Recommended by Texhs as part of this list.

The Cat Lady is an immediately striking game, it's monochromatic & semi-photorealistic aesthetic accompanied by an opening act that can only be described as uncomfortably candid and merciless in execution. For it's first 15 minutes or so, The Cat Lady calls to mind it's psychological horror contemporaries, however, it's the immediate swerve the premise of The Cat Lady takes after it's strong opening that lifts The Cat Lady out of its psychological horror niche and truly gives it character by placing it squarely in the realm of the exploitation film, a Silent Hill game by way of I Spit on Your Grave, a horror adventure not only about coming to grips with your trauma, but also about catharsis, of delivering justice to those who have wronged you and others like you.

What I found the most striking about The Cat Lady was its distinctly feminine attitude. Often does cheap horror use violence against women as a standard shock tactic, the standard positioning of women as a stand-in for innocence and the brutalization of their form/psyche as the ultimate "horror", quote-unquote, but rarely are distinctly feminine worries and perspectives used as a basis for tactful horror (in gaming, at the very least.) In the same way Silent Hill 3 strikes that chord of uniquely feminine fears with its focus on birth (God), the body (blood, puberty, the denial of autonomy by patriarchal organizations a la religion/The Order) and urban life (being approached by strange men in public, walking home alone at night), The Cat Lady focuses on similar topics and themes, the lead character Susan Ashworth made an immortal angel of death who enacts vengeance on so-called "Parasites", for the majority of which are men who hurt vulnerable women. These include doctors who exploit their seniority over female co-workers to enact violent and sexual fantasies upon them, repairmen who kidnap women while they're alone, and stalkers who feel sexually entitled to a woman because they tried to buy their hearts with material goods and get violent when denied.

But even outside the obvious violence, there's the more abstract forms of violence dealt to Susan: her past involving dealing with newfound motherhood alongside her misogynistic, immature husband who often made her feel like a lesser; Susan's present as a loner who's one source of joy is often criticized and threatened by the society she resides in, the entire hospital chapter that revolves around Susan and her requests/questions being denied by hospital staff despite her insistence, it's all so very purposeful in its implementation and execution. To loop back around to the I Spit on Your Grave comparison, it can feel exploitative, the way Susan and others are often victims of excessive violence to move the plot along, but the way Susan status as the player character lends our sympathies to her and gives her character and meaning, the way each parasite she takes out is firmly established as a villain and never given any sympathy or justification for their actions, it's all done to ensure catharsis, to criticize, to enact a vengeance that often goes undelivered in the real world. It makes The Cat Lady stand out among its horror contemporaries for it's shockingly mature sensibilities, despite the schlocky one-liners and cheesy soundtrack that are plenty abound.

While The Cat Lady can be quite heavy-handed in its messaging and tone (the entirety of Chapter 3 being a "DON'T HAVE A BREAKDOWN" mental health puzzle is borderline comical), it has a lot of material that resonates to this day. It's treatment of mental illness (accidentally using spoiled milk in my coffee and suffering a mental breakdown aside) is sympathetic and quite accurate to reality, and the main villain of the game's latter half being a targeted observation and take down of imageboard culture, the blackpill philosophy and the way it exploits the vulnerable into radical real-life action is something that I both was not expecting to see in a 2012 game and also still ring true a decade later. It's these touches, this sympathy and focus on catharsis and finding meaning despite tragedy that makes The Cat Lady such a thoroughly engaging experience and a genuine horror standout even a decade later.

Recommended by C_F as part of this list.

On the cusp of the 11th century, you are brought into this world, writhing and bare within the desolate outskirts of the Japanese countryside, neck-deep in the overgrown grass and surrounded by the ravenous gaze of demons. The alarmingly-familiar stench of death brings you to your senses quick, and a quick crane of your neck puts you face-to-face with a mummified cadaver, its dried-out face gripped with fear and frozen with rigor mortis too familiar for comfort. Dawdling in this endless expanse of overgrown weeds and youkai as you are now is a death wish, so you'll have to do what you must: Rob the strikingly familiar corpse of its earthly possessions and make your way into the inner walls of the nearby capital. Within, walls of beggars & vagrants line the run-down streets, and demons await the unfortunate around every turn, devouring the unsuspecting and luring countless victims into deathtraps for their own amusement. Thieves and rouges patrol the barren alleyways, no better than the supernatural fiends they contend with for survival. Death here is a commonality that spares none, no more uncommon than the rising and setting of the sun. Welcome to the capital of Japan: Heiankyo.

Cosmology of Kyoto is ostensibly an adventure game, but more aptly put, it's an interactive cultural archive of Heian-era Japan, a loose collection of vignettes and folktales representative to the era, complete with a database of historical facts and folklore so in-depth it has an actual bibliography. As an unnamed wanderer, you will experience the many sights and sounds of this blighted town besieged by despair, encountering mythological and historical figures and bearing witness to their many antics and deeds. Whether it be through run-ins with youkai or the wayward blade of a bandit, you will die, and depending on your actions, be sent to one of the many accurately-recreated hells and afterlives described in Buddhist mythology, and get reincarnated back into the world of the living, picking the possessions off your last cadaver like you did when you first stepped foot into this world, and continue to explore every corner of this decaying capital.

The setting and atmosphere of this fictional recreation of Heiankyo is where Cosmology of Kyoto truly shines. From the moment you step into this world, it is made abundantly clear how unimportant you are: Events are quick & abrupt, and your avatar is rarely ever the provocateur, often being delegated to a mere observer as either a spiritual folktale or a random act of brutality takes place in front of their eyes, before life goes on and you continue walking. There's this sense of detachment that, while a negative in any other "immersive" experience, works heavily in Cosmology of Kyoto's favour, as you really feel like an observer to this world, transplanted to bear witness to this sparse moment in history, and just as quickly as it starts, its over, leaving you with a deep-rooted feeling of confusion and discomfort to take with you long after the journey is over.

If you let it, Cosmology of Kyoto will take you hand-in-hand in its beautifully crafted world of mysticism, and the overwhelming sense of atmosphere packed into this roughly 3 hour package knocks its contemporaries both past and present out of the park. If you like to truly get lost in a game and take in the atmosphere of a setting, Cosmology of Kyoto is a masterclass example of such an experience and I cannot recommend it enough.

This isn't the kind of thing I typically use my reviews for (and I don't plan to make a habit out of it), but about a little over a year ago, I released a Yume Nikki fangame called Separation Anxiety for Dream Diary Jam 5. With the help & company of fellow Backloggd user ludzu, we've recorded a developer's commentary for the game. If you ever wanted to hear someone ramble about niche RPG Maker games, game development, and Silent Hill, I hope you enjoy.

https://youtu.be/eJwd2Ss6ERk

Surfing through petabytes of information, a storm of myriad colors clouds my vision, a harmony of sound and visual stimuli overclocking my senses. There's a rhythm to be found in the chaos, a flow to the motion, a song that's built upon a cacophony of sounds, bullets and explosions creating an orchestra in my mind.

Rez is less of a game and more of a transcendent audiovisual experience. The gameplay is hypnotic, putting you into that trance state as you take aim and shoot before your brain can process what you've done, but the real point of Rez is it's aesthetic, a style so thick and permeating it becomes the substance. Shots that fall in time with the music, the soundtrack that gradually builds and builds as you progress through the level, it feels less like a rail-shooter and more like an improv jam session: everyone's feeling out the tempo, the rhythm, the harmony, working out the kinks as you go along until it all falls into place and everything starts to harmonize, the song in your soul finally coming out in full force, an iridescent moment in time where the instruments sing and everything is perfect. Rez is a reminder: Take in the sounds, witness the lights, let it wash over you like the waves of the ocean lapping the coast. That's what it means to be alive.

Back in 2017, ATLUS would reveal a teaser trailer for their upcoming project: A brand spankin' new mainline entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series, in high definition, exclusive to the (as of then) recently released Nintendo Switch console. While in retrospect quite foolish on my part, this announcement served as the impetus for me to buy my own Switch console, because there was no way in hell I was going to be missing out on the latest entry in my favorite JRPG franchise of all time. So with my Switch secured, all I had to do was wait for the game to come out. So I waited. And Waited. And Waited some more. Finally, 4 years later, after ages of "Never Ever" jokes amongst friends and colleagues, my most anticipated game of the year was actually primed and ready to play inside my glorified paperweight of a console, and it was finally time to see if ATLUS could deliver on a near half-decade's worth of hype.

Shin Megami Tensei V could best be described as the next generation's take on ATLUS' magnum-opus, Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. An average Japanese teenage boy is lifted from his average life and thrown into a world of demons and ideological warfare, fuses with a demonic creature to become a powerful half-human half-demon warrior, and must pick a cause to fight for in order to bring about a new world from the hotbed of chaos. But rather than feeling like a retread of old ground, SMT V serves as a culmination of the series' many mechanics, combining them into a Greatest Hits amalgamation of gameplay to create the best feeling JRPG I have played in years. Essence Fusion is the next step in the Demon Source mechanic from Strange Journey, constantly forcing decisions between defensive options like Affinity Fusion or offensive options like new skills for Nahobino and his demons, as well as offering new build depths via Passive Skills that can now be used by the main character. Character progression and party composition that makes the player design teams around both the highly limited skill slots you'll be working with throughout the game, while also developing unique demon builds catering to their innate strengths and weaknesses, building off the Demon Affinities and Apps from IV to offer a whole new depth of strategy to both battles and character builds. The new open world navigation bringing together the verticality of IV's dungeons and exploration with brand-new incentives to explore via the Korok-esque Mimans who provide invaluable character building resources, and the new Abscesses, which incentivize exploration, the way they unveil more of the world map and offer new character skills when eliminated. The absolutely sublime soundtrack by Ryota Kozuka taking the game in a more ambient, atmospheric direction with the overworld music while kicking it into high-gear with the many, many battle themes. It all comes together with a level of experience and polish, gained by decades of experimentation and refinement, that truly makes SMT V the best playing, most balanced entry in the entire franchise thus far.

While I could ramble about the sublime gameplay and the quality of life changes, there are aspects of SMT V that miss the mark. While the brand new open-world approach is a breath of fresh air and opens up a lot of new avenues for level design and exploration, this comes at the cost of the dungeons, of which there are only two in the whole game, both of which are fairly disappointing in terms of design and difficulty. The new open-world segments are fairly meaty and will make up most of your playtime, but the general aesthetic of "ruined city" starts to wear thin when its all you really have to chew on for ~30 hours. Alongside this, the story feels somehow both bloated and anemic, with sections in-between the open-world exploration that feel like monotonous padding full of exposition, but paradoxically having a finale that rushes towards a conclusion that feels unearned and slapdash, and the new approach to alignments killing any real incentive to make choices. It's a step up from Apocalypse's writing to be sure, but it's sad that it fumbles the ball, especially when the themes and allusions apparent in the world design, lore and plot beats are all so strong.

SMT V had the (somewhat unreasonable) goal of justifying a $299 console for me, and yet despite that high mark, it managed to pass with flying colors. Even with my criticisms, this is my game of the year: I could not put this game down for the life of me. SMT V is a shining gem of both the Megami Tensei franchise and JRPGs as a whole. I loved this game, and it was honestly worth the 4 year wait I endured for it. I don't know how ATLUS will top SMT V, or if they even will (on a gameplay level at least), but SMT V has skyrocketed to being both one of my favorite MegaTen entries and one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. God damn this game fucking rules!

Recommended by BeachEpisode as part of this list.

"Until I feel new dawn bloom on the silent sea/Sing for me your song... "

Within the woefully cut-short multimedia duology known as the Zone of the Enders franchise, the first entry is regarded as a black sheep: Even with the prestiguous name of Hideo Kojima attatched to it, its most known for its original PS2 release being coupled with a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2, and even Konami seems fit to forget about it, since the only game of the duology to get the snazzy 4K VR rerelease was its sequel. Zone of the Enders, for all intents and purposes, has forgettable written all over it, and it's easy to see why on a surface level: It's in many regards, a mediocre early-PS2 game that suffers from poor gameplay, massive amounts of padding and ambitions far larger than its woefully-small britches. But despite being cognizant of these flaws, Zone of the Enders manages to be a gripping experience, stuffed to the brim with a sense of comfortable familiarity.

Zone of the Enders is a story familiar to many mecha connoisseurs, a tale of a boy thrust into the horrors of war from the cockpit of his cool robot that's at the center of a scheme far grander than he can comprehend, coupled with an early 2000s English dub that while at first laughable, manages to elevate the basic story into a surprisingly gripping and emotional 4 hour ride. The combat is incredibly simple, but its self-expression and showmanship are what lifts the entire thing up, letting the player do some incredible anime bullshit like flash-stepping, clashing giant mecha swords, shooting big fuck-off laser beams and throwing your opponents around like ragdolls into one another to cause massive explosions. Even when I was faced with the same combat encounter I've been dealing with for the past 2 hours, dashing behind an opponent and chucking the enemy into a building and watching the fireworks fly never gets old. All of this is complimented by its incredibly sleek post-Y2K aesthetic and short runtime, which means that just before everything can start grating your nerves too hard, its over. Even though its been forgotten by publisher and fanbase alike, there's a clear passion evident in every facet of ZoE, from its visual language to its mecha design, and even if it can fall quite flat at times, its got oodles of heart overflowing from every pore, and that alone makes it worth a shot if you have even the slightest interest in giant robot action games.

"Until my rumbled hands lead to the end of night/Find me in your eyes... "

Cheap special effects. Over-the-top violence and gore. Hokey acting. Gratuitous sexuality. These are the hallmarks of the classic Halloween staple: The B-Horror Movie, where high concepts, low budgets, and mid-range actors band together to produce certified schlock for the silver screen! In an interesting parallel however, we have the mid-budget late 90s video game, which has the same kind of soul we find in B-cinema: ambitious ideas, middling budgets, and acting of dubious quality. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the common ground there, and so, enter stage right Crazy Games and their loving send-up to B-Horror, Illbleed.

Illbleed is a virtual horror house all about exploring different attractions based on in-universe B-Movie horror films; in which you focus on disarming traps, fighting monsters and making it to the end of each stage without bleeding yourself dry, giving yourself a heart attack, or just flat-out biting the dust. From Psycho to Child's Play to Tremors, Illbleed wears its influences loud and proud, but in the same breath, it's not afraid to poke fun at itself, its influences, and the very nature of the B-Horror. In between some horrific monster design and genuinely unsettling moments of terror, there's moments where the game will peel the curtain back a bit to reveal the inner workings of the setting and poke fun at itself, from employees complaining about malfunctioning equipment in the park, to some stages flat out requiring you to break the rules of the universe to proceed. It's all incredibly surreal and bordering on full-blown Dadaism, but it all works in Illbleed's favor, lending the game this enjoyably irreverent tone throughout.

Illbleed can be hard to parse at the best of times, and the first level will test your patience like no other, but much like any B-Horror film, if you can stick with it past its rocky start, you'll be in for the ride of your life. Illbleed is a cult classic for good reason: It's a loving homage to B-Horror and an unabashedly earnest celebration of the medium and it's influences that isn't afraid to revel in the absurdity of it all.

Recommended by lpslucasps as part of this list.

One of my favorite past-times online is wandering through the remains of old websites that have slipped through the cracks of time, free of Javascript and the sleek minimalist design of the current netscape. Ancient fan websites for niche anime series, the blogs of middle-aged professors talking about their field of study, the personal websites of long-gone starry-eyed netizens, abandoned forums archived in whole by a community enshrining their texts like an old religion, it's akin to exploring an abandoned building: It's purpose is long-forgotten, it's structure has rotted away, and the only signs of life are the pests and micro-organisms that have found their ecological niche within. Like the digital archaeologists of today, the rats who reside there have no clue about the significance of the artificial home in which they reside, they can only peer upon the bones and wonder what it all meant.

Hypnospace Outlaw's greatest strength is how it manages to perfectly capture the feel of late 90s internet. From the hyper-compressed audio and video, the gaudy yet charming layouts of old webpages and the general interconnected feel of insular online communities, it has the cultural language of the pre-Y2K internet down to a T, but more importantly, Hypnospace Outlaw captures the twilight of the Wild West-era of the internet. Hypnospace is an ecosystem, a thriving network of fringe individuals and communities connected through the power of Sleeptime Technology, but just like in real life, corporate shortsightedness and the cold hand of Capitalism tried to force Hypnospace into a more marketable form that would ultimately kill the very ecosystem it cultivated. In a striking parallel to the world of today, the final stretch of Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in the modern day, decades after the Y2K panic, where the goal of the player shifts from maintaining the peace in Hypnospace to simply trying to maintain Hypnospace. From the Internet Archive, to Flashpoint, to the Lost Media Wiki; there's a prevalent culture on the net today around preservation, full of communities that work around the clock to try and save the internet as was, before corporations forced the discontinuation of legacy software and aesthetics in the name of profit, before the internet was monopolized by corporate spyware and data-harvesting scams that forced the cultural mass extinction of the disparate websphere.

Hypnospace is an undeniably fantastical game, an alternate history dealing in the hypotheticals of advanced sci-fi technology, but its undercurrent of pre-Y2K fear and a longing for the internet as it was give it the grounding to resonate with the players who grew up in that era of the world. To pretend the internet was ever the mythical wild west we romanticize it as nowadays is foolish, but its undeniable that we lost something in the years following. All roads on the Information Superhighway converged into one, right into the mouth of the corporate Abaddon.

And it might be too late to go back.

Recommended by PKMudkipz as part of this list.

The Mega Man franchise is something I've held dear to me as a fan of classic no-frills side-scrolling run-n-gun action, but despite the plentiful spinoffs into nearly every genre under the sun, I've never actually ventured very far into any of the franchise's numerous spinoff series. So, at the behest of one user's suggestion, I'm dipping my toes into yet another Mega Man spin-off series with Mega Man Zero.

Taking place in the far, far future, Zero (from the Mega Man X series) has been revived by a struggling Reploid rebellion force to help aid in the fight against an X that has gone from all-loving hero to genocidal despot. Already, the concept of turning your old hero into the villain of a spinoff is novel, and transforming the dynamic from law-enforcement agent snuffing an attempted rebellion in Mega Man X to rebel fighter struggling against a powerful government agency is something MMZ runs with at full speed. MMZ is no doubt about it, the hardest Mega Man Game I've ever played. Your resources are incredibly limited, the enemies you face are tough as nails and are always placed in a way to wreck an unsuspecting player's shit, and the way missions are structured means running out of continues can lock you out of content and chances to get additional resources. This constant struggle against the game's many challenges really sells the struggle the characters deal with, and makes you feel like every victory is earned by the skin of your teeth. Despite this, I can't say it ever dips into outright unfair territory. If you're patient and pay attention to your surroundings and enemy attack patterns, the game can quickly become a breeze, especially with the breadth of weapon options and the ease with which Zero controls, sliding and wall-jumping everywhere while never feeling slippery or loose.

MMZ, while fun and challenging, suffers from a lot of systems that feel superfluous. The Cyber-Elf system is very helpful for newcomers and skill-impaired players, offering many boons that can help take the edge off the game's difficulty, but it feels a bit like an afterthought and the amount of resource grinding required to make the most out of some of them feels like a waste of time. There's a ranking system that encourages replays and mastery, but it's incredibly demanding, knocking off points for many, many actions in a way that discourages using a lot of the tools the game offers a player, and it's pretty frivolous even if you do care about that kinda thing, as there's no immediate reward for getting S-Ranks outside of bragging rights. But as a whole, Mega Man Zero was a solid time. It wasn't enough to immediately sell me on the rest of the entries in this sub-franchise, but it's a solid action-platformer and a good dose of Mega Man X-flavored action if you still need that particular itch scratched and (somehow) haven't tried this spinoff series out yet.

Recommended by Squigglydot as part of this list.

Of all the things to turn into a multi-media franchise, Black Rock Shooter has to be one of the more bizarre things to do so. All the way back in 2007, Pixiv user 'Huke' posted a sketch of a girl simply titled "Black Rock Shooter". This would eventually lead to a collaboration between Vocaloid band Supercell and Huke to create a song and music video named after the eponymous sketch, "Black Rock Shooter". The resulting unprecedented success of the music video lead to the creation of a multimedia franchise that, while nowadays, is a relatively obscure property with a mostly dormant fanbase, once ruled as a mainstay of late 2000s-early 2010s weeaboo culture referenced by video games and anime alike, with an OVA, an anime series, and the topic of today's writing, a PSP action-RPG released all the way back in 2011.

Black Rock Shooter: The Game is a third-person rail-shooter/action RPG hybrid about our eponymous Black Rock Shooter fighting an alien menace to save the last remnants of humanity from extinction, and as interesting as that sounds, it's unfortunately dragged down by its own ambition. The story has its moments, being a pretty somber affair that can get get surprisingly dark at times (the whole "saving humanity" thing goes tits-up by the halfway point and things don't really get better for our hero afterwards), but there's a lot of drawn out cutscenes full of fluff and nonsensical expository dialogue that fails to explain anything of worth. The gameplay is novel but it shows all its cards from Hour 1 and never really evolves in terms of strategy or intrigue. The mission based structure and numerous optional challenges suit the handheld ecosystem but often lead to busywork that makes the game feel incredibly padded despite its relatively short length. It's very "one step forward, two steps back" in execution, but in all honesty, the game itself is the least interesting part about Black Rock Shooter: The Game, when its very existence is a much more intriguing topic.

There's something to be said about the intersection of internet media and the mainstream in this specific cultural era, when the internet was still a relatively untested medium for entertainment and anything that saw a modicum of success online would often be poached by bigwigs in an attempt to turn that viral success into real-world profit. It's this line of thinking that could put flash hits like Alien Hominid and Super Meat Boy on official storefronts, or on the other side of the coin, lead to endeavors like "Fred: The Movie" or "The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange", efforts to capitalize on internet stardom before their Fifteen Minutes of Fame expired. In an era before itch.io, modern YouTube, and video streaming, where avenues for smaller creators to publish their work were much more limited, going "official" was simply seen as the only option for any IP, a relic of thinking from before the internet was such an integral part of our lives.

But despite the cynicism I've presented thus far, Black Rock Shooter: The Game has a surprising amount of money and talent thrown at it for being a late PSP budget title, including the writer for Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts II, the director behind Persona 3 & Valkyria Chronicles, and high-budget voice talent like Miyuki Sawashiro. Hell, the very fact it got an official western release (despite being limited to only America and Europe) is nothing short of a miracle. This production information, contrasted with the game's middling reception, makes coming back to Black Rock Shooter: The Game over a decade later feel like discovering the ruins of Ozymandias' works, a once mighty glimpse at a media powerhouse, the ashes of a firework, its luster a mere memory to those around to witness it. But if anything, it serves as a reminder of simpler times, the era of rags-to-riches stories born of the most unlikely of circumstances, the kind of meteoric stardom you see less and less of nowadays as independent publishing venues and thousands of talented artists competing for attention online render the multi-media fame of any other potential Black Rock Shooters more and more of a fantasy as the years go by.

Godspeed you, Black Rock Shooter.

The best way to describe Devil May Cry 2 is "aggressively mediocre."

I knew about this game's reputation long before I got to it, which is why I took so long to eventually get around to playing it, but I had the HD Collection and I figured it was high time I play it, just for shits and giggles, see if it's really that bad. However, when Mission 1 started and I was messing around with the controls and saw that Stinger animation, I already knew just how the rest of the game was going to pan out. If you want the definitive DMC 2 experience, just play until that god awful Infested Chopper boss fight and exit, because it stops being funny after that point.

For a game with a 6 month development time held together with duct tape and spit, it's a miracle the game even functions, but that's the most charitable thing you could say about it. The enemy AI is brain dead, the guns are so powerful that they will single-handedly carry you throughout the entire game, and the plot is just a series of random events and non-sequiturs that happen while Dante performs his best Two-Face impression. Nothing is overtly broken or outlandishly terrible, but it rarely ever ascends past the stunning highs of "Okay, I guess". I eventually gave up around Mission 14 when I just got too annoyed and bored to bother finishing it.

But above all else, Devil May Cry 2 is a testament to Hideaki Itsuno's ability to find the best qualities in even the worst games. Dante's moveset is very free-flowing, since he not only starts off with Air Hike, there's now a dedicated dodge button that functions as a wallrun/dodge roll, which would later be implemented as the Trickster Style in DMC 3. There's also the Majin Devil Trigger, which acts like a prototype to the Sin Devil Trigger in DMC 5, as well as minor things, such as Rebellion being introduced in this entry or the first instance of a playable Trish.

In a way, I'm glad it exists, since Devil May Cry 3 wouldn't have been as great as it was without the failure of DMC 2, but outside of its historical context within the series, DMC 2 is not worth your time in the slightest.

"Where did your true self go? You are now nothing but an empty vessel pretending to be human. "

There's a pounding in my head it hurts its screaming its crying my heart is beating too fast way too fast it's gonna burst my hands are cold my skin is cold my skin is hot its too hot too hot too hot too hot too-

The Delmeter finally kicks in, and the splitting headache fades. The world stops spinning and I can finally feel my own two feet. There's a corpse by feet, it's face a gnarled mess barely recognizable as human. There's blood pooling beneath my shoes, and I can feel the Delmeter fading already.

Galerians is a 2000's survival horror game about Rion, a young boy who wakes up in a hospital, with no memories of his past and a sudden batch of psychic powers, who's only motivation is to locate the girl who's been contacting him telepathically. In doing so, he unravels a conspiracy surrounding the sentient supercomputer running the city that wants to replace humanity with a race of psychic superhumans known as the Galerians, and how the girl he's looking for is the key to stopping the AI's ascension to godhood.

As Rion, you have to manage your limited psychic powers via the multiple types of drugs you will inject and ingest over the course of your adventure. Rion can switch between different types of psychic attacks by injecting himself with three different types of drugs, and each attack used will slowly drain your drug meter until you need your next fix. Compounding your limited usage of Rion's psychic powers is the AP meter. By attacking, taking damage, or even simply running around, the AP Meter will fill, and if it hits max and Rion tries to use a psychic attack, he will Short, making him a walking death trap that will instantly kill all enemies that come near, but will slowly drain Rion's HP until he either dies or takes another drug called Delmeter (of which there is only a finite amount of in the whole game) to reset the gauge to 0. The limited resources, alongside the ticking time bomb that is the AP Meter heavily discourages combat in Galerians. Outside of a few forced encounters, combat is completely optional and provides no tangible benefits for Rion, meaning that in true survival horror fashion, hoofing it is usually your best option in any given situation.

The puzzle solving is fairly simple, usually consisting of key hunting and very basic fact recollection. Rion can use his psychic powers to gain hints for item locations and puzzle solutions, which means that it's very hard to get truly stumped. While the puzzle solving is basic, the moment-to-moment gameplay is mind-numbing and the combat is rather clunky when you're forced into it, Galerians' aesthetic is what really makes it stand out. The story is a wild ride full of insane plot twists and heady themes that aren't really tackled in a very deep or clever manner, but this alongside the sparse moments of Scanners-esque ultraviolence and beautifully rendered early 2000's CGI cyberpunk landscapes full of alien architecture and that glorious Y2K technological aesthetic elevate Galerians from a mediocre Resident Evil clone to an absolute standout hidden gem of the survival horror genre.

Morimiya Middle School Shooting is an arcade-style top-down shooter made in the RPG Maker MV engine. The plot plays out like a bizarre Japanese version of Hatred: A violent, misanthropic middle school student with a death wish arms herself with as many guns as she can take into her local middle school with the express purpose of killing as many as she can before getting arrested.

The standard game play loop is comparable to a rouge-like version of the original Postal. You have 5 minutes per run, and you have to rack up kills before either the time limit runs out or you get caught/killed. You get graded on the number of people killed/wounded on a 5 star scale, and depending on your score, you gain points to spend on permanent upgrades like new weapons and permanent perks.

The game is technically impressive, turning the standard RPG Maker engine into a admittedly decent top-down shooter, and it has a surprising amount of depth to the moment-by-moment game play. You have a base 50% accuracy and you have to go into an aim mode to raise it, at the cost of your movement speed. Running and gunning is a surefire way to get yourself caught, as it makes your aim absolutely atrocious. While most of the students are defenseless, the rare hero or two can catch you off guard and very quickly take you down if you get cornered. Teachers also roam the halls, the females alerting others of your presence and the males running to pin you down and end your run. Despite first impressions, the game is not the mindless "cathartic" murderfest I was expecting. There is a certain level of strategy and planning involved in each run, and from a certain point of view, it could even deconstruct the murder fantasy of its own premise, seeing as the murder fantasy is very quickly ended if you get too careless.

Let's address the elephant in the room though: It's a game about children murdering children. Even though the limited graphics and frankly cheesy sound design take the edge off somewhat, this is a pretty alienating premise for the vast majority of people (even the original Postal drew the line at child murder!) Plausible deniability isn't even a factor either, seeing as the game was developed by a guro artist, so the violence is definitely meant to get someone's rocks off. It's an abhorrent production all around, and the only reason to play it over other arcade shooters is if you're morbidly curious or if it's your kink.

The sound of bullets whizzing by and the slumping of bodies as they hit the floor. The adrenaline that pumps through my veins as I shoot goon after goon with pinpoint accuracy. Wading through bodies as I march forward towards my exit, an army of men pouring in from every which way in a vain attempt to stop me. Another empty handgun is tossed to the wayside, another poor soul gets his arm broken and soon enough I have another one in my hand. In this march of death, surrounded by a cacophony of shouting, gunfire and the thunderous footsteps of incoming hitmen, there's only one though running through my head:

"I wonder what picture they're showing this week at the theater down the street."

French Existentialism is a philosophy about the isolation of the human experience in a hostile, uncaring world. We don't know why we're here, and all that matters is what you do with your own two hands. Arrest of a Stone Buddha is all about this. Taking influence from French cinema and action directors like John Woo, the game is part aimless life sim and part high-tension shootouts and assassination missions. Between the thrilling (if simple) assassination jobs where you fight legions upon legions of cannon-fodder while trying to make it to your getaway vehicle, there's long stretches of time where our lone gunman is wandering around his neighborhood in downtown France, taking in the sights, drinking at the bar, watching a movie at the cinema or taking a visit to the local art gallery. It's all just a way to kill time between the only moments where you feel truly alive: the ones where you're knee-deep in bodies and pumped up on adrenaline.

It's charming at first, but as the in-game month drags on, it loses its luster, which is ultimately the point Stone Buddha is trying to drive home. You start wandering aimlessly, loitering around the city, going to bed as soon as possible just to make the next day come faster in the hopes our new job will give us a momentary distraction from the mundanity of it all. But a new job will only stave off the ennui for so long. Our hitman is empty inside, and no amount of culture or walks in the park or drinks or new coats is going to fill that hole. Without the killing, without the violence, there's nothing for him.

There's nothing for us.

Recommended by Cold_Comfort as part of this list.

Shmups are a genre I've always been interested in but never really got into. Much like their Arcade-origin ilk, they are gaming in its purest form: an exercise in skill and score. It's a genre all about throwing yourself against an insurmountable wall and trying to achieve not only completion, but mastery. It's a genre that's for the most part, rather light on story or characters because the in-universe stakes are unimportant when the true conflict is between player and game. When I'm tired of longer, story-heavy games, this kind of primal, back-to-basics approach to game design is therapeutic in a way: much like a rouge-like, it's non-committal and allows me to put in a run or two a day, get a little further, and not feel like I need to commit to anything longer than that. But despite my interest, I've never had a shmup that really hooked me. At most, I'd find something neat that I would credit-feed until I reached the end and promptly forget about a day later. But when I booted up ESCHATOS for the first time and heard the glorious FM Synth sounds of Yousuke Yasui's score pierce my ears as dozens of enemy ships flew on-screen and the camera made these big, cinematic sweeps and took these wild angles during the action, I could tell I had something special on my hands.

ESCHATOS takes a sink or swim approach to its game design: it lays down the ground rules and hands you all the tools you'll need, before throwing you straight into the deep end. You have 3 buttons that each serve a specific purpose: a narrow shot that travels to the top of the screen, a wide shot that covers more horizontal ground but doesn't go full-screen, and a shield that can both block shots and deal contact damage. To get a higher score in ESCHATOS, you need to destroy each enemy wave without letting a single enemy escape, which will increase your score multiplier. Let an enemy live, and the multiplier goes down. In order to get the best score, you need to learn each individual enemy's behavior, each wave's formation, and how to best use the tools at your disposal in order to keep the multiplier rising, encouraging multiple attempts to help you learn and master each of the game's Areas and Stages.

While it's not the toughest game on the market, ESCHATOS is no walk in the park either. Screen-clearing bombs are an instant-use pick-up and not something you can hold for later, and lives are few and far between, meaning that learning enemy formations, bullet patterns, and how to maneuver your ship carefully to both dodge, attack, and claim Bombs and Extends is essential to your survival. Despite its difficulty, what kept me from shelving ESCHATOS is how it encourages replays and multiple attempts. ESCHATOS keeps track of your total accumulated score over multiple runs and offers rewards at specific milestones to keep you engaged, from more lives when you start, to more continues, to the ability to start your run from later stages, meaning that even as you fail, it always feels like you're making headway, and each run always felt like I was getting closer and closer to the end.

Outside the standard game mode, there's also a remixed Advanced Mode that applies a new risk-reward power-up mechanic to the standard game mode, and a Time Attack mode that removes the traditional lives/continue system in favor of a time limit that increases as you do well and decreases when you get hit, both providing a good amount of variety and challenge if you ever get bored of grinding out runs in Original Mode. If you have even the slightest interest in the shmup genre, I would highly recommend this as a entry point. It has the right balance of challenge and spectacle that'll keep you coming back no matter how many times you've failed.