Hello, in the recent years I find myself willing to spend much less time and energy on games, but I do still enjoy them. Oftentimes I end up quitting a new game I tried out relatively early on, because I’m encountering some block, grind, non-optional boring side quest, empty open world, uninteresting clutter or details that I have to manage, or similar. Like, I just wanna play the actual game play, see how the story continues, and visit those areas that were designed with care. Not worry where on the map I can sell the glimbrunses I collected so I can buy a 37% stronger glarpidifice that I’ll need to beat the next glutrey after which I’m allowed to continue the main story.
Sorry if this turned into some kind of a rant, but I hope it’s understandable what I’m looking for and what I meant by fluff. Some games that have fulfilled this for me during the last years:
- Stray
- Skyrim (there’s a lot of fluff you can worry about in Skyrim, but the thing is you don’t have to worry about it, you can also just walk in any direction and see what situation you wind up in, at least for the first 10-20h of a playthrough, which IMO is enough time for a game anyway)
- Life is Strange
- Some Pokémon ROM hacks where the difficulty spikes were not too harsh
Looking forward to hear your suggestions :) Games where there is some fluff but you’re allowed to just ignore it are also fine, but not having any fluff is preferred. Bonus points for anything on the Xbox game pass.
It sounds like you’ve found some games you like but are turned off of by some difficulty bottlenecks. If that’s the case, considerWeMod. It’s a trainer for a ton of games that allow you to “cheat” in singleplayer games(god mode, speed hacks, etc.)
I still love playing games but as I get older, my tremors get worse, making it impossible for me to get through one on my own. WeMod allows me to explore all of the game world without being stopped by something as simple as clicking on something quickly.
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Thank you!
I love WeMod, been using it since it was created
Sable is on a giveaway this week by Epic Games. Use the free-&-open-source Heroic Games Launcher to play it without having to download their platform.
I got bored by FAR’s puzzles and didn’t finish it but I guess I should persist, huh?
I really enjoyed both Far games. I never felt like any of the puzzles were large enough to get tedious. When I finished Lone Sails I just wished there had been a longer section of driving the ship… it kind of felt like you never got to really go before there was some interruption that you had to stop and get out for.
Jazzpunk is not a game I’ve heard of in a long time, great silly surrealism
Manifold garden is great too
Jazzpunk was one of those games that left me wishing there was more of it.
Manifold Garden is just such a perfectly executed atmosphere, it’s hard to do it justice with description - like walking around inside an Escher drawing.
Portal I and II.
Psychonauts I and II, with the caveat that there used to be a HUGE skill spike in the penultimate chapter of #1. I gather they’ve softened it, but don’t know how much.
I know Portal isn’t a shooter. But Portal made me think of them. I feel like a lot of FPSs would fit OP’s question. Half-Life 2 and most of the Halo games come to mind.
Portal I
Still suffering from the trauma of there being no cake
I enjoyed the Star Wars Jedi games.
Slightly old by now, but Portal and Portal 2 remain two of the best games I’ve ever played. Gameplay is intuitive and linear, and doesn’t require grinding or building up resources. I thought the difficulty increased appropriately as well.
Fun fact: Portal was originally a university student project called Narbacular Drop that got hired by Steam. In a sense from its limited narration and story, it felt a bit more like a proof-of-concept than almost a full-fleshed game to me at times, which, for me, was hands-down Portal 2.
They’re great fun to stream and watch, too.
The third party add-on levels are awesome too.
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
I only finished it for the first time this year, after about 20 years of giving it a go, getting part way through, then forgetting about it. ADHD is evil. Still, it was fun, there were no long boring parts, nothing was grinding or luck based, and it felt really tight as an experience. Very well thought out, honestly I would consider it a masterpiece.
Have you played any other loz games? They are all amazing like that
I have played a bunch of them, Twilight Princess was an absolute no for me for some reason, but I liked Ocarina and Majora when I was younger. I plan to play a decompilation of both of those soon, native resolution and performance etc. I enjoyed Link’s Awakening as well, finished that on my original Gameboy back in the 90s, and Windwaker looks fun though I have only recently gotten onto a computer able to render it nicely, so that is on my play list.
Alright not every game was 100. Twilight Princess was meh. Windwaker was pretty fun
Yeah, I think I will get Windwaker going soon and beat it. I love the cell shading look and the world is interesting.
Dredge is a pretty unique one that I had a lot of fun with. Firewatch is good but short
mass effect, cyberpunk, clair obscur, baldur’s gate 3 all super fun and have difficulty options. Doom is pretty fun too. I’ve just been ripping through game pass single-player campaigns and RPGs.
All of these are top notch
Ya I’m a big single-player story-driven player. Other recommendations are red dead 2 (never played 1, I’d like to), lies of P, sekiro, elden ring, bloodborne, uncharted series, death stranding (I love this game but completely get why people bounce off it), alan wake 2 (also not for everyone), control, and I’ll always have a soft spot for halo 1-3+reach. Theres probably a bunch more i’m forgetting but I loved all of those games. I just love a really good story.
I would describe Red Dead Redemption II as having significant fluff, not just in how much time it wastes getting from A to B a lot of times but also in that whole island chapter, Act 4, I think.
Time spent riding during missions has never felt like fluff to me. As it’s usually filled up with dialogue and stuff. Plus the nature and views and stuff are relaxing.
For the in-between missions riding you can just get one of those cheat menu mods and use the teleport feature.
It’s the in between missions riding that I was referring to. The previous game was much more lenient about giving you opportunities to fast travel. Also, when I played the game, mods weren’t an option, and OP might be looking for Xbox games.
Oh, you’re right, I missed that part. Shit.
ya thats fair
Sekiro? I guess it’s less of a difficulty “spike” if it’s just a difficulty cliff from the jump.
these are my favourite games, thats why I put them in the second comment I realize they’re a little on the more difficult side. My bad I didn’t clarify.
That’s fair, I may have been traumatized by spending 3 hours trying to get through the first section in Sekiro before calling it 😅
One thing i’ll say about sekiro is that it demands you learn “the dance”. You need to play the game on its terms and learn the rhythms, essentially you just need to “git gud” but it is absolutely worth it once it clicks. Its an incredible game once you finally get a feel for it.
Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.
I adored the details they gave the characters in that game. I accidentally
Tap for spoiler
got the good ending just because I wanted to see the story of each character
It also had such nice and natural-feeling LGBTQ characters.
Titanfall 2 is a great shooter and story game. Don’t bother with Titanfall 1 if you are only in for singleplayer as it is multiplayer only.
look back to some of the games for the 8 and 16-bit consoles. They tended to be about fun rather than shock factors. So check out the larger games for the megadrive for example.
Also, I kinda thought borderlands was good in that it adapted to how you prefer to play and the difficulty seemed consistent.
If you haven’t already tried Oblivion Remastered, that’s a no brainier.
Avowed was pretty straight forward with a decent story. It’s more linear than Skyrim, and sometimes I had to reload a save because I walked into a situation I wasn’t ready for, but all in all, I made quick consistent progress.
I played both on Gamepass.
Also, there’s no shame in turning that difficulty bar down when it’s available. I’m in the same boat as you. I don’t want to master the game, I just want to enjoy it.
Subnautica comes to mind. It’s a survival game with a heavy focus on exploring and a very structured story. Fluff text and the obligatory random documents and audio logs are mostly optional, though the game does have a mystery to solve so some of those you want to pay attention to. No real spikes in difficulty, it’s honestly an easy game.
And you can turn off some of the survival elements that some people find annoying. For instance, having to spend half your time early on hunting a specific type of fish for freshwater.
spoiler
I’ve done entire runs of this game only salvaging water. No bladderfish, no coral + salt, no stillsuit, no water reclaimer. You can easily make it through to the endgame on the water you spawn with plus what you find in wrecks.
The Wolf Among Us, and I imagine other Telltale games (but that’s the only one I played so far). It felt a lot like Life is Strange in gameplay and storytelling, even though it’s also a lot different.
In a similar vein, point and click adventure games like The Whispered World, The Book of Unwritten Tales, or Syberia. The modern ones usually don’t have a failure state (as opposed to the infamous Sierra games), but unlike LiS you may get stuck on a puzzle.
I usually have a good time with isometric fantasy rpgs in the vein of Baldur’s Gate. They don’t really have grind, the world is generally well-filled with a relatively dense story and interesting quests (denser than Skyrim at least), and if the game becomes too hard you can turn down the difficulty. Though you do need to actually be interested in the combat mechanics (which are much more complicated than e.g. in Elder Scrolls games) to really enjoy these games, IMO. One downside is that these types of games are usually really long; I’ve dropped a couple of them halfway because they overstayed their welcome.
Some examples:
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Baldur’s Gate 3 (don’t really need to have played 1+2 to enjoy this one, though they’re still very good)
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Divinity: Original Sin 1+2
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Pillars of Eternity 1+2 (2 has much better combat, but the first one is pretty important to understand the world)
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Tyranny (this is a relatively short one)
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Pathfinder: Kingmaker 1+2
For more Skyrim-style games, I really enjoyed the Gothic series. I think their level of grind is about the same as Skyrim (probably a little less, but it’s been a while), and if you can get past the outdated graphics of the early titles they’re quite fun. Especially the dialogues, they aren’t as serious as Skyrim’s.
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