Mine are vehicle building games like Stormworks or Scrap Mechanic. It’s so much fun to shoot at your friends with your latest nuclear drone while hiding in your bunker with a better defence system than Area 51 !
I’m very curious about your fav niche game genre !
(I’m sorry for my bad English ^^')
I really like exploration era sailing games. Trade and explore. Upgrade ships etc. I’ve tried them all and none are that great. But the idea is something I really like. If something like Uncharted Waters combined with Black Flag ever came out I’d be in gaming heaven.
I love the Mystery Dungeon games. Most people know about the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon ones, but there are also Etrian Mystery Dungeon I & II, Shiren the Wanderer titles, Taloon’s Great Adventure, Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, and more!
I like them because they are pretty casual games you can pick up and put down easily, but if you want to get deeper into the strategy, you can. We didn’t get these games in the West until the Nintendo DS era, but they started with the SNES in Japan.
Kerbal Space Program
Sandbox RPG games with deep simulation and emergent gameplay elements cranked up to 11. Stuff like Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi and to some extent RimWorld.
I don’t know if there is a name for this genre and if anyone has similar games to recommend, please do!
I never understood what Dwarf Fortress was. Could you explain it to me please ?
Sure. Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator and fantasy story generator
It has 3 game modes: fortress, adventure and legends.
You begin all 3 by creating a world. The game will simulate the geology, tectonic plaques, erosion that eventually lead to a world that is habitable
Then the game puts elves, dwarves and humans on it and simulates a couple hundred years of history.
Civilizations rise and fall, go to war. People marry, have children and die.
Then you start your game. In fortress mode, you lead a group of dwarves to establish a new settlement. It plays like a city builder, colony sim and a little like the Sims
Every npc is simulated very in depth with thoughts, memories, relatives, moods, needs. This means there is stuff like trauma and npcs deal with it in different ways and eventually process into into a change in their personality and stats. The personality affects their social relationships.
You guide the dwarves to dig and build rooms, workshops, taverns. You organize the military and trade.
Eventually you might get attacked by globins or something. Each goblin will come from a specific village, they will have a family, thoughts and moods and memories.
You can see how the game is unique. No other game will go to this extent in simulating the world and its people.
Adventure mode is how you play with just one character and explore the world. It’s not good to play yet because most of the development at the moment is for fortress mode.
Legends is like Wikipedia for a world you generated, you can browse all events, people, places.
What makes the game amazing is the stories. One time, a beast from the caves arrived. It was a monster in the shape of a slug, made of lava, with wings.
It flew up my well and was about to kill everyone. But some beekeeper dwarf was lowering a bucket. The bucker hit the Beast so hard it fell into the water reservoir and died (it was made of lava).
Some water evaporated and the hot steam hit a few dwarves sending them to the hospital.
Another story is a mayor I had that was so good at consoling people he became legendary at it. He suffered trauma because a drunk angry citizen punched him. Also he lost his cat. He reflected on this and “found peace”, it’s kinda funny but that’s how the game rolls. After that his stats changed or something and he was never bothered by anything. Managing stress in the game is important so this guy being so zen kept me on the edge of my seat when he was in danger due to how valuable he was as an unstoppable beast in consoling everyone all day every day and preventing fist fights or worse as we were dealing with a war with elves.
Bottom line is, the game is extremely deep to a fault even, but I love it so much. I love how the stories are so unique and how things can go in such weird ways, I love seeing characters develop so organically with no scripted events at all.
Wow. Your explanation was amazing (like the game). I’m gonna check it out !
I would recommend starting with Rimworld. It’s a lot like Drawf fortress but it replaces the insane depth of Dwarf fortress with more accessibility for the average gamer. Think of it as a more streamlined Dwarf fortress. If you feel like you need more depth then there’s always Dwarf fortress.
Ok, i will check it out too
Cool! Let me know if you have questions. On reddit we had r/dwarffortress, we should maybe ask one of the gaming communities if there is interest. Earlier I found https://lemmy.zip which is a lemmy instance geared towards gaming.
Ok, I will ! You seem to know a lot about the game, why not make a lemmy community yourself ?
Haha! I don’t think I can moderate and run such a community. Also my instance here for Lemmy is something I spun up for personal use given I like to self host stuff as a hobby, and I don’t think it would work well as a home for a community.
However I saw someone made a new tool to explore the “lemmyverse” at https://lemmyverse.net and using it I found there is an existing community for dwarf fortress that seems a lot more seriously set up than mine would be: https://lemmy.ml/c/dwarffortress
I subscribed! Last time I searched there wasn’t one but maybe I just had to use a tool like this lemmyverse site that collects data about all communities across instances.
That’s a very useful tool !
I have tought about self hosting a website/ my own lemmy instance but isn’t it dangerous to host things avaliable on the internet from your home ?
chess roguelikes games are great. Breathe new life into a very comfy ruleset:). Always interesting to see how the design space of chess is expanded
couple of examples https://store.steampowered.com/app/1972440/Shotgun_King_The_Final_Checkmate/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2065000/Chess_Survivors/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2096510/The_Ouroboros_King/
I’m not sure anyone here would consider medieval combat niche, but I do love me some Chivalry 2
Never played Chivalry, but Bannerlord for me. There isn’t anything quite like it despite the devs over promising. Besides the actual battles the rest of the game really needs mods to feel fleshed out.
I really like Kerbal Space Program.
And I also really like Factorio for all my logistics/factory builder needs.
“Open world” puzzle games. What I mean by that is that you can go and solve any puzzle you like in the world. Nothing is linear. If a puzzle stumps you or has you frustrated, you can always leave and go try another one. The last good one I played was The Talos Principle and I’m heavily awaiting the sequel which is supposed to come out this year. Other good ones are the Myst series (the first game is sort of linear in some parts, but the rest are pretty open), Quern, The Witness, The Outer Wilds, and a few others I can’t remember right now.
Well-produced open world puzzle games don’t come out super often, probably due to how difficult it is to make a puzzle game and now you have to incorporate open world elements into that. For example there are over 138 puzzles in the Talos Principle, and some of the last dozen will probably take you well over half an hour to figure out at minimum on your first playthrough. Makes it pretty niche.
edit: the Hitman series is also like this sometimes. It’s more of a stealth game but it has puzzle elements. If you’re finding one of the targets difficult to assassinate, you can always leave the area and try to take out a different target.
Also vehicle building (Space Engineers and From The Depths), and automation games like modded Minecraft and shapez.io.
Is From The Depths’ gameplay like Besiege’s, linear with levels to complete ?
To be honest, I’ve never played the actual story mode, only messed around in the Sandbox.
Isometric Theme Park simulators. I’m in love with Parkitect and have fond memories playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 as a kid.
OpenRCT is the GOAT of this genre IMHO
I will check it out! Known about it for a long time but I’ve never really taken a look.
I like Idler Auto-Battlers, if that’s a good description. Games like Dragon Cliff or Ghost of Dragon (both by the same devs).
A group of NPCs automatically fight indefinitely, gather loot and experience and while that’s going on you can manage a base or something, change the party, maybe some other stuff. A big part for me is also not constantly resetting to increase some multiplier, like you would in a Cookie Clicker, Leaf Blower Revolution or NGU Idle.
I need to find more games like this though. A lot of games on Steam in the Idler category are either clickers, which I don’t want or F2P, that seemingly try to get you to buy stuff.
Sooo, football manager in fantasy setting? :)
I know you’re joking to some extent, but can you just let the game run for hours, and it will continue to simulate matches / seasons, with basically no input? Or would it require regular input by changing players and other things?
I tried an FM once on Game Pass, but when it started with walls of text one after the other, I just zoned out and didn’t even try.
Yeah, I was 100% joking. I have never played any football manager.
But as Darkest Dungeon introduced the idea of managing a roster of heroes, I can see how it can be easy to sink hours into base management alone
First person tile based dungeon crawlers! Like SMT I and II, or the Labyrinth of Refrain games! The less map and info, the better, so I can get full immersion in exploring and getting lost in a dungeon for days!
I’m not sure if it counts as niche, but I like stealth games. Thiefs, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja.
Discovering secrets unseen, clearing whole levels and running like hell to the next dark corner when I get cocky :D
Have you played Acid Spy ? If not, you can pick it up for ~6$ in during sales on steam. Despite being very short it’s well worth it !
Looks interesting, thanks :)
I really love point and click adventures. Especially those like the old ones from LucasArts. No rush, no quick reflexes, just your brain and a fun time.
“Simulator” games are surprisingly deep I have noticed. Power Wash Simulator and House Flipper are really fun and I’ve logged quite a few hours in both despite never pay attention to the genre before.
