I’d hoped to have my GOTY list and descriptions for my top ten games up sooner, but I had numerous life events that continued to pull me away from settling on my list and honing down my thoughts on each game. Unfortunately my summary of each game will be scattershot as I want to get this done ASAP. I wish I could put forth better effort on my list but there are more pressing matters to attend to. Nonetheless, I hope my list with its games and summaries of each are satisfactory to read about.
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#10 Momentum Platforming: The bulk of what made Pepper Grinder enjoyable is its momentum platforming. A mixture of well designed platforming levels and the basic chainsaw mechanic makes traversing every level enjoyable, particularly the areas where you are sawing through the ground/sea areas. While I ran into numerous incidents where controlling through those underground levels was tough because of the constant momentum and needing some tight controls with the sticks, none of the platforming the game’s puts forth warranted too much difficulty or precision (a la Super Meat Boy). Mixed Bag on Robot Controls and Boss Fights: What ultimately frustrated me with this game were the areas where you were navigating machinery and the boss fights. The machinery, particularly the large robot sections, felt mediocre to traverse compared to just traveling through the levels normally. You’re mainly just crushing hordes of enemies and buildings to get to the next area. The boss fights, while novel in that you’re constantly on the move, tend to be very frustrating to play through as the areas you’re moving around are quite small and sometimes the movements you need the game can’t quite give it to you. The final boss battle took me a lot longer to defeat than it should. Excellent Presentation: I love the pixelated art and the animation appears to be smooth throughout the game. I really enjoyed the variety of the soundtrack where almost every song set the scene for each level and many of them are jams.
#09 Excellent Bending of the Rules of Poker: It goes without saying that Balatro does an excellent job of bending the basic rules of poker with its scoring, particularly with its joker mechanic and manipulating the types of cards. Constantly defeating antes by aiming for playing certain types of hands that mesh well with the jokers acquired and the constant changing of what your deck contains, if it’s all just one digit, all one suit, etc. Depending on how far you are progressing, the shifting of jokers and cars creates an impressive mix of madness and hence a part of its impressive appeal. Quite Not in the Right Mindset: I am definitely down on what Balatro is putting down and appreciate how it completely spun a rigid, old time card game and enjoyed my time with the game, I just can’t quite get my head adjusted enough to enjoy it to the fullest. There’s a ton of RNG depending on what jokers you get along the way and depending on the deck type and jokers, it feels like you have to funnel your hands down to a science and I haven’t quite been able to bend my head to get to that point. I have won a few base hands at their base difficulty but haven’t progressed any farther than that at this point. I still enjoy it enough to go back to it once in a while but not so much where it’s one of those comfort, time sink games that many others have had with this game.
#08 Excellent Bones: The developers of Metal Slug Tactics produced a pretty solid tactics game in their attempt to implement the franchise’s frantic action origins within the context of a traditional, grid, turn-based tactics genre. The prioritization of maximizing your movement to build adrenaline to employ special actions and to minimize damage along with its neat sync mechanic that gives it that tactics juice. The roguelike elements are done well enough where full campaign runs don’t take too long to complete and they throw in enough stuff around the tactics to maintain its engagement. Sloppy Execution: There’s two main areas where the game hurts itself a ton. Initially, there were a number of bugs that, while not gaming breaking, were very annoying to deal with over the course of a run. The main bugs that I initially encountered were the constant overlapping music tracks and the instances of one of the player units disappearing after a death and revival but I believe these issues have been resolved through a recent patch. The other area where it’s tied in with the game is its terrible menu layout and navigation and the odd uses of button prompts and the inability to remap them. It’s simply a headache just to navigate through all the menus (game and gameplay/battle) and the numerous different button prompts to select during the battle menus is perplexing even if you get used to it after numerous runs. Potential: I can foresee a sequel where they can clean up the menu and button interface, ditch the roguelike run and craft a dedicated campaign that I can see Metal Slug Tactics 2 a better realization of itself.
#07 Fun Trial by Fire Gameplay: It took me a number of runs and retries on the first two courses to get a feel on how to car the speed and car physics, but once you do then it’s a matter of you tackling the course at hand. The game simply asks you to place the best time on the course, the combination of what turns and how hard to approach each turn plus some unexpected obstacles thrown along the course makes it a fun, repeatable, trial by fire racing game. Not only do the courses throw a few loops, but the three separate car classes also present a fresh set of challenges and each one has differing characteristics, particularly speed over the course and engaging off drifts. Unfortunate Gameplay Moments Many times you’ll have a good run going and then all of a sudden there is a reaction to your action that’s unexpected and forces you to restart your run. They’re not aggravating to a point where you chuck your controller in a rage but those instances do make attempting runs frustrating, such as exiting off a drift or when you hit an object at a certain angle and you suddenly veer off course. The thrill of learning the course, dealing with the changing course conditions and knowing what you can do with the car is still there, it’s just running into these issues on a frequent basis hampers the enjoyment factor a bit. Sega Saturn, Ska, Short: The other massive appeals to this game is its Sega Saturn Sega Rally presentation and sky soundtrack. The developers mostly nailed the look of its game to mimic Sega Rally Championship on the Saturn and the infectious ska soundtracks adds to the joy of gunning for that perfect rally run. Sadly at only ten tracks and three car classes, players who stick with it can quickly finish the game in a few hours.
#06 [WARNING: As of 15 September 2025, it has come to light that the developer's director of this game has come out to be one of those, if you catch my drift.] Surprising Amount of Content: Victory Heat Rally hits on all the basic areas for me: colorful art, energetic soundtrack, tight turning controls and good sense of speed. I was surprised to encounter the amount of content packed into this game. The single player championship contains 12 cups of gradually rising difficulty with four varying courses for each cup. Every cup also has two interesting mini-games to test your speed and drifting meddle and a boss battle to unlock that driver to be playable. Mostly Excellent Racing with Neat Mini-Games: I liken Victory Heat Rally’s racing to a tightly packaged, item free, Mario Kart 8 150-200cc type of racing. The emphasis is on speed and knowing how to drift throughout the game’s short and windy courses. I also like the game mixing in rally races so that not every single race is purely circuit based. The mini-games add in more content and toward the end, test your drifting skills in getting golds at those events. The driver battles emulate Tokyo Xtreme Racer where the farther ahead you are, the more damage they take on their health bar until it’s fully depleted. Dry Racing: The main gripe with this game is that all of its courses have one flavor, they’re very short and windy. A few of the rally races eschew some of the windy flavor but even those races are done within two minutes. There’s no tracks that either give you time to breathe a bit or are lengthy enough to be more of an endurance to throw a different challenge. The racing is still enjoyable and the challenges get tense toward the end but it’s mainly just racing and while that’s all good, I wish there was more to it than having these twisty short races that take two minutes to finish.
#05 Love the Continuity Between the Mini-Games: I haven’t played all of the mini-games in UFO 50, but I love how there’s an underlying story and many strands of continuity and reused assets found throughout the mini-games I do play. It’s a neat take by the developers to have UFO 50 centered around a “console” with games in chronological order and each game having its own title card and credits to particular employees. The dedication to craft such a detail into all 50 mini games is very commendable for the developers to undertake for this product. Dedicated to a Certain Era, To a Intended Fault: I also laud the developers for replicating playing those games of that era to a tee. Not only do they get the technical aspects with the 8-bit graphics, appropriate music and sound effects, and a certain feel of control of your actions in every mini-game. Many games that require the quick input responsiveness do get it to make those mini-games palatable to play, the others the movements are just off to emulate the frustrations of playing those certain games. To the devs credit, from what I read no mini-game is bad to a point where it’s completely unplayable to avoid that particular part of gaming of that era. Hits and Misses: The mini-games that I truly enjoy playing I could see them pluck and have it be a dedicated full game if they were able to. The others are nice curiosities that touch upon the roughness of developing certain types of genres of that era. Not all 50 games are hits and that may be part of the point as there’s an underlying thread of the telling a story of a fictional developer of their output, rise and fall. Nonetheless the ones that are worth playing seem to outweigh the not quite fun ones.
#04 Flexing the Rigid Turn Based Tactics Combat - I love how Tactical Breach Wizards brings a new dimension to the all too familiar grid based tactics combat. Though player and enemy’s area of movement may have some grid basis, many attacks don’t follow the same convention. I love the variety of attacking options both the player can employ with the set cast of characters along with enemies who throw unique attacks of their own. The most enjoyable aspect of battle is being able to knock enemies off the stage and combining character attacks to defeat enemies in a turn. Excellent Story, Dialogue, Presentation: Adding to the game’s excellent tactics combat is its surprisingly well written story with the main crew along with well written dialogue and a fun presentation with it’s great use of fonts all over the game. I also love the pin and thread poster board to summarize what’s going on with the story after a certain point of each act. Most of the game’s mood is on the funny side but it handles its serious topics with tact that doesn’t cause any conflicts in trying to mix between the two emotions. Slow Pacing and Annoying Battles By End of Game: My biggest gripe against Tactical Breach Wizards was its story and mission pacing and battle conditions on the final stretch of the game felt too slow, stretched out. I still enjoyed the story and playing through the missions structured around it, it was much to chew through and while the battle conditions were interesting, their execution made it tougher and longer than it seemed. Lest I forget the final boss battle with that particular gimmick.
#03 Link to the Past Zelda in Twin Stick Shooter Form: In hindsight, it’s almost surreal we never got an implementation of a twin stick plane shooter into a Zelda adventure setting. Not only does Minishoot’ Adventures tackles that premise, it executes on that premise with flying colors. The typical Zelda adventure quirks are there, a main world with main dungeons, numerous smaller dungeons with tons of secrets, and acquisitions of new items and skills. The ship feels good to control and with its branching upgrading skill trees makes traversing and battling a constant joy throughout. Excellent Execution: This game nails the same satisfaction of what great adventure games does, rarely a dull or frustrating moment as you explore the entire world progressing through the story beats or off the beaten path of its numerous side ventures. Every battle, from gunning through the usual foes as you make your way from one area to another, all the way to the big boss battles are always engaging encounters. Plus there’s lots to dig into if you’re really into what Minishoot’ Adventures is putting down as there’s tons to go after even if you initially mainline. No Dungeon Maps, Few Hard to Spot Secrets: The only aspect that mars Minishoot’s ceiling is its lack of dungeon maps and a few secrets that were hard to spot or decipher how to accomplish. The lack of maps in all dungeons makes it frustrating for players who know there’s something there they haven’t gotten yet, but always run into a wall on where within the dungeon they should be at to get that dungeon marked off. There were also a few secrets that were hard to spot due to its unintentional camouflage with its surroundings or you see the secret but unsure on how to get to it. They made my progress of attaining 100% item collection longer than it should but I managed to tough it out and earned my achievement with minimal outside assistance.
#02 Surprisingly Excellent Characters and Storytelling: I was caught off guard on how well the characters, story and how it unfolded during my entire playtime of Crow Country. It starts off with a woman named Mara going to Crow Country to unravel a mystery. You get to learn more about Crow Country and its mysterious past through reading employee notes and a few encounters with other characters. Though the mystery gets resolved all too quickly by the end, I found myself engaged enough with it wanting to know what happened and what’s to come. Great Presentation, Great Puzzles, Compact Package: I adore the PS1-esque presentation Crow Country goes for, emulating the look and atmosphere of horror games back then with a modern shine. As small an area as Crow Country is overall, the place is packed full of puzzles that can be resolved quickly in reviewing over the notes you read and compile though there’s a couple toward the end that the notes are vague that I needed to get outside assistance for. I also like that there’s a free hint system if you’re ever stuck trying to get to the next story puzzle to progress. Crow Country’s small area is a major benefit of knowing the map quickly to navigate and backtracking is rarely an annoyance. The minimal sound effects and music are also well done and wraps up the game’s small and tight package. Combat and Camera: The biggest qualm players will encounter is its combat. It took me some time to get used to tank-era gun combat but after toughing out a couple of encounters against the game’s various zombies, I grew accustomed to how to get myself some space, aim, and shoot. But I can foresee many folks being frustrated over not being mobile enough to shoot and constantly tooling over the sticks to aim before even shooting a bullet. Combined with the combat issues is its camera angles. While you can always move it around but at times of intense combat the camera angle you may get during an encounter puts you at disadvantage at times. Just like other horror games, combat is optional and you can choose to clear out enemies at another time.
#01 Why It’s My #1 - The Narration: When the narration of a story really drives what it wants to deliver, you feel it. No matter which plot point the game wants to touch upon in its twelve chapters, it does it with such focus that in spite of the large amount of character interactions and information to digest, it never feels bloated or tangential. What starts off as an intense scene of the Watcher shoving a shiv through the AllMother spirals all around to explore the AllMother’s past, the original Sister Sin, the AllMather’s past with her parents and friend and ends up being an exploration of numerous human group concepts and emotions. While the developers honed in on those themes based on two recent large mass human events, by the end you feel you can pick up on what they’re putting down. Numerous Topics Hits Close to Home: There’s a number of topics that 1000xRESIST touches upon that personally hits close to home. The aspects of the dysfunctional Asian family and generational divide hit the hardest as I’m still dealing with both of those threads to this day and it’s been a bit reassuring that the developers whether it’s through their own experiences or not were able to confidently present that front and center. The game also doesn’t shy away from politics as they constantly refer back to the massive Hong Kong protests when citizens tried their best to have their rights and freedom recognized against a harsh regime. Considering the recent political landscape in the United States, the fight to maintain your rights while maintaining your sanity throughout it all. They weren't afraid to make their statements bare and I connected with that immediately. Lackluster Gameplay, Maps and Navigation: The game is largely a story driven affair and ideally shouldn’t have any hiccups with its gameplay, but this is probably the area where it could deter folks from being engaged to what the game wants to tell. In the center hub, while there’s a map, it’s far from being helpful in guiding the player to the Sister’s offices and other small areas and the waypoints to help you get to them made it even more confusing to navigate around the area. The areas where you’re warping from one node to another is another flaw where sometimes the node path is crooked enough where it breaks you away on where you need to go. The only gameplay mechanic I enjoyed a bit is the shifting of days that changes the setting around you to solve a couple of puzzles.