30. The Messenger
A mysterious adventure game with a ton of personality, excellent pixel art, and genuinely funny writing.
The Messenger sees you as an unnamed protagonist who is given a simple task: Deliver this message to a temple at the top of the mountain, and let no evil beast stand in your way.
That NES-style plotline is definitely no mistake either; the game is very unabashedly inspired by greats like Ninja Gaiden and The Legend Of Kage (and, per the developers, the later SNES title Chrono Trigger). They did a great job capturing the spirit of the physics of those kinds of games, while taking care to ensure it meets modern expectations of smooth gameplay.
That attention to detail is what really sets this apart from many other retro-style games that think clunky controls are part of the experience, when really the focus should be on artwork, level design, and enemy design.
And The Messenger really crushes it in all those areas! The gameplay does become a bit convoluted after you clear the first leg of the game, but you'll want to keep coming back to this again and again as you unravel its mysteries and laugh at its meta jokes.
29. Mini Metro
Simulation games are an interesting genre. They can either be extremely tedious and esoteric, or they can draw the core of their gameplay from very common experience such that their appeal is extremely universal. Mini Metro kind of does both.
You are placed at the helm of a city's subway system. You must plan out its routes and keep passenger flow optimal as the city grows and new stations are built (by some department that you apparently don't have control over in this fictional universe, but okay).
Things start small and compact and tidy and manageable, but the city's growth never stops. Your view veeeeeeeeery slowly - but constantly - zooms out, and new stations can pop up anywhere, including across rivers, which means you have to spend resources like tunnels, additional cars, or new tracks.
The brilliant design choice here is presenting what is actually quite a complicated and difficult simulation game in a minimalist, modern, Helvetica-laden package that completely removes any intimidation most would have about playing it.
The maps are also based on real cities, so if you're the kind of person who enjoys seeing if you can outwit people who designed things a long time ago, this is the game for you!
This game has brought me many hours of joy, and I'm so glad it got a Switch port, because it's a pretty perfect travel game.
28. The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
I know I've said this a few times already, but the only reason to remake a game that's already highly regarded is to improve upon the mechanical experience while preserving the emotional one, and Grezzo pulled this off for Nintendo once again with their remake of the iconic 2000 title The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
I think a survey of 1,000 self-declared Zelda fans would return over 900 naming either Majora's Mask or A Link To The Past as their favorite in the series (coincidentally, I'm one of the 100 left - I'll always rank the original #1!), so this was an extremely risky undertaking, and I think Grezzo clearly knew that. Every bit of what made the original game special is not only preserved here, but presented in higher fidelity, really giving you a sense of the eerie town of Termina and its surroundings.
Most of the at-the-time-innovative-but-now-extremely-cumbersome-and-clunky control issues of the original are totally improved upon here, preventing any of that messiness from getting in the way of the emotional experience that this game can deliver.
Like in their Ocarina of Time remake, Grezzo used the 3DS' dual screens to make inventory management SO MUCH SIMPLER. There's even a dedicated button for your ocarina!
You'll be swapping masks, tooting out songs, and firing arrows with lightning speed, stopping that terrifying Moon from killing us all in no time at all (pun very much intended).
AAAH!
Fuck's sake, I hate that thing.
27. Jackbox
I wouldn't even know how to begin calculating how many hours I've spent this decade playing the various Jackbox games at social gatherings. They're the ultimate modern party gaming experience. Younger generations will regard Jackbox the way ours sees charades: It's just the shit you do when you're with your friends, man.
The games are varied just enough to have something for everyone, but they all maintain a core snark that has been the hallmark of this company for 25 years now. I played the CD-ROM games in the '90s, and at this point I feel like Cookie Masterson is my surrogate weird uncle.
Favorites include Earwax, where you must choose a perfect pair of sound effects; Trivia Murder Party, which plays very much like classic YDKJ but if Cookie were a cartoonish serial killer; and Fibbage, where you have to come up with a lie that's good enough to fool the room and still be clever enough yourself to spot the truth.
And then there's Quiplash, a no-holds-barred humor experience that has generated more inside jokes in my friend circle than I care to count.
All six packs are a great time, and I see them as part of the overall Jackbox experience, which is why they aren't ranked separately.
26.Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
Closing out this subset of my list is another co-op game into which I pumped many hours this decade, but it would certainly take the right crowd for this one to be a party game.
Requiring a minimum of two players, you assume the role of either the defuser or the expert (or a member of a team of experts, if you're playing with a larger group). Only the defuser can see the bomb; only the expert(s) can see the instructions for how to defuse the bomb. Everyone has to communicate quickly and clearly, or kaboom!
The bomb comprises modules with various kinds of operation; anything from pressing buttons to entering passwords to decyphering morse code to snipping wires. But you have no idea how to do any of it without critical information from your experts and the pages upon pages of complex instructions that they have in front of them.
Environmental factors will also try to distract the defuser. Lights flash or go out entirely, an alarm clock may suddenly buzz, and all the while the timer of impending doom is ticking right in front of you.
A game like this obviously lends itself pretty naturally to modding, so that community is quite active and comes up with some ridiculous situations.
This can be a great bonding experience or a frustrating anxiety hell time, and sometimes you kinda can't tell which you're in for until you start playing!
