What's a game you love but can't actually recommend?

My favorite jank? GTA: San Andreas Multi Player.

Its a mod for GTA:SA that allows better multiplayer action than GTA online does.

Ive been playing it since around 2007 or 08. I like to roleplay as a homeless dude from Blueberry who goes around quoting Carl Marks at everyone. It’s pretty fun, and I’ve been doing it enough that im known around one particular server for doing it.GTA:SAMP isn’t really obscure, but at this point it’s old as fuck, and nobody really talking about it anymore.

Map games

But i dont "love" them

I "love" them in the same way a flagellant "loves" his whip

Deadly Premonition. It has a cast of very charming and surprisingly well written characters alongside a fascinating mindfuck of a story that is very much unlike anything else I've ever experienced. Heavily inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks and the closest I've seen another piece of media come to recapturing its dreamy, surreal vibes. Has a cult following despite being an absolutely shit game by all reasonable metrics. The combat is atrocious, it's unfathomably buggy, you're forced to drive between locations in a janky ass car, and the driving is like pulling teeth. It's really quite an unpleasant game to play for many reasons, and that's if you even get the game to run; the PC port is basically unplayable and requires a fuckton of fiddling on newer systems. Despite all that, it's an experience I remember very fondly. Just don't know if I'll be booting it up for another run in the next decade.

Fallout New Vegas (pure vanilla with not a single mod aka the console editions and the broken PC ports).

It's sometimes hard to recommend FNV to other people due to the fact that the only way to really enjoy the game is using the Viva New Vegas modlist.

I'm never reinstalling Windows so I have to pray that MO2 gets ported to Linux sooner rather than later because I personally despise hacking with WINE prefixes/organizing esps/ESM files myself. Also the fact that

• Mods are distributed through a proprietary network shithole service called Nexus Mods
• I own a copy of the game on Steam unfortunately and I know how much I despise interfacing with that program.
• There's so many mods to install goddamn

ITT: a bunch of games that are fucking awesome and i'd absolutely recommend them to others

I couldn't recommend most people play MGS 1 or 2 in the current year, but they are amazing works of art.

I wish more people could experience those games in full, but yeah...

Dwarf Fortress, I'd recommend it but only to someone I know had some interest, especially if they want to play the ascii version. Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead would be another. They're pretty hardcore, Aurora 4x and Dominions would also be hard to get people into unless they had some interest

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

gameplay is excellent, probably still the best fps/rpg hybrid, especially if you love kicking enemies off of/into things, but the story is extremely generic

Piranha Bytes Gothic and Gothic 2 are some of the best RPGs ever produced in my view. The atmosphere, the sense of progression and danger, the way every single item and enemy is curated and placed in the world with care and thought, the way the game doesn't hold your hand and characters actually behave like human beings - including the player. All wonderful.

Unfortunately, the graphics were ugly as shit for 2001-02 and the combat is unbelievably janky. A large part of the game's difficulty curve comes from how fiddly and frustrating the combat is. So, it is really hard to recommend.

There's an old rogue-lite called Castle of the Winds from ages ago in all its 16 bit glory

Short answer: Elex, what if Bethesda was both far more ambitious and also far less talented.

Long answer: I’ve been playing Quasimorph recently. It’s a bit like a turn based extraction shooter where you control a single mercenary clone (IN SPACE) and do missions for different factions in a sort of mount and blade style of reputation balancing (or not balancing). Your clone levels up, you can select from different builds, you choose your load outs and missions. If you die you lose the gear and leveled clone you sent (or the fresh meat who valiantly died in recon by fire).

The graphics are somewhat charming in that Gameboy Aliens game industrial sort of way. The music is actually strong, but that’s incredibly subjective.

It’s niche, it’s hard, it’s unfinished, and updates are slow but steady.

I can’t imagine the target audience being large, and I don’t expect the mechanics to change or expand overly much. For what it is, it’s fine unless you are the rare sort who wanted to play a combination of the original XCOM, Caves of Qud, and Escape from Tarkov. So I enjoy it very much, but I don’t recommend it to people unless they’re willing to potentially waste their time on something weird.

Easy answer is E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy.

It's a janky mess built on the source engine. The plot is downright incomprehensible. Gameplay mechanics aren't properly taught to the player, leaving you to work out how everything works (my legs are ok). The maps vary massively in terms of quality (the tutorial area for example has an optional side path that is just an incredibly long empty corridor that takes, like, twice as long to cross than the path you're railroaded towards to reach the same destination). It's basically an unlicensed WH40K game so it's got my dislike of Warhammer to work against to win me over.

Despite this, I have a huge soft spot for the game. It's one of the comfort games I boot up and play when I'm sick and sad.

Dragon's Dogma isn't obscure but it fits enough.

One of the very best RPG combat systems with a god tier magic system put in a paper-thin world. The leveling up is shitty and requires playing as different classes because your own class has such shit stats that leveling up is useless. Getting any real enjoyment out of the game is a 20 hour slog to get to the end-game stuff.

Dungeons Keeper 2, Heroes of Might and Magic III, medieval 2 Total war and Sid Meiet's Pirates!

I love them, but they're too old and I'm sure there's a modern version somewhere that's better. Also you won't get why theyre fantastic unless you were there when they came out. All games that scratch an itch no other game does.

War Thunder, this game has so many bad things going for it I probably could rant about it for hours, but I find it really fun. If you do ever end up playing this game, please please don't spend money on it, high tier is an absolute mess and isn't worth spending money on it or grinding for it, just play the game to have fun and unlock things as you go even though it takes fucking forever.

honkai impact, which i've been playing for a year now bc my wife is a big mihoyo fan and i liked it best out of their three offerings. a lot of the older stuff is very jank/rough, it's a gacha game so it comes off with that usual baggage, and the general art direction is even more male-gazey than genshin. but the visuals/flow of the combat with modern characters is great, and there's clearly a lot of effort put into the choreography and animations that make actually playing the game with the 3-woman teams just really fun.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. The combat is absolutely fantastic, I've tried Mordhau but its just not the same. Unfortunately its almost entirely dead, there's only one server left in the US and it's only populated in the evenings (not even every night). It's also full of chuds, the chat is literally toxic waste.

Legend of Grimrock 2

Marvel vs Capcom 3. It's a sick fighting game but it is also totally fucking psychopathic. I put over 10k hours in that mfer and going back and looking at how ungodly fast and fucked up it is makes me wonder how the fuck I managed to play it at a high level. Playing competitively is unbelievably fuckedd up.

Not obscure but ... League of Legends

Mobas literally have some of the best gameplay of any games out there but the player base and overall culture around the game prevents me from recommending it to people

One of my favorite games is Antimatter Dimensions. It's an incremental/idle game. It's kind of amazing. But trying to explain to someone what an idler is is pointless and most people who are familiar just think it's a Cookie Cutter clone. But it's not.

It does vertical prestige layers but like each layer, the mechanic of the first part is built on the entire previous layer, then the second part takes what you've built up to and flips it on its head a bit. This continues for several currencies that are used for various things. In December of 2022, the Reality Update™️ was released and once you get to that prestige layer the game turns into a completely diffeent thing. like if you have ADHD or enjoy Factorio but hate all the walking, I seriously recommend it to those people but if you don't fall into that group, it's probably not for you and I can see it getting marked up as the dumbest game you've ever played.

Antimatter Dimensions is one of my favorite games but just don't. And if it does click with you, it sort of sneaks itself into your daily routine. Check in for 30 mins in the AM and do some purchasing, consult the guide. Maybe let it idle through a time wall. Plan prestige challenges in the evening after work. Might let it run all night and check in these three things I'm grinding for next morning, etc. like it doesn't consume your life but it becomes part of you.

Don't play it lol.

i'm not afraid to recommend jank.

that said, i struggle to convince people to play The Longing, a game where you're creature that shuffles slowly through a system of caves while you wait for 400 real world days for your dad to wake up.

Fallen London. Some of the best writing in any game, DEEP LORE, with the greatest secret ending I've ever played all in a F2P browser game. But it's a real time investment

This is the game that launched Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies if you've played those

Probably Everquest. It set the tone for what mmoprgs were to become but now it's nothing more than an antiquated time sink.

I mean def the most forgotten-to-the-sands-of-time game i've played is Wet. I rly enjoyed it at the time as a suburban teenager with nothing better to do, but I can't recommend because in hindsight it was pretty mid and it didnt come out on pc, so you'd have to put in the extra work to emulate and its not worth it lol

Dungeon crawl:stone soup

Some of my favorite memories are from that game but I can’t recommend people wade into the awful pile they’ve made it into. Every successive update seems to be devs fishing things out of the soup because it detracts from the stone.

I had a lot of fun playing Far Cry Primal but the story is practically nonexistent and the gameplay eventually gets super repetitive (although this probably goes for all Far Cry games). It's one of those games where you're having a good time while you play it, but afterwards feel guilty for spending so much time on it when there are practically infinite clearly superior games you haven't played yet.

Shining Force! A TTRPG from 1992. The music and character design are really about a decade ahead of everything else that was available then. If you level one of your characters up to lv 10, you can “evolve” them into a different sprite that lets them wield better gear. This was my comfort game growing up, and was remastered for GBA in 2004. If you like it, don’t play the prequel, only the sequel.

The Movies (2004) is an incredible concept, with a lot of jank

I would say Hinterland, but that game can be got for a couple bucks and really doesn't overstay its welcome if you wanted to just do a single run. Seriously, I love that game enough that I considered modding it, but there's just enough layers of encryption that it isn't worth bothering with for a low-tech guy like myself.

I have a huge soft spot for Capcom's Strider (Arcade, 1989) to the point that I have an actual PCB. Wildly ambitious in terms of design and worldbuilding...and incredibly janky. Also, it has a co-opted soviet council turn into a giant mecha-centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. Notably influential within Capcom's own devteams, having characters who influenced Street Fighter II's Chun-Li and Mega Man X's Vile.

Also fitting the bill more directly, we have Wolfteam's Earnest Evans (Sega Mega Drive/Mega CD, 1991). A lot of 16 bit games successfully played with segmented characters for an early form of skeletal animation - like a lot of well respected classics like Alien Soldier and Contra: Hard Corps - but Wolfteam tried to take things a step further with a entire platformer where the main character has sophisticated ragdoll physics. The end result isn't very playable, but it's pretty impressive for a platform that can't do hardware rotation effects. Also one of the all-time funniest speedruns imo.

It's hardly obscure but Final Fantasy 14. They've actually shortened the grind to get to "the good part" significantly since the old days, but it's still way too long and I cannot in good conscience recommend a game where your choice is twenty hours of boring bullshit or paying $20 to skip it.

Death Stranding, Overwatch, Monster Hunter 3U.

Death Stranding because I'm not going to subject anyone to Kojima's brand of technobabble and self-fellation combined with a (admittedly fairly deep mechanically) walking simulator.

Overwatch because an FPS/MOBA combination has to be doing some actual damage to my psyche, and also it's just a hard sell to start with because of obvious reasons.

MH3U because it's only available on the 3DS and Wii U and it's the last really slow MH of the pre-World MHs. On 3DS it has no online play, and the Wii U servers have been taken down. It's the last MH before they introduced the mobility additions and improvements from 4 that made combat more fluid and fast, and before World introduced the system that basically finds the monster for you, as well as making mat gathering much more easy and less tedious.

EDIT: ooh for something that's more 'obscure jank' I just remembered I LOVED Phantom Breaker on the 360. It was a fighting game by 5pb/Mages that had a split style system. You had to choose between 'Quick' and 'Hard' where one was fast/felt more rushdown-y and the other was slower/felt more defensive. The game was super flashy because you would constantly clash, and meter built really fast WHILE ALSO CARRYING OVER BETWEEN ROUNDS which led to wild round start set-ups. This clip from will it kill is from the newer version but it's fucking hilarious.

THEXDER (1987)

"You control a robot ("mech") that is capable of switching from a 'mech into a jet at any time, wading through levels after levels of high-tech enemies."

download abandonware or play inbrowser

Space Bar to Laser, Z to Activate Shields, Down Arrow to Transform to Jet Mode

"Thexder is a solid PC conversion of Game Arts' hit in Japan, licensed to distribute in the US by Sierra."

I bought it in a store. It was packaged in a big box, the game came on a thin magnetic disc encased in hard plastic, there was a thick booklet also.