I love any rhythm mechanic that isn’t “press green when the note hits”; I’m someone who forgets where X is on a controller the second a QTE appears, and for me, a game like Guitar Hero is basically 400 rapid fire QTEs. But Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favourite games of all time. Mother 3 had a neat rhythm mechanic in its combat system, basically just more damage for tapping along to a lil song. Good stuff.
Also - incredibly specific - I love games with loose enough builds that I can be a Necroarcher. Stealth, bow as my main weapon, tons of skeletons. This basically only includes some of the Elder Scrolls and Divinity games, but I’m always so excited if I can do it.
Not exactly the same, but a big part of why I adore Ancestors - The Humankind Odyssey is specifically because of the friction and specificity in the controls. Like, you have to think a lot about “what’s in my dominant hand, and what’s in the other?” and switch objects between hands to have different interactions between those objects. It’s a great game for so many reasons, but one of the big standouts to me was how thoughtfully obtuse the controls were, which makes sense considering a big part of the game is representing apes continued evolving dexterity with objects.
If you can endure the scaries, Alien: Isolation sounds a lot like “the game, but a video game” if you replace your mom doing dishes with a dude in black leather and a cycling helmwt that bleeds acid!
Give me a hundred skill trees that all feel different with a thousand skills that all feel like they meaningfully change things and I’ll play your game for a hundred years. Also more games with “backgrounds” for your character that change the way you can interact with the world in weird and unexpected ways.
yeah totally! i’ve been picking at the original Doom here and there and thinking about how smooth that game feels. and on one hand, wow that game really does hold up quite well! on the other, it is interesting how that lack of friction is sort of the gold standard for controlling a character, right? by now it’s pretty standard to be able to change mouse/ stick sensitivity in menus, and in most cases, it probably should be! but also, i can’t help but admire that in older Armored Core games, you change your turning speed by buying and equipping a part that… makes your mech turn faster.
i should find a let’s play of Ancestors. it sounds super weird and ambitious.
Ancestors covers another of mechanics I love in “games with a poor tutorial that give you just barely enough info to be able to - with some wiki help - discover what’s going on mostly by yourself.” That’s to say your mileage may vary!
I don’t play that many deck building games, I think Slay the Spire is the only one I’ve played much of, asides from Dominion. So I don’t specifically have an affinity for deck building games, but I do love card driven games in general.
In terms of a mechanic that automatically has me curious, this mostly applies to card driven table top war games like Twilight Struggle, Paths of Glory, and Empire of the Sun. But even kind of card adjacent mechanics like picking from dark events in XCOM 2 or the bonus cards you get in Unity of Command 2. Just put a rectangle on the screen format like a physical card and I’m in.
I’d love to know what games you have in mind here! I don’t know of many deck building games with a strategic scale, I could use some recommendations
Another mechanic that automatically has me interested is logistics. If you tell me I have to manage supply lines and will be punished when those supply lines are cut, I’m much more interested in the game. I want the nitty-gritty details, even if they get fiddly: are you on the other side of a river? where’s the bridge? oh the bridge is blown, so is there a ford? can we build one with an engineer? etc… my favorite recent example of this is not a video game but Nevsky. I was lukewarm when I first heard about this game, because I don’t know anything about the time period, but when I heard that there is four types of transportation for supplies (carts, sleds, boats, and ships) and they’re only usable in different seasons (sleds work great in the Rus winters since they can travel on frozen rivers, but boats can’t move. and then in the muddy season carts get bogged down and are unusable) I immediately bought it.
So the classic example of this is the war-game A Few Acres of Snow - which I haven’t played, and wouldn’t recommend based on its uncritical view of colonialism based on a few impressions I’ve seen - but it uses deck-building to represent how by expanding too quickly can spread your resources too thin, as you fail to draw the cards you need on a turn to complete the actions you want. I’d say Dominion also does this, though the game isn’t really all that caring about its theme so it isn’t explicitly allegorical. The video-game Concrete Jungle also plays with this a bit too. But honestly, it mostly feels like an untapped aspect of deckbuilding I’d love to see more.
But I do think a lot about deckbuilding as a mechanic to make strategic games more interesting, but perhaps a little easier to onboard people into? I think about worker-placement games and how many of them could also be an interesting game if they were transformed into a deckbuilding game. When I did play board games before self-isolation, I played with many people less entrenched in the hobby as I am. Worker placement games can be overwhelming for many people because of how many decision points you generally have, which is really fun, but if you don’t play board games often it can be stressful. A hand of cards telling you exactly what you can do does a lot to lessen that burden imo. I look at my stack of Vital Lacerda games on my game shelf - they’re all brilliant and I adore a lot of the designs. But I wonder how much more would I take them out if they didn’t just overwhelm the players with so many decisions and little in terms of signposts telling you what to do.
I have another that I just thought of: I love being able to steamroll enemies before they have a chance to do anything. The two games I’m thinking of are Persona 5 and Into the Breach.
In P5 if you sneak attack an opponent each teammate has a chance to attack before the opponent. If you hit each opponent’s weakness they are “Down” and you can do an all-out-attack. This leads to lots of thoughtful gameplay with character attack order, skills, party balance, and limited resources like bullets and MP. Being able to sneak attack, get every enemy down, and all out attack is such a satisfying way to prove your mastery of the game’s mechanics.
In ItB the game shows what the enemies are going to do on their turn. Your job as mechs is to stop them from doing those things. It’s sublime when it goes right, as there’s almost always a way to do it correctly (probably always, I’m just not great at it).
How do you feel about the sprint system in something like Receiver where it’s quickly tap W to actually sprint? To me that felt like the best implementation of sprint without a stamina meter because it comes away feeling good in a clunky way. I would personally really like to see that mechanic return in something like a battle royale where sprinting is necessary but can be awkward to perform.
That, to me, is a sprint button made annoying for no good reason. A good go-fast button needs to be part of a rhythm of play. Like with bunny-hopping you’re not just mashing jump, you learn the basic rhythm, adjust timing for slopes or height differentials, target specific landing spots. The goal is to add depth to movement, making you feel accomplished as you learn to flow through a game space.
It’s also terrible for accessibility. My old man thumbs are starting to feel mighty rickety and I dread any game that makes me hammer on a button for extended periods of time (looking at you GTA).
Oh I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to mash with my thumbs. I usually switch to an index finger. But one of the first things I look for in any accessibility menu is “turn repeated button presses into holds”
On a similar bent to Glorgu, I love ‘We Go’, mechanics in turn based strategy and tactics games. Any time opponents enter their plans simultaneously, and see them resolved simultaneously (instead of taking turns) opens up a world of chaos and deception that I just can’t get enough of. I think timeline based mechanics have a lot of the same feel of this, but lack the uncontrolled feeling a good ‘We Go’ style game has.
Standouts in this genre include Frozen Synapse 2, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, and the asymmetrical Phantom Brigade.
I have a mechanic I love the idea of, and am always excited about it, but I think it’s partially because it’s very rarely done well.
I love the premise of a roaming boss. A monster or enemy wandering around, or even hunting you down. I thought it was really cool to stumble into a Big Daddy wandering around Rapture. I wasn’t able to play the game myself, but Mr. X in RE2 seems like an awesome execution.
I love the ability to pick up enemies and throw them into other enemies. Hitting a enemy with their buddy is the height of humiliation and it’s why the new God of War is bad and God of War 3 is great because you can pick up a basic fodder enemy and use them as a battering ram.
Yakuza is really good at this as well. You can end entire trash mobs in seconds in Yakuza 0 by grabbing a guy while in the Beast stance.
AC Valhalla has a move you can get where you harpoon a guy and then push a direction on the stick to swing them in that direction, potentially hitting other enemies. It’s a little finicky, tbh, but I still love using it. Sometimes I can get elite enemies to just collapse completely from it.
