Top contenders:
- Subnautica
- Dishonored
- Prey
- Bioshock
- Control
- Titanfall 2
- Modern Warfare 2
- The Outer Wilds
Subnautica is so immersive I’d find myself holding my breath if I was running low on oxygen as if it would help.
Yeah, by the end of Subnautica I spent my time
spoiler
just going around to my bases and decorating them and fixing them up so they were pleasant places to be in. I built the rocket ship, and I did use it just to see what happened, but canonically in my head I chose to stay on the planet by myself and not leave. Hands down the most immersive game I’ve played.
Dishonored is the one game I’d love to erase from my memory just to have to joy of playing it for the first time again. It’s easily in my top 10 favorite games of all time. I wish there were more like it - Prey was great, too, but not quite the same, and there hasn’t been anything else that’s really scratched that itch.
Football Manager. I’m a simple man. I don’t like starting off as a top team, it’s always more fun for me to download one of the extended databases and take an amateur Sunday League team to the highest heights. I’ve been managing my current side, Wakefield AFC, for almost 20 years. I’ve led them up the ladder from the Northern Counties East League Division One to the Championship.
I remember the first time we averaged more than 100 fans in attendance per season. I remember the first player we sold for cash (veteran midfielder Jack Sang, for a whopping $2,400) instead of letting go on a free. I remember our first ever televised match in 2030 during our Cinderella run in the FA Cup. It was a respectable 2-1 loss to a team 3 divisions above us, but the $250k share of the gate receipts saved us from bankruptcy. I can picture the statue they’ll build someday of Seb Bolton, who scored 116 goals in 223 appearances between 2026-2032 and led us to back-to-back promotions. I’m currently trying to shepherd the development of youth player Tony Okonkwo, a 6’5" center forward who very well could become our first homegrown million dollar man.
That was an enjoyable read in the same vein of reading about crazy EVE Online shenanigans. I will probably never touch it but I admire how fun you make it sound.
Red Dead Redemption 2, by far.
Honorable mention to Elite: Dangerous while playing with a HOTAS
Elite got too real. When you pick a “job” the grind gets real enough to feel like a real job.
That reminds me, my carrier is probably in a ton of debt.
…Meh. I’m pretty sure I can’t be bothered.
Yeah, lost mine. I got it, thought it was cool, and then never really felt like I could utilize it well. Ran out of $ and that’s that.
You can always buy another one with just one afternoon’s worth of mind-numbing Robigo passenger runs.
Oh, I prefer exobio, but that’s a slog sometimes. Everything gets to be a grind after a while with that game. The common lamwnr: lightyears wide, an inch deep. It’s a great game, just need a break.
Probably skyrim. The first time I played it, it made me feel like I had a 2nd separate life that I had to pull myself back out of to rejoin the real world.
Same. I remember seeing a lot of buzz surrounding it on release day, but I’d never played a TES game before. Decided to download it and play for an hour just to see what it’s about. I remember after what felt like roughly an hour I suddenly had massive hunger pains, checked the time and realised I’d just been playing for about 9 hours straight with no break. I don’t think I’ve ever had another game do that to me before.
Control. Not the entire game but one very specific sequence with a hard rock tune stitched throughout. If you know, you know.
The ashtray maze was a great sequence and a ton of fun, but immersive? I don’t think so.
Subnautica. Literally immersive
That’s virtually immersive. Literally immersive was when I fell into an actual pool while playing Super Mario on a gameboy.
I remember being soldered to my game boy as a kid, too…
Actually happened in my 30s LOL.
when you walked into a pool of tin ?
Prey.
They really put the immersive and sim in immersive sim. So much player agency over the world and everything you do in it just makes sense. The computers you use are physically interactable, no UI as dressing. Your menus are just you accessing your handheld smart device (inventory, logs, map).
Every object on the map is persistent. You want to fortify your office to fend off Typhon on your return? Gather the turrets around the map and have them guard the staircase leading to your little paradise. Want to decorate it? Drop items from your inventory and drag them around. Have some trophies of your accomplishments.
I could go on and on about other mechanics like the fantastic gloo gun or how the maps are filled with little secrets/shortcuts, but then I’d be here all day.
Playing for the first time currently and I can’t put it down. We finally got a good successor to system shock 2 and I am so happy
VR is going to win this for me multiple times over. Half Life: Alyx; Resident Evils 7, 8, and 4; Pavlov; The Exorcist: Legion, A Chair in a Room: Greenwater; Batman: Arkham VR; the list goes on.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Felt like I was fighting for my actual life in that game.
I know there are much more immersive games, but the most immersive I’ve played is The Witcher 3, I don’t play many realistic games. Stardew Valley and Minecraft for the win.
Fallout New Vegas, had me fantasizing for weeks about being a desert cowboy. My wife and I finally went to Vegas and we visited a bunch of spots from the game. We played FNV all week together and then we went up the strat tower to get a birds eye view of the city. It was a really fun experience.
Game definitely shows its age now, but it really sold the atmosphere and dragged you into it when it came out.
…definitely shows its age now…
What I’m hearing is we need someone to make Fallout 4Vegas.
Elite Dangerous in VR.
In my case it’s definitely DayZ. It’s an open-world zombie-survival multiplayer game.
I’m not a huge gamer myself but that one has always stood out to me above all the others. Once you’ve spent hours into a character you seriously don’t want to get killed. The map is massive and there’s only 60 other people at best so you often don’t even run into anyone - only hear the occasional gunshot in the distance. Wearing headphones lets you hear 360-degree sounds and the proximity voice chat I think is pretty cool feature too. It’s often jokingly called hiking simulator since you, for the most part, just run in a forests.
It’s also the only game where I’ve genuinely felt bad about shooting another player. Self-defence is a different case but just cold blood murder only because I can has multiple times left me feeling kinda shitty, so nowdays I just try and talk to people and then usually I get shot instead. I’ve also often felt absolutely terrified, hiding in a corner of a room in a house hiding from another player who I’ve just realized is close to me. I haven’t felt anything like that with any other game and have felt that DayZ is quite unique in that sense.
I must add, thought, that those flight simulator cockpits that people have built for themselves seem kind of intriguing too.
I still have several sessions that I have on repeat in my memories, most just walking through the forests and hiding from random parties, or trying to hunt someone from the random gun shots
And like you said the map is immense but If I was dropped in the same place in real life I would know my way around immediately.
I’m a big fan of open world for immersion. Oblivion when it came out, GTA SA and 5, RDR2.
But something that surprised me about immersion was Cataclysm DDA (with good tile and sound packs). It takes a long time to get into the groove of the game as a first timer, but once you do, the emergent stories that come out of it are incredibly immersive.
Just want to chime in here to let people know that Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, available on Steam for $20, is a free open source game. You can get the latest builds (both experimental and stable) on github. Free.
Super Mario on a Gameboy, by a pool, when I wasn’t paying attention.
