Recommended by Liquidrocks as part of this list.

"I DARE YE ENTER...

...THE DUNGEONS OF DAGGORATH!!!"

A wireframe wizard greets me with this phrase as I first boot up Dungeons of Daggorath. The screen is pitch-black, nothing but the sound of our intrepid hero's heart beating faster yet faster as I attempt to parse the command prompt and figure out how to even begin to start my adventure, which so far consisted of the far-off sounds of monsters assailing my eardrums whilst I bump into walls typing 'MOVE'.

Static fades in.

The UI fades out.

The wireframe wizard appears once again to taunt me with this message:

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

Thus far, the adventure proves fruitless.

Dungeons of Daggorath was released in 1982 (a whopping 40 years ago as of time of writing), so if I wanted to make any headway, I was going to learn how to meet this game on its own terms. A search for clues leads me to a .pdf file of the game's instruction manual, which provided me with the much needed context for this endeavor: An ancient land besieged by the return of an evil wizard and a tome left behind by the previous valiant hero full of tips and tricks for surviving the eponymous Dungeon of Daggorath, cheekily revealing the manual itself a diegetic part of the world. More importantly though, I found the list of commands needed to get this show on the road.

PULL RIGHT TORCH

USE RIGHT

LOOK

MOVE

Vision. A rattlesnake of some kind, presumably the very same that dispatched the last 3 or so bumbling adventurers. Browsing the manual as my lumbering oaf of an adventurer has his calves nipped at provides the remedy for this situation:

USE SWORD ???

PULL SWORD ???

PULL LEFT SWORD

USE SWORD ???

ATTACK ???

ATTACK LEFT

My bumbling with the command prompt seals yet another adventurer's fate, consigned to becoming a beast's meal.

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

Back on Floor 1. The sounds of beasts creep ever-closer. To lollygag has proven fatal before.

P R SW

P L T

U L

Now that the first major hurdle has been overcome and the gameplay has slowed down, I am left with naught but my own thoughts and the masterful soundscape of Dungeons of Daggorath. Instead of a traditional health bar reminiscent of the TTRPGs Daggorath is obviously inspired by, your status is represented via a heart monitor on the bottom of the screen, a constant thump-thump that speeds up and slows down according to the current strain on your body. In the dungeon, each enemy has their own unique sound, alongside dynamic volume levels in relation to your current position to let you know exactly how close they are to your current location. The static hissing of a rattlesnake. The thunderous footsteps of a golem. The clanking of a knight's armor. The tell-tale beating of your adventurer's heart filling your ears, providing tensions that would be unmatched for a decade bare minimum as you run down a hall in an attempt to lose your pursuer, the once-steady heartbeat turning into a double-kick stroke that threatens to burst from your very chest.

An attempt to escape a blob monster with a wry smirk leads to my adventurer dead on the floor from the strain put on his heart. Four Pine Torches and my Iron Sword, gone down the drain.

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

P R SW

P L T

U L

Another try. I've figured out how to pace myself as to not put too much strain on the heart of this asthmatic would-be hero I'm apparently playing as. A hole in the ground that signifies progress. Floor 2, featuring a new color palette to enjoy (stark white), and a knight that turns me into a fine red mist. Another run down the drain.

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

Another glance at the manual would reveal the Save function I've been desperately missing for the past 2 hours.

P R SW

P L T

U L

To survive Dungeons of Daggorath is to immerse yourself in its now arcane terms, play dirty and exploit the rules to give yourself any edge necessary. Allow a lone spider to nip at your ankles, since their attacks do fuck-all damage to your heart-rate and it keeps other monsters from occupying the same space as you, allowing hit and run tactics to be exploited to their full potential. Scatter your inventory on the floor in front of you and snuff out the lights, the dungeon itself filled with kleptomaniacs who will prioritize picking up your goods over maiming you, leaving our brave soul to beat the monsters to death with an unlit torch in the pitch-black abyss. These kind of insane game plans are not only completely viable, as even the manual makes note of these phenomena, but a breath of fresh air that makes Dungeons of Daggorath stand out even today, its minimalist design and technological limitations giving way to such insane gameplay mechanics and situations that make the experience worth having solely for the stark contrast to the decades of refinement and technological advancement we've had that would frown upon such ridiculous exploits.

Floor 4 robs you of everything in your inventory except for what you carry in your own two hands. A brutal lesson in grinding was learned here.

ZLOAD

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

ZLOAD

"YET ANOTHER DOES NOT RETURN"

ZLOAD

On Floor 5 lies the cruel wizard in wait. The sun has long since set, and a sense of sunk-cost fallacy is the only thing keeping me going against a gauntlet of beasts most foul. A smorgasbord of magic rings and hours of hit and run tactics ingrained into my muscle memory serve me well in our final encounter.

In an era built upon many layers of innovation and game design advancements, it's always good to come back to the games of old to humble ourselves, to see how we've grown and witness the unique ideas that are often left behind in the nebulous name of progress, especially with games as that are as seemingly limited as Dungeons of Daggorath. Even if you don't have the determination to reach the final floor of the dungeon, I believe that simply bumbling around for an hour or two is an important experience for any enthusiast looking to see the roots of the medium, to observe what we called revolutionary in the era of the ColecoVision, to glimpse for a moment what was once cutting edge.

"BEHOLD! DESTINY AWAITS THE HAND OF A NEW WIZARD..."

Recommended by Sonique as part of this list.

It's a name so iconic it's transcended its arcade roots: Donkey Kong. The classic tale of Italian vs Primate, and the shenanigans that ensue henceforth, involving barrels, sentient fireballs and lots of ladders, and for the first four levels of Donkey Kong (94'), you're lead to believe that this handheld replica is more of the same, until DK gets right back up when the game should be over and flees to the big city with Pauline in tow. A single cutscene shows you the bread and butter gameplay loop: bring the key to the door to advance. Thus does 94' reveal itself not as duplication, but as evolution.

The arcade philosophy is one that was largely bred by circumstance, of technological limits and economic goals: to make the most of what you have, you encourage replayability, skill, and mastery above all else. It's a philosophy considered niche by most but lives on in many forms, from character action games to the entirety of the shmup genre, but it has an unlikely relative in the puzzle genre. Puzzles may not have the replayability aspect due to the inherent oneness of the solution, but they emphasize similar values: skill and mastery. Learning Puyo chains in Puyo Puyo, or spacial awareness in Tetris, the idea of having a foundation that requires skill and knowledge for the player to fully expound upon. In this sense, the evolution of Arcade to Puzzle-Platformer in 94' is the best possible step Nintendo could have taken with the idea.

Making a handheld game inherently changes the game design philosophy you approach a project with, and this is where 94's strengths truly shine. The levels are all relatively bite-sized, with time limits rarely going over the three-minute mark, always focused on the main goal of bringing a comically-large key to the locked door in each level to progress, and are always clustered together in groups of 4 (3 regular levels and a fight against DK himself) before allowing you to save your game. Each cluster of levels is capped off with a cutscene that showcases a new mechanic that will be used in the next level cluster going forward, most of which lift directly from older Donkey Kong entries, from the hammers in the original arcade title, to the vine climbing mechanics of Junior (and even the appearance of the little rascal to annoy you from time to time). 94' is always introducing new mechanics, new level structures, new gimmicks to play around with and test your puzzle-solving abilities all the way until the very end, where it unfortunately falters by turning into a precision platformer gauntlet (not an inherently bad idea, Mario controls great and is about as nimble as he would be in 96's Super Mario 64, but it really downplays the strengths exemplified in the earlier worlds).

94' is a masterclass of handheld game design, a prime example of a pick up and play title that would inspire both future series such as the Mario vs Donkey Kong series (an obvious spiritual successor to 94'), as well as other puzzle platformers that would come down the line, and it's clear with titles like Donkey Kong 94' why Nintendo is considered one of the best when it comes to platformer game design.

[This review is sponsored in part by My Buddy Erick, who so generously gifted me my copy of Elden Ring]

FromSoft's latest dark fantasy dodge-roll extravaganza is a game I was perfectly content to let pass me by despite the insane hype built up by its memetically-long development cycle and the critical acclaim heaped onto it by its rabid fanbase. The Soulsborne series is something that I'm very aware of as an avid gaming enthusiast (it's kind of impossible to ignore the biggest action RPG craze of the past decade,) but it's a series that I, up until now, admittedly had zero interest in. I'm not one for the fantasy aesthetic or its vast amounts of masturbatory lore about the adventures of ancient knights named Big Shoe Lorentz et al, and the online circlejerk of hardcore Souls masochists who get their rocks off by being elitists online isn't my kind of scene. It wasn't until every single friend, mutual and countryman I knew seemed to be playing this damn thing that I eventually caved when I was generously offered a copy by a friend of mine who was similarly swept up by the Elden Ring cultural zeitgeist.

As my first Soulsborne experience, I was surprised by how many of the positive qualities in Elden Ring are in none of the popular conceptions perpetuated by the Soulsborne fanbase en masse. The often-lauded nightmarish difficulty isn't nearly as tough as gamerbros will lead you to believe, often being more of a test in patience and observation instead of any particularly taxing test of "Pure Gamer Skill" you'd see in a character action game (except for maybe Malenia). The story is relatively understated all things considered and the quote-unquote lore is mostly left to the player to piece together on their own instead of being forced down my throat via lengthy exposition, which is a far cry from the initial impressions I had set by the enthusiasts stripping these games down into 6 hour loredumps. It's honestly kind of refreshing! The exploration in Elden Ring is nothing short of magical in those first few hours; stepping into Limgrave, searching every nook and cranny for adventure and constantly being rewarded for doing so. I could see exactly how this series managed to get so popular, and Elden Ring certainly dug its claws deep into me with all the hours I sunk into this damn thing. The bases are loaded, which makes the surprise foul all the more disappointing.

Disappointment is often the brood of expectation, especially when you have such a rabidly devoted fanbase that would proclaim the release of Elden Ring equivalent to the Second Coming, so the shoes to fill were quite large (almost as large as the shoe of aforementioned legendary knight Big Shoe Lorentz, if you will), and for what it's worth, Elden Ring does a good job at tricking you into thinking it manages to fill them. The awe of these stunning landscapes and sprawling world do well to mask the inanity of it all, and it's a charade Elden Ring manages to keep going for an impressively long time, but once it starts to funnel you towards the finale, the jig is up. For a series hailed for its innovation in the action RPG genre, Elden Ring isn't really convincing me that FromSoft is doing anything truly innovative. It's very pretty to look at and well-executed mechanically and all that, but I struggle to see how you manage to maintain a fanbase as rabid as Souls fans with something like Elden Ring.

From the outside looking in, it feels like they've made this game at least four times now: fucked-up, decaying dark fantasy world where some Average Joe called something vaguely demeaning is beset to dodge-roll their way to the front doorstep of the setting's head honcho. It seems the well has run dry if the only difference I can gleam from Elden Ring is that our Average Joe now has a jump button and a bigger playground to explore, the triple A idea of relentless biggering being the final step FromSoft has taken into true mainstream appeal (even despite all the xenophobia peddled by western devs in their criticism towards Elden Ring's design philosophy like we're back in the 7th gen or something.) I'm not very partial to the open-world genre in general, these massive timesinks with tons of little repetitive checkmarks to fill-out a sprawling sandbox, and Elden Ring is no different in this regard, even if it manages to keep the fresh ideas coming for an admirably long time, which begs the question of what makes Elden Ring stand out from the crowd besides the big names behind it and its innate goodwill built up by a decade of prior entries. By the time I reached the Mountaintops of the Giants, I had already checked out, and very nearly dropped it when Elden Ring kept dragging its feet and setting up more hoops for me to jump through in an attempt to pad out its already ludicrous runtime.

So as my first Souls experience: It's fine. If you've already drank the Kool-Aid, you were never going to be anything but pleased with Elden Ring, but as a first-timer looking in: I'm not entirely sold on what Miyazaki is peddaling. I can only hope the other Soulsborne games do a better job at selling me on their core appeal.

Nekopara is a series of adult visual novels you've most likely heard of in passing from post-post-post-ironic weeaboos online who wear Ahegao hoodies in public and think being horny is a personality trait. It's the funny anime game about the catgirl cafe that's garnered a status comparable to something like Bad Rats: a gag gift best sent to your friends during a Steam sale for a quick laugh (which is how I obtained my copy back in high school), or something you play so your "hilarious" Steam status pops up on your friend's screens during their CS: GO matches. In honor of the holiday, I thought "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the porn game about cat girls and published a review on it online?", but while I slogged through one of the most joyless visual novels I've ever read, I came away with a lot to ruminate on betwixt the standard anime hijinks and incestuous little sister jokes.

Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.

The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").

What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.

It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.

Recommended by turdl3 as part of this list.

BABA IS YOU

Back when I was in high school, my campus offered a Computer Science course as an elective of sorts, and I remember sitting in that classroom with six other kids while our teacher explained the basics of programming.

"Think of programming like a logic puzzle. You have a set of rules you always have to abide by, and you need to figure out a solution to each problem by working within those rules."

Obviously, this is a very reductive way of approaching the subject, but I bring it up because I recognize that same programming mindset is at the core of Baba is You. The game's main mechanic of moving Nouns, Operators and Properties around to change the logic of the world is basically a programming language in and of itself. The internal syntax logic remains consistent, and each level in Baba is You is always centered around working within the logic of a level to achieve the same goal of making some variation of X IS WIN. It's just up to you to figure out how.

BABA IS MOVE AND OPEN

Despite that simple goal, Baba is You is a very difficult game in practice. Baba is You is always introducing a new Modifier or Property to experiment with well into the endgame, making sure that every area is constantly reinventing the wheel in a way that ensures that the player retains that sense of wonder the game held from minute one. But even with this unrelenting avalanche of ideas and mechanics, Baba is You remains accessible through its incredibly free-form approach to progress. The branching path level structure always gives the player options to progress, with completed levels unlocking other levels in an immediate radius instead of a linear fashion. The player is only asked to complete a relatively small fraction of an area to have it marked as "complete", meaning that even if you are truly stumped, you only need to complete the bare minimum to see the game through. The final level is even unlocked once you complete about third of the game, meaning that at any time, you can stop and clear the game if you have the smarts. Baba is You may be rigid in its puzzle structure and logic, but it's sense of progression is anything but.

BABA IS LOVE

Above all else, Baba is You is delightful. It's adorable aesthetic and endless innovation kept me going long after the ending was waiting for me, and even though the game could potentially be beaten after an hour or so, I put off that final level until the very end just to see what other tricks Baba is You had up its sleeve. Even in the final areas, puzzles were still wowing me with their creativity and putting a smile on my face even as I slammed my head against a wall for hours on end trying to figure out the solution. Baba is You is a truly one of the most creative puzzle games in recent memory, and its clear how much passion was put into its creation by the people behind it, and it's a game I highly recommend if you love a good brainteaser.

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... "

Recommended by STRM as part of this list.

Postal as a franchise has always been historically tied to transgression. The first Postal deconstructed the nature of the Shooter genre and its glorification of the one-man killing machine by framing it as a mass-shooting simulator, and its sequel was a meta-textual response to the very controversy the original Postal stirred up, as well as a bizarre time capsule of immediate post-9/11 Americana. The series has always prided itself on being counter-culture, against the grain, purposefully offensive in an attempt to rile-up their critics and moral guardians, but the thing about being counter-culture is that it's a constant countdown: culture is constantly evolving at rates that no one can really keep up with, and once you lose that pulse, you're out of touch, and the only thing you'll have left is the memories of when you used to rage against the machine.

Postal III is already well known for its abysmal reputation, but I posit that its critical reception wasn't the death knoll for the series' relevancy: it was its very conception. Even discounting the external factors that lead to Postal III's poor quality, such as Akella's numerous lawsuits, the 2008 Great Recession in Russia, and Running With Scissors' loss of control that would lead to the numerous delays and bugs, the very concept of a Postal game, a series made by 12 dudes in Arizona on the cheap for the purpose of pissing people off, being outsourced to the Russian equivalent of EA for a big multi-platform console release was a sign of the series' fading relevancy, and this corporate cynicism is apparent in how generic Postal III is. Trading in it's open-world first-person roots for a brown and grey third-person shooter with cover mechanics, escort missions and a surface-level Grindhouse aesthetic belie Postal III's corporate nature. It pretends to have the same juvenile, anti-authority attitude its predecessors did with its surface-level jabs at soccer moms and environmentalists, but its reliance on celebrity cameos and toilet humor can't even generate the same amount of outrage that the lowest of Postal 2's lows could, and Postal 2 contained multiple hate crimes. It's playing pretend-punk, trying to maintain its aggressive anti-authority edge but still trying to conform to what's popular at the time because you can't just let your publisher not make money on an investment.

Postal III was a modern-day Icarus that Running With Scissors never truly recovered from. Even when RWS took down Postal III and created an expansion to Postal 2 after 11 years that would retcon Postal III from existence in an act of goodwill, the death knell has already been rung: Postal's cultural legacy is dead in the water, and all that's left are cameos from right-wing chuds and an eternal encore of the good ol' days with Postal 4, the equivalent of a washed-up Hair Metal band playing their one famous single for a crowd of the geriatric. Postal III is worse than just being a bad game. It's a pathetic game.

Having a fucking morality system in a series that prided itself on its indifference to player violence. Christ.

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 T0M196 as part of this list.

[Apologies in advance for not playing the PS2 version like you requested, it didn't emulate well on my machine, but I heard the PSP port is pretty 1:1 all things considered.]

"The dreams I've abandoned couldn't have come true. I have other dreams I haven't given up on. They still shine bright. They still light my way."

Perpetual loser U-1 has it rough: the girl he likes won't give him the time of day, his bully is always taking opportunities to dunk on U-1 and remind him how worthless he is, and U-1's only friend through all of this is his faithful dog Puma. But all of this changes when U-1 discovers his status as the legendary Gitaroo Man, and is drawn into the interplanetary conflict between Planet Gitaroo and the Gravillian Empire, who's leader Zowie is vying for domination of the universe. Armed with the mysterious and powerful Gitaroo, U-1 has to learn to shed his cowardly ways and become the hero that will save the universe through the power of sick-ass guitar solos.

Throughout the game, each stage pits U-1 against a brand-new, colorful and charming foe utilizing some kind of new music genre to duel U-1 with. While each of these stages could stand out as the highlight of the game all on their own, I want to draw attention to Stage 6. Crash-landed on the shores of Planet Gitaroo, U-1 is sitting underneath the shade of a dying tree, guitar in hand as the gentle cackling of the campfire serves as accoutrement to the ebb and flow of the ocean's waves crashing against the shore. The world is bathed in the warm hue of the evening sun, sinking into the ocean and ushering in twilight. A girl in the spitting image of U-1's crush back on Earth walks up to U-1, and she sits next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder, few words spoken as U-1 serenades her with the gentle sounds of his guitar. It's the only stage in the game where U-1 isn't engaging in a duel, but rather playing his guitar for the sake of someone else, and the track that's playing in this moment, "The Legendary Theme", is such a beautiful and moving piece of music that it genuinely brought tears to my eyes. This moment, this lull between the wacky character designs, the fun and energetic music battles and off-the-wall plot, is such a memorable and poignant scene compared to what preceded it that it may seem out of place at first, until you reach the climax and realize how much Stage 6 embodies the core tenets of Gitaroo Man.

U-1 is a loser, a grade-A wimp who gets no respect from anyone and is always told by others how he'll never be anything but a grade-A wimp; but on Planet Gitaroo, where he's the Gitaroo Man, he's kicking ass and taking names. He's a hero to the people, an indomitable warrior of legend who will stop Zowie, and by the final stage, U-1 has learned to harness the power of the Gitaroo for the sake of love, gaining the self-confidence needed to save the universe. When he must return home, not as Gitaroo Man but as little ol' U-1, Stage 6 showed that U-1 never needed the power of the Gitaroo to be loved. He just needed to believe in himself and show the world not what Gitaroo Man could do, but what U-1 could do. It's that self-love and confidence that U-1 obtained back on Planet Gitaroo that turns out to be what made Gitaroo Man Gitaroo Man in the first place.

Even if Gitaroo Man isn't the most difficult or in-depth rhythm game out there, it's the greatest rhythm game of all time in my heart. Gitaroo Man is bursting at the seams with charm, overflowing with charisma and creative energy: From its wonderful character designs, to its charmingly goofy dub, to its absolutely phenomenal soundtrack full of heart and experimentation, Gitaroo Man has firmly cemented itself in my heart as an all-timer.

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.

Recommended by FernandTheFresh as part of this list.

[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]

An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?

This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.

Yeah, it's one of those.

While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).

Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.

...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.

Recommended by fallentianshi as part of this list.

Note: This is a review of the Japanese version using the fan-made English patch

"My body didn't come with wings, but my mind does... and it gave me the sky"

In the not-so-distant future, war is fought not on the behalf of nations, but on the payroll of corporations. Where the very concept of the state is a relic of the past, and the only boundaries that matter are the interests of CEOs. Where human greed has trapped the world in an endless Samsara, and the only way out is to ascend the flesh that so endlessly desires. In this strange world, pilots take flight in their steel coffins, embroiled in a war between titans that's about to reach its apex.

Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere is the biggest surprise I've been subject to in a long time. Before going into this, I had always thought the Ace Combat series was one of those boring realistic military simulation games for that hyper-specific niche of history buffs and WWII LARPers, but when I booted up Electrosphere, heard the sounds of Atmospheric DnB fill my ears and laid my eyes on the most Y2K-ass menu I've ever seen in my life, any preconceived notions I had were immediately shot down. The first-person diegetic UI quite literally sucked me right into the experience of Electrosphere and the massive branching story had me invested in the world, the characters, the stakes, everything right from the opening act, which is an incredibly strong start that most games wish they could achieve.

Elctrosphere's mission-based structure that marries arcade-era game design with a wildly engaging story creates an incredibly strong central gameplay loop, alternating between aerial combat missions and a plot dolled out through a wonderful multi-media combination of FMV, CGI and animation. Flying around in the air, learning to maneuver my jet in order to sweep across the land and shoot down enemy aircrafts is a thing of beauty that really gives Electrosphere a great learning curve and a drive for the player to do better, not for some score at the end, but for the sake of improvement itself, and it kept me hooked even when I would end up crashing into the side of a mountain at least once per mission.

Beyond my inability to figure out how to pilot a plane, Electrosphere is a phenomenal game and a real surprise to me. Mostly due to its botched localization in the states, Electrosphere is an oft-overlooked entry of the cyberpunk video game genre, when it really should be a landmark entry. With its engaging blend of gripping story and unique gameplay, Electrosphere was a genuine delight to play through and get enraptured in, and I'm really glad I gave this game a chance.

Recommended by ludzu as part of this list.

The funniest thing about Palette to me is that is shows that even as far back as the year 2000 (22 years ago, oh how time flies!), the biggest successes made in RPG Maker have basically never been RPGs. Not only did Palette sweep the awards at the Fourth ASCII Entertainment Software Contest, it managed to get a publishing deal and a full-blown remake for the Playstation, which means its rousing success despite a lack of any traditional gameplay probably set the Arthouse RPG Maker scene in stone for the rest of time. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. What is Palette, first and foremost?

Palette is, put simply, a game about memories. A psychiatrist being held at gunpoint has to walk a girl known as B.D. through her mind palace in order to help her piece together her fragmented psyche and unravel the mystery of her tragic past. This is not just simple set-dressing mind you, it's part and parcel of the whole experience: the visual and mechanical fundamentals of Palette are built directly on top of this foundation.

Visually, the rooms are framed as vignettes, snapshots of locations and events that you only see the relevant part of, people rendered as loose outlines only marked by their most prominent details, loosely connected by thin threads of logic and feeling, just like trying to recall a childhood memory. True to its name, the color palette is the star of the show here. The psychiatrist's office (the real world) is rendered in color, but the mindscape you explore is a stark black-and-white, with the important objects you need to interact with always rendered as a bright, contrasting red. As you step into memories, it seeps into either a warm sepia or a cool monochromatic blue to represent the tone of the memory and the events wherein. It's constantly shifting to set the mood with little effort for maximum results, pushing the engine to its limits as the game struggles to handle its artistic vision.

Mechanically, the gameplay centers around a Gauge on the right side of the screen. It's split into chunks, and moving to another room or clearing obstacles in your path consumes a chunk of the Gauge. You hit 0, and you're booted back to the psychiatrist's office to try again. You must find mementos scattered around your mind palace in order to increase the amount of Gauge you have to work with, as well as unveil more and more information about B.D. and her situation. In a great bit of story and gameplay integration, you start off very weak-willed, and it takes a while just to remember basic information, but as you gain more mementos, you're able to access more traumatic memories and power through the mental roadblocks preventing you from uncovering the truth of the situation. It's remarkably subtle storytelling that helps the mystery naturally build up towards its climax.

Speaking of, the mystery at the core of Palette is an intriguing one, constantly presenting questions and drip-feeding you information at the perfect rate, motivating you to continue playing and powering through admittedly tedious backtracking and pixel-hunt puzzles just to see how these pieces connect and intersect, but it kind of crashes into a cacophony of nonsense near the climax as twist upon twist is cascaded on top of each other like a 7-lane pileup, but that's not a negative, and I walked away both shocked and thoroughly satisfied with my time. If you don't mind jumping through a few technical hoops to get this game running, it's a landmark piece of RPG Maker history and a mystery story that's worth checking out.

Recommended by a real-life friend of mine, Brother_Milkshak as part of this list.

Out of all the retro gaming machines, the PC-98 has always been a bit of a curiosity to me. A machine used mostly by Japanese corporations for business-like affairs, whose direct legacy in gaming was almost entirely limited to its domestic market, obsessed over by only the most rabid and niche of retro enthusiasts (outside of Japan anyways.) Despite its limited hardware, being built with a primary focus on business and number-crunching, it was a massive hotbed for developers both big and small to pump out games of all types on the system, from college students making Shinto-inspired Arkanoid clones to big name companies making sci-fi adventure games. But the most prolific genres on the machine by far were the ones that didn't require a lot of real-time processing power: RPG's, Visual Novels, RTS's, the kind of games that could utilize the larger RAM and clock speeds of the PC-98 to their advantage, while masking its lacking hardware. However, just because these genres were easier to develop for the system didn't mean that other developers didn't try to flirt with the idea of high-octane action, which leads us to the game of the hour: Night Slave

Night Slave is about an all-female extraterritorial counter-terrorist squad of mecha pilots and their decisive, titular operation against the terrorist group known as "Slave Dog". Surprisingly enough given the aforementioned limitations and specs of the PC-98, Night Slave is a real-time 2D action-platformer-RPG-shoot-em-up-visual-novel extravaganza in the vein of something like Cybernator, chock-full of platforming, run n' gun action. Before each level, you choose from a selection of primary weapons, sub-weapons and superfluous accessories for your mechsuit and try to get a high score blasting enemies while collecting power-ups in a system similar to Gradius, where power-ups can be reserved for later use and the more power-ups you have, the better your reward will be when you activate it for use, ranging from a one-time partial health refill to permanent weapon and armor upgrades, capping off at a full-screen nuke. It's a surprisingly thoughtful mechanic all things considered, and it adds some complexity to what would be a rather standard 2D run and gun affair. After completing a level, the player is treated to visual novel-styled story sequences with some rather stunning pixel artwork, usually providing either exposition or something of the more... NSFW variety.

The other prominent thing about the PC-98 is that despite the variety of genres, the most common type of game in its vast library was that of the Eroge (lit. "erotic game"), which usually entailed nudity, sexual themes and lots of lovingly-rendered scenes of the proverbial Beast With Two Backs. Night Slave is no exception in this regard, with your reward for completing a stage usually being a scene of your all female crew engaging in "The Game of Flats," which is probably titillating if you're into that sorta thing, but if you aren't down to see some pixel art of Gals Being Pals, there's an option to turn that off on the title screen, turning Night Slave into a no-buts no-frills action game, but this also turns off the non-H scenes so if you wanted to know what was happening in the plot then tough shit I guess.

The unfortunate thing about Night Slave is that despite its impressive technical showing, fantastic artwork and somewhat thoughtful game design, it sort of sucks to play. Despite being quite impressive technically, Night Slave constantly struggles to render the action on screen at a decent rate, fluctuating between rough at the best of times and PowerPoint presentation at the worst of times; aiming your weapon is incredibly finicky and stiff, oftentimes requiring either a full-speed sprint or a complete halt to adjust your aim up or down; the mech controls can be really clunky and unresponsive at times, which can make both platforming and dodging more tedious that it has to be, and the game seems to demand a lot more than it can feasibly deliver, as the difficulty curve fluctuates between braindead easy due to AI and environmental oversights with enemies and bosses, and unfairly difficult when it expects the player to pull off shenanigans that the aforementioned controls and technical faults make harder than it needs to be. It's all very frustrating, and even considering Night Slave's short runtime, I simply could not be bothered to see it through to the end. The game was slowly wearing away at my patience the whole time and by the time I got a little over the half-way mark, I wasn't having a good time anymore, and I don't have the motivation to go back and finish it. There are a lot better run-n-guns out there, and way easier ways to get your rocks off.

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!