Top 25 Games Honorable Mentions

Well, here are some honorable mentions that may or may not make it to the Top 25 if only I were to actually play them to completion, or if I just feel like it at some point, but well, what is done is done!

• Faster Than Light
• Balatro
• Slice & Dice
• Lumines
• Into The Breach
• Ori and The Blind Forest
• Citizen Sleeper
• Super Mario Bros Wonder
• Parasite Eve
• Metroid Zero Mission
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Terranigma
• Final thoughts

Faster Than Light

The only issue this game has for me, is that there is no Switch or mobile version for it.

In FTL, you control a Federation ship, escaping from the hands of some sort of Rebellion. You hold key information that will give you the upper hand, and are on your way back to the base.

By jumping from beacon to beacon, you’ll face countless threats, solar flares, nebulas, and asteroid fields. You will battle pirates, rebel scouts and other alien ships, trying to survive and manage your limited resources. The battle system is simple, but with lots of depth. It plays in real time, but the game lets you pause at will to make choices, turning it into a bit of a turn-based affair.

Honestly, I think I just need to play it more, it is extremely well designed and deep, and there are so many systems and ships you get to drive and manage, it is one of those that could be your only game ever, and you would have a happy (or stressful) life.

Balatro

This is one of the recent games here, it came out earlier in 2024 and it has proven to be quite addictive. I am not as crazy as others on it, but I decided to put it here just because it’s beautifully simplistic in its gameplay and synergies, but it manages to be much deeper than one might originally think. Deck builders are a genre I haven’t explored much, other than this one and Marvel Snap, which is also a fantastic game on its own.

I still have not won a match of Balatro, I’ve gotten close to this day, maybe once the stars align, it will click, and I will be hooked, and this will jump to the top.

Slice & Dice

However, unlike Balatro, this game is new to me, and I have played it for 18 hours this week alone. I’ll just quote what I said two posts ago:

Slice & Dice is way too dangerous. It’s a roguelite where you control a party of characters, all of them represented by dice, each side does something like attack, heal, or shield. There are also status effects, like poison, losing 1 hp per turn, stone, which makes one side of the dice unusable, or pain, where you get damage back when you hit an enemy.

Each turn you roll the dice, and you can lock the ones with values you want, and roll the rest again twice more. The enemies are also dice, and will have their own turns and do a variety of attacks as well.

– A day of videogames

Maybe it’s just the shiny new feeling speaking, but I don’t think I am ever removing this game from my phone. Maybe buying Balatro on my phone would overtake it? I don’t want to test that theory though.

Lumines

This is a game that kind of looks like Tetris and kind of plays like Tetris, but it is not Tetris at all. Lumines is a great game where the main objective is to form 2x2 squares, which can be combined to bigger sizes, they’ll get swooshed away and make space for more squares to come, by a bar that scans the screen from left to right in in a loop.

All of this is done to the rythm of the music playing in different stages, all with different tempos and themes. The music in some stages is simply incredible, and sometimes it’s just a bunch of computer sounds that don’t sound as nice.

Regardless, the gameplay itself is extremely satisfying, you can empty the whole screen in one fell swoop if you pay attention to the square placement and such, and it is a very great game that puts you into the zone. The people who worked on this game eventually did Tetris Effect as well, but I have not had the chance to play that one.

I only wanted to choose one “don’t think just get in the zone” game, and Ridge Racer 2 won.

Into The Breach

When I started Into The Breach, I hadn’t played a lot of tactics/strategy RPGs, and a roguelite at that? Today, I have played Fire Emblem, Triangle Strategy and The Hundred Line, and yet, ITB stands out from them when it comes to raw gameplay.

If Lumines gets me into the zone where I just focus and flow with the music and gameplay, Into The Breach will make my head actually think about every little choice and step I take, to face the challenges found here. The game design here is simply incredible.

In this game you get to control three mecha robots, and defend the cities from the Vek, giant insectoid creatures that come from the underground. The cool thing about this is that you get to know exactly what moves the enemies will do, which makes it so you can technically win every encounter in a single try if you take your time and make the right choices.

I played it for a while on my laptop, but I ended up buying it on Switch as well because it really was that good, I have gotten to the final island a couple times, but I still don’t win a run. Once I do and the game opens up even more, this one has a chance to rank up.

Ori and The Blind Forest

This was quite a surprise for me last year. A Metroidvania where you bring a forest back to life, to its former glory, following a charming creature and jumping around in different biomes, waking up the forest and getting rid of whatever curses it’s under.

This game surprised me with its buttery-smooth gameplay and feel at every moment, as well as the wonderful level design and the simply incredible power-us, one of which is one if not the most satisfying platforming mechanic of all time.

If nostalgia/relevance wasn’t a thing, this would be above Aria of Sorrow. When it comes to pure platforming and fluidity, this is better than Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

The story is also rather good, told in a few lines of dialogue that make it feel almost like a fairy tale, it can be quite thought provoking at times as well. It is just a really well done piece of art.

Citizen Sleeper

This was a very neat modern role-playing indie game where you play as a Sleeper—a robotic body emulating someone’s conscience—who escaped from the corporation that built them, trying to survive life day by day, making choices with limited time and energy to spare.

It is a challenging future in a space station far away from everything. your choices lead to different events and different endings that can provide different outlooks on life both in the game and in the real world.

It was quite a unique experience, and I still owe it another replay to see more of it. And the sequel for it is already out too, which it’s apparently great too, but hasn’t had the impact of the first, from what I’ve seen.

Super Mario Bros Wonder

This game is maybe the epitome of 2D Mario, except maybe for something like Super Mario World. However, this is the one that I’ve actually completed from start to finish (even if I didn’t 100% it or did the bonus leves just yet).

A great solo or multiplayer experience, I played half of it with friends and family, leading to lots of fun and chaos. But when playing solo, the online features of this game managed to keep it interesting and to help me get away from tough situations, thanks to the online cooperation the game has.

Obviously, the physics and gameplay of a Mario game are pretty much perfect at this point, and the new addition of this game, the Wonder seeds and its psychodelic effects on the levels and everything around you, were super fun and kind of mind-blowing. Not all of them are great, but none of it is bad, and they spice up the levels quite a bit.

The thing that just kept me impressed the whole time were the animations of the characters. After decades of the same basic 3D template look, the new style featured on this game finally manages to bring some life and personality to these characters, and I loved it so much.

Awesome levels, colorful world, good music and great animations, just plain fun.

Parasite Eve

Parasite Eve was quite a revelation for me, I don’t really remember how I came across it for the first time, but when I did, I thought it was a really cool game with incredible graphics for the PS1, that looked even better on my PSP, and now it’s in the perfect screen with my Anbernic handheld.

I loved the gameplay for this one, since it was a sort of active time battle mode, but instead of being fixed in place, you can move around in the room, get closer to enemies in range, avoid getting hit by projectiles and reposition yourself.

The music is an absolute highlight here, it is a very unique style, more modern than other JRPGs at the time given its setting in New York in the “real world”, it’s just plain cool.

The story was quite strange, with neat science fiction elements that kind of left me fearing this could happen in real life. I was so amused by the premise that I ended up reading the original novel (that is actually a prequel to the game) and watching the japanese movie—fairly accurate to the novel.

The science behind it all was fascinating to me, and the references in the game were neat. Sadly, I did not finish the game since I got stuck in one part and other things took over, but the gameplay and style are really good and hold up well today—other than the slow running speed.

Metroid Zero Mission

Any other day of the week, I would maybe choose Zero Mission over Fusion, it is a similar situation as to Ys The Oath in Felghana vs Ys Seven. One of them represents the epitome of the old days, and the other, the beginning of a renaissance for the franchise.

There literally is zero reason to dislike this game, unless you don’t like Metroidvanias at all. The bosses are better balanced and the overall gameplay progress is more fluid than Fusion, which can sometimes get interrupted by longer dialogue scenes.

Extremely well made game, and probably the best way to get into the series given how much Fusion departs from the rest of the franchise. I’ve replayed this one a couple of times too, thanks to how quick to pick-up and play it is. Just give it a go.

Super Mario Galaxy

This is top tier 3D Mario, the game I played whenever I visted that one friend who had a Nintendo Wii (other than Mario Kart Wii), and it was some of the most fun I ever had, I could repeat levels over and over and try new ways and find secrets and just enjoy life and be a kid.

The power-ups, the levels, the platforming… the nostalgia is strong on this one, an absolutely great game that definitely marked my childhood.

And the music, the music is absolutely wonderful, it is better than many of the games in my Top 25, it’s a complete masterpiece and I may as well do a top videogame soundtracks next where this would definitely be in…

Unfortunately, I just never played enough of it, I think I reached the final stages but I can’t be sure, my memories are blurry, so I couldn’t really place this one anywhere without feeling bad about other games I love with a clearer picture of them.

Terranigma

Terranigma is a game I love, it is also the game I’ve convinced the most people to play (only behind how many people I’ve convinced to buy a Miyoo Mini Plus) and it is kind of a weird game, in the best of ways.

The game borrows a lot from Zelda and from its own predecessors. It’s an Action RPG with a very ambitious, thought provoking story, about the reconstruction of the World, and Humanity itself.

The game is a true hidden gem that didn’t come to the Americas. The gameplay holds up really well, there are multiple attack moves you can do, without having to equip a certain weapon or item, it’s just epic, to me it feels like a 2D Monster Hunter when it comes to the attacks and combos you can do, but that comparison is just my brain connecting dots.

I have not completed this game just yet. I still have a save file with 13 hours in it and another one with 9 hours. But I feel compelled to starting it once again because why not, and since I got my Anbernic handheld, I may do it sometime.

Final thoughts

Well, that’s fun, there are more games I could have mentioned but this is good enough right? This is also the last post for August, and we will resume to a more chill posting schedule on the upcoming months, until I feel like starting another blogging challenge or something.

And if you haven’t, check the Top 25 itself!