What's one game you wish you played sooner?

Tomb Raider 2013.
I played it last year. All thanks to SG!

All that Lara Croft/Angelina Jolie archaeology treasure raiding thing never really vibed with me. Never played any of the old games, tried a demo or 2 as a kid. It didn't appeal to me back then, TBF I did have a potato Windows XP system back then. But the 2013 version looked interesting, somehow I never committed to that interest. Thankfully I had the fortune of winning it here.

Dishonored
I genuinely just despise stealth games, tried multiple in the genre, disliked every one of them. So even though i had heard all the positive things about Dishonored i ignored them.
Then (due to PAGYWOSG), decided to give it a try last year, since it fit one of the themes, and god damn, the reviews were right, it was great. It was less like your standard stealth game, and more akin to the recent Hitman trilogy which is right up my alley. Just sneaking around, fucking up, and killing everyone in the room as a result of my mistake, instead of basically getting a "Oops you failed, try again", is the kind of thing i love. Or just not sneaking around at all, and killing everyone on sight. Maaaan, i do wish i had played it sooner.

Gothic remake. Let us play it finally!!

Psychonauts 2
INSANE game price kept me away until the end of last year

System Shock 2.

Bit of an oldie but I'm old so it's ok but a true classic. Picked it up a month or so shy of it being out for a year. Normally at the time I used a local PC games magazine to play demos (yes off a CD 😋) but I must have skipped that month or something else happened because it was only when the demo was put on a "best demos of the year" bonus CD later that I played it and was blown away (SS1 was good but it didn't grab me like 2 did).

After playing the demo 4 times over a Friday evening I went out the next day fully prepared to whack down full price for it (something to this day I've only ever done once) and was dismayed that I couldn't find it.......and then I saw it......in the bargain bin ($10AUD at the time) 😱. Good for my wallet I suppose but I felt terrible the the makers didn't get a decent bit of money from me 😢. Especially so after I played my first run through over the next 3 days (and learning not to play at late at night with the lights off, I swear this is one of the few games where I've legit screamed in fear when I got ambushed thinking I was safe). To me this is one of those games that showed what was possible when narrative, game design, atmosphere and just general TLC all come together to create something more than it's component parts.

An irrational thing to think I know but a while later when the studio went bust I immediately thought of that bargain bin price I paid and felt so guilty 🥹 (not that my purchased would have made a difference of course). This is one of the small number of games where I can confidently say that even if I had paid full price I got more value from it than most other purchases. And my retail disc still gets a whirl even 25 years later.

project zomboid

I wish I had played Fallout (the first one) as a teen in the early 00s. I only played it this year and it felt very user-UNfriendly, slow, clunky and empty... and ultimately not worth my time when I have 2000 other games waiting to be payed in my backlog. But back in the day, I wouldn't have had that perspective, and being stuck with it with no other alternative and, so to speak, "forced" to play it, I probably would have ended up loving it (in a love/hate way, but still).

Dark Souls.

INSIDE. It's the successor to LIMBO and IMO it's much better. I discovered it a bit by chance and I still think about that game on a semi-regular basis.

Basically every game I bought on Steam, HB or Fanatical that I didn´t install right away to actually try out and play it ^^

Portal series

I played it long time ago but before i played it it was alrdy in my library for 1-2 years. at a period where i didn't have internet for a few months but preinstalled games on steam i was trying out portal and man i had such a blast with these games :)

Half-Life 2 - I still haven't played it :P

The original System Shock. I played it recently and it was a decent game, but I didn't enjoy it that much. I feel like it was probably a good game for it's time and I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I played it back in the 90s.

Fez

The Wolf Among Us. Was sitting in my library for 7 years. Such a good game. Even felt compelled to post a Steam review for it.

Life is Strange, it really surprised me how much i liked playing it and it's worth the praise without a doubt.

Can't think of any. Playing stuff late is pretty much always more rewarding.

I played better versions of Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 than people initially did. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is amazing, right now. The latest game I began playing is Dead Cells. I get to experience the final version with all the content straight away.

Half Life 2... I played it in the past year... you can see when I won it.
probably would have enjoyed it even more back then. Was playing pretty much only WoW/Path of Exile for the longest time which is why so many games got put off.

Satisfactory.
The whole "open world survical crafting" tag put me off so long. And I thought "pfft, who would like building factories".
Turns out I LOVE building factories and some inner child is screaming of joy when it sees the factories and machinery do things. And "open world survical crafting" was a lie. Its open world and you craft factory stuff.. but not punch down trees to craft axes..
400 hours later..

Other one was probably PREY (Arkane one).

Bethesda really did the game dirty with the name. First I thought it was some cheap cashgrab on original prey after beth cancelled Prey 2..
Then I heard its "immersive sim, like system- and bioshock games" so I was like "why would they make Prey series into imm sim".
Really should've played the game without thinking about first Prey game..
And I was spoilered about story so it didnt have impact on me. But it was really great game.

Spec Ops: The Line. I played it about a year ago. People rave about its harrowing story, and perhaps it was revolutionary for its time, especially for a shooter, but it felt pretty run-of-the-mill by today's standards. I wasn't a big fan of the gameplay either; it felt awkward and dated. It wasn't a bad game by any means, but I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more 10 years ago.

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.

I still remember noticing a copy of the book at a bookstore when shopping for a gift for my mom and dismissing it, unaware of its long-time bestseller status. If I had to guess, I might not have had the game in my backlog yet and even after I got it, it still took some time for me to play it.

I'd like to say I have a soft spot for historical fiction (albeit one that ends up with me randomly watching a movie set during a time long gone once every 5 years or so, and then I never care to make it a more frequent thing), so this game ended up completely blowing me away. There's a whirlwind of emotions, twists and turns at play here (excuse my vagueness, don't want to spoil anything in particular) that absolutely took over me for the week or so I spent playing the game.

It's somehow been 3 years since I played it now and I've been meaning to replay it for forever, but in the meantime, I've raved about it for long enough that my mom bought me a copy of the book :'D

Quite a few times I've played a game that I really enjoyed and wondered "why didn't I play this earlier?", but if I stop to think about it a bit more in depth I realize that there's no guarantee that I would have liked said game at an earlier point in my life. For example the first time I played Tomb Raider (the original one) was last year via the remastered version, even tho I owned the original on Steam and I have played several games in the series that I liked, but I still remember that my first encounter with this game back in the 90's was because my cousin owned a PS1 and had it, and I remember not being able to wrap my mind around the controls back then so I just watched him play instead. So I highly suspect that if I had tried jumping into it earlier, as in before playing through most of the TR games made by Crystal Dynamics, I wouldn't have been as willing to push through the awkwardness of learning the controls in order to be able to enjoy the game itself. I know for a fact that there's a lot of games I've loved as an adult that I wouldn't have had the patience or skill for as a child.

But to give an actual answer: Jazzpunk. I have no clue of why I didn't play this one as soon as I got it (2015) and instead left it gathering digital dust for years (2023), because I know I'd have liked it just as much. Multiple times as I played it I wondered just why I hadn't played it before, to the point than that thought became one of the main things I remember when thinking about that game.

Resident Evil franchise. I was on Team Silent Hill back in the day and never touched RE and now I regret being so loyal to just one franchise... We didn't need to be so divided! :|

Elders Scrolls Oblivion. When I got it I decided to take my time and enjoy it. Didn't want to finish it too soon.
Well Skyrim happened not long after. Maybe one day.

Nice question, thanks! Bookmarked this topic, gonna read it. My answer is:
Planescape: Torment. The reason is simple - i really liked this game, but finished only first 2 locations, because it is long and takes much time reading all dialogues and trying to explore the world (+reading game guides). So i really hope to finish it sometime later, when i have enough time. Obviously if i played this game sooner when i had more time for pc games, i would've finished it already. Cause the game itself is a philosophical masterpiece.