I recently booted up Half-Life 2 to replay it. I have played the absolute shit out of this game before, so 60% of it just feels like a drag to me now. It was such an amazing game but it’s sort of spoiled for me after I’ve played it too much.
I also discovered ULTRAKILL a few months ago. I feel like I could play that game forever. It has tons of content, weapon combinations and higher difficulties with different enemy behaviour.
Do any of you have more game suggestions like Ultrakill? A really replayable singleplayer game.
!!BTW I don’t mean online multiplayer games or games similar to candy crush!!
Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.
Another great roguelike is Hades, which may or may not have dominated my video game attention for the last 8 months.
I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.
Hrm, you’re not wrong but Hades also exemplifies why quality wins over quantity when in replayability.
If I had to choose a single game to play for the rest of time, it would be Dwarf Fortress. There’s just so much variety in its world generation and how the game can be played that if I was limited to just that one game, I would still have things to do.
Three of my favorite roguelikes are cataclysm dda, caves of qud and cogmind, recommend them to everyone
What’s the hook to each one? I hear people mention Caves of Qud a lot, but the low-fi graphics aren’t grabbing my attention on their own.
All of these are classic roguelikes, a genre of games which frequently aren’t much to look at. The tradeoff for the looks is that they offer vast depth and complexity… and (usually) permadeath and a learning curve that’s more of a cliff. I recommend watching some yt videos about any roguelike you want to learn more about, just so a fan can explain the appeal and show off all the basics.
That said:
Caves of Qud - actually one of the prettier classic roguelikes, if you can belive it. You’re a traveller in a strange and unique world of vast salt deserts, jungles, and the titular caves. There is a ton of flavorful, semi-randomly generated history (especially the ever-important tales of the sultans) and cultures, so every run feels different. There is technically a main plot, but you can just ignore it and go exploring - it’s a sandbox experience. The best parts, to me, are the aforementioned flavour, the tactical combat (that can get incredibly chaotic, with screen-warping effects going off every turn), the build diversity, and delving too greedily and too deeply into the caves.
Cogmind - haven’t played this one, but it’s on a list. You’re a robot. You’re building yourself from parts as you go, fighting other robots and stealing their parts.
CDDA - one of my faves, but definitely not something I’d recommend as an intro to this genre. You’re a survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Go do things and don’t get bitten. It’s a sandbox - survive as long as you can, achieve a self-set goal. The distinguishing feature of CDDA is how realistic it tries to be - crafting is very complex, you need to track your thirst, nutrition, and sleep, you can easily get sick or get your arm broken, the zombies can track you by sight, noise, and lingering scent… My favourite part is surviving long enough to build elaborate apocalypse death mobiles, Mad Max style.
Minecraft?
Hard to do better than the OG endless sandbox.
Even if one gets bored of the game itself, there’s a practically infinite number of mods and community content out there. New game modes like skyblock, mods that turn it into an RPG with magic systems, mods that make it an in-depth factory building game, mods that take you to new realms and thousands of items to discover… There’s a lot to enjoy.
Adventure maps are also fairly underrated. There are tons of community-made maps that can turn it into a different game. Notably, there was a huge Hogwarts campaign with quests and spells that turns it into a harry potter game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcsoE5X4fc
FTL. It’s a simple fun cheap game. Steam says I’ve played this for over 3,000 hours!
Rimworld, Terraria, Minecraft, Satisfactory, basically sandbox games, where each playthrough is different.
Not sure about satisfactory, considering the map is always the same. So the only sources of randomness are starting at another location in the same map or playing differently yourself
Then just go for factorio. Randomly generated map and recources. Highly adjustable for dificulty and a LOT of mods that add to the game. Concidering that the dlc , that seems to be as complex as the Base Game, comes out in Oktober you have a good Kandidaten for infinite replayability
Obligatory Rimworld shout out.
I’ve dumped more hours into this game than the rest of my game library combined.
Edit: typo
A significant number of comments have mentioned Rimworld, guess I’ll install it. Thanks for your recommendations!
