Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?
Best examples I can think of are:
- Outer Wilds
- Doki Doki Literature Club
- The Stanley Parable
What are yours?
(please no spoilers)
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Sauna2000 (it’s not out yet, but there are some demos floating around).
Squirrel stapler
Cruelty Squad - depends on the kinda person you are. If you’re super open-minded about game presentation then I’d tell you to go into it blind. If not, then I’ll happily try to sell you on it. If it helps, the game looks the way that it does because of how fucking confident it is in itself; and that confidence is fully justified. Give it time, even if the first level doesn’t hook you, give it time because in my experience it will eventually hook you and reel you in and leave you thinking it’s one of the best games of all time.
Undertale
Hypnospace Outlaw
Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Give the first two a try, and if you don’t like either one, skip BRC; it’s a spiritual successor to JSRF and if you didn’t like JSRF then you probably won’t like BRC.
Hylics. If you liked that and wanted more, Hylics 2. Hylics 2 actually does something throughout the game that I’ve only ever seen as a gimmick in other games. It’s really cool and it’ll probably catch you off-guard every time it does it.
Katamari Damacy. If you liked that, there’s also We <3 Katamari.
Myst. The newest version has VR support. If you liked that, the recent Riven remaster also has VR support.
S C O R N (if you like Myst, give it a try. It feels very myst-like)
Hrot (boomer shooter, but if you like boomer shooters then you should give it a go).
If you’re at a place in your life where you’re trying to still find yourself: Night in the Woods. Especially if you’re a furry. This game is really fucking good. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll make you cry. It’ll make you miss home but also be glad you aren’t there anymore. It’ll make you question your place in life and who you are. Also, you can interact with things multiple times, make sure you don’t miss out on dialogue, you’ll regret it.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - This is hard to go into blind because it’s buggy as fuck and most people recommend some form of community patch even for your first playthrough. That said, play it on the highest difficulty. It’s unironically more fun once you get used to it. If it’s too hard though, don’t be fooled into thinking that dropping the difficulty will make it easier, the hardest difficulty is special (you can only take a few hits, but the same is true for most enemies), and dropping it down will result in enemy difficulty scaling becoming more traditional (buffing health and damage).
Portal (and Portal 2).
Bugsnax.
If I can throw in a movie too:
Willy’s Wonderland. It’s a Nicolas Cage movie and that’s all I’ll tell you. DO NOT LOOK UP THE TRAILER. I wouldn’t have watched it if I hadn’t seen the trailer, but the trailer also has huge spoilers. I’m not a huge movie person and I had to watch it after seeing the trailer, but again the trailer has spoilers. It is on my top-10 movies list now.
Portal 2 has, hands-down, the most hilariously-written dialogue I have ever seen in a video game. That alone is worth playing the game, but it’s also a fun puzzle game to boot.
I was gonna mention Bugsnax, but you beat me to it. That game starts so innocent.
Nethack / Cdda / coq…
Because going blind Is the game
Not as good as the examples you listed but subnautica imo
- Snatcher
- Policenauts
- King’s Field (any of them, even Pilot Style)
- Halo 1-3 + ODST and Reach
- Yakuza 0
- Silent Hill 2 (the original, Enhanced Edition for PC is still the best way to experience SH2)
- Life is Strange (only the original game, completely ignore the fanbase, theyre all toxic)
- Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (too bad BioWare doesnt have a single good or competent writer anymore)
- NieR, both Gestalt and Automata
- Rule of Rose
- Dark Souls 1-3
- Elden Ring
- Kuon
- Armored Core (all of them, but the controls are hard to deal with before Nexus)
- Steel Battalion (only if you can find and afford the controller, otherwise dont bother)
I’m honestly not sure this applies to any of those games.
The Halo 1 and KOTOR twists do hit pretty hard if you somehow haven’t been spoiled. KOTOR has one of my favorite reveal sequences ever with showing you how much foreshadowing you missed, and Halo’s twist turns the game on its head.
You can only stuff about those games without having the twist or whatever spoiled. What Halo twist was it? I’ve finished it a few times and don’t remember really. It was all about how open it was and the action, plus the multiplayer.
The twist is that >! Halo is a doomsday machine !<
yea and Halo Reach hits pretty hard if you don’t know what to expect too
However, Reach’s tagline was, “From the beginning, you know the end,” so there was an expectation that everyone playing would know how it was going to pan out.
Someone hasn’t played NieR!
That’s true, it’s on my list though! Waiting for a decent sale or bundle. (:
I had this kind of moment with Prey.
Subnautica I guess
Warframe. Focus on the Main Quest. That is all.
Tunic.
The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:
Tap for spoiler
If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!
I also second Outer Wilds.
i bounced off tunic super hard. i love the puzzle aspects, the cryptic manual pages, and figuring things out, but the combat was way too brutal, even on the easier setting. the bigger white ghost enemies at the very start killed me so many times i no longer want to go back to it.
I’ve gotta remember what those ghosts are.
I’ve slowly acclimated to Soulslikes since Tunic, and a common theme is that they make you think you need to be pressing more buttons, when they’re often teaching specialized bits of patience. In Tunic’s case, a lot of people expend their stamina too quickly.
Still don’t like FromSoft’s games
i thought that too, and tried studying their movements, but they attacked faster than i could even press the button.
Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.
it’s especially wild in a cutesy game like tunic where it just bodies you ten minutes in. it made me feel like i had been tricked.
Try playing Environmental Station Alpha. Super cutesy robot, absolutely unfair difficulty for a Metroidvania. Which is a shame, because there’s an interesting story and gameplay buried in that difficulty, and I love Metroidvanias.
man, soulslikes ruined metroidvanias.
I didn’t have too much trouble up until the first real boss. Thankfully there was a save point pretty close by so I just threw myself at it more times than I’d like to admit.
The game throws big bosses at you at a time when you won’t have range weapons, and expects you to dodge these big sweeping attacks that would be more appropriate fighting with ranged weapons. And by the time you get a ranged weapon, it’s too late, and they’ve raised the stakes again for future bosses to the point that having a ranged weapon isn’t even an advantage.
I was forced to reduce the difficulty just for the bosses. All of the other enemies were mostly fine.
I switched that to easy mode at one of the mid game bosses, and I still struggled. The combat is way too tough for what it is.
I thought the reward for the puzzles was not good enough, either. When you play Outer Wilds, you figure things out, unlock a wonderful story, and learn tricks for other puzzles. When you play Tunic, you (eventually) figure things out and get a bad ending for a game that barely reveals anything, story-wise.
I also thought that requiring a web app or a bunch of paperwork to figure out the language was far too inconvenient for a game made in the 21st century. They borrowed the wrong lessons from Fez.
hey i learned to read the language in fez fluently. this is more like they took the wrong lesson from double fines Hack’n’Slash, where the glyphs are absolutely everywhere and look so much alike that the easiest way to decipher them is to replace the font.
I just finished playing tunic (good ending). A friend and I were playing it at the same time. If I didn’t have that friendly competition I would have dropped it so many times. There is way too much manual work in this game that you often times aren’t playing a video game anymore.
At the end of it all I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment just relief that I’m done with the game. Only to find out after doing the secret puzzle is just more meta puzzles outside the game.
Outer Wilds on the other hand is fantastic and not having to use a pencil and paper to advance in the game is A+.
Factorio
For normal Factorio i would not absolutely agree,but for space age this is absolutely true. It takes a lot from you when you already know how to get started on the new planets.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
And probably Tears of the Kingdom too but I haven’t played it yet.
If you’ve played botw, you basically can’t play totk blind by the nature of the games’ similarities
TotK makes BotW feel like a tech demo
Surprised I haven’t seen Undertale yet. The online fanbase is hilariously toxic, (seriously, don’t go looking for any extra details about the game after you finish it) but it’s a solid game that should be experienced 100% blind. All I’ll say is that it’s a game that is written to subvert expectations; If you go into it expecting to play it like a traditional RPG, you’ll be in for a big surprise.
Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club
Spec Ops: The Line
Prey 2017 can be incredible blind and Dredge might be worse if you’ve had the ending spoiled
What Remains of Edith Finch, I think it has a fantastic narrative. Not so much twists, just best experienced yourself.
