What game do you consider an unconventional masterpiece?

Outer Wilds is a masterpiece that by its very nature is difficult to share such that it will become a cultural phenomenon. It will likely forever remain a niche cult hit.

I have three favorite games, which I struggle to rank against one another. Two of them are The Witcher 3 (which is utterly uncontroversial) and Morrowind (which many people may disagree about, but nobody thinks I'm weird for liking).

The third is Lego Racers (1999, PC/N64/PS). It received mixed-to-positive reviews, and was completely forgotten by the broader gaming zeitgeist within a few years after release. I think it is utterly brilliant and the best take on kart racing I've ever played.

So the big thing mechanics-wise that separates Lego Racers from other games in the genre (that is to say, Mario Kart) is—no, it's nothing to do with the Legos, bear with me—is that powerups on the tracks are set. This set of three powerups are always in those spots, and always of those types. (Actually, there's a mechanic where if you're carrying one powerup and you drive through another, you'll swap them—so they're not always those types! But each one is always a specific type, easily distinguishable by color, and if it's not the set type, it's because some other racer changed it.) This means that the line you take through the course is driven by powerup choice, and you might reasonably vary it for tactical reasons; for example, if Captain Redbeard (who really likes cannonballing people) is right behind you, you might choose a blue shield powerup over other options.

As far as I can tell, no other game does this (though I certainly haven't attempted a comprehensive audit). Kart racers with powerups seem to invariably take the Mario Kart route of having them be randomized, which makes every powerup placement interchangeable and eliminates any strategy in powerup choice.

Now, the game isn't super well balanced or polished, and so overwhelmingly the best strategy is to exclusively go for green speed powerups and ignore the rest of the game mechanics (and the rest of the AI racers, who will immediately fall into irrelevance until you start lapping them). I do think it's fun, but to an extent you have to make your own fun by screwing around with the other racers; it's really easy if you focus on trying to beat it.

The Lego aesthetic is cute; the build-your-own-car schtick is neat for about three minutes, until you realize it does absolutely nothing and just drive Baron von Barron's car. It's definitely not a perfect game. I just wish it had made more of an impact on its genre.

The Return of the Obra Dinn
I don't think got enough attention. Papers Please was obviously well known and very well received, but Obra Dinn I thought was extremely tight and very satisfying to play. It feels like he got every detail of that game nailed down.

I'd throw a flawed masterpiece in for Noita, because it's got problems.
As someone with 400 hours in it, I still don't really feel like I know everything about that game because it is so densely packed with stuff.
But if we forget about the extreme barrier to entry for a moment, there are a lot of loose threads in the game because it was essentially four unassoicated developers working together for the first time and when the game released, all but one left the project, which left a lot of content hanging and a lot of weirdness which was never fixed.

Factorio, simply for the fact that it scratches a very particular itch in my brain like nothing else I've ever played or experienced. It's so powerful at what it does that I have to treat carefully, so that I don't get sucked in and lose a day. Even its development logs are a delight that is hard to describe if you aren't a programmer or engineer of some sort. The quality of their programming and design work is a thing of beauty in and of itself.

The World Ends with You (DS) ticks this box. It has two gigantic things going for it. The first is the music fits the vibe of the game perfectly. The second is that it is the only game that I know of that used the two screens on the DS the way that it did. In combat, you control two independent characters with a combo mechanic that bounces a damage multiplier between the two. It has a learning curve, but once it clicks it's incredible.

Morrowind - huge open world "do what you want, we won't guide you" hardcore RPG from times when Bethesda didn't make games to profit heavily but for hardcore players.

FTL - Faster than light - I didn't expect this game to be so good! I really didn't think much of it, but I dived in and spent too many hours playing it over and over again. Really great game!

Zachtronics games - If you like to think (hard), these are for you. Many different styles, all of them will get your brain going.

I’m going to continue singing the praises of Mosa Lina — it’s a small but infinitely replayable physics-based puzzle game with a super unique design philosophy. You’re given a select set of tools from a broader pool for each “run” and need to problem solve your way through a set of levels that aren’t designed with any particular tool in mind.

99% of the time, the set of levels is solvable with the tools you have — but it takes practice and in-the-moment ingenuity on the player’s part to discover workable solutions.

I’ve never played anything quite like it, and could quite easily imagine it spawning a genre in and of itself.

Gazillionaire, from 1994. Words cannot express how deeply addicted to that game I was as a 10 year old. My Dad and I would hotseat play until 11:30 PM, trying to quit starting at 7:30 saying 'just one more turn.'

It's in the niche I would call 'financial simulators,' like many of the future space trading games that would follow. But no other game that I've encountered has quite the same soul Gazillionaire had.

My favorite Steam review

Like if Primus made a venture capitalist simulator.

Papers Please is one truly unconventional game that I think is very well done. The clunky UI being something that actually enhances the game is genious. Brilliant game.

I'd second Obra Dinn as well. Very different detective style game that is aesthetically pleasing.

To me, an unconventional masterpiece isn’t necessarily a perfect game, but a game that knew what it was, executed that idea perfectly, and brought some new ideas to the table.

For me, Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor fits that description. I think it’s mostly forgotten now because on the surface, it’s a generic action game stapled to the LotR IP. However, I think the game has the best realization of the attack chain system WB was using at the time in the Batman games, Mad Max, etc., the world was fun to explore, upgrades were good, stealth was good, and the nemesis system was actually groundbreaking and it’s a shame we haven’t seen more systems like that, who’s goal is to make your personal experience entirely dynamic while upholding the quality of if a writer had just written a mini boss up in any other game.

The game was divisive on release, scoring anywhere from 6 to 10, and is almost the epitome of an 8/10 action game from the 2010-2015 era, but I think all of its systems working together made for an entirely unique game that we haven’t really seen since and it was just plain fun.

Nowadays it isn’t really mentioned unless threads go up that are basically “what’s a pretty good, but not perfect game you played 10 years ago that nobody remembers anymore”. I mean, I haven’t thought about the game in at least 8 years and here I am claiming this forgettable, generic on the surface game is an unconventional masterpiece. But I do truly think the systems running the game were pretty revolutionary and if Shadow of War had gone a different direction, we might still be talking about the series today.

Gotta be The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood for me. This is a really interesting one, because the amount of agency you have over the story, its structure and its themes and its ending is so dramatic that it's almost hard to believe that the game works, or coheres, as a piece of art. The game styles itself as a VN with tarot reading as the main mechanic, in a similar vein to, like, VA-11 Hall-A or Coffee Talk, these little job simulators where you make latte art and meet characters, learning their stories as they become regulars. Only here, instead of a barista, you're an exiled witch, and instead of foam ferns you're crafting major arcana for your deck. This might be your impression during the tutorial, but the game is kind of hiding its hand here (har har).

What will eventually become clear is that every reading you perform, every throwaway interpretation of a card you choose, has a direct and significant impact on the lives of the other characters and, as the main plot unfolds, your own story; decisions that you thought were of little consequence become unimaginably significant as the game unravels. On its own, this is a neat little trick -- what you thought was a VN was also a clever choice-based RPG! You thought that the art you were making was jut the tarot cards, but in reality you were writing your own narrative, setting up your own arcs and themes, for the art that is your version of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! But what propels the game to masterpiece status, for me, is that the game doesn't really want or expect you to intellectualize it in this way. It's a remarkably well written game, sentimental without being melodramatic; saturated with deep longing for a better, or at least different, world; one which might never come, or which you might make yourself. Choices are not merely consequential; they are also difficult, and meaningful, and complex, and worst of all muddy. When you draw a card with only negative interpretations, how can you look at the smiling face of the witch in front of you? How can you know which bad future they would prefer? Moreover, how will that decision affect you and your story down the line? And what were you thinking when you made that card, four hours ago? Hoping to use it against your enemies, perhaps? Well, look how that's turned out.

The complexity of these choices, the heavy feeling of responsibility attached to them, and the emotional investment the game managed to instill in me by, essentially, making my playthrough my own unique creative work combine to create an experience that doesn't feel at all video-gamey. I never felt the urge to submit my role-playing to the ruthless logic of a "right" answer or an "optimal" decision; instead, I had to sit there, with the game and the text that I had, indirectly, chosen, and just feel. That's something very special, I think.

Tribes 2
One of the hardest multiplayer FPS games I played. You have to combine flying through the air with the physics of shooting flying discs/rockets at each other, whilst making use of the terrain to build up your speed and maximizing the pros of your current combat class. It was really innovative for its time, unfortunately they messed up with future releases...

Maui Mallard
Strong nostalgic feelings towards this one, but it had well designed levels, a great soundtrack and overall very "atmospheric" fun game.

A Short Hike takes the Breath of the Wild kind of climbing-stamina gameplay loop and perfects it over a very short amount of time while filling out a beautiful little world and narrative around it. It's magnificently designed to point you at what it would like to do, and afterwards give you a beautiful sense of closure.

I'm a light gun game afficionado already, but I've dumped enough quarters into Point Blank that I'm convinced it's got some kinda sauce no one can replicate. It throws you into progressive Warioware minigames - shoot 10 ninjas; shoot an apple off someone's head with one bullet; shoot the matching picture; etc. But you can lose lives by fucking up, and every game pits you against the other player for score. It's hyper-competitive, but it's so blistering that you don't get caught up if you lose one. I don't know if anyone else has done this formula, but they got the pacing and manic feel just right. There's a faithful port in modern arcades using optical guns that nailed the pace; I'm glad to see the series kept alive.

Pokéclicker is a masterpiece of addiction. Don't play it.

Free and open source games aren't known for the highest quality but even so there are several popular ones that always get posted as being pretty good like OpenTTD, SuperTuxKart, and 0AD. But one of my favorite FOSS games never even gets a mention: OpenClonk.

Maybe it's the Worms-like graphics that have been done too often years ago, or the awkward controls, or the unforgiving map challenges. All I know is it is a game I keep going back to that always feels rewarding when completing a mission.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

It's an extremely fun first person action rpg. Even though the story is cliche, for its time, immersion factor was very high. It's the first game I've played that I truly felt like I was in that universe. There were various contributing factors to this. First person for starters was very unorthodox for an action rpg at the time, but it definitely contributed to immersion. It also didn't do that thing where in first person you look down and see nothing. You could actually see your body. The way you moved also made you feel you had weight and momentum. As a plus, the environment was responsive to some extent to the fights (which was very rare in those times). Not to mention its graphics were really good for its time, and the art direction definitely made the world feel more immersive.

Afaik the same group of devs also produced Dishonered later, which I also love, but I didn't get that feeling of immersion as much as I had in Dark Messiah.

I have no idea why it isn't more widely considered a masterpiece.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

I think this game is only a masterpiece if you've been following the universe for years. It has lots and lots of cool lore. There is no other game I've seen that added so much lore and layers to an existing universe. No other game that made it so much fun to theorize on the stuff they've added. No other game that added layers that made you feel as if you're diving into a deep and dark lake with no bottom.

Sadly it's held back by some other aspects. The open world system they developed for this game suffered from a flaw many open world games at the time had: it didn't have much meaningful gameplay content and variety to explore. I also think they could've done the combat a bit better.

Also, many fans criticized the game, in my opinion, very unfairly for not being enough like Dragon Age: Origins. This certainly soured the opinion of a wider audience about the game, because conservative* criticisms are given too much credit.

• By conservative I mean an approach that tends to resist any change in an established game/story/etc

Edit: Changed the wording a bit.

I think Human Resource Machine is fantastic, but I'm a huge programming nerd. I'm a programmer by profession, and my free time is often spent either writing scripts or side projects or thinking about programming, so a video game where I get to program stuff is pretty much tailor-made for me.

MaBoShi, without any hesitation.

It reviewed very well on release, and is still in the upper echelons of Wii game ratings on Metacritic today. But given its niche platform—WiiWare and DS download play—it wasn't widely experienced. But those that did spend time with it recognise its greatness. It was in the book "1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die", if that helps add weight.

It's an inventive action/skill game and technically 3-games-in-1: Circle, Square, & Bar. Circle = physics, Square = turn-based, Bar = Reaction. All three are super deep in terms of gameplay and scoring mechanisms, which is more impressive when you realise they're essentially one button games. On Wii there's an extra layer of game design because three separate games can be happening at once and can affect each other. At a glance the package can seem quite abstract, but only in the same way as, say, pinball. It's very much an arcade game; there's no story or scenario to be found. Circle game is quite possibly my favourite game of all time—masterpiece.

Of course WiiWare no longer exists, so it's only going to get less attention going forward. You'll need to play it through the wonders of emulation (Wii or DS). The DS ROM was extracted from the WiiWare game, so I play it on my iPhone which is just great.

Yes, I'm still playing it 16 years after release. 😎

Useful links:

• https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2013/06/29/maboshi/
• https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/04/18/per-game-skins-in-the-delta-classic-video-game-emulator-for-ios/

Oxygen Not Included: this is one of the most complex and rewarding simulations out there. It’s a super fun trial and error sandbox that continues to deliver interesting challenges long after most games have fully revealed their content. It’s almost like the Factorio of simulations, if that makes any sense.

Brogue Community Edition: This is a FOSS ASCII title that took the premise of the original Rogue and continues to develop it. The gameplay loop is tight, the ASCII graphics are extremely well done, and it’s a blast to share game seeds with friends to see who can get furthest in a given instance of the game. You can download the latest release from the Releases page here: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

The Tetris the Grand Master series (1999, 2001, 2005, arcade; now available on Switch and PS4/5) is the Dark Souls of Tetris you never knew it existed. I consider it a masterpiece for same reason Dark Souls is one: it's a game made to challenge the player and where growth of the player itself is expected, and the whole game is carved around this concept. If brevity is wit, then this game is at least on the level of Oscar Wilde.

But it's not difficulty for difficulty's sake either: there's was a deliberate reflexion on both adding elements to make Tetris harder but also giving the player the tools to overcome it. Again: it's more Dark Souls in this approach than the die-and-retry custom levels of Mario Maker.

There's a lot to explain if we were to cover all that was changed compared to previous version, but the skinny version is this:

Difficulty in Tetris is speed. There's an upper bound to speed in which the player cannot physically move the piece fast enough to survive.

So we give the player to three mechanical tools to survive : first is fast movement, second is allowing the piece to move a bit after it has landed, and third is easier rotation against obstacles.

With that you have unlocked a whole new game within the game. It's a game that have vastly less degrees of freedom than before, and where each decision can have dramatic consequence.
It's thrilling like a high speed chase, and requires both good reaction time and forethought. All the while having the exact same control and general logic than before. It's still Tetris! You are still stacking, and doing four lines at once is still valuable.

The sensation is a bit similar to discovering the inverted castle in Symphony of the Night. It's as if the game was telling you "you seem to handle OK. How about I increase the challenge with a twist?".

If you want learn more:

• I made a video about it
• the precursor to that video is a script that I posted here on Tildes

/u/kfwyre is probably tired of me repeating the same thing over and over on Tildes, but I don't care I love those game so much :D

Star Citizen.

I think it’s unconventional because it’s still in Alpha after 10 years or something. Has been given 100’s of millions of dollars in funding. And it’s still a broken mess.

But, the technology that runs the thing is a marvel. Many people think it’s a scam, but what they have built is literally miles better than any game ever made.

The whole persistent universe with no loading screens, you take a train out of the city to the space port, an elevator to your launch pad and then take off into space, all in one living breathing world with other players doing stuff, no loading screens. It’s all happening in real time and the resolution from room to ship to planet including atmosphere and clouds, is just mind blowing.

Recent updates have made combat and flight arguably worse, so I don’t know if I’ll ever even play it again, but the limitless potential of really living in accurate space on a big cool ship is inspiring. It’s a masterpiece that never was, for want of scope creep and bad execution of brilliant ideas and techniques

I think I'd call Exanima one of those.

It is an exceedingly difficult game to learn, and looks particularly silly when you're still getting over the learning curve. I could see most folks picking it up, thinking it was janky dogshit and dropping it, because it looks like weird marionettes flailing on each other and doesn't tell you a damn thing about what to do. It's that if you push past, meet it where it's at and get competent at the combat, I just don't know of a game that feels quite as dynamic and immersive.

It's all about realism by way of making everything stick to a physics system. When you make a character, it matters how tall you are and what your body shape is - a short, stout character cant move very far very quickly but just about can't be knocked over. They can swing a heavy weapon in a solid way and recover fast. A tall, wiry one can create/close distance incredibly well, but you can knock yourself over swinging around too wildly. They have a reach advantage but cant hit as hard, perhaps meaning you're better off with an edged weapon. Different weapons feel different to use, because some are heavier, longer, or have a different balance despite being the same type. The weight of armor impacts your speed and maneuverability, as well as the minute ways you move when you're fighting. This applies to enemies too, and you can use their gear as an advantage - a guy in heavy plate can't turn as fast, and takes longer to recover if they're knocked off balance. Monsters aren't human, they move very differently and often much faster, which is legit scary when you're used to slow zombies and human opponents.

The consequence of this approach is that you have to give it your full attention. It takes a lot of practice to survive, and then a lot more practice to look like you know what you're doing. But once you do, it is just the most satisfying thing. When you make just the right move, swing hard and clock a dude so hard he crumples and hits a wall, it's awesome. When you learn a difficult weapon, like a flail or a halberd, you can use physics to your advantage and swing folks around/trip them up. You can learn magic that blasts folks' feet out from under them, and place objects around to try to maximize how long they'll be stuck unable to fight you. In combat, you can do stuff like duck under a high attack and stab forward, or back step just out of reach then lunge. It's dynamic in a way I've yet to see another game accomplish, even something coming from Fromsoft or the like. It looks plain, but when you're in it it's demanding just enough of your attention that you don't really have the space for thinking about how stuff looks, you're too busy making sure you aren't getting clipped by a blade or getting backed into a corner.

The actual content is top notch too. The dungeon is large and complex, highly detailed, and you have to pay attention to know where you're going. Maps are made of paper. You can't see where you are on them, and you need to find something like a compass to know how you're oriented. You need to look closely at what's on tables and underneath things, move stuff around to find important or helpful stuff. Combat is tense and enemies often surprise you - the zombie might seem slow, but then they manage to rear back and swing wide and now you've got 1/3 of your bar going red because you stepped too soon. Later on, when you encounter monsters in places like a ruined town and the sewer system, they come out of nowhere and in groups. It's legit pretty scary when one gets close and grapples you. Big things, like an ogre or a demon, can knock you so hard you fly across a room, or perhaps across a table which sends dishware and cups and stuff flying.

I think what makes it a masterpiece is that it achieves making you feel like you're really in it, at least as best as that can happen considering you're pressing buttons and moving sticks. It's so completely dedicated to a certain kind of realism that the resulting experience outclasses a whole lot of stuff I've played. It's hard to recommend but with time and patience I think anyone who pushes through would feel similar about it.

Gotta be Kid Icarus Uprising. It's got a real weird control scheme that both filters players and makes it significantly harder to port, but it's also the cornerstone for why the game is so good. Fun, truly unique gameplay with a great story and music. It just also hurts some people's hands.

While still in development, voices of the void, is one of my top 3 games ever played. It is honestly one of the best atmospheric horror games, though don't get me wrong it's not pee your pants scary! Best part is it's super cheap (technically free) on ichio

You play as dr kel, recording singals from space, while maintaining the base and getting your weekly job done (there's an incentive to do your job but you're free to do anything)

This War of Mine does an excellent job making you feel civilian experience in a war zone. It is rightly hard to win and when you do it is very satisfying. And for a low budget game, I love the aesthetic

Seems like a lot of replies are just popular games. I'll take a swing.

Days Gone for PlayStation.

Reviewers trashed it, it had a super buggy launch, and the sequel was cancelled due to poor sales.

Once they fixed the bugs after about a month, it was a really incredible game. The quality of the writing is a bit inconsistent, but the moment to moment gameplay and atmosphere are unparalleled in many ways.

I'll never forget the first time I was playing, riding my motorcycle through the thick woods of the Pacific Northwest and taking in the sights while scrounging for supplies. Then, as soon as I realize my motorcycle is running out of gas, I notice the sun is almost down and I hear the sound of approaching zombies. That was the moment I fell in love with that game.

Chibi-Robo! Plug Into Adventure!: I have met a total of 1 other person who’s even heard of this game since 2005. We both agree it’s an overlooked masterpiece, like many games from the GameCube era. I haven’t played it for nearly 20 years but it sticks out prominently in my memory of that period.

You play as a small toy/cleaning robot brought home by a father in a struggling relationship to play with their oddball daughter. It offers a rewarding world to explore, which is just a regular house and backyard. Not to be cliché but I love the metroidvania aspects of exploration in worlds like these. You have to be at the right place at the right time with the right tool to advance the story. The story itself is a bit dramatic for a children’s game especially for that time, putting you in the middle of their dysfunction and discovering the ancient lore of their problems that have been swept under the rug. A father with honesty and money problems, a mother who can’t cope, and a possibly neurodivergent daughter is a cast I think ahead of its time. All of this baked in with a cute art style, tons of mini games and missions, with just the right amount of silliness. I think it’s a perfect game for kids.

Miasmata is the product of just two brothers IIRC, whose previous work was mostly just a handful of small games for Windows Mobile/PocketPC.

Misasmata is an ambitious game about finding a cure for a disease while exploring and mapping a big island, and there may or may not be a monster hunting you. Your character is diseased and weak, but highly organized, with the tidy little notebook and map making up most of the diagetic UI. You stumble around the gorgeous map with a weird physics driven movenment system that has you trudging up hills and trying to keep your balance half-falling back down.

It's more than a little obtuse and janky, being a mostly (entirely?) custom engine, but it's one of the more immersive games I've ever played, and the cartography mechanic is both satisfying and unlike anything I've seen in other games.

Candy box and candy box 2 made some great merging of different game styles just over ten years ago, they were a joy to explore. Original sites are down, but you can play them for free here: https://candybox2.wordpress.com/

My go to games as a kid were 2D isometric city builders and probably the pinnacle of beautiful graphics in that genre is Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Impressions Games.

The genre died around then and now has come back, spearheaded by indie developers. It’s kind of cool to see it back.

Alone in the Dark. Not the original, but the second game commercially released under that same exact name. Also not the ones that were released for PS2 and Wiii, but the one for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC specifically. More realistically just the PS3 version. No, not the game that came out this year with the same name.

It may just be the most technically ambitious video game ever made, which was also probably why it ended up being so terrible: it was released as a buggy mess. An early car chase sequence, for instance, would have been really epic, if only you could be reasonably expected to finish driving through it without the terrible car physics getting in the way and causing you to drop off out of the level geometry. Specifically, the last jump that is supposed to land you safely in Central Park is not scripted well enough to work, so you’ll have to keep playing it over and over again to get it to work properly and continue playing the game. And that’s ignoring the huge cornucopia of small bugs and irritants that built up from them throughout the game.

But when it does work, it’s pretty impressive. It’s got fairly realistic fire effects. If you run into a door, you can burn it down. You can pick up a fire extinguisher to bash in the door, or you can put out the fire when it’s done enough. You can waggle a joystick to waggle objects in your hand, say a burning chair. You can toss a bottle of alcohol and shoot it in midair to turn it into a firebomb. There’s no health meter; instead damage just shows up on your body. Your inventory system is the pockets in your jacket. Atari nee Infogrames really wanted this to be the showcase game for the decade.

That being said, these systems don’t necessarily make the game very fun. The inventory system was really restrictive, especially because you realistically only had two hands, so it was hard to juggle everything the way you needed to. The damage system would have been fine, except it’s all just internally a HP variable and that damage shows up as poorly added textures that made it look like you had just got some patches of gross skin stuck on your clothes, and healing kind of just looked like you were wiping them off. And of course the graphics looked pretty good for the time, but they have certainly not held up.

The thing is, though, that the game is actually pretty amazing in spite of all the negatives. A lot of those problems with the gameplay aren’t actually bugs; they’re just emergent properties of the systems they designed. There’s actually a lot of really good design in place in the game, too: there’s a lot of little puzzles you’ll come across that will need pretty inventive solutions that you need to figure out how to solve. And the music is fantastic; it’s got a reactive score by Olivier Derivier, and it features The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices.

But the bugs were too severe on launch and it killed the public’s interest in the game. The only version of the game you should try is the PS3 version, which got delayed and and as a result has a number of bug fixes that don’t seem to have ever been implemented in the PC or 360 versions of the game. The other releases are actually completely different games made by different teams. One of these days I need to try to play the Wii version; it’s supposedly terrible but I’m curious because it was made by Hydravision, the French developers who made the Obscure games.

Happy's Humble Burger Farm in my humble opinion is a good candidate for the best horror game ever made. It's janky and goofy and it's hard to explain without ruining the mood progression. I'll just say you play as a fast food chain employee with a very stressful job. (Or do you?)

Tunic

First, what I think holds it back. Tunic is a Souls-like puzzle game that presents itself like a 2.5D Zelda clone. You can play through the game from start to finish and only engage in it as that unique Souls-like with some mild puzzles and it would be...fine.

The combat is not very deep but it's varied enough to keep things interesting. The soundtrack is phenomenal and the art in the game's in-game manual (put a pin in that) is uncannily reminiscent of early 90's gaming in the best possible way. The difficulty curve is all over the place; you'll go forever without sweating only to hit moments requiring near perfect play in order to proceed. I'm talking "SL1 Dark Souls 3 run" difficult. It can be jarring and insanely frustrating in a way that I don't think would be fun for people who don't like bashing their head through a brick wall. On the bright side, there are (what can generously be called) "difficulty accessibility options" which allow you to turn off stamina or damage if things get too difficult. I like breaking through frustration, but I 100% recommend enabling those if it means someone can finish the game without souring on it. The story provided through the normal ending is interesting enough with some twists.

You can play the game like that and it's alright. A fun little Zelda-clone Souls-like with some great atmosphere, but not much to write home about otherwise. I expect a lot of people either stoped halfway or beat the game like this and called it a day or watched trailers and think it's just not for them.

But that's only half of what Tunic is.

I called it a Zelda-clone before because if you only play it liit'shat, that's all it really is. A Souls-like with a Zelda aesthetic. When you take the full picture though, it's a very loving homage to 90's era Zelda. It's also not primarily a Souls-like; it's a Witness-like.

Tunic's greatness, what shoots it up into the highest tiers of the gaming echelon imho, is it's puzzles. Like The Witness and Outer Wilds, Tunic hides an incredible amount of secrets in plain sight, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to follow until you reach a point where the veil comes off and the things you learn completely recontextualize the game you've been playing this whole time. Very few games are able to induce this type of "Holy shit" moment as effectively (honestly, only The Witness and Outer Wilds compare imho).

The big gimmick with Tunic is that there is an in-game manual reminiscent of old school manuals that came with games back in the day. The manual explains everything you need to know about the game: mechanics, lore, hints and tips, maps of each area. There are even hand-written notes scrawled in pen throughout as if from the previous owner of the game's physical media. The catch is that everything in the manual and in the game is made in a (totally decipherable) made-up language. The experience has been described like buying a used game at a garage sale only to find out when you got home that it's in Japanese.

As you play, you find more missing pages of the manual which reveal more information, mostly through context (since you can't read the language). It's very effective and there are multiple layers of puzzles (including a whole ARG, but I have mixed opinions of ARGs in general so I won't go into that). Finding every page of the manual will require, among other things, solving one of the most intricate and satisfying puzzles I've ever come across in gaming: The Holy Cross and The Mountain Door. Of course, finding the full manual unlocks the true ending which, along with translating some of the lore, again recontextualizes the game.

Altogether, it is a damn impressive achievement of a game especially considering that it was the work of a single dev. I highly, highly recommend anyone with an interest in puzzle games or knowledge-based games to give it a try.

TL;DR: Tunic is like an onion. It has layers. Unfortunately, the outer layer undersells how amazing the lower layers are.

I recently completed Hypnospace Outlaw and I loved that game. When I first heard of it as one of the detective games like Obra Dinn and stuff where you have to trawl through data to progress in the case.

What I didn't expect is that the game is a heartfelt love letter to the Geocities-era internet.

Everhood. The shorthand explanation is Undertale if it was a rhythm game instead of a bullet hell, and it's got a truly excellent soundtrack to make each fight enjoyable at any difficulty level. Looking back at the Steam store page I see it broke the 10,000 review mark, so it's not unknown, but it does have an Overwhelmingly Positive rating at 10,000 reviews, which I think supports the "masterpiece" bit of my claim. It's absolutely worth checking out. The soundtrack is here if you want to hear what you're getting into before you play.