Recommend a PS4 game that I can actually play

The Game Room
41

Just saw a couple of The Witness videos, and…okay, maybe I should have been a little clearer when I would like a Myst-like game. I meant a game centered around exploration and with no time pressure (and no means no, not “no except for one utterly nerve-fraying sequence at the end of the game”) which fixed the huge problems with the Myst franchise. See, the problem with the original release of Myst was that if you missed the clue or didn’t interpret it correctly, you were completely screwed, or at best had to waste an inordinate amount of time on one stupid task. On my first few plays, I couldn’t even find the secret panel in the Stoneship Age…even after I knew it was there…because I didn’t know I had to turn up the brightness setting on my monitor. That’s why later version put hints in the game. No, you weren’t SUPPOSED to need them, but there had to be some safety valve to certain players didn’t quit in disgust. I’m not seeing one in The Witness, which means that the first time I run into something obtuse, or badly designed, or with an easy-to-miss clue, that’s it, I’ve just hit the wall (and I definitely do not have the patience for brute-forcing). This reviewer admitted to spending one hour on a single puzzle. That’s not a red flag, that’s a freaking atomic air raid siren. In short, not touching this one with a 5,000-mile pole.

As for Divinity/Legend of Heroes…they look nice. Really, really nice. And believe me, I love expanding my horizons; that’s pretty much why I got two IPads even though I’m nothing close to a tech junkie. The thing is, I did the research and…well, there’s a lot of…stuff. Inventory, stats, tactics, partnerships, status effects, all kinds of information I need to keep in mind. Is is the sort of thing a complete novice can pick up and work out? And while I’m at it, can I still make progress with less than the perfect setup? Think a Mega Man game, or Time Crisis 4 (I like to be flexible :)), where you ideally have the “right” weapon, but even without it it’s still possible to win the fight, it just takes more effort.

So to recap:
Fallout 4 - Everyone at least likes it, combat is a breeze if you use special targeting (and I will), potentially addictive.
God of War - Erm…hack and slash?
Horizon Zero Dawn - “Story” mode which makes combat…easier? Compelling protagonist. Pretty much just one task.
Lego games - Respawning at minor cost.

Let me know if I’m missing anything.

Arcite - Thank you for letting me know about Flower. I just got it and it seems like the perfect no-stress, wind-down, enjoy-the-scenery type of game. And with achievements! :smiley:

I’m leaning toward Little Big Planet 3, but there is one thing I absolutely must know, so I’m going to ask you point-blank: Is Sackboy sure-footed? In other words, does he or does he not slide all over the place and make it an absolute pain to get him to where he wants to be or jump with any kind of precision? If he does, that is an absolute dealbreaker. Never again. Never, never again.

42

Little Big PLanet 3 is a great game, but if you’re worried about coming up against platforming sections that you might not be able to get past, LBP3 Story Mode may well have them, the end game is not easy.

Story Mode in Horizon Zone Dawn makes combat easy. I don’t know how easy, I’ll be honest, but I bet it’s easier than LBP3.

43

Subnautica has a Creative mode with no food/drink requirements, no oxygen and no health meter. Plus structures can’t be damaged and you start with all the blueprints. It’s a complete “Tool around the ocean and build stuff” mode. Despite the mode description in the start-up, you can complete the story in Creative, making the game into a big stress free exploration-slash-walking sim.

44

Subnautica? Actually, that sounds kind of neat. (I miss Sub Culture.) Anywhoo…

PSN is having a flash sale from 1/18 thru the early morning of 1/21. A ton of games for cheap including Lego games. Lego City Undercover is 8.99! Also Thief which I know nothing about is 4.99. Jazz-Punk you might like is 3.74, Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut I know nothing about but I’m going to try it cuz it’s only 2.99. Also ZERO ESCAPE: THE NONARY GAMES is great but a bit pricey at 14.99. If you like that sort of thing.

45

It’s been 4 years since I played LittleBigPlanet 3, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don’t particularly remember the controls being hard or the character sliding around a lot.

DKW, while you don’t know until you try it, based on your comments about many other games upthread (many of which, to be fair, I’m unfamiliar with,) you might find Fallout 4 too complicated. It’s got an elaborate crafting system requiring you to collect lots of different parts/ingredients (“junk,” in-game) from lootable locations, obtain meat and/or grow crops for food recipes, a weapon customization system where you can mix-and-match parts with a million different options, and a leveling-up system with an overwhelming smorgasbord of perks to spend your points on. While I tend to get into such things when I play a game, based on your previous opinions, for example, the Assassin’s Creed Origins weapons system, it seems like you tend to find such features off-putting.

46

Tried Q.U.B.E. It’s sort of a poor man’s Portal.

On The Witness, spending one hour on a puzzle isn’t a ding, it’s value for money. On the other hand, about the timed part, [trigger warning] just one word: Grieg. Word to the wise.

47

It also has an in-between mode, where you have everything the survival mode has, except no food/drink requirements. That’s the one I prefer playing - it’s challenging, but not tedious (I also hate base building, and this keeps that at the minimum).

48

Just a belated reply to this - can’t speak to Legend of Heroes, but for Divinity, at lower difficulty levels you can ignore all of this stuff completely. At the lowest difficulty level (“Story”), you literally can’t die, so obviously it doesn’t matter what you do in terms of setup. At the second-lowest level (“Explorer”), you just need to do the obvious, standard RPG stuff - level up strength for your fighters and intelligence for your mages. The third level (“Classic”) gets difficult and requires a little bit of optimization but you can really win with any build. The last level (“Tactician”) is a MASSIVE leap and becomes exponentially harder - Tactician really requires pretty tight optimization but Classic can be won with a suboptimal build and Explorer can be won with basically any moderately intuitive approach.

And the story is really good for a game of this kind. A lot of characters are set up in a particular way that makes them feel very trope-y, but go in directions you don’t expect.

For what it’s worth, I hated Fallout 4. I thought it was dull and repetitive, and the degree to which it was ever a challenge was usually about making the right numbers go up rather than thinking tactically or cleverly. But I’m obviously in a tiny minority there.

49

There’s a mod for that.

50

At any rate, if the OP doesn’t like keeping track of a bunch of different stuff in order to navigate through the game, I doubt Fallout 4 will be his speed.

51

Yeah; Likewise for Legend of Heroes, you really don’t need to “optimize” anything on the default (“Normal”) difficulty level. If you can handle “I see this shop has weapon upgrades for my party, so I will buy as many as I can” then you’ve probably got the required level of mastery. If you can handle “This character misses more than I’d like, so I’m going to equip a thing with an accuracy bonus” or perhaps “I just lost to a boss that petrified my party, so this time, I will equip things that protect me from petrification!” then you are totally there. There aren’t even really weapon choices. It’s “This character uses one handed swords, so I’m going to get them the best one handed sword I can.” There are more choices in other equipment types, but you can totally muddle through. The game isn’t there for the challenge unless you push the difficulty setting WAY up.

You’ll also probably discover that you don’t need to keep much information “in your head” at all – anytime you are considering using a thing or taking an action, there will be an explanation of what it does.

52

“You should’ve led with that!” - Barbara Kean :slight_smile:

Well, that settles it. THIS is what I’ve been talking about all this time, THIS is what I need, THIS is what I need right now, something completely free of the stress of four decades or electronic aggravation. Just get in there and have a blast firing off sheets of flame and energy bolts and ice storms (or whatever), and I can optimize my setup or master advanced tactics on my own time.

I’m going to get back into a genre I’d completely left for dead ages ago. This…this means a lot to me. Thank you.

Oh, just tossing off another question offhand: to anyone who’s played Rock Band 4, how is the campaign mode? I find the song list underwhelming (per usual), but I might give this a try if has a really good story.

53

Awesome! Make sure you go with Divinity 2, not the original, which I think is leaden and boring with an order of magnitude worse writing. And, one minor story-related piece of advice. You get to choose between generating your own character or using one of six pre-generated characters as your “primary;” you can then recruit up to three of those pre-generated characters to make up your party. All six have interesting side stories. I strongly recommend that you do not play as the character named “Fane,” but that you do recruit him as a party member. Fane knows a lot about what’s going on in the plot, which he will share with you if he is a companion but won’t ever say out loud if he’s your main character.

54

Mafia 3 might be of interest. It’s fun but parts of it can be a bit frustrating (e.g.: storming the submarine in the Stones Unturned DLC*) until the player figures out the best way to handle those situations. Staying alive gets easier when Lincoln gets access to throwing knives.
*Most of the time, the trick is to go slow so you don’t aggro too many mooks and get swarmed. Here you need to go fast to avoid the boss with the RPG and duck into a little room to pick off the mook coming up the stairs.

56

Noone’s suggested Final Fantasy XV? I know it’s like two years old but they’re still updating it. There’s another DLC due in March. I just love the game honestly and was surprised how good it was since my experience with the FF games has generally been disappointing past VII. The guy who voiced the main protagonist, wow. I was just blown away by his acting, especially at end game.

Games I enjoy on the PS4:

Witcher 3 - amazing story, great voice acting, great graphics
Subnautica - More of an open world, very little direction game (but there IS an end goal) so maybe not your cup of tea
Dragon Quest XI - Another JRPG, though completely different side of the spectrum from FFXV, I still enjoyed it
Rime - An enjoyable, low stress little adventure/puzzle game
Stardew Valley - Time management, farming game in the same kinda realm as those old Harvest Moon games

Fwiw, my 11 year old daughter is OBSESSED with Hatsune Miku Project Diva. Dear god, I am so SICK of listening to those songs in the background but she is GOOD. She’s unlocked everything, has mastered 90% of the songs. I love rhythm games but I couldn’t handle this one. So I’m impressed with her lol

57

Okay, update. First, a note about achievements. While I’m not obsessed about them and I’ll gladly skip one or two that I find excessive or just not worth the effort, I do find them a useful indicator for how suitable a game is. If I can complete tasks in a nice, orderly progression, with a few others that I have to work on specifically, and maybe 10-30% that are out of reach, that’s fantastic. If I find that I can get hardly anything and even the basic achievements look way out of reach, that’s a pretty reliable sign that I made a bad purchase (Guitar Hero Live was a great example, and pretty much every fighting game ever would qualify). I always have an eye on achievements, and a very long dry spell is always a red flag.

Now then. Flower. I’ve had enough of this piece of junk as I can stand. (I wish I could say that I’m surprised at how quickly my opinion turned.) Granted, it had its share of annoyances, such as never being able to go backwards (hate that!) and the frequent jump cuts that continually disoriented me and made it really hard to stay on track. And the nonsensical-sounding achievements, one of which I couldn’t even figure out at all.

All of which would’ve been at least mostly tolerable were it not for the fourth level, which had a very long stretch where I didn’t have the faintest idea where I was supposed to go. I could see the new area in the distance, and I kept getting blown back because there was still the one thing I had to do in the previous area, which I didn’t even have a clue for because this game had to have the immersion. :mad: Argh! Frustrating!

But I figured that could have been an anomaly, so I soldiered on, to the fifth level, where I damn near got tendonitis from the horrible vibrations every time I touched something I shouldn’t. (Why doesn’t the game have any option to shut off vibration?? I had to go into system options to shut off this torment.)

But okay, should’ve gone for the permanent solution in the first place, live and learn. And the next thing I learned was that this game was hopeless. Sixth level. Restore the city. Forced-movement lanes, blowbacks, and the same problem as level 4 where I don’t now where to go, but with a much bigger area now.

Arcite, I’m not resentful…it was only about seven bucks, after all. But this is exactly why I have so much trouble getting testimonials that are actually helpful for me. Time and again I hear about things that are “really easy” and “relaxing”, and I run into frustrations and irritations and annoyances and dead ends that no one’s ever mentioned. Did I mentioned that WWE game I played for about 10 minutes before dumping it in the trash?

Little Big Planet 3 still looks good, though; will probably give it a chance sometime this year.

Got Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition this weekend. (I know 2’s supposed to be the good one, but again, this is my first RPG in over two decades; gotta walk before I can run.) Wow. How do I put this…it’s breathtaking simple and astoundingly complex at the same time, and seemingly designed to appeal to both little kids and raging militant ultra-hardcores (with a third level for the apparent centerline of this dichotomy). The story and gameplay…what little I’ve seen so far, anyway…are largely linear, and its not possible to get lost since 1. everything is mapped out to the last pixel (woot! :D) and 2. there aren’t a whole lot of places to go in the first place. There’s a gigantic smorgasbord of skills, items, and attributes, all of which are fully accessible by all characters (this appears to be the big selling point). I have no illusions that I’ll ever fully grasp all the things in this game, much less develop anything in the same friggin’ galaxy as strategic mastery, and I’m going to hack 'n slash 'n flail 'n fumble 'n generally look like a bungling rank novice in my first, oh, 75 fights or so, but that’s what Explorer level is for, right? Buddy, give me infinite health and I’ll swim through a lake of acid. In fact, I completely fail to understand why I’ve never seen games that have this ever trumpet it. I have to imagine that this would make an enormous difference for a lot of players, especially those that aren’t familiar with the genre. For crying out loud, Minecraft can’t say “We have a mode where nothing that can kill you ever shows up!” Anyway, looks beautiful, having fun just going around and doing stuff, I’m sure I’m going to have a blast, thank you storyteller for telling me about this.

A few more quickie notes:

Shantae Half Genie Hero: Finally figured out how to beat the first boss, and I also got the second, although it was way too frustrating. Taking a break from this for a while and trying to figure out what I did wrong. Maybe I got the wrong powerups, or maybe I’m just extremely shellshocked from all the freakishly difficult/horribly designed platformers I’ve played over the past couple of years (I got took a lot more hits from those mermaids than I expected). It looks good and I look forward to making it further.

Atari Flashback Classics Vol. 1: Someone here said it best - the idea of being able to play classic Atari games on the PS4 is better than actually playing classic Atari games on the PS4. Still, it’s good for what it is, a few minutes of blasting stuff. Will probably get the rest at some point. I would appreciate a proper paddle controller (anyone know where to get one?).

Brothers: Got a little bit into this. Yeah, it’s a walking simulator, mainly existing to show quirky animations and pretty graphics. Works for what it is, and I’m haven’t gotten the frustrations I did from Flower. Will get back to it again sometime.

Rime sounds like it’s right up my alley; the exploration and discovery aspects of Assassin’s Creed without the stress of combat or missions. Will definitely get it.

58

I got them. Initial impressions:

Rime - This looks really, really good. Heck, I’ll go a step further: This is exactly what I need right now. While it has the look of the Myst games, it’s not truly open-world, as tasks need to be done in a more or less specific order. Fortunately, there are subtle hints to help me along when I get stuck. “Dying” or getting stuck are non-issues; the game simply resets to the last safe area in the former case and the latter simply isn’t possible. Much like Myst, the main appeal is getting things done and watching amazing things happen, and it’s yet to disappoint so far. And for just $20 used? Best buy! (Or whatever the equivalent is here.)

Subnautica - Well, thank goodness for Creative, because otherwise I would’ve lasted for all of, oh, two minutes before running away screaming. This one’s going to be a long haul, no question about it. The biggest problem is that, much like Minecraft, the wildlife is everywhere and you have no control over what they do, but whereas the worst a stray cow or pig could do was get in the way of your cart path, the fauna in Subnautica do not like you and will mess you up every chance they get. I called up a submersible craft and got out of it for a few seconds, and it was unceremoniously yoinked. This is the single most hostile environment I’ve ever seen in any game, and needless to say I’m going to be taking a lot of guidance from whatever wiki I can find. There is potential here, I can see it, but so far it’s been a real baptism of fire and I’m going to have to take it slow. Am looking forward to contributing something to the thread here!

Divinity - Okay, here’s what I found out. While there are a tremendous number of options, it’s less a matter of having to hit the perfect combination or get walloped as different approaches to the same problem. Do you intend to fight every stubborn sentry you meet, negotiate with them, or hide in the shadows and sneak past? Do you want to learn lockpicking to get past those doors or smash your way through with brute force? I think that in time it could be managable. As for combat, Explorer Mode makes it a breeze, and thus far I’ve taken almost no damage from nearly every fight. Emphasis on “almost” and “nearly”. You need SOME level of knowledge of the combat system, SOME skill, SOME experience. And as I’m going in completely raw, that worries me a bit. Again, what’s “easy” for a 15-year combat veteran is anything but for, well, me. Will I be okay if I have some sort of healing? As for Story Mode, I haven’t delved far into that yet, but it is possible to get killed. You have to really work at it, of course, and anyone with a little sense should have no trouble surviving. “A little sense” for a programmer, that is, and if it’s possible to get killed by friendly fire and environmental hazards, there could be others…check that, there almost certainly are others. I really like the look of this and would hate to have to give it up because I ran up against an absolute terror or an instant-death trap that anyone could have very easily avoided. :rolleyes: Anyone know the best place to learn about these? Main site isn’t much help in this regard.

Will probably get the rest of the Atari Flashback Classics soon.

Thanks to everyone who responded. Seriously, I don’t know how I possibly could’ve gotten such good suggestions otherwise. It feels pretty good to be back in the saddle, to remind myself that there is still fun and beauty in this hobby I’ve overindulged in for four decades.

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I’m glad you found some games you’re having fun with. :slight_smile:

60

Couple of late suggestions.

Submerged. Currently 2 dollars at the Steam store. Offer ends at the end of 02/12/2019. Descriptioin from Steam: “Submerged is a third-person combat-free game in which you explore a mysterious flooded city and discover the beauty of desolation in vast outdoor environments. You take on the role of Miku, a young girl who has brought her wounded brother to the city in their small fishing boat. Navigate the flooded city streets by boat, scale the drowned buildings, and use your telescope to scour the city for the supplies needed to save your dying sibling.” Who doesn’t ever die, by the way.

Journey. A classic from 2012. Another ruined world, you walk through a desert, explore the ruins of a fallen civilization, and have a transcendent experience. It had a multiplayer aspect but I suspect too few people are playing it now for it to kick in. If you are alone and in the same place as another player you will see each other. You can’t talk or interfere with each other, but you can guide, simply by going ahead and waiting for them to catch up. Or be guided. It was weird.

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Have you tried Skyrim Special Edition? It’s a massive open world fantasy game. Combat difficulty is adjustable, there’s a main story and multiple subquests/sidequests with tons of random exploring available as well.