zeno clash is definitely a butt classic
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This is a good thread. I’m trying to think of a solid game that fits the description, but in the mean time, here’s a related previous thread:
https://selectbutton.net/t/games-that-should-have-upended-the-world/
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I don’t have a ton of “critics hated this game but it actually owns” I can list here as most of them are games I tried because peeps like SB hyped up to me (Alpha Protocol, Nier, etc.) but there are a ton of games that if not stone cold classics are legitimately worthwhile that would bring people enjoyment if they knew they existed. I checked several PC games I’ve played and enjoyed over the past several years on metacritic to see if they were loved or hated that ended up having zero reviews and maybe not even any user reviews. They are just victims of what I refer to as The Flood, the sheer number of new games that come out every single day.
…That said, if forced to play by the topic’s rules I would probably argue for Toki Tori 2+. Its metacritic score seems to hover around the mid-70s and that is a legit great puzzle platformer.
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I think it’s interesting that multiple people in this thread keep running into this phenomenon of “don’t people hate this game? Oh wait… it got pretty good scores”
Like if you think about this topic for more than 10 minutes you start to really break down: what does “critically maligned” mean? And what does “classic” mean? Like each of these terms seems to have a public and a personal quality, and they are divided temporally. Are these games that were contemporaneously reviewed poorly, but are now widely regarded as good and influential? Or games that people have always considered bad, that you think are good? Games that were considered bad in their day and now forgotten, which you think is a shame because they represent dead ends in game design that you think could have been fruitful to follow? Or games that were reviewed well on release, only to have the public opinion sour over time, and your position is that the game is actually at least as good as people thought it was back in the day - but maybe for different reasons?
Anyway Alpha Protocol is a good answer. The only Bioware style game that has the presence of mind to set the protagonist in a milieu that can completely comprehend and contain their capacity for wildly hypocritical, potentially sociopathic responses. Also the only Bioware style game that seems to recognize that “picking conversation responses” should be treated as a legitimate game mechanic, if you’re going to be doing it all the time. I don’t think any subsequent Choices & Consequences games paid any attention to it, as can be surmised from playing the output of Bioware itself.
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There does seem to be a canon of classics that is collectively agreed by both players and critics both in the then and now. Some of these make no sense which makes the critically maligned stuff hard to understand although obviously a lot of this comes down to personal taste and experience.
Critically ignored seems to be the more common problem these days
This phenomenon is disconcerting not only for games coming out now, but makes widespread retrospective appreciation of great older games difficult too.
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Threads like this remind me there are probably some wicked games out there I will never play because there are too many games
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You might never play your favourite game 
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This is literally the first I ever heard about Perfect Dark being critically maligned.
I mean, N64 Gamer Magazine gave it a score of like, 101% (because they gave Super Mario 64 100% and Perfect Dark was better so they had no choice obviously (Pokemon Gold/Silver later got 102%))
Anyway, I feel like Bomberman 64 reviewed pretty poorly, and while I was initially disappointed that it wasn’t just regular 2D bomberman with 3D graphics, it grew on me and I ended up really enjoying it for what it was. It felt like just a really chill slow-paced puzzle adventure game with some nice tunes.
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Great thread. Feel like I should have a ton of examples, but the first that comes to mind is Dark Savior!
Not sure I’d describe it as critically maligned per se, but the general consensus both then and now seems to be that it’s a fairly mediocre adventure game. Not sure I can do it justice any better than this blog post does.
I love everything about Dark Savior. The isometric visuals are stunning, and do some really interesting things with perspective and platforming. The Groundhog Day style narrative has a genuinely fascinating looping temporal structure. The characters break from their archetypical moulds in super interesting ways. The main character, Garian, is a scoundrel with few redeeming qualities, and not in the typical, loveable-rogue sort of way—at the beginning of each loop of the game, he gets drunk and almost murders a child. Even the battle system, which can be exploited once you get the hang of it, is still enjoyable. It’s a fascinating game.
god this is actually a really depressing thought that hadn’t occurred to me till now
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Wow why’d you have to hurt us all like this
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i mean it’s true of everything, you might never meet someone who would have been your best friend ever, but also there are 7 billion people on the planet so even getting second or third or seven-hundredth is pretty good.
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At what point will there be more videogames in existence than people on earth? Are we already there?
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it’s troubling to me because the flipside is there is often broadly loved/critically accepted games that become canonized and will probably be that way forevermore that i truly, truly don’t understand (i.e. Journey, as just one example) and it seems like who can afford to be ‘known’ or not seems to come down to a lot of arbitrary factors that often have little to do with how interesting or unique an experience is.
i understand most games don’t fall into the category of complete and utter hidden gems, but given that a huge percentage of stuff gets ignored or maligned regardless… it’s kind of hard to take anything there for granted! even sometimes older stuff that i’ll see get a critical re-evaluation from people, often i find the re-evaluations to be wrong and just reasserting kind “you haven’t heard of this for a reason” kind of logic.
i find it pretty maddening that something can be extremely unique and different and offer a completely different perspective and approach from what’s getting recognized and it gets totally ignored. because my feeling is - what if these games disappear from Steam or wherever else they do exist? at least games that had physical copies… y’know, had physical copies. there’s no guarantee some of these things won’t just disappear forever in the future unless someone is interested in them enough to preserve them. so that’s the scary thing. someone has to know and care enough to want these things to be preserved. in the case of some obscure NES game that had a billion physical copies and is on romlists everywhere, i’m not very concerned about that at all. in the case of games released only digitally, i definitely am.
btw these may or may not be intuitive to you all, but here are some tips for recognizing something in the wild that might be misunderstood or unknown, as someone who regularly digs into that stuff:
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it’s by a developer or group of developers you’ve already liked stuff from. this may seem obvious enough but a lot of stuff in this category can still go under the radar easily. and a lot of games might be maligned because of fans having previous expectations from developers that may just be looking at the game the wrong way and be comparing it to something else that’s successful, rather than evaluating it on its own terms. i feel like this happens often.
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the way reviewers or commentors talk about the game. if the positive reviews are not just glowing but specific about elements of the game that are interesting or they indicate that the experience was unique and meaningful for them in some way. basically language that indicates the game is either a highly unique experience or it was meaningful in some kind of specific way.
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screenshots are kind of my last ditch, because they can mislead you about a lot of things… but they can also be a good way in. that said, stuff that looks conventionally pretty to me definitely doesn’t attract me as much as if a screenshot looks interesting or unique or has some sensibility that doesn’t look like anything else… more than it being “pretty”
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obviously we have youtube today so if you see a footage of a game in action and it kind of jumps out at you in some way, or there’s something about it that strikes you in a way that you don’t expect. again, this can totally mislead you sometimes but it’s at least a way in.
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Ah, I finally thought of a good one.
I got a Nintendo DS flash cart toward the end of the system’s commercial lifespan, and I used it to play a lot of games I would never have spent $35 on. One of those was Chibi-Robo! Park Patrol. I think it got mixed reviews at the time, but mostly people just didn’t bother with it. I’d never played the original Chibi Robo for Gamecube, though I always kind of wanted to.
Park Patrol is a small, cozy game where you play as a little robot planting and watering flowers in a local polluted park in order to revitalize and re-green it. It’s such a peaceful goal, I loved that about it. The gardening parts of the game were somewhat arcadey and kind of fun; I remember you had to defend your rewilded zones from little smog monsters who would kill your flowers. So there was sort of a defense/maintenance element to it. When you planted enough flowers in particular areas of the park, those areas would turn green and come alive, which was quite satisfying.
My favorite part was: Every evening, after your day of gardening, you’d get to go into the big city and meet up with your anthropomorphic toy friends. You’re super tiny in a huge world, and you just kind of hang out in seedy alleys and stuff. You do some basic but satisfying adventure game puzzles where you do favors for toys to earn “Happy Points”, which you can spend on upgrades.
I liked the concept of “Happy Points” so much at the time that I thought out this whole idea of using them in real life to improve communication between drivers on the road. In addition to honking your horn when another driver displeases you, you could also have the ability to send a happy point to a driver that did something nice for you, like let you merge into their lane. Maybe you could spend your happy points on bumper stickers or some shit, I dunno. It was an idea that felt original and exciting in 2007 and feels cliche and moribund in 2020.
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i think BREAKDOWN was a critical Cad but i looked and it turns out it was mostly positive
i really enjoyed playing through Natural Doctrine a few years ago
These are great choices. I enjoyed The Dark Spire so much more than Etrian Odyssey, which got all the love.
P.N.03 would probably be my choice. I love that game, but it was pretty much universally considered the worst of the CAPCOM 5. God Hand, another Shinji Mikami game, may have outdone it a few years later with the famous 3/10 IGN review.
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i was going to include PN03, but i couldn’t recall what critics at the time felt about it.
yeah, i like pretty much everything about the dark spire more than etrian odyssey. including the aesthetics and music. love that klaus nomi core shit.
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Thank you for praising MD Altered Beast! It is a perfect quick co-op blast and I think it plays better than the arcade version, the characters have a nicer weight to them.
I will nominate Tokyo Jungle. It’s rough around the edges but it’s a cracking survive-em-up. It’s got franchise potential and I’m sad Sony have just let it fall away.
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I think this could make an amazing ARG game, nevermind Team Instinct or whatever Pokemon Go stuff, I want to lead the Corgi Tribe to domination
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