Heaven’s Vault

You play a space archaeologist, and the big central mechanic of the game is translating things written in the Ancient language.

Ancient is written using ideographs, and more complex ideas are represented by combining glyphs that describe the concept, like ever more complex compound words. There are art of speech markers, glyphs that describe how other glyphs in a word relate to each other, intensifiers, and even a few cases where super common words are just the combination of other basic glyphs into a single composite like a Norse bindrune (for example the symbols for creature and knowledge overlap to make person, an intelligent creature). 46 base ideographs, but that includes digits, so it’s only 10 more than English.

So for example, a word that reads NOUN-person-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-NOUN-knowledge-person means “Emperor”, because noun-knowledge-person means “law” and thus the result is a person who the law belongs to, aka a ruler or in the context of an empire the emperor. Replace that noun marker glyph at the beginning with the adjective marker glyph and you would have “imperial”, the quality of being emperor-like.

One of the longest words to appear in the game translates as “mouse” and it’s 21 letters long and is literally something like creature-CONNECTOR-many-many-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-NOT-ADJECTIVE-CONNECTOR-many-creature-CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-ABSTRACT NOUN-person-CONNECTOR-light-NOUN-plant-CONNECTOR-rock, which is several words stitched into a compound word, where some of those words are themselves compound words (the idea is something like “creature like a very small pig”, but the word I’m calling “pig” means “creature that is happy in the soil” where happy is something like “the quality of a person who is metaphorically full of light” and “soil” is “plant-earth”). Those CONNECTORS are letters that are used to build compound words.

Donut county, you’re a hole in the ground growing as you consume the environment.

Katamari damacy, you’re a ball rolling over and collecting items in the environment and steering is like steering a canoe.

Octodad, be an octopus in a suit pretending to be human who can’t control his limbs properly. I am bread is similar.

deleted by creator

• Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back

• Katamari: A giant ball gets rolled around and collects stuff forever

• Baba Is You: Movable text is rules to the game

• Untitled Goose Game: You have to piss people off the right way

• Billie Bust Up^[unreleased]: Musicals tell you upcoming platforming challenges

• Celeste: every time you die you quickly reset on the same “page”/small tile of map

• Splatoon: you shoot at the ground to go faster, hide, and/or win

• Odama: real-time tactical wargame pinball

• Golf Story: Golf-based fetch quests

• Astral Chain: asynchronously control a companion in combat

• Okami: paint skills on-screen in combat

• Astro Bears: Snake but in 3D

• Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime: Up to 4 players pilot parts of a ship together

• Pokemon Ranger: draw circles around monsters to catch them

• Viva Pinata: breed pinatas to create new species

• Spore: create and evolve a creature

Fez: a 2D plateformer in which you can change the perspective to create ways to unreachable plateforms

Baba Is You: a puzzle game in which you move blocks with words written on them, combining them to create small phrases which become new rules of the game.

Crypt of the Necrodancer: Roguelike to the beat! Dance pad compatible.

Tunic is incredibly unique and I can’t say I’ve played anything like it. On the surface it’s a classic dungeon crawler zelda inspired thing, but once you play… Really any amount of it, you start to see past the veil and the real game is revealed to you. Even after completing the entire game and all achievements, there is technically more of the game available to be explored.

Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Obsidian’s Outer Worlds) will be an absolute bliss for anyone who enjoyed portal or superliminal. It may be the single greatest puzzle/exploration game ever made, with no exaggeration.

Return of the Obra Dinn was a game that I could not put down. I played it in one sitting beginning to end. I was enthralled and I felt like Sherlock fucking Holmes. It is a very unassuming game but by God, you will be gripped. It stands up there with Outer Wilds as being a game that absolutely propelled itsself up to one of the best of its genre (this one being Mystery/Puzzle)

In Return of the Obra Dinn you play an insurance claims investigator. You can magically view the moment of somebody’s death and hear the audio prior to it to aid in your investigation of a ghost ship.

Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.

Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.

Opus Magnum. It’s an optimization puzzle game. You have to assemble mechanical arms and other bits (that grab, swing, rotate, push, and pull) into contraptions that assemble resources that look like molecular diagrams. Optimization puzzles aren’t unique but I felt like the pieces you build the contraptions out of in this game are pretty unique, the game is on a hex grid so rotation can play a big roll. Another interesting thing the game does is that to beat a level you simply have to accomplish a proper assembly, which in itself isn’t that hard, but the game grades you on three different metrics (speed, size, cost) and gives you no overall score to tell you how much you should value each metric. In this way it is up to your preferences what you want to optimize for if anything. I had fun trying to minmax every stat separately on every level before building my “compromise” machine was not supposed to make big sacrifices in any field.

A lot of people have mentioned it but I definitely recommend Obra Dinn, haven’t played a mystery game as unique and enthralling.

Kenshi, or noita are the 2 indie games I can think of

Kenshi is unique in a way that it doesn’t give you main character vibes. You’re a nobody like mostly everyone else.

Dwarf Fortress mostly doesn’t have unique gameplay mechanics or anything; but the Legends viewer certainly is a unique feature, due to how all the systems work together to weave randomly generated stories and history of the world through the entire world generation process. So even though you didn’t play the game through all those years, the game still kept track of everything going on while simulating the world creation and you can go through it and see all the battles, conflicts, migrations, rise and fall of civilizations, deaths of monsters, etc.

Before Your Eyes

The recently deceased Benjamin Brynn is on his way to the afterlife. The player must interact with Brynn’s memories through an eye-tracking webcam to progress, as the game reads and responds to the player’s eye movement and blinking - from Wikipedia

It tries to emulate life flashing by your eyes as you are dying. I haven’t gotten around to play it but, the concept is cool nonetheless.

Found about it from this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTI1WCopTsg

Shadow of the Colossus is an experimental action puzzle game where you navigate a desolate world in search of 16 colossuses you need to kill by strategically and carefully climbing on their bodies.

This mechanic is probably familiar to many from other newer action games. This is where they stole it from, and SOTC still did it the best.

Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality

What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.

Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.