Im tired of having to spend thousands of hours to stand a chance against others, im tired of video games turning into a second job. Im tired of playing against sweatlords who systematically abuse every single exploit they know of to ruin servers and destroy people’s fun. Im tired that every new game has to be an esport now. Im tired.
So yeah im fully done with mp games. However i still like games, and recently i realised i basically only enjoy singleplayer games. So yeah, Anyone got good/niche/unknown singleplayer game recommendations?
EDIT: im an idiot i didnt specify what sort of games i enjoy lol. Sadly ive already played disco elysium, i actually got 100% on it on steam, hah.
Recently I played Control, and i consider that title to be one of the best games ever made, so i really enjoy that kind of game but oddly the RE4 remake that resembles Control bored me so bad I turned it off 2 hours in. Basically I really enjoy shooters and games woth very strong narratives.
But my favorite game by far has to be RE:Village, that game blew my tiny mind, everything about it was amazing, the impeccable art direction, the gunplay, the enemies and the story, just 
. But by far the greatest thing about that game was the winter mood, i played it in the dead of winter and love the season, it genuinely shaped my expectation of what video games should be like. I also had a lot of fun hunting treasures and prizes down.
I really like factory games. Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Modded Minecraft, and Mindustry all are basically endless entertainment because you can always keep expanding. There's also Factorio which is the OG but I can't recommend it because I haven't played it.
I also enjoy roguelikes when I don't have the time to sit down and play a factory game for hours. Noita, Hades, Slay the Spire, One Step From Eden, and Enter the Gungeon are my favorites but there's essentially an endless number of roguelikes, each with very different mechanics and varying levels of difficulty. Some you can play for thousands of hours looking for secrets to trying to create the perfect build, like Noita, but generally they're all a lot of fun even if you don't play them to that extent.
Another genre that I think doesn't get a lot of attention outside of Rimworld are management sim games. There's Dwarf Fortress, which kinda has a reputation for being incredibly deep with simulation mechanics that make every fortress come alive. You can really get lost in the game just trying to get a very efficient fortress that makes your dwarves happy, but it's also open for you to do anything you like, so you could try taking over the world in 10 years or making a giant soap factory complex. There's another pretty notable game in the genre, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, that is a little tough to get into because it's a Chinese game focused on Wuxia fiction, with a lot of references to Chinese culture. However, once you get over the initial difficulty spike, and read a couple guides, it's also a lot of fun. You can make a sect of dragon slaying demigods, pushing your characters' power level to infinity with a thousand different mechanics, each one a little more esoteric than the last.
Edit: Just saw you said you don't really like management games like Cities Skylines, but you really love Planet Coaster because you like placing the bushes one by one. If so, I think you might actually enjoy Satisfactory the most out of all the games I listed. It's incredibly relaxing and therapeutic to connect conveyor belts. You also said you liked narrative stuff and enjoyed Control. You might enjoy Bioshock, they're pretty classic games and despite some pretty questionable parts in Infinite, they have solid narratives that a lot of people enjoy.
Comrade. Let's build communism together
That chinese game seems interesting, is it hard to find?
It's on Steam. If you want to get started, I'd recommend going in blind and playing until you lose (might take less than 3 hours of play time, maybe 8 hours if you're particularly lucky/make good choices). Then, join the game's discord server and read through the foundation guide and start over. I'll warn you, though, if you don't like games like Cities Skylines you might find the non-combat parts of the game pretty boring (you can fast forward at 10x speed though, and pause whenever something bad happens).
Never played cities skyline so I’m going in blind, wonder if i’ll enjoy it or not
DSP is goated. I've started Satisfactory and it just isn't grabbing me like DSP did. The absolute scale of that game and how it turns into a logistics hybrid after you get the towers is just so fucking good.
Glad you enjoy DSP. Satisfactory suffers from early progression just being way too slow and tedious (biomass generators
) but it does get a lot better when you unlock trains. They let you decouple factories from one another, and scale your production a lot higher. They also make building factories a lot less time consuming since you can just make common components in mass in their own factories and simplify the factories of higher tier parts. For example, produce motors and stators in their own factory, so your modular engines, smart plating, turbomotors, etc all can reuse those components and you don't have to make them from scratch in each separate factory. Modularity is king in factory games.
God this is giving me flashbacks of the "from raw vs intermediate component" convo for DSP lol. This is part of what draws me to these games is that there is no wrong way to play them. I think my mall isn't in the best position but I did set it all up in a way that I think I can run trains by the storage containers. Not sure how that all works yet tho.
I haven't gotten to motors and such yet but yeah I def wanna avoid making those in house then?
Also biomass was anxiety inducing becuse the Internet says plants don't grow back. I think they do tho? I still felt stressed trying to rush coal and putting my starter factory in the absolute worse spot.
Oh it is true that there is no wrong way to play, of course. Doing things in the way I said is gonna mean you'll have to thing harder about logistics because you'll have more (smaller) factories. It's just what I found to be a much easier way to play so I didn't need to make 13 different recipes happen in each advanced factory, instead I could frontload making basic components in simple factories, and export them. Is it ideal? It's still up to you.
And the plants don't grow back, but it is basically impossible for you to run out of biomass unless you actively go out of your way to use biomass power for hundreds of hours. And don't worry too much about where you place your factory, everything you build in the first couple Space Elevator phases is gonna be much smaller than the factories you'll build later. Think of it like the starting planet in DSP, it basically doesn't matter what you did in it once you branch out.
It's funny because on my second playthrough of DSP I made my starter planet also my science and logistics hub with my rockets on the inner planet in that system. I basically stayed at home unless I needed to go set up like a spin farm and I would bring that home. Dang I need to set my mods back up and play that again lol.
I do have coal set up on Satisfactory though so I have 600mw to play with. I'm using half right now. So the stress isnt there and I can focus on starting to do research and such.