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Marathon was what I played when my parents wouldnt let me get halo as a kid. a DOOM clone that when you dig a little deeper has a huge wealth of lore and writing inside the terminals you find. Durandal is one of my favorite characters in any series, ever
Also the Messenger was pretty fun as well
Addie’s Present on the PS1. It’s not translated, but it’s manageable to just keep talking to NPCs to advance the plot. It’s super cute where the characters’ voices are represented by musical instruments that change playing style to represent emotions with a solid Rubiks cube-style puzzle game where you re-arrange letters with your magical puzzle-cylinder to transform items in the world to help the town inhabitants. It’s very cute.
Also Robot alchemic Drive on the PS2, which isn’t that obscure but it’s such a good game. Its main gameplay loop of missions defending the town from invading kaiju with a remote control giant robo/mecha that you control in 3rd/4th person is almost perfect. It’s obviously a budget game (made by the same people who made the Earth Defense Force games), but it feels exactly how you’d imagine a giant remote-control robot should feel. The visuals of you standing either on the ground as you clash with the aliens above, with buildings usually crumbling around it is great. No games like that usually present the scale of stuff like that well.
Paradise Killer just came out of nowhere a few months ago and it’s absolutely incredible.
I don’t even know what I can say without spoiling it. It’s a visual novel/walking sim type game where you investigate a murder. But the world it’s set in is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a game. Think Bloodborne, but with a bright and cheerful art style to reflect the fact that all the characters think this Lovecraftian shit is a good thing. And like, all the characters are fairly deep and have rich backstories, but their backstories are so alien that finding out about them just ends up raising so many more questions about the world as a whole.
I honestly might have said too much, because it’s really great going in completely blind and discovering all that weird shit for yourself. It’s not the perfect game by any means, but it’s so unique and interesting that it’s one of the few games I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone
I played it a week or two ago after impulse buying it on sale just 'cause it looked interesting and I have to agree thats it’s an amazing game. I like that you described it as “think Bloodborne, but with a bright and cheerful art style”, because its whole aesthetic is basically Lovecraftian Vaporwave. And judging by a quick google search of those two terms put together, it’s probably one of the first times that those two genres have been combined which would explain why it feels so cool.
I loved Floor 13 in my youth. You run a government black ops department that is tasked with keeping the government in power by any means necessary, albeit without bringing attention to yourself, otherwise you lose by being thrown out the window. You also have to please your masters in the secret society you’re in, often in conflict with the government’s wishes.
A remake was made recently, but it sadly seems to have got poor reviews when the original could have been massively expanded on. Infiltrating the INLA and turning them into a pro-U.K. group was always a funny bit and the premise never quite fulfilled in the original.
