What kinds of games might you recommend with deep worldbuilding and interaction that aren’t RPGs?
I like worldbuilding and stories, and I like when they’re mixed with the interactivity of games, so RPGs seem like they should be a natural fit. Problem is, I dislike the stat-heavy, grindy progression of many RPGs.
I enjoy point & click adventures and visual novels but they’re often more limited in their interactions. What kinds of game might I be missing combining the two?
The Outer Wilds might be the kind of games you’re looking for.
And if you are open to a more linear structure there is FPS like bioshock which have amazing world building and have very light RPG elements.
There is also the “walking simulator” genre, with games like firewatch, gone home or SOMA. But it’s also quite linear.
You may enjoy Control, I personally couldn’t get past the rather uninteresting gameplay and mechanics, but the lore and snippets of story you find scattered around are something else
I was also going to recommend Control, it’s my favorite game of all time. The world building and lore is fucking fantastic!
I am gonna give a recommendation out of left field a bit, and answer The Last Federation a game from the developers of Tidalis, oh and AI War.
https://arcengames.com/the-last-federation/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/273070/The_Last_Federation/?curator_clanid=32938991
You play the last surviving member of a species that used to rule the galaxy with terrifying advanced technology and weapons. Eventually your species fell and became wiped out by the other species that were being subjugated. Now there is a power vacuum and these other minor powers are battling to becoming the new empire. Your job as a lone alien with an extremely powerful ship (in a small battle, not powerful against an entire civilization of warships) is to try to balance the scales in an evolving conflict between political/military actors and create a peace that learns from the foolishness of your species ultimate mistake.
Very interesting way to make a 2d tactical space combat game and I love how your job isn’t to conquer the universe like Stellaris, your job is to push and nudge in just the right places to stop full on a galactic war.
Arkane’s immersive sims are fantastic. Dishonored 1 and 2 and Prey (2017). Brilliant worldbuilding and interesting stories that you can interact with. I don’t think either is particularly stat heavy or grindy, but I have an extremely high tolerance for that sort of thing so maybe my perspective is skewed.
Hmm let’s see. So the Subnautica games are survival games with a lot of exploring, uncovering mysteries, finding logs, figuring out what happened to you, the alien civilization, the ecosystem, etc.
If you like Obra Dinn, recommended elsewhere in this thread, The Case of the Golden Idol has some similar energy of looking at scenes and solving who’s who and what’s what and how this person died.
Chants of Sennaar is a game where you decipher fantasy languages and learn about the peoples that speak them while progressing up a tower and solving puzzles.
Viewfinder is a surreal-perspective puzzler with lots of narration and backstory from the characters
Sable is an exploration game with puzzles to solve, in a fancifuil sci-fi desert world with towns and NPCs and crashed spaceships to explore
The old Escape Velocity trilogy (though nowadays you’ll need a classic Mac emulator to play them) are top-down ship captain games where you fly your ship around, trade, fight, do missions, usually have multiple storylines going on at once, lots of planets, ships, stations, factions, etc. The modern game Endless Sky is explicitly molded on the EV series.
Sunless Seas and its sequel Sunless Skies have some similarity to EV mechanically, but with a lovecraftian, steampunk aesthetic to the world, and lots of world-building.
Beyond Good and Evil is a third-person action game that has good plot, characters, and worldbuilding, and there are updated versions available that run on modern hardware.
Bastion is an isometric action game a little like Diablo in the combat mechanics but with no numbers for you to worry about. Explore the aftermath of a most peculiar apocalypse and discover the world that was and the peoples who lived there. Good characters and worldbuilding.
I know it technically claims to be an RPG, but Disco Elysium plays more like a visual novel really. It has none of the grindy, stat-heavy progression that seems to turn you off of traditional RPGs.
It uses the interactivity of the video game medium as an important part of its storytelling and presentation, however, and has an incredibly deep lore and very interesting world building.
Disco Elysium is more of a novel than visual novel. It is a ton of reading.
Perhaps audiobook is a better description? Ever since the Final Cut came out almost every line in the game is voice acted.
Some of the classic RTS games perhaps, like C&C or Starcraft? They tend to be story driven and the most stats you tend to care about are “do I have enough resources” and “do I have enough units?”
