Basically story-oriented role playing games, instead of dress-your-virtual-doll-and-find-the-jumbo-potatoes "RPGs".
Like for fuck sakes, I have way more fun reading a totally rail-roaded choose-your-adventure book game than with GOTY shits.
Or please point me at your favorite choose-your-adventure mobile-books, I love them. Or good AI-DMs, I tried one once and didn't really like it.
No, I can't join an IRL TTRPG group cuz where I live :cri: and I don't like to talk to my computer either.
Edit: Dang, thank you all!
Planescape: Torment is getting kinda old but it's clear it was a big inspiration for DE, so it might be worth trying that if you haven't before.
If you're okay with something a bit more casual, I like a lot of the stuff inkle puts out. I would personally recommend Heaven's Vault, about a space archeologist peicing together an ancient language and other mysteries.
Heaven’s Vault
"Hmm, interesting"
Best British Game Award
Dang it
Nah for real, do you reccomend the Inkle "Sorcery!" saga too?
Sorcery Saga is fun and also pretty short if I remember right
I liked Sorcery, but always thought it was a bit expensive being split up over 4 parts. It's cool though, a thoughtfully digitized choose your own adventure book, so it's probably something you'd be interested in.
all those baldur's gate things really although torment is probably the most like of those
Play the Baldur's Gate series on an easier difficulty if you're not too familiar with ADnD/ don't want to read up too much on it. They're fun, but I can see that being off-putting for some people.
Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansions and Pathfinder: Kingmaker are also pretty cool when it comes to having more choices to make.
Edit: And Tyranny for one of the newer wave of CRPGs.
right, those games have a bunch of combat that may or may not add to your experience. I'd even recommend just cheating at Torment, that game kinda only has combat for marketing reasons.
Citizen Sleeper. No action RPG mechanics, just a system of resource management where a set of dice are rolled at the start of each cycle and you have to choose how to distribute them. Really well done and contributes to the game's themes. It's also got beautiful art, an excellent soundtrack and the ways the narrative can branch can be really touching.
Roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. Live the life of an escaped worker, washed-up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society. Inspired by the flexibility and freedom of TTRPGs, explore the station, choose your friends, escape your past and change your future.
I really want to get into Citizen Sleeper but white text on black background causes halation and royally fucks with my eyes - same with anything that has a dark mode - it was one of the reasons I made an account here - the default b/w theme is hellish.
Citizen Sleeper really had potential. Early on, it felt difficult to survive, but after the first few segments, it got very easy and repetitive. I had to test what would happen if your body depleted- nothing, you just lost a level in a skill which just means it would take more time and dice-rolling to do the same questlines. It became clear that the same thing happens no matter what dialog options you choose. It didn't really feel like a game, more like an interactive story with multiple endings.
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante (I think is the name)
Suzerain
Tyranny
Planescape Torment (original)
Shoutouts to Suzerain for demonstrating how fucking hard it is go down the succdem path without being 'authoritarian', and showing the weird policy alignments between developmentalist right wingers and socialists (they still won't be your friends).
Also showing how incredibly personally enriching just selling out to capital is.
Still wish I could go with a communist revolution ending and it being a 'happy' ending, instead of a bad one lol.
Dude, I don't wan't to be reminded of depressing history, gonna pass on Suzerain.
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
Wow, this game sounds very bleak and fascinating. Also the tvtropes page is clearly written by a lib who's seething over one of the possible and that's hilarious.
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
I did not know this existed, but it looks incredible.
I second The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Suzerain, I liked both.
Planescape Torment (original)
So you don't reccomend the enhaced edition? There are 4 versions of Planescape available in freegogpcgames: "classic", "enhanced", "tides of numenera" and "dark sorrow", which should I download?
Sorry, my brain was misfiring. I meant the original planescape, not the offshoot Torment: Tides of Numenara. Do go ahead and get the EE of the original though, it runs much better.
The old Black Isle games like Baldurs gate, Planescape et al.
I'd like to shout out Heaven's Vault, which is more of an adventure game, but has a lot of the same vibes, cool dialogue/archeology twist and a pictographic language you need to decode in a semi-realistic way.
Similarly, I think you'll like The Longest Journey series as well.
Yeah, I'd say Planescape is the closest to Disco Elysium that I can think of. Technically it's a D&D game where you build your character and fight monsters and stuff, but that's really just an excuse for a game about the nature of the self with a 600,000 word script.
I had totally forgotten about The Longest Journey games! I loved those but know no one else who has even heard of them.
If you haven't played Night in the Woods yet, that was good. But smaller, cuter, and more indie.
On the other end is the Pillars of Eternity series. You aren't railroaded, but its very much story driven. Its mechanics however are like 1-1 DnD mechanics, which might be a drag for you. There's story mode though.
If you like CYOA books, choice of games might be for you. They have hundreds of these kind of games.
Citizen Sleeper! It's all about getting by in a sci-fi capatalists hellscape and finding joy in little things.
Pentiment comes out next month and it looks really good. Same director as New Vegas, entirely non-violent, set in 1500s Bavaria.
Sawyer kept describing it as "medieval murder mystery", I think it is legitimately medieval DE.
Sounds like you might want something that falls between the Visual Novel and CRPG spectrum with a healthy dose of point and click adventure elements.
There are few games that have quite the same style of narrative freedom that DE has, you can try Planescape as others have recced as well as Arcanum of Steam and Magick Obscura. On the VN side of things there's not a whole lot in terms of games with narrative freedom - they're all pretty linear barring the odd dialogue choice here or there. You might have better luck with a conventional point and click type game. Go on Grimbeards youtube channel and pick one you like the look of to be honest. A lot of them tend to be less linear than RPGs
Roadwarden is a new game in that style
https://www.gog.com/game/roadwarden
https://gog-games.com/game/roadwarden
The problem with crpgs for someone looking for narrative driven stuff is that, even though they have great expansive stories, they're also hard as shit until you spend 100 hours learning tabletop rules lol
Most if them do have a story mode at least which makes combat virtually unlosable. Though at that point it could be pretty boring unless you are that into the story. I definitely do agree though, I've put down so many crpgs cause I'd have to read a goddamn novel to understand the mechanics and some are also just walls of text like Pillars of Eternity 1 and the gameplay to story ratio is off for me
If you don't mind some deck building mechanics check out Griftlands by Klei
There's not a ton of strict role playing but there are choices and I found the overarching driving story to be engaging
It's not anything like DE, but it is extremely open ended and cool: Caves of Qud. The universe it takes place in is totally alien to our own in creative ways, the mechanics for reputations and factions are dynamic and interesting allowing you to do a lot of interesting roleplaying, and the one feature of the game that the devs absolutely refuse to add is the ability to join the fascist Deus Vult losers.
When I was younger I played a lot of CYOA apps by Choice of Games. More recently I've enjoyed Vampire the Masquerade: Coteries of New York and its sequel Shadows of New York, but I don't know whether they're available on mobile
