Which genres of games just grab hold of your attention?

This one’s a pretty wide potential discussion since the term genre means a lot of different things when referring to games, because games contain so many other elements. Some people think of game genre in terms of worldbuilding and the setting, like Fantasy or Science Fiction, while others think of genre in gaming as the gameplay loop, like 4X  or Role Playing or Bullet Heaven. But what these all have in common is, each facet of genre can be something that hooks you immediately.

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to even describe why a game hits my boxes. Take the upcoming game Songs of Silence. It feels to me like the gameplay blends turn-based strategy, roguelite elements (more Dead Cells than Hades, I think) and some classic Fantasy RPG elements, while also using a beautiful hand drawn aesthetic somewhat reminiscent of Art Nouveau. It’s really my jam, and I’m not sure exactly why.

Similarly, to this day I miss the RPG Arcanum, which fuses Fantasy and Steampunk, and I wish I could find more games like it. The Shadowrun trilogy , a futuristic RPG which features both Fantasy and Cyberpunk elements, scratches a lot of the same itches for me. I’m a sucker for the melding of steampunk and magic that Arcanum offers, so maybe it’s the genre mashup itself. When I saw New Arc Line recently, I was very interested. I like both steampunk and cyberpunk stories on their own, but once you throw magic at them, I can’t stop thinking about them. I think this is why I loved Torg a lot, because with that game, you could actually throw your characters from one setting to another whenever you got bored.

So for me there are different ways the word genre works when it comes to games — and there are several genres I’ll always be drawn to, like a moth to a blue and hot pink neon light.

What about you? Are you a huge MOBA fan, always on the lookout for the return of Heroes of the Storm? Would you love a game that mashes together the looter shooter aspects of Destiny with steampunk flair? Is the only thing you’d love more than Larian making Baldur’s Gate 4 would be Larian making a Cyberpunk RPG? Will you give anything a try as long as it isn’t a seafaring adventure, or a Metroidvania? What genres grab your attention the fastest?