What classic games are still a unique experience even today?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Often times when you ask for a list of recommend games, you get the usual "canon" of "classic" or "acclaimed" games from decades past. However, often times these games have not held up and are not as special today. For example, there was nothing like FF7 when it came out and that made it an acclaimed game. However, almost three decades have passed, and since then there are many games that follow FF7's format that are just as good if not better, which makes it harder to single out FF7 as a recommendation when the alternatives exist, even if they aren't at the top of a "canon" list of "best games ever". So in that case you have to ask what flavor of that game you want. The same has happened to many a genre.

But some games have not had many imitators of similar or higher quality to diminish how good and worthwhile they are. For example, Thief. Almost three decades later, there is still pretty much nothing like Thief. Dishonored does not have sound propagation and is not about sneaking. It is about running through missions and killing people. The sneaking is just a preamble to your attack, and you have lots of powers. There is Gloomwood, and while sneaking is a bigger part of it, sneaking is not the end-all-be-all of it like it was in Thief. So Thief 1998 still stands alone as an experience you can single out and recommend today.

[Bertram_Tung]

Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos

Still no space sim/adventure that has the sense of scope (little to no loading screens between systems) and full newtonian physics like this gem.

[rusty_shackleford]

Wizardry 8, it should have sparked a whole line of imitators but there was never a single one made. Such a great game.

[asf]

all of them

[Oyster Sauce]

Dungeon Keeper is very accessible, even today, and nothing else plays like it. It's also a great game!

[psychic_dream]

I can only think of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, where no other game seemed to replicate its unique sense of theming and exploration. Even Far Cry 1 was originally supposed to feature dinosaurs, as seen in the early CryEngine tech demo released to showcase the GeForce 3 GPUs. Unfortunately, this concept was scrapped in favor of Trigens.

[dagal]

Black & White. While it doesn't strike me as a good game anymore when replaying it, it certainly qualifies as a "unique experience", given how they managed to make an immersive strategy with RPG elements, where the only UI is basically the hand that you use to move or do stuff, and doing stuff actually interacts with the real world on a way that the villagers/creatures can see and react. Also, in later levels it becomes quite hard to manage everything on your own, even by cheesing the pause button. In order to be successful, your best bet is to have your creature do the right things on its own: go to other villages and do miracles to convert them, avoid wasting time on silly stuff, etc. How well will the creature do autonomously will depend on how well you have trained it before, in earlier levels, when you could afford to spend plenty of attention on it. I have never played any other game in which your success depended on the behaviors you have trained on an autonomous AI agent.

Then there is VtMB. I'm sure it doesn't need an introduction in this forum, but for this thread I'd like to focus on its crazy script and branching design. Right from the first decision you make, character creation, the game can play completely different. And sure, the story is overall the same, but even with the same character there are several valid ways to play through each challenge. Four of us could make a separate playthrough, and it would result in four completely different experiences of the same game. Today, it would sound insane "wasting" so much creative design on branches that a player would miss in one playthrough (and plenty of details that a lot of players will accidentally miss).

Carmageddon. Not the remake, but pretty much any of the old ones. Yes, there are other games with cool dynamic vehicle damage, and more realistic too. Yes, you can also be a driving maniac in GTA-style games. Yes, trackmania has better car physics challenges to appease autists. But when everything said and done, I could never find a racing game that provided as much raw fun as Carmageddon did, because of the dark comedy elements that make it so memorable. Such games wouldn't get released today.

[Tweed]

Galapagos: Mendel's Escape

[Tinky Winky]

Gothic 2, even Piranha Bytes failed to replicate the experience.

[Tangerine]

Mendel Palace. It was a strange tile-shuffling game, but I liked it. I don't think I've ever met anyone else who's heard of it, much less played it.

[KOS-MOS]

S4 League

It’s not really what you'd call a classic game, but I’ve never found another game that delivers the same incredible gameplay and fun, fast-paced atmosphere. I spent an insane number of hours on it, and it honestly depresses me that no developer ever tried to make an S4 League 2, or at least a game close to it.

The only way to experience a game like S4 League now... is to play S4 League on private servers. That’s pretty much it.

This game was unique, and will probably remain unique forever, I guess...

[Fox1]

Often times when you ask for a list of recommend games, you get the usual "canon" of "classic" or "acclaimed" games from decades past. However, often times these games have not held up and are not as special today. For example, there was nothing like FF7 when it came out and that made it an acclaimed game. However, almost three decades have passed, and since then there are many games that follow FF7's format that are just as good if not better, which makes it harder to single out FF7 as a recommendation when the alternatives exist, even if they aren't at the top of a "canon" list of "best games ever". So in that case you have to ask what flavor of that game you want. The same has happened to many a genre.

But some games have not had many imitators of similar or higher quality to diminish how good and worthwhile they are. For example, Thief. Almost three decades later, there is still pretty much nothing like Thief. Dishonored does not have sound propagation and is not about sneaking. It is about running through missions and killing people. The sneaking is just a preamble to your attack, and you have lots of powers. There is Gloomwood, and while sneaking is a bigger part of it, sneaking is not the end-all-be-all of it like it was in Thief. So Thief 1998 still stands alone as an experience you can single out and recommend today.

I would say Half-Life and Half-Life 2, while at the time the mechanics were ground breaking I feel many other games that absorbed them do it better or have a better story and atmosphere. The STALKER series immediately comes to mind for me, even with the jank

For stealth games nothing comes to mind that has done disguises or hide in plain sight better than the Hitman games, with the later ones still being the pinnacle of the formula (WoA trilogy minus Absolution). For light and sound based stealth I still don't think anyone has really surpassed Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, at least none that I can think of, that game has aged quite well and still deserves revisiting.

For post apocalyptic RPGs Fallout 3 and NV are still some of the best, NV being far ahead, while I like the improved gunplay of 4, I hated the dumbed down skills system and the story and characters sucked. Even despite the outdated buggy engine and copy pasted environments, exploration, looting, and quest design make them fun to revisit every couple of years.

Resident Evil 1,2,3 -- Pioneer of survival horror. The tank controls, claustrophobic camera angles, ammo scarcity and puzzles give decent challenge make these games a joy to play even today (especially modded on PC with updated visual mods, I never played them at launch)

[asf]

black & white was never good

very innovative, and throwing villagers on the sea was fun, but it was never a good game

[Vergil]

The Overlord games are pretty unique.