Lurker > Paratroopa1

I have archived this now, but I'm going to save it one last time just in case there's anyone I still want to show it to that I can't think of right now. I don't think so though; I think this has run its course

Again, thanks to everyone for reading this list and enjoying it, I've gotten a lot of really nice comments about it. I might do another sometime because writing about my favorite hobby is fun

wow, Hypnospace Outlaw sure does end really abruptly and in a bummer way

PumpkinCoach posted...

additional note: couldn't admit it at the time, but what really made me feel like a rube was not the mouse shake thing, but that the pizza song got stuck in my head and i ended up eating more pizza than normal.

also, i was just about to bump this! not in the headspace for it rn but i will get back to this soon.

god the soundtrack in hypnospace outlaw is really special, between the oddly catchy MIDI loops and the glorious pastiches of the kinds of bands popular at the time, whether it's a pitch-perfect parody of Linkin Park on a teenager's edgy website or a 7-minute long prog rock anthem about a man shaving his face

I'm playing Hypnospace Outlaw on this topic's recommendation now I'm really enjoying it. It's just extremely fun to flip through all the pages of this ridiculous parody of 1999 internet and see all of the many different cliches they make fun of. It's so on point.

Just bumping this for now still need to archive it

That is much easier, true

I mean more of a problem of like, oh no, this is a lot of copying and pasting I need to do

I guess I'll do it later while watching some youtube videos or something

Also now I'm realizing that I probably need to save the writeups on this list and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do that. hmm

Haha, thanks! I think some people I talked to were surprised that I was able to commit to writing about 100 games I liked in just this decade, but surprisingly enough, to me most of all, I'm kinda enthusiastic about a lot of different games and all the little things in them, so it wasn't too hard to run the list up to 100.

Having now played Obra Dinn a bit (it's really good) and A Short Hike (short, but intensely wholesome and sweet) I'm only regretting that I wasn't able to play MORE games this decade, like, now I can get around to Mario Odyssey, and AI Somnium Files I still really want to play, and ugggh too many good games

I think it would be fun to do a list like this for my all-time favorite games, but I'm not sure what to do now that I've exhausted my talking points for all the 2010's games. Maybe I just need to write like, "top 100 games from 1980-2009" (I don't think any of my favorites predate 1980)

Also true but there's one more example I think, it's just slipping my mind. Maybe I WAS thinking of codenames tbh

Fastbreak posted...

Honorable mention codenames *nods*

Loved the necro dancer write up

Codenames goes into my "it's a board game, so I'm not including it here" category. There was at least one other thing like that that was a board game that I played a lot in video game/digital format but I can't remember what it was at the moment, but I just decided not to include board games

Playing codenames online is very fun though

Naye745 posted...

i'll get around to necrodancing my heart away someday

...someday

It's a good game! Although as a rhythm game it's quite simple, but I still think the flow feels very good even if the rhythm pattern is as basic as possible

Whew! I guess that wraps it up. I expected that whole project to be a lot shorter, but I ended up really getting into it when I talked about my biggest faves, and finding the words to write about some of my most sentimental favorites was tough, but it was a good exercise. Thanks for reading, I really appreciate the engagement and kind comments - like I said, I mostly did this list for myself, because I feel kinda compelled to make lists and write about them, but it's nice to know that others take interest in this sort of thing. I figured this list might be unique enough to be worth reading, even if it's just one guy's opinion on some games that he likes.

I guess that's it. Not too much else to add. I'll probably do this again in 10 years so see you then. Until then, I guess I need to find some other list project to keep me occupied. Getting this one off my chest was a huge relief and I'm so glad I was able to do it.

List recap:

1. Crypt of the NecroDancer
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
3. Undertale
4. The Witness
5. SpyParty
6. CrossCode
7. Mega Man 10
8. Darkest Dungeon
9. FTL: Faster Than Light
10. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
11. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
12. Night in the Woods
13. Rhythm Heaven Fever
14. Slay The Spire
15. Baba Is You
16. Virtue's Last Reward
17. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
18. Super Mario Maker
19. Jackbox Party Packs 1-6
20. Cadence of Hyrule
21. Portal 2
22. Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
23. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
24. Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - Prosecutor's Path
25. Mass Effect 2
26. Sid Meier's Civilization V
27. Animal Crossing: New Leaf
28. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
29. Freedom Planet
30. Cuphead
31. Elsinore
32. Celeste
33. Life Is Strange
34. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
35. Puzzle & Dragons
36. Grim Dawn
37. WarioWare D.I.Y.
38. Ultimate Chicken Horse
39. Lovers In a Dangerous Spacetime
40. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
41. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
42. Dead Cells
43. Shovel Knight
44. The Fool And His Money
45. Mega Man Unlimited
46. Pikmin 3
47. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
48. Kid Icarus: Uprising
49. Into The Breach
50. A Hat In Time
51. Catherine
52. Kero Blaster
53. Divinity: Original Sin
54. Bastion
55. Another Metroid 2 Remake
56. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
57. Armello
58. The Stanley Parable
59. Mario Tennis Aces
60. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
61. Monolith
62. Fire Emblem: Awakening
63. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
64. Yoku's Island Express
65. Super Mario 3D World
66. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
67. Downwell
68. Her Story
69. Xenoblade Chronicles
70. StreetPass Mii Plaza
71. Crawl
72. Rock Band 3
73. Starbound
74. Terraria
75. Untitled Goose Game
76. 20XX
77. Super Mario 3D Land
78. OneShot
79. Gone Home
80. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
81. Game & Wario
82. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
83. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
84. VVVVVV
85. Pokemon Sun/Moon
86. Zero Time Dilemma
87. Tricky Towers
88. Hammerwatch
89. Beat Saber
90. Firewatch
91. Papers, Please
92. Torchlight II
93. Overcooked!
94. TIS-100
95. The Binding of Isaac
96. Pushmo
97. SpeedRunners
98. Last Window: The Secret of Cape West
99. 868-HACK
100. Caves of Qud
(Games that I forgot to include: Kirby's Epic Yarn, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors)

Sometime probably in February of 2015, there was a topic of discussion that started happening on the game's forum about whether or not to remove the Shrine of Rhythm from the game. This was a controversial 'upgrade' that could be found randomly in dungeons that removed every eighth beat from the game, forcing the player to pause, and if they moved on that beat or missed any other beat in the song they would instantly die. But in return, they would get a gold multiplier, so the shrine was required for maximizing a score run. At first I hated this shrine, but assuming that I would simply have to get used to it, I started taking it, and I started learning how to play this game with as much discipline as I could muster. Eventually, I mastered it, and I was able to play runs with shrine of rhythm without dying very often at all. But, naturally, my original reasons for hating the Shrine of Rhythm really were correct, and it was discussed what should be done with it. Even knowing that doing away with it was probably the right thing, I made a fairly impassioned devil's advocate defense in favor of it, because learning how to master it had improved my experience with the game quite a bit. It was ultimately completely reworked; however, my involvement in this discussion and my enthusiasm for making suggestions about the game must have caught the dev team's attention, because I was invited on for the beta test of the final release.

I was under orders not to talk about it at the time, which killed me, since I so badly wanted to tell Dels that I had access to zone 4 and the final build of the game before everyone else, but I had to wait and play coy like I wasn't doing that. It was one hell of a privilege to be involved though; a couple of the bugfixes/changes I suggested made it into the final game, and it was just fun as hell to get to see the final parts of the game before everyone else, and see them develop. Around this time I got more involved with the community, along with a lot of its big players at the time who are mostly still around today.

Ever since then I've been at least semi-active in the community and I've done a lot of racing over the years, and eventually got... sorta good, not really great, but I've had a few decent wins to my name, and I eventually won an event as part of a team and even made some money as a runner-up one time (CONDOR for its first few years was quite flush with prize money, as the devs donated it to us to help grow the community - that was super nice of them). Between 25 dollars here, 33 dollars in Cadence of Hyrule, and 20 dollars in Pokemon Puzzle Challenge, my official gaming earnings comes to 78 dollars! I felt like bragging about that. I'm more proud of just having been here at the start of this community, though - I was running this game even before Spootybiscuit, who would eventually go on to become the most talented player of this game.

I watched along with the rest of the Necrodancer discord as Spooty accomplished beating the game with the hardest character, Coda, at AGDQ 2016 - most of us weren't sure he could even pull it off, and it stands to me as one of the most impressive feats anyone has ever accomplished in a GDQ run. This led to a race of Necrodancer happening between Spooty and Mudjoe2 (another top runner) at SGDQ 2016, and that was what led me to finally make the pilgrimage there. There were about 10-11 of us at that event from the Necrodancer community, and meeting them was like meeting old friends. We then proceeded to spend the entire week playing Ultimate Chicken Horse (see entry #38). This was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. It's staggering to think that I've made actual real life friends playing this game.

There was a lot of hype when this game had its DLC come out, and then again when Cadence of Hyrule was released, and that's kept the community pretty active. I've kind of taken a step back from it now as I feel like I've done about all I can do with this game - but CONDOR season 9 is starting up soon, so back I go getting dragged into this yet again, starting the 20's off right with more Necrodancer. This game's pretty much a core part of my identity at this point, really. I was lucky to pick it up when I did - best decision I ever made. This game didn't have to be as good as it was, but everything just fits so perfectly. Addictive gameplay, polished visuals, creative monsters and items, and the music - jeez, I didn't talk about the music much, but this game could have sucked if not for a brilliant soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky. I wasn't really the hugest fan of his prior work in Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy but the evolution of his style was really impressive in this game, and he stepped up and delivered a soundtrack that was thoughtfully composed to match the style of this game.

All that, though, and it's probably the fact that I just got so deep into the community and speedrunning the game and all that that it's really a slam dunk for my game of the decade. I got a little burnt out on this game but I think I'll pretty much always come back to it; I never really get tired of it. It's pretty much perfectly suited to my skills and my tastes and I have about as much history with it as I'll ever have with any other game (despite it only being the game I logged the 2nd most playtime with this decade - Slay the Spire is a few hundred hours ahead somehow).

That was a bit of a ramble. I knew that this would be the hardest write-up to do and it's probably the messiest but that seems appropriate enough. There's so much I could go on about in the design of this game or anecdotes about my history with it that I wouldn't be able to shut up for a while but I think that covers it. It's the most transformative gaming experience of the decade for me and one of my favorites all time.

#1





Years of release: 2014-2015 (PC early access), 2015 (PC), 2016 (PS4/Vita/iOS), 2017 (XB1), 2018 (Switch), 2017 (Amplified DLC)
Beaten?: haha

Hi, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Paratroopa and I am mostly known for playing Crypt of the NecroDancer. My name, or at least my online handle, is listed in the credits of this game as a beta tester. I wound up in this situation by making the best impulse purchase I've ever made in my entire life.

Most of the games on my list I either heard of because of their general prestige, or otherwise through word of mouth from someone I know. Breath of the Wild is a goddamn Zelda game, for instance. Dels has the impressive distinction of having being the one to introduce me to my #3, #4, #5, AND #6 games on this list (good job Dels). FTL and Darkest Dungeon were known to me because they had a lot of good press among indie games. The list goes on. Every game was either recommended or at least suggested by a friend, or had come out to rave reviews that couldn't be ignored.

There is one game on this list. One. ONLY ONE. That I purchased completely on a whim because I saw it on the Steam store, with no recommendations from any friends, without having heard a single peep of hype from anywhere on the internet, only having seen the store page and the trailer. It's this one. It's Crypt of the NecroDancer.

I bought it in early December 2014, because Steam recommended it to me (good job Steam), and it was a little bit on sale because it was in early access, and I was like, hey, why not, I'll take a chance. It's a roguelike, love those, and it's a rhythm game, love those too, seems like a good concept, game looks fun, let's give it a chance, maybe it'll be good. I then basically fell down a randomly-generated rabbit hole for the next six months.

Crypt of the NecroDancer is, indeed, a rhythm roguelike. You're in a dungeon, you can move in four directions on the grid, and every step you take has to be on the beat of the music. Going in a direction attacks an enemy if one is in your range, otherwise you move. Enemies will try to attack you immediately after you move. Weapons, armor, and various items increase your capabilities. The dungeons are randomized every time, split into themed zones, each with their own unique set of enemies. You have only one life, and if you die, you have to start over. That's about all there is to it! The rhythm element is a brilliant addition, as not only is it fun to tap along to the beat of the song, but it also forces the pace of the game, requiring you to make a decision every beat of the music of what you want to do. The game didn't originally start as a rhythm game, but rather as just a game where you had a time limit to move - but the designer, Ryan Clark, eventually realized it played a lot like a rhythm game so that became his concept. And now here we are.

According to my achievement stats, I beat zone 1 on 12/3/14, and zone 3 on 12/10/14 - there were only three zones at the time. I beat All Zones mode for the first time ten days later, on 12/20/14. I'm kind of surprised it took even that long, despite the fact that the first all zones clear is a pretty big accomplishment - I remember playing this game a lot the first time I picked it up. I was instantly hooked. The gameplay mechanics are fun and addictive - every time I died, starting over with a new dungeon to see what I could do this time was never disheartening and always exciting. I wanted to keep on going, unlocking every item and just figuring out how everything worked. Victories were always rewarding, and deaths always felt fair and never like a frustrating setback.

Pretty soon Dels and I started playing daily challenges, in which you play a seeded dungeon every day and compete with every other player to try to set the highest score on a single attempt. We got pretty good at it, and I know we both set some pretty good scores back in those days. For a while doing the daily challenge was kind of a ritual that we'd do. I was interested in challenging myself further, though, so I went looking at Speedrunslive to see if anyone was racing this - they were. Two racers named Rat and DJC. I watched them play for a while and really wasn't sure that I would be able to compete, but they were enthusiastic about inviting me in and told me to get involved in CONDOR, or the Crypt of the Necrodancer Online Racing... league. I did.

I sucked, at first, but this was yet another leap of faith that would pay dividends. Racing this game is extremely fun; playing this game fast really amplifies the difficulty of every little choice you have to make, forcing you to forgo more items and take bigger risks as you wander into increasingly crowded rooms, spending as little time fighting as you get to the exit. We used to do these unseeded, but now we do them seeded; both players play the same random dungeon, and each player competes to complete it the fastest. This has greatly improved racing and made it really interesting to see how different players approach the same seed. And while there are some items that are better, stronger, or faster than others, it never feels like a run of this game is "good" or "bad," merely "different" - you're not pulling the slot machine every time hoping for the one magical run, but rather, every run simply offers different options and challenges. So, I got more into speedrunning this game as well as scorerunning.

I continued to play through the early access period in early 2015. This was back at a time when early access was still kind of a dirty word - I think it still is, but at the time 'early access' really felt synanimous with unfinished games and doomed projects that never seemed like they would ever see the light of day. Necrodancer changed my mind on this. I'm so glad I got to see this game develop during early access - every week brought new changes, added items and content, and it was always exciting to see a new patch come out that would add new stuff to the game. I only wish I had gotten into it earlier! The early access phase didn't take too long, and the devs pushed content out on a tight schedule and had a very clear deadline in mind for when they wanted to release the full game. And, impressively, Ryan Clark really listened to players' input on what should be changed in the game - a ton of player suggestions got directly implemented into the game, almost always for the better. The community in early access was really dedicated to playing and mastering the game and coming up with suggestions to make it better, and I think the interaction between players and devs here really improved the game.

I'm also reminded of how I said I loved beautiful outdoors environments in Firewatch and The Witness, and that's probably the biggest thing that keeps me in this game. I never want to leave. I think Breath of the Wild actually helps cure my seasonal depression a little bit; I'd really like to be outside and hiking around right now, but when I'm too cold and sad to do that, BotW is particularly soothing; the world is just so goddamn beautiful. I'd snap my fingers and transport myself to this world and live there forever if I could, even accepting the lack of modern convenience, video games, and not having Ganon trying to destroy the world. Uggggh I just wanna live in this world so damn badly. It's outrageously pleasant and idyllic and doing anything in it is enjoyable, and while it's not a replacement for real life, it does kind of beat it in some ways, because in real life I can't climb on and jump off of steep cliffs without consequence and I don't have a magic parachute that I can use to glide over valleys.

The gameplay is also quite an exciting evolution over previous Zelda games, I think. I've always loved exploring Zelda's worlds to find hidden secrets and boy, does BotW have those! You don't have to search the world for everything - the game is surprisingly short, actually, if you just get straight to the point - but if you do you can hardly walk five feet without stumbling over something of interest, and just about nearly inch of the game is worth exploring for some reason or another - and there's a lot of game to cover. So Zelda exploration, check. What about dungeons? I feel like a lot of people are kind of turned off by the way BotW handles these, but I'm not. I've never been that in love with the standard style of Zelda dungeon in use since LttP, anyway; the puzzles tend to be far too tame and the dungeon layouts too linear and easy to figure out (some Zeldas are better than others - LA, MM, and ALBW all do pretty well in their own ways), and I'm just not really that sad to miss them. BotW went for what I think is a much more natural and interesting approach for its main dungeons, throwing out the idea of series of rooms and having just these big mechanical beasts that have a series of puzzles inside them to work out - I spent a lot more time figuring these out than most Zelda dungeons, honestly, and figuring out how the spaces worked when you rotated them around was a real joy. The shrines are pretty decent, too, I really like how a lot of them can be solved through clever uses of the game's awesome magnesis and stasis tools - this game has a lot of uses for them that aren't always entirely intended but can be used anyway. Again, the puzzle-solving aspects of this game feel very emergent, where different elements of the game interact in unexpected ways and puzzles don't always need to be solved in the most obvious way. My only complaint is that the shrines can get a little repetitive and the way they all look the same makes them feel very... well, samey. But it's a minor complaint, I don't expect them to all look unique; it'd just be nice if they changed up the color palette sometimes, I guess.

Combat's great too! Look, I know that people are really bothered by the weapon durability system, and I get it - it's just a generally bad feeling to have weapons break on you and to always be worrying about managing your inventory and saving your best weapons for later. This bugged me at first, but then I just... let go. I embraced the zen art of just using my weapons as I felt appropriate, letting them break once they had served their purpose, then picking up some new weapon to bash a lizalfos over the head with. I found a real joy in always needing to explore to find new weapons and being able to just pick up any old crap off the ground and use it in a pinch. Eventually the whole weapon durability thing started to feel like a plus - I think the game would be stale if you could just find the most awesome weapons and keep them forever and never need to find new ones. The fact that they break means strong weapons always remain rewarding to find, and I like that. I don't mind that this game has an uneven character progression or anything like that, I think it suits the game just fine. You can really sort of beat this game as fast or as slow as you want, and that's great. This game's even kind of difficult if you don't get yourself fully geared up - for a long time I wasn't able to find the armor upgrades I needed and I was taking a lot of damage and had to just eat food to get through fights, but as a result I learned to get better at this almost Dark Souls-like combat system - I almost started to get good at it, I daresay. I really suck at this type of game, but regardless, combat always felt intuitive and exciting.

I haven't actually beaten this game yet. I've done most of the major quests of this game, and I watched my mom play the final area and boss, so I know what's there and I haven't felt a need to tackle it yet. I've just wanted to try to complete as many sidequests and find as many things as I can before I complete the game, because... I don't want it to be over, I guess. I've spent a long time playing now and I just kinda don't want to go to the end because I'm not done fucking around with everything else. Of course, Breath of the Wild 2 is coming soon, so I guess it's time I probably finally got around to wrapping this up. But uh, wow, I could probably think of more topics to cover about this game but... yeah I think I got most of it. It's just kind of a perfect video game? Yeah. Pretty much a perfect video game.

I'm just fucking with you all though. The real reason I love this game so much is that I get to dress Link up in a cute girl's outfit and then go hang out with very attractive bird and fish people. If it wasn't enough to already be a perfect video game, damn. Kass is my new husband now. It's like they created him for me specifically. It's like Nintendo knew that my specific tastes are beautiful video games with lots of exploration + hot bird people.

If they knew that they made this game for me, they'd probably be really mad that my heart belongs to one other game in particular. My pulsing, rhythmically beating heart.

#2





Years of release: 2017 (Wii U/Switch)
Beaten?: Surprisingly, no, but I'll get to that

Including this game at the top of my game of the decade list is probably the most cliche thing I could have done, but look. It's cliche for a reason. This game is going to win the GotD2 contest for a reason; gaming publications are naming this their game of the decade for a reason. My opinions can only go against the grain so much. I'm human.

It is important to note that, while I do consider the Zelda series perhaps my favorite series of games, it's front-loaded. For quite a while, the Zelda series has been kind of dead to me;

2003: Wind Waker. AMAZING game. No complaints. Zelda still going extremely strong at this point.
2004: Minish Cap. It was okay, but it didn't really capture the magic of the previous Game Boy games for me. Not a bad game by any means but not an unforgettable one.
2006: Twilight Princess. Don't really love it. It has its upsides (turning into a wolf being ridden by a hot furry imp is always gonna have its upsides for me let's be real about this), but the color palette is so washed out and the game so dour and depressing that I just can't really get into it. At best, it's trying to be Ocarina of Time, but worse. Disappointing.
2007: Phantom Hourglass. Hated it. It felt so barebones in every way, I found no joy at all in exploring the world or the dungeons. It was a cheap imitation of Wind Waker and I detested it.
2009: Spirit Tracks. Hated it more. It was even more empty than PH, and I eventually got sick of this game and didn't even finish it.
2011: Skyward Sword. To be honest, I just haven't been able to get into this one. I don't think it's terrible - the color palette is certainly an improvement on TP! - but I find the game just doesn't make me that enthusiastic about exploring it, for some reason. SS never caught on as much as some other Zeldas so I don't think I'm alone here. I want to go back and give this game another chance someday.
2013: A Link Between Worlds. Ten years since WW and finally another Zelda that really hit the mark for me. It's still kind of in remake-territory though, and it isn't a 3D Zelda, so we're still in a drought on those at this point.

And then another four years and all we got was Triforce Heroes, which I didn't play. Also, Four Swords Adventures happened at some point in the mid-00's and I forgot to list it, it was great but I don't really consider it a standard Zelda game.

And then Breath of the Wild comes along, and oh no, it's one of those dreaded open-world games. I said this a while ago, but I tried to get into open-world games a few times and it just didn't click for me. I don't know why - the thought of a big expansive world to explore, where your options are seemingly limitless and the game doesn't tell you what to do, it carries obvious appeal, but games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 just never managed to charm me enough to keep me wanting to be within that world. It kinda tricked me into thinking that I just wasn't into open world games. Oh, I was, but I was just waiting for the right one.

I wasn't even that excited for Breath of the Wild. My expectations were really low - the idea of an open-world Zelda did not appeal, and the Zelda series had been largely dormant as far as my tastes were concerned for 14 years aside from one really good remake. I'm not even the one who bought the game - at this point in my life, I still live with my parents, but I was temporarily displaced to my grandparents' house while they were at their winter home due to a plumbing incident that flooded my bathroom and part of my bedroom. Too long a story to get into for this writeup, but while I was away, it was actually my mom and my younger brother who got the Switch and the game, and it's kinda their console and game and not mine. My mom played this game for a solid hundred hours and told me that I needed to come over and play it, so I did, expectations still thoroughly whelmed. Well, she was right. I did need to come over and play it.

It's hard to know where to begin. I think this Awkward Zombie comic kind of sums it up:

http://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/wild-streak

As the description for the comic says, I, too, walked out of the starting cave, turned around and immediately tried to do anything but what the game told me to. And the game's response, in turn, was "ok." There were no artificial boundaries to stop me, at least not until I wanted to get off the great plateau. You can just... run everywhere. Climb on everything. Every object and every surface is something that can be interacted with. Every place is a place that is meant for you to go. The old man can wait, if you feel like just kind of fucking off for a while in some bushes hunting for bugs.

I'm immediately reminded of way back in the way when I played Super Mario 64 with one of my friends when I was a kid - we both loved Super Mario 64, but while I wanted to go into all the levels and you know, play the game, my friend got hours of entertainment just out of running around the starting area outside of the castle. This kind of baffled me a little bit, but thinking back on it now I get it - there is just a sort of inherent fun about running around and jumping on everything, even if you're not really doing anything in particular. No surprise, that same friend of mine loves Breath of the Wild, a game that I think perfectly understood this exact appeal. It just feels great to go anywhere and do anything in this world, anything at all. Running on stuff, jumping on stuff, climbing on stuff, even if it doesn't really meet any particular goal except to see what's over there, it just always feels good. All I need is to think "hey, I wonder if there's anything at the top of that mountain in the distance", and that's a good enough motivation for a hike that can take up to 20 minutes to get all the way over there in which the journey is more than the destination.

There's something so emergent about this game's sense of fun. I'm reminded of how, in Terraria, I enjoyed the idea of sort of creating my own adventure by having a general destination in mind but leaving it completely up to myself to decide what route I wanted to take. BotW has this, too; I'll often know the general place that I need to get to, but there's no specific route to get there. Sometimes the game suggests a route by providing a trail; sometimes it doesn't. There's so many places to go and so many ways to do it that no one person is likely to go in the same exact direction the first time they

Naye745 posted...

i need to play undertale. someday!

it's okay. you might like it

(this is how i talk about undertale when I don't want peoples' expectations raised)

The Alphys segment of Hotland is one of my favorite parts of the game and I don't know why everyone hates it

The only part of the game that I would describe as slightly weak is the Core, but I don't mind that since it's the one and only time the game takes a break from goofiness and decides to play being an RPG straight, and it's not that long and it has great music, so it's fine.

banananor posted...

Ugh, am I really going to reinstall crosscode? I think I quit just before the good part.

I like your writing style. 100% going to make my friend play spy party now

I can't guarantee that CrossCode won't remain an issue for you or that stuff coming up is going to turn you around on it so I don't want to get your hopes up, but I will say that from the sound of it, you're at the part of the game that I considered to be its lowest point in terms of my own personal energy playing the game. So it might change.

Thanks for the compliment! I'm mostly writing these just to amuse myself, but it's really nice if other people enjoy reading it.

But Para, aren't you forgetting something? What about -

(slaps Deltarune hastily out of your hands) NO! It's not out yet, damnit! I want to bank this one for the 2020's! Okay, so, I did play Deltarune and it was really great - even the "demo" itself feels like a complete enough experience that it could have ranked in like, the 30's of this list. It's just enough to feel kind of like a full game experience, like playing a one-shot session of Dungeons & Dragons - a few hours long, wraps up in one sitting, still pretty satisfying. Nontheless, I'm gonna wait, even though I guess you could say it was one of my top 100 gaming experiences of the decade. Deltarune is a game I look forward to having it compete for a spot on my 20's list. See you in ten years to blather on about how awesome it was.

#3





Years of release: 2015 (PC), 2017 (PS4/Vita), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: Yes

(You're going to have to excuse me for my over-the-top sentimentality. This is where I'm about to be ridiculously enthusiastic about a five-hour game about skeletons and goats.)

Sometimes, when I'm lying awake at night and alone with my thoughts, I like to peer past the space of things that exist and imagine the infinite worlds of things that don't exist. It fucks with my head a little to imagine just how limited our exploration of all the possible games that could exist actually is - all of the ones that have been created are a particular creative expression of one person or a few people or a few hundred people, but for every such expression that does take the shape of a finished game, there are thousands, millions, countless numbers of creative expressions and possible cerative expressions that have never seen the light of day. When I hit a stumbling block in my own artistic endeavors, either due to challenges or a lack of motivation, this is something that keeps me going; knowing that if I don't create the thing I'm setting out to create, nobody will. If I get very lucky, some of my dream projects might get made by someone else (hi, Cadence of Hyrule), but no project will ever be made that is exactly the way I would have made it, had I seen it to the end, and I feel a little bit of a sense of duty tugging at me to see that project given birth and expressed to the world.

This decade, for me, is split neatly into two halves: pre-Undertale, and post-Undertale. Everything before Undertale might as well be ancient, a relic of a long-past generation. Everything after Undertale is basically current. And then Undertale itself somehow seems to exist in a timeless place - it both feels like it must've been there my whole life, and at the same time I feel like I played it just yesterday. In reality, Undertale a little over 4 years old, and that fact manages to blow my mind from both angles; how can it be that recent, how can it be that old? I still feel a little bit like I'm basking in the afterglow of having just played it for the first time, and at the same time, it is really bizarre to imagine a world in which this game didn't exist, in which Toby Fox never made this project and never introduced it to our culture. A little superlative, sure, but I don't care. Undertale is GameFAQs's greatest game of all time, isn't it? I happen to think that pick has aged pretty well!

I think pretty much everyone is at least basically familiar with Undertale at this point and won't be surprised to learn I'm among the throngs who considered it, if not a life-changing experience, at least something relatively profound. Among cute, narratively-driven games with adorable characters, simple but clever gameplay mechanics, and a few really good twists and gimmicks, Undertale knows no peer. The characters aren't just memorable; they're iconic. The music isn't just good; it's a video game music staple. The gameplay isn't just fun; it does a few things that change how I think about games. The game isn't just good, it's woven into the fabric of gaming's canon. Yeah, that's a lot to put on this short little indie title and I know that overhyping it really doesn't do the game any favors, but I don't care, this is my list and this is how I feel about it.

Sometimes I wonder what Toby Fox was thinking when he made this game. Did he know that everyone was gonna love it or did he think that was he was making was completely a personal pet project that would only ever matter to him? I'm always kind of fascinated by games that are the visions of a single developer, which is a category the last two games on my list also fall into. I dunno, there's just something so damn pure about Undertale, the way it so effortlessly carries the unique voice of the single person who wrote it - well, ok, there's two, since there was an artist, but it still feels very much like something nobody but they could have created.

I don't even know what's so damn good about it. I mean, if I tried to describe the game it would probably sound pretty lame. But everything about it just landed so well for me. Everything about it was just so damn charming and clever in a way that I just don't see very often. I talked about a-ha moments in puzzle games, but this game has a lot of similar sort of moments - in this case, the a-ha moments were as simple as jokes that landed really well, details or secrets hidden in surprising places, events in the game's absurd plot that made me go 'oh wow, so that's what they decided to do next.'

I talked about my concept of the easter egg hunt with Stanley Parable - games where the primary purpose of the gameplay is to have a playful conversation with the devs themselves, trying to uncover fun, irrelevant secrets hidden in the game's most obscure corners, looking for different ways to make the game respond to your actions, taking delight when you realize that the dev thought that you might do that and included a unique response. The old masters of this genre, for me, are Super Mario RPG and the first two Paper Mario games, which are teeming with bizarre easter eggs in just about every possible nook and cranny - Undertale is the new master. Every time I play the game or see it played, and it's been a few times now, I learn something new about the game I didn't know before - some dialog option I hadn't considered, some action during an event I hadn't tried, some secret buried way deep in the furthest possible spots. Out of all the things I like about Undertale, and there's a lot of things to like about Undertale, this is probably my favorite part.

But, also, I love the characters, I love the music, I love the gameplay even if it's very simple and leaves a lot of unexplored space. I love the stuff that happens in this game, which I dare not spoil; yes, even now I still care about not spoiling Undertale! The less said about it, the better, really. And yet I still can't help but overhype it. It's hard, okay? I've spent the last four years not wanting to express how much I love this game too much to avoid giving people the wrong impression about how good it is (in reality, your mileage may vary, and it's better if you think this game sucks and you're surprised). But now that I'm writing this list I don't feel like doing that anymore, so suck it. You've probably made up your mind one way or the other, but I do really hope that if you're still feeling sore about Undertale winning the games contest that you'll be able to look past that and appreciate the game for what it is. It's a beautiful, lovingly-crafted piece of work and it doesn't deserve to have

SeabassDebeste posted...

i remember hearing about spy party. it sounds utterly fascinating. i also think there's absolutely no way i'd be able to succeed at either role.

Yeah, this is why I wish SpyParty had an option to buy it as a 2-pack - I think it's best to try to learn this game with another player so you can grow and learn at the same time, because that kind of helps preserve the early learning and discovering phase of the game, which I think kind of has its own joy to it, I liked the early part of this game when I didn't know what was going on and I was basically just making my best guesses at who the spy was, without thinking about all the super complicated ins-and-outs. I'm very happy to teach SpyParty to new players, but it's tough because it's like stepping onto a tennis court with Serena Williams when you don't know anything about tennis - your only hope to score a point on her is to hope she double faults for no reason, at least at first. I do think that it's not too hard to learn this game though, I think you can begin to play it as a reasonably competent level after a couple of hours. At first, playing sniper is befuddling because there's so much going on and playing spy is tricky because you don't really know how to act properly, but I think it comes naturally pretty fast. But learning from a veteran is hard as spy (it's not too bad as sniper, since there's only so much I can do as a spy and you can still catch me, since there'll be some handicaps).

#4





Years of release: 2016 (PC/PS4/XB1), 2017 (iOS/...what in the FUCK is an Nvidia Shield, wikipedia?)
Beaten?: 100%

I am in absolute awe of The Witness and what I think it accomplished to a degree that it is difficult to talk about this game without going into superlatives and pretentiousness, and yet somehow I only ranked this game #4. #4! It's an insult to a game that I loved so much that I don't know if I'll ever love a puzzle game this much again.

I have a lot of puzzle games on this list, and I think the reason is that I love those "a-ha" moments. They're everywhere in games, not just puzzle games; moments when you realize a new strategy that can be employed, moments when you find the last collectable you were looking for, moments when you finally get the hang of some skill or move that you couldn't pull off, those are all "a-ha" moments to me and they're the sort of things I live for in video games. But puzzle games in particular deliver some of the most truly breathtaking a-ha moments for me, the ones where you sit and look at a puzzle for a while, not understanding, not figuring out the key behind it, and then when it all clicks together, that satisfaction of suddenly seeing what you weren't able to see before. It's something that games like Baba Is You and Portal excel at, and I think The Witness delivered this for me more than most games I've ever played.

It's kinda hard to talk about The Witness in words, because the game certainly doesn't use any, and the things I could describe could potentially ruin the experience of seeing them for the first time and having to reckon with them yourself, which I think is a really critical element of this game, even if it's not the sort of game that could traditionally be "spoiled." But also, if I were to describe it in the most basic words possible, it would sound really basic. You wake up on a beautiful, deserted island and there's mazelike puzzles everywhere that you can solve. There are no explanations. Not your reason for being there, and not for how any of the puzzles work. That's the beauty of this game - the only way you can learn the rules of the puzzles is by playing them and trying to understand the way the puzzles are teaching you how to do them.

It's a simple enough concept but the way the puzzles build on themselves, adding new elements to the core basics and previously-understood rules, playing with the different possible ways that you could solve these puzzles, that's what led to all these a-ha moments for me - there's a great deal of satisfaction in coming to understand, without being told, how to solve a new type of puzzle element, simply through inferrence, by testing what works and what doesn't. It's all very simple and intuitive and the end but the journey of getting there isn't simple, and the various different ways the game introduces new challenges to its puzzles are consistently surprising right to the very end.

I played this game over screenshare with Dels, who I hope won't be too annoyed that I shouted him out again - we play a lot of games co-op together. I think that playing this game with an engaged co-op partner really added a lot to this experience for me - the two of us were able to act as two pairs of eyes and two brains, looking for things the other missed, bouncing ideas around that the other didn't think of, and when one of us got tired or frustrated, the other one could instantly take over and have a crack at it, totally fresh. I do think it's important to mention this, because it made me realize that I might have had a different experience playing it alone, and others migth have had a VERY different experience playing it alone - this is why this list is my list! Even working at it together the game was not easy; wouldn't call it one of the world's hardest puzzle games, it seems designed to be relatively intuitive (I'd put it roughly on the level of a Baba Is You but FIRMLY below The Fool And His Money or the horrifying abomination that is Snakebird), but it was challenging, and for me just the right level of a brain workout. I liked the variety - some puzzles require you to think out of the box and examine new possibilities, while others are just the type where you need to crunch to find the answer. I like both, and the game swapped between the two styles pleasingly often. That's about the most that I'm willing to say about how this game operates.

Also, I just adore how this game looks. The world is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and similar to how I was talking about how much I love the outdoors in my Firewatch writeup (remember like three weeks ago? jeez I've been putting these last writeups off because I didn't have the words for them) I found myself just kind of wishing I could find a hammock in this game and chill out in it. There's no music (not much, anyway), just a lot of very pleasing ambiance and the occasional sound effect when you activate a puzzle, and the soothing atmosphere really enhanced the experience of walking around, exploring, deciding which puzzles to do next. Puzzle games have a slight tendency to be clinical and dry, so I found the warmth of this one welcoming.

A lot of people on the internet seem to prefer to talk about this game's themes and what it all means, and while I certainly think there are interesting philosophical topics to plumb here, that conversation doesn't interest me too much, not with this game - I don't think there's that much here. But this game as an instruction on game design is a topic I could talk about pretty much forever. I've always been fascinated by how puzzle games are designed and this along with Baba are maybe the two I find the absolute most fascinating - trying to imagine how this game was built kind of blows my mind, and trying to imagine how carefully it was fine-tuned blows my mind twice over. It all comes together so ridiculously seamlessly that I'm not sure how this game could ever be repeated, and I feel a great urge to celebrate it while I can. I can't believe I only ranked this game #4 but here we are, games are really good nowadays I guess.

This was the last unpredictable game on my list by the way. Anyone who's read my list so far, even if they don't know me, could infer the top 3 games - they're all easy.

Fastbreak posted...

I feel like I heard of spy party as a concept back in like 08 even, man it's been so long and they've stayed that committed

2008 is when it began development, and, yeah, it's turned into a really good game with a pretty dedicated community.

#5





Years of release: Oh, god, hahaha. Like, 2013-present (PC early access)? I picked it up in 2016 and it came out on Steam early access in 2018 but it's still not finished
Beaten?: N/A

It's SpyParty! The best new eSport you've never heard of!

SpyParty is a deception game that is played 1v1 between two human players. In it, one player takes the role of the 'spy' at a fancy party full of AI-controlled guests - the human player infiltrates this party, milling about, drinking and schmoozing with other guests, pretending to be an AI themselves. The other player, the 'sniper', must watch the party carefully, trying to pick out the spy in the group - they have only one bullet, and they have to pick the spy correctly, or they lose. The twist is that the spy has objectives they must complete to win - they have to do small, subtle things such as quickly planting a bug on someone unseen, stealing a statue and putting a different one in its place, taking a microfilm out of a book, getting in contact with a double agent, etc. All of these actions are things only the spy can do, and the sniper has to watch this busy party to find the person trying to complete these objectives right in plain sight before they complete all their objectives.

I love deception games - games like Mafia and Resistance that are all about hiding in plain sight, trying to sneak things past the other player or players undetected. While those are social deception games, in which you have to talk and lie your way through the game, this is something more akin to a puzzle game, in which you have to move around at the party and get the other player to think that you aren't the human-controlled character, then sneakily do something right under their noses when they're not looking. Both players have an intense challenge in front of them - the spy has to figure out exactly when the sniper won't be looking or what they're not paying attention to to try to complete a mission, and the sniper has to be tracking everything at the party carefully, figuring out who could be suspicious, who possibly has missions completed, and not make the wrong shot.

I was going to say there is no gaming experience anything like this, but there is one on my list - Game & Wario's Fruit, which is like a heavily simplified version of this game. This is a very grown-up version of Fruit, several orders of magnitude more complicated - Fruit is a game you play for an hour with friends for fun, SpyParty is a game that it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to master. There are so many subtle little things to figure out in this game, so many ways as the spy that you can fool the sniper, so many ways as the sniper to better lock down your ability to catch the spy in the act.

This game has been in development for over 10 years now, and in public beta for about 7 years, and I think it'll probably be released for real sometime in the next 2-3 years or so, but I'm counting this as a 10's game because it's been in a highly playable and mostly polished state since about 2016 or so, which is when I picked it up. The detail that's put into the game by the dev, Chris Hecker, is impressive, as he's basically developing this game as a labor of love and has invested a lot of time into fine-tuning the game exactly the way he wants it instead of rushing it out the door.

At first, it seemed like a fun little game, but once I found out about the competitive SpyParty community in 2018, I realized just the insane depth of this game - people spend time researching the habits of other players and attempt to counter their play specifically, and they know the game inside and out, utilizing tricks and methods that I didn't even know existed until I came around to their streams. It really opened up a whole new world to me and I've been kind of off-and-on obsessed about improving my play ever since, although that comes with long periods of burnout where I just can't see myself improving that much anymore past a certain ceiling. Still, I'm involved in the community and have done streams of competitive games from time to time - this game is just fascinating to watch be played, the experts at this game are so good at disguising their actions and so good at spotting spies doing things and making the correct shot. I'm never at a loss for things to talk about and I could commentate over these games for hours.

It's hard for me to recommend this game to other people, because you have to find human partners to play with, and it's hard to play with people who don't have the same skill level as you. If you do pick it up, I recommend as much as possible picking it up with someone else and learning the game together - but if that's not possible, and this seems like it's up your alley anyway, give it a try. It's really one of the most interesting competitive experiences I've ever experienced in a video game, and I don't think that my writeup here can do justice to how much depth there is. I ended up not writing about this one for a day because I couldn't figure out how to start describing why I love it so much. I took like a year off between finding this game for the first time and coming back to it and really trying to hone my skills, and during that year, I just couldn't stop thinking about the game concept here; there's so much about the game mechanics that made me come back and think "wow, SpyParty is such a cleverly designed game." It's still a pretty small community of players at the moment, but I do hope that more people pick this one up.

Waluigi1 posted...

Whew, finally caught up! I didn't read every thing but I've enjoyed your list.

Out of everything the one question I have, or more just thing I don't get, is as someone is seems huge into indie games and Nintendo, why would you not be interested in watching the Nindies/Indie World showcase?? For some reason that just stuck out as super odd lol.

Didn't expect them to show anything new; most of the indie games that come out on the Switch have already been on Steam for months or years. This, combined with it happening in the morning in my time, makes it a highly skippable event. I could not have predicted that something like Cadence of Hyrule would be announced during it - even very-good case scenarios for what they could have announced would have been something I would be happy to catch the news of afterwards, it would have taken a beyond-my-wildest-dreams scenario to make me want to tune in as it was happening, and it just so happened that a beyond-my-wildest-dreams scenario occurred.

I'm gonna try to finish this list soon I promise

LadyVyxx posted...

I haven't been keeping up I'm slowly getting there, has Dead Cells made an appearance >_>

Yes, somewhere in the 40's

banananor posted...

I have some strong feelings about CrossCode. I absolutely adore the premise, aesthetics, and gameplay.

The puzzles are good and the boss fights rewarding. The platforming and exploration is complex, if infuriating- as you mentioned.

The reason why I abandoned the game after maybe 20 hours was because of the pacing. Both in story and gameplay loop.

The overworld grinding and exploring and dungeon puzzling and boss fights are all good to great, but once you start a dungeon, you're stuck in there for the next few hours. Once you're done with a dungeon, you're not going to see another one for even longer. When you want to explore a new area, you'd better kill robot rabbits for 30 minutes first and maybe craft some armor

I didn't like the dungeon vs sleep time mechanic in the persona series- it was always to your advantage to burn through a dungeon in a single game night- but it at least gave you a choice

There are about three or four different games in cross code (grinding and crafting, dungeon puzzles, dungeon bosses, exploration "puzzles") , and I don't get to choose which to play when I boot it up

Lastly, and this is a design choice meant to simulate the doldrums of mmo play, the story is just too slow moving for me.

Everything is pretty interesting for the first few hours. It sets up a premise and a lot of mysteries. The organization of the theme park's history vs the real planet's history vs all the players' real lives vs the protagonist's predicament is intriguing.

But at about 2 hours they dump you in the mmo and say "play", and nothing related to the main plot happens for the following 15.

Maybe I quit at just the wrong time, or I'm at the wrong stage of life to get sucked into such an involved game, but I felt like the game was not respectful of my time and agency

Man, I want to love the game. It gets a lot right and is rough in these few ways. I'm really glad it exists. It's the modern adaptation of getting lost in a SNES fever dream where you're six years old and only allowed to play an hour a day and the game just goes on forever and you wish you could burn through the game faster because you like the characters and world and want to see where they go.

This is the risk of big, complex games like this. Pacing is the easiest thing to sacrifice.

I will probably go back to the game someday and hack my save file to skip the grinding and crafting. I'm just not ready yet

If you're in the desert area I will say that that is the slowest part of the game and you're not far from some really major stuff going down. Plot-wise, everything is a pretty slow burn from the start of Bergen Trail through the end of Autumn's Fall, but after that it really kicks into high gear and I don't think lets up very much afterwards (aside from one very long segment of dungeoning).

I do think these complaints are valid - I spent 60 hours on this game but I generally will do every optional thing I can see available to me before continuing on with the main thread of the game, and this was one where I WANTED to spend 60 hours. I think you could do it much faster if you rush through it, I'm not sure how much grinding is necessary (and if it is you can just drop the difficulty slider, there's no shame in doing this imo)

I do think the game's pacing is a bit weird because while I did enjoy the dungeons and the puzzles, they're a lot. I fortunately really enjoyed every phase of this game (except perhaps the exploration puzzles) so it didn't bother me too much, but I did put the game down once or twice because I just wasn't mentally prepared to take on the dungeons. Once I actually took them on though I enjoyed the hell out of them.

Hmm, I think MM9 is a lot harder than MM3

KamikazePotato posted...

Yeah that was one part where I just accepted that my bedtime that night just became 'when I finish this section'. Good times.

It's weird to say for a game that is gameplay heavy and pulls that aspect off well, but I think CrossCode's writing impressed me more than any other part of the game. I think I enjoyed literally every bit of dialogue in the game.

Yeah, I agree. A lot of really good writing in the game - I really didn't expect it to be so sharp. Even some of the plot beats in the game that I think could have been overly maudlin in the hands of another writer were really handled gracefully - this was a game that could have been silly in a bad way but instead was worth taking seriously.

SeabassDebeste posted...

forgot to say, i loved ghost trick, but i'd peobably only wanna replay it now, at least 5-10 years after playing it the first time

most of the stuff in your top ten seems to be defined by being punishing, which i have no interest in! thought MM2 was ok when i played it for the first time like 2-3 years ago, much preferred DKC2

I did notice this, but the only thing I'd define as punishing is Darkest Dungeon. CrossCode is fairly challenging but I don't think to a ridiculous degree (and it has some pretty friendly accessibility options if truly needed), Mega Man 10 also has an easy mode in addition to a hard mode (I just really like the fact that it has a hard mode), and FTL is kinda hard even on its easiest difficulty but I think anyone could get it with enough plays. DD's a motherfucker though yeah.

KamikazePotato posted...

Also can confirm regarding CrossCode that I had no crashes. Had some slowdown in some areas, but turning off weather effects fixed that.

For Para's eyes only: the Vermillion Wasteland, from start to finish, is one of the most emotionally satisfying stretches of gaming I've ever played.

I stayed up until 8 in the morning during that part

Update on Return of the Obra Dinn: I've played a little bit of it now and it's really cool. I like the whole concept of piecing together the story bit by bit, it has a little bit of a Her Story feel to it in that way, and it almost feels like doing actual detective work the way the game expects you to make inferences based on tiny details. Will almost certainly be a top 100 game by the time I'm done. Probably not top 20.

If tiers are a thing you care about, then this is the last tier of games. Every game from here on out is something that I regard as a top-of-the-top masterpiece and was something that I seriously considered ranking as my #1 game of the decade. I feel confident about the order I chose to rank these games in but these are my absolute favorites and they're kind of the reason I wanted to make a list. Everything else up to this point was great but this is the Real Shit.

#6





Years of release: 2018 (PC)
Beaten?: Yes, pending epilogue content coming in 2020

Holy shit, guys, we really fucked up on this one. Well, okay, I didn't. But you guys have really screwed the pooch on this one by allowing CrossCode to be my hidden gem of the decade - my unequivocal top candidate for the most overlooked game in quite a long time. I don't want to overhype this game too much, but, well, given how much praise I've given to games ranked lower than this I guess the ship has already sailed on that, so let me tell you about CrossCode, my 2018 Game of the Year.

Whereas Mega Man 10 envisions a world in which we never stopped making Mega Man games, CrossCode imagines a world in which we never stopped making SNES RPGs. Except, instead of going back to that time and recreating it as it was back then, this feels like a natural evolution; a game with 1995 sensibilities that could only have ever been made in the 2010's, with all the game dev tools and game design knowledge that we have today. This game takes Secret of Mana's gameplay and Phantasy Star's aesthetics and refines both to a sharp point, and the level of polish and the size of the game are really on another level. I can't believe I only ranked this game #6.

The game takes place in the virtual MMORPG world of CrossWorlds, where people log into physical avatars that they play as in a physical game world, and you play as Lea, a main character who is both mute AND an amnesiac, and yet bucks every single cliche you'd expect on both fronts and is probably my favorite protagonist in an RPG to date for reasons I care not to spoil. Events unfold as you play through the game of CrossWorlds, making new online friends and looking for answers to Lea's mysterious past. The story starts out pretty simple and unobtrusive but suddenly kicks into high gear in the game's second half, and I found it pretty gripping and demanding to be seen to the end. The writing quality's a notch above most of its peers; jokes land, emotional beats are felt, and the cast of characters is one of the most deeply likeable I can think of in an RPG this side of, well, Bug Fables.

The gameplay is like Secret of Mana meets a twin-stick shooter and while I've heard some people find it a bit overbearing, I found it to be absolutely perfect. Combat in this game is butter-smooth; Lea's melee and ranged attacks, as well as her dashes and guards, all feel perfectly intuitive and effective. Combat is fast and hits hard. The game fortunately has pretty forgiving difficulty sliders that you can turn down, which is good, because I think first time RPG players would find this game pretty tough. For me, it was just right - this game demanded exactly the right amount of timing, reflexes, and strategy that I want out of an action RPG. It also offers exactly the amount of character building and customization that I wanted - CrossCode has a very sphere grid-like system of upgrades with the ability to swap between several different layouts on the fly, and nearly all of Lea's special arts are useful and turn the tide of battle in a different way, allowing for a lot of different ways to approach combat. Tons of options here, none of which felt especially inferior to any other. Combat never got old for me in this game; both random encounters and boss fights demanded my attention, and one plot-relevant boss fight near the game's climax was so exhilirating and demanding my mastery of every single aspect of the game's combat that I think it might be my favorite boss fight in a video game ever? I'd have to really meditate on that but yeah I think it might be true. Again, I really hate to overhype this thing, but there's no getting around the fact that this game has my favorite RPG combat *ever.* I can't believe I only ranked this game #6.

Even the visuals and the music are good! This game really has Nintendo levels of polish in every facet of its design that I just don't see in indie games very often. Sprites are colorful and lovingly animated, everything's easy on the eyes and pops off the screen in bright, beautiful hues, and enemy and boss designs are universally inspired and creative. The music takes a lot of cues from Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and Phantasy Star Online, and while I wouldn't call it quite as good as any of those three, it still have a really good sense of personality and panache that this style of game demands.

I do have to warn you ahead of time that CROSSCODE IS ALSO SECRETLY A PUZZLE GAME. These aren't RPG puzzles for babies like you'd get out of Golden Sun or something - CrossCode has dungeons that are more like a Zelda game in their complexity, but I'd put the level of difficulty in their puzzles on something more like the level of Braid, or another medium-difficulty puzzler like that. Some puzzles in dungeons took me a good 15-30 minutes to figure out, which is good enough for me to call them serious headscratchers, and I think some people have gotten turned off this aspect of the game. I loved it though - the mix of combat and puzzles in this game is probably better realized than any other RPG I've played to date. I can't believe I only ranked this game #6.

I do have a COUPLE of problems with this game. First of all, exploring areas can be a little too difficult for its own good sometimes, and it almost feels like a running joke that the devs had fun making areas increasingly complicated and annoying, with multiple layers of platforms that are very difficult to read as you're jumping across them, and item boxes in high places that you have no idea how to reach are common. This game also leans a little too hard into it's MMORPG premise at times with how much money and items you need to craft current-grade armor and weapons; a lot of the times I would find myself badly needing an armor upgrade, only to level myself out of needing it by the time I found all the necessary materials to make it. Armor upgrades can be a bit frustrating too as you end up losing combat modifiers that you really liked in order to get a stat increase. These are both minor complaints, but frustrating enough that I do suddenly remember why I ranked this game #6.

I enjoyed this game so much, and was so ho

This decade of games was so good that a game that I thought was a perfectly executed swan song to one of my most beloved franchises ever is still somehow outranked by 6 games

#7





Years of release: 2010 (Wii/PS3/360), 2017 (PC, in MMLC2), 2018 (Switch, in MMLC2)
Beaten?: Many times

Mega Man has been, for a very long time now, one of my favorite gaming franchises, if not my favorite, and classic Mega Man in particular is my jam. I've been playing them since I was toddler-age - my mom was a young, hip, video-game playing mom back in the 90's, and she had an NES, and we played video games together all the time. One of our favorites was Mega Man 2. Most kids have a favorite Disney movie or something like that that their parents put on for them. For me, my mom would sit down with me and play Mega Man 2 for me almost every night, from start to finish, and I would follow along, learning every part of the game. By the time I was 4, I could start playing it a little bit myself; when I was 5, I was able to beat the entire game on my own, without my mom's help at all. Mega Man 2 was my video game equivalent of learning to walk; I learned to love both video games and music from playing it. It's one of my most formative experiences and to this day it's one of the most important games to me.

All of the NES Mega Mans were a big deal; I beat them all before I was 8. I remember at the time that there was criticism over the fact that they just kept making a new Mega Man every year and that they all looked the same, but this didn't matter to me - I loved how many different games in the series there were. It was one of my favorites, so why would I not want Mega Man games every year in perpetuity for the rest of my life? Sadly, of course, an endless stream of Mega Man games was not to be - we got a couple more numeric MMs on the SNES and PS1 (which I didn't own) and otherwise the series moved onto the X spinoffs, which I never liked as much.

I longed for the heyday of Mega Man gone by, and one of those fantasies I had in the back of my brain was how cool it would be if Capcom themselves ever decided to put out a brand-new NES-stylized Mega Man game. In the early 00's, there were people who were trying to do this sort of thing in flash and in some of the earliest ROMhacks but they were never very polished (not until Mega Man Unlimited in the early 10's, see earlier part of list), so it was clear to me that the market for this sort of thing existed, but I never imagined that Capcom would do it - but man, what if they did, though? So imagine my shock when the madmen did it and released Mega Man 9 in the late 00's, a perfect followup to the NES stylization of Mega Man 6, as if the past 15 years of development in gaming had never happened - a completely flawless return to the days of 2D sprites and 8-bit music. I said earlier that Cadence of Hyrule was one of the most amazing miracles, but I think Mega Man 9 shocked me even more. Putting out a retro game that didn't feature the latest innovations in graphics technology just wasn't a thing back then. It was unthinkable that anyone would make a new NES game on purpose. And yet, they did it.

Mega Man 9 was great. What if those crazy fuckers did it AGAIN, though? 9 was nice, but it was probably a one time thing, right? Surely they wouldn't be doing a new one every year again. BAM, here's Mega Man 10. Mind blown again.

I really liked MM9 but I adored MM10 to death. It's hard to explain - I know the general take on it is that 9 is the superior game, but I think 10 is just a little more polished and a little more interesting. 10 feels like a more finished product to me - I know this is a seemingly very small thing to harp on, but I never liked how MM9 reused music assets from Mega Man 2, it made it feel like it wasn't trying to have its own identity. 10 doesn't have this problem, making something completely new. It introduces a much-needed hard mode that I've always been hoping for in the series, and it delivers - the boss fights in hard mode are so much more challenging and involved than the boss fights anywhere else in the series. I like the level and boss designs more than 9, overall, and I loved how 10's Wily Castle ends on a big, dramatic reveal, whereas 9's it kind of an anticlimax.

I love the music in 10 more, too. For a diehard fan of the Mega Man series like me, and Mega Man's music in particular, it was an unbelievably awesome treat to see nearly every previous Mega Man composer (2's Takeshi Tateishi nowhere to be found sadly) and have them each compose a track for each stage. I ended up going 8 for 8 on predicting who wrote which one - I've picked apart the franchise's music so thoroughly that I can recognize everyone's styles by this point, and they really stood out here. The fact that every song has a slightly different flavor to it was really fun and made it stand out as one of my favorite soundtracks in the series - and music is something that REALLY matters to me in a Mega Man game. Music is a thing that keeps me coming back to a lot of video games, but this one in particular.

Bringing everyone back for one last go at the soundtrack as well as all the other references to older games in the series, like in the Weapons Archive boss fight and the DLC stages that have you face off against bosses from the game boy games, made Mega Man 10 feel like something of a swan song for the series. When I played it, I sort of got the sense that this might be sort of a farewell to the series, and the most magical thing that Mega Man 10 did for me was make me feel perfectly at ease with that. This is one of my favorite games in the series, and it delivered everything I wanted so well that I felt like I I would be okay if they never made another one of these things again. It's really difficult to put into words how great it is to receive closure on a beloved franchise like that, to be able to say goodbye to it and move on without feeling like there was untapped potential left unexplored. Mega Man 10 did the impossible; it made me feel at ease with the unavoidable march of time.

Then Mega Man 11 came out 8 years later and eh, it was fine I guess

Naye745 posted...

yeah while i still hold original pokemon crystal as my favorite pokemon game, heart gold/soul silver are (i think) legitimately the best pokemon games ever made. surprised they aren't on the list!

Yeah, I dunno. I already said my piece on it but I think Pokemon's novelty as a video game started to wear thin for me before the 2010's even began. I do agree that HGSS are really great which is why I gave them an honorable mention nod, and I put Sun/Moon on my list because I so adore gen 7's batch of Pokemon and world more than any other Pokemon game to date, plus it might be the most "complete" form of Pokemon that we ever get (although SwSh DLC may address that, it looks like). As much as I still love Pokemon as like, a franchise, or just a general idea, as video games they stopped holding my attention in the late 00's I think.

This game does get a little bit repetitive; there's a lot of grinding missions to get money and experience to be able to build your party high enough to be able to take on the game's harder missions, and dungeons themselves can have a lot more walking around than is really necessary, but I don't mind it too much. This is a prime "play this game while watching youtube videos or whatever" sort of game, pausing the video whenever I need to really think about a choice. As dramatic and unnerving as this game is there is also quite a bit of downtime to manage all your heroes and I do really like that feeling of gradually building up my party and my village with the money and trinkets brought back from missions, and it does appeal to that "numbers going up" sensibility that I have. The game's difficulty means that seeing the numbers go up REALLY matters, and that's what I love.

The Crimson Court DLC added even more to this game, and it's hard as hell - this is a DLC I don't recommend to first time players, as all of its content is harder than anything in the base game and it just makes the game more crazy and stressful. But I loved it - I ended up doing a run of this game on Bloodmoon difficulty, the highest Crimson Court difficulty - you have to complete the campaign in 100 in-game weeks and with something like 13 or fewer deaths, or your save file just gets wiped - and completed it 100% before the time limit, which meant completing every quest and upgrading every building in town to the max, including monuments. I got it just in the nick of time, and planning it out and executing it was a huge challenge that I felt totally satisfied by at the end.

This was a really rambling writeup, the game mechanics of this game get me more excited than almost any other game I've ever played. Like I said, it's not for everyone. It's dark and it's not fucking around and I feel like some people would just be stressed out by the whole endeavor, but I live for it. I'm probably done with Darkest Dungeon now but the sequel is coming, and I look forward to what they do with it - I'm sure they'll come up with some new interesting tweaks to the whole formula, which they'll need to, because I think Darkest Dungeon is very close to perfect as it is. It's expertly fine-tuned and meaty as hell. The sequel has a lot to live up to, but I look forward to including it on my next game of the decade list.

This was my first writeup to go two posts long, oops.

#8





Years of release: 2015-2016 (PC early access), 2016 (PC/PS4/Vita? there's a Vita port of this game? the fuck?), 2017 (iOS), 2018 (XB1/Switch), 2017-2018 (DLC)
Beaten?: Completed a 100% run on Bloodmoon mode

One of the things I've had a problem with in a lot of games, but especially RPGs, is a lack of the feeling of danger. I get a thrill out of knowing that death or failure would be a serious setback, if not an outright true game over like in the arcade days, and it heightens the feeling of adventure to me knowing that there is real risk into venturing forth. I remember getting this feeling first out of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in which you have to make a rather long trek to get to new places, and venturing into a new cave brings with it the possibility that you might die and need to start over, which really brings an urgency to the gameplay that you don't find in games that don't have lives or continues. This is a big reason that I've gotten into the Roguelike genre so hard - death always matters at least a little bit, while you can always start up a new run pretty quick you never want to lose your old one, especially if you've gotten quite far into the game, and to me, that makes the games feel exciting.

I say RPGs have a particular problem though for a few reasons. One, you can usually always save just before any dangerous boss fight, so there's no penalty for failure. This is NOT a bad thing, to be clear, it's probably the best way to design most games for most people, but it does come with a cost. Two, in most RPGs, if you're having trouble with a fight, you have the option to just go level up a bit more. Doesn't work in every game, but it works in most. Three, in most RPGs, you can either just spam healing items to win if you really need to, or you can find some sort of broken combo that will solve the fight if you look hard enough. This all isn't a bad thing, either, since it allows for an interesting, adjustable difficulty curve and puts a focus on hunting for the best strategies over working them out on the fly, but there is something missing, I think.

Darkest Dungeon is not a game for everyone. I daresay it's barely a game for anyone - I'm genuinely surprised at how many people have played and enjoyed this game to any degree, because it's difficult, intense, unforgiving, and from my experiences most people are sort of lacking in the tactical acumen I think this game demands. It is so precisely up MY alley in its game mechanics, however, that I am willing to forgive, and eventually even indulge in and enjoy, the dark and brooding atmosphere and Lovecraftian aesthetics that I would normally shy far away from. It provides me all of the risk and danger and on-the-fly tactics that I desire so greatly and executes them with ~~impunity~~ precision.

Darkest Dungeon is a bit of a roguelike-adjacent, in that the game is procedurally generated, the dungeons you enter having random encounters, the heroes you recruit having somewhat-random abilities and traits, and any of your characters dying is permanent. It is not a roguelike because instead of playing run after run of expendable heroes, this is a long and grueling campaign of at least 30 hours, in which you recruit many heroes over time, and while they may permanently die, the general state of affairs in the game continues, although on hard mode you can permanently game over, even quite late into the campaign, and have your save wiped. Not for the faint of heart. On normal mode, it's a bit more forgiving, since losing your heroes is a setback that you can endure - it's possible to get things to a state that's so bad and hard to dig out of that it's almost easier to reset the game, though. I did. I didn't mind. I could have played better. I learned from the experience.

You form parties of four out of your heroes, who are all generic people from one of 15-17 different classes, on missions into dungeons, which are basically series of rooms and random battles that you must endure on your way to completing your objective. Survival is not easy, there are no healing items to endlessly chug when things get bad, and running from battles comes at a high price. You must manage both your characters' health as well as their sanity as they encounter horrors; this has a very Arkham Horror kind of vibe to it in that sense. It's quite a grind, as you level up your heroes and take on more tasks until eventually you are ready to storm the Darkest Dungeon itself, which absolutely lives up to the hype of how hard and scary it is.

Darkest Dungeon is probably the most balanced game I've ever played, which is a high compliment. Every single class in this game is useful, although a couple are more essential than others (the healing Vestal and Occultist are must-haves; classes like Bounty Hunter and Abomination are a bit more niche). Every class has 7 different skills (this includes a basic attack) and you get to take 4 of them - I think there are only one or two skills in the ENTIRE GAME that I never found a meaningful use for, and I think both of them were significantly upgraded in the most recent patch. Everything else has its place. And not only is every skill in this game useable, so is nearly every party formation and every possible strategy. Despite the fact that this game is difficult, you can make almost anything work if you know when to use what. You probably don't want a party of four people of the same class in most cases (though there's a couple you could do it with), you want frontliners at the front and supports in the back (every class has skills they can only use from or against particular positions in the party order), but I've found myself with a fairly uneven bunch of heroes available to me for a given mission and still managed to cobble something together that worked. The breadth of options that this game gives you is really impressive. Yet, nothing is broken. There is no way to break this game wide open; you pretty much have to play by its terms. You can level up your heroes and give them equipment, but there is only so much you can do. Grinding will not save you. You need to be at the maximum level to even stand a chance at the endgame, anyway.

Every battle winds up demanding. Enemies can deal huge critical blows at any time and any mistake you make can be very costly. It pays to know when to use what skill, to pay attention to enemy formations and coordinate your tactics accordingly - trying the same strategy against every enemy formation will not work in the long run, adaptability is crucial in a way that I don't see in most RPGs. The game plays out kind of similarly to a pen-and-paper RPG where you see the % odds of hits and

I actually don't mind I just think it's funny that this topic could briefly be confused for the anagram topic

Fortunately there are no more AA games on my list so no chance for this topic to derail again

Blackquill is my favorite character in the series so AA5 does have that going

I just don't rank AA5's finale very highly, so while I think VERY highly of 5-6 the game kind of feels like less than the sum of its parts because I don't think it sticks the landing. That's why it ends up in "this was quite good" territory instead of "holy shit that was awesome" territory. AA6 nailed the landing (but fucked up the DLC case, oh well)

LeonhartFour posted...

Spirit of Justice is really good. I prefer DD just because it's more consistently high quality, but 6-5 is excellent.

Spoilers for my future case ranking: I really liked 6-4.

Bug Fables is probably 25-40 hours depending on your level of quest completionism and how much time you spend stopping to smell the roses by reading extra dialog and stuff; my playthrough is at 40 hours with only a little bit of postgame content left to do (there isn't a lot of postgame stuff but there are a couple of very notable things) and I don't imagine you would take much longer than that. It's a reasonably meaty game but not excessively long. I don't know if it's appointment gaming, so your call, but I do recommend it.

Finished Bug Fables and I think my ranking for it is just about right. As a Paper Mario pastiche it's quite good and gets a lot of things right, especially in the gameplay and character designs, but it doesn't quite go all the way on some things. The plot is very bog standard even by Paper Mario's standards which is a bit disappointing and while it's very wholesome and cute I think it could have done a bit more to be unpredictable or bizarre like Paper Mario is, introducing more weird scenarios and situations and all that. It has its moments but some stretches of the game are a little too unremarkable and run of the mill and the final chapter wasn't as interesting as I was hoping it would be. But, the battle system's great, the characters are a sheer delight (this is an aspect where it outdoes PM), and the game does a really nice job in most regards. That's my final word on it I think. Remains a pretty strong recommend from me but with tempered expectations - it's more of a 'personal pick' than a 'I think everyone needs to play this game' kind of pick. If you're a big Paper Mario fan then it's probably a must play.

#9





Years of release: 2012 (PC), 2014 (Advanced Edition)
Beaten?: With almost every ship on hard mode

You know, it's funny - it's been so long with this one, I don't even remember the origin story. I feel like, this deep on the list, I should have some sort of personal details to relate about my experiences with the game. But for FTL, I can't even tell you when I first learned about it, why I decided to buy it, what my first playthrough was like. All those details are just missing, and I don't know why. FTL just feels like it's always been there for me, somehow.

I have a measly 592 hours on this one compared to Slay The Spire's 1,144, which feels paltry by comparison, but I think I spent roughly the same amount of quality time with FTL as I did Slay The Spire, and it's my 4th most played game on Steam. (#2 is Team Fortress 2. #3 is... later.) FTL wins out by a hair for me, I guess, because something about the gameplay just feels a bit more satisfying. Having a spaceship with all these little crew members I can direct around, upgrading my systems and buying new weapons, being excited to see if I get any nice rewards on the next jump. Even though, after playing a game for hundreds of hours, you tend to exhaust all the possible things that can happen, FTL doles out its most interesting rewards rarely enough that it can be really exciting to go on another run and see if you'll get a really cool setup. At the same time, it gives you rewards that are good enough often enough that you never feel like any of your runs are totally screwed because of it. (I know that I've seen people complain about not getting enough weapons before, but you really need to be aggressive about routing to shops and looking for them in stores - it helps a lot.)

I think I remember why I don't remember my origin story with this game now - I think that originally I didn't actually like it that much. I think that before Advanced Edition came out, and before hard mode came out, the final boss was a little too simple to figure out and the total possibilities for your ship loadouts not quite interesting enough. Advanced Edition didn't add THAT much, but what it added was just enough to completely open up this game anew to me, somehow, with its new subsystems (Hacking is totally broken but hey) and its new ship layouts and its new weapons and events and all that, as well as hard mode. You know how I said that roguelikes live two lives, one in the first 50 hours of the game and one after the first 50 hours? The first 50 hours of FTL for me were surprisingly mediocre, but what I wasn't expecting was how this game would blossom for me after the first 50 hours. I don't really know what happened - I just got hooked on this game even I'd been at it for a while. I really wanted to master hard mode and complete it with every ship. I really wanted to do everything this game had to offer.

This game does still have some flaws. For one, I think some of the ship designs are super cumbersome and require a great deal of luck to get off the ground, and sometimes winning fights with them can take an excessive amount of time as you need to wait ages for certain systems to recharge or for health to recover as you painfully micromanage fights. There's some waiting in this game that feels unnecessary at times, but I give it a pass - it's all part of this game's surprisingly emergent gameplay, where fires and ship breaches can hit you from multiple angles when you're also fighting a ship at the same time, and there starts to get to be a lot of stuff to manage, and even after a fight's over you still have to spend time repairing the ship.

It's one of the most well-tuned roguelikes I've ever played - there's just so many different ways to win, so many different tools that will get the job done, and every run has an interesting story to tell, which is the biggest thing that I think sets this one apart. Every run has the potential for some funny situation or some kind of war story that I've never seen before, and that keeps me coming back. I'm sort of done with this game now but I still keep coming back to it every once in a while when I want something relatively easy to play - Into The Breach by the same dev has filled this role a little bit lately but it can't touch FTL.

This game has some really good mods for it too - I really enjoyed FTL: Captain's Edition, which changes just about everything in the game, events, weapons, whatever, but also adds some surprising new mechanics that take the game in some neat directions. That mod alone added a whole bunch more value to this game for me, and it was worth pointing out though I wouldn't rank it separately or anything.

I don't have any big points to end on. FTL is just really good and one of the definitive play-this-over-and-over again experiences of the decade. I'll keep coming back to it for a long time, probably.

Top ten time! Finally getting to the end of this list. This is really getting into the good shit now, these are all like all-time favorites from here on out.

#10





Years of release: 2016 (3DS), 2017 (Mobile)
Beaten?: Yes

It's staggering to think that, as the previous decade closed out, I thought that the Ace Attorney series might really be done for. AA4 was a really disappointing follow-up to the trilogy of games I loved so much, and AAI1 - well it came out in 2010 but never mind that - didn't exactly recapture the glory days.

AA5 got us back to respectability, but it still never really quite hit the highs that the first three games did. After it came out, I was like "oh, Ace Attorney is pretty good again," but it hadn't quite hit that level of, oh we're BACK, yet. So my expectations for the next Ace Attorney were... let's say subdued. I wanted to play it, but I wasn't waiting on pins and needles for it. My anticipation level was moderate. I wasn't really expecting a whole lot. Maybe it's just because my expectations were low, but holy crap, it delivered.

I feel like there isn't much for me to go into detail about here. You guys all know Ace Attorney. I don't need to describe Ace Attorney to you. And I feel like getting into the nitty gritty here of why this game ranks so highly for me would be better saved for like, a ranking all the cases in Ace Attorney topic or something (which I wanted to do but then I waited too long and now I don't remember the cases well enough to do it lol).

A few things I can say - first, this game takes a risk and it delivers. Lacking for new challenges for Phoenix to face, it takes him to a new land with new laws, and this worked out really well, putting him back in an underdog role that would have been hard for him to find otherwise. The setting and the new characters it brings are all great. Second, the divination seance mechanic was a major game changer for me - it was such a new and unique way to present mysteries in this game, and every case that featured them was way better off for it. The way each one of them manages to trick you and reveal surprising new details was just ingeniously constructed. They're a small part of the game, but really added something when they were used. And third, the final case of this game just really hit that peak again - the high points of the original trilogy that the series had yet to reach again after that point, it hit them here. I didn't think it was possible; I didn't think they could pull it off or that there would be any story they could tell that would do it justice. But holy shit, they did it.

I think that's all I need to say about AA6. To be honest, it was good enough that if they never make another Ace Attorney game after this, I think I could be at peace with that. I THINK that we will get an Ace Attorney 7 one of these days, maybe somewhat soon, but it's hard to know for sure - it's a bit hard for me to imagine where the series goes from here, but I've thought that before, and they found a way to make it work, so they can pull it off again, I'm sure. AA6's DLC case does evoke a bit of a feeling of a victory lap - there's a sense of the idea that they know they can't keep doing this forever. With any luck we'll get some more Ace Attorney adventures, though. But if we don't, I'll be glad that they went out on a high note, climbing back to the peak that they reached in the first three games. I couldn't ask for more.

KamikazePotato posted...

When I was making my 'Favorite Stories in Fiction' topic, someone asked me if I'd played Night in the Woods. I said no, but that I'd heard good things, but was also hesitant to try it because of the effect it might have on my mental state. They then told me 'yeah don't play NitW'. I don't think I've ever seen a game where its most ardent supporters warn people not to play it.

Yeah, I don't really know what more to add. It isn't for everyone, and i think that anyone who really loved the game and absorbed its messages and themes would intuitively get that. It's a little bit of a shame, because honestly a lot of the game is really silly and feel-good, but yeah the heavy stuff is weighty. I don't know - all I can say is that not every game is everyone's cup of tea just because I loved it, but it is my personal list