Top 25 Video Games Lists v2.0: Cable's NES Nostalgia 15 & 2 (starts pg32)

[Crow]

20. Life is Strange

I'm noticing I have a habit of grouping two or three similar games on my list, at least in these lower rankings. I guess my mind just goes "I like both of these narrative-and-choice-driven adventure games about equally, but not as much as the games right above them, so they'll be right next to each other". And I guess that's fine, since this is another great game in a similar style as the last one. Heavily narrative-based adventure with a lot of player choice - much more so here than in The Walking Dead, which is probably why I prefer this over that one - and a healthy dose of puzzle solving gameplay with an occasional stealth moment thrown in.

This game starts out pretty unassuming - you play as Max, a fairly average high school student who's really into photography. Through some completely unexplained course of action (literally, never explained or even tried to rationalize - and I'm okay with that, honestly, it's better than some shoehorned "destiny" or convoluted magic reasoning; just a thing that happens), Max gets the ability to rewind time, at least a short distance. The rest of the game is Max using this ability however she and the player chooses.

Other early events that occur in the game's runtime include Max reuniting with her old friend Chloe, who she hadn't seen in years, and finding out that Chloe had made a new best friend in that time period who had mysteriously gone missing about half a year ago. I won't say much more on that front as telling any more would be spoiling a lot of the great twists and turns of the story, but suffice to say it's a very intimate coming-of-age tale more than anything else, using its time mechanic less as a main focus and more as a way to move the story forward.



The game does start off a bit awkward with a good dose of high school drama and I'll freely admit the first episode can be a bit offputting on the whole. But by the end of episode 2 I was absolutely hooked on the story following an incredibly heart-pounding and terrifying sequence, and the game only escalates from there, with further time shenanigans and higher stakes. The atmosphere of the game in the last three chapters changes tone entirely, becoming a lot more dire as Max grows as a character, with some pretty chilling sequences occurring and some pretty messed-up characters rearing their heads, but, well, you'll just have to play to find out.

The choices in this game mostly don't add to up major changes, but it's a lot of smaller, intimate details that can change the other characters' personalities and attitudes towards you. And with the time rewind mechanic, you can see all the possible outcomes of any scenario and be certain of which one you want to pick - though odds are it's not going to be a very black-and-white decision, there are a number of moral dilemmas throughout the game but it never really feels like the game is judging you, more than you have to live with the consequences of the actions you take, full well knowing the outcome. And it can be the difference between someone living or dying, in quite a few cases.

I feel this writeup isn't particularly helpful but more than any other game on this list this is really a game you have to experience for yourself to see the appeal of, and while I love it I'm also aware it may not be for everyone. It's far less showy and extravagant than The Walking Dead, but I feel I can connect with the characters better and feel that choices carry more weight, especially since people aren't dying left and right here. But yeah, definitely a good game and a really memorable experience.

Oh, and did I mention the soundtrack? Lots of indie rock, and one of the endings is accompanied by Spanish Sahara. which only made a really sad ending even more heartbreaking. Yeah, the soundtrack is excellent. And Spanish Sahara is also excellent.

[Crow]

it turns out all the videos of spanish sahara are filled with people spoling the ending of the game though so don't read the youtube comments 

[Crow]

surprised that these are the games i'm getting no comments on, i know i've seen at least the walking dead on someone else's list already 

[Dr. DTVT]

Dark Souls or GTFO

J/k not really

[Blind Faythe]

Interesting game. Love your write ups again, so descriptive and they tell a lot about this game. I should try it out. Looks fun enough.

[Crow]

19. Hexcells (Series)

This is probably going to be a pretty short writeup as there's not really a lot to say about this game. It's a logic puzzle game that plays like a mixture of picross and minesweeper with a few other mechanics and set on a hexagonal grid. It's simple, it's elegant, and it's absolutely genius. Seriously, the developer squeezes so much out of this basic concept and makes a genuinely challenging but interesting type of puzzle with enough meat to it to last three full games, as well as a procedurally generated mode in the last entry in the series. On pure playtime alone, I'm sure I've dumped more time into this game than most if not all of the other games on this list, and that infinite puzzle mode in the last game is a big reason why.

The first in the series is basically an extended tutorial but the last dozen or so puzzles do get somewhat tricky if you're not familiar with the puzzle types, but Plus and Infinite really expand on the basic mechanics and put the same rules into quite a nice variety of scenarios while introducing one more major mechanic that adds a nice layer of depth to the puzzle design. And each and every puzzle has a unique solution, there is absolutely no guessing required, and if you think you can't find the next move to make you're just not looking hard enough or not putting the right pieces together. Some of the puzzles took me upwards of half an hour or more when I first solved them, too, and with over a hundred designed puzzles between the three games in the series there's really a lot of playtime in the standard puzzles alone, much less the procedurally generated ones. And while those tend to be easier, they're still fun and can be tricky on occasion.

But yeah, really not much else to say here. Straightforward but enjoyable puzzle game that I urge everyone to check out. The developer also released Squarecells last year, which combines picross and nurikabe in an interesting way, and while I'm not as big a fan of that game it's still pretty fun and elegant in its own way.

[Crow]

18. TRI: Of Friendship and Madness

On an objective level, this is probably the "worst" game on this list. It actually does have some glaring flaws; for one, there's no autosave, so you do have to frequently manually save your progress once the game introduces scenarios where you can actually die. The game also really likes hiding its secret collectibles behind fake tiles, and while there's generally some indication that the tile is fake, it still happens a bit too frequently for my taste. And there can be a sense of tedium in its mechanics; constantly making tiny rearrangements to the triangles you create to get juuuust the right triangle to progress. There's also one or two puzzles that are just plain garbage.

And frankly, none of that even matters, because this game is just so. damn. clever. The mileage this game gets out of two basic premises - drawing triangles to use as platforms, and creating angles with triangles to shift gravity - is stunning. There are so many cases where you see a new room and go "wait, is this even possible" and then after screwing around with it for a bit you start to see what new way they want you to use your singular tool and it's just, such a great feeling. By the time you get to the end of this game, you'll know the ins and outs of the game's mechanics almost as well as the developers do.



And there's a lot to do in this game. With 15 levels the game managed to squeeze in 20 hours of gameplay out of a single playthrough from me, including all the time spent hunting down the secret golden fox statues for 100%. And I really do feel like you'd be missing out on a lot if you didn't - the game never really forces you to explore every last path but it hides these statues in some of the most insidious places imaginable that I can't help but crack a smile every time I see one in a particularly absurd place, because I just know there's going to be some insane solution that doesn't even feel intended that the developers knew you could get to - it's one of those games where they thought of every last thing. I don't think it's possible to get to any place in the game where the developers didn't intend you to get to, because of how thorough they are in placing the secrets in every single possible point of the level you can physically reach - which, for most levels, is practically every single side of every physical surface. I just, adore that game design philosophy. It wins me over in a heartbeat and keeps me playing to the bitter end, even with the small frustrations the game has.

Aesthetically the game is also pretty damn visually gorgeous, which is sort of impressive for how low-res a lot of it looks. A lot of basic, block shapes, simple brick textures, the iconic yellow/red of the triangles (which, for the record, signals whether or not you can stand on the triangle from your current point of gravity). There's a lot of cool structures built from the basic geometry as well, some of the levels give off a really nice sense of scale, others feel really claustrophobic and mazelike. The music is... weird, sort of japanese folk inspired but still, very weird. I think it works though since the game world itself is kind of bizarre in its own way. The story isn't anything to write home about - all I really remember is that there's a fox who loves screwing with you and making weird things happen.

I definitely do have my gripes with this game but they are absolutely pummeled to bits by all the things I like about this game. Though it's not quite my favorite in the land of first-person puzzle games (there are two more upcoming on this list, though neither are particularly similar to this one) it's still a real hidden gem and one of the biggest surprises I've run into on steam since I honestly didn't really know what to expect going into this one and what I found was a game I absolutely adored. Really, do check this one out if you get the chance. I'm half considering it's too low on this list at this point now that I've written up all this but I locked the list in place when I started the writeups and I don't intend to write another full writeup tonight anyways so eehh oh well.

[ReaperKK]

Just catching on the write ups now. I've heard some great things about life is strange.

[Crow]

it's quite good, definitely check it out if you're interested

[Sacul]

I have TWD but haven't played it yet.

Will probably try LiS one day, despite the common opinion being that the end is meh. Seems like my kinda thing

That Hexcells one seems pretty neat, will put it on my list.

[Crow]

honestly i liked the ending of LiS, though the end of TWD is better for sure 

[Randaran]

Hexcells is one of my favorite puzzle games. Nice choice. 

[Crow]

wow sorry for not posting any of these for a while
(pokemon happened oops)

to make it up to you all i'll do three right now and then try to get another two up tomorrow or saturday

[Crow]

17. FEZ

FEZ is a puzzle platformer, but that's not really true. It's more of an exploration game that has elements of platforming and puzzling, but really, the exploration aspect of this game is what makes it enjoyable to me. The game world is very vibrant and colorful and there's so many little details put into absolutely every last screen that it makes seeking out new places an adventure by itself. And the game boasts a pretty decent size, as well as unbounded exploration - aside from the intro and outro, and a small small number of locked doors, you can go anywhere in the game any time you want. It's not a metroidvania, though it certainly has some of the sensibilities. And that's the kind of game I just tend to be drawn to more than any other. Spoilers; my #1 game of all time absolutely fits into this category. Just a strong sense of discovery and exploration.

That's not to say that the base mechanics of this game are bad; in fact they're pretty clever. The main gimmick is the ability to rotate the world, which serves to make each screen a sort of maze where you have to find the right place to be in and the right place to turn to progress. And there's a fair number of little gimmicks done with this mechanic, though the core mechanic itself just serves as a neat way to make these more compact areas really open up and give the game a nice sense of three-dimensionality despite being displayed as a 2D game. There's of course a lot of moments where 3D space is "flattened" and two places that are very far apart in 3D space are right next to each other in 2D space, which is where a lot of the puzzle aspects of the game come from.



The other main aspect of the game is its sort of collectathon nature; the goal is to collect all 64 cubes, 32 normal cubes and 32 anticubes. The former tend to be either 1. basic platforming/puzzling challenges that you don't have to poke around too much to find or 2. collected by gathering 8 cube pieces. The latter though is where a lot of the weirder, more "meta" puzzles come into play; decoding symbols and decoding the game's language, amongst other more well-hidden secret areas. There's actually a third kind of collectible, but those are the reeeally weird/kind of dumb meta puzzles, including the infamous black monolith that literally had to be brute-forced by a group of players for the solution to be found (and I'm not sure anyone has ever figured out how it's supposed to be solved, if it's meant to be at all?) Regardless I tend to ignore the third kind of collectible in my playthroughs and the game has more than enough to explore with just the standard collectibles so whatever.

The game's atmosphere is really pleasant and chill, on the whole. The music is very ambient for the most part, and the penalty of death is always very minor, usually just going back a platform or two. No lives, no restarting from your last save, there aren't even any "enemies" to speak of. Combine that with how pretty the game world is as well as the various worlds you visit throughout the game and it never really gets boring, even if the game itself never really feels "hard". It puts me in a good place. Again, my #1 game evokes the same reaction from me, just to a stronger degree. Doesn't discredit how great this game is though.

Definitely a worthwhile experience, this one, and I'm glad it got a fair bit of attention when it came out... though maybe not for the right reasons. Shame about the developer, yeah, but the game itself, still great. Definitely check this one out. Especially with the steam sale going on right now, hint hint.

[Crow]

16. Undertale

Ooh lord. I got this right when it came out, had known about it for a while and was glad to see it finally released. And then it blew up. Bigtime. Became utterly inescapable on the internet, to the point where I actually got kind of sick of it. I will fully grant that this probably would be higher on my list if not for the overexposure. But that doesn't discredit that this is just a fantastic little game, absolutely deserves all the praise it's gotten.

I'm also fully aware this isn't the kind of game for everyone; on a gameplay level it really isn't anything that special, and for an RPG it boasts a pretty short game length, somewhere around 6-10 hours depending on how fast you play and what ending you go after. And if you don't like the writing of this game, chances are you are not going to enjoy the game at all. I understand that. Me, personally? I love the writing. The quirky humor, the fleshed-out main characters and all the little side characters where you only get to see a slice of their lives yet each of them has their own personality and feels unique. And the humor in this game is generally pretty on-point; and even if one or two jokes don't work for you there will be plenty more to make you chuckle.

More than anything though this game is just ADORABLE. There's a pleasant atmosphere running through everything that makes it really hard to want to hurt any of the monsters (unless you're a soulless monster, I guess). And the game will totally let you do that; you can play through the entire game without killing a single monster. Or you can kill every last one of them, I guess, but, don't do that. The game takes place in a society distinctly different but not too far distant from our own, and it's interesting to trek through the various environments and see all the little details of monster society.



The combat of the game is pretty interesting, as well. It's presented as a standard RPG confrontation not dissimilar to Earthbound (which, yes, this game was decisively inspired by) but doesn't really play like one. To avoid killing monsters you go out of your way to interact with them in nonstandard ways that vary for each and every monster type, and monster attacks are presented as a small shmup game, minus the shooting; you just have to dodge attacks, and again, for every monster type the attacks are unique. You really get a lot of personality out of these encounters due to how each monster differs, and there's enough variety in monster types that you won't see the same monsters more than a few times either, so the game ends up feeling pretty diverse.

I've sort of had to dodge around talking too in-depth about the game since a lot of the enjoyment comes from the story and interactions themselves, which I definitely don't want to spoil; the two screenshots I've used here are both from very early on in the game, the first area which was used as a demo years before the game was officially released, so there's nothing particularly spoilery happening. I'd just definitely recommend everyone give this game a chance and if you're anything like me you'll be sucked into the charming world of Undertale for a brief but pleasant stay.

[Crow]

15. Freedom Planet

And here's the biggest reason there's no Sonic games on my list proper; this game takes all the lessons learned from the 2D sonic games and improves upon them while cutting out all the biggest issues. A sense of speed that isn't hindered by slow, awkward level design? Check. Boss battles that feel exciting and rewarding to fight instead of being slow, drawn out, and simplistic? Definitely check. Cutting out the godawful lives/game over system older games have? Yeah, in a sense. I mean it's there but there's no penalty for game overs, so whatever. And the game keeps intact a lot of the positives - vibrant, colorful worlds, sprawling levels with many different paths to take, an undeniable 90's charm, a memorable and catchy soundtrack, short enough to be played through in an afternoon but replayable enough to sink days worth of playtime into. It's just a classic example of iterating on a formula and doing it just right.

And of course, the game doesn't really play exactly like a 2D Sonic game anyways. Sure, it started out as a Sonic fangame but it very decisively evolved beyond that into more of a love letter to the vibrant platformers of the sega genesis/mega drive/whatever. Gunstar Heroes, Rocket Knight, even some shades of the Mega Man X series are present here. But none of the characters are the traditional "jump and spin dash" style of gameplay that Sonic games focus on. Lilac is my personal favorite, having a mixture of fluid combat moves and a sense of general speed alongside a double jump and charge dash. Carol has weaker but swifter attacks, can climb walls, and can get a bloody motorcycle to ride around levels on. And Milla is... weird. The hardest character to learn but overall the fastest, as far as I've seen - her speedrun world record is the shortest of the three by several minutes. What this means is that the 12-level main game for each of the characters plays vastly different for each of them, with levels often having paths specifically designed for one character or another and a few levels being character-exclusive as well.



The level and boss design also tends to be quite good; each stage is quite lengthy, some of them taking over half an hour for me to complete the first time through, with lots of different paths and secrets scattered throughout. And each stage has its own gimmicks and little gameplay mechanics; heck, each half of the levels tends to have its own mechanics as well, since the first 8 stages are designed sort of like act 1 and act 2 of a sonic zone combined. The levels are also design in such a way that there's few points where you really have to stop and wait; you can just keep moving and speeding through levels once you know your way around. The bosses are all fairly unique encounters, some of them having a massive scale to them, others being more like one-on-one fights in fighting games. There's a lot of them yet enough variety to them that they never feel repetitive, and some of them can be damn hard - the bosses later in the game especially. The final boss was hard enough that the developer had to go and tone it down just to keep it from being a massive difficulty spike right at the end of the game; though the original form of the boss is intact on the hardest difficulty, regardless (and actually really fun once you learn how to fight them).

I won't say it's a perfect game or anything - the story is a bit cheesy and predictable, though it fits in with the "90's saturday cartoon" style of story pretty well, and the levels could prooobably serve to be a bit shorter in a few places, but really there's not a lot to complain about here. It's just a really enjoyable 2D platformer that's always fun to come back to. And there's a sequel coming out at some point, which should definitely be exciting to play. Great game though, for sure.

[ReaperKK]

I've never heard of Freedom Planet but now I really want to play being a huge Sonic fan.

[Crow]

i am glad that my list is being a positive influence

[Bolsters]

FEZ and Undertale have been on my radar for quite a while but I haven't gotten around to either yet.

[Sacul]

Tried to play FEZ once, but I just got lost and lost and... geez, my OCD hates no having a map or a guide of where everything is  But I'll eventually try it again, have it on Steam.

Ugh, Undertale's too tumblr for me

I'll take a guess that your fav game ever is Journey.

[Crow]

FEZ has a map, and a very useful one 

lets you see how rooms are connected, lets you know when you have everything in a room

[Sacul]

...did it have a map?!? 

[Crow]

[Genowyn]

Two of my favorite games from last year in LiS and Undertale.

Fez is also great. I finished it but never really completed it, too much of a task.

[Phoenix87x]

Fez is incredible. And the deeper you get the better it becomes

I've never played anything quite like it

[Lynxo]

And the deeper you get the better it becomes

A lady acquaintance of mine once uttered such a phrase.

[Zydar]

[Crow]

so i'm super bad at this "keeping timely posts thing" apparently also i just totally forgot uuhhh

well i can try to do one or two before bed 

[Crow]

14. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

The first (and not last) visual novel style game on my list, Danganronpa is a hybrid mystery/horror story that's pretty well-known for being absolutely vicious to its characters. The basic premise: 15 students are locked in a school. The only way to escape is to kill someone - and get away with it. After each murder a trial is held and the remaining students have to decide who they think the killer is - if they're right, only the killer gets executed, but if they're wrong, the killer walks free and everyone else gets executed. And ooh boy are the executions a thing to watch. If this sounds halfway between Phoenix Wright and the Zero Escape series, then you'd be right. It's basically a comfortable middle between the two.

Gameplay-wise this is fairly interactive for a visual novel; you can run around the school that serves as the game world and interact with other characters or points of interest to find clues to solve the mystery of the day. And the trials play out like a combinations of cross-examinations from the ace attorney series and a variety of minigames; shooting the correct statement with the correct evidence, shooting at letters to spell out a word, heck, there's even a rhythm minigame thrown into the mix. It's certainly an interesting style of gameplay and while I'd say it's far from perfect, and as well there are moments where figuring out what exactly the game wants you to do can be a bit frustrating, the gameplay elements are still minor enough compared to the story so as to not get in the way.



Where the game's strengths really lie is in the writing and the characters. Sure, there are a few characters who die a bit too quickly to really get to know, and there's a few who are not particularly great characters either, but there's a lot of interesting personalities clashing here. Some friendly personalities, some more mysterious ones, some aloof or outright evil ones. I'd say my personal favorite of the bunch is Celeste but there's more than enough personality to go around. And you do get the chance to learn more about each of the characters outside of the main storyline as the game has a sort of dating sim aspect to it that allows you to also unlock new skills for use during the trials. And with the number of great characters the game has, it can be all the more painful when one shows up dead, or worse, you have to find them guilty of murder. And they seemed like such a nice person, too. Oh well.

The overarching story... well, it's hard to say much about it, but it's an interesting mystery in itself, trying to figure out the mastermind behind this whole ordeal and figuring out just exactly how the students all ended up locked inside the school to begin with, completely isolated from the rest of the world. A running theme of the game is hope versus despair and the protagonist, Makoto, does have to face a good deal of both in order to survive. But yeah, talking further about the game's plot would be spoiling too much, so you should definitely go and check it out for yourself.

The second game in the series has even more interesting murder mysteries and probably a better cast of characters overall, but a weaker overarching plot and mildly disappointing final chapter, alongside a large number of gameplay changes I feel was for the worst, which is why I chose this game over the sequel, but they're both pretty good games in their own right and anyone who likes a good story should definitely check this series out. Just be prepared to have your heart broken when your favorite character shows up dead in a puddle of pink blood.

[Crow]

13. The Talos Principle

This game is here more for its puzzles than anything else. Because the puzzle design in this game is pretty dang solid, constantly evolving and changing, adding new elements and combining them in interesting ways to make you think outside of the box, all while never feeling overwhelming or ever getting to frustratingly difficult and obscure solutions like some puzzle games tend to. And the weird part is that a lot of the mechanics are pretty basic. You have gates you need to open, a jammer to disable one piece of machinery, laser redirectors to point lasers towards a receiver, buttons to press down, boxes to stack or hold down buttons with, fans to blow you or objects in a direction. A few more complex mechanics like the time-clones and rideable platform that get introduced later in the game too, I guess, but they mostly keep it pretty simple.

What strikes me most is how many different puzzles they're able to squeeze out of these mechanics and still remain interesting. So many puzzle, in fact, that they were able to release a decent-sized DLC bonus story that added absolutely no mechanics and yet had a variety of unique puzzles all to its own. I'd honestly say that the DLC is actually better in every regard than the main game, refining the puzzles and removing some of the more frustrating elements (less enemies, no rideable platforms) to make for a more tight and consistently enjoyable experience. And yes, I'm kind of factoring the DLC into this game's placement on my list, but really the game would still be here even without it. It's just a really good puzzle game.

And that's without talking about how gorgeous the game's atmosphere is. Sure, it's very "standard" looking but just looks pretty damn gorgeous, and there's a lot of massive monuments throughout the levels to keep the scenery interesting. The game's three main areas all have a different general theme - forests, desert, mountains - and a theme of ruins running throughout them all, with some puzzles for the secret stars taking good advantage of these environments for some pretty interesting puzzle design.



The story of the game is also pretty interesting too. You play as an AI, and the framing of the puzzles is that some deity-like voice speaking to you throughout the game guiding you through the puzzles to test your capability to learn and adapt. All the while there's a backstory to discover the reason why you're being put through these trials in the first place. One neat touch about the game is that while you spend the majority of the game alone, it never feels like a barren wasteland - there are messages left all over from other AIs who have come to the same realms before you, solved the same puzzles you have. There's also interaction with a devil-like figure through a computer terminal that tries to convince you to leave the path that the commanding deity figure is trying to set you on, and there's a lot of philosophy involved in those discussions, without ever trying to force any ideals on the player and letting them make their own decisions in the end.

It's a very engrossing game between the atmosphere and the engaging puzzles that left me playing for hours on end many times over, and quite a meaty experience with well over a hundred puzzles to solve and 40 more secret puzzles to really see everything there is to find in the game. Just very well-crafted in all regards and while I definitely wouldn't say quite every puzzle hits the mark, there are so many puzzles doing so many interesting things that I can't complain if there's a miss every so often. And do make sure to get the DLC for this game, because again, the story and puzzles are both superior to the main game in basically every way, and the main game was already pretty great to begin with. So yeah. Good stuff, definitely check this out if you're a fan of puzzle games.

[ariich]

The Talos Principle has been on my Steam wishlist for, like, forever, but I've never got round to buying it. It does look great though!

[Crow]

shoulda picked it up in the steam sale that just ended

[ariich]

shoulda picked it up in the steam sale that just ended

I did it today, just in time.

[Crow]

i can die happy knowing i have positively influenced your life 

[Sacul]

That Danganronpa game sounds edgy af, so might add it to my to-play list 

Also this:

The Talos Principle has been on my Steam wishlist for, like, forever, but I've never got round to buying it. It does look great though!