Starbound

 

 

Around 1,600 hours played

Price: $15 

Price per current hours played: $0.01

 

I'm sure many reading this will have, at the very least, heard of Starbound. Many, I'm sure have played it. Simply put, it's Minecraft meets Metroid, a 2D platformer, survival, RPG, simulator... yes... all of them. 

You start out a castaway on an alien planet. You need food, shelter, tools, and weapons. Pretty basic. Now, to upgrade all these things, you need resources, and some of these resources aren't on the planet you're on. That spaceship of yours needs repair, but it will soon be transporting you and your allies to the far reaches of the known universe. You'll travel to distant planets, battle all sorts of uglies, and collect the rarest of resources to build your ultimate weapons, armor, and tools.

Each planet has a number of random biomes, and there are multiple star types, which effect those biomes. Some stars make planets too cold to explore, too hot, or too... irradiated... You're going to need to find a way around that... You're going to have plenty to do on these planets, like mining, fighting, and searching for civilization both current, and long forgotten. If you can't seem to find one you like, you can just build one. If you build it, they will come.

Like Minecraft, one of the best things about Starbound is the ability to mod it. There's tons of mods, the most universally known being Frakin Universe, a mod that adds all sorts of new tech, planet types, and biomes to work with. You can follow different paths every time you play, giving you an endless amount of new stuff to do, from brewing up booze, to bee keeping, or crafting swords out of slime... not sure how that works...

At $15, this is another game that's value far exceeds it's price. Seriously, paying full price for this game is pretty much ripping off the creator. I don't know what these people were thinking.

Vintage Story

  

Around 600 hours played 

Price: $20 

Price per current hours played: $0.03

 

Vintage Story is one of the most immersive games I've ever played. Yes, at first glance, it looks like Minecraft, but it's almost nothing like it. No more punching trees for wood, or walking around with a full set of iron armor within five minutes of gameplay.

 

In Vintage Story, you start out with nothing. You need the bare essentials just to survive your first night. That means baskets for inventory space (crafted from reeds), food you can collect from berry bushes, prey animals, or wild crops, a place to shack up where you can't be killed by drifters or wolves, and fire to light the night, and cook your food.

You start out by grabbing some sticks you can get from tree branches, or bushes. Then, you need tool heads, like a pickaxe. You get these by finding stones (only harder stone will work), flint, or obsidian, and knapping them. To knapp, you place the stone on the ground, and use another to chip away at it to get the desired tool head shape. Pottery and metal smithing use similar methods.

 

Food is your biggest concern. You need all the basic food groups to gain more max HP (Vintage Story's version of leveling). You need veggies, grain, fruit, meat, and dairy. You can survive on just one of these, but you need them all to gain HP. 

 

There is, however, a food chain. Small animals will try and steal your crops, and larger animals will try and eat the smaller ones. There's also food spoilage, a winter season where nothing grows, and a hot season where stuff spoils faster. You need a way to store things, long term, and a chest in your house simply won't do.

 

There's so much more to Vintage Story than that. I've got about 600+ hours on this one, and I can't get enough of it. The game goes for about $20, but it's worth far more.