending some time with Sekiro. It is arguably their best game. It learns most of the lessons from the Souls series, innovates on that, but also doesn’t lose anything, in my opinion.
Elden Ring is good, but I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the older games. Yeah, the combat has been perfected, but that’s a relatively minor part of the gameplay, all things considered. DS1 has the perfect world to explore, with corridors that are crafted to perfection. It’s open enough to feel like you’re choosing where to explore while being closed enough to have good encounters. Elden Ring is so open that it loses a lot of control, which essentially means the only encounters that matter are in the dungeons. Those are a small fraction of the game, so it feels like a lot of time and effort spent to make something that’s experientially worse than the simpler older style. It’s still a master class in open world design, but I feel the game would be stronger if they focused on the classic design.
I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)
I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).
It was frustrating to start. I agree. It requires such a different skill set than the Souls games but it feels like you should be good at it already, but you won’t be.
One key to the game is in a quote a character says fairly early on: “Hesitation is defeat.” The way to play is to put constant pressure on the enemy. In the Souls games you’re encouraged to back off and take time to recover when you need to. In Sekiro, you need to keep the pressure up to break their posture. If you back off then they recover and progress is reset. It’s tough, but it’s one of the best combat games once it clicks. It’s why almost every game since has added a posture bar, but they don’t go all the way to the logical end that Sekiro did. Even ER took the posture mechanic, but watered it down.
Funny, I dropped Seiko 3/4 of the way through. Elden ring has been on the wishlist, never bought it.
I guess it’s hard to beat the best, all the co-op and troll-invade glory that was DS.
Elden Ring is like getting the gameplay of Dark Souls, but all encounters are on your own terms as the hard progression walls you get in linear dungeons don’t apply to most of the game. I wouldn’t call it easier, but I would describe it as more accessible.
They definitely turned up the dial on combat challenges for bosses, but I agree, it’s more accessible. There are so many ways to trivialize the combats, and you can even skip a lot of the bosses. It’s so much easier than ever before to come back later with a significant power increase and easily defeat any boss.
Probably the thing that helps accessibility the most though is making it clear there are other paths, and you can come back to a boss later. That was always the intention of the Souls games, but people often slam their head against a wall until it breaks, and they think the games are (too) hard. The tools were always there to make the game easier, but a lot of people didn’t take advantage of them in the older games. ER makes the alternatives so much more obvious.
GTA San Andreas. I still have a dent in my forehead from that case.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. It was on my wishlist for awhile, but some of the negative reviews had me thinking it wasn’t something I would enjoy. Then I kept seeing comments that it was a good game to play if you like Skyrim. I disagree with that, it’s not so much Skyrim vibes than as if Oblivion and Elden Ring had a baby that was into weird creepy shit and obsessed with the Knights of the Round table.
It’s cool AF and I was absolutely obsessed from the very beginning. I am glad I waited a bit to play it because there’s 3rd person mode now and I don’t think it initially shipped with 3rd person mode. I get insanely sick playing a lot of 1st person games. Some games I’m fine with and other games I’m puking my guts out and going to bed within 15 minutes of booting up the game, so having 3rd person mode (even if it’s officially unsupported and a little glitchy) means I can play for hours and actually enjoy the game.
Just started playing this and blown away by it. Combat feels better than skyrim, and while it nerfs my “stealth Archer” approach it makes you actually utilize multiple mechanics while fighting.
If you havent tried it, I would suggest “Dread Delusion”. It’s ps1 like graphics, and definitely has parred down mechanics, but the world building, exploration, missions, and story are really enjoyable.
I’ll be honest, I’m playing on story mode because I hate the slog of combat being so insanely difficult in most video games and I hate having to grind to level up in early games. As my one coworker so excellently put it, “if I want to punish myself I’ll pick up overtime”. I’m very sad that I can’t sneak around shooting everyone in the back like in Skyrim but I am enjoying the mechanics of Tainted Grail and I love the world and the lore and the whole idea of the Wyrdness and the fact that nighttime and daytime are actually different is delightful.
I’ll have to look at Dread Delusion, I’ve never heard of it.
No shame in story mode, the combat is definitely harder than skyrim. That being said, I do like that since there isn’t level scaling, combat difficulty lets me know if I should actually be picking a fight (like finding an orge in early game and realizing I can barely damage it).
Completely agree on the lore and wyrdness too. It’s been a bit refreshing to play something that, while pulling from other fantasy, seems to really build and flesh out its own lore.
Pacific Drive
It was hitting my suggested sections for almost two years, all my game searches, tags, and algorithms. I brushed it off as some wandery nothing indie game.
It came out in 2024, but then this year 2026 a few months ago, I finally decided to give it a ahot and it was NOTHING like I thought it was. Also, a lot more blatantly queer first and deeply queercoded, which is an extremely refreshing change.
I’d been playing games like snowrunner and expeditions, and waiting for the steam frame to come out to play a bunch of vr games, so a cozy horror survival driving game that feels kinda like gta meets raft meets forza or snowrunner or something was not in my expectations.
It’s technically a roguelite extraction survival crafting story adventure rpg, kind of. Horror-lite, fantastic fresh soundtrack, based in an alternate timeline 1990s USA Washington State Olympic peninsula. It’s done quite well and I don’t want to finish it, though I’m close. It has some mods through Nexus mods, but most are primarily to make things easier balance-wise. No workshop support, doesn’t run great on steam deck but does run okay if you turn the graphics down all the way. Has probably the best dualsense controller integration I’ve played in a game, though, I generally don’t play many that have native support for dualsense features because they all look boring to me.
Anyway, if you like Washington State, driving, crafting, music, and you’re gay, give it a try. It’s only single player, though, and expect to put 40-60 hours in it. I’ve got about 90 so far without the expansion and am avoiding finishing it because I like it. Most of the bad reviews are from two camps: homophobes and people who this niche game doesn’t quite fit. But if what I’ve described to you sounds attractive, seriously give it a try. It goes on sale for about ten bucks USD. You don’t need any dlc, there are a few skin packs that give you infinite usage uniques, the soundtrack, and an actual expansion that seems like a totally separate gamemode that I plan on playing after I beat the story.
I do strongly suggest using a dualsense controller if you have one.
Pacific Drive was so goood
Undertale/deltarune. I played a demo for one of them (I forget which) and I found it too handholdy with not enough happening. Of course the games get a lot more fun after the tutorial section, but for me at the time it just felt too dragged out, so I didn’t properly play them until a few years later
I’m in the middle of my first Undertale play through right now. I’ll say some of the dialogue and situations that come up are just really funny and that has made it worth it to me so far.
Persona 5 Royal. And with it the entire Persona series. This shit is amazing.
A couple years ago, i found a video about a rhythm game with a cool story named vivid/stasis. Since i was curious about the story and it was free, i added it to my steam library
It took me a while to actually start playing game and its amazing
