Fair warning: the rest of this post has mild player character capability spoilers and a judgemental tone. No mention of puzzles or solutions, just observations about how people are playing the game and some talk about my own experience with it.

Like Outer Wilds, this game involves a lot of reading and connecting the dots on one’s own. Unlike Outer Wilds, a lot of the puzzling happens outside the game entirely, providing you no in-game method of remembering things or solving some puzzles. Very early on, the game tells you to keep a notepad for it, and it quickly becomes more than a suggestion. In my hubris, I didn’t take any notes until a fair way into the game, and had to basically repeat some of my earlier forays to get information I had thought to be extraneous.

Anyway I’m approaching 120 hours spent and having a blast with it still. I feel like I’m approaching or in the late game, as some of the things I need to do involve having already solved and re-used info from previous puzzles, sometimes more than once.

Have you played the mainline souls titles? The NG+ system in Nioh 2 leads out into new unique maps (The abyss) rather than being the same game with revamped enemy placement and health nine times lol.

I see Outer Wilds here but not Nioh 2, so I’m posting about Nioh 2.

Soulsian adventure with ninja gaiden blood, extremely high amount of endgame content, wild depth of character building, lots of avenues to increase your character’s power with many “correct answers” to the question of “how should I make my dude stronger”. Dropped a while before the most recent push for graphical fidelity with AI upscaling/antialiasing so it actually runs well on a large majority of steam hardware surveys machines.

It’s hard early on, but provides the player with tons of options when it comes to progressing through stages and bosses, flexible movesets for each class of weapon and access to potent tools like Gun and turning into an enemy that killed you a dozen times the first time you saw it briefly. The endgame goes beyond replaying through the game into dungeons made of fragments of the stages and some more unique maps (The Abyss). There’s a hefty amount of individual bosses to learn, and incentive to do some of the more fun fights in the game multiple times - a lot of which do not require a run back through a stage to get to them. The game does itself a service by breaking up gameplay into chunks with a world map you launch missions from, some of which are just a singular straight up boss fight.

There’s a lot of games being mentioned here that had a full run. Let’s talk about an actually cancelled game - SkySaga: Infinite Isles. Block game in the vein of Portal Knights that was extremely inspired.

The gameplay loop consisted of using “Keys” on a portal at your home island that would randomly generate a floating island with various objectives on it and a boss, all of which was harvestable for materials and blocks to build with back on your home island. There was a social hub city island everyone could access that alowed access to PvP and a few types of guilds with various combat, gathering, and exploration quests. Crafting was pretty good, allowing you to use metals with various properties to mix and match your own gear - some metals did more damage or applied an elemental effect, some had quicker swing speed, some were durable as armor and others not so much but they increased movespeed or jump height.

The game had about a dozen beta access phases then dropped off the face of the earth, with the server (and how it worked) lost forever. Completely lost to time, cancelled before it could release proper. No other block game has come close to the kind of structural appeal it had for me, and I think about it frequently. There’s a few reverse engineering projects in the works but they are stagnant.

I love a lot of the games in this thread but they had an actual release and real servers, you could play them for multiple years. Some others promised a bit more than they delivered, and were cut a bit short by EA or other trash publishers. SkySaga was killed before launch and placed in an opaque prison, truly cancelled.