It’s a few days before Christmas and you don’t know what to buy that person who only likes games you haven’t ever heard of! Or maybe you are that person and you want some more games. Don’t worry, because I’m here to help with an updated and modest list of personal recommendations.
I can recommend a lot more, and of specific genres if you’re looking for certain things for yourself or others but this is what I came up with off the top of my head on a Friday night.
Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi
This one is a “classic Castlevania”, made by a small team who did a very good job putting together game that is fun to play in moderately sized level chunks. Hard at times but never grueling like the Beyond The Ice Palaces of the world. Does a lovely job on the sprite art and backgrounds.
I spent a huge chunk of 2024 simply not shutting up about this game, and I pledge to continue hard-selling it at every opportunity. This is a fast-paced run-based action game with no character stats and no levels, you put together equipment and figure out upgrades and your preferred attack styles along the way. If you really like putting together crazy builds, you will love this game. It does get really hard at times, which is both a thematic element and also making sure you change up that equipment.
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
El Shaddai is, for the most part, a third person action game where you switch between a few weapon/attack types depending on the enemy. It has that very loose combat feel you find in lower-budget games of that style and it can get repetitive in nature. It also has experimental story-telling and 2d sequences and some of the most beautiful designs and in-game art you’ll ever see. It’s a very worthwhile experience.
Short story-driven 2d action game. You are a mercenary who has undergone a process where you achieve immortality, but of course there’s some weird stuff going on around all that. You talk to a lot of people, you hit a lot of things in a chain-based combat system and travel through a very intentionally designed world and story.
Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition
A narrative horror-adventure game about your wonderful first day working for a company that is some kind of evil beyond the normal companies being evil. Filled with a lot of interesting puzzles and weird horror stuff. Developer Baroque Decay previously released Count Lucador which is another good horror-adventure.
A very distilled run-based game, in Rogue Loops you go in uh, loops and then fight a boss. And advance to the next world and do that again. And do that across difficulties. You unlock characters with different fighting styles the more loops you do and there are some aspects of “character growth” (HP++) but this is a pure action->run->run again game. I would recommend checking out the demo to see if this style works for you.
If you want to show off to all your friends that you are absolutely in the know about Japanese Dungeon Crawlers, you must play Xanadu Next. Also it’s a really good dungeon crawler, solo character variety. If you have no idea what a “dungeon crawler” is, you should just buy and play it. And you’ll be an expert.
