Looking for Recommendations

General Discussion
1

Hi, everyone. I’ve been here for a while, and lurked for a good while before that, and as the title suggests I’m looking for recommendations that suit my tastes and also to share some of the oddities I’ve collected over the years with those that are interested. What I’m really looking for are primarily text games with a level of mechanical depth and “realism,” even if the rest of the game isn’t nearly as fleshed out.

A lot of projects that fit that description end up being abandoned or half-finished, and in general I’m open to other oddities that do something unique even if they don’t fit the exact description of what I’m looking for. In general, I really enjoy those weird, abandoned, half-finished projects, and other projects that are ambitious yet underdeveloped.

Like I said, I’m also willing to share some of the stuff from over the years that I have saved, provided I can find the original source and credit. Really, I’m hoping this thread can be a resource for others that like “realistic” text games and other weird projects, as I feel like they often go underappreciated and end up being nearly impossible to find.

2 Likes
3

First game that I can think of is 100% Gaining Perspective if you already haven’t played it.

4

“A Piece of Cake! / C’est de la tarte !” , comes to mind

5

Oh, that’s an absolute classic. I’ve played it a fair amount. That’s almost exactly the kind of stuff I’m talking about, though.

6

I’ve seen that around, but I’ve never actually checked it out. Thanks for the recommendation!

7

Any games that you’ve collected that you’d personally recommend? I’m looking for stuff that’s exactly like that.

1 Like
8

Well, the ones that I can think of off the top of my head are Tainted Elysium, Fetish Master, and Free Cities. There are, however, specific caveats to all 3.

Tainted Elysium is by far the most interesting from a systems perspective to me, but also by far the most unfinished, and is at this point seemingly completely abandoned without even any community continuations. It has a category here, which I’ve linked, and I think there are some old downloads of it floating around here somewhere outside of the category, but overall it’s just dead. An absolutely fascinating quarter-finished experiment.

Fetish Master is another seemingly completely abandoned project, but relatively more finished compared to Tainted Elysium. There are also several community continuations of it that can be found in the linked category here, of which I recommend the Legacy Edition w/ Maternal Reads + the patch. It’s somewhat buggy and devoid of flavor at times from my experience, but also has a lot of room for experimentation and personal alteration. It also has the benefit of itself being an engine with the dev tools included in it, so if you put enough effort in you could pretty much do whatever you want with it.

The final, and most polished, recommendation I have is Free Cities. It’s relatively simple in terms of systems (at least in terms of body-related stuff), but that simplicity allows room for a lot of flavor. The major caveat with this one is the occasionally questionable content of the game itself, but afaik you can control pretty much all of what content is displayed. The other caveat is that there isn’t that much support for wg-related stuff in it, but I’ll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my own wg mod for it. I will say, however, that I update it at most twice a year and that I am no writer or coder, so the quality of it is what it is. I’ve tried to make it as polished as possible, and it was updated (relatively) recently, but I’m sure at this point it’s at least somewhat behind the main branch, which I have also linked at the beginning.

These are my, like, top 3. I hope these recommendations are at least of some use, if you haven’t played these already. If you have already played these I’m sure I could dig a little deeper, but as I’m sure you could tell I am not exactly the most timely with responses.