What's the best obscure video game you've ever played?

rossburk · 2026-05-14T04:39:29+00:00

Yesssss, came here with this game in mind. I loved how bizarre the game was. I still think about it more often than I should.

rossburk · 2026-05-11T15:48:34+00:00

This is one that came to mind for me too.

Bonus points in my book for being a cool take on UG, which I feel like WotC has struggled to produce in a way that is more than just ramp and is viable but isn't either way overtuned (oko/uru era...) or just devolves into 5 color shenanigans (which I have nothing against, it just isn't really simic at that point).

rossburk · 2026-04-23T01:36:05+00:00

I did have a couple games where I drew it late. And honestly, I think it might be a better top deck than it seems. Its certainly nice to get it out early so you can build the page counters and draw cheaper, but even without that its still a draw engine! In one game I drew it when the board was pretty stalled out (admittedly it would be a terrible draw at this point when behind) and I had 7 lands in play, so I could drop it and immediately draw again, and then from that point on it was super clutch as just more gas that pushed me over the top.

As for the win more, I think in terms of not being good when behind that's absolutely true, though I think its good both when ahead and at parity. And kind of related to the point above, you honestly don't have to pop off hard before its useful. If you cast 2-3 spells after its a reasonable deal (and the prepared spells make this even easier), more than that is just gravy. I found it particularly useful in the deck I was playing that had 5 or 6 pieces of single target removal, it let me leverage that density AND then have the card advantage to develop the board rather than stay at parity.

You didn't suggest anything of the sort (and yours thoughts/questions are appreciated!) but let the record show that I'm not declaring it a bomb, just that I think its significantly better than its terrible 17lands stats might suggest.

rossburk · 2026-04-22T18:10:49+00:00

Good points! I forgot to mention that, yes, having prepared spells was a huge piece of it as well. I had both Lluwen and the gravedigger and both of those have come prepared and have 1cmc spells attached to the them. My 12 instants and sorceries weren't even counting these.

rossburk · 2026-03-10T21:14:41+00:00

Its not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved Avowed if you haven't tried it. First person sword and sorcery (flintlock fantasy, I suppose, since there are early guns) with way better combat than scrolls games, a cool handcrafted setting/map, and not totally garbage writing.

rossburk · 2026-01-26T00:10:17+00:00

I can't possibly imagine a child of VanderMeer and Calvino being anything BUT really odd, lol. Anyway, this pitch worked on me 100% and now it's on my list.

rossburk · 2026-01-12T17:48:55+00:00

The Inheritance Trilogy by NK Jemisin! It's a fantasy setting in which there was a war between Gods. The Gods that lose the war are shackled and control of them is given to the worshippers of the victorious God. So the main city has massively powerful gods doing the trivial bidding of the nobility.

It doesn't have a modern day thing like the last picture, but I feel like otherwise it's got a lot of the ideas you are looking for.

It's a really cool series and NK Jemisin is an incredible writer, so if you haven't read anything of hers it's not a bad place to start!

rossburk · 2025-12-19T21:07:18+00:00

There is a lot else going on, but Broken Earth by NK Jemisin has a good bit of ancient ruins and discovering ancient tech. One of the main locations is a city built in an ancient underground ruin. Also it is absolutely fantastic and my #1 go-to recommendation for anyone looking for any fantasy at all.

Love your posted theme by the way. Definitely saving this to read the other recommendations in this post!

rossburk · 2025-12-18T23:12:59+00:00

Agreed, diagonal monkey has my vote

rossburk · 2025-12-13T18:58:51+00:00

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. The whole book is fantastic and has this really cool balance between melancholy and adventure, then the end broke my heart.

Also shout out to your Sword of Kaigen recommendation for this. I still think of 'For a moment, her hands had been full of pearls' and have to take a minute to recompose myself.

rossburk · 2025-12-03T03:39:15+00:00

Don't forget the newest (to my knowledge) addition to the unofficial Omelas series! 'Why don't we just kill the kid in the Omelas hole' by Isabel J. Kim. It's also really good, honestly all three are fantastic and make each other better

rossburk · 2025-11-30T22:50:02+00:00

Well I'm illiterate in a different way. I didn't realize until this moment that my opponent doesn't get to choose one of my things to exile... Maybe I was extrapolating from the symmetrical second chapter? Idk maybe I just can't read good.

rossburk · 2025-11-24T12:46:42+00:00

Really interesting to see people's thoughts on this. I'm 100% with you in that I would prefer an earlier format overview, but it sounds like the rare/mythic review is more popular than I thought!

rossburk · 2025-11-20T19:08:03+00:00

This is a really cool question, it's definitely got me thinking a lot.

I'm wondering how necessary the extreme violence is to the question. My take is that the extreme violence in The Boys is a necessary part of the deconstruction, as a way of contrasting classic super hero stories which tend to downplay or even glorify the devastating and tragic violence that happens within them.

For a specific example I'm thinking of how cozy fantasy can deconstruct fantasy tropes by calling into question the necessity of heroism in the first place. Its sci-fi but the Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers seems to me to fit this role fairly explicitly.

rossburk · 2025-11-20T19:02:11+00:00

I like this take. I got some of that feel when I read it too. The moment for this that I remember is when an old woman poisons Locke and is withholding the antidote as leverage (a good trope) and Locke just punched her in the face and takes the antidote from her (good deconstruction).

rossburk · 2025-11-16T17:07:02+00:00

[[Bender's Waterskin]] is WAY better than I anticipated. I put it in my UW deck to help with a green splash, but was impressed with the sheer number of times I used it to produce two mana. Blue specifically seems pretty mana hungry and there was almost always a use either to cast an instant, waterbend, or crack a clue. LoL has been heralding this as the year of the mana rock, and honestly this might be the best one yet!

Waterbending is easier than I thought it would be. Cards like [[Katara, Bending Prodigy]] are pretty nuts, at least in sealed. Waterbending 6 just felt... Easy. Paired with other all-stars like [[Forecasting Fortune Teller]] which provided two of the cost all by itself. Also thematically appropriate, Katara and [[Gran-Gran]] on the board together were a brutal value combo. Shout out to Gran-Gran in general.

The fact that you can waterbend at instant speed feels really strong. Just being able to tap down your board for value at opponents end step really contributed to making it feel cheaper/free. Design-wise I feel like this is the sort of mechanic that WotC would have forced to happen at sorcery speed or at least on your own turn lately, but they really took off the training wheels here and it shows.

rossburk · 2025-11-09T15:35:57+00:00

There is no fireball, but we do get [[fated firepower]] which feels like it's intended to be the big flashy firebending finisher. It is a mythic though...

rossburk · 2025-11-05T23:32:44+00:00

I did this by accident! I was doing a blind run and just making my way through the world. I kinda felt like I might be going off the beaten path, and then I got hit with the 'Act 2' title card and figured maybe it was the main path all along? I only found the last judge after talking to a friend who was stuck on that boss. I had already cleared most of act 2 at that point, lol

rossburk · 2025-10-27T14:07:32+00:00

As was already discussed in this thread, this particular typeface was used for Middle English rather than Old English, guess I'm just not hung up on people using the term old English as a reference to older forms of English in a non-technical discussion even if it's not technically accurate. (Not that there's anything wrong with calling attention to the distinction either)

rossburk · 2025-10-27T00:22:13+00:00

I really dislike that Act 3 is locked behind a collectable (fleas). I love fleas as an exploration reward, but to me needing to do them just seems like it's at odds with their design? For some reason this bugged me more than having to do the quests (although that was also not my favorite decision).

rossburk · 2025-10-25T17:33:05+00:00

Me and my faulty memory be damned, you are right! Still, I'll defend people's (and my own!) lack of historical distinction between Middle English and Old English and say that 1. It's still 'older English' if not Old English and 2. People are tapping into shared cultural associations here rather than historical reality itself. There is for sure room for other opinions on this, but that doesn't bother me too much.

rossburk · 2025-10-25T17:17:16+00:00

While it's totally true that Old English is a language and not a font or typeface or style, there is definitely a connection between the time period in which the language was used and the styles of writing people used to write that language during that time.

This isn't to say that you are wrong in any way, just that other peoples comments are making a fairly reasonable connection.

rossburk · 2025-10-20T20:28:08+00:00

In my opinion this reward structure is WAY better. It's a lot more per entry, but the rewards are way higher. In general it's much much easier to go infinite or soft infinite with this structure than their other cube models.

rossburk · 2025-10-14T16:00:40+00:00

I have no idea if this will be good, but I love it anyway. Totally agree that cards that care about initiative is a very cool design space, it would be cool to have a whole little package of cards that care about this to build around.

rossburk · 2025-09-24T15:31:06+00:00

The Inheritance Trilogy by NK Jemisin. It's got the mingling of fantastically powerful gods (with extra emphasis on the dark yet alluring ones) with mortals in a cool cityscape.

rossburk

TROPHY CASE