Submitted 1 month ago by koncertejo@lemmy.ml to games@lemmy.world
I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
I sketch out factory designs for Satisfactory
Same my friend, same. I’m starting my new factory on Friday and I’m getting ready for the math.
Btw if you’re not already, we’re here at !satisfactory@lemmy.world
I wasn’t already, but I am now.
Tunic!
The “final” puzzle took a whole page of paper. It was brilliant
I still smile whenever I stumble upon these pages of my college block
The loading page was some straight up bullshit though.
So many instances of…
“…no…nooo… NOOO”
Then it works
The Witness
Lots of diagrams
This. So many sketches and diagrams the month I played through this one.
I left my computer to go out with friends to have wings. I was thinking about the puzzle I left behind on the trip there. I was trying to draw the patterns on my phone while we waited. This game gets into your head.
Agree, I filled like half notebook with this game
I remember opening Paint to solve that incremental puzzle in the mountain only to realise there’s multiple symbols in the same space
The following games all typically do not hold the player’s hand. They are to varying degrees, some give you a map and/or journal, some do not.
I love the Morrowind recommendation. Also, unlikely suggestion, but I had to get a pen and paper for The Great Crystal dungeon on Final Fantasy XII.
The last game I recall breaking out pen and paper for was Tunic. You can definitely beat the story without, but the later puzzles call for it.
Animal Well.
Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.
If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.
It reads like it would be a game similar to “A normal lost phone” and "another lost phone“ - two of the best phone puzzle games I‘ve played.
I might give Her Story a try
I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!
Reviews
“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun
Guess that means you have to play it now.
Myst was my answer even before reading your post, so I would say the rest of the series. Also Quern, in the same genre. Maybe The Talos Principle if you like puzzles, though I don’t remember reaching for my notepad while playing.
Exile was pretty good, minus the pixel hunting on the forest level, but I’d say overall quality dropped off pretty quickly after that.
My most recent such games were Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn.
During Her Story I ended up with an A5 sheet full of keyword ideas I wanted to search the recordings for.
Obra Dinn had me draw multiple iterations of a ship deck while trying to figure out who was likely to sleep in which hammock :D
I usually wrote a lot of scribbles for Stardew Valley, at least when trying to go for perfection.
Heaven’s Vault feels like it should have its own journal, but it really didn’t.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! could use a notebook at points or at least scrap paper.
I hear Lorelei and The Laser Eyes was specifically designed around the idea of the player using a physical notepad to help solve the puzzles. Recently released and reviewed strongly, you should check it out if not already on your radar.
It definitely does, and I’ll second the recommendation, but at least one set of puzzles only really requires the the notepad because they didn’t give you sufficient software tools in game, not because it couldn’t be done well in game.
Tunic
Elite Dangerous
Death Stranding
Tunic 💯💯
Why Death Stranding? I don’t understand this one…
I kept some paper logs of what was needed where. Mostly for building things, but also for deliveries. I was trying to be relatively efficient in hauling stuff around.
Morrowind, Factorio and Stardew Valley
Elite: Dangerous, because every time I tab out of the game to check INARA for the closest outfitting or something there’s about a 30% chance of it crashing and becoming unlaunchable until I restart my computer. Hence writing system names down on paper before launching the game.
Riven is one of my favorite games and IMO the best of the Myst series of games. My recommendation is Outer Wilds, which doesn’t necessarily require real life note taking although you could. However it is a fantastic puzzle/exploration game that is easily on par with Riven, and will hit that same vibe of learning more and more about the world and using that knowledge to progress. Trust me, its very worth it. Also get the DLC too!
Seconded, though I would advise getting the DLC after completing the main game.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but Elite Dangerous. I’m about to print out pictures of the controls just to teach myself to use them.
I would bet others like EVE Online for the bill better.
I use paper because the game tends to crash when I tab out to figure out where I was supposed to go. And then it won’t launch again until I restart my computer.
Honestly it was really handy to have a pen and paper around for Elden Ring for me. There was just so much I wanted to keep track of so that I could come back or to make connections. But it’s also a very acquired taste kind of game to go through!
Three very different games I actually took notes for :
La Mulana. In the “modern” version you have limited memory space to save some of the many texts you find, but you’ll need more than that to solve the puzzles anyway. Good luck trying to scribble the weird pixelated symbols in your notes, too.
I play Shin Megami Tensei games with notes to optimize fusions, when I have a particular demon in mind and I want them to inherit the right skills. Later games let you see fusion results, but only one step ahead.
And then there’s spacechem. I love Zachtronics games in general, and all the following ones tend to be progressive in difficulty and let you experiment from a good enough solution to better solutions. As the first, less refined one, spacechem is special. Before long it needs planning and calculations to even get something that works.
If you liked riven you might like the witness.
World of Xeen
For the hardest dungeon you have to solve a crossword puzzle. In the game you can read a long story that contains all the answers but the puzzle is in a huge labyrinth far away from that story and it would be too tedious to change back and forth between the two.
The manuals of the games (it’s actually two games combined into one even larger game) have dedicated blank pages for notes at the end. I also had the way to the boss of the second game written down there.
Back then it was quite common for RPGs to have space for notes in the manuals.
I played that long ago (I had a MM1-5 collection on a CD-ROM).
I finished the Clouds of Xeen side without much trouble, I was even surprised when I realized I had found that game’s ending. But I never could do any progress on Darkside… Not sure what I was missing.
Darkside is considerably harder. It’s easier when you finish Clouds first but you quickly reach a point where it also gets harder. I think a balanced party composition is also even more important.
When I was a child I didn’t understand that it was turn based. So whenever there was a monster I rapidly clicked the fight button without much regard to strategy. Made it even harder. Don’t think I managed to beat either game back then.
Star Trek for Sega Genesis certainly fit this criteria.
The legend of grimrock 1,2. I have pages of notes and a hand drawn map on gridpaper for them!
Steam Workshop 😭
For me with this ADD, a lot, honestly. But, if you’ve ever tried your hand at breeding in Ark, you kinda understand what is like to be a CPA in tax season.
Love that your example was riven. Was my first thought on the title.
The myst games, their newer game Obduction, the Talos Principle. Those puzzle games all are awesome and take some pen and paper.
Escape from mystwood mansion, the house of da Vinci are a couple others that feel the same way.
Less adventure, more “must optimize!” games like Satisfactory, Factorio are other games that require me to bust out pen and paper or at least a website, spreadsheet or calculator.
Subnautica, if you want a map, you have to start triangulation and drawing
Second this. If I remember correctly, at some points in VLR, you have to enter some certain passwords to deactivate some certain things or something terrible will happen. But if you play this game on 3DS which has an additional touch screen, you can utilize integrated notepad feature of the game to write down what you need to remember ;-) It is crucial to play these kind of games knowing as little as possible, so I won’t disclose any more details.
Dungeon Master
Still got my notebook as a kid with the spells like ZO KATH RA still around my parents house
Void Stranger is a relatively recent one. It’s a Sokoban style puzzle game with layers of puzzles and a ton of hidden depth.
It took me 50 hours to feel like I beat the base game and I haven’t even touched the post-game content they added after release. I have a folder full of text files with notes and clues and puzzle attempts and one of the best puzzles involved taking several screenshots and stitching them together in an image editor.
La Mulana is another one to check out. It’s a metroidvania heavy on puzzles and exploration that’s actively hostile toward the player. It’s an exercise in frustration and every inch of progress is measured in blood. Every bit of information is important, and there’s a lot of information to untangle. I haven’t come close to beating it yet and my notes from just the first few floors are extensive.
Bathilda_Bagshot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Return of the Obra Dinn
charade_you_are@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
First and only game I was able to think of. Good stuff