I like not just CRPG, but specifically scifi and/or post apocalyptic CRPG. I’ve replayed the first two Fallout games umpteeth times. Wasteland 2 and 3, while being tactical CRPGs rather than singular character driven ones are high on my list of great games.
But I’m looking to diversify. I know there are many Fallout-likes, but figuring out which are worth my time is difficult. So what have you?
UnderRail is always recommended but it also looks kind of impenetrable to understand.
ATOMRpg was fun at first when I tried it, but after a while my character simply couldn’t pass any speech checks and I got stuck wandering around the map in frustration.
I haven’t tried Encased. Reviews are split, with a lot of critique of the end game. I have no clue if it’s been worked on.
Colony Ship looks super interesting but I won’t buy it until it’s done.
Not exactly the same but check out Kenshi. It’s also more like Wasteland than it is like FO but i can’t recommend it enough.
Post apocalyptic weird low-tech scifi sandbox.
Important to note, its completely open ended. No story. But quite a lot of stuff to do, factions to keep tabs on, settlements to build and manage, people to recruit… lots of moddability.
You’ll have to find your own purpose out there.
Oh and it’s crippling difficulty can be daunting.
I’ve played Kenshi quite a lot. I enjoyed it and might replay again, though I’m kind of after something a little more structured. Kenshi is a great “forever game” to play in small spurts though.
I spent some time on Kenshi and had a good time, but I still don’t get how the factions’ system works. It looks liem there’s a bunch of NPCs around, and a few of them have some sort of quest (I remember the Sheks that go in the desert to die fighting some big enemy), but I see people talking about how the world changes regardless of your actions and I just haven’t experienced that
I’d have to check it again for details but there’s a tab in the menus that logs faction activities. There you can see who’s raiding who and if someone’s planning to raid you a few days in advance.
Otherwise there are these religious fanatics that require you to carry their book, pay taxes and basically be a racist to be in good standing…
Also travelers are out and about who trade, get robbed, enslaved, attacked by monsters etc etc.
You might want to look into Disco Elysium. It’s not exactly scifi or post apocalyptic in a traditional sense but is certainly adjacent to it if not in a subset of it. It plays similarly but is more akin to the gameplay of Planescape: Torment.
It’s at least worth checking out some reviews, descriptions, screenshots, trailers, etc. It might not be your thing but as a Fallout 1 and 2 fan it was right up my alley and is easily one of my favorite games of all time!
I guess you can fit the Borderlands franchise in this category? It’s post apocalyptic, an FPS and story driven. It can also get quite technical if you want to get deep into character builds. Other than that there’s Bioshock. Let me know if you’d like some lesser known games if you’ve played these already.
Classic Fallout-likes are more in the CRPG vein. Overhead view, turn based combat, dialog heavy, multiple solutions to things.
I dig Borderlands, but it’s a straight up lootershooter.
