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.
Any good movement mechanics. Shoutout to grappling hooks!
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.
Titanfall|2 was so fucking amazing
Probably the one thing that saved Halo Infinite SP for me.
Grappling hook for the win! From xontic, to overwatch to spider man games,just swinging around is a blast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. 🤣
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.
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.
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?”.
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
Skill trees, it’s sad but I am such a sucker for a good skill tree… or a bad one. A lot of rogue-lites especially and 7 days to die <3
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.
- 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!
