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.
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.
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.
I love when games utilize impossible spaces. I feel like so many games try to stay grounded in reality, so I appreciate when a game really takes advantage of being a game and plays with reality a bit. (ie: Antichamber, The Stanley Parable)
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.
Mine is Warframe’s travesal. Unmatched and unbeatable that all you need to know. But a close second in Titanfall 2’s one.
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.
I love fighting groups and just bouncing between enemies where hits stun. It’s especially good when enemies require different attack/dodge movements so everything feels like a choreographed production once I get into the flow.
I really liked Ys Origin for this, though there are plenty that do it well.
There are a few that I find really cool.
The “bullet time” in the max payne series was very enjoyable to me. Dodge-flying around enemies while bullets hit your last position and all looking like you are in the matrix movie? Yes please!
Then there was the flying in GTA5. The controls and “feel” of all the vehicles are very good, but flying is really implemented in a great way. Its by no means to difficult to learn (like a real simulator), but has a pretty high skill ceiling. To really “fly beautifully” you have to know your shit. And thats not even counting fighting air-to-air or air-to-land. It’s beautiful.
Also I’m a sucker for all atmospheric games. Bonus for being dystopic. The System-/Bioshock series, Stalker, Fallout, Cyberpunk2077 and many many more. Disco Elysium. Some games really are art in its purest form. Still entertainment, but art at the same time. I remember the first time I entered Novigrad in Witcher 3, not even on a good graphics card. Such a vivid, “living” town, with logical alleyways, bridges, beautiful architecture, soundstage just amazing, … I think to this day no other game has surpassed W3 when it comes to creating a believable city. It’s just art!
The “Choose your reply (or none)” mechanic of ‘Oxenfree’.
There’s a few things that irk me about that game, but it’s one of very few I know to get conversational interruption working well.
The one problem it had is that so, SO many players want to “absorb every byte of audio in the lines the characters are giving” and so will avoid interrupting to the last minute. Generally, I think people “treasure” voice acting a bit too much, ironically degrading its value. Good acting in movies tends to involve tons of interruption and cut-offs.
I’m one of those that hate interrupting people, so in Oxenfree, I missed a lot of opportunities to choose a dialogue option because I was waiting for the right time to cut in. I eventually just made myself do it, but I really hated the feeling of cutting off other characters.
I loved how Telltale does it instead where you select a dialogue option and the game has you say it at the right time.
It’s so weird to me that what works so well for others bothers me so much. In fact, it bothered me so much that I didn’t bother replaying it, despite replaying being a big appeal of that game.
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.
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
I’ve always been a fan of destruction and general environment interactability in games. Imagine what Red Faction Guerilla could be on modern hardware.
Have you seen Teardown? The whole game is basically made around some really impressive destruction tech.
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.
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
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.
I loved the mechanics in Company of Heroes 1 and wished it was more accessible and window-friendly.
Infantry: MG suppression, cover system, retreating and reinforcing squads, squad members spreading out and dodging shells, captureable weapons, occupiable/destructible buildings, destructible terrain, artillery leaving massive dirt clouds and craters (aka cover). It made me feel like I was fighting in a real war, but without the “unfair” TTK of real life MGs/tanks.
Macro (vs Starcraft 2): no workers (capture territory to generate resources), no 6 pool (base has starting bunkers) or proxy (can only build production in base), 1 of each building all game instead of 10+ Rax/Gate, 4-6 squads instead of 100+ Marines, cutoff harass (disconnect enemy territory from their base). I felt like I was fighting my opponent instead of the game.
