10 Best And Worst Games Not To Overlook (So Far)

By definition, every time I write a “games you shouldn’t overlook” list, its purpose is to look to the future, to predict which games will be worth your time in an upcoming year. But what I’m setting out to do today is the opposite – to look back, specifically on the “games you shouldn’t overlook” lists I’ve written to see how those predictions turned out. Because let’s be honest, if you make enough predictions about the future, you’re bound to be wrong a few times. Even Nostradamus didn’t bat 1,000 when it came to predictions. (Probably, I didn’t bother looking it up.) So, in an effort to keep me humble (psh, good luck, I’m awesome) I’ve picked out the 5 worst games I thought would be good across the five such lists I’ve written so far. (Not counting the 2024 list, which is bound to be 100% accurate and you should totally read it.) But hey, we’ve never been particularly negative around these parts, so I’m not just going to dig up my worst failures – I’m also going to pick my 5 greatest successes because I’m awesome and I told you so. For better and for worse, these are the 10 best and worst games I’ve written about since I started writing my yearly prediction lists back in 2021. (Yes, that’s only 3 annual lists, but there were 2 other mid-year lists, from E3 2021 and Gamescom 2022, for a total of 5.)

But first, let’s look at some…

Honorable & Dishonorable Mentions

Honorable Mention 1: Oxenfree II: Lost Signals (2022)

Dredge really should be on this list, but since I already chose it as my best overlooked game of 2023, I feel like I’ve already congratulated myself enough for predicting that game would be great, so in its place is Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, a game that was quite good but didn’t get a mention among the best overlooked games from last year. Sorry Oxenfree II, it was a packed year for great games in general, so it’s no surprise it was arguably the most competitive year for overlooked games as well. This sequel may not quite have exceeded the original, but that’s a pretty high bar to clear, and Oxenfree II did manage to justify its existence by maintaining the same spooky vibe and great writing as the original while pushing the story in an interesting direction. By introducing a new cast of characters, developer Night School Studio opened up the world of Oxenfree to further development, which is undoubtedly a good thing as well.

Dishonorable Mention 1: Crime Boss: Rockay City (2023)

A lot of the “worst” games I’ve written about aren’t really terrible so much as they are…not great. Underwhelming even. So even though I could have included games like Ghostwire: Tokyo (2021), Atlas Fallen (2023), or Park Beyond (Gamescom 2022) for failing to live up to their potential, they were all mediocre at worst. In terms of pure quality, Crime Boss: Rockay City should rank as one of the absolute worst, but it lands here as only a dishonorable mention simply because I didn’t have very high expectations for it to begin with. I thought it would be a silly, more linear GTA clone with a bunch of D-list celebrities, and it turned out to be a bland level-based Payday clone with extremely phoned-in performances from a bunch of D-list celebrities. It fell short of expectations, sure, and it was a pretty bad game as a result, but if you read my original entry and thought I was saying it would be game of the year material, you clearly weren’t reading closely.

Honorable Mention 2: Sea of Stars (2023)

If I were ranking this list solely based on the quality of the game, Sea of Stars would undoubtedly be higher on the list. However, I’m more or less ranking these on the quality of my predictions, and it was only an honorable mention on my 2023 list, so it winds up as an honorable mention here for that reason alone. If only I had been more confident in my prediction. Still, Sea of Stars was justified in winning best indie game at the 2023 Game Awards with its story, retro aesthetics, and thoughtful updates to the JRPG formula. It didn’t completely revolutionize the genre, but it delivered a satisfying throwback experience that a lot of fans had been missing since the ’90s.

Dishonorable Mention 2: Shredders (2022)

I wrote in my original preview that it had been a rough time for fans of extreme sports games, and unfortunately Shredders did little to remedy that problem. It wasn’t a terrible game by any means, but the characters are embarrassing at best and annoying at worst, and there’s just so little to do in this game that it fails to sustain interest for long. If you’re more of a fan of realism than over-the-top action, you might get along with the game’s controls just fine, but the learning curve is somewhat steep and it’s hard to justify spending a lot of time memorizing tricks when the story mode is only a few hours long and the other activities in the game quickly become repetitive. Shredders is the kind of game that might turn into something special if it were given a sequel, but for how low-budget everything here feels, it’s unlikely developer Foam Punch will return to this IP anytime soon, if at all.

Now on to the top 10!

Best #5: A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022, E3 2021)

A game so nice, I wrote about it twice! Okay, the Plague Tale games are far from nice by any definition of the term, and the 2022 list basically just included a reference to the original preview from E3 2021, so I sort of only wrote about it once. Regardless, Requiem is a fantastic sequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence, one of the better games of 2019, as it ups the stakes considerably from the original – both the physical stakes, as the upgrade from Xbox One to the Series consoles allowed Asobo Studio to ramp up the number of rats, as well as the emotional stakes, with the focus shifting from just surviving the plague to finding answers for younger brother Hugo’s mysterious illness. The core of the original remains, however – the characters are still great and easy to care about, the tension and dread are still as high as ever, and the level of challenge is well balanced to prevent too much frustration while not making stealth feel trivial. It’s a depressing, deeply unpleasant journey, but one that you absolutely shouldn’t miss out on.

Worst #5: Somerville (2022)

When you’re the youngest sibling in your family, sometimes it feels impossible to escape the expectations set by your older siblings, and that certainly turned out to be the case with Somerville, which was made by many of the same developers behind Inside and Limbo. If it were from a different studio, it probably wouldn’t even register as a disappointment, but compared to two of the greatest indie puzzle platformers of all time, it doesn’t stand a chance. Oddly enough, Somerville has more story than either game before it, yet it somehow isn’t as compelling; the puzzles are simpler, but the physics involved make them fiddlier than they should be. It’s not a terrible game by any means, but it doesn’t linger in the mind the way its predecessors did. And worst of all, the good doggo you’re given as an in-game companion? Adds nothing to the experience. Yeah, unforgivable.

Best #4: Unpacking (E3 2021)

I wrote three sentences about this game in my original preview. That’s how confident I was that it would be good. I was right.

Okay, okay, I’ll say more this time around, and I am deducting points from myself for making it an honorable mention instead of including it on the list proper. But if you want a chill indie puzzle game, you really can’t go wrong with Unpacking. It’s the kind of game that you can complete in a single sitting if you have the endurance for it or take a break somewhere along the way, and that’s good because once you start playing it, you won’t want to stop. The gameplay is wonderfully simple as you place, rotate, and reconfigure the objects in each room, and it is incredible how much storytelling can be accomplished simply by the implications of each home that the player character moves into and which items remain (and which don’t) from one place to the next. Developer Witch Beam created an absolute masterpiece here, and it only places so low on this list because a) I know some gamers just won’t give a roughly 5-hour indie game a chance and b) I have made some really great predictions over the years.

Worst #4: Back 4 Blood (2021)

Ah, Back 4 Blood. You should have been so good and yet you were…not. By a long shot. I don’t hate you, I’m just really disappointed. And for good reason – this game was created by many of the same developers who worked on the Left 4 Dead franchise, yet this game somehow managed to be worse than its spiritual predecessors in basically every way. The art direction in particular is a weak point – special zomb…er, ridden are way too similar-looking to distinguish from one another, and your teammates are so easily mistaken for enemies that it’s practically a matter of when, not if, you’re going to take one of them down by accident. The card system that was one of this game’s selling points is functional at least, but it can easily feel overwhelming for both newcomers and L4D veterans alike and isn’t as fun a system as one might have hoped. You can play without them, of course, but if you’re playing on anything other than the lowest difficulty, you’re really going to struggle unless you have cards equipped. Worse still, you only have a limited number of continues before you have to restart the entire chapter, which feels like the game kind of forcing you to get to grips with the cards. Again, there is some fun to be had here – it is a co-op zombie shooter, after all – but it’s telling that in the 2+ years since its launch, very few players have been back for(4) blood since.

Best #3: Tunic (2022)

See the Sea of Stars entry above? Ditto for Tunic, which would likely be #1 based on game quality alone. But alas, it was an honorable mention in 2022, so it winds up here instead. I mean, what is there to say about Tunic that hasn’t been said better in countless 9.5/10 or 5/5 reviews? It’s the best Zelda game Nintendo never made, the cutest Soulslike game From Software would never dare to make, and one of the best overall games of the last 5 years at least. The finished product is everything I hoped it would be and more when I wrote about it in 2022 (and when I made a passing reference to it in 2021) and my only defense for not making a bigger deal about it was how long it had been in development. Very few games emerge from development hell almost 7 years after first being announced, let alone at the level of quality that Tunic was able to achieve. So in the end, I was right to think it had potential, and I was wrong to doubt its development team’s ability to bring it to fruition.

Worst #3: The Last Case of Benedict Fox (Gamescom 2022)

This is the first game on my “worst” list that is actually kind of bad overall, not just disappointing, and it’s only going to get worse from here, believe me. First and foremost, The Last Case of Benedict Fox just doesn’t feel great to play. The controls are sluggish, the traversal is clunky, and the combat is repetitive. Enemies ambush you constantly, and you’ll die numerous times to larger enemies that force you to hide or flee simply because the game doesn’t do enough to signal what needs to be done. Boss battles are sparse and unimpressive, and getting from one point to another is a frustrating slog due to the lack of an on-screen map (and you can’t pause to check the full map without enemies being able to attack you) and the vague hints on offer are rarely helpful in pointing you in the right direction. For a Metroidvania, any one of these issues would be annoying, but all of them together makes for a nigh-unplayable experience. Sure, some of the puzzles are cool, the central mystery is intriguing, and the art style is compelling. Heck, some of the issues I mentioned may even have been patched out at some point. That still doesn’t make me want to give this game a second chance. It’s simply a case not worth solving.

Best #2: Psychonauts 2 (2021)

They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, and in that sense I knocked it out of the park with my first “games not to overlook” list, because Psychonauts 2 was my #1 pick and it totally slaps. Sure, it’s the sequel to one of the most vibrant, wacky, charming indie platformers of all time, so it isn’t that surprising that it ended up being good. On the other hand, it came out 16 years after the original, and extremely belated sequels simply do not have a great track record of success in any medium, let alone video games. But any concerns that there might have been about this game were totally unfounded – the sequel picks up (literally and figuratively) right where the original left off, and developer Double Fine immediately establishes that they haven’t gotten rusty in the intervening years, polishing everything that was good about the original while expanding into new and intriguing areas with some nice quality-of-life upgrades to boot. The writing and characterization that stood out the first time around is every bit as good here, as is the art style, and although the gameplay isn’t fundamentally that different (for better and worse) there are enough creative new applications of its platforming mechanics that it never feels too dated. It’s a mind-bending adventure in all the best ways, and it took a particularly strong game to keep it out of the top spot.

Worst #2: 12 Minutes (2021)

*sigh* Okay, so remember how I said in the previous entry that I “knocked it out of the park” with my 2021 list? Yeah, that’s not even remotely true. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a well-written article, and I’m proud of myself for taking some big swings. However, despite the top pick being a truly great game, the rest of the list (outside of the honorable mentions) is pretty much garbage. The best of the bunch besides Psychonauts 2 is Hollow Knight: Silksong which STILL isn’t out (fingers crossed it comes out in 2024 because I NEED this game in my life). All three of the other games were on my shortlist for worst games. And 12 Minutes is comfortably the worst of the three. Let’s just put it as plainly as possible (and consider this your **SPOILER WARNING** for a truly bad game that you shouldn’t bother playing if you haven’t by now – just skip ahead to the next entry if for some reason you don’t want to know): if your game revolves around a central mystery, and the solution to that mystery is incest, you need to rethink…just so, so many things. Not least of which should be the premise of your video game. I don’t care if you have big-name Hollywood celebrities involved. As soon as that particular plot point hit the internet, any chance of this game gaining any sort of following evaporated instantly. Not to mention the violence against the main character’s own wife, which is necessary to advance the plot. Even if you can excuse the domestic violence and incest, WHICH YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T, this game is really nothing special – it’s a point-and-click adventure of the type we’ve seen a million times, and none of the puzzles or mechanics are particularly inventive. It’s a narrative-heavy game with an absolutely terrible finale, which renders the only good thing it had going for it irrelevant. Y’know, because INCEST.

Best #1: Lies of P (Gamescom 2022)

On the one hand, it feels a little like cheating to call Lies of P the best prediction I’ve made on any of these lists because everyone was talking about this game after Gamescom 2022. But here’s the thing, a lot of those people weren’t necessarily convinced “what if Bloodborne but Pinocchio” was anything more than a meme. I mean, the trailer for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey practically broke the internet, but that turned out to be one of the worst movies…maybe ever? So I think it’s fair to say that capturing the internet’s attention and actually creating something good are two very different things. Thankfully, in the case of Lies of P, Neowiz Games and Round 8 Studio managed to do both. In fact, they succeeded so well that I didn’t even put the game on my list of best overlooked games of 2023 – it went from a game that people noticed, went “huh, that’s a weird idea,” and promptly forgot about to genuinely one of the best games of the year. Of all the games that I predicted would be good, if I had to pick just one to insufferably brag about, it would be… Dredge. I mean, come on, I already told you at the start of this article that I was pretty proud of the fact that I called it. But if I had to pick a second game to insufferably brag about, it would be Lies of P. I made that prediction with confidence, I said it with my whole chest, and I. Was. Right.

And that’s it for my list, let me know what you thought of it, thanks for reading, bye!

…Wait, what do you mean the list isn’t over? What do you mean I haven’t revealed my worst prediction? I think we can all agree that I’ve made some mistakes from time to time, and I owned up to them, and now we can all just move on with our lives, right?

Okay, okay, fine. I could just end on my greatest triumph and be insufferable about how right I was about Dredge and Lies of P and all that. But I’m not going to, in part because I’m not really insufferable; I actually think I’m quite sufferable if you got to know me. But I’m also not going to end the list there because we still have to deal with…

Worst #1: Atomic Heart (E3 2021, Gamescom 2022)

*deep, soul-shaking sigh* There’s really no sugarcoating this one. No joke, I called this game “basically my Half-Life 3” in describing my level of hype and anticipation for its release. I included it on two separate lists, including making it #1 on my E3 2021 list. I ended my entry in the Gamescom 2022 list with a plea for developer Mundfish to “make it good, please.” (*Spoiler Alert* They did not.) I put myself way out there for this game, in other words. I wanted so much for this game to be a spiritual successor to BioShock, one of my favorite games of all time. So much so that when it released and was terrible, I wrote an entire article wherein I basically questioned how I could have been so wrong about it. Well, and also whether it should be considered Soviet propaganda, which is an absolutely wild thing to have to genuinely evaluate in our modern society, but I guess everything old is new again because we haven’t exactly solved that whole Nazi problem either. I never did publish that article, in case you wanted to look for it, because I figured (probably quite correctly) that nobody wanted to read (no joke) over 2000 words on this dumpster fire of a game. Just know that I have thought long and hard about this game’s failure, and I’m not remotely proud of the fact that I was publicly cheerleading for it in the two years leading up to its release. The game’s protagonist is genuinely obnoxious, the writing is abysmal, there were a whole host of technical issues on launch (no clue if they’ve been fixed because there’s zero chance of me returning to this game), the combat is clunky, and the puzzles are tedious and repetitive with very little variation in setting as you go through bland gray corridors and copy/pasted science labs. I could go on about the ways this game fails to live up to its potential, but the fact of the matter is I’m just tired of thinking about this game. It’s gone from my most ardently desired game to my greatest regret. If there’s a single thing I could tell you to categorically ignore from any of the five lists that qualify for this review, it would be anything related to this godforsaken game. Enjoy your complete and utter irrelevance, Atomic Heart. I’m done with you.

That’s it for this list! I think we can all agree, there were some real hits and misses there, but on the whole I still come out of this looking very smart and credible, I think we can all agree. Right? We can all agree on that, yeah? All of us? It definitely hasn’t cratered my self-confidence, no sirree! Here’s to making many more accurate predictions about video games! So what did you think? Should Stray have found its way onto the list somehow? (Yeah, I agonized about including that game, and I’m still not 100% convinced it didn’t deserve at least an honorable mention.) Were there any other games, for good or bad, that should have made it onto the list? Or, on the other hand, were there any games you want to argue didn’t belong on the list? Let me know what you think, and thank you so much for reading all the way to the end! Game on, gamers!