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.
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.
One of the few things i dislike about the dark souls games is the time between 0 hp and actually playing the game again
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.
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.
Not really a boss fight but probably my favorite moment from any video game is the shockwave level from Inside. The way the music gradually comes in is pure magic.
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.
Same. I really liked the early alphas of 7 days to die but then they went and tried to make it much harder and it just stopped being fun. I haven’t played it recently so maybe they’ve backed off but early on I put in so many hours. Building was great and the zombies did just the right amount of damage to buildings.
Same. I suspect what happened is that they did the mistake of catering to their hardest core of players. People who make impenetrable minmaxed defenses that exploit every mechanic in the game engine, suddenly find that the game is “too easy”, so they adjust the game to make it challenging for them.
Thus leaving the rest of us with a game where dogs chew through concrete.
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.
wallrunning from titanfall 2, driving a mech like in titanfall 2, basically every mechanic from titanfall 2
That time mechanic has to be my favorite mechanic from any FPS.
I forgot to mention it, that was indeed a very good mechanic
Yeah it was fucking awesome
Titanfall 2 was so good, I miss it. A lot of it’s slick movement mechanics show up in some of those modern “movement shooters” like Ultrakill for example.
Goated game, apex just doesn’t hit the same
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.
CrossCode has an amazing “hanging out with friends” vibe from start to finish. The gameplay and plot are great but the lighthearted atmosphere is what stuck with me most.
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.
Add Dwarf Fortress to that list.
Ah yes. The game with the world’s best bug reports. I had a lot of fun creating a dwarven city in the treetops.
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).
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.
Right? I feel like a lot of stuff needs to have the golden question asked. That is, “Is this fun?”.
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.
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.
Transitionless turn-based combat, like in Yakuza : Like a Dragon.
Any good movement mechanics. Shoutout to grappling hooks!
Titanfall|2 was so fucking amazing
I just finished playing the campaign for the first time a few weeks ago. Very fun
Probably the one thing that saved Halo Infinite SP for me.
I love the dashes in Hyper Light Drifter. With precise timing they can be chained, making them not just useful in combat but also to quickly move through areas. Really satisfying.
Grappling hook for the win! From xontic, to overwatch to spider man games,just swinging around is a blast.
Elder Scrolls’ take on Dungeons and Dragons gameplay. If you read Arena’s manual, it’ll explain that they wanted a game that steers you into one dirrection, but if you want to say “fuck it” and go the other way, the story should support that. Similar to a DnD session where players don’t do what the Dungeon Master planned so he has to make up sonething else on the spot.
To this day, that’s why the main storyline is relatively short. But a storyline for alternative ways of life than “the hero who saved the world” exist, no matter if you’re a warrior, mage, thief, or assassin.
any game that feels good to move around in is instantly better than games with less developed movement systems. games like sm64, source bhop/surf, tf2 rocket jumping, etc. why not make it a joy to get from one place to another instead of just moving in a straight line or fast traveling?
One of the things I like best about AC games
This
Traversal in a game is the #1 factor for me enjoying it. Riding Torrent in ER is fun. Building mechs that can have a suspension system and turret system in TOTK is fun. Thwipping as spiderman and doing tricks is fun. Pogoing in HK is fun.
Traversal is what players spend 99% of their time doing, so make it fun
I had a real weakspot for Tf2 surf maps and I don’t fully understand why. I think it’s partly the fact that this isn’t how you’re “supposed” to play the game, but is an added bonus that came about by accident.
I’m also not very good at them, I spent far too long on surf_utopia (v3, I think) and only ever got to the end of it once.
The Ori series is really good for this. Bash is one of the greatest movement mechanics I have ever used in a video game, and coupled with Ori’s other moves you can fly across the map and it feels extremely natural.
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. 🤣
- Turn based gameplay, especially as it’s done in classic roguelikes. Also like it in turn-based strategy (XCOM etc), going back to Rebel Star on the Spectrum.
- Deckbuilding. I love it in boardgames so it’s fun to see it being explored in videogames too.
This is going to sound insane, but Gears Tactics, the Gears Of War spin-off game might actually be a good fit for you. The game straight up copied the combat from the new XCOM games, but it did it really competently. The main difference are all the special abilities your squad members get, which when you are at a high level makes the game turn into figuring out how to min-max for the best chain damage combos.
Not a game you’ll play forever, but worth at least a play through of the campaign, so if it’s on sale I recommend it.
Thanks, checking it out!
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.
