Some games bring me in the zone/give me flow like no others.
For example the following games do that for me:
- Olli Olli
- Contra (NES)
- Dark Souls
- Street Fighter II (SNES)
- Street Fighter 3
- Street Fighter 6
- Like Dreamer
- Choplifter HD
- XCOM
- Infested Planet
- Tetris Effect
What games are providing you with flow experiences?
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Factorio
Both are almost exactly like programming for me. Impossible not to get in the zone.
I go between flow and “burn it to the ground” with Foctorio.
Do you do DCSS with pictures or @?
I’m a webtiles man.
Used to get this from Rocket League back in the day. My eyes would practically glaze over at times with just how automatic my movements would be.
Katana Zero did it for me
Infinite forest for Destiny 2’s Halloween event did it as well
Trackmania sometimes does it
Super Hexagon too
Destiny 2
As a launch computer player I have never been so scorned by how shit a game could be
I had such high hopes and low expectations and it ruined me
God I miss the Haunted Forest.
It was the coil for me in destiny. I put so much time into that and I’m kinda sad contest of elders doesn’t have a similar upgrade system.
Sekiro, and nothing else has ever come close. It’s so smooth and so fast that I drop into the flow state with no trouble at all.
Sekiro truly did that to me, especially the boss rush where I took a chug of water before getting started and got into the flow zone for the next hour.
Doom Eternal and especially its challenge arenas are immediately what came to mind for me!
While id soft screwed Mick Gordon on the OST, they did so much right in the gunplay and movement mechanics in that game. Rotating through the power trinity and bhopping around an arena whilst gibbing demons is something I just don’t tire of.
Any soulslike. When the boss movements click in your brain it’s very much a flow state.
Celeste.
Rhythm games do it for me!
- One Finger Death Punch
- Rock Band
I’m a DDR 3rd mix bitch and huge into IIDX, Ouendan, and beat saber (before Facebook bought it) I could not agree more
Currently Deadlock.
Dark Tide (Warhammer 40K). The combat just flows so well, and the relentless hordes of enemies lay on the kind of pressure that forces you to use every tool in your character’s arsenal to its maximum potential.
Anything that can get my adrenaline pumping, which generally only happens with multiplayer games when I am facing a human opponent. Dark Souls is a great example for me, here, because the single player gives me that rush for a while but eventually I’m able to breeze through every boss and enemy in the game with minimal effort, so going into invasions and getting sweaty against a host and his 2 OP phantoms is the only way to get that rush again, because, generally speaking, other players can think so no two opponents are really ever the same.
I actually kinda wonder now what the flow state even feels like to others who suggest things like strategy games or puzzle games. To me, it’s like that fucking hyper focus the protag has in the movie Wanted. Crazy Lazer focus on whatever action is going on, and it’s just like… Automatic. No thoughts. Just actions. So I’m really curious how it might manifest in something slower paced like Civilization and what not. Or even how some folks can enter that state via meditation. That sounds awesome and I wish I could trigger it with something else.
Rocket league
Dead Cells, especially the first level puts me in a flow where I’m wondering at the end how I actually got there.
Apex Legends. Its a difficult game to master, but every once in a while I get “in the zone” and pull moves/plays that impress myself. It’s not often, but feels nice when it happens. I still enjoy it even though I “suck” most of the time. I basically play it as a survival game >90% of the time.
Roguelikes. Binding of Isaac is one of my top played games with something like 500 hours in the game. I put it down a year or two and picked it back up like nothing. Just dodging and weaving and min maxing like i never stopped. Even new games that have a similar feel, I just tend to lock in and end up getting really far in my first run.
