When I read about immersive sims online I keep seeing them described as systemic games that give the player choices for solving the problems they come across. But in my experience the different choices you have are so imbalanced in terms of applicability, rewards and exclusivity that I find it hard seeing them as such.
In Bioshocks the aggressive combat playstyle is viable everywhere, is the most rewarding both in terms of gameplay and resources and doesn’t lock you out of anything. The alternative playstyles can still be used situationally to access any exclusive treasure. On the flipside going all in on an alternative playstyle takes more time and often amounts to skipping content.
Frankly I don’t like either, I don’t want to miss out on content and I don’t want my choices to be meaningless.
With Bioshocks and Prey the meta is playing aggressively. With Dishonored it’s stealth. To me the whole scheme seems antithetical to the game structure of a linear story based game. The developer can’t craft a particular experience because they have to accommodate for different options, and the options can’t be too different because the path is the same.
The games that best fit the description for me are BotW and Minecraft or even Hitman, none of which is considered an immersive sim. The popular immersive sims seem closer to Batman Arkham games, which have no pretense of player choices save for what tools you use in combat, than they are to the aforementioned titles.
So, which immersive sim did you play that fulfills the immersive sim premise?
Dishonored is a good one, and Deus Ex is one that really defines immersive sim well.
You got a building you need to get into to get information. You can walk though the restricted areas guns blazing. Or use your hacking skills to bypass a bunch of security and turn defense turrets against the guards. Or you can get into the ducts and sewers. Or you can climb up a stack of boxes you spent three hours gathering from across the area to get up to the second floor window and break it open with a crowbar.
It gives you player choice, and it can be imbalanced because it lets you make stupid choices that are way harder to pull off or were never thought of by the devs. And it’s way more about gameplay than actual story flexibility. No more than you’d get with the endings of a Fallout game
Well, no one said immersive sims have to be 3D action games where you either fight or hide!
Mosa Lina calls itself “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. It’s an aggressively random puzzle platformer where the levels are randomly generated and the tools you have to solve them are also randomly assigned to you. Mosa Lina is a puzzle game that wants you to be clever, not smart, since there’s no predefined solution and success depends on your understanding of the tools and how they interact.
Rain World is a physics-heavy survival game with a simulated ecosystem. I’ve played a bit of it on a friend’s system. You play as a small creature who’s been separated from its family and you have to find them again while avoiding predators, catching food, and sheltering from lethal rainstorms. Since other creatures independently wander around the game world and attack each other, navigating your surroundings is often unpredictable.
Rain World has been in my backlog for a while. I’ll give it a go, and thanks for the other suggestion as well
Not very related but I’m having a similar problem with dead cells. Can’t figure out why shields and traps exist when the dodge roll is more useful in nearly every situation.
So you can get the ability where your shield does its thing when you dodge roll through an enemy.
The roll has a cool down - parries do not. And some of the parry effects are super powerful, especially if they synergize with the effects on your weapon(s). Same with skills/traps.
Huh, I assumed parties had the same cool down as normal blocking
I think the Deus Ex games are all solid imsims. The original DX is or course one of the foundational imsims and fathers of the genre, but I think both HR and MD qualifies well too. And for me Dishonored is too, both stealth and violence are equally viable and you have lots of player freedom, and the world is affected by your choices. The first two hubs of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines are also solid imsim gameplay, the latter half is unfinished however and corners you into combat. STALKER: Call or Pripyat is fairly imsim-y in my opinion.
Bioshock is not an imsim, it’s just a very good shooter.
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll check them out. Didn’t know Bioshock wasn’t one
Again like I said elsewhere, imsim is a horrendous and purely vibes based genre classification and so you’re never going to get clear cut definitions of what is and isn’t one. But by most agreed-upon metrics Bioshock doesn’t qualify. You can’t really take multiple approaches to encounters (social/stealth/hacking/violence/lock picking/stacking boxes etc), the world isn’t really interactive, there is not really any emergent gameplay and so on.
Don’t get me wrong - Bioshock 1 is one of the best games of all time, but it’s an excellent shooter and not an imsim.
Huh, tough one. For me, the point of games like that is to be a super sneaky sneaker who steals everything not nailed down, so I only really notice if the game is really good at that or really bad at that, or punishes it in some way. I get particularly frustrated when I accidentally skip things and bork the narrative because I snuck into an area I wasn’t supposed to access; but the frustration is not that the game let me do it but that there are areas I’m not suppose to access in the first place. That’s antithetical to my enjoyment of those games.
Unsure I quite get what immersive sims are, but some games come to mind that don’t overly favour a play style or another:
- Starbound, similar to Minecraft in being a sandbox building/survival game, and in how it lets you be creative to get to your objective
- Dissidia 012, that though you are forced to play with the characters the devs wanted most of the time, they’re so varied and rotate so often, plus enemies being just as varied, there’s rarely a single strategy to solve all combats
- Dreamscaper, where you can change strategies rather easily
- Deus EX, which gives you a surprising amount of freedom
- Ultimate Ninja 5, which is similar to Dissidia 012 about character and enemies rotation, plus battles are made to be even faster meaning you need to be quick to react to how enemies are attacking
Did I stray too far?
Nobody knows what imsims are, not even fans of them. It’s the vaguest most vibes based genre in existence.
Hmm…
Looking at the other reply, SomeAmateur’s, immersive sims start making sense, and so I’d take out Dissidia and Ultimate Ninja. They are pretty on-rails other than on combat.
Also with the other reply, I’d also say Bioshock isn’t. Having played the first and part of Infinity, both feel more like dungeon crawlers with hack and slash elements and some occasional choices. Not much on the part of simulating anything.
Also now I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3, TES games and Kingdom Come: Deliverance would be better fits for immersive sims with decent gameplay freedom.
Also unsure how well they’d fit, but maybe Undertale and Hades would be good picks. Yet to play either, but from what I’ve seem of both, they give you some freedom to choose how to progress, and the scope of the consequences that come are in accordance to your choices.
