For me, Tunic. Well, it's a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.
I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.
Oh, but what's this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.
spoiler
I knew it was an English cipher from the beginning. Nobody ever goes full conlang, as much as I would love that. I got as far as deducing it was phonemic, as the same glyphs kept appearing before cleartext words, which I assumed were "a/an" and "the", and the way "the" was written made me think it was two glyphs, one for the and one for . The last thing I got before giving up and looking it up online was one of hte ghosts standing next to the well in the village and repeating the same word three times. Of course he's saying "well well well".
Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don't think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.
Wuthering Waves.
It's a gacha game so I went into it not expecting much, I was just looking for an action combat game with a party of characters and as it was "free" I figured why not give it a shot.
I'm 39 and have been playing games my entire life (probably wayyy too much) and yet this gacha game somehow is literally my favorite game I've ever played... I cried like 4 times during the story and side stories, everything (except the gacha) is amazing. The art, the music, the gameplay, I love it all. I was never expecting to love a gacha game so much lol
I feel the same way about Genshin Impact. But I stopped playing it because the daily FOMO was real.
That Phrolova quest was so peak. The music was so good.
I haven’t played the story since 3.0 launch, but that was an experience.
You should definitely go through to 3.1
The story quest before this most recent one hurt, like I'm still sad weeks later. That was definitely one of the 4 times I cried playing the story lol
I want to, but I’ve been playing Pokémon ROMhacks to celebrate Pokémon week haha.