What game mechanics do you enjoy or that surprised you when playing a game? I recently started playing Tunic and I love building out the “manual” for the game and getting hints on how to play.
Double jumping. Something about double jumping just always feels really liberating. It’s such a strange concept as well, with no analogue in the real world.
A really well done survival-craft gameplay loop is sooo addicting. When they get the balance just right it’s so satisfying, but when it’s off a little bit it can be so frustrating. For example I thought Subnautica had a really great balance of resource gathering and building and exploring. On the other hand, something like Raft has the balance way off and it’s really not fun for me at all.
Subnautica was the first survival-crafting game I played and I became obsessed in large party because of how finally tuned crafting and progression was. Now I keep trying a bunch of other similar games hoping they grip me like Subnautica, but they never come close. No Man’s Sky was closest but it’s too big and unfocused. I went from repairing my little broken ship to owning an entire freighter in like 2 hours.
Much like how I keep buying racing games hoping something will click like the old burnout games, I’m coming to realize I don’t think I like the genre that much, I just liked that one special entry within it.
Have you tried Forza Horizon? I haven’t been invested in a racing game as much as that one since NFS Underground 2. YMMV but I think it’s pretty much the pinnacle of Arcade style racing games.
I actually have heard that before and have wanted to try! Unfortunately I’ve only had playstation consoles with the exception of the 360. I was actually planning on eventually getting a series x or s to play their exclusive stuff (particularly from Arkane), but if things keep turning out like Redfall I may reconsider.
Not sure if this is necessarily a mechanic, but I always like in rpgs especially jrpgs when you have times when you just hang out with your friends. I think it’s great for pacing, world building and character development.
Honestly that’s a big reason that Personas 3, 4, and 5 stand as some of my favorite games. Letting a player focus on the main character’s relationships with the supporting cast around them just makes the main story hit that much harder when it involves all of these people you’ve ended up forming strong feelings about.
Ya Persona 5 and FF7 remake are the two games that I have played and IMO do this the best!
I like having a hangout spot. Like the Normandy in Mass Effect is a really good one.
Boss fights that are synchronized to the music. Not too many I can think of off the top of my head right now though. There’s Violette in One Step From Eden, and I guess you can count the final stage of Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion sorta loosely did this with the final minute transition.
Every fight in Hi-Fi Rush does this, and it’s really cool.
I really want to give Hi-Fi a shot, but I’m terrible at most rhythm games
It’s one of the more forgiving ones, so it’s worth a try if you are curious.
MGR Revengance put on a master class around this.
optional, well hidden, especially cryptic content. this kind of thing is the BEST. it plays into my simple collectathon loving brain where just finding things for the sake of finding them is where all the fun is.
see: Environmental Station Alpha, Tunic, FEZ…
Shadow of the Colossus fits the bill on this one for me. Jacob Geller’s video on the decade-long search for the game’s last secret is a much watch IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQNeYbBiCKw
I don’t know if it’s actually a mechanic but I love it when a game has instant restarts and generous checkpoints. Takes away a lot of the frustration and allows me to play on a higher difficulty and still enjoy my time with it.
This is definitely huge for me. Nothing quite as frustrating as watching an unskippable cutscene every time you die to a boss.
Random crits. Fair and balanced.
Killing someone with a crit rocket in Team Fortress 2: hahaha fuck yeah
Getting killed by a crit rocket in TF2: what the FUCK dude
And then there’s those rare moments when you get a crit so devastating for the enemy team, you almost feel bad for them. 🤣
If you let me interact with environment in a way that’s grindy, it brings me personal joy.
Things like mining ore, picking up herbs, so forth. It brings me back to my Runescape days.
This is really niche, but I love drawing maps manually on first person dungeon crawlers. The Etrian Odyssey series is fhe quintessential example of this, and it in itself is a modern reinvention of the old days when you would use pen and paper to draw the map of a dungeon when games were so unforgiving that they did not give you any map at all.
Etrian Odyssey gives you an on screen map, but you get to mark where certain things are between your runs.
The whole thing gives me the same type of feel as manually keeping score of a baseball game. Kind of a lost art.
I think one that really stands out for me was the unexpected time travel mechanics of Titan Fall 2 that you leveraged for puzzle solving.
It was so outta left field but so we’ll executed it really left a lasting impression. Such a fantastic game overall really.
Creative allowance. Even if it makes the game “unbalanced”.
Just Cause 2 with the grappling hook you could attach one end to a statue and one to a truck.
Grand Theft Auto 3 was the first game where I realized I could complete an assassination by stealing a police car, use the swarm of police cars following me as a “net” to trap my target’s car so he couldn’t drive away, and then blowing up the pile of cars with a grenade.
Rimworld where I can create a settlement of nudist vampires trading beautiful wooden sculptures for slaves to feed on.
The Sims 3 of course.
From the Depths, Minecraft, Space Engineers, Valheim also to a large degree.
The last two Zelda games (especially totk) lets the player get really creative as well
Oooh yes. I have a switch, but didn’t pick up TotK yet. It looks amazing.
While it’s very similar to botw, it fixes a few things and introduces a lot of new fun mechanics. If you enjoyed botw, there is no way you don’t have fun with totk.
All time favorite was the feral druid transformations back in the WoW days (Burning Crusade ish I think).
I loved turning into a cat, putting bleeds on some boss, turning into a elf form and popping off a revive/heal, going back to cat to DPS, maybe going bear to pick up and add or two as back up tank. Super fun.
Also flying around in bird form, picking herbs to make potions and just chatting with the guild mates on the headset was very relaxing.
Past that the flying mechanics from City of Heros/Villains were great and I compare any flight mechanics now to those then.
Have you tried Dragonflight? They seem to have added physics/inertia to the flight mechanic. I haven’t played for like 15 years but am tempted to pull the trigger for that alone.
YES I GET TO TALK ABOUT GOOP
In NakeyJakey’s The Last of Us 2 video he describes a condition he has called Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain. Having GGGB essentially means that your motivation and interest in games is powered almost purely by moment-to-moment gameplay. Anything that gets in the way of gameplay, like:
- Stealth/Trailing sequences
- Overly long, unskippable cutscenes / game sequences where you just stand around to look at how pretty a game is
- Long Tutorials
is a threat to Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain.
I have Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain. A very bad case, if I’m being honest. It’s the reason why I can’t stand games like The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption 2, and other “prestige-type” games. It’s the reason why I am a big fan of a lot of Japanese games, which tend to focus very heavily on mechanical systems.
So when I say a game is “goopy,” this is what I mean. Maybe the movement system is godlike (Gravity Rush, Infamous 2, Forspoken). Maybe it has really deep customization mechanics (Bravely Second, Final Fantasy Tactics, Etrian Odyssey). Maybe the pew pews feel good (Apex Legends). Maybe it’s a Ys game (Ys).
Ooh, I’ll have to give that video a look at some point. I feel like the term game “goop” is actually perfect to describe the main type of mechanic, where the player is meant to learn and experiment with things.
I must be playing different Japanese games, as if they aren’t from Formsoft they tend to feel like cutscene simulators to me. Sometimes it can be fun if they have enjoyable writing (looking at a lot of the side content in the Yakuza games).
Nah I wrote a whole thing about it. Japanese games are in general significantly more interested in game feel in the moment to moment, even when they have tons of cutscenes (ex. MGS)
A game like RDR2 is extremely concerned with realism and physicality even if it costs the players agency. Morgan controls like a lumbering tank, and everything feels cumbersome. The game will make you watch him skin an animal for 20 seconds where you aren’t even playing the game, really. Contrast that with something like strangers of paradise or devil may cry. Is it realistic for Jack “Skip Cutscene” Garland to cancel out of any animation to perform a finisher? Nope. Does it feel good as fuck? absolutely.
Maybe I just don’t jive with the common tropes of game feel for them, as most of the ones I’ve tried haven’t given me that visceral fun you got.
Right? I feel like a lot of stuff needs to have the golden question asked. That is, “Is this fun?”.
Tunic’s writing system was the reason the game was recommended to me and i was not disappointed. Figured it out on my own during the second or third section of the game, after spending more time on it than actually progressing.
Also a big fan of literally climbing on bosses in shadow of the colossus.
Its a little silly but I do enjoy those little things they add to a game that don’t really add much in terms of gameplay, heck you’re even able to play the game without making use of them, but are a nice way of sort of just “grounding” yourself in the world for a time, giving you some time to pause and reflect a little on whats been happening.
Stuff like pulling out a guitar with Into the Radius and trying to strum out a lil beat or stopping in at a diner in Shadows of Doubt and having a little coffee and watching the world go by while mulling over a case that you’re on. I think that kind of stuff is pretty rad.
A very social one I like is being able to get beers from the bar in Deep Rock Galactic.
Oh yeah, Deep Rock is good for that, getting some beers, having a little dance, getting pissed off at tossing barrels into the ring, finding the little football and the goal posts and having a game of that, its great xD
Sea of Thieves has tons of that kind of thing. Nothing beats an impromptu shanty on your way to pirate shenanigans.
Haha yeah I remember that too! That game was a pretty chill one to play with friends, just sailing around with your instruments and getting into the occasional scrap with another ship, good times.
I was looking at Shadows of Doubt earlier today. Looks great, would you recommend it?
I’ve certainly enjoyed my time with it so far, and I’ve found it to really scratch that detective noir itch quite well. Its early access mind you so I’ve encountered a few bugs here and there, and it might feel a little repetitive after a while (an issue that I imagine will be ironed out more as the game gets fleshed out more) but what’s there was still pretty fun and for the price I say it was worth it for me :)
