i’ve heard of Reventure! but yeah that’s one of those games that manages to find an audience that’s still not a mainstream or critical darling one at all. OneShot is a bit more well known example of game that fits into that category of “actually genuinely popular with some people, but not really known much at all outside of that”. in spite of the tons of glowing Steam reviews that game has i’ve never seen anyone mention it outside a certain subset of people.
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me: Fight’n Rage is a shamefully obscured masterpiece
fine, god
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I found out about this game from @username’s thread of new steam releases, and as of today I am the only person to have reviewed it on steam. What I said there is absolutely how I feel about it so I’ll just quote it here even though my writing is unpolished.
This is a game about reaching a particular flow state that feels like it could be preparation for occult undertakings. I have not played very long and the game is very much in early access, but what I have played has felt like slowly deciphering an alien language. Gradually, over successive minutes, I began trying to maintain a model of a three dimensional chart of graphemes in my head. I really liked that tension of gradually being able to intuit what moves would work as I played, rather than just going through trial and error or depending entirely on the visual clues to work very slowly towards scoring combinations.
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My personal pick is Cursed Mountain for the Wii. It’s a fairly basic horror game but mixes Tibetan mythology and mountain-climbing mechanics to make something I’ve never really forgotten. It has something like a 67 on metacritic.
I have never played a game that made me feel like this, like I was scaling an actual mountain. Like I was a worthless animal trying to make progress over a slab of rock too gigantic for me to fathom. The atmosphere of the game is unmatched when it comes to scaling the environment itself. On the Wii a lot of the climbing segments end up being fairly standard ‘waggle for your life’ kinda stuff but it scores points for just sticking in my mind so strongly. It makes you feel like a mountaineer but also insignificant compared to the mountain at the same time.
Combat is kinda silly and has you grappling ghosts for most of it but there’s some neat sections where you have a vision quest trying to gain entrance to the peak. Some of it was pretty dumb (white explorers mastering ancient Tibetan rituals while everyone else dies) but there are a lot of interesting ideas about climbing and how the scale of the experience relates to the setting and mythology that I’ve not really seen elsewhere. I want more mountain-climbing games (Celeste and Getting Over It don’t scratch this itch).
Disclaimer: this is mostly half-remembered from playing it like 8 years ago. I’ve been meaning to go back and play the PC version.
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I love Chex Quest 3, it’s such a lovely work of passion. Startlingly good level design given how basic Chex Quest 1 was.
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Oh another one for me is Deadlock: Planetary Conquest. It’s a fairly unremarkable tiny Civ-like in a lot of ways, but it’s also got some of the best “alien races that aren’t just stand-ins for different traits of humans” that I’ve seen. My favorite two example are:
Humans: Instead of being the standard jack-of-all-trades types, the humans have three major traits: Good at Commerce, Prone to Controversies, and Absolutely Willing To Die in a Way That Makes Everyone Else Uncomfortable. To the last point, all human infantries carry a stim pack type thing that will power them up for exactly one battle…and then they die. It’s explicit in the manual that all the other alien races consider this to be unthinkable…including the insectoid Ch’Cht who don’t value individual life at all.
Tarth: The Tarth a big rocky-looking boys who are good at smashing things. The more interesting thing is that they are also really, really good at farming because they require much more food, so agriculture was the thing they learned to do the best.
The manual also has this incredible story about how they first tried space travel. They have a highly active volcanic moon around their home planet, which at the time they thought was something living. A group of “moonwatchers” got together to try and go to the moon via catapult. They made this big-ass catapult, but the 5 moonwatchers who built it couldn’t decide on who would go first. So all 5 of them climbed in, launched into the sky, and immediately fell back down, dying. From the guidebook:
“Conventional Tarth wisdom from then on stated that “Wise moonwatchers take turns.””
Anyway I think this shit is so funny, and it’s all reinforced by tons of short video clips of these aliens saying weird shit, it’s great. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about this game, except the reviews on GOG. I don’t even know how I got it when I was a kid!!
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OH and the music is boss too:
had to upload these myself, not sure why I picked soundcloud if I’m being honest
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Further thoughts on Infernium: I think it becomes a little too difficult near the end, with some of the final “pac man arenas” being more frustrating than engaging, but until that point its such an impressive game. I loved the diegetic discovery of mechanics that made sense of the world.
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another game that i just remembered that seems to have gotten wildly mixed reviews, from positive to extremely negative, from people is Dreamweb:
this game has a totally fiddly inventory system and puzzles, and dialogue and stuff is kind of clunky. but it also has this super unique sort of overhead gameplay perspective that lends to this feeling of alienation and an indescribably Cronenbergian vibe that i still think about. there’s also some genuinely shocking moments of gore that i think are really really well done. it also doesn’t outstay it’s welcome in terms of length - i remember feeling like it wrapped up pretty nicely. so maybe not the easiest game to play but there are walkthroughs and stuff on the internet now and the vibe is kind of unlike anything else to me. it’s also available for free now via ScummVM.
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Strania the Stella Machina. By far the best G.Rev game and probably the best and most forward-thinking shmup of the modern era.
I just hope the reviewers knew that Hiroshi Iuchi, creator of the critical darling Ikaruga worked on the (beautiful) graphics.
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I love Dreamweb!
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@Felix you should talk about Mirror Drop! I know you liked it a lot even if it didn’t do much for me, but I think it totally belongs in this thread
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I came into this thread already pumping to throw in a bunch, but using Wikipedia and Metacritic to gauge critical reaction made me realize that I don’t really have a lot of examples and I’m just salty that either the games I love aren’t as well-known or that they aren’t as universally/highly praised as I think they ought to be, not that they aren’t liked or praised. I thought I remembered Sonic Colors for the Wii being weirdly hated on, but it was actually just Jim Sterling giving it like a 4/10 for whatever reason I still don’t understand.
Or, like, Ranger-X, which isn’t mentioned much in lists of “Mega Drive classics you must play!” but I think that’s mostly because it’s not as well-known as something like Gunstar Heroes, and even then that’s been quickly changing
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Cradle is one I never saw much critical reception (65 metacritic) or discussion for but was pretty unusual and worth mentioning. It’s a high-concept scifi premise where everyone’s dying from disease and people have somehow invented a means of objectively measuring beauty numerically which changes how commerce works. It’s technically unfinished but you and your lamp-woman have to figure out what happened and how to solve humanity’s problem.
Voice-acting is not great and the game has crappy block puzzle segments. But, the game has some neat stuff. It’s set on a plateau in Mongolia and has a huge open space you can traverse if you like but there’s not really much of anything there. The lamp-woman’s eyes make use of FMV recording’s of an actress so it makes for convincing expression in a cheap but effective way. Text logs litter the environment in a natural way (they’re almost entirely localised to your hut and very few exist in the barren outside).
Flawed but decent. Also the second(?) Ukrainian game in this thread
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Epidemic for the PSX is Genki’s immediate followup to Kileak: the DNA Imperative. While Kileak was genuinely atrocious, Epidemic is not. An interesting movement system, wolfenstein 3d style secrets, and enticing early-psx visuals combined to make it a memorable alternate vision of what first person shooters could be. WRT the movement, you can freely switch between a slow stomping mech mode and a fast, slippery hovertank mode and both modes have utility in the game.
It’s a shame that its reputation was sullied by its predecessor
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i have this game! i like it. clunky movement but the vibe is very cool.
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I don’t have much of an argument here but I thought Wipeout Fusion (83 Metacritic) was pretty dang cool. It gets a lot of hate from Wipeout fans and I don’t see it. It’s probably because it’s the first one I really played but the music, ship design, weapons and even the world-building were really neat compared to comparable racers at the time. It’s definitely not the best in the series but I actually enjoyed the upgrades and more offbeat, open-terrain tracks.
The game also introduced Zone mode.
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i know it’s a big game, and has it’s fans, but final fantasy xiii is still my fav game i’ve ever played.
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Castlevania 64 was totally panned, but I think it’s -
for fuck’s sake, apparently i just have an inferiority complex
Anyway, it’s a great low-poly low draw distance gothic horror-comedy. It’s not SotN, but it does come close to that kind of maximalism at times, especially with the full day/night system and weird gems that I never really figured out what they do. I guess it’s only hated in retrospect?
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One of these for me is Continue?9876543210. It had some positive coverage in a few places on release, I think, but otherwise seems to have been spoken of mostly negatively when mentioned at all.
You play as a video game character who has died and is wandering through RAM until the areas you are confined to are reused. Your goal is to put off your inevitable oblivion long enough to make your peace with it.
I found the game insightful and affecting, and I still think about it pretty often.
One of my favorite games with one of my all-time favorite soundtracks. But it’s definitely one that I never hear anyone mention (other than you).
Edit: You can get the Nimbus soundtrack for free here, but it’s incomplete. (My favorite track, 3-3, is missing.)
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