Feeling nostalgic, I went back through my Steam games to find the ones I remember the most fondly. This is an extremely biased list and is half “how much I enjoyed the game” and half “how much I remember enjoying the game”. I can’t really see a huge pattern with the ratings but my favorite genres are farming, story, puzzle, turn-based tactics, and RPGs.
10. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
- Music: Good
- Length: Long
- Genre: Open World, RPG, Assassin, Choices Matter
- Gameplay: Some grinding, smooth and fun AC trademarks, and some things took “too long”.
- Characters: Great protagonist (male or female), forgettable others
- Story: Decent
- Replayability: Decent
- Price: $59.99
This was my first Assassin’s Creed game and I really enjoyed the game for the most part. The protagonist (you can choose to be Alexios or Kassandra, I played as Kassandra) is awesome and I especially love that she doesn’t appear to just be usual “male fantasy” character. She’s really tall, very muscular, and wears actual armor (not much “boob armor” that I noticed). This is an example.
I love that your choices actually matter and will affect the game throughout and at the end, and the stealth felt pretty natural and rewarding for the most part. The world was very beautiful, but due to the nature of the game (which takes place in 431 BCE Greece), the locations got a bit stale after a while.
I don’t really like the genre of Open World (which often come with fetch quests, tedious content, grinding, and “quest clutter” unless you 100% which would take an extremely long time), so that’s likely a big part of why this isn’t higher. Additionally, Some of the travel took a while (mitigated by the beautiful landscapes), especially sea travel (and those stupid sea shanties!).
Overall, I’m very happy that I played it and look forward to the next AC game (pending decent reviews). I probably won’t play this game again but it was well worth the time and expensive price tag.
9. My Time at Portia
- Music: Good
- Length: Long
- Genre: Crafting, RPG, Simulation
- Gameplay: A bit tedious/monotonous for gathering/combat/relationships
- Characters: Decent
- Story: Decent
- Replayability: Not great
- Price: $29.99
- Twitch vods of me playing here
My Time at Portia was chosen to scratch my Stardew Valley itch and it did its job very well. Instead of farming, you have crafting (through stations as seen above) but there’s also relationships (with marriage/children), combat, somewhat interesting mining (extremely cool but underutilized jetpack!), festivals, exploring, and an actual story line.
One of the best things about this game is the customization (I pretty much played entirely to find new outfits!) and the fact that the world keeps expanding (areas and people) and I kept on wanting to see more. There are some nice music tracks but nothing extremely noteworthy.
My list of “good” things is pretty short (very similar to the good things in Stardew Valley) but I’ll expand a bit more on the bad things, as they may be deal breakers for some. I think the biggest flaw of this game (which comes with the genre, to an extent) is the tedium/grind. Until you have a lot of money (which was right before I finished with the game for me), gathering materials takes a long time. I would go to the mine (again, extremely cool jetpack!) and get way more ore than I thought I could ever use only to run out the next day (literally the next day at one time).
The combat had potential to be very cool but there are only a few floors/monsters for only a couple areas and I didn’t feel like there was exciting loot there, only crafting material (which again, you can just pay for later if you ever get rich). I think there were less than 5 bosses as well (which were not amazing). The combat, at the end of it all, became a bit tedious, which is a shame because it had some really cool aspects.
Relationships were optionally tedious. The fastest way to gain relationships is with gifts (I found this hard to do) and going on dates (either romantic or platonic) and these were fun for the first time for each person, but then very grindy/repetitive for future ones.
Despite these things, I had a blast with this game and definitely rank it among my favorites.
8. Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark
- Music: Decent
- Length: Medium
- Genre: Turn-based tactics, RPG, strategy
- Gameplay: Punishing but flexible and tons of classes/customization
- Characters: Decent
- Story: Decent
- Replayability: Decent
- Price: $29.99
Similar to Final Fantasy: Tactics (which I have not played) and Fire Emblem, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark (which I just found out does not say “Mask” in the title) is a great (and somewhat challenging, especially in the early game) strategy game. I adore games with good customization and you can customize the classes of every character (and can pull skills from multiple “learned” classes) and customize the appearance of every non-story character.
I think the best aspect for me was the customization and class system. I continually planned what classes I wanted each of my characters to learn in order to augment the unique play style I wanted for them. Every battle was interesting and felt unique, challenging, but doable. I spent a long time (probably way too much) customizing my characters to get them to look appropriately awesome or quirky and grew attached to some of the story characters which, while not totally original, were pretty interesting.
The game is punishing but the difficulty (in addition to the standard presets) can be customized. For example, you can choose whether you want perma-death (as in Fire Emblem), no lasting punishment, or a hybrid where they get injuries and have to sit out some battles (this is the recommended setting) until they recover (I believe it’s one per death), still being able to fight in the meantime but they will be weaker.
The biggest drawback to the game from my perspective was about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the game, I felt “done”. I had created my characters in such a way that I had some pretty broken combos (which were very fun to design, plan, and attain but much less fun to just repeat every battle afterwards) and had learned most of the relevant classes for each characters. This led to me having my Rogue be almost useless while starting to learn the mage tree, since he didn’t have much better to do and I had others who could carry while he learned a class purely for a small stat boost.
Overall, it was very rewarding and quite challenging in the beginning of the game, while you’re still figuring things out and don’t have as many options to get (brokenly) creative. I’d definitely recommend this game to someone who enjoys the genre.
7. Portal 2
- Music: Is there music?
- Length: Medium/Long (depending on if you download from the Steam Workshop)
- Genre: Puzzle, Co-op
- Gameplay: Easy to learn, hard to master
- Characters: Good? It’s been so long since I played the campaign, but GLaDOS is awesome
- Story: Decent
- Replayability: Decent
- Price: $9.99
One of my three “not-so-original” favorite games that mostly everyone has heard about and has a lot of hype for. While I enjoyed the main campaign, this game really shines in the co-op if you have a good friend with relatively similar puzzle-solving skills (it becomes much less fun when it’s just one person telling the other what to do). There are some amazing maps made by players that you can download from the Steam Workshop and that’s where most of my hours were spent.
The mechanics of this game are extremely simple and easy to execute. It’s just a matter of how creative you want to be and how long you want to spend falling down an infinite loop of holes or needlessly launching yourself out angled portals.
The only downside I can think of for Portal 2 is that the co-op campaign is relatively short and easy. Most of the difficulty (where I find puzzle games to really shine) is again from player-crafted levels.
I don’t think I need to say anything more on Portal 2 since it’s so well-known and many others (far better at writing reviews than me) have already done so.
6. Ibb & Obb
- Music: Excellent
- Length: Very Short (6 hours and completed most of the extras)
- Genre: Puzzle, Co-op
- Gameplay: Easy to learn, hard to master
- Characters: n/a
- Story: n/a
- Replayability: Poor
- Price: $11.99
- Twitch Vods of me playing with Dork here
A unique puzzle game (co-op only) where you use momentum around the horizontal line in the middle of the screen (which has a very strong gravitational pull!) and bounce pads to lanch yourself and your friend to move to the right. Moving to the right seems to be the basic story, but maybe there was something more profound that I missed. Most of the puzzles are relatively short with the exception of hidden bonus levels, which can be quite challenging. Most of the game does not require any “mechanics” (perfect timing, close execution of buttons, etc…) but some of the (optional) hidden levels do.
The music is amazing and atmospheric for the most part and the gameplay is very simple to pick up, with only a few mechanics that are introduced simply (and without explanation) that you must figure out in order to proceed to the more complicated puzzles that use that mechanic. Similar to Portal in a way, the puzzles are very satisfying to complete and it’s often very fun to just fly around, bobbing between the ground where there are holes.
The only downside is its length, which is quite short. Overall, one of my favorite co-op games that I’ve played and a very solid game.
5. OneShot
- Music: Good (mostly atmospheric)
- Length: Short
- Genre: Story, some puzzles
- Gameplay: Somewhat tedious puzzles, mostly walking around and talking
- Characters: Excellent
- Story: Excellent
- Replayability: :^)
- Price: $9.99
- Twitch Vods of me playing here
A beautiful story with adorable characters that’s somewhat “meta” (similar to Undertale). The main character talks to you and thinks you’re a god and you sometimes need to find things in your computer’s folders (I won’t spoil more). I fell in love the characters and the world which are very charming and endearing
I can’t type too much because you really need to experience it yourself. The only downside I had were that some of the puzzles were a bit tedious (not too many of them) and one area I was stuck on for a long time (I couldn’t figure out the puzzle because the missing piece was behind a door that was on the side of the map and so had no “door” visual…).
As for replayability? Well, you only get one shot. 😉
Play this game if you love story games. Similar games are To the Moon, Rakuen, and Finding Paradise.
4. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
- Music: Good
- Length: Long
- Genre: Turn-based tactics, strategy, CUSTOMIZATION!
- Gameplay: Difficult, stressful, rewarding, frustrating, can be tedious…
- Characters: Decent, mostly non-existent
- Story: Not great
- Replayability: Excellent
- Price: $59.99 for XCOM 2 and the $39.99 for WotC (wait for a bundle sale)
- Twitch Vods of me playing here
The best turn-based tactics game I’ve played. XCOM 2 (like Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mask Mark) is similar to Fire Emblem but in a futuristic war setting. The game can be hard and is very punishing (I played on Ironman mode where you cannot manually save or reload so all your decisions are permanent) and characters have perma-death when they die on a mission. Sometimes you may want to fail a mission just to get your soldiers out.
With mods (and there are a ton), there’s a lot of customization and that’s where I spent a fair amount of my time (getting attached to cool characters makes it so much more tragic when they die…). Luckily, you can “save” your characters so if you want to use them on another play through, you don’t have to customize them again (although they’ll still be level 1, of course).
The beginning of the game is harder than the end, as you figure out the mechanics and your units get a lot more skills (more skills = more strategy and more ways to creatively solve problems). This game also tests your knowledge of probability. A common frustration is people missing with an 85% chance to hit. This is very possible (and will happen about 15% of the time). Luckily, on standard difficulties, there is some hidden programming that actually makes things go in your favor (although most people feel the opposite).
Between each “mission”, there’s another layer of strategy game that includes some base building. You choose how to organize your base, what you want to build and research, what side-missions you want to do for more perks (your soldiers do this automated and will always succeed), and what resources you want to prioritize. This is also where your soldiers heal if they were attacked on missions.
I have this recommendation with the expansion War of the Chosen, but I felt like the expansion mostly just added more stress and I don’t think it’s necessary to have a great game (although I have not played vanilla). There’s a very highly rated mod for vanilla called “Long War 2” that I’ve heard is excellent.
The biggest downside of this game for me is the tedium of playing optimally. I tried to play on the hardest difficulty, but some of the optimal strategies took forever and required a level of care that I didn’t enjoy. For example, laying in ambush for 8 turns to see if someone patrols into you, then moving 3 more squares and doing this again. I didn’t run into this on the standard difficulty, where I’d play a bit more loosely and got myself in (and out!) of some sticky situations as a result.
An extremely solid (if pricey) strategy game.
3. Undertale
- Music: Excellent
- Length: Medium
- Genre: Story, choices matter, and… I’m not quite sure.
- Gameplay: Innovative/fun combat, moves at a quick pace, fun/easy “puzzles”
- Characters: Excellent
- Story: Excellent
- Replayability: Excellent
- Price: $9.99
Another very popular Steam game, but I think it’s with good reason. The music, characters, and story are amazing and it’s also a “meta” game with a lot of self-referential twists and turns. What you do definitely matters and some of the “fights” are the most fun I’ve ever had in a combat setting.
There’s a lot of flexibility in how you play the game (don’t let anyone tell you how to play) which makes for great replay. I highly encourage you not to google too much. The fights are in phases and between each of your actions, you have to move a red heart (see above) up/down/left/right to dodge attacks and then you can either damage or interact with your enemy/enemies.
The game is extremely funny and can be very challenging under certain circumstances. I can’t write more but if you like story games with a lot of personality, check it out!
2. CrossCode
- Music: Excellent
- Length: Long
- Genre: Puzzle, RPG
- Gameplay: Amazing puzzles, in-depth combat, though there is some tedium at the very end.
- Characters: Absolutely amazing
- Story: Excellent
- Replayability: Not great
- Price: $19.99
I hesitate putting this as number 5, because I absolutely love this game and it has such a special place in my heart. This game is now number 2!… Heh. The characters are so quirky and full of personality, the game has such style, the music is great, the story is very interesting and full of turns, the art is great (some of the faces they make while talking are hilarious), the puzzles are amazing, and the combat is very in-depth without being overwhelming. This is going to be long.
OK, let’s start with the premise/basics of the game. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but essentially it’s set in an hyper-immersive MMORPG (that is also a physical location, and the characters are made up of synthetic matter, controlled remotely), where the characters shown above are controlled by “players” outside the game. It’s a game inside a game, essentially. The gameplay is essentially three things:
- Exploring/questing (questing is optional, but I hear the EXP makes things go faster) with fun platforming/puzzles to get to a ton of hidden items.
- Dungeons, each with a unique theme, that are full of challenging (but not bang-your-head-into-a-wall) puzzles. None of them took particularly long, but there’s a “race” between your character and her friends that can make it fun to see how fast you can get through the puzzles (I felt I went pretty fast but I only got first out of 3 people once out of like 5 or 6 dungeons, probably due to the bosses). I found the puzzles extremely creative and (with only half of an exception on one dungeon), very, very fun.
- Combat. Combat outside dungeons is usually pretty straightforward, but every boss fight is essentially standard combat (hit things, dodge things) mixed with puzzles, which make them very fun, challenging, and each fight is unique. There is a HUGE (and somewhat overwhelming) skill tree for the true RPG enthusiast. As an example, here is an outline of the skill tree, which each of the 5 regions looking like this. There are passive (like more melee, ranged, crit, defense, etc…) and actives (fun unique attacks either AoE or single target with cool visual effects for each).
For me, one of the hallmarks of an amazing game one that makes me feel something. I felt happy, I got sad, I laughed, got mad, and even looking at the game again, I feel the same things. CrossCode does this extremely well. Additionally, there’s a lot of MMORPG nostalgia from playing this game due to the setting (without most of the issues I have with actual MMORPGs).
There are really only two downsides to this game. Early on, I felt the game tried a little too hard to convince me that the characters were playing an MMORPG. There was a lot of “hey, we just started this game, let’s go kill 10 rats!” which (again) was optional but I felt compelled to do all the quests until I got a better feel of the game.
The other negative was the “final mission”. There was an extremely tedious section of about 30-60 minutes (or it felt that long) of fighting (and again, the last mission was the only tedious fighting in the game) and the final boss took (I kid you not) 20-30 minutes. The boss, while interesting, took a very long time and it was difficult until I figured out the patterns. Luckily, if you die after the halfway point, you respawn there, not at the start of the fight. I was told by another player that this was due to me being underleveled (I stopped doing most of the extra quests about halfway or 3/4 the way through the game) and requiring each of the 16 or so phases to be “two-cycled” (dodge, do some mechanics, and then try to burn down his health in a DPS phase and for me it usually took two of these cycles instead of one).
This is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played and would highly recommend it if you like puzzles, RPGs, and great stories.
1. Stardew Valley
- Music: Excellent
- Length: Long
- Genre: Farming, co-op, RPG
- Gameplay: Fun combat, isn’t too tedious, amazing co-op
- Characters: Decent
- Story: Not great
- Replayability: Great
- Price: $14.99
- Twitch vods of me playing 4 player (still playing while writing this) here
This list is taking forever so I’ll be brief. One of the most popular games on Steam and I’ve always loved Harvest Moon so this isn’t too surprising. By far the best thing about this game is the co-op mode. You can share or have separate money (as of update 1.4) and there’s great farming, mining, combat, relationships, fishing, exploring, and more.
The music is fantastic and if you like farming games, you need to pick this up. Between being able to automate a lot of things and having gift caps (only 2 per week), I feel like (for the genre), Stardew Valley is much less grindy/tedious than it could be. It has great replayability too if you play it with a different group of friends (or solo) and.. I’m really out of words. Fun game! Me like!
Summary
Thanks for reading! Please comment if you have any thoughts and you can always check out my Twitch stream here. I may go back and edit this later but hopefully there aren’t too many typos. My little excel summary that i used to organize my thoughts can be found below.
Honorable mentions:
- A Short Hike
- Evoland
- A Hat in Time
- A Plague Tale: Innocence
- Rakuen
- Tomb Raider trilogy
- Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2
Melyn 
