u/Severe_Sea_4372

Somewhere in the roguelite boom of the last however many years, the classic art of tight platforming puzzle design got lost. I enjoy roguelites, to be clear, but so much design energy is going into runs, meta progression and RNG that precision platforming and handcrafted puzzle rooms now feel like a fading art.

That said, metroidvanias have kept this approach alive more than other genres. But even there, only Hollow Knight really gives any attention at all to platforming segments, and the puzzles are on the intuitive simple side, just right for a game that’s essentially still a metroidvania (and not a puzzle game per se)

Once I started digging though, I was quite surprised by how many puzzle-heavier metroidvanias and platformers there are. More than just a couple and all with basically OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE score on Steam…

and yet… and yet… I somehow never came across any of them, either on Reddit or being marketed anywhere else (just lucky manual googling) that I’m wondering how many 10/10 games of this kind are languishing in obscurity. 

Animal Well is the best example of what I mean, top notch game. So is Croak - yes, it’s just the demo but you can tell at surface glance it’s gonna blow up hard on full release, it’s got clever traversal tricks, peak art style and peak platforming segments. And both of these games hide their secret rooms brilliantly and their design is just a chef’s kiss, above and beyond what other indie games do. They show LOVE for this kind of design, because let’s be real, there’s not a lot of money in making games like this. Probably idk, I’m not a dev.

I have also played Cocoon and The Plucky Squire on my vacation this year (work great on the Deck btw) and I was flabbergasted by how many goodies of this kind are hiding in that puzzle platformer tag on Steam. That’s DESPITE being infested by those weird Hentai games that are neither platformers, no puzzle games. But I guess that’s just a standard Steam problem at this point lmao

Anyways, fellas - what else is out there, new or old or upcoming, that search algorithms haven’t been kind to? Share some of your discoveries with me :V

You’re gonna laugh at me but for me, the one I always think of as a simple retreat - minimum complexity, but maximum fun - is the legendary game I assume you all know (and love?)

Yes, it’s none other than the classic ZUMA. One of the rare games that never truly left me.

When I need a break but still want fun, this is the thing for me. It calms my nerves so darn much and requires absolutely zero brainpower to engage with. It’s also one of those evergreen casual games that still feel like they haven’t aged a day. 

Nostalgia in a bottle, this game. Doesn’t matter where I am, how I am… this game always gets me in a better mood and gives me a fun time. Helps that you can play it for like ten minutes or for hours, especially when I’ve had a bit to smoke. The only modern game that mechanically comes close to getting that deceptively simple feeling of gaming right is Blitzkrieg Express, it’s basically Zuma the WW2 edition™ where instead of balls, you shoot various parts of armored traincars coming your way. It’s great, it’s calming, there’s explosions.

I also replay Icy Tower which, btw… I did not know there was a sort of modern remake apparently coming out this year? Yeah, apparently, not like it needs a remake though.

All round, it’s the nostalgia train I get aboard on, the classics, the OGs that I return to 9 outta 10 times. I just really like to wax all nostalgic, I guess.

I want to hear what your retreat games are though, the games that always bring you joy when no other game is pulling you in :}

You can be as broad or as specific as you like, for me it's something general af

It’s the very concept of grinding, as in doing same-ish activities hundreds to thousands of times over until you’re incrementally rewarded for it some way and so on in a loop that just lengthens the time of those activities, while giving you the reward at longer and longer increments.

If you’re any sort of mmo or arpg (PoE, Last Epoch, Diablo…) fan or even a cozy farming enjoyer (yes you, Stardew), I can only hope you already know what I’m aiming at here… when I say swinging between enjoying it (just wanting it to continue forever) and hating every second of it because you know the odds of getting that sweet piece of loot you want are so slim, so RNG contingent, that it’s only a matter of sinking time. And literally nothing else.

I could yap on about how in some games grinding is less painful because ways you can influence RNG drop rates, like the Circle of Fortune in Last Epoch, or running tormented bosses and helltides in Diablo 4. But I’m not talking technicalities here because ultimately it doesn’t matter if the grind for something will take me 2 hours or 6 hours, it depends on how fun and mentally soothing it will be to lose those hours for a piece of digital loot.

Basically, before I get down into it I don’t know myself if I’m in for a good time or for a slog that gets boring about ten minutes in. Sometimes the mood keeps me for months on end, oftentimes it’s just for that one long gaming night-sesh…

I think this is the biggest general hate-love divide for me as a gamer right now, just based on the brute time the game wants me to spend repeating similar things over and over. What would be your most intense love-hate relationship of this sort, if ye have one?

The most useful-boring one I made so far is, when you boil it down to its essential function - a dumb Excel mass extractor & stat sorter. 

I work in marketing & influencer outreach and the sheer number of info that my other agents fill out the sheets with is beyond terrifying. What’s worse is that it’s only a semi-organized mess, with people marking down all sorts of info (usually, views per channel, subs, whether they’re cold or warmed up - but also loads of auxiliary stats that clog up the sheets with pure mass)

Anyway, my Excel extractor don’t do nuthin’ fancy, and that was the guiding idea I had behind it. Agents are only really good if you set them up for one specific purpose. The way my sheet declogger works is that I just plomp all the Excel files into an OpenClaw wrapper (hundreds of these around now but I used MoClaw since a friend recommended it and I wanted to see if it can pass the first test of doing something braindead simple, but doing it well). I just prompt it then to pull out the parts I want, in the sequence I want, and sort it out for my weekly report to clients on how campaigns are going.

That’s all there is to it. Stupid thing but it saved me from manually digging through those dirty, dirty sheets with all those internal trackers and internal stats that really only make sense to the team, or sometimes not even to the whole team but only to me who made them back in 2019 (lmao)

The nice part is I’m not asking AI to invent anything textual since when it comes to LLMs, that’s one thing where AI always fails me. And always ends up making such a sloppy mess of things that its only use to me is in summarizing some data. And even then, it’s happened more than once that Claude just flat out DELETED some important data, although to its credit, it did add the new data I wanted. Especially when the lists are more than 500 entries long (complete with stats, data, messaging, etc..)

Yeah, I’m not that good at this but… one step at a time, or so everyone tells you. It’s not automation with bling that I’m implementing, but the bits I did streamline are still streamlined. So I guess there’s also something to be said about the durability of said automations. I want everything to be sturdy and hold up, hence why I started out with something so simple. Out from the dirt and the thorns and onwards to the stars, I guess?

I had many games over the years, same as everyone else, that will always be benchmarks for how to do some things in videogames. The best of this are what you call the “full products”, when the mechanics story and all the individual mechanics together just make a game where you can’t single out 1 thing that makes it great.

Some other games (including the same ones sometimes) do just one thing very well that other systems in other games will always get compared to them, or the system is so unique that its impossible to duplicate it 1 for 1 in any other game. Ones others can only look up to and envy their success. 

These or some I that done it for me in the last 10 years, I don’t want to talk about older games because they would be too numerous too count

Celeste / parameter difficulty tuning - but also the best assist mode I encountered in any indie game. It lets you tweak everything (game speed, dash count, invincibility) without ever making you feel like you’re cheating. To be fair, I like to play on harder difficulties but I can also appreciate a well implemented difficulty system and clever workarounds like this. Especially since platformers can be notoriously gimmicky and some people just don’t like the high precision they sometimes demand of you

Rimworld / custom storytelling and sandbox colony pacing - The storyteller system tracks your colony wealth, defenses, and mood then schedules raids and crises around your actual state instead of a fixed timer. It’s such an elegant system. Randy Random is my favorite of course,  the absolute troll king who will stack three disasters back to back or hand you two quiet seasons at random. Survival games that just roll random events on a clock just feel static after this, and there’s a reason it’s still Rimworld is still the king of colony sims

Last Epoch / targeted affix crafting - you pick the exact stat you want on your gear and work toward it step by step. No blind currency slamming and hoping the dices will roll in your favor. Going back to pure RNG crafting loops in other ARPGs is physically painful after LE, especially since the Circle of Fortune basically lets you abuse loot chance % which in turn is offset by the new corruption system which can break your items if you’re pushing legendaries too hard. Between PoE and Diablo though, it’s still the best crafting system by a mile

Outer Wilds / exploration that’s only limited by your knowledge - The only progression is what you personally figured out. You could beat the game in 20 minutes if you knew everything from the start, theoretically. Any game that gates exploration behind collectible counts instead of letting you find out your own reason (especially in a sandbox) is a bad sandbox. Because of this, there’s nothing like Outer Wilds where exploration is concerned. One of the rare exploration heavy games that gate progress behind knowledge and not some item you need to collect. The world is aaaaall open to you!

It feels like the golden rule of almost every competitive RTS is that if you just sit in your base and defend, you lose. The other player takes the map and eventually crushes you with a massive army. I get why it has to be like that for balance, but sometimes I really just want to build an insane fortress and force the other guy to throw units into a meat grinder.

Single player survival RTS games are really good at making this playstyle work. Like in Diplomacy is Not an Option, you get to build a massive castle but the game forces you to constantly send your army out to clear enemy camps so you can harvest soul crystals for your spells. You can't just hide inside forever, without the crystals you are cooked in the later waves.

Could mechanics like that translate to a competitive pvp setting? Like giving the turtle player a really strong defensive advantage but forcing them to periodically push out for a rare resource so they still have to take risks.

Older games tried to solve this in a different way and man I really miss how it felt in the old Command & Conquer games. There was nothing quite as satisfying as turtling up, hearing the superweapon ready voice line, and dropping a nuke on someone. It felt like the ultimate payoff for building a heavy defense. But the reality in pvp was that anyone good at the game just optimized their base layouts. They would spread their buildings so far apart that your massive expensive nuke would only take out a single power plant and maybe a barracks. They ended up just being super late game stalemate breakers rather than a reward for a dedicated turtle strategy.

Age of Empires has the Wonder victory which is kind of similar, but I always felt like it was a bit undercooked. It is literally just a giant countdown timer. I always wished they fleshed that mechanic out more. What if instead of just a flat win timer, building a wonder gave your base or units various escalating bonuses over time? That way the attacking player feels the pressure of the defender actually getting stronger, rather than just racing a completely arbitrary clock.

So I was wondering, if you were put in charge of designing an RTS with a defensive bend today, how would you solve the "defender's disadvantage"?