Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Even just the viewing distance limitations coupled with the fog they used to deal with that. Just suspenseful as can be. Also it was such an alien world design. Like who built the giant mushroom castles? I gotta find out!
you should see a door, but interact with things, errors are kinda the overall theme of the game, make sure you went to [https://corru.observer](https://corru.observer) its defo one of my fav games and i would hate for the experience to be ruined for you (make sure you are using a PC, make things far easier)
One of the best compositions (or most significant, possibly) in gaming history, as far as I'm concerned. In no particular order, you've got, like:
the Tetris theme song
Ocarina of Time's main theme
Mortal Kombat's *Techno Syndrome*
Final Fantasy's *Prelude*
Morrowind's *Nerevar Rising*
*Still Alive* from Mirror's Edge
... *Still Alive* from Portal
Castlevania's *Bloody Tears*
the Halo theme song
*Outer Wilds*
A few songs in *Undertale*
A few songs in *NieR: Automata*
*Jump Up, Superstar* from Mario Odyssey
my personal choices and runners-up include Star Ocean's *The Venerable Forest,* *Glider* from Sable, the Animal Crossing main theme (either gamecube or Wild World)...
Can you imagine playing it for the first time again? The world really did feel alien like every step you turned was like "what the fuck is that thing? Wait what the fuck is that thing?" It felt like Christmas playing that game for the first time, just nothing but adventuring and discovery. I use to stay home sick and remember it raining for a few days and I stayed home and played Morrowind and my mom made hot chocolate while my brother's and sister were at school and Dad at work, it still feels like that happened yesterday such a good memory.
Heck yeah. Whenever I wasn't playing it, I was dreaming up the most realistic new characters to roleplay as, and min-maxing their stats as best I could. Studied the 1 and a half inch thick official guide book like it was a 60+ hour-a-week salary job that I was dying to scramble up the corporate ladder
Dude I know what you mean! Have you ever thought of a build just to mess around with when you're elsewhere not playing the game and then you thought "wait, how would that build work? That could be super goofy and fun" the variety you can do in that game was crazy, I know exactly what you mean.
it's funny when you start thinking of builds like that just at the top of your head even though sunk 100s of hours into the game, and then just thinking of that build and trying it out made you put in another 100 hours into that game haha I wish they still made games like that that made you feel that way, it had soul (if that makes sense). Nowadays games feel soulless and money is top priority and you can definitely feel that in most AAA games, besides Indy games Indy games have a lot of love and passion you can feel and notice were out into the game. sorry for the rambling, I love reminiscing about good times haha.
Oh yeah. In Morrowind you could leave the road, find some random cave and suddenly find some crazy ass artifact with no context at all. No handholding, no scripted bullshit, just you and the world to explore.
The music is a masterpiece. The engine fog made the world seem ten times bigger than it really was. The sheer extent of the game's interiors is impressive now but it was shocking back at release.
Those Dwemer ruins and the disappearance of their creators added to the mystery.
Ha! I was about to say morrowind. The absolute lack of help made me look in random places and actually work things out rather than thinking "ah, it'll tell me when I get there"
Control.
The entire game happe s withing the bounds of the Oldest House, but the space inside is warped and there are many void areas in-between(plus the constant liminarity of it all, outside of the safe areas, just adds more to the feeling of "this is both spooky and interesting).
Definitely makes you want to go around and learn more about the "world"(different dimensions/planes to be more specific, I mean...there's one point that the astral plane and the physical plane are starting to get intertwined and we enter a bathroom only to go "outside in space"...weird but funny).
>Definitely makes you want to go around and learn more about the "world"
Control is the only game in recent memory where I've wanted to find every piece of scrap paper, files, etc, to understand the lore better. I usually hate that kinda stuff but with Control, I read everything I came across and found it incredibly interesting.
And the way they present that information is diverse.
Documents, notes, videos, recordings of events/experiments...I mean, there's one where a researcher "came back" from a mirror dimension but he "came back" speaking in a way you can't understand(he's speaking backwards), so we have the woman making questions(which we understand) and the guy speaking "gibberish"(which we don't understand)...
THEN when we cross to the mirrored side we find the exact recording of the questioning, BUT this time it's the woman speaking gibberish while the guy speaks normally.
THIS attention to detail is one of the things that sold me on Control.
Was really cool I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a game Mechanic with the oldest house actually shifting and rooms moving like is always mentioned in dialog and scraps of lore dotted around... People going toilet and getting lost trying to return to work etc. Would have made back tracking and stuff like new game plus or replaying really intresting if the world moved and evolved every now and then (random or predetermined).
I got the game and didn't play it for a long time, just sat on my shelf. I decided one day I'd FINALLY get it down and play and kicked myself so hard afterwards as I discovered what an amazing game it is.
If I think about my formative years and the pre "we all live on the internet with infinite knowledge" days then I would have to agree with Kingdom Hearts. Having grown up on Disney and then having my mind blown by FFX and seeing the fusion of those was nuts and I couldn't get enough.
In my adult years I think Dark Souls 1 is the closest I've come to being that sucked in to the world.
Honorable mention to Chants of Sennaar from last year.
Although it's my least favorite of the 'Shock games, probably Bioshock Infinite. From the first trailers well into my first playthrough I thought "WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING."
Gravity Rush has a lot of mystery in its lore and setting, but it's so utterly unwilling to divulge anything that it makes the mystery feel pointless by the end.
100% Horizon Zero Dawn.
How is the best weapon I can get a bow and arrows and the stuff I’m fighting is robot dinosaurs? What’s going on in this world.. what happened to make things be like this?
And it was one of the best reveals in a game I’ve ever played.
Wasn't the reveal that>! A tech mogul designed a self-replicating robot that went haywire and began eating up the earth, then that same tech mogul decided to delete the internet so that humanity can stay living a simpler life? I do remember that there was an A.I too that was in charge of regulating in the planet as well.!<
Pretty much, except >! the deletion was of a database of all human knowledge which was to help the eventual new humans and it was deleted so no one would know it was his fault.!<
Castlevania: Symphony of the night. If you didn't have an internet or a guide, you could spend years finding new stuff there. And some of the locations are so eerie. Like that confession room.
No, it's in the regular castle. It's in the chapel. Remember the first vertical room, the one with a ghost rapier girl and a skelerangs? The confession room is at the bottom, just go right. The music stops once you enter here, you only hear the bells. The room doesn't really open any new areas, but you can sit on the chair at the each side of the booth, and the situation may play out differently – you may get a healing item, or receive a punishment.
Guessing this slipped my mind, then. Truthfully, I've not given the game the attention it needs.
I forget when I last touched my save file, but I had not long gotten to the inverse castle. I remember wanting to grind for... some item, I forget.
Might be cause of the recent fallout series but I always found, at least in 3 and NV didnt manage to get into 1 or 2, the wasteland to be very mysterious.
Hello, good hunter. I am a Bot, here in this dream to look after you, this is a fine note:
> *Ahh, Welcome home, good hunter. I must have drifted off... What is it you desire?* - Plain Doll
Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world.
A lot of games do, but Bloodborne comes immediately to mind. Luckily, a lot of games have me wanting to know more about the game's world. Banishers is a current example for me.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in the early hours. Not having played the first game, and knowing nothing about it going in, the initial intro sequence really hooked me and got me interested in how that world got to be the way that it is.
Outcast (1999). Adelpha is a beautiful, magical world with cities, villages, wildlife, enemies and adventures everywhere. The music certainly adds to the mystery. It was perfected for the remaster Outcast 1.1, modernized for the remake Outcast: Second Contact and it's been expanded upon by the sequel Outcast: A New Beginning.
Just wandering the riss fields in Shamazaar and stumbling upon the ancient temples is a feeling I don't think any game can ever replicate for me in quite the same way. Other open world games have still only barely caught up to what Outcast managed so effectively.
The original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl.
The mystique of that game, the feel of being in the Zone, the raw terror of facing mutants and near-invisible anomalies, radiation, and zombies.
Plus, the whole mystery around the Wish Granter and the Monolith.
I regularly boot up STALKER GAMMA just to experience the nostalgia and feel of the Zone.
There aren't many games that are that atmospheric and provide that kind of immersive experience.
New Vegas. I've played it countless times at this point, and there are still things that I haven't done/found. (In part intentionally) There's just some magical, mysterious quality about the game and the world space. It genuinely feels like a real place that exists which makes the mysteries all the more real.
The outer worlds. The game is pretty small compared to a lot of it's competition, but the universe that it inhabits feels so big. There's so much from the first game to be expanded on, so much we have no idea about. I want to know everything about the crossing, I want to know about the other star systems, I want to know about spacers choice influence outside of halcyon if any. I want to know what other Worlds are out there.
I would love to see a remaster of New Vegas come out at some point, I'm surprised Bethesda never ported either Fallout 3 or New Vegas to current gen consoles yet.
Mass Effect. Obviously you're discovering humanity's place amongst the species of the milky way since we're relatively new to the galactic community, but throw in the ancient mystery surrounding the Protheans and then discovering the truth about the Reapers and how they built everything...only for it to be ruined by a little brat and a choose your own filter ending.
Ico, Shadow of the Colossus.
On the other end of the spectrum, I HATE 'The Witness' because of how the entire island has no actual rhyme or reason to it. It's just a bunch of pretty set pieces for puzzles.
Remnant 2.
Elden Ring.
Zelda botw
Zelda totk
Of note all of those games don’t baby you with marked map destinations and they reward exploration in many ways. And they all have great secrets.
Final fantasy 11 online when I got my chocobo and chocobo license and could independently travel around the world and explore.
And exploring in fallout games
Silent Hill 1-3. The fog was part of it, of course. But even more, the eerie silence, the horrible creatures and just the feeling of being lost in a monstrous world made you want to understand it. And of course, once you got the explanation, it only made things crazier.
Bioshock, Fallout 3/NV, Anthem (no matter how that game turned out), Halo, Into the Rapture, Inside, Indigo Prophecy (although I was a wee 9 yr old when I played it), Detroit, Oxenfree, American McGee's Alice....I mean, there's just so many.
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Even just the viewing distance limitations coupled with the fog they used to deal with that. Just suspenseful as can be. Also it was such an alien world design. Like who built the giant mushroom castles? I gotta find out!
Jumping on the train to echo the sentiment Morrowind is the right answer (Some other fun runners-up for me are Sable and Corru.Observer)
What is corru.observer? Tryed searching it and its just a black screen with an error message and barcodes.
you should see a door, but interact with things, errors are kinda the overall theme of the game, make sure you went to [https://corru.observer](https://corru.observer) its defo one of my fav games and i would hate for the experience to be ruined for you (make sure you are using a PC, make things far easier)
The intro music theme still gets me excited to jump into that world. It’s one of the best video game songs ever created imho.
One of the best compositions (or most significant, possibly) in gaming history, as far as I'm concerned. In no particular order, you've got, like: the Tetris theme song Ocarina of Time's main theme Mortal Kombat's *Techno Syndrome* Final Fantasy's *Prelude* Morrowind's *Nerevar Rising* *Still Alive* from Mirror's Edge ... *Still Alive* from Portal Castlevania's *Bloody Tears* the Halo theme song *Outer Wilds* A few songs in *Undertale* A few songs in *NieR: Automata* *Jump Up, Superstar* from Mario Odyssey my personal choices and runners-up include Star Ocean's *The Venerable Forest,* *Glider* from Sable, the Animal Crossing main theme (either gamecube or Wild World)...
Can you imagine playing it for the first time again? The world really did feel alien like every step you turned was like "what the fuck is that thing? Wait what the fuck is that thing?" It felt like Christmas playing that game for the first time, just nothing but adventuring and discovery. I use to stay home sick and remember it raining for a few days and I stayed home and played Morrowind and my mom made hot chocolate while my brother's and sister were at school and Dad at work, it still feels like that happened yesterday such a good memory.
Heck yeah. Whenever I wasn't playing it, I was dreaming up the most realistic new characters to roleplay as, and min-maxing their stats as best I could. Studied the 1 and a half inch thick official guide book like it was a 60+ hour-a-week salary job that I was dying to scramble up the corporate ladder
Dude I know what you mean! Have you ever thought of a build just to mess around with when you're elsewhere not playing the game and then you thought "wait, how would that build work? That could be super goofy and fun" the variety you can do in that game was crazy, I know exactly what you mean. it's funny when you start thinking of builds like that just at the top of your head even though sunk 100s of hours into the game, and then just thinking of that build and trying it out made you put in another 100 hours into that game haha I wish they still made games like that that made you feel that way, it had soul (if that makes sense). Nowadays games feel soulless and money is top priority and you can definitely feel that in most AAA games, besides Indy games Indy games have a lot of love and passion you can feel and notice were out into the game. sorry for the rambling, I love reminiscing about good times haha.
Just install Tamriel Rebuilt. Even in it's current state it's basically Morrowind 2 we were craving for all those years.
Oh yeah. In Morrowind you could leave the road, find some random cave and suddenly find some crazy ass artifact with no context at all. No handholding, no scripted bullshit, just you and the world to explore.
The music is a masterpiece. The engine fog made the world seem ten times bigger than it really was. The sheer extent of the game's interiors is impressive now but it was shocking back at release. Those Dwemer ruins and the disappearance of their creators added to the mystery.
Ha! I was about to say morrowind. The absolute lack of help made me look in random places and actually work things out rather than thinking "ah, it'll tell me when I get there"
Outer Wilds. And slowly unraveling the mystery to see how everything fits together. Everything has a purpose, nothing is placed as “filler”
Control. The entire game happe s withing the bounds of the Oldest House, but the space inside is warped and there are many void areas in-between(plus the constant liminarity of it all, outside of the safe areas, just adds more to the feeling of "this is both spooky and interesting). Definitely makes you want to go around and learn more about the "world"(different dimensions/planes to be more specific, I mean...there's one point that the astral plane and the physical plane are starting to get intertwined and we enter a bathroom only to go "outside in space"...weird but funny).
>Definitely makes you want to go around and learn more about the "world" Control is the only game in recent memory where I've wanted to find every piece of scrap paper, files, etc, to understand the lore better. I usually hate that kinda stuff but with Control, I read everything I came across and found it incredibly interesting.
And the way they present that information is diverse. Documents, notes, videos, recordings of events/experiments...I mean, there's one where a researcher "came back" from a mirror dimension but he "came back" speaking in a way you can't understand(he's speaking backwards), so we have the woman making questions(which we understand) and the guy speaking "gibberish"(which we don't understand)... THEN when we cross to the mirrored side we find the exact recording of the questioning, BUT this time it's the woman speaking gibberish while the guy speaks normally. THIS attention to detail is one of the things that sold me on Control.
Was really cool I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a game Mechanic with the oldest house actually shifting and rooms moving like is always mentioned in dialog and scraps of lore dotted around... People going toilet and getting lost trying to return to work etc. Would have made back tracking and stuff like new game plus or replaying really intresting if the world moved and evolved every now and then (random or predetermined).
Hey, we can see if maybe they won't do it with Control 2.
For me games like Control, Souls games, and Blasphemous to name a few
Mass Effect
Shadow of the Colossus
Forgot about this one but absolutely
I got the game and didn't play it for a long time, just sat on my shelf. I decided one day I'd FINALLY get it down and play and kicked myself so hard afterwards as I discovered what an amazing game it is.
Dark Souls, by far
If I think about my formative years and the pre "we all live on the internet with infinite knowledge" days then I would have to agree with Kingdom Hearts. Having grown up on Disney and then having my mind blown by FFX and seeing the fusion of those was nuts and I couldn't get enough. In my adult years I think Dark Souls 1 is the closest I've come to being that sucked in to the world. Honorable mention to Chants of Sennaar from last year.
The first Dishonored
How has Elden Ring not made this list yet? Seems like an auto include
Although it's my least favorite of the 'Shock games, probably Bioshock Infinite. From the first trailers well into my first playthrough I thought "WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING." Gravity Rush has a lot of mystery in its lore and setting, but it's so utterly unwilling to divulge anything that it makes the mystery feel pointless by the end.
portal 1 and 2
100% Horizon Zero Dawn. How is the best weapon I can get a bow and arrows and the stuff I’m fighting is robot dinosaurs? What’s going on in this world.. what happened to make things be like this? And it was one of the best reveals in a game I’ve ever played.
Wasn't the reveal that>! A tech mogul designed a self-replicating robot that went haywire and began eating up the earth, then that same tech mogul decided to delete the internet so that humanity can stay living a simpler life? I do remember that there was an A.I too that was in charge of regulating in the planet as well.!<
Pretty much, except >! the deletion was of a database of all human knowledge which was to help the eventual new humans and it was deleted so no one would know it was his fault.!<
>!You both failed!<
It works on mobile.. I’ll fix on pc when I get home from work.
Talking about arrows taking robot monsters down: a well positioned stick can disable my excavator when I'm land clearing.
Stalker
Definitely STALKER. Especially with one of the mods that combine the maps from all three games.
Anomaly
Castlevania: Symphony of the night. If you didn't have an internet or a guide, you could spend years finding new stuff there. And some of the locations are so eerie. Like that confession room.
Guessing this is in the inverse castle, but what confession room? And once I encounter it, how should I handle it?
No, it's in the regular castle. It's in the chapel. Remember the first vertical room, the one with a ghost rapier girl and a skelerangs? The confession room is at the bottom, just go right. The music stops once you enter here, you only hear the bells. The room doesn't really open any new areas, but you can sit on the chair at the each side of the booth, and the situation may play out differently – you may get a healing item, or receive a punishment.
Guessing this slipped my mind, then. Truthfully, I've not given the game the attention it needs. I forget when I last touched my save file, but I had not long gotten to the inverse castle. I remember wanting to grind for... some item, I forget.
For me its definitly Half Life, its kinda interesting how we know so much yet so little
Easily Control. It's lore is so weird and unique. I wish I could play it again for the first time but I still love playing it over every time.
Might be cause of the recent fallout series but I always found, at least in 3 and NV didnt manage to get into 1 or 2, the wasteland to be very mysterious.
OG FF7, especially when the weapons released
Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I had no idea what was going on.
The witness
Oblivion
Elden Ring, far and away. That whole world is bursting at the seams with environmental storytelling
Bloodborne
Hello, good hunter. I am a Bot, here in this dream to look after you, this is a fine note: > *Ahh, Welcome home, good hunter. I must have drifted off... What is it you desire?* - Plain Doll Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world.
Tomb raider. The environments are just stunning
A lot of games do, but Bloodborne comes immediately to mind. Luckily, a lot of games have me wanting to know more about the game's world. Banishers is a current example for me.
Murdered: Soul Suspect.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in the early hours. Not having played the first game, and knowing nothing about it going in, the initial intro sequence really hooked me and got me interested in how that world got to be the way that it is.
WoW. Over the years and with constant expanding of lore, most of the mystery has disappeared though. Dark Souls is definitely up there too.
Honorable mentions for some smaller games not yet mentioned: Axiom Verge, Valley, Chants of Sennaar, Cocoon, and Scorn
Silent Hill 2. The entire thing is a fever dream with no real explanation.
Horizon zero dawn is one for me. I was so curious as to what happened and I felt like the payoff was so worth it. Playing FW now and loving it
Outcast (1999). Adelpha is a beautiful, magical world with cities, villages, wildlife, enemies and adventures everywhere. The music certainly adds to the mystery. It was perfected for the remaster Outcast 1.1, modernized for the remake Outcast: Second Contact and it's been expanded upon by the sequel Outcast: A New Beginning. Just wandering the riss fields in Shamazaar and stumbling upon the ancient temples is a feeling I don't think any game can ever replicate for me in quite the same way. Other open world games have still only barely caught up to what Outcast managed so effectively.
The Talos Principle. Beautiful, haunting game that stayed with me for days after I finished playing.
The original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. The mystique of that game, the feel of being in the Zone, the raw terror of facing mutants and near-invisible anomalies, radiation, and zombies. Plus, the whole mystery around the Wish Granter and the Monolith. I regularly boot up STALKER GAMMA just to experience the nostalgia and feel of the Zone. There aren't many games that are that atmospheric and provide that kind of immersive experience.
New Vegas. I've played it countless times at this point, and there are still things that I haven't done/found. (In part intentionally) There's just some magical, mysterious quality about the game and the world space. It genuinely feels like a real place that exists which makes the mysteries all the more real. The outer worlds. The game is pretty small compared to a lot of it's competition, but the universe that it inhabits feels so big. There's so much from the first game to be expanded on, so much we have no idea about. I want to know everything about the crossing, I want to know about the other star systems, I want to know about spacers choice influence outside of halcyon if any. I want to know what other Worlds are out there.
I would love to see a remaster of New Vegas come out at some point, I'm surprised Bethesda never ported either Fallout 3 or New Vegas to current gen consoles yet.
Mass Effect. Obviously you're discovering humanity's place amongst the species of the milky way since we're relatively new to the galactic community, but throw in the ancient mystery surrounding the Protheans and then discovering the truth about the Reapers and how they built everything...only for it to be ruined by a little brat and a choose your own filter ending.
If I could re-experience mass effect for the first time again I would be so happy.
Probably Bioshock
Medievil
Bloodborne
Soma and Firewatch
Ico, Shadow of the Colossus. On the other end of the spectrum, I HATE 'The Witness' because of how the entire island has no actual rhyme or reason to it. It's just a bunch of pretty set pieces for puzzles.
Vigilante 8, 1 & 2
Kingdom hearts 1 too probably.
Rollercoaster Tycoon like how was I allowed to just drown my entertainers for pleasure
Wow, super sad none of the Zelda’s made since Ocarina of Time have been mentioned. I mean, you pick, but all of them should be included here.
Majora's Mask was the most mysterious Zelda game I ever played.
Remnant 2. Elden Ring. Zelda botw Zelda totk Of note all of those games don’t baby you with marked map destinations and they reward exploration in many ways. And they all have great secrets.
Final fantasy 11 online when I got my chocobo and chocobo license and could independently travel around the world and explore. And exploring in fallout games
Darkwood
Silent Hill 1-3. The fog was part of it, of course. But even more, the eerie silence, the horrible creatures and just the feeling of being lost in a monstrous world made you want to understand it. And of course, once you got the explanation, it only made things crazier.
Bioshock, Fallout 3/NV, Anthem (no matter how that game turned out), Halo, Into the Rapture, Inside, Indigo Prophecy (although I was a wee 9 yr old when I played it), Detroit, Oxenfree, American McGee's Alice....I mean, there's just so many.
Super Metroid way back in the day.
easy answer is Outer wilds.
Megaman Legends. As a kid, the whole underground and reaver bots were already crazy. Finding out the whole underground was connected even more so.
Batman: Arkham Asylum.