For me, Tunic. Well, it's a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.
I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.
Oh, but what's this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.
spoiler
I knew it was an English cipher from the beginning. Nobody ever goes full conlang, as much as I would love that. I got as far as deducing it was phonemic, as the same glyphs kept appearing before cleartext words, which I assumed were "a/an" and "the", and the way "the" was written made me think it was two glyphs, one for the and one for . The last thing I got before giving up and looking it up online was one of hte ghosts standing next to the well in the village and repeating the same word three times. Of course he's saying "well well well".
Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don't think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.
Detroit: Become Human. I skipped it it when it was released and totally never played it. Recently I got it on discount and tried it out. Even my wife is extremely invested in the story and she doesn't even play games.
Psychonauts. I just saw a few times this game on some top game lists and decided to try. Man, this game fucking rocks! Also, Psychonauts 2 is also epic and Compton's level should be made into a standalone game! What an epic imagination devs at Double fine have!
Rust. I was there during Beta. Me and one my friend had fun. But once Garry had remade it to what it is today, we tried to play with more people. I hate the game but it is also so much fun with friends.
Heavy modded Minecraft. Once only vanilla payer, my friends finally convinced me to play TPPI with them. Never going back to vanilla.
There’s a great video on YouTube of a speedrunner doing Psychonauts in front of a room full of the devs, at least some of whom are a bit drunk
I have watched both Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 speedruns. Second one was fun cause they only had this game released for a year. So speedrunner was rubbing their bugs all over their faces during that. Hilarious watch it was.