Games You Might Not Have Tried - ep 7 - Find New Games - Extra Credits

It has been far too long since we did one of these. So, you know the rules. These might not all be good, but they've all got something interesting to them, and they've all flown under the radar to some degree. Here we go. The Talos Principle. The Talos Principle is basically Portal's darker, philosophical, slightly pretentious older cousin. While it doesn't have portals exactly, its core gameplay relies on the same type of lateral thinking and puzzle solving that Portal does. What's interesting about it is that while it doesn't have Portal's humor, it delves fairly deeply into many of the core questions about what makes us human. Sometimes it does stumble a bit into philosophy 101, asking questions that you'll literally see in an intro to philosophy textbook. But for how unabashedly it pursues those questions, it manages to do a fairly good job of

staying on the right side of pretentious. It also gets some shockingly compelling human moments if you follow the core narrative about the prior events of the world it takes place in. Just know in advance that you are in for a lot of reading on this one. Lots of text. The pacing's a bit broken by its do some puzzles, read three pages of text, do some more puzzles structure, but if you can get past that, it's definitely worth checking out. Also, do you know how hard it was to describe this game without spoilers? If you did, you'd be super impressed right now. This War of Mine. This War of Mine may be one of the most powerful game experiences I've had in the last few months. It's a game about being a civilian in an occupied city with fighting raging in the streets.

Your goal isn't to win the war or to conquer your enemies, but rather to simply survive until the fighting stops. What's amazing about it is that they simply lifted most of their mechanics from zombie survival games. Scavenging, base building, managing a small team. All they had to do was remove the zombies. This makes it a compelling experience. It feels like a game that you might just play for fun, but then you'll hit one of those gut-wrenching moments. Or you'll find yourself playing just to win, and you'll make this horrible decision along the way to achieve that. And then the reality of it hits you, and you feel terrible, and you remember how actual people have to live through this horror and make those choices. And maybe you just have to lie down for a while. Darkest Dungeon. Usually we try to steer away from things still in early access, but James has

dropped too many hours into this one not to talk about it. It's probably the most harrowing traditional game experience he's played in quite some time. It's a standard roguelike, but it asks the question, what would exploring these endless dungeons actually do to a person psychologically? So, while you're trying not to get your party killed, you're also trying not to have them become insecure, arrogant, or outright insane. It's dark, it's brutal, it's full of despair. It feels hopeless in all the right ways, and yet you'll find yourself soldiering on. If you're looking for a challenging roguelike with some novel new mechanics to balance, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than Darkest Dungeon. Never Alone.

Never Alone is a platformer that dives into the legends of the Iñupiat people of Alaska. It has some great, if a little basic, multiplayer platforming and is the perfect thing to play with somebody who perhaps doesn't play too many games. But what really makes it stand out is just how rich the source material is. This game was commissioned by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and developed in direct collaboration with them and the care and love for these stories shows. As you advance through the game, you unlock Discovery Channel-style interviews with the tribe members talking about the Iñupiat culture and practices. And while in some ways that may sound a little lame, I found myself completely drawn in. When I had just returned a magic drum to a medicine man and I saw the screen flash, "Video unlocked. Drumming in

Iñupiat culture." I was like, "All right, let's check that out." A reaction I probably wouldn't have had if I'd stumbled across the same snippet on TV. Just one word of warning. As the title implies, this game is way better as a co-op experience. The actual platforming in the single player is quite weak. Sunless Sea. Would you like some more Cthulhu-oid steampunk Victorian weirdness from the makers of Echo Bazaar? Well, look no further than Sunless Sea. Gone are all the time systems and the gating mechanisms. This is a single player experience where you take to a ship and explore the waters around Fallen London to your heart's content. As always, their writing is excellent.

Although, as with The Talos Principle, I hope you like reading. You'll need to to really get the most out of this game. The world itself is unbelievably expansive, though. They're continuously updating the game, but even as it stands, you could probably spend the rest of the year just playing this game and not necessarily see everything in it. The only problem here is the traversal. The browser-based Echo Bazaar worked because you could instantly navigate between stories, allowing you to quickly chop through the busy work. But here, there's no fast travel, so you'll end up at a point where you find that 80% of your time is stuck doing mindless FedEx quests. This was a huge negative for me, but it's a testament to just how compelling the world is that I have spent so many hours on this game anyway. Mount & Blade: Vikings

Okay, so this one isn't exactly new, but I had to put it on here because Mount & Blade needs to get on one of these lists, and Vikings does some surprising things with the formula. First off, for any of you who haven't tried Mount & Blade, it's a medieval RPG sandbox. It's not fantasy, just medieval, and it's unbelievably expansive. You can be a trader, a mercenary. You can work your way up to being a lord or a king. You manage provinces and politics and fight alongside your troops in third-person battles. Every troop has their own class advancement tree, and eventually you're going to have 200 of them in your party. Every lord has their own opinion of you that you have to juggle and manage as you try to rise from nothing to ruling a kingdom. But Vikings adds a central storyline to the game and places it in a very real

historical setting. If you like Norse history, or even if you just watched that Vikings show on the History Channel, you'll find yourself crossing paths with all sorts of famous historical characters. But more than that, I found a surprising number of difficult moral choices built into Vikings, and these moral choices were made all the more striking because they weren't on a morality meter, and they were embedded into a world that I could think of as my own. If you can deal with the graphics that look like they belong on a PS2, and anything I've said about this game sounds interesting, the Mount & Blade series is probably one of the best bargains out there at this point. And finally, Life is Strange. I love this game. It's silly, and it's a little ham-handed

at times, but it's nothing if not earnest. Life is Strange is a side project by the guys who made Remember Me, and despite clearly having a far smaller budget, I think it's the better game. It fully embraces being a Telltale style adventure game with a plot like My So-Called Life if Angela was capable of reversing time. And it's got a soundtrack right out of an indie film. The lip syncing is pretty terrible and there are some animation issues, but if you can look past that stuff, you're going to find a game that isn't great, but it's just the right kind of good. Earnest, innocent, and exactly what you need if life is just too heavy sometimes.

Thanks for watching. Go enjoy some cool games. See you next week.