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(This ranking is based on the original game, but the 2015 expansion "Road to Gehenna" is excellent and turns the base game's biggest weakness into a strength, with a more focused and better-written narrative delivered in an interesting and unique way.)
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Going back to Dark Souls 1 recently, the difference in polish between the two games is startling. I almost never had a bad-camera moment in Dark Souls 2. The UI is great. Soul grinding is a much smaller part of the experience. Infusions are a great system. I could go on. So it's a shame that DS 2, while a very fun refinement of the very fun game that preceded it, keeps the Dark Souls Express rolling farther and farther away from Demon's Souls Station, in both tone and level design. Dark fantasy is still the mode here, but the fiction of Dark Souls 1 distinguished itself from Demon's Souls by emphasizing the "fantasy" part - more magic and crystals, less oppressive melancholy. The tonal gap between DS 1 and DS 2 is smaller by comparison, but the mystical hokum and tongue-in-cheek absurdity are certainly more common in DS 2. These things worked in the first game because they contrasted nicely with the surrounding world; here, they begin to dilute the fiction and nudge it closer to stock fantasy. (text in progress)
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It had been a while since I was wrapped up in "cracking the code" of a game, before playing this. I still haven't succeeded with PA, despite some long nights with it. My current record is something like 5 floors complete, and unlike the best tough games, I find it easy to blame poor design and bugs for some of my failures. Thankfully those flaws also enabled some of my best runs, and those good runs were still frickin' cool even if skill was a minimal factor in them.
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A stripped-down take on the Metroid formula that you might call "bite-sized". The brevity works in Xeodrifter's favor, both to mitigate the repetition (SPOILER: all the bosses are the same guy, he just gets stronger) and to give you just enough time to play around with your limited weapons and abilities before they get stale. Its sharp level design, good controls, and charming visuals make it inviting to play while it lasts, and hard to get exasperated with.
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This was my Dungeons of Dredmor. Random grids, random consumables with weird effects, enemies move when you do, stand near them and trade blows until someone dies, etc. The game's USP, if you will (but you really shouldn't) is that you get all your equipment from the hub room you're sent back to after you die, by feeding currency into a random loot generator machine. You can store things in the hub, but whatever you bring into the actual levels is lost when you die. That's a fun concept and makes things interesting each time, but SP's real strength is its overall solid-ness and pleasing presentation. And the fact that I can say all this about a game built for tablets, not having touched the PC release, is cool.
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A bite-sized horror game that is disturbing and ambiguous, both to just the right degrees.
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So a baseball sim, especially one that's mainly played through spreadsheets, should strive to do one thing above all others, and that is "simulate baseball". This game does that kinda badly. In my (admittedly limited) experience of watching real games, the sort of hijinks OOTP routinely gets up to - multiple walks per inning by relief pitchers, average/bad runners going from first to third on doubles, runners scoring from second on singles (or errors!) with no throw home, 4-5 run innings (against ace starters), consecutive 3+ run innings - are way less common in actual baseball. Of course, my favorite team does happen to prioritize pitching and defense, so maybe a Twins fan would have the opposite opinion of this game's accuracy. Anyway, I like making fake trades and fake lineups, even when the resultant box scores make it seem pointless sometimes. And there are like 150 silly facial hair options you can choose for the little auto-generated player portraits, which btw are instantly recognizable as coming from the same nightmare face-generating middleware Oblivion had. The game's okay, whatever.
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Yeah this isn't a great game. It's just cute and pleasant to kill time with, watching numbers get higher until you can get the next tiny cigar shop or bar or not-a-strip-club. I never made a microtransaction in it either, except for the transaction of: watch a terrible 1-minute ad for a slot machine app <-> small reward. Which I did a few too many times.
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