Players usually want a good story in their games. I can enjoy a good story too, but sometimes I just want to get going and do stuff without listening to several minutes of dialog in-between action.

Do you know any games where there’s no story (or very minimal/skippable one), and the game mechanics alone carry the game?

EDIT: Thank you all for the suggestions. There are some that I’ve never heard of and look very interesting. Will definitely pick some of them up.

GrimReaperCZ
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Rogue-lites are probably a good suggestion, considering I played and enjoyed Bullets Per Minute and Rogue Legacy. Also Dead Cells is probably one of my favourite. If there’s at least some form of progression then I think I’ll like it so I’ll look into the others you mentioned. Thanks.

Slay the Spire maybe?

If you liked Bullets Per Minute, pick up Metal: Hellsinger. Not a roguelite, but a very well-structured single-player story-minimal (~10-15 second voiced introductions to each level, occasionally a 1-2 minute, voiced cutscene between stages) game. It’s more like Doom - set arenas, with set encounters across varying difficulties - with a more refined, BPM-style “shoot on the beat” system. And it sports an insanely good original soundtrack with guest vocalists from across the spectrum of metal.

Nova Drift is one of my favorite rogue-likes, highly recommended. Check out the youtube channel “Ultra C” for a ton of different rogue-likes.

Nova Drift is great! Easily one of my top played games.

Hades deserves to be in this list if you’ve not played it.

Hades for sure has a story. Probably the best implementation of story in the whole genre.

Yeah it does, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main attraction. It’s good, but I wouldn’t call it story driven.

The gameplay loop uses getting to interact with the characters and to advance the various subplots as part of your reward/consolation at the end of each run. I’d call that story-heavy.

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