I love nothing more than hazardous weather in video games, the long dark is pretty good with its intense blizzards that you can get lost and die in minutes, I also love no man’s sky. The whole building a base in an extremely hostile environment that if you step outside for too long you’re a goner.
I’m a sucker for these games, I need more. You guys got anything for my itch? Bonus points if it’s super intense and dangerous
Timberborn.
I recently got Against the Storm. It’s a gameplay loop about building a fantasy villiage in a hostile forest, so it sounds like what you’re looking for. The faster you expand into the woods, the faster the hazards and challenges appear. The storms aren’t visually spectacular, but they provide negative status effects.
I like games that let me adjust the complexity and difficulty by adjusting the rate of my expansion. The first time I really felt that was with Creeper World. It’s an RTS where you build turrets to claim territory against an ever-encroaching rising tide. You might enjoy that. Creeper World III is probably my favorite from the series.
Stalker 2 has very violent thunder storms. The lightning strikes are especially intense.
Especially with Dynamic Weather Overhaul
Modded STALKER Anomaly is worth a shout too. Some of the weather mods and sound mods make blowouts extremely intense and impressive.
“There’s an Emission incoming. Find cover, Stalker!”
May not be exactly what you’re looking for, but subnautica and subnautica below zero are two of my favorite games.
Subnautica starts with you Crashing in a life pod onto an undiscovered water planet and trying to rescue other survivors, gathering resources, building bases submarines etc. Weather is not really a consideration since you’re underwater, but there are lots of other pitfalls.
Subnautica below zero is a sequel but set on the Arctic pole of the planet and requires you to go above surface a lot where the freezing temperatures start killing you once you’re up there for very long.
Pacific drive?
Just reminded me I gotta finish that one
Project Zomboid. Despite the top down camera and simpler graphics, storms and blizzards have great atmosphere. They make you wanna shut yourself indoors even more than the apocalypse itself.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I was about to suggest Breath of the Wild. The stormy rain is amazing, happens more often and harder than in Tears I think. The constant change of equipment can be a little bit annoying, that’s probably why they dialed it a bit back.
The rain with the dramatic music at the beginning of Link to the Past is pretty awesome too.
Mad Max has some intense and deadly but also rewarding sandstorms
Flight simulators put a lot of effort into the weather. So flightgear for a free one. Microsoft Flight Simulator if you wanna pirate or pay
The Lazarus facilities in Star Citizen have a constant irradiated electromagnetic storm around them. If you fly too deep (past the facility), your ship will be disabled and you’ll crash. You can take a tram deeper into the storm and you’ll start to receive radiation damage. So you’ll either want a special protective suit, or take refuge inside of facility buildings every now and then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OzfPaUWYpY
On this particular planet, your ship can also get hit by stray bolts of lightning (a rare occurence) while flying around any storm . It will shut your ship down for a short time.
On some parts of planets, the weather is cold enough to freeze you (if you’re not wearing the right protection).
Some planets are very hot and will kill you if you stay too long outside without protection.
There’s an underground prison on a hot moon that you can escape from. If you don’t get to a vehicle in time, you’ll die from the heat (or lack of oxygen).
I imagine that when base building comes, this’ll be an important thing to consider. For the moment, the only two times it has come up as a significant obstacle to overcome in my playtime was during a Lazarus worm thing I did with my org where it took much longer than normal because some players just kept coming back, making the whole thing take twice as long. The second was the Hathor laser which made it a pain in the ass sitting outside the crater with a railgun. Had to take a Nursa to cool down every now and then.
No Man’s Sky on extreme hazard planets.
Edit: ah fuck, you already said that in your OP, should’ve read it before 😄
Heavy Rain is worth playing… For the rain…
Edit: just remembered, there is also that Blizzard-Survival mode in the first Tom Clancy’s Division game.
Stormworks. Obviously. The entire game is about engineering and designing vehicles to go on various rescue missions, or to go to space, or sometimes to mine oil… okay the devs have gone a bit off track from the original vision but the storms are still good for a voxel physics sandbox game.
Looks good, I’m usually not a fan of voxel games but I do see the aesthetic hitting hard in some screenshots
@ me if you get anything good. My recommendation is rain world which is great if you like platformers. The game makes you feel like a small animal in very hazardous conditions that you must often run and hide to escape from.
Ooh I forgot about rain world, that is a very good one, nearly shit myself when one of those chameleons caught me
Frostpunk has definitely storms and hazardous weather, but it’s more of a strategy game.
