45. Hollow Knight
Sometimes a game's aesthetic goes a long, long way with me, and this was absolutely the case with the twinkling beauty of Hollow Knight.
This game is a magical jaunt through underground caverns that feel like a kid's storybook. You sort of feel like you're inside the Owl City song "Fireflies."
The gameplay itself is fairly standard Metroidvania fare, but wrapping it up in this gorgeous, fantastical package really made for a unique experience.
It really is pretty impressive how even the evil bosses don't detract from the game's whimsical feel.
It feels weird to say that the game made me feel nostalgic, as it is undoubtedly of modern aesthetic, but I think its spirit goes a long way to take you back to a time in your life when fairytales maybe comprised a big part of your understanding of the world.
44. Yooka-Laylee
Another one for the sub-category of "sequels that we've been waiting a long, long time for," Yooka-Laylee was the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that brought back the original team behind Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. (Microsoft purchased Rare in the early 2000s shortly after the latter's release, disbanding the team.)
The series shot right back to its fanciful, charming roots, complete with adorably named characters (the big baddie, a large bee, is called "Capital B") and anthropomorphic everything.
My absolute favorite is this egregious vending machine called Vendi:
I mean -- good lord.
Delightfully layered lands abound as our heroes bounce through them doing exactly what they're meant to do: Collect things.
Come on, that is why we play these things, right?
43. Pokemon Go
Haters be damned -- Pokemon Go was and still is great. It introduced the world of Pokemon to a lot of people who didn't know a thing about them, and it got them excited about walking around (the latter, myself included).
I've used Pokemon Go as my daily running motivation, and it works. I couldn't care less how I look in my swimming trunks, but knowing I'm 30 candies away from evolving my Magikarp?? Outta my way, jerkass!
The collaborative mechanic of gym battles and raids is all great fun too. The game is just a lot of really harmless RPG-lite fun, topped with some adorable cherries like this:
42. Luigi's Mansion 3
A proper entry to this wonderful series that removes the pacing issue I mentioned in Dark Moon and plants Luigi in a beautiful neon art-deco tower, letting him scour the place floor by floor to do some phantasmal cleanup.
It's all a visual delight, almost presenting us a hypothetical hindsight view of a flapper-era Nintendo aesthetic, with gilded edges and chunky fonts and this absolutely delightful character, who I expect to see on drag stages for years to come:
My absolute favorite thing about this game, though, was Luigi's new PDA:
Yep, that's a Virtual Boy.
Fantastic.
41. New Super Mario Bros. 2
The critics were not as kind to this game as they were to literally all the other Super Mario games (it has the lowest Metacritic score, a paltry 78%), but I loved it. I think it improved upon the brilliant New Super Mario Bros. in every way that it needed to, from game mechanics, to control, to level design, to enemies.
It's also quite a bit tougher than the first one, really ramping things up in its final act.
I think most look back at this game now and think "why play this when 3D Land and 3D World exist," but these 2.5D Mario games really offer a different kind of experience, and I'm quite thankful for them and hope this subset of the main series continues.
