City Builders and God Games

[Meow-Professor]

I feel like these two genres share a lot of elements and are worth talking about together.

These are really the only types of games I play apart from fighting games.
We can discuss them here.

Lately I've been playing a lot of indie games for the genres.
Recently I've been really into Gnomoria. It's still early access but it has a lot of content and relatively few bugs, and a lot of mechanics I really like. It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. I could never get into DF myself (not due to the UI, actually, I just didn't enjoy it).

I played Banished after seeing it mentioned a lot when it comes to indie city builders. It is enjoyable, but there isn't much late-game, and it seems like its main draw is the difficulty and not much else.

On the topic of god games, Reus caught my attention because of the really good artstyle. I didn't enjoy it much, and found it extremely repetitive. It is very achievement-centered, which I wasn't a fan of.
I know I was really late to these three, but I was busy with fighting games.

 

[Squire Grooktook]

Ever play Actraiser on Super Nes?

It's basically a God Game/Action Game hybrid. You play as the judeo-christain God* on a quest to restore a world that's been turned into a wasteland and it's people into zombies by Satan. You send your spirit to animate a statue and liberate each country in the action stages, then you send an angel down to play civilization/god mode and manage the restored peoples buildings/developments/civilization.

Over time, you listen to the peoples prayers, which develops the story and characters, and eventually introduces the next action sequence when you find you need to save them from a temptation, plague, or calamity caused by a demon.

One of my favorite games of all time. Not only is it really fun, but the story is really great. There's some legit tearjerker moments in there.

Spoiler: *

Note that "God" and "Satan" are censored to "The Master" and "Tanzra" respectively in the western version, but they are God and Satan in the original Japanese version. Either way, the stories pretty explicit about who's who, so playing the localization is fine.