Games catch my attention from a variety of avenues, whether I hear about them through word of mouth, get recommended by a friend or streamer I like, or catch a glimpse of them in a showcase.
Now, I’m a man of hyperfixations; when something enters my metaphorical crosshairs, it won’t leave until my curiosity has been satisfied. This has led me to try out all kinds of interesting, occasionally experimental games over the years, simply because I liked their vibe or core gameplay mechanics.
10 Best Steam Games We All Want On Console
Do these really need to be PC exclusive?
Of course, not everyone plays games based on vibes, and as a result of that, many games that I personally think are great don’t get much in the way of attention. Even if I personally love them, if you check the current concurrent player counts, there’s virtually no interest.
Frankly, I don’t think that’s fair, so if you’ll pardon my self-indulgence, I’d like to share with you some excellent games that few, if any, other people are currently as obsessed with.
The following games all have single-digit concurrent player counts at the time of writing, according to SteamDB. If you check later, and they’re higher, we’ll call that mission accomplished.
10Arzette: The Jewel Of Faramore
Like A CD-I Game That Doesn’t Stink
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
If you used YouTube at all during the mid-to-late 2000s, you’re probably familiar with the concept of YouTube Poop. If you’re familiar with YouTube Poop, you’re familiar with the hilariously bad Legend of Zelda games that were released for the Phillips CD-I in 1993.
Despite how objectively bad those games are to play, their weird cutscenes ensured their enduring legacy through the ages, to the point that one group of devs decided to make a new game in their image. Except it’s, against all odds, good.
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is an action platformer with pseudo-Metroidvania elements cast in the slightly off-kilter mold of those nefarious CD-I games.
The gameplay is similar to those games, except that everything’s been properly balanced and formatted to be played by normal human beings. No more unnecessarily detailed levels, no more weird hitboxes,no more quasi-useful items; it’s all a much more playable experience.
Coupled with this is a series of hand-animated cutscenes that echo that same lovably cheap and weird vibe of the CD-I games, albeit more intentionally. I always looked forward to interacting with every new NPC, because I knew a wealth of funny dialogue and bizarre proportions was right around the corner.
9Battle Chef Brigade
Cooking Is Basically A Puzzle
Battle Chef Brigade
I don’t play casual puzzle games like Tetris very often, just because I don’t really have the skillset for that kind of piece-moving foresight.
However, if there’s one way to get me interested in those kinds of puzzle games, it’s combining them with another genre. Thus, we have Battle Chef Brigade, a hybrid action platform and match-three puzzler.
Battle Chef Brigade has you scavenging the nearby wilderness for monsters to slaughter as ingredients, then carting them back to the kitchen to cook them as a match-three game. It’s a good premise for casual play, though it also has a surprisingly dense story campaign with minigames and escalating, challenging mechanics.
Battle Chef Brigade is what I like to call a very “snappy” game. Individually, the monster-hunting and puzzle-spinning would seem kind of slow-paced, but by putting them together and having you engage with both under duress, the whole experience feels a lot more cohesive and fun.
Also, you don’t need to know how to actually cook to play it, which is nice for me.
8Dungeon Munchies
Weaponized Gastronomy
Dungeon Munchies
Speaking ofgames about cooking, Dungeon Munchies (not to be confused with Dungeon Meshi) is one of those bizarre games that seemingly crossed my desk out of nowhere one day.
I don’t recall if anyone recommended it to me or if I saw it somewhere; it just sort of appeared in my life while it was still in early access. I’m glad it did, though, because I can safely say I’ve never played another game like it.
Dungeon Munchies is a mild Metroidvania with a big emphasis on resource gathering. The monsters you kill and the wild crops you find can be turned into both ability-enhancing dishes and multiple kinds of weapons.
The crafting catalogues for this game are, in a word, gigantic, and the synergies you can accomplish by mixing abilities and weapons are seemingly infinite. It’s kind of like a roguelite without the do-it-again bit.
It’s also a surprisingly heartfelt game, with both hilarious and emotional moments in abundance. You wouldn’t think a game about a ghost girl in a chef’s hat could give you those existential feels, but life is strange like that sometimes.
7Gori: Cuddly Carnage
The Best Parts Of Games Past
Gori: Cuddly Carnage
The early 2000s were home to a variety of off-kilter action games. The industry was going through puberty, and there was a lot of gleeful violence and irreverent humor. If you ever feel nostalgic for that particular era of gaming but can’t or don’t want to play old games, you might just enjoy Gori: Cuddly Carnage.
This game is just delightfully shameless in its style and presentation, placing you in the role of a cute little kitty on a bladed hoverboard, dismembering bloodthirsty unicorn plushies in a shower of multicolored gore. It’s the kind of game that knows exactly what it is and what it’s trying to do, and honestly? I respect it.
Of course, it helps that the combat is actually fun. Your hoverboard gives you a high degree of mobility and verticality, and your attacks all come out hard and fast. If you enjoy games where half the fun is racking up the biggest combo counter possible, you’ll have a grand ol’ time with Gori: Cuddly Carnage.
6Headlander
Headlander
Back in college, Double Fine was one of my favorite developers. Not only did they make some of my favorite games, like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend,but they were tinkering with nifty, experimental takes on some established conventions and dramas.
One of the most unsung products of those efforts wasHeadlander, a game that positively oozes retro sci-fi charm.
Headlander is a Metroidvania game where your primary resource is headless robot bodies. Since you’re just a disembodied flying head yourself, you can plug into any unused body and use its abilities for combat or traversal. Or you can just plug yourself into a robot dog and bark at people, whatever.
The kitschy aesthetic of the game, with its orange chairs and neon lights, was what originally drew me in, but in addition to that, it’s got some surprisingly crafty puzzles for a game of this type.
It’s not always as simple as “find body, bring here,” you often need to navigate around mazes and obstacles to even get to the right body, then figure out how to get it back with reduced mobility.
5Chroma Squad
Chroma Squad
One of my earliest loves in pop culture was Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, as well as its many subsequent sequel series. I love practical effects and stunt combat, which Power Rangers was always chock-full of.
If you’re an old-school or newcomer fan of Power Rangers, or the tokusatsu genre as a whole, you’ll get a kick out of the stunt fighting TV simulator,Chroma Squad.
Can We Get a Power Rangers Game That’s NOT Mighty Morphin, Please?
Go Go (Another) Power Rangers (Team)
Chroma Squad is both a tactical RPG and a business management sim. When the cameras aren’t rolling, you need to assemble your team of actors to portray teens with attitude, secure advertising deals, and raid the hardware store clearance bin for costume and prop materials.
When it’s time to film an episode, your ranger team will use their teamwork abilities to dash and bash rubber monsters across the field.
I’m not very good at tactical RPGs, and don’t play them very often, but I still adore Chroma Squad. Being based on something I like helps, but it’s also a very accessible game in general, good for those new to the genre.
4The Wonderful 101: Remastered
They Went To The Trouble Of Remastering It
The Wonderful 101: Remastered
Speaking of Power Rangers, if you’ve followed the works of former Platinum director Hideki Kamiya at all, you know the man is a die-hard fan of tokusatsu.
One of the first non-Resident Evil or Devil May Cry games he directed was the Kamen Rider-inspired Viewtiful Joe, so you know the man has taste when it comes to dudes whaling on rubber-suited monsters. Out of all his works, none made that love clearer thanThe Wonderful 101.
Originally a somewhat ill-advised release for the Wii U, The Wonderful 101 returned to modern platforms in 2020 as a crowdfunded remaster, which I contributed to. Thank you very much.
It’s a character-action game like most of Platinum’s creations, but with a little pinch of Pikmin mixed in. By recruiting heroes and rescuing civilians, you increase your squad size, allowing you to link up into bigger, stronger constructs for pummeling baddies.
Wonderful 101 is a showcase of what Platinum can do with minimal restraints. It’s absolutely bonkers the whole way through, full of lovably exaggerated characters, not to mention some of themost exciting QTEsin the history of gaming.
3The Magic Circle
The Meta Impact Of Development Hell
The Magic Circle
When you hear abouta game being in development hell, it’s kind of hard to conceptualize. Surely, it shouldn’t be that difficult to make the game, right?
Well,it isthat difficult, especially when your dev team is full of people who absolutely hate each other’s guts. This is the lesson I learned by playing The Magic Circle.
The premise of The Magic Circle is that you’re a bug tester for a game that’s been trapped in development hell for nearly two decades, and one of its NPCs is officially tired of it.
He contracts you to destroy the game from the inside so he doesn’t have to endure the devs’ endless bickering over the half-finished world anymore. This game’s story and voice acting are some of its biggest highlights, with some excellent performances by James Urbaniak and Ashly Burch, to name a couple.
Gameplay-wise, it’s got a kind of emergent puzzle gameplay that has you tinkering with the properties of objects and NPCs by assigning modifying functions. I found it incredibly satisfying to solve puzzles with what felt like wholly unique solutions, not to mention faffing about with the system and turning a rock into a pet or something.
2Later Alligator
Assassination Has Never Been So Goofy
Later Alligator
I find that the older I get, the more I appreciate goofy,comfy visual novels. It’s nice sometimes to play a game that doesn’t expect laser precision out of you, and it’s even nicer when said game is both delightfully creative and absolutely hilarious. Two of my favorite cute and goofy games happen to involve anthropomorphic alligators, and one of them is Later Alligator.
This game is ostensibly supposed to be a mystery, wherein you try to figure out who among your alligator friend Pat’s family ordered a hit taken out on him.
In practice, it’s just a sequence of very silly mini-games and funny character interactions. Both the writing and animation are top shelf in this game, which makes sense, as the studio that made it also made one of my favorite web series, Baman Piderman.
Also, as a born-and-raised northeasterner, I love the game’s pastiche of New York City. Filled with alligators though it may be, it’s still amusingly relatable, both in its depiction of quiet city streets and lovably weird extended families.
1Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse
The Freelance Police’s Biggest Adventure
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered
In my youth, I gotwayinto point-and-click adventure games, thanks largely to Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, Telltale’s adaptation of Homestar Runner.
Following that thread, I became a big fan of theirepisodic series of Sam & Max games, getting on the bandwagon right before the third season, The Devil’s Playhouse.
All three seasons of Telltale’s Sam & Max games have gotten the remaster treatment by Skunkape Games, but the first one doesn’t qualify for this list, and the second one is better if you played the first. Thus, we settle on Devil’s Playhouse, which is just as well, as it’s the most ambitious Sam & Max game to date, save for the VR game I can’t play.
Devil’s Playhouse has a perfect blend of hilarious character writing, multifaceted puzzle design, and some surprisingly twisty story beats. Despite being a very silly game overall, I still get a little choked up at the ending, both for a big emotional beat and because we haven’t had any new Sam & Max games in years.
