What in your opinion are the best non-voiced games?

Chess.XD

Too many to list. While the condition does somewhat decrease the amount of games to choose from, it's still huge. Not just because of all the 90's games, even among more recently released indies there were a lot of great non-voiced ones, e.g. I really like A Short Hike, Supraland, Night in the Woods, POI, Hob, Yoku's Island Express, Dark Quest 2, Stikbold etc., etc, (there's also the question of games like the latter that do have voices but talking gibberish only, so you still need to read text to understand - do they count as non-voiced or voiced?).

Doom

Super Mario Bros.

Pac-Man

Pong

Yo! Noid

Simon's Quest

I'm gonna answer this for "games released in the age of voice acting, in genres that usually have voice acting, but do not have voice acting."

On that basis, I will say the recent Shadowrun trilogy. All of them have excellent dialog with a ton of reactivity, thanks to them having zero voice acting. Every line in a response can be tailored to your character's role and personality, since it's not being recorded by an actor with limited time.

That reminds me, whenever I see a RPG where it appears most, if not all, dialogue is voice-acted, I keep thinking to myself it can mean only one of two things:

a) there isn't that much dialogue (if there are lots of NPC, and/or different discussion branches) compared to most text-only RPGs.

b) if there is, the game must have cost a fortune (and time) to make, in order to get all that voice acting dialogue done. Plus it takes quite a hefty amount of room for all the audio clips, but I guess that is a drop in a sea as new games are so humongous anyway...

Then again some RPGs seem to solve this problem by using voice acting sparingly only with the most important characters, and/or in the beginning parts of the game.

I'd be happy if the characters just gave a generic "mumble mumble" voice in dialogue, and the text says what they are actually saying. That gives a good enough impression as if the characters are actually saying out loud something, without having to voice-act each and every word they say (which to me is mostly waste of time, money and natural resources, like bananas and kiwi fruits).

EDIT: Ok I see others covered this already.

Underrail is another example that follows that approach.

I was about to say Daggerfall but it have voice acting. not much but a little bit, one example is guards shouting HALT, HALT, HALT and more HALT.
As have been said Shadowrun Dragonfall, Hong Kong, Underaill are great too, i really like Battle Brothers and Atom RPG.

I hope it counts.

Are the older LEGO games still considered to be non-voiced? I mean much of the games' cutscenes were fitted with grunts in place of actual dialogues that the newer LEGO games now have. If you would consider these old LEGO games to be non-voiced games, then I'd say these games are some of the best non-voiced games out there.

For a modern one: Ghost of a Tale. I didn't really miss voiceovers; the superb writing and the expressive character portraits got the job done.

Hob.

Game was designed intentionally for telling a story with no speech.
I judge games almost exclusively about whether and how they manage to create immersion - & Hob was a very pleasant game experience in that regard - just because of the telling silence.

New topic, what in your opinion are kai2’s top 10 posts in the “what are your top X in X” category :o)

Wing Commander is the good non-RPG example of the downsides to voice.

Wing Commander 1 and 2 had end of mission briefings that were individualised to your performance in the mission. They recounted whether you completed each sub-objective, how your wingman fared and how many kills the two of you got.

Wing Commander 3?

Good job. You're cleared to land.
Bad luck. You're cleared to land.

i did enjoy abzu or dreamscaper EA

Can you maybe specify criteria?