For me, if I ever hear “card-based” or “soulslike” I have absolutely no desire to play a game, no matter how many people reccomend it.
I’m also not a huge fan of modern “roguelikes” but I’ve sunk days into nethack and games like that.
Survival crafting. That’s not gameplay, that’s busywork.
What?! You don’t like making spears? You don’t like building log palisades? You don’t like doing it for the 900th game in a row?!
Counterpoint: games where you speed through the early part of the progression and get around to automating or otherwise trivializing many of the initially tedious elements are pretty cool. I’m talking about games like Scrap Mechanic or Astroneer. The core gameplay loop is going out exploring, collecting materials, bring them back to base and repeat. But by allowing you to get the basic resources automated you can focus on building setups to defend your base and produce more resources passively. It’s a very satisfying form of progression.
I think Subnautica really did that loop really well. Starting out you needed to grab fish to stay alive, a bit of an investment but not super tedious, exploring gave you some farming options, more exploration let you recharge batteries, and you kinda kept going and going. It’s the game that made me enjoy the genre under very specific circumstances. It gave you the feeling of needing to survive while also not tugging at your coat asking you to eat another dozen potatoes or something.
Over here playing nothing but deck-builders, rogue-likes, and souls-likes
if I’m playing a city builder I don’t want my city building options to be “whatever’s in your deck of cards”
if I’m playing an RPG I don’t want my skills and equipment or whatever to be “a bunch of cards”
if I wanted to play a card game… I’d play a card game
I dislike how nowadays slay the spire and its ilk is what people assume for the term deck builder instead of multiplayer (usually offline) games like ascension or puzzle strike or dominion
For me it’s too much RNG I don’t feel like I’m in control of what I’m doing. I do not trust in the heart of the cards.
Turn-based RPGs
I prefer turn-cringe RPGs
Open world, suvival, crafting
Games with these qualities that are actually good are marketed as RPGs or adventure games
My favorite games are FTL, Papers Please, We Love Katamari, Castlevania NES, Wild Guns and Fallout New Vegas and FZero X. I don’t even know what I like.
