Gaming

I remember enjoying the original Carmageddon quite a bit.

You think about a Mix of Thief and dishonored, i guess? Least Puzzle, more Sandbox stealth but Open for the Player to approach the Situation (and Not so much Tool/scenario Drive Like the Hitman Games). I would add Safe zones/Houses as in Nobody finds you there. So you can avoid running away from every enemy on the Map, which offen Happens If you have to flee. This could add some kind of inbetween restock or Adaptation options etc. Think espionage Thrillers and so in.

Is it weird that I think of Halo 3: ODST as one of the real detective games? Not because it's particularly dedicated to being that, but because the default ending of the game is that you don't solve the mystery and leave unsatisfied. You're just some grunt and what's actually going on is above your paygrade. Learning the truth is a bit of a pain in this ass but it's also basically half of the game's story. I think it was a really ballsy move for what it's worth.

...Also Goddamn how is ot that no one has managed to make something like Theif again outside of Gloomwood (which is admittedly rad as hell?) I only managed to play Theif recently and it's still one of the best stealth games ever. Modern games need to learn how to leave the player alone for a while and let them cook.

People brought this up at the time, and the go-to problem with it is if you go too far back, like your 1812 example, you have to deal with reloading a gun being one of the most time-consuming actions you can perform. WWI was taboo for a while due to chemical and trench warfare, and for the most part, devs still shy away from it.

Inscryption?

If you haven't looked recently, you might take another look.

I felt the same way when Slay the Spire came out in 2019 -- not a lot of similar games at the time, and I couldn't figure out why more developers hadn't made similar games, as it seemed like a very good match for indie studios. But there have been a whole lot of games that came out since then.

Searching Steam for games tagged as single-player and deckbuilder, and sorting by user review

I get over 600 hits, almost all of which came out in the past three years. I'd say that single-player deckbuilders -- and note that I'm assuming that you're talking about deckbuilder games, not, say, solitaire implementations or similar, as I think that there are pretty good entrants there -- are actually doing pretty well.

Slay the spire? It's a deck builder rouge like. Excellent game. Dunno if it's what your looking for but I highly recommend it.

God, I so badly want more.

There's maybe a chance that the Adam Jenson trilogy gets finished up, but the Embracer situation has made that less clear.

Searching Steam for games tagged as lovecraft and horror and sorting by user review gives me about 500 entries.

I think that Lovecraft's setting is actually virtually the only fictional setting where you're spoiled for choice, because Lovecraft permitted other people to use his setting. Like, you only get to do a Star Wars game if Lucasarts licenses it, because they leverage their copyright on the setting. Most people and companies who create a setting don't allow other people to freely use it, and copyright law permits them to make that restriction. But Lovecraft was unusual in that he specifically encouraged other people to build on his world.

Maybe Robin Hood or a small handful of others from history, like Greek or Norse mythology, that developed before copyright law had really become the norm.

I dunno. Maybe there should be some kind of Creative Commons license that permits use of setting and maybe characters, while still keeping an individual work copyrighted, to encourage creation of collaboratively-developed settings like that.

This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.

One of the top entries I see on Steam -- though I've never played it -- is an Overwhelmingly Positive-rated game, Disfigure, that appears to be a Lovecraftian action roguelike that just came out a couple of months ago.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2083160/Disfigure/

EDIT: Well, hmm. Someone tagged it as Lovecraftian, but the author doesn't really describe it that way. Just creepy.

It's not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse -- don't remember whether it was this community or not -- trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn't a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don't have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.

I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier -- maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn't as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don't think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games -- Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.

Here's a list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mecha/comments/yb52yl/compilation_list_of_almost_all_mecha_games_for_pc/

Armored Core got a release in 2023 and seems to be good.

What about MechWarrior 5?

GW2 has gotten way better throughout the years.

You probably mean the party based instanciated MMORPG? Not many around of those, that's right.

I never finished all GW1 addons.

It's sad the closest recent other entry is like CK3 a totally different genre really

I miss the patrician series

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkv05ZO7d8I

Tunic is another example that he goes over in the video. There might be some others mentioned but it's been a while since I watched this.

I haven't been playing any point & click entrants since...God. There were some hidden object games that I got when I got Steam. I guess maybe outside that subgenre, Samorost and Machinarium, maybe a bit over a decade back.

But I dunno if the situation is honestly all that grim.

Searching for "Point & Click" on Steam and sorting by user review.

I get over 4,000 entries, and the top-rated entries are dominated by releases in the top few years.

You might be thinking specifically of adventure games, but even if I add the adventure tag, it's still over 3,000 entries.

I wanted to counter this but I can't. Most of the mascot platformer-esque games now are imitating some other, older mascot platformer. A Hat In Time just doesn't have any real gimmicks. IDK if Pumpkin Jack does (I really need to try it at some point). Maybe Froggun but I imagine it has even less of a story and it's more of a puzzle game?