So, Minecraft has two different sets of modes. There’s Creative, Survival, and Adventure which control your abilities. Creative means you have immediate access to anything in the minecraft inventory. Want a diamond pick? Rightclick and take it. No mining and no crafting necessary. Also, mobs don’t regard you as hostile in this mode. Survival is what it says on the tin. You’re trying to survive. You have to physically have the materials to make items, mobs will treat you as hostile and so on. Adventure is pretty much only for doing puzzle maps and stuff that you’ve downloaded from the internet. It restricts the blocks you can break and so on so you’re not tempted to cheat as much.
The other modes are Peaceful, Easy, Normal and Hardcore. Peaceful means your hunger never goes down and you regain health really quickly. Also, no mobs spawn. Easy and Normal let your health decrease and mobs will spawn but they’re easier to kill and do less damage in Easy. Hardcore is tougher than Normal and if you die even once, it deletes your world. It is not a mode for us casuals.
If you are interested in Minecraft, I suggest Survival on Peaceful. Once you’ve made a bed, a bunch of torches and generally created a nice little farm, you can change to easy and see how good you were at protecting against mobs. You’ll still be able to die but it will be from doing things like digging straight down or running off cliffs rather than getting sneak attacked by a creeper or traveling too far and getting hounded by skellies before you can get back to your bed.
:smack: Yep, that would work too!
I’m willing to buy a $2.50 Steam key for Terraria and sell it to you for $20, just to help out 
Because of this thread, I’ve been playing Banished for hours. Sure, I’ve only made it out of one winter in one game but that’s not because people are starving. It’s because I want to build the perfect village and keep making rookie mistakes. Instead of living with the mistake, I start over.
I’m really liking it.
It’s not really all that complex, the various concepts are introduced bit by bit and apart from open sandbox/multiplayer games where there’s a colonization rush you’ll rarely be in a hurry to do anything in the campaign. So you can take your time, bulldoze if you made mistakes (you’ll only lose the time it’ll take to harvest the resources needed for your next big planning screw-up and tax the cocks off your chumps :p), it’s pretty forgiving on the whole. At least **1470 **was, again I have only played a few missions of 2070.
That said it does really help to have a printout or scratch pad with the various buildings & their respective resource input/output. The reason being that they’re deliberately all over the (mathematical) map to make you plan ahead, so that for example this iron mine produces 5 metal/cycle but this tool shop needs 3 metal/cycle to turn out 1 tool/cycle while that factory needs 2 tools/cycle to function at full output… and so on.
So it can get a bit equationey at first once you get into caring for the finicky needs of the upper upper class without wasting anything or having bottlenecks/surpluses you can’t flog off :). But in a good way ! Add to that the space optimization problems and I was in OCD heaven :D.
The amazing thing is that it was made by one guy. It’s not all that much my kind of game but I can see why others would like it.
And yes, if you overexpand, it’s harsh. Hunger and cold will slowly kill your village.
It’s what Harvest Moon would look like if it had been adapted by a depressive Russian.
If you want depressive Russian games, I got your back, man. I have a soft spot for them so I can recommend a few particularly existentially bleak ones, you need only ask 
There are no objectives, no score, no winning or losing. A lot of people don’t even consider it a game. You mainly just experience it.
I hereby ask.
Also, French ones.
Only ten bucks? Getting that myself.
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum, although it would probably be more towards $10
Weasel,
You could get several games if they’re too cheap.
Perhaps you can pay yourself 2$ for the next step and get Stealth Bastard Deluxe. Then pay yourself a bit more for the next few steps and get a 10-15$ game until you’re done. It’s more about giving your something to look forward to and enjoy, correct? If so, you don’t need it to be one thing, it can be several things.
Regarding Civ, Civ 5 is a good deal more streamlined than Civ IV was. There’s a remake of Civ II that you can play online called Freeciv. You could get an infinity of those.
First, there’s the big one : Pathologic. Now, it’s ugly, it’s clunky, it’s slow going, and it’s somewhat badly translated. But bear with that because it’s also delightfully oppressive and weird.
The premise of the game is that you’re one of three people who showed up in a small town in the backwoods of Russia, and there’s a strange disease going around. Also monsters. Your only real goal is to survive 12 days, but if you want to understand what the hell is going on (or want to save people) you’re going to have to do a little more than that. Each of the three characters has a very different P.O.V. on the story and can uncover things the others could not, or relate to the various people in the town in different ways.
It’s pretty awesome.
Then you’ve got** The Void**. Describing this game is… problematic. It’s kind of a first person shooter (but not really), and kind of a survival horror game (but not really) where you use raw colors to fight unrelenting oppressive… things, in order to free an emotion of your choosing from the bleak underworld where you’re unceremoniously dumped.
As I said, it’s hard to describe, it’s very focused on aesthetics and philosophy, and playing it feels very surreal. It also looks beautiful.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention tactical RPGs - Russians love those. There are a bunch out there. My fave is probably Marauder:Man of Prey, which was made by the folks who did 7.62mm. The premise is that Russia has collapsed as a nation, the central government barely exists anymore and nobody enforces any laws or orders. So it’s pretty much post-apocalypse - everyone for themselves, looting, raiding, famine, bullets as currency. The hero is former Russian military but is only concerned with scrounging food and keeping his wife and House secure.
You will probably wind up laying mines and barricades around so that the locals (who hate you for hogging all the food you find) don’t storm the place. So, yup, cheerful game 
French games, well, those mostly get translated & distributed just fine, so there’s not really much to tell there. You probably played a few without realizing it :). But **Syberia **is probably worth a mention : it’s based on a series of comics by Benoit Sokal. Sort of a *Myst *clone, and quite pretty.
But if you want a good game *set *in France, try Gabriel Knight 3. It’s a point n click adventure game which revolves around a real life mystery in a small town of southern France. There are some unbearable puzzles (that fucking cat moustache…) but I really liked the investigation aspect of the game, and the fact that the world keeps ticking regardless of what you do - either you’re in the right place at the right time to eavesdrop on a conversation or you’re not. While you’re off doing one thing the rest of the characters are doing their own thing, so the whole thing feels realistic and alive.
There’s also Remember Me, which is a sort of Uncharted meets Deus Ex. Set in future Paris, either utopic or dystopic depending on your point of view, the premise is that a company has found a way to tap into people’s memories : deleting them, creating them at will. This in turn has led to a Brave New World kind of dictature, where most people spend their lives hooked up to fake memories that make them happy, erase all the bad/traumatic ones and the big bad government has jackboots everywhere just beneath the surface. You play an action girl who winds up in a rebel group that tries to liberate the people… not always by ethical means (in fact, you’ll wind up brainwashing a few people by editing their memories to basically rewrite their personalities without their knowledge or consent).
The gameplay is sort of eh - you’re got your basic third-person platforming/parkouring, some hand to hand combat arenas, and the memory puzzles which are fun but few and far between but nothing to write home about. The artistic direction however is top notch, and future Paris features tons of little architectural details that made this Parisian go “hey, I know that place !” and “oh cool, they put this in !”
Remember Me was on sale on Steam yesterday evening BTW, it probably still is.
In addition to Kobal2’s list, it would be remiss to not hop the border into Ukrainian game developers and mention Cryostasis. From Wiki:
Also the STALKER and Metro games which make good atmospheric use of their Soviet-built settings (Chernobyl/Pripyat and the Moscow Metro system respectively)
Yeah, I didn’t mention **Metro **and **STALKER **because they’ve made it into the Western mainstream at this point and are pretty well known, but they’re great too of course. Bleak and depressing too, naturally :).
Same goes for the **Witcher **games - technically Polish, but infused with a similar post-Soviet “everything is terrible and everybody’s a self-serving asshole” feel and spirit to them. But there again, you probably didn’t need me to hear about those two.
I’ve never played **Cryostasis **though, only watched part of a Let’s Play of it. It seemed to have some interesting mechanics, but got a bit same-ey after a while.
Kerbal Space Program is easier than it sounds. At heart, all you need to do is build something that rockets upwards until it’s out of the atmosphere, then turns ninety degrees and rockets sideways so that it misses the Earth when it falls back down. Do that, and you’re in orbit. Once you can do that, you can start playing around with making it more efficient, carry bigger loads, fly further, etc.
Yeah, I sort of assumed as much but didn’t know if you were doing that or just staying firm to the “Russian” thing. Cryostasis was enough off the path though that I thought it warranted a mention. It’s also caught in publisher limbo so it’s off Steam and I think the only way to get it is to buy an old boxed copy.
Kobal,
Sounds like you enjoy games from Ice-Pick Lodge, they also made Knock Knock which looks like a 2D haunted house game. Have you tried it?
Russians must really love DayZ.