Stocking Stuffers: The Best Games I Can’t Get Anyone Else to Play
The Island of Misfit Games
Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas and all that crap. Listen, kid, I know you’re excited because you think I slid down this stupid skinny chimney with a Switch 2. Let me tell you something – the new Metroid? It ain’t shit. You wanna play a real Metroidvania? Huh? What’s Mario Kart? No, no, no. You’re too old now to fall for gimmicks and first party propaganda. Besides, a Switch 2 and both those games is like 800 bucks. So I read the list you sent me, and I thought, why not spend a tenth of that on some cool indie stuff that’s actually good? And here’s the best part: nobody you know will have ever heard of any of these, much less beat them before you. Isn’t that sick? Why are you crying now? C’mon, look, I even brought you a Steam Deck. Most of these can run on a Steam Deck. Oh, yeah? Big ugly Switch, huh? Does a Switch have dual trackpads? Can a Switch boot into Linux?
CHR$(143)
Few games are just as thoroughly confusing while you’re playing them as they are when you’re skimming through bizarre, uninformative screenshots trying to figure out what the game even actually entails. CHR$ flits through a handful of discrete possible genres in its introduction before it finally fully dawns on you what it is CHR$ is at its heart – a game about engineering mechanisms to solve problems. A little bit of Zachtronics fake-work simulator, a little bit of Factorio style systems engineering, a little bit of the old Powder Game pixel-physics simulator, and a hint of Boulderdash – but always something a tad more than the sum of its parts.
And then, CHR$ takes a hard left turn, and forces you to combine your structural design talents with coding, showing you the limits of engineering solutions, and the power of combining engineering with programming. The game makes you grapple with logic, power, timing, material constraints, instrument monitoring, and the ability to save your best, most efficient, most fool-proof and hardy designs for later use, then throwing a new problem at you in the next level that you’re barely equipped for. By the end, you’ll be designing and building a functional nuclear power plant, complete with waste disposal and automatic failsafes, and that’s just to get started on your mission. There’s never been a game quite like CHR$, there probably won’t be ever again, and if you enjoy tinkering or challenging puzzles, it behooves you to give it a shot.
Tactical Nexus
If you thought CHR$(143) was tough to parse, I give you Tower of the Sorcerer with scientific notation. Tactical Nexus is both the most complex puzzle game to ever exist, and the least approachable, because everything, every decision you make and optimization you find comes down to math, and often, staggeringly difficult math. The superficial simplicity of it all – you spend some amount of health to destroy enemies so you can get the stat and health items they’re blocking – belies the incredible horrors beneath. Tactical Nexus doesn’t just want you to solve an ordering puzzle, it wants you to solve it as a multi-dimensional differential, along a series of axes corresponding to various interlocking properties of your character, your available equipment, how many dirt blocks you’ve dug through already. And then, it goes meta.
Every time you reach a level’s exit with a high enough score threshold, you earn a token that can be used in every other level, or on a replay of that level, to begin with a variety of rewards, or saved to slingshot yourself into a far deeper exit, which gives you access not only to more floors and items, but multipliers to your final total… if you can survive that far. And that gives you even more valuable tokens, and then…
Tactical Nexus was for a long time burdened by the developer’s insane presumption that, since every DLC added more to this geometrically expansive power curve, their release should mean every already released part, base game included, increases in value, and priced the game accordingly, each part becoming more and more exorbitant as the months wore on. It was one of the most breathtaking schemes I’ve ever been witness to, and thankfully, their will eventually collapsed. Tactical Nexus, at least the first two chapters, is now free to play, a light taster that you could potentially play for thousands of hours on its own, before even dipping in to the even more batshit DLCs.
I almost feel bad mentioning it… if you start to obsess over Tactical Nexus, it might literally rob days, weeks of your life, and leave you with nothing but that ominous, chilling promise – Strongers are waiting.
Madcap Mosaic
I detest ‘deckbuilders.’ I think most of the games are terrible, most of the mechanics half-assed, and the format a siren song for developers who don’t have the faintest idea how they actually want to design and balance the elements that pop into their heads. Just like how ‘roguelite’ or ‘proc-gen’ is for world and level design. But even the worst format can be redeemed with enough thought. So it is that Madcap Mosaic, a deckbuilding roguelite, became one of my favorite games of 2022.
In Madcap, you conduct a series of battles via stepping along a grid, activating the tiles you walk across, revealing the tiles you move adjacent to, and thereby accumulating enough Defense to prevent damage that turn, and hopefully enough Attack on top of it to whittle at your enemy. Each victory allows you to visit a similarly obscured sprawl of new tile types, replacing the basic swords and shields with far more potentially powerful tiles. Conditional effects, stacking damage, extra movement, and an incredible variety of synergies to consider and experiment with. It’s got just enough random chance, just enough room for strategy, and just enough complexity to stay engaging through dozens of runs without feeling utterly miserable to parse your decisions. Forget Slay the Spire, push Into the Breach back into its spawn – give Madcap Mosaic a chance instead.
Full Quiet
Full Quiet is the best NES game ever made, full stop. Developed with the intentional and genuine constraint of being able to run on what is now truly archaic hardware, this homebrew game blows the pants off of just about anything made in the NES’s actual life cycle, and then it goes even further. The closest comparison I would make to Full Quiet would be the first La Mulana, and that’s a level of praise beyond what I would even deign to give to La Mulana 2.
A stunningly gorgeous, engrossing world, full of mystery, challenge, charm, and rewarding exploration, and all with a level of restraint that makes it clear how little the technical advancements of the past decades matter. You can keep your Pixar-quality light refraction and dynamically shrinking horse testicles – Pap is calling. Restore the Grid, and Ohnnah will come!
The Skautfold Pentalogy
Yeah, I’m putting five games together here, and yeah, you should play all five. Pugware’s Skautfold series had a very brief moment of visibility on the release of the second game, Usurper, a rough looking but thoroughly stylish take on the Castlevania side of the Metroidvania family tree. After that, sadly, it was a lonely vigil waiting for each successive game in the planned series, a series that repeatedly threatened to die on the vine and remain unfinished.
What makes the Skautfold games so interesting is that they aren’t just an iterative refinement of a single blueprint, or a spiraling chase of market trends and ‘game jam’ clique-baiting. Every game plays a bit different – a new perspective, new format, new location, almost a new genre, but set in the same bizarre alternate reality, one relatively short span of events, told from five successive viewpoints. Play them all, and if you can tolerate the rough edges, the overwrought writing, and the near absence of balance, you’ll probably find yourself favoring one, and championing it in bitter competition with the two or three other people who have played the series, who like a different title better. A niche within a niche, a schism to the atomic level, the anime cliché of an after-school club reduced to three members who don’t speak to each other.
By the way, my favorite game is Moonless Knight, the one set in turn-of-the-century Japan and featuring a 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand inspired ‘cuss out the enemies’ button.
Land of Towers
I know not everyone has a VR headset… but everyone should. It’s the future of gaming, and if you get motion sick or claustrophobia or the vapors or whatever when you use one, you’re incompatible with the future and should be culled. But until such time as I personally get to determine the genetic future of the human race, this will unfortunately be the most niche title on this list, simply because it is a VR exclusive.
And it has to be – you absolutely could make a flatscreen game where you pick up, rotate, and nail together boards to make crude window shutters, ladders, and bridges alone in the mountains of the Caucasus, but it could never reach the level of immersion this game manages in VR. The cold silence of a morning alone in a shack, the wind through the trees, the creaking wood, your night shattered by the roar of thunder and the distant beating of drums.
Land of Towers is not a horror game, but the final scene is one of the most chillingly effective moments in a videogame that, up to that point, is mostly about being a terrible handyman and enjoying some solitude. And for that final scene alone, I think it’s a must-play for anyone who has a headset or can get ahold of one.
Hero’s Spirit
Hero’s Spirit is the only game on this list I’ve written up on Substack, and that’s because it’s also the only game I’ve felt warranted a re-write [so far] since I’ve started writing. There’s so much to discover, learn, explore, and experiment with, and all in a game with no controls except tile based movement. “Beating” the game is to only scratch the surface, and a thorough playthrough will still leave questions that can only be answered by diving into increasingly difficult NG+ cycles.
You can, and probably should, just read my write-up from earlier this year to get a better sense of it, but most importantly, you should give it a shot yourself. Just… don’t give in to bloodlust immediately, okay? I don’t want you to start crying again when I explain what the carrot’s for.
Voidrun
Voidrun is a top-down shmup with a unique gimmick – your only form of attack, and your main form of defense, is your ability to dump a chain of bombs out of your craft, forming an line impassible to enemies or their shots. Those bombs won’t detonate, however, until you close a loop of them, destroying the ground they encircle and damaging anything else within. It’s a little bit like the arcade classic Qix applied to a more dynamic environment and diverse enemies.
It’s also one of the most unique and compelling callbacks to the era of arcade games and their 8 and 16-bit ports. Voidrun feels like it could have been at the front of the pack in that time, a merging of so many distinct ideas into a surprisingly cohesive whole, and then finished off with a pitch-perfect presentation. At least, once you get one of the palettes that doesn’t give you eye strain. And lock it to 60 FPS if you have a monitor with a higher refresh rate.
Loyalty and Blood: Viktor Origins
Where Voidrun feels like a long-lost paragon of the age of arcades and arcade ports, Viktor Origins feels like the same for pre-smart phone portable gaming. Though designed through and through for mouse and keyboard [you can play it with a controller, but probably shouldn’t] its bite-sized mission format recalls the pleasure of sneaking a few levels in on a bus or train ride, and the optional objectives and plentiful secrets give you ample excuse to replay them.
And replaying those levels is where the real joy of Viktor Origins is – the omni-directional blink-dash, a variety of guns to bring along, armor sets to complete, and satisfying boss fights make you feel like you’re constantly improving, refining your skills, tightening up your route. Getting a full clear on each level is almost like a micro-speedrun challenge, though you don’t generally have to approach perfection too closely to finish them up.
Viktor Origins is one of those games that I’ll remember every couple years and immediately reinstall and play through in its entirety, and every time I appreciate it a little more. Speaking of which, I’ll finish this article later, I need to go do something.
Smashing Spirits: Brazil’s First Boxer
This game would be very easy to dismiss on first glance, or even after playing for a few minutes, as a cheap, stiff platformer. It’s not until you start to get the hang of the combat that it all clicks into place – long before Doom: The Dark Ages proclaimed the birth of “stand and fight” combat, Smashing Spirits showed the way. Every fight is a face-to-face confrontation, with you bobbing and weaving through enemy attacks while laying into them with dozens of body shots that eventually wear them down and leave them broken. The more hits you land and attacks you dodge without getting hit, the stronger your own punches get, until you’re zipping in and ripping Spartan warriors apart with your hands faster than a Doom Slayer’s chainsaw.
This isn’t an altogether perfect game by any means – I still think the platforming and level design are barely tolerable, the basic enemies are all locked in place and only perform a single attack pattern when approached, the exploration and collectables are an afterthought. But the pace and impact of the combat shows how good melee combat could be, even in a 2D platformer. In fact, when I was writing up Idosra: The Electric Renaissance last week, I kept thinking to myself how much better the fighting in that could have been if it were a little bit more like Smashing Spirits, if you could punch and duck and weave and pummel the guards like you’re in the Matrix. And I don’t even have a big problem with the melee in Idosra.
Much like how Mordhau ruined first-person melee combat in other games forever, Smashing Spirits has been coming to mind every time I play yet another 2D platformer where your attacks are just arc shaped hit boxes that you wiggle into enemies. It should be a new paradigm, a model for fast, satisfying, and engaging punch-em-ups, and instead, the Brazilian brothers responsible went on to make a bunch of typing games and that really bad arena shooter I played during the last Next Fest.
Vision Soft Reset
The least spoiled about this one the better. A Metroidvania with a unique gimmick – rather than exploring an interconnected physical world, represented by a two dimensional map, you’re exploring a branching timeline. Zelda lore freaks eat your hearts out. As with Smashing Spirits, this is not a totally flawless game on its own, but the conceit and execution are so unique and interesting that it doesn’t really matter too much if the game fails to make the most of it, because no other game to my knowledge has even attempted to make any more of it.
Touhou Shoujo Tale of Beautiful Memories
Touhou Shoujo, aka Super Touhou RPG, is the first Touhou game I ever played. Hey, listen, I’m terrible at shmups and I don’t care for them. Anyway, despite it being an extremely referential fan game with dozens of characters you’re assumed to have some baseline knowledge of, it still holds up if you don’t. Wanna know why? Because it’s pretty much Super Mario RPG… except with even more of everything.
More party members, more abilities to learn, more secrets to find, more minigames to suck at, more action commands than you can shake a stick at with bad enough timing that your party wipes.
Despite a somewhat rough presentation and a slow start, there’s a depth to both the combat and the exploration that means you’re constantly finding new things, learning new nuances, and every single NPC has a unique dialogue for talking to them while standing on their head.
It’s genuinely charming, it’s genuinely challenging, and it’s genuinely fun to explore. After a few hours, it outgrows its obvious inspiration, and blossoms into a game with its own identity, a massive scope, and some real teeth. And some radically enlarged bust sizes. Why would you care? You know the canonical cup sizes of all the Touhous, you creep?
Seven: Enhanced Edition
A post-post-apocalyptic open-world cyberpunkfantasy isometric stealth game that sticks almost every one of those landings. Seven, now much harder to search for compared to when it was subtitled The Days Long Gone, is one of the best stealth games I’ve played, one of the best open-world games I’ve played, and one of the worst titled games I’ve seen. I don’t remember what Seven means in the context of the game, if it even has any real context. I know I shouldn’t talk, as someone who is physically pained by the need to give something a title, but c’mon. People are gonna think I’m talking about Se7en or something.
Anyway, Seven starts out pretty slow, but once you bust out of the little introductory camp after the tutorial and start exploring the rest of the world, it becomes clear you’re playing something special. It helps that much of the music will have a familiar twang to it, courtesy of Marcin Przybyłowicz, the composer for games including Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Too bad the DLC kind of sucks, but hey, it’s free anyway and you don’t have to do it.
Arthurian Legends
Forget all the hype about ‘boomer shooters,’ the genre equivalent of those cable channels that run ‘classic’ shows you can’t be convinced were ever aired. Wrap your meaty fists instead around some cold steel – Arthurian Legends is a boomer hack’n’slasher, plus the best Build engine game that never was, in spite of it not actually being on Build engine. Look, I’m going somewhere with this.
The weapons are a hoot, the game keeps a rapid pace and has excellent level design, and there’s just something incredible about shield bashing a guy into a trap or using a bare fist in your off-hand to just slug a guy in the jaw between attacks. The equipment durability is the first in a game like this to not get on my nerves, and feels more like a [fairly generous] ammo counter for powerful items. It’s also just immaculately stylized, if not a little tonally inconsistent, which is impressive, given that it’s not really on any of the true ‘boomer shooter’ engines, and seems to have been custom made to emulate just the good parts while incorporating new features that would have instead needed to be hacked in awkwardly. And that’s frankly even more impressive than just making this in GZDoom or whatever.
If you won’t do it for that, or for the secret levels with unique bosses, or the incredible intro text, or the Monty Python references, do it because it’s a Christmas game. Ho ho ho! Ancient Celtic Secret!
Helen’s Mysterious Castle
For a long time, this game would occasionally come up and pique my attention, then I’d look at the store page and go ‘oh, yeah, this is that RPG Maker game. Whatever.’ For one reason or another, I was finally convinced to shell out the ludicrous asking price of two dollars, and eventually, even play it.
Yes, it is an RPG Maker game. Yes, it’s a JRPG with a single character. Yes, it’s short. Yes, you absolutely must play it.
Part of what makes it special is the combat – like some party-based games, every action takes a certain amount of time, but since every encounter is a duel, you have to balance attacks with blocking, save casting for safe windows, and switch up your equipment to deal with new threats. The design is extremely tight, the fights consistently engaging, and your arsenal becomes a sort of party all of its own, each new weapon a potentially crucial component of your next build.
But it’s also just a very charming and focused game in general, with great writing, snappy pacing, and a complete absence of fluff or bloat. It doesn’t take nearly as long as games you’ll end up with a tenth of the fond memories of.
Helen’s Mysterious Castle was my favorite game of 2020, and is among the very small cohort of games which I consider to be ‘perfect,’ in the sense that there is nothing I can think of to add, remove, or alter about it to objectively improve it. If it cost ten times as much, I’d still declare it among the greatest bargains to be found on Steam.
That’s a wrap. There are plenty of other games I think are underrated, or don’t get their due, or are better than their popular reception would lead you to believe. But these are truly critically underplayed games, treasures lost in the shifting sands of Steam’s storefront, and finding them, playing them, and presenting them is a big part of why I made this page and why I started writing in the first place. If even one person gets tricked–I mean convinced– to try just one of these games, it will have made this whole year worth it for me. Enjoy the holidays, everyone.
Great Xmas article! Several of these games sound fascinating and truly unique. You've sold me on Skautfold; I am absolutely getting that bundle for 80% off. It seems perfectly up my alley for gameplay I'd enjoy and weird concepts I'd study.
A Zachtronics-style brain melter that combines Powder toy and Oxygen Not Included, a game comparable to La Mulana of all things, a deckbuilder that's better than Slay the Spire and Touhou Mario RPG?
At this point my backlog might as well be infinite.
Excellent article. You managed to make every game sound interesting in one or two paragraphs.