My Top 10 Games (this decade) [that you may have not played yet]
If anyone understands the rising guilt of Backlogs, the FOMO from a constant stream of new titles, it’s me — the guy that quit his job nearly 3 years ago to finish his steam library and isn’t even finished yet.
So listen: I get it. There’s always a heavy-hitter, an HD-Remaster of a lost love, a Nintendo, A new Rockstar. Hell, there’s even a new Star War these days! We consume left and right, catching our breath only to hear that there’s yet another award-winning Game of the Year candidate hitting the presses, and you’re Hell’s perfect mouth-breathing idiot for not having pre-ordered it yet.
It’s my job to play games, look cute, and sometimes even talk good while doing it. So here’s a list of games that I not only haven’t been able to stop thinking about, I usually message a slew of friends I think they’d be perfect for after finishing.
A few things before we begin:
- There’s going to be a recency bias generally speaking, as I think we’ve all played ‘The Greats’ by now, so don’t be sad if your favorite AAA darling didn’t make it.
- Content Warnings!! Please pay attention to them! I’ll miss some stuff here and there, but not all of these are Unproblematique, so proceed with caution.
- I took a whole day off work to write this, so while you don’t have to sub to my stream or hit my up patreon [*cough*] [*cough*], it would truly mean a lot to me if any of these hit you a particular type of way, to check out at least one of these amazing games + support the developers so we get more. And if you do, PLEASE hit me up to talk about it!! I’d sincerely love to hear what you thought.
Without further ado,
DISCO ELYSIUM (2019, ZA/UM, $39.99)
[CW: Mental Illness]
I’m starting this list with one you’re about to be hearing a lot more about soon. Tied with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as my personal Game of the Year, Disco Elysium is by all accounts an impossible game. As in, the more you play, the more you realize what’s actually going on design-wise, it feels like it can’t be as real or as extensive as it’s presenting itself to be.
And then you continue on, daring it to repeat itself, to run out of content, to stop being so haunting and poetic, to stop being so goddamn funny. And it never does.
Most of you know me as someone that doesn’t really ‘do’ table-top RPG’s. My ADHD doesn’t really jive with Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, I don’t have the patience for many real play podcasts or twitch shows, and I find TTRPG combat to be generally atrocious.
Disco Elysium has basically none of the things I dislike about TTRPG’s or CRPGS and instead plays out like a one-on-one session with the world’s most buckwild Dungeon Master.
Some quick hits:
- Zero combat. We’re painting word pictures, baby.
- Challenging not in difficulty, but in ideology. DE doesn’t exactly have one single ‘message’, so much as a complex world that challenges you to introspect about your values. It’s not here to change your mind, but rather see which things you care about, and to what extent.
- The sickest ‘Character Creator’ system I’ve ever seen in a game, hands down.
- I almost died sitting in an uncomfortable chair too quickly.
Here’s my honest tip for those of you who binge and never finish games; treat it like a book. Play whatever feels like a ‘chapter’ to you, then pick it up the next day or so. I basically marathon’d 3–4hr sessions with good sized breaks in between and never fatigued or found my interest waning — but the dialogue is as dense as it is truly high quality. You’ll go from screaming about the end-times, to debating bad-faith cryptofascists, to talking to your necktie, to setting shit on fire at such a break-neck pace that it’s good to give it all time to sink in and settle.
One huge tip: Failure in this game is often more rewarding than success. While you may find the desire to ‘save-scum’ to ‘win’ certain skill checks, they do not always lead you to the paths you think they will. There is no such thing as a binary ‘good or bad’ outcome, even in what seem like important conversations, and you aren’t missing out on content. Embrace disaster.
I don’t think I’ll ever replay Disco Elysium, but not for a lack of incentive. My time with it was valuable enough that I don’t want to lose any of that meaning by comparing it to another. Instead, I’d rather hear bits and pieces of others’ journeys and revel in just what a magical piece of art it really is.
oh, and PS: Kim Kitsuragi is one of the best written fictional characters across all media. We really don’t deserve him.
RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN (2018, LUCAS POPE & 3909, $19.99)
Try to quell the sighing sound your brain is making right now. Yes, you know it’s good, and you know you should play it. I do the same shit, and did the same thing with this one. Then I played it and lost my goddamn mind.
If Disco Elysium is an impossible game via scope, then Return of the Obra Dinn feels like it was transported here from a different dimension. Created by Lucas Pope of ‘Papers, Please’ (another amazing game you’ve probably neglected to play, but know is considered Quite Good), the concept of this adventure is simple, yet so creative it feels as though we could have gone hundreds of years more without anyone having had the idea.
Here’s the pitch I wish someone had given me: You’re not a detective. You’re not even a sailor. You play a fucking auditor for a company whose boat, the Obra Dinn, has mysteriously returned to port after being lost at sea for years. Your job is, with the help of a ledger and a probably demonic pocketwatch to piece together what happened on the ship — not for justice or anything, but so the company knows who to fine for damages.
Fuck yeah.
I will also say this: the opening 30 minutes or so of this game are perfectly crafted. I streamed this one in its entirety — it’s not a short game exactly, but myself and my chat were so truly immersed that we didn’t go anywhere for like, 7 hours. Tian almost missed a flight they had that day to watch more of it. The end of the ‘intro sequence’ we’ll say left me unable to form coherent sentences for a few solid minutes, just yelling ‘oh shit!!! ohhhhh shitt!!!!’. It’s a delight.
The visuals are really unique, but that’s where my one warning comes in: a nonzero amount of folks reported having issues with the game, getting headaches or general drowsiness as a result. I didn’t personally experience any headaches, but there are also a wealth of options to change pieces of how the game’s rendered to try to help address pains you may have.
Still, please make the effort. Don’t let this be another one of those games you put off for years. It’s also amazing with friends or partners — once it’s got its hooks in you, no one’s gonna want to move a muscle while you all bust out the pen and pad to start taking notes and making connections.
THE MESSENGER (2018, SABOTAGE STUDIO, $19.99)
The Messenger is a game I didn’t think I’d love. Unlike the others, I can’t say it’s really a game-changer in the way that some of the rest are — but the proof of its excellence really is in its details.
Try your best not to look up a lot about this game. Not because I want to seed you for some Big Events or whatever (though there are plenty of surprises), but more that I think The Messenger is best when you accept it for what it is — and let the layers slowly build on the experience until you reach a critical mass of Really Cool Shit, All At Once.
Before we get too deep, let’s lay some groundwork for the Platformer lovers. Simply put, it’s got some of the tightest controls and smartest level-design I’ve played in a hot minute that I could have sworn I was playing a Shovel Knight DLC, or perhaps a Castlevania-era competitor. The majority of the time you spend really is running, jumping, slashing, and grappling, and the developers really put in the effort making it shine. Even after finishing it, I’d boot it up just to do some cool tricks or kick around for the feel of it all.
At its core, The Messenger is a modern-day Ninja Gaiden made with familiar 8-bit graphics, but the more you explore and talk to NPC’s, the more you can tell everything isn’t *exactly* at it seems. It’s as you go further that the game’s most endearing quality reveals itself — that this was made from love. Love for the genre, love for the games it references and borrows from, love for the team that came together to produce it.
The Messenger is not an ‘impossible’ game; but for Sabotage’s first product (with many on the team never having shipped one before), it represents a dream come true — and that emotion surges throughout. There is a giddiness and joy in every zone and in every track that is just beaming with pride to really be here, to finally exist, no longer a ‘good idea for a game’ from someone that thought it’d never come to fruition.
Again, the game’s truly good. It’s not too difficult (something many indie platformers pride themselves on), but it’s no slouch either — so if you don’t vibe with that, it may not be for you. But for me, I started the game with a smirk, that grew into a smile, that grew into an even-larger one that never really went away.
Do yourself a favor: always listen to the Shopkeeper’s stories — and whatever you do,
ENTER THE GUNGEON (2016, DODGE ROLL, $14.99)
[CW: Guns! A lot of guns.]
Continuing from a game I didn’t think I’d love, Enter the Gungeon is a game I didn’t think I’d ever even play. I’m in the camp of designers for whom ‘The Binding of Isaac’ sparked absolutely zero joy, nor am I particularly a big fan of shooters — and for that matter, guns at all.
That last bit presents a bit of an issue, as Gungeon is quite literally filled to the brim with guns, and gun-adjacent humor. One of its more memorable weapons is a bullet that shoots guns; there’s also a shotgun that fires smaller, ricocheting shotguns — and of course, a playable character that’s a literal bullet (that wields a sword, which is a really good gag).
Despite being in various playable forms since 2015, I only played Enter the Gungeon this year with it’s final update, A Farewell to Arms — the team has moved on to other work, which means that what you can buy now is the truest, definitive version, packed to the brim with challenge and silliness.
There’s secrets to explore. There’s wild combos to discover. There’s challenge, and the excitement as your skills as a player evolve to see more of the world unfold. And honestly, for the price tag, that’s a ridiculous deal. I feel a bit of regret that I never tried it sooner, but also happy that Dodge Roll managed to put together something so lasting and ultimately, so enrapturing for their supportive community.
Circling back to the ‘excessive guns’ bit: as the name implies, there’s really no escaping them. You launch yourself through a six-shooting elevator to various ‘chambers’, there’s a dragon with a cannon for a nose, a Medusa inspired boss with machine-gun hair — you get the picture. As much as I was finding myself engaging with the gameplay, there was a nagging feeling of guilt in the back of my head — should I be giving this my time, given the senseless violence across America, given the terror and death these weapons incite? Shootings are appallingly common in today’s society, and as I delved deeper, this was never far from my mind.
You may not be a person bothered by this, but I was, and I’d like to speak to those that feel the same. I can’t decide for you if that should be a deal-breaker; but part of what stuck with me about this game, ultimately landing it a special place in my heart, is how careful the developers are to create their own world & fiction rather than mimic our reality. There’s only one standard human enemy out of a cast of hundreds (which, to be fair, still makes me go ehhhhhhh), but there’s a deep lore to this distant planet & eldritch dungeon and inventive designs that make the experience feel wholly their own.
The absurdity of the situation swelled within me — why am I in my feelings passing judgement over a cartoon robot shooting Megaman blasts or Literal Letters of the Alphabet at Giant Blobs or Demons when the umpteenth Call of Duty is releasing, or the 5-billionth ‘Realistic World War 2 game AAA dev swears isn’t Political, somehow’?
In the end, I came to view the experience not as an endorsement of violence or an advertisement for firearms, but instead as a love letter & celebration of classic games from throughout the years — from Super Metroid, to Mass Effect, to Dead Space, Gears of War (and even fucking Aqua Teen Hunger Force!? Somehow?!) —in a way that felt genuine and sincere.
You may not think of yourself as someone that would like ‘this type’ of game, but for its cost and the colossal amount of content, I really think this team deserve a shot to surprise you.
WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH (2017, GIANT SPARROW, $19.99)
[CW: Death]
I’ve never been interested in Bojack Horseman. I’ve never really wanted to watch Your Lie in April. There’s an entire genre of media (you’d probably know more examples than I do) where it seems as though a key component is to make you really sad, or in some form or another commidify intense, unpleasant emotions. While I’m sure at least the two examples I listed are very high quality, I can never imagine a headspace I’d be in to want to consume them.
For those of you who feel similarly to me, I cannot say that you will want to play What Remains of Edith Finch, only that I believe it to be an ultimately cathartic and healing experience. Your mileage may vary.
Stripped to its core, you’re looking at a Gone Home-esque walking simulator (do we have a better name for these yet?) that doesn’t take too long, and is fairly linear — though there is a good deal of gameplay found in its many vignettes as you play through the lives and final moments of the titular character’s deceased family.
You read that bit correctly. What Remains is about a young girl inheriting a rather peculiar house, reconnecting to memories of past relatives following her mother’s death. If that sounds heavy, it’s because it is — but never for a second is this adventure anything but respectful or reverent of the gravity of its subject.
By the end of my time playing Edith Finch, I was in tears. Then, Tian came home from work, and we made some food and I played through the whole thing with them again — and again, I cried. Not because I was sad, but because I felt a deep understanding and appreciation for what it means to be alive. For what it means to have built connections with those I love, and the beauty in simply sharing the road with all of them.
What Remains of Edith Finch didn’t put uncomfortable truths in front of me for any sort of shock or gimmick; instead, it lead me to have a conversations with myself I’d desperately wanted to have, but never knew how to maneuver towards. In many respects, of all the creative, mind-bending, skill testing adventures on this list, Edith’s journey was the most important one of all.
FIREWATCH (2016, CAMPO SANTO, $19.99)
Firewatch was the first game among these I played chronologically, and in nearly 4 years the experience has never left me.
Life isn’t just our highlights or our adversities — it’s also our transient in-betweens. Times too short to be significant, but too long to be insignificant. Pauses in the hallway of time. Firewatch is a front-row seat to the lives and interactions between two individuals (Henry & Delilah) that find themselves in one of these moments — working volunteer as fire lookouts for the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming during 1989.
As the plot thickens and distorts, Firewatch never loses its masterful grip over the relatable ennui our characters face. Sometimes, a day is just work and good company. Sometimes it’s less. Finding our peace with the passing of time is a part of growing up that doesn’t really have succinct or snappy marketable appeal, and that’s part of what makes this story so special.
I’m going into less detail on this one intentionally because most of what I find so fascinating about it is hard to really contextualize to someone that hasn’t experienced it. So instead, think of it as a great book — it’s not so long that you couldn’t finish it in a sitting or two, and if you’re someone that’s feeling a little isolated or lost, you could do a whole lot worse than to set up camp for a night and see what you have to learn about yourself.
QUADRILATERAL COWBOY (2016, BLENDO GAMES, $19.99)
So, so many people have never heard of this game and pains me in a deep way.
Here’s the quick pitch: you play as a gang of thieves planning a series of heists in an alternate-1980’s armed with a “top-of-the-line hacking deck outfitted with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM”. Each Heist is a puzzle, and using your various tools and teammates you visualize and flawlessly plan your entries and exits into various high-tech security systems.
This is also perhaps the first game to ever care about nailing what it might feel like to be a hacker. Instead of doing an odd minigame or passing a skillcheck (or worse, holding down a button), you instead quite literally re-script or de-program locks and security sequences via personal computer, learning your own skills as a programmer in the game’s language as you progress.
That meme about mashing the keyboard only to say ‘I’M IN’ in a gruff voice? Yeah, you actually do that. You have unlimited freedom to explore your mark from the safety of your virtual simulation, which means the time to carefully ponder and plan how the operation will all come together.
There are no cowboys, at least not in the traditional sense. There are many quadrilaterals. You pick up state-of-the-art gadgets from a black-market pawnshop run by a cat. It’s really special.
It’s tough to explain just how masterfully all of the pieces fit into the final package here, but to end on an emotional appeal, I cried a lot as this game wrapped up. Sure, it’s all cool hacking maneuvers and spy gadgets, but as time passes between jobs, you get brief looks into the lives of your squad — what is the world like here in the 1980's? What are your dreams together, and how much are these crimes helping you achieve them?
Is this a rebel cry, an attempt to feel any semblance of control as technology spirals further out of our reach, our individual power disappearing alongside it? Is it the inevitable result of boredom — an impulsive itch in a world gone gray? There’s no dialogue in the game because there doesn’t need to be. It’s the brief moments of exploration and downtime between jobs that doesn’t just fill in the gaps, but makes your team’s struggle — and the eventual ending — strike an emotional cord so many storytellers could only wish to approach.
LISA: THE PAINFUL (2014, LOVEBRAD GAMES, $9.99)
[CW: Violence, drugs, self-harm, phys/emotional abuse, implied sexual assault]
LISA is, hands down, the most intense game I’ve ever played. Launching a full year before 2015’s Undertale, LISA takes Earthbound’s quirky combat & sense of humor and dunks it straight into a giant R-Rated vat of Mad Max. Taking place in the post-apocalypse, the wastelands are littered with shitheads, drug addicts, murderers and lowlifes.
There’s a lot that’s been said about this game (including a great video by hbomberguy if you’re wanting maybe a more in-depth breakdown of why you should/shouldn’t play it), but part of what makes it stand out is the inherent truth to the world and its inhabitants. LISA’s developers understand what makes us human — and then use that knowledge in a terrifying but humbling reflection of us at our lowest.
As an RPG, it fluctuates between innovating on classic mechanics and outright mocking them. It’s condensed adrenaline shot of weird music, graphic 8-bit and unapologetic violent silliness as you collect a Chrono-Cross sized roster of expendable and bizarre party members to aid you in your fight for survival.
Your quest is a simple, noble one — a shitty dad has a shot at redemption by saving his missing daughter. But when I found myself playing Russian Roulette with my weaker party members because I was strapped for cash (where a loss means their permanent death), only to then spend that money on drugs for stat boosts to get through some difficult confrontations, I couldn’t help but feel doubt about if my end goal was worth all of the destruction to get there.
Crucially absent from your journey through LISA’s hellscape is apathy. The story and struggles it reflects are dark, but taking detached pot-shots ala South Park this is not. There’s real pain here, and to move forward is to internalize the complexity and savagery humans are capable of when hope is an all-time low. You make irreversible, gameplay-altering sacrifices. You can see the world around you get worse as a direct result of your actions. You can also rage against the emptiness and try to bring a little bit of hope, if you think there’s a point to doing so. The writing and characters toe a line between silliness and dead serious that keeps you off-kilter culminating in an ending that left me unable to say anything.
It’s not a game I think everyone should play, but I do think there’s real merit to diving in and seeing for yourself what ruined Olathe has to say. LISA didn’t let me choose whether or not I was a monster, only what sort of monster I became.
A HAT IN TIME (2017, GEARS FOR BREAKFAST, $29.99)
Wary as I am to dive into experiences that advertise themselves as intensely emotional, I find myself even more weary these days of indies, usually platformers, that put cute and quirky front-and-center of their appeal.
Let me expand on that bit — it’s not that I don’t want fun and colorful games!! It’s just that for every Super Mario Odyssey or Wind Waker, there’s scores of look-alikes diluting the pool that it can be daunting to figure out which are worth it to try, and even then, expectations are commonly set to a cynical variant of “Well it’s not [Insert beloved franchise], but it’s the next best thing.”
Then comes A Hat In Time, stealing your lunch money, goomba-stomping your cynicism and making you look like a dumbass. I don’t want to mince words: In controls, quality, and tone, this game is the sequel to Super Mario Sunshine that we never got. Not satisfied to simply pay homage to gaming’s giants, Hat makes a deadly-serious bid across its design, presentation, and sheer style that it deserves to be counted among them. And given the disparity in raw resources, the fact that it comes in striking distance is impressive by itself.
While the premise of the game is nonsensical, there’s so much life and laughter in every corner of this game that it comes off as more joy-fueled psychedelic trip than anything a Professional Creative Brainstorm could come up with. A Hat in Time is constantly bouncing off its own boundaries, shifting at breakneck speeds between different gags and goofs you’re not quite sure what you’re going to run into next.
You begin in ‘Mafia Town’, where all the residents are muscular thugs all named ‘Mafia’. In another world, you star in competing movie franchises to settle an age-old rivalry between a disco penguin and a scottish train conductor. At one point you sell your soul. There’s a moment where shit gets legitimately spooky, and then the game moves on like it never happened. It’s this cartoon-like audacity that gives you very little time to say ‘wait, what’ before you’re whisked away to the next piece of candy or clever joke on your path.
Unlike candy though, Hat’s silliness is filling. It’s a game with loads of content that left me both satisfied and wishing there was more on the way. Lots of games people get real philosophical about what ‘fun’ is — but if there is such a thing as Objectively Fun as Hell, it would look a LOT like this.
THE HEX (2018, DANIEL MULLINS GAMES, $9.99)
This one’s last for a very specific reason: It’s almost impossible to talk about.
The Hex is a follow-up by Daniel Mullins, creator of 2016’s Pony Island. If you’ve played it, that should be sufficient for you to stop reading and set time to play this one right now.
For the rest of you, here’s what I recommend: Play this game at night. It’s not a horror game, really, but it -is- spook-adjacent enough that I think it’s perfect for it. Preferably alone, or with a friend or partner that’s going to go the whole way. The game should last between 4–6 hours on average, and aside from a bit of lull in the pacing around the halfway point, it moves deftly through its narrative. I could not tear myself away from it, and I think for your benefit, you shouldn’t try to either. Make the time.
When I finally finished this game, I was in shock. Literally mouth agape. The very next emotion I felt was anger — because all I wanted to do was talk about what a fucking trip that was, but I was the only person I knew that had played it.
It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that my motivation for writing this entire list — as much as I want people to experience all of them — is just so I can convince even one more person to expose themselves to The Hex.
I know that this sort of tip-toeing around what the actual game is about can be annoying, but please — if I have any good will built up between us as people, just do it. Besides, I guarantee that nearly every review you try to look up is going to give you the same sort of cryptic bullshit.
The Hex is never what you think it is.
It’s a masterpiece.
Anyways, those are my favorite games among those I think are bound to be less-popular. Thank you for taking the time to read this — I don’t get paid to do this, and the time it takes to summon all of that doesn’t grow on trees, but it’s worth it if it helps even one person find a new inspiration or resonant experience.
Please consider sharing this link with friends or retweeting it if you see it floating around! I’m someone that suffers from a lot of depressive spirals and anxiety, and more than a few of these games spoke to parts of me that helped foster a level of comfort with myself, even when I least expected it, and I’d love someone to find one of these games at a point in their lives when they needed something just like it.
tl;dr — help developers make art, help eachother enjoy art. It’s SADS season folks, be good to one another. I hope this list was helpful to you.
BONUS STAGE: A VERY QUICK AND NOT DETAILED LIST OF OTHER GAMES I HOLD IN SIMILARLY HIGH REGARD TO THOSE ABOVE THAT I WILL NOT EXPAND UPON
[if you were thinking of getting one of these and you are convinced i have good taste, let their inclusions below be the breaking point to doing it]
[i know i’m risking diluting the focus of this piece but my adhd will not let me make a separate, broader list if i don’t do one right now]
- bloodborne
- darkest dungeon
- dark souls 3
- dicey dungeons
- divinity: original sin 2
- donut county
- golf story
- GRIS
- her story
- hollow knight
- into the breach
- LUCAH: born of a dream
- mario + rabbids: kingdom battle
- megaman 11
- nier: automata
- night in the woods
- ni no kuni 2: revenant kingdom
- papers, please
- pokemon sword & shield
- pony island
- pyre
- resident evil 7: biohazard
- sekiro: shadows die twice
- shovel knight: specter of torment
- super mario odyssey
- the gardens between
- the last guardian
- the legend of zelda: breath of the wild
- the swapper
- titanfall 2
- undertale
- VVVVVV
- west of loathing
