When I hear about a new game, I usually read the first sentence or two on Wikipedia. I rule out games described as certain genres or types, like soulslike or online-only multiplayer games. Then, I check reviews on a site like Metacritic. If the critic or user reviews (doesn’t need to be both) are good enough, I add it to a list to play.
I also do this with movies and tv. Obviously, with sequels/series I know a little bit more about the games/movies/shows but I still go in as blind as possible.
The handful of times I went into movie theaters and randomly picking a movie off the board without knowing anything about them were good times.
Outer Wilds. A game that is best gone into blind. Seriously.
I tried so hard to get into this game but just felt like I was blindly bumbling around for no reason half the time and got bored. I probably only made it 5 hours in so maybe it gets better but I just wasn’t even sure what I should do. Maybe I’m doing something wrong because I really want to enjoy it.
It’s different than a lot of games because it doesn’t tell you want to do.
You explore and, as you do, reading the lore start to see threads of a mystery. As you pull on those threads you come across others.
Each time you’re going out exploring something you can potentially get stuck trying to figure out one thing. But in that case there are other clues you can look into and I find doing that helped a lot.
But it does go against the grain since there are no power ups, upgrades, keys and abilities. All progression happens because of the knowledge you have. I can start a new game and go straight to the end because I have the knowledge and the knowledge is what you’re gaining when playing the game.
Because of that it goes against years of gameplay mechanic expectations. So many games “pad” content with text that when I first started I just tapped through the text looking for anything that was color coded as being important. Except that in this game it’s all useful. There is no color coding because it’s a narrative and mystery that you’re uncovering.
That being said as fantastic as it is not every game is for everyone. If you decide you want to give it another try let me know and I can give you some slight spoiler hints that may budge you in a direction. A kind of “what about this” kind of thing that can set you down a path towards what the game is narratively doing.
Thanks I appreciate this. I’m busy with some other games right now but I will remember this comment and if I go back to it in the near future I’ll get ahold of you :)
I look forward to it if you ever do
I bought it! Idk anything about it, but it’s in a stack of about 5 physical games on my to play list. I’m also excited for Disco Elysium
I’ve literally said to my wife that if I ever have temporary amnesia to get me to play this again because it’s that special
Same with No Man’s Sky. It’s one hell of an experience
Oh yeah, what an incredible game. I usually don’t mind spoilers for media, but I was careful to avoid them for this one, because everyone swore down how important it was to go in blind, and now I’ve played it, I completely agree. Sometimes I wish I could erase it from my memory so I could play it for the first time again, but actually, I don’t want that, because then I’d be a person who had never played Outer Wilds. It’s probably the most sublime game I’ve ever played.
And now I’m partaking in a key cultural touchstone amongst Outer Wilds fans: being aggravatingly cryptic when talking about one of my favourite games, what fun.
The only other part that gets close (but is never quite the same) is watching other let’s plays as people ponder, explore, and have those AHA moments. And experiencing second hand the emotional roller coaster as they realize something and then uncover something that completely changed their understanding again.
Eelis on YouTube does Supercuts of those and every now and again I’ll watch one just to experience it vicariously through them.
I’ve stopped getting into hype for Media. It’s allowed me to go into everything blind, and truly experience it without some predetermined expectations.
I am thoroughly enjoying gaming, movies and TV again. twists are actually twists again. I get to learn the world and backstories as they’re told by the story tellers.
It makes gaming fun again for me. like it was when I was a kid and just got my first nintendo
I don’t like getting spoilers, but I’ll read the reviews, the description of the game by the publisher, and 2-5 minutes of let’s play footage (in the middle) to make sure I’m not wasting my money. That strategy worked well with The Witcher 3.
I’ll occasionally pull up videos if I’m unsure. But I just look for like 10 seconds of gameplay to see how it looks.
I look at genre, average review, and watch maybe 30 seconds to a minute of a game play type trailer. If it looks interesting, I’ll add it to my wishlist and buy it when I can afford it. I’ve been let down a few times, and absolutely lost my soul to a few games that I knew nothing about prior.
Hello my twin!
Yeah, I tend to operate the same way. I stopped watching movie trailers maybe ten years ago because there are only five basic movie trailers, and they all hit the same tired beats. I hate them all.
- Comedy
- Adventure
- Drama
- Horror
- Nolan (just pick one of the above and put a BWAAAAAAA in it)
I’ve been playing Another’s Crabs Tresure. It’s a souls like but you’re a crab. It’s been pretty fun and challenging so far. Never been a souls fan but a new game at $30 is hard to pass on
I am pretty much the opposite. I have been burned in the past… things like difficulty (esp. co-op games not really adapted at all for single-player), inventory/loot, hunger etc being annoying. Or sometimes games start out fine and then just eventually lose me.
In fact for some games without much replay value I’ll just watch a let’s play of it and get 90% (or perhaps better because it’s not me dealing with nonsense) of the experience.
Then again, I also just have mostly stopped buying games. And the last thing I bought off Steam (in 2020) was one of those things I wanted for a while and it ended up being a disappointment for me.
The only thing I’ve been burned on with difficulty is souls style games. Anything else I can handle.
I do the same thing. I just finished the game “Stray” without watching any trailers or video reviews. Just the steam written reviews.
I really enjoyed it.
I used to get some very good games out of discount bins and off the bulk used shelves. Lots of games that didn’t get the a-list treatment in advertising or were from smaller studios. You could pick up 5-6 games for $30 so it was worth the risk of buying them based solely on the cover.
Sometimes games are so bad that they’re so good. It’s hard to explain… but sometimes it’s true lol
When GameStop purged their 360 and PS3 titles I drove around to so many stores lol. Got so many awesome games at $1-5ish
I did that, not so much anymore after Rockstar published State of Emergency on the PS2 (Am I showing my age? lol) and it was absolute dog shit. Now I tend to wait after day one just to be sure.
From the title, I thought OP would just look at a cover and buy the game, ignoring reviews. This is not the case, there’s some research on the (perceived) quality of the game, so I wouldn’t consider this unpopular.
