I don’t mind admitting that I don’t have the widest attention span. Heck, my mind wandered no less than three times in writing that last sentence. As such, I don’t always have the patience for games that throw a lot of disparate mechanics at you, like grand-scale strategy or involved, team-based extraction shooters. If I can’t keep it all in my head, it’s all going to fall out, and I’ll just get frustrated.
This is why, on occasion, I enjoy playing games that stick nearly exclusively to a single mechanic. They may branch out slightly and offer little spins on that one mechanic, but the game’s bedrock gameplay loop and concept always keeps that one mechanic at the very center. These kinds of games may be relatively simpler in execution compared to some big-box titles, but when you can really nail that singular mechanic with precision, that tends to stick in my mind a little better than something overly complicated.
10 Guitar Hero
The Game That Made You Think You Could Play Guitar
Good heavens, has it been 20 years since the original Guitar Hero launched already? I’m getting old. I still remember when that game took the world by storm. Dance Dance Revolution was already firmly entrenched around that time, but while Guitar Hero was conceptually similar, the mere act of holding up a plastic guitar and strumming along with the track made it a completely different ballgame from either DDR or other, more traditional rhythm games.
Guitar Hero took finesse and control, at least if you were playing on the hardest difficulty. You couldn’t just mash the fret buttons and strum randomly, you needed to slide your hand up and down to reach everything, strum in perfect timing, and know when to use extra abilities like star power and the whammy bar to maximize your score.
In short, it was all about having an ear for music and translating that sense into hand-eye coordination. I don’t think the franchise’s ultimate collapse had anything to do with a lapse in quality or overcomplication, it was just too many games released back to back, and expecting us to pay full price for each one.
9 Before Your Eyes
Don’t Blink
Speaking of getting old, you often hear that time passes more quickly the older you get. Life is very random and uncertain when you’re young, but as you get older and settle into routines, things suddenly seem to speed up exponentially. That’s why people say “I blinked and my life passed me by.” Life thankfully doesn’t actually move that quickly, but what if it did?
Before Your Eyes is a narrative adventure game where the central and sole mechanic is that, every time you blink, the story lurches ahead. That’s you as in you, the person playing. The game watches for your blinks via a connected webcam. If you want to know the full scope of the story, you need to force yourself to pay attention with eyes wide open, without looking away or blinking.
It’s a mechanic that demands a lot from you, yes, but that’s by design. It’s a deliberate message that your life passes you by if you’re not paying it conscious mind. You blinked, and it was all over.
8 One Finger Death Punch
More Like Two Fingers, But Still
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Developer |
Silver Dollar Games |
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Platforms |
PC |
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Release Date |
March 2014 |
Part of what makes martial arts movies so much fun is how effortless the stunt actors make it all look. Yeah, actually learning and performing a martial art is really hard, but the way these guys do it is so smooth, so clean, and so simple. If fighting was that straightforward, anyone could learn how to do it. Reality is not so accommodating, unfortunately, but at least in games like One Finger Death Punch, you too can become a god of the fist. Or finger, I guess.
One Finger Death Punch is an incredibly fast-paced combat action game that only uses two buttons: the left and right arrow keys. Enemies approach from either side of the screen, and you have to counter and strike them with laser precision. You can’t just mash the keys at random, though; you need perfect timing to strike them all down with a single blow.
The game occasionally throws some little wrinkles at you, like needing to enter a series of inputs in a rapid sequence, but it never gets any more complicated than tapping those two buttons. If you find more elaborate character-action games too involved, this game is a great way to get your action fix with comparatively less commitment.
7 Viewfinder
A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words
There are a couple of perspectives for photography based on how you approach it. For most of us, it’s just a convenient way to store visual information for fun or reminders. However, in the hands of a skilled photographer, a physical photograph can be a little window into a slice of history, a vivid depiction of a once-in-a-lifetime view. Viewfinder takes that philosophical perspective in a more literal direction.
Every puzzle in this game revolves around the use of photographs or other similar static artwork, either picked up off the ground or snapped with an instant camera. By holding a photo up, you can superimpose its view upon reality, manifesting whatever was depicted in it. Besides being a very visually interesting mechanic, it encourages you to think carefully about placement and perspective, not unlike taking actual photos.
When you manifest a photo, the terrain will look exactly as it does in the photo. If you didn’t capture the view right or took it at a weird angle, it will appear in that same skewed fashion, though this can be both detrimental and beneficial depending on the precise kind of puzzle you’re trying to solve.
6 Unpacking
Empty Boxes, Full Shelves
Moving is a surprisingly involved process. Even when all the boxes have arrived and all you have to do is put them away, it’s a combination of a puzzle and a physical challenge to lift everything up and out and find an ideal place for it. It’s a little task that Unpacking was able to gamify, and with a surprisingly heartfelt tinge.
Unpacking is a narrative puzzle game in which you play through the various moving milestones in a person’s life, unpacking their belongings and placing them around their new lodgings each time. It’s a healthy bit of environmental storytelling, trying to cram what few possessions they have into various, often limited, levels of space, though it’s also a nifty way to express your personal style of storage.
The only thing you need to do to complete a level is have all of your stuff safely stored; it doesn’t matter where it is. So, if you keep particular belongings like clothes or knick-knacks in a space others might not, this is your chance to see if your organizational styles are actually viable. And you get to take a little picture at the end!
5 Tetris
Stack ‘Em Up
The vast majority of stack-based puzzle games could be considered one-mechanic wonders. That’s part of what makes these kinds of games so addicting; they’re very easy to understand and pick up thanks to their short rulesets, but take time and effort to truly master. Any game of this nature could fit this list, though I think we can all agree the game that made it cool was the original Tetris.
In Tetris, there are only two bedrock rules: stack the Tetrominos in the field, and make lines to clear them away. That’s it, that’s the whole game. Just keep doing that until you run out of space or the game gets too fast for you to keep up with. Within that simple framework is a dastardly galaxy of strategies and maneuvers. Can you even imagine how satisfying it must have been for the very first Tetris player to drop a long piece into a full clear?
Later Tetris games like Tetris Attack added multiplayer, as well as the ability to drop junk pieces on your opponent. Personally, though, I like Tetris fine solo. It’s a brain-teaser, not a competition, something that challenges your timing and visual calculus.
4 Nidhogg
Swish, Swoosh, Stab
Have you ever been playing a fighting game with a friend, and you tell them, “hold on, don’t do anything,” so you can get a free shot off on them? Imagine if that little bit of mind-gaming was the central conceit of a fighting game, and that the free shot was also a guaranteed kill. That’s pretty much what playing Nidhogg with a friend is like.
Nidhogg can best be described as a high-speed fighting game. Both players have fencing sabers that can kill that other with a single stab, but only if you get a clean hit in. You have to psyche each other out with stances and footsies to get a stab in. Whoever gets all the way to the end of their side of the stage first wins, and their prize is getting eaten by the Nidhogg.
The three-tier sword stance mechanic is really the only one to speak of in Nidhogg; everything else I mentioned is more a matter of emergent gameplay from that otherwise simple framework. It’s already impressive when you can get a whole game out of one mechanic, but it’s even more impressive when that mechanic makes you take the game further.
3 Rocket League
Like Soccer With Hot Wheels
When you were a kid, did you ever try to make up your own game in the sandbox? When all you had was some toy trucks and a little ball to work with, you make something up on the fly with whatever rules happen to work. I have to imagine that’s at least similar to how the concept for Rocket League came about.
Rocket League is, when you boil down, just soccer with cars. Heck, it’s not even full soccer, as there are no involved rules like onside kicks or fouls. You can’t really “foul” a car, after all. You just ram into the ball, with or without your speed booster, and try your hardest to nudge it into the opposing team’s goal. It’s the bones of soccer with a wider field, faster movement, and less downtime. In other words, it’s basically perfect.
There are other game modes and mutators if you really want to shake things up, but car soccer is always the first word in the conversation. I guess that’s why a soccer ball is fun to play with, because there’s so much you can do with it if you’re creative enough.
2 Cryptmaster
Type To Live
Okay, actual question: are typing tutor games still a thing? Like, that kids use in/for school? I don’t even know if kids still type on keyboards, let alone learn typing in school computer classes like I did. Well, if they don’t, that’s a shame, not just because I think it’s an important, valuable skill, but because it would be substantially harder for the lot of them to enjoy Cryptmaster.
Cryptmaster is a dungeon-crawling adventure game that is built entirely around typing out single words. When conversing with other characters, your undead amalgamation of heroes can only grunt in single words, so you need to have a wide vocabulary if you want to get information and give the right answers to questions and puzzles.
This also applies to the game’s combat system, wherein you need to quickly type out a word from one of your party’s move lists to use attacks and cast spells. Enemies won’t wait around for you to hunt and peck, so you need to type quickly and decisively to land every blow. If you’ve got a decent typing speed and a sufficient grasp of the English language, no monster will be able to stop you.
1 PowerWash Simulator
Just Wash The Wall, Wall-Washer
In a similar vein to Unpacking, there’s something about mindless little chores that makes for shockingly good game material. A game doesn’t always need to have a life-or-death goal to keep you motivated, sometimes it just needs to give you a simple, straightforward task and hand you the means with which to do it. That’s why PowerWash Simulator is so addicting; it’s just spraying water everywhere, but it’s tangibly satisfying.
Every last job in PowerWash Simulator has the same general goal and flow: an object or location is dirty as heck, and you need to spray water until all that stank goes away. It’s slow, methodical work, but you can see your progress unfold in front of you as dirt falls away to reveal the vibrant colors and architecture beneath.
Not unlike working a real trade job, the methodical nature of PowerWash Simulator encourages you to get good at your single job. There’s little you can do to improve your abilities beyond buying better sprayers and the occasional bottle of soap, so you come up with little tricks, optimize your spraying angles and footing. You know what they say, there’s always business for someone who’s really good at one thing.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
