25 Games to Know Me

26 September 2023

This post was originally made on Cohost.

Made with Topsters 3

These aren't in any particular order, beyond them coming to me and a bit of alphabetical influence from looking through my steam favs. I'm going to elaborate on each of them below the cut.

• Space Funeral "You feel better, but not much." This game feels melancholy in a deeply relatable way. Sometimes the world is fucked up and fixing it actually makes it worse.
• MYST "I know my apprehensions may never be allayed..." It's fucking MYST.
• Yuppie Psycho Okay so the thing you need to understand about me is that Brian Pasternack is basically the perfect anxiety boy to me. This little scrimblo cares only about one thing: Being a good boy at his first day at his big new job. It's not his fault that he walks into a cursed haunting. But he's trying really hard. I have a plushy of him. He's a good boy. Possibly the goodest boy.
• Yume Nikki This is one of the foundational Dream Diary games, the other also being on this list, and is probably one of the eeriest melancholy games ever made. You can also apparently play it in a browser with friends now?? That's pretty cool.
  cw

  it does however end in suicide, so be careful with that.
• LSD: Dream Emulator This is the other foundational Dream Diary game lol. One of the more fascination Playstation games, and also a humongous influence on walking sims.
• Day of the Tentacle "Yesterday!!" Probably the greatest comedy point-and-click game of all time.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Whether you're playing the original or the remake on switch, this is my favorite Zelda game. I love how it approaches:
  spoilers

  dreams, temporality of existence, and memory.
• DOOM It's fucking doom. One of the most expanded and modded FPS games in history. Seriously, check out some gzDoom mods and have a great time.
• Destiny 2 Play Time: 579 hours. (On Steam. I started playing it back when they were at Blizzard)
• The Witness Heartbreaking: The worst person you know made a great game.
• Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door I do not exagerate when I say this is my favorite GameCube game. I've beaten it... three times? It's an incredible RPG with fun characters and a whole hell of a lot of heart, wrapped up in stagecraft and theatrics that really sell the whole thing. Have you ever wanted to play a papercraft diorama videogame which is also a nine-part Epic? Well, here you go! And finally somebody talked some sense into Nintendo because they are finally re-releasing it.
• Cave Story Sometimes when you're a teenager you find a weird japanese indie game that gives you feelings you don't entirely know how to navigate and may be partly why you had a rabbit fursona for like a decade. I can't get into much more here but last time I talked about Cave Story with my gf I ended up crying through a good portion of the conversation just because of how much it means to me. I dunno, good game!
• Lisa: The Painful RPG Probably the most earnestly harrowing game exploring cycles of violence ever written, the LISA games thoroughly and frankly depict how sincerely horrid and awful trauma is, how it makes us into our worst selves, and how the effort to do better takes consistent, constant effort. It's hard to play. Enormous amount of content warnings are needed. Despite its odd sense of humour which may potentially make it look like an unnecessarily brutal and crass shock game (which many of the fan games unforunately are), it's heartening to know that the developer claims to be inspired by learning about the trauma people in his life went through, and wanting to write about those horrors very frankly.
• Disco Elysium It's fucking Disco Elysium.
• Fallout: New Vegas Regrettably I am occasionally a stereotypical trans woman.
• Echo of the Wilds A really calming little gem about the complexity of confronting our own problems, the way we repeatedly go up against them, and how we need to listen to ourselves. It resonates on a lot of my own feelings about needing to take breaks and recover from burnout. It also had seven years of updates from the developer, slowly improving it until it became its current very-playable and very smooth iteration, which is itself very impressive.
• Ao Oni A bunch of kids go into a spooky house and a big scary monster chases / kills them. Except it's an RPG Maker game, not a chasey first person nonsense game. Honestly a cornerstone of RPG Maker games even if it's rather goofy at times. Also has a bunch of adaptations and spin-offs, including a short anime which was honestly pretty funny.
• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs IMO the best Amnesia game and also the best game from The Chinese Room. We'll see if that changes, but this is one of my favorite games about the horrors of capitalism.
• Silent Hill 3 Being a teenage girl sucks yo.
• Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days The only game to feel like you're playing LiveLeak footage, and every bit as grimy and distasteful. Incredibly game. Jacob Geller and Blake Hester did a great podcast about it.
• Dicey Dungeons A saturday morning cartoon roguelike! Incredibly fun and charming.
• Barrow Hill A fantastic research / archaeology point-and-click game with strong horror vibes. @hthrflwrs did a great writeup about it and its sequel.
• The Lost Crown Another game like the above, with strong development ties and similar vibes.
• Hotel Dusk: Room 215 A mystery game with a lot of really clever usage of the Nintendo DS, presented in a way which makes you really invested in the writing and characters, pushing you to pay attention to suspects emotions and slowly unravel the melancholic tragedy of the hotel.
• Iji Yeah.