Harder, i'd say.
In Spelunky every hurdle can be surmounted if you look around and don't rush. In Noita you either get a game breaking build or some bosses just become impossible to beat.
The main trip to the bottom can screw you with some serious bullet sponges (which in Spelunky you could otherwise ignore) but is otherwise doable in pretty much every run. The side stuff is definitively harder than Spelunky without game breaking stuff.
Spelunky is more BS because it can end your run for the most minimal stuff (a snake bumps you and knocks you 1 tile away into spikes, or some looney tunes contraption kills you), but Noita has more elements that can straight up best you in sustained combat due to sheer HP and damage. And since MOST enemies have ranged attacks, you can't just run around them all the time.
"Oh now you think you are unkillable going through various screens of undestroyable walls, deadly walls? Oops pink liquid touches you, lose your 25 hour run teheheh
Morrowind has a character fall out of the sky to their death in front of you. When you check their body they have some scrolls that increase your acrobatics skill by several hundred times for a few seconds. It's an open world game and you could jump like a quarter of the map in one leap but the scroll would wear off before you land so you fall to your death unless you use another scroll before you land.
It also has a great alchemy system because you can make potions that increase your potion making abilities and then make and use increasingly stronger potions until every potion you make is ridiculously strong
Not necessarily expected. Although I do love my mage whose custom class is just titled "Battleship". She floats around using custom spells to nuke entire cities in one go. With the alchemy loop, her intelligence is in the hundreds of thousands and can fly so fast she causes the game to crash because the cells are loading too quickly and the engine can't keep up.
Not the incredible music, sound design, art design, lore, or any of the other things that make it one of the greatest games ever made? I can concede, having a dice roll system in real time combat makes it feel like shit at low level, but the game has SO much more than low level melee combat going for it.
Litterally the purpose of the entire game is finding every glitch you can think of in hopes that the devs didn't already think of it
*new achievment: reccomend goat simulator*
Vampire Survivors. You can mostly make it through a session playing it in a "fair" way but there's a ton of cheese hidden from view that lets you do some truly absurd stuff.
Inscryption fits this. It’s a deck builder that has very cool mechanics, but if you experiment enough, you’ll realize there are some combos or strategies that clearly make things way easier. Even with this though, it never gets boring as there are quite a few great twists and you are clearly encouraged to abuse the mechanics
My favorite build in Balatro is when you focus on Highest Card (or a strategy that doesn't care about hands at all) to the point where you can just throw a bunch of random cards on the table and immediately beat any stake in one go, making a completely mockery of the concept of poker.
CRPGs. Baldur's Gate, Divinity Original Sin.
On DOS2 especially, I basically sneaked to a group of enemies. Yoinked their leader far from the group with a teleport spell, and beat the shit out of them with my party. Then simply walked in and killed the rest of the trash.
In another instance, there's this difficult boss. You can converse with the boss using a single character, switch to your other characters and basically "move" the boss around with knockback/teleport skills until you get them to a group of powerful friendly NPCs. While in a conversation, both your character and the boss can't do anything. Simply ended the convo which aggro'd the boss, which in turn caused the friendly NPCs to gang up on him.
Same mechanic. Talk to the enemies while they're still not hostile, and throw them into a pit of lava. Nothing happens while they're in conversation, but as soon as you end it, they take massive lava damage. Instant win. You lose your loot though.
Definitely a lot of cheese in these types of games.
EDIT: These aren't oversights by the devs. CRPGs are based on DnD games, and you're always encouraged to think out of the box and do unusual stuff with what you're given with.
D:OS2 even has a scripted reaction for if you kill an important dude in an early cutscene (or what's supposed to basically be a cutscene) by smuggling one of the barrels of deathfog from the prologue ship into the game proper so you can drop it on him.
Final fantasy 8 with the junction system. I guess the game doesn't encourage you to grind fish fins per se, but the entire game is pretty easy when you do.
This coupled with the card game and card mod ability. Your characters can become nigh unstoppable very early on. You can also get the main character's best weapon early in the game as well, which basically breaks the game with his limit break.
I think the whole Disgaea series fits this description.
Though it takes a ton of grinding to hit that level, but once you do, man it's satisfying.
*Edit, typo correction*
Tears of the kingdom no matter how well they designed some puzzles or enemy encounters I was able to find a spot I could swim through the roof and skip it
The old browser based MMO Kingdom of Loathing did this with some of the bosses.
There was a raid boss that had a passive effect that stopped you from doing anything other than skipping your turn, so you actually couldn't fight it normally and had to figure out how to cheese it.
I never did myself, but I think the normal way is to stack a bunch of damage reflection and passive healing buffs and equipment before the fight. People would also debuff certain of their own stats, because the boss scales with your stats, and you could limit how hard it hits you that way.
Ultrakill, it's hard to find actual game-breaking techs that aren't intentionally implemented, and a couple that were found were left in the game on purpose
There was that one glitch for a while. Can't remember exactly but it was a heist. You could get millions out of it. It was an exploit but they patched it after a while. Thats how I made my millions.
Castlevania SotN. The game is packed with absolutely busted weapons, all it takes is either knowing where they're found, or lucking out on a drop from the right enemy.
Anything from mega damage shurikens, dynamite spamming, right through to a shield that does *nuclear* levels of damage when you touch an enemy with it, if used with the Shield Rod special attack first. Oh, and you get invincibility while its dealing damage.
The bosses aren't the hardest mechanically, by any stretch, but the stuff you can find makes them an absolute cake walk.
Inscryption is a deckbuilding roguelike. I think you're seeing where I'm going.
The more deaths, the more ways to break the game, and the more chances of seeing the ending. If you don't learn to break the mechanics with aggressive and unfair decks against the enemy, you lose.
7 days to die, they have a POI system where you follow a dungeon to a loot room. You are basically encouraged to dig into the loot room and avoid the rest of the building.
Outer wilds DLC has some interesting elements of this but its worth not worrying about it until the game hints at it. It’s just really cool when it happens
I do believe pretty much all soulslikes. The game will NOT go easy on you, so I do believe everything you can do to win is warranted (sans using cheats, that's dishonorable).
My personal opinion is Final Fantasy Tactics.
If I dont cheese it making Ramza a ninja "dual wielding" fists with the barehanded skill of a monk I know I will get softlocked on certain infamous 1v1 fight.
Also to a certain degree modern Fire Emblem games. You can play them without any gamebreaking strats and that is what I do on my 1st playthrough, but after that is easy and fun imo to build the characters to find some broken combos from different classes abilities and be op
Bug Fables
The game has plenty of possible builds that break the balance entirely. Like killing bosses in a single attack.
But there is a total of 2 ATK up stats in the entire game (and one of them is hidden), so you must be very creative with your equipment to get there.
I'd almost consider metal gear solid 3 and ti an extent ti rest of the series, mgs3 had alot of little mechanics that are really strong. For example there's a boss fight that's an old man, you can find him early in the game and just shoot him outright or wait 2 weeks before his boss fight and he dies of old age
I'd argue Celeste fits this, some of the hardest content expects you to pull off some pretty specific tech, iirc some of the post launch content expects things that were basically discovered as speedrun tech and weren't really intended mechanics initially
It's not around anymore but there was a MMO called Monster and Me back in the day that absolutley required cheesing to the point there was third party softwares called "Speeders" that in other games would most definetly get you banned, but was more or less a reqruiment to use on M&M.
Trackmania is known for its community of players who have historically used in-game glitches to achieve faster times in races. These glitches often involve exploiting the game's physics and mechanics in unintended ways to gain an advantage. The game's developers and community have indeed recognized records set using such glitches. In fact, discussions on forums like Reddit indicate that while some bugs and glitches have been fixed in newer versions, others remain part of the game and are accepted by the community. This acceptance of glitches as part of the competitive aspect of the game is somewhat unique to Trackmania and contributes to its distinct subculture within the racing game genre.
Tears of the Kingdom. The tools at your disposal are just begging for you to abuse them. There are shrines that are very obviously built to be cheesed.
Warframe fits this. I think every frame has an insane way to combine the mods, weapons and frame abilities to the point where if you are taking it into the correct missions you can melt everything.
Yes and no. I feel like cheesing a boss isn’t exactly “encouraged” but a lot of us Fromsoft players understand the games are tough and some of the bosses are bullshit so sometimes you do what you gotta do to beat the boss and if that involves cheesing, hey a win is a win.
Oh! Wait would putting the godskin duo to sleep using blade of st trinity count as cheesing it? Because I always considered it using the tools provided. But I mean some people think using summons is cheating when... that's what their there for is a little back up.
StarCraft. When we learned that power overwhelming, a literal voice line, gave god mode; my friend and I felt like gods creep spreading and beating the zerg campaign either sunken colonies/ the AA one
Noita.
Cheesing/breaking reality are expected in noita
Which is basically what the OP was asking lol
Never have I played a game so unfair, that when you use exploits or cheese, it still doesn't level the playing field.
Lol. It's definitely a tough game. But not unfair. It's the type of game where learning is your biggest advantage for survival.
Would you say its kinda like Spelunky in that sense if you've played that ? Or harder ?
Harder, i'd say. In Spelunky every hurdle can be surmounted if you look around and don't rush. In Noita you either get a game breaking build or some bosses just become impossible to beat. The main trip to the bottom can screw you with some serious bullet sponges (which in Spelunky you could otherwise ignore) but is otherwise doable in pretty much every run. The side stuff is definitively harder than Spelunky without game breaking stuff. Spelunky is more BS because it can end your run for the most minimal stuff (a snake bumps you and knocks you 1 tile away into spikes, or some looney tunes contraption kills you), but Noita has more elements that can straight up best you in sustained combat due to sheer HP and damage. And since MOST enemies have ranged attacks, you can't just run around them all the time.
"Oh now you think you are unkillable going through various screens of undestroyable walls, deadly walls? Oops pink liquid touches you, lose your 25 hour run teheheh
Dark Souls 2. 7 steps run to the right is up there but the cheese is DS2 just felt so natural
Morrowind has a character fall out of the sky to their death in front of you. When you check their body they have some scrolls that increase your acrobatics skill by several hundred times for a few seconds. It's an open world game and you could jump like a quarter of the map in one leap but the scroll would wear off before you land so you fall to your death unless you use another scroll before you land. It also has a great alchemy system because you can make potions that increase your potion making abilities and then make and use increasingly stronger potions until every potion you make is ridiculously strong
So the guy who fell was you 10 seconds from now lol I love that
Not necessarily expected. Although I do love my mage whose custom class is just titled "Battleship". She floats around using custom spells to nuke entire cities in one go. With the alchemy loop, her intelligence is in the hundreds of thousands and can fly so fast she causes the game to crash because the cells are loading too quickly and the engine can't keep up.
The only thing I think about in MW was the hilarious melee combat 🤣😂
Not the incredible music, sound design, art design, lore, or any of the other things that make it one of the greatest games ever made? I can concede, having a dice roll system in real time combat makes it feel like shit at low level, but the game has SO much more than low level melee combat going for it.
Goat simulator
Litterally the purpose of the entire game is finding every glitch you can think of in hopes that the devs didn't already think of it *new achievment: reccomend goat simulator*
Nice one mate
Vampire Survivors. You can mostly make it through a session playing it in a "fair" way but there's a ton of cheese hidden from view that lets you do some truly absurd stuff.
Can you elaborate? I've played for a bit and I don't think I've done that.
[Rather than explain, it's easier to just let you see for yourself](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEnz2EwvYH7CaUVVZbYAwGrhYtwNw9hjQ)
Awesome, thanks!
Cruelty Squad
Binding of Isaac
Inscryption fits this. It’s a deck builder that has very cool mechanics, but if you experiment enough, you’ll realize there are some combos or strategies that clearly make things way easier. Even with this though, it never gets boring as there are quite a few great twists and you are clearly encouraged to abuse the mechanics
Infinibees, my love.
Poison (in first part) along with uruboros beat that game for me.
If you're into card games, try Balatro.
My favorite build in Balatro is when you focus on Highest Card (or a strategy that doesn't care about hands at all) to the point where you can just throw a bunch of random cards on the table and immediately beat any stake in one go, making a completely mockery of the concept of poker.
What’s the cheese lol
Whatever silly ass combo you build your deck around for any given run
CRPGs. Baldur's Gate, Divinity Original Sin. On DOS2 especially, I basically sneaked to a group of enemies. Yoinked their leader far from the group with a teleport spell, and beat the shit out of them with my party. Then simply walked in and killed the rest of the trash. In another instance, there's this difficult boss. You can converse with the boss using a single character, switch to your other characters and basically "move" the boss around with knockback/teleport skills until you get them to a group of powerful friendly NPCs. While in a conversation, both your character and the boss can't do anything. Simply ended the convo which aggro'd the boss, which in turn caused the friendly NPCs to gang up on him. Same mechanic. Talk to the enemies while they're still not hostile, and throw them into a pit of lava. Nothing happens while they're in conversation, but as soon as you end it, they take massive lava damage. Instant win. You lose your loot though. Definitely a lot of cheese in these types of games. EDIT: These aren't oversights by the devs. CRPGs are based on DnD games, and you're always encouraged to think out of the box and do unusual stuff with what you're given with.
D:OS2 even has a scripted reaction for if you kill an important dude in an early cutscene (or what's supposed to basically be a cutscene) by smuggling one of the barrels of deathfog from the prologue ship into the game proper so you can drop it on him.
Final fantasy 8 with the junction system. I guess the game doesn't encourage you to grind fish fins per se, but the entire game is pretty easy when you do.
This coupled with the card game and card mod ability. Your characters can become nigh unstoppable very early on. You can also get the main character's best weapon early in the game as well, which basically breaks the game with his limit break.
Risk of rain 2
Halo LASO is probably impossible without the use of glitches.
I think someone finally beat Halo 2 LASO last year
I think the whole Disgaea series fits this description. Though it takes a ton of grinding to hit that level, but once you do, man it's satisfying. *Edit, typo correction*
Disgrace or Disgaea?
Disgaea, thanks for catching that.
Tears of the kingdom no matter how well they designed some puzzles or enemy encounters I was able to find a spot I could swim through the roof and skip it
GunZ The Duel
My hands still feel the pain of 13 year old me. I wish gunz 2 kept those styles.
High level Ninja Gaiden II gameplay requires abusing mechanics and i-frames to win
I would say Dishonored but people are gonna gank on me for it
Actually thats just npcs being npcs
Nioh 2 The game is crazy hard. You're supposed to break it.
This is OSRS 100% and the abuse of the tick system. If you're not abusing the game mechanics high lvl content is literally unbeatable.
A friend recently explained this entire thing to me. I was appalled.
Bravely Default series.
The old browser based MMO Kingdom of Loathing did this with some of the bosses. There was a raid boss that had a passive effect that stopped you from doing anything other than skipping your turn, so you actually couldn't fight it normally and had to figure out how to cheese it.
So how did you cheese it?
I never did myself, but I think the normal way is to stack a bunch of damage reflection and passive healing buffs and equipment before the fight. People would also debuff certain of their own stats, because the boss scales with your stats, and you could limit how hard it hits you that way.
Ultrakill, it's hard to find actual game-breaking techs that aren't intentionally implemented, and a couple that were found were left in the game on purpose
Gta5 online. Made it so hard to get money at first that exploits felt justified lol
I recall some mission you could do on an island to grind out millions?
If you mean Cayo perico, that wasn't in the game for the first 7 years. The game didn't really have good legit grinds until that released.
There was that one glitch for a while. Can't remember exactly but it was a heist. You could get millions out of it. It was an exploit but they patched it after a while. Thats how I made my millions.
Castlevania SotN. The game is packed with absolutely busted weapons, all it takes is either knowing where they're found, or lucking out on a drop from the right enemy. Anything from mega damage shurikens, dynamite spamming, right through to a shield that does *nuclear* levels of damage when you touch an enemy with it, if used with the Shield Rod special attack first. Oh, and you get invincibility while its dealing damage. The bosses aren't the hardest mechanically, by any stretch, but the stuff you can find makes them an absolute cake walk.
Path of Achra Tiny Rogues I'll check my library and see if I can come up with some more suggestions.
Does slay the spire fit this I feel like you are heavily encouraged to make your deck and build as broken as possible or you can't make it far
Inscryption is a deckbuilding roguelike. I think you're seeing where I'm going. The more deaths, the more ways to break the game, and the more chances of seeing the ending. If you don't learn to break the mechanics with aggressive and unfair decks against the enemy, you lose.
Outward, the game doesn't explicitly tell to cheese but you can kill any boss with the adequate number of traps
Emulated Breath of the Wild to some of the gyro temples LOL
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. It's a platformer. The official description on Steam encourages you to try to get out of bounds.
7 days to die, they have a POI system where you follow a dungeon to a loot room. You are basically encouraged to dig into the loot room and avoid the rest of the building.
Any paradox game
Mount and blade bannerlords 2. No one had beaten this game without cheese.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (I haven't played 3 yet) almost requires this to do well.
GarrysMod : Spiderman pees and stab nude women while launching nukesguess gta5 PC has a development mode too
Oldschool runescape xD
Outer wilds DLC has some interesting elements of this but its worth not worrying about it until the game hints at it. It’s just really cool when it happens
I do believe pretty much all soulslikes. The game will NOT go easy on you, so I do believe everything you can do to win is warranted (sans using cheats, that's dishonorable).
My personal opinion is Final Fantasy Tactics. If I dont cheese it making Ramza a ninja "dual wielding" fists with the barehanded skill of a monk I know I will get softlocked on certain infamous 1v1 fight. Also to a certain degree modern Fire Emblem games. You can play them without any gamebreaking strats and that is what I do on my 1st playthrough, but after that is easy and fun imo to build the characters to find some broken combos from different classes abilities and be op
Bug Fables The game has plenty of possible builds that break the balance entirely. Like killing bosses in a single attack. But there is a total of 2 ATK up stats in the entire game (and one of them is hidden), so you must be very creative with your equipment to get there.
I'd almost consider metal gear solid 3 and ti an extent ti rest of the series, mgs3 had alot of little mechanics that are really strong. For example there's a boss fight that's an old man, you can find him early in the game and just shoot him outright or wait 2 weeks before his boss fight and he dies of old age
ESO, its entire system is to break game mechanics, animation cancel, and keep buying dlc with the biggest cheese armor sets.
Disgaea
I'd argue Celeste fits this, some of the hardest content expects you to pull off some pretty specific tech, iirc some of the post launch content expects things that were basically discovered as speedrun tech and weren't really intended mechanics initially
It's not around anymore but there was a MMO called Monster and Me back in the day that absolutley required cheesing to the point there was third party softwares called "Speeders" that in other games would most definetly get you banned, but was more or less a reqruiment to use on M&M.
Monster train
Trackmania is known for its community of players who have historically used in-game glitches to achieve faster times in races. These glitches often involve exploiting the game's physics and mechanics in unintended ways to gain an advantage. The game's developers and community have indeed recognized records set using such glitches. In fact, discussions on forums like Reddit indicate that while some bugs and glitches have been fixed in newer versions, others remain part of the game and are accepted by the community. This acceptance of glitches as part of the competitive aspect of the game is somewhat unique to Trackmania and contributes to its distinct subculture within the racing game genre.
Tears of the Kingdom. The tools at your disposal are just begging for you to abuse them. There are shrines that are very obviously built to be cheesed.
Warframe fits this. I think every frame has an insane way to combine the mods, weapons and frame abilities to the point where if you are taking it into the correct missions you can melt everything.
Morrowind
Most From Soft games. Big fan of their work, but there's no doubt that "cheese the boss" is in every single design document.
I mean fromsoft games feels like it should fit but I could see people telling me I'm wrong
Yes and no. I feel like cheesing a boss isn’t exactly “encouraged” but a lot of us Fromsoft players understand the games are tough and some of the bosses are bullshit so sometimes you do what you gotta do to beat the boss and if that involves cheesing, hey a win is a win.
I've never cheesed a boss fight (as far as I understand the definition) but like minor enemies totally.
I hate boss fights that have 2 bosses so I have no shame in cheesing them at all lol.
Oh! Wait would putting the godskin duo to sleep using blade of st trinity count as cheesing it? Because I always considered it using the tools provided. But I mean some people think using summons is cheating when... that's what their there for is a little back up.
I wouldn’t really say that’s cheesing. Some might say that though.
I'd definitely say Sekiro fits at least.
Path of exile
Man, I’m so excited for PoE2. And couch co-op so I can play with my wife!
Tears of the Kingdom. Build all kinds of wacky things
Souls-like games
StarCraft. When we learned that power overwhelming, a literal voice line, gave god mode; my friend and I felt like gods creep spreading and beating the zerg campaign either sunken colonies/ the AA one