Last time you were pleasantly surprised by a game (any genre)

[luj1]

Going from most recent...

• Arcane Dimensions (last summer) - Among the best experiences I have ever had on the PC
• Powerslave (last summer) - A classic I barely remember from the time I was a kid, very stylish concept
• Project Warlock (last summer) - Wonderful concept, music, foley effects are second to none
• Neo Scavenger (a few years ago) - Amazingly fun blend of RPG and survival elements, an atmospheric and cleverly designed game
• Grimoire (a few months before it came out) - The best crawler experience, blew me away
• Wizards & Warriors (a few years ago) - Once you stomach the clunky controls and interface, becomes a really enjoyable and unique crawler
• Underrail (when it came out) - Enjoyed the combat and theorycrafting on the fly
• Wizardry 8 (3-4 years ago) - Loved the combat, the humor and character building. Awesome setting too
• Trackmania Turbo (4-5 years ago) - Nice sense of speed, crazy fun when hanging out with buddies in hotseat modes
• ToEE (5 years ago) - revisited it for the 2nd time and had a ton of fun, literally sliced in half by 2 giant lobsters when I left town
• Legend of Grimrock (when it came out) - Loved the ambience and atmosphere

Let me add,

• Ori and the Will of the Wisps (a month ago) - Great style and production standard, everything feels very crisp and fluid. Somehow reminds me of the old days
• C&C Remastered Collection (a month ago) - Really fantastic remaster, Red Alert 1 is one of the great games of my childhood. This and Starcraft were the only good remasters
• Fallout of Nevada (this summer) - Good writing, funny situations, you have to use your brain. Classic intelligent gameplay plus great music, very bleak and ambiental

 

[Modron]

Just listing the things that surprised me (in order of me remembering them as I wrote this) and not everything I enjoyed but expected to be great from the start like ATOM RPG + Trudograd, Bloodstained, Fallout Nevada/Resurrection, KC:D, Archolos, Yakuzas, et cetera.

1. A Legionary's Life - Essentially a life sim game about a Roman Soldier during the second Punic War, as he participates in campaigns in Spain, Carthage, and Greece or dies of course. Well written almost an edutainment experience.
2. Titan Outpost - Zero combat rpg about the daily grind of harvesting fuel on Titan, lots of twists and turns leading to quite a variety of different endings. Looking forward to the Jovian System.
3. Last Stand Legacy Collection - Never played the old flash games and they turned out to be quite good, especially the last one.
4. Super Daryl Deluxe - Never even heard of it until I stumbled onto the steam page, didn't like the initial skill selection during the opening sequence but stuck with it and enjoyed the experience of this sidescrolling RPG/light platformer.
5. The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa - Melancholic slice of life sim, tight daily schedule with lots of things to do and fighting styles to unlock and learn. River City Ransom inspired beat em up with stats that improve by use. Really enjoyed it. Going to D1P Fading Afternoon.
6. Dead State - Quite enjoyed the Reanimated release, surprising because the codex hivemind had spent years hammering home that it was mediocre to shit.
7. Vigilantes - I was initially was on the fence about it buying it but I pulled the trigger and quite enjoyed it. Here's to Prometheus Wept.
8. Expeditions Viking - Didn't expect quite such a pivot into a RPG from their previous Expeditions Conquistador, quite enjoyed it in 2017.
9. West of Loathing - I was unfamiliar with the series but bought it anyways since lots of people here were touting its virtues.
10. The Quest - A proper RPG born out of mobile phone game development that is good? Yeah it surprised me.
11. Tales of Illyria Series - For the same reasons above. Shame they didn't port to PC and that google dropped the hammer on their third game for listing attack helicopter as their preferred pronoun when they got tired of filling out the nth google developer survey.
12. Dex - What's there to say but that it was great? Terrible shame the main developer passed away robbing us of further good things.
13. Blood & Gold Caribbean - I surprisingly enjoyed it years after release and a shit ton of patches had made this poorly reviewed paid warband mod actually pretty fun.
14. Charlie Murder - One of those rare RPG beat em ups, very solid never played in on the XBLA but did enjoy discovering it in 2018.
15. Binary Domain - I should add this just because it was a popamole shooter that was quite fun. Had some light C&C, weapon improvement, and enemy robots had different behavior depending on what part of them you destroyed.
16. Warlock of Firetop Mountain - Who knew adding tacticool combat to CYOA story book would be quite so fun? Shame they didn't give this treatment to their further Fighting Fantasy adaptations.
17. I suppose I should put Judgment/Lost Judgment here since it seemed like they were never coming to the pc and then boom Sega releases them to Steam without warning.

Timespinner - I should mention this as a cautionary tale. What starts out as a very mechanically solid RPGvania gives way to the most degenerate homo erotic script that has ever been put to a videogame (the kickstarter developer sought out the most degenerate third party they could find in all of the land and outsourced the writing to them). Under no circumstances should you play this, is a solid game for the first two to three hours then the writing gets increasingly disgusting and woker (all the possible bad guys are huwhites and all good npcs are homosexual mystery meats who spend lots of time talking explicitly about their proclivities) the further you get into game.

 

[DonGabo]

I played "Brigand: Oaxaca" for a couple of hours yesterday. It will surprise anyone that can look past those graphics, controls, low framerate, weird resolution scaling... etc. Amazing what a single dude can make, specially when you look at the "Deus Ex" sequels.

 

[Modron]

Knew I forgot to mention something.

 

[Daedalos]

I'm a huge survival horror nerd, so yeah. Some guys that blew me away these past 5 years

So on the top of my head games that really surprised me and I liked alot.

Alien Isolation
Prey
Resident Evil 7
RE2:remake

Lost Ark
Disco Elysium
Underrail
Wasteland 3
Pathfinder: Wrath of the rightous
Hitman 3
STASIS/CAYNE/Beautiful desolation
Battlefield 1

 

[luj1]

I played "Brigand: Oaxaca" for a couple of hours yesterday. It will surprise anyone that can look past those graphics, controls, low framerate, weird resolution scaling... etc. Amazing what a single dude can make, specially when you look at the "Deus Ex" sequels.

Yeah Brigand is great

One man projects such as Underrail, Grimoire or Brigand shat on Obsidian, Owlcat, Larian with impunity

 

[ADL]

Over the past five years
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019
Control (expected it to be good since it's Remedy but it was better than I expected)
Destiny 2 The Witch Queen
Evil Dead: The Game
Hellish Quart
Isonzo
Last Epoch
Kynseed
Titanfall 2
The Surge 2
Warhammer 40K Inquisitor Martyr

 

[Egosphere]

i liked Talos Principle more than i expected to

 

[rusty_shackleford]

guess I'll ignore the 'last time' since everyone else did too

Archolos -- witcher in gothic engine
ATOM RPG -- It's like Fallout except... well, no, it's like Fallout and they didn't mess it up. Wow!
Witcher 3 DLCs -- base game is awful, DLCs are great, what a plot twist.
Wizardry 8 -- most """blobbers""" are absolutely terrible. Defied expectations, wasn't terrible, best game in the genre ever.

 

[Galdred]

Kenshi: It delayed playing it forever because I expected it to be super janky, but it ended up being one of my most played games on Steam
Chaos Gate: Daemonhunter: I expected it to be bad, and despite having one of the worst menu optimization I have ever seen (lthe game literally stutters in menus), and a distinct lack of variety, I found the tactical battles interesting until the end, and the boss battles well done, which is pretty rare in the genre.
King Arthur: Knight's Tale: The Early access was a mess with poor optimization, lack of content, and very few updates. I expected a 1.0 trainwreck, but the released game was really good.

 

[smaug]

Hated BG nearly a year ago (no TB and awful exploration.). Tried it out about 2 weeks ago and I thoroughly enjoyed playing, strangely enough. I appreciate the UI, itemization, and combat (sort of).

So, more of a redeemed game in my case.

I take it back, it’s a horrible game with the only plus being it’s aesthetics. I probably abandoned this play through shortly after but I can’t remember.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Ecstatica (1994), went in thinking it was just going to be a goofy pre-RE survival horror game with badly aged graphics and an obnoxious unkillable enemy, came away having felt that it aged a lot better than you'd think, owing to a weird blend of British comedy and medieval horror.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

I'd add Grand Tactician: Civil War to the list. I never thought that someone would make a war game where you could command and build armies, fight battles, forge policies, import weapons, and manage a national economy, but damn it if that Oliver Picklefucker or whatever his name is didn't do just that. It's flawed as shit, but it's a giant diamond in the rough.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Few days ago I played "else heart.break()" and I was pleasantly surprised.

It's hard to define this game and I don't think it could appeal to everyone.

Superficially it resembles an adventure/puzzle game with an isometric view similar to many crpgs, set in a populated city to explore with a mystery to solve. However there is no quest log or compass, you have to find the way by yourself.

In the core of the game, the city is completely dynamically simulated. Every NPC and object in the city is tracked and interlinked dynamically with everything else. The twist of the game is that, at a certain early point, you find a way to "hack" almost any object in the city to discover the program that define its behavior and how it interacts: you can literally see and modify the code of the city.

This brings to a lot of way you can interact with the world and solutions you can invent to overcome the obstacles. For example you can re-write the code of a common key, that open a specific door, with a code that brute-force the lock of any door, to create an effective lockpicking tool.

The programming language is a relatively advanced, a kind of blend of popular scripting languages such as Python or Lua, but in order to decipher the scripts and to deduce their logic, you need to carefully observe and experiment. If you already know how to program this obviously speed up everything. Indeed this game that could be recommended to teach real coding to kids or young people.

 

[kangaxx]

Atom RPG seems very good so far. Definitely a nice surprise.

 

[Gregz]

Vampire Survivors. Brilliant design philosophy executed with finess.

 

[Darkozric]

Brigand: Oaxaca, pyramid and polyphonic levels are total incline.

 

[Pound Meat]

Goldeneye Wii. Got it in 2010 but didn't realize I could play online multiplayer until 2012 by using the gym wifi nearby.

 

[jackofshadows]

Surviving Mars - turns out has almost perfect streamlined <> complex balance to me
Days Gone - never had thought will have so much fun with such a shooter game
CP2077 - great storyfag game
Black Book - incredibly cute game with rich folkish setting
Disco - fascinating game that brought me to the Codex

 

[Norfleet]

I am confident that this is a physical impossibility. For a game to be a "pleasant surprise", it would have to undermine my expectation (thats nature will conform to the laws of thermodynamics even if the game's mechanics do not) and do so in a way that I would regard as satisfactory. This immediately puts a tall order on things: That the game must somehow manage to violate physical laws, and that in doing so, it not kill me (otherwise I can't have an opinion about this outcome anymore). I don't think this can happen.

 

[luj1]

Going from most recent...

• Arcane Dimensions (last summer) - Among the best experiences I have ever had on the PC
• Powerslave (last summer) - A classic I barely remember from the time I was a kid, very stylish concept
• Project Warlock (last summer) - Wonderful concept, music, foley effects are second to none
• Neo Scavenger (a few years ago) - Amazingly fun blend of RPG and survival elements, an atmospheric and cleverly designed game
• Grimoire (a few months before it came out) - The best crawler experience, blew me away
• Wizards & Warriors (a few years ago) - Once you stomach the clunky controls and interface, becomes a really enjoyable and unique crawler
• Underrail (when it came out) - Enjoyed the combat and theorycrafting on the fly
• Wizardry 8 (3-4 years ago) - Loved the combat, the humor and character building. Awesome setting too
• Trackmania Turbo (4-5 years ago) - Nice sense of speed, crazy fun when hanging out with buddies in hotseat modes
• ToEE (5 years ago) - revisited it for the 2nd time and had a ton of fun, literally sliced in half by 2 giant lobsters when I left town
• Legend of Grimrock (when it came out) - Loved the ambience and atmosphere

Let me add,

• Ori and the Will of the Wisps (a month ago) - Great style and production standard, everything feels very crisp and fluid. Somehow reminds me of the old days
• C&C Remastered Collection (a month ago) - Really fantastic remaster, Red Alert 1 is one of the great games of my childhood. This and Starcraft were the only good remasters
• Fallout of Nevada (this summer) - Good writing, funny situations, you have to use your brain. Classic intelligent gameplay plus great music, very bleak and ambiental

Tales of Maj'Eyal (few weeks ago) - Great combat and character building. Fantastic as an entry point for modern roguelikes. Still getting supported after 10+ years.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Titanfall 2
Bought it this week
Really good shooter and addictive multiplayer

 

[JarlFrank]

The End of Dyeus.

Found it while browsing the Steam catalogue, the screenshots looked nice enough, it was extremely cheap, and the description made it sound like an exploration-focused game without annoying crafting systems.

And damn, it was the most fun I had with any game last year. Absolute explorefag heaven.

 

[luj1]

The End of Dyeus.

Found it while browsing the Steam catalogue, the screenshots looked nice enough, it was extremely cheap, and the description made it sound like an exploration-focused game without annoying crafting systems.

And damn, it was the most fun I had with any game last year. Absolute explorefag heaven.

Looks like a mix of Daggerfall and Minecraft.

 

[Reggin Backward]

When I played and finished Sleeping Dogs for the first time. Knowing that it will almost surely never get a sequel or a continuation left me empty for a while. So it's not really a surprise in a good way but it reminded me that there can still be some original games out there.