Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?
Best examples I can think of are:
- Outer Wilds
- Doki Doki Literature Club
- The Stanley Parable
What are yours?
(please no spoilers)
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Subnautica.
Survival. But you’re in the middle of an ocean. Good luck!
The way the game drip feeds you information. I love it!
- Disco Elysium
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- House Of The Dying Sun
- FEAR
- Limbo
- Oxenfree
I disagree with FEAR simply because I’d say to play it on the hardest difficulty and go balls to the wall because the AI will fuck you over if it gets the chance; and the longer you take to clear a room, the more time the AI has to organize and execute a plan. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve seen plenty of people get stuck on FEAR because they tried to play it like a cover shooter, I’d fully agree with you.
Honestly, fair assessment. Well said.
Yes! Return of the Obra Dinn 100%. You can still watch other people play it on YouTube later and have a blast seeing them figure things out. And read Lucas Pope’s excellent devblog later as well.
I am super intimidated Return of the Obra Dinn. But it looks so cool, and I feel like it uses a lot of lateral thinking and makes you smarter for playing it.
Journey. You can get it on PlayStation, iOS, steam (on sale for $5 atm) and epic. It is 2-3 hours short and not very challenging, but it does look absolutely stunning and has a very beautiful gameplay mechanic that you better find out for yourself. IMO it is one of the best games of all time and one that really demonstrates what the medium is capable of.
spoiler
Gosh this one makes me cry every time
Control
Yeah, got it for free on epic, assumed it was a game on dictatorship for reason… What a trip it turned out to be
Undertale, but at this point you’d have to have lived in a cave for the last decade to not know most of the spoilers by now.
Well, apparently I have!
The only thing I’ve heard about Undertale so far is that it is supposed to be good.That’s all Ive heard too. I tried playing it but the combat was weird. Kinda boring to me so I never advanced further.
Same. Fehlt like a very early game experiment.
Yeah I didn’t really get it. I did play Everhood though and that was much better.
It gets good by the end but yeah if you don’t mesh with it early on it can be hard to get into and want to finish it.
Yeah that happened to me. Never finished it and wonder why it’s so loved.
Yeah I almost had that happen with me but I think I ended up watching someone play it. Still kind of regret it but at the same time probably wouldn’t have finished it on my own otherwise and I atleast have Deltarune to look forward to now.
Undertale is such a bolt of lightning. It both depends on its player having experience with traditional JRPG and having no fucking clue what it is. But when the conditions line up, as it did for many people at release, it was such a master fully crafted experience. But even the slightest amount of “it’s good because…” really siphons part of the experience away.
Spoiler: There are high jinks, low jinks, dangers, puzzles, capers, japers, being captured, and other sorts of fun activities in this game.
I have heard the name but don’t know what it’s about, I’ll look into it. Thanks !
Inside. Made by the same company as Limbo, but Inside is much more “don’t look up a single thing”
Thanks for the recommendation. Just bought both for $3 lol
Sweet deal!!
Limbo was alright for me, but Inside blew my mind. So if Limbo doesn’t float your boat, don’t stop there!
have a great time !! Inside is fantastic
Tunic.
The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:
Tap for spoiler
If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!
I also second Outer Wilds.
i bounced off tunic super hard. i love the puzzle aspects, the cryptic manual pages, and figuring things out, but the combat was way too brutal, even on the easier setting. the bigger white ghost enemies at the very start killed me so many times i no longer want to go back to it.
I’ve gotta remember what those ghosts are.
I’ve slowly acclimated to Soulslikes since Tunic, and a common theme is that they make you think you need to be pressing more buttons, when they’re often teaching specialized bits of patience. In Tunic’s case, a lot of people expend their stamina too quickly.
Still don’t like FromSoft’s games
Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.
Sauna2000 (it’s not out yet, but there are some demos floating around).
Squirrel stapler
Cruelty Squad - depends on the kinda person you are. If you’re super open-minded about game presentation then I’d tell you to go into it blind. If not, then I’ll happily try to sell you on it. If it helps, the game looks the way that it does because of how fucking confident it is in itself; and that confidence is fully justified. Give it time, even if the first level doesn’t hook you, give it time because in my experience it will eventually hook you and reel you in and leave you thinking it’s one of the best games of all time.
Undertale
Hypnospace Outlaw
Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Give the first two a try, and if you don’t like either one, skip BRC; it’s a spiritual successor to JSRF and if you didn’t like JSRF then you probably won’t like BRC.
Hylics. If you liked that and wanted more, Hylics 2. Hylics 2 actually does something throughout the game that I’ve only ever seen as a gimmick in other games. It’s really cool and it’ll probably catch you off-guard every time it does it.
Katamari Damacy. If you liked that, there’s also We <3 Katamari.
Myst. The newest version has VR support. If you liked that, the recent Riven remaster also has VR support.
S C O R N (if you like Myst, give it a try. It feels very myst-like)
Hrot (boomer shooter, but if you like boomer shooters then you should give it a go).
If you’re at a place in your life where you’re trying to still find yourself: Night in the Woods. Especially if you’re a furry. This game is really fucking good. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll make you cry. It’ll make you miss home but also be glad you aren’t there anymore. It’ll make you question your place in life and who you are. Also, you can interact with things multiple times, make sure you don’t miss out on dialogue, you’ll regret it.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - This is hard to go into blind because it’s buggy as fuck and most people recommend some form of community patch even for your first playthrough. That said, play it on the highest difficulty. It’s unironically more fun once you get used to it. If it’s too hard though, don’t be fooled into thinking that dropping the difficulty will make it easier, the hardest difficulty is special (you can only take a few hits, but the same is true for most enemies), and dropping it down will result in enemy difficulty scaling becoming more traditional (buffing health and damage).
Portal (and Portal 2).
Bugsnax.
If I can throw in a movie too:
Willy’s Wonderland. It’s a Nicolas Cage movie and that’s all I’ll tell you. DO NOT LOOK UP THE TRAILER. I wouldn’t have watched it if I hadn’t seen the trailer, but the trailer also has huge spoilers. I’m not a huge movie person and I had to watch it after seeing the trailer, but again the trailer has spoilers. It is on my top-10 movies list now.
What happened to Edith Finch
What Remains of Edith Finch
Yeah. That one. I’m just going to stick with calling it Edith Finch.
What’s up with Edith Finch
Dude, where’s Edith Finch?
Soma
Thanks, just bought it.
Bioshock.
Red Dead Redemption (and RDR2).
Portal.
What about Portal makes it worth going in blind?
Its something of a mystery game. You wake up in an unfamiliar place and have a nebulous goal.
Letting the clues of the story build is a big part of the experience.
At its heart it’s a puzzle game so going in having seen someone do the puzzles will make it not as interesting.
I’m gonna go with Skyrim, the more unoptimized and aimless your playthrough is, the more fun you’ll have.
Just started playing Skyrim for the first time last week.
My character is optimized for ending fights before they begin – by liquifying the opponent’s noggin’ with one swing of her 2-handed warhammer.
Other than that, she travels the world collecting ingredients to cook, brew and smith stuff with.
I suspect that’s not an optimal build, but it’s fun.Perfect, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I believe Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic experience going in blind.
Especially Phantom Liberty. I went in blind, made decisions, lived to regret them, fucked up everything, and loved every minute of it.
- Snatcher
- Policenauts
- King’s Field (any of them, even Pilot Style)
- Halo 1-3 + ODST and Reach
- Yakuza 0
- Silent Hill 2 (the original, Enhanced Edition for PC is still the best way to experience SH2)
- Life is Strange (only the original game, completely ignore the fanbase, theyre all toxic)
- Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (too bad BioWare doesnt have a single good or competent writer anymore)
- NieR, both Gestalt and Automata
- Rule of Rose
- Dark Souls 1-3
- Elden Ring
- Kuon
- Armored Core (all of them, but the controls are hard to deal with before Nexus)
- Steel Battalion (only if you can find and afford the controller, otherwise dont bother)
I’m honestly not sure this applies to any of those games.
The Halo 1 and KOTOR twists do hit pretty hard if you somehow haven’t been spoiled. KOTOR has one of my favorite reveal sequences ever with showing you how much foreshadowing you missed, and Halo’s twist turns the game on its head.
yea and Halo Reach hits pretty hard if you don’t know what to expect too
However, Reach’s tagline was, “From the beginning, you know the end,” so there was an expectation that everyone playing would know how it was going to pan out.
Now i wonder about the opposite. Games that you should never go in blind XD
Dwarf Fortress, probably.
My Summer Car
Path of Exile is one of those games where you never stop learning new things and the ceiling is always higher than you think it is.
Most multiplayer games gain by already knowing mechanics, maps, characters, items, etc.
If you‘re an achievement/trophy hunter, there‘s a lot of those cause of missables
Personally I’d say none because I’m a firm believer games tend to be more fun when you go in blind.
