Indie & Overlooked
Eternal Darkness Broke the Fourth Wall in 2002, and the Sequel Never Came
Silicon Knights' GameCube horror game faked crashes and muted your TV on purpose. Two decades later, the follow-up is still just a rumor.
3 min readOverlookedFreedom Fighters Was IO Interactive's Best Game Before Hitman Made Them Famous
An alt-history Soviet invasion of New York let you recruit a resistance army. Almost nobody noticed.
3 min readOverlookedKiller7 Refused to Explain Itself, and That Was the Point
Suda51 and Capcom shipped a rail-shooter-adventure hybrid that confused as many players as it converted — deliberately.
3 min readOverlookedJet Set Radio Arrived on a Dying Console and Still Changed How Games Looked
Smilebit's graffiti-skating game gave cel-shading a mainstream showcase right as the Dreamcast was running out of time.
3 min readOverlookedOkami Was Clover Studio's Closing Argument, and Capcom Barely Heard It
A PS2 game painted like a moving ink scroll got rapturous reviews and arrived just as its own studio was being shut down.
3 min readOverlookedBeyond Good & Evil: The Cult Classic That Undersold on Arrival
Michel Ancel's photo-journalist adventure drew some of 2003's best reviews and some of its worst sales.
3 min readOverlookedThe Quiet Corners of the Rockstar Catalogue
Beyond the headline franchises, the label has published a scattering of smaller, stranger games. A few are worth knowing.
3 min readOverlookedSystem Shock 2 and the Horror of Running Out of Ammunition
Looking Glass and Irrational made a role-playing game where scarcity, not monsters, did the frightening work.
3 min readOverlookedPsychonauts and the Levels That Are Also Characters
Double Fine's 2005 platformer made every stage an argument about the person whose mind you were visiting, and the market ignored it anyway.
3 min readOverlookedSkies of Arcadia: The Dreamcast's Sky-Pirate Romance
An optimistic, adventurous role-playing game arrived on a console that was already running out of time.
3 min readOverlookedThe Indie Platformer Nobody Played
A 2013 release with tighter movement than half the genre's icons, buried under launch-week noise.
6 min readOverlookedVagrant Story, the PlayStation Swan Song Square Never Repeated
A dense, strange, beautifully art-directed dungeon crawler that was too demanding to be a hit and too distinctive to be forgotten.
3 min readOverlookedGrim Fandango: A Film Noir in the Land of the Dead
It was widely loved, poorly sold, and remembered as a symbol of the end of an era. It deserves to be remembered as a game.
3 min readOverlookedLaunch-Week Casualties
Some great games arrived in the wrong week, on the wrong console, in the wrong genre cycle. Three well-documented cases.
3 min readOverlookedGTA2, the Forgotten Middle Child
Sandwiched between a cult curiosity and a global phenomenon, the 1999 sequel had ideas worth remembering.
3 min readOverlookedSwinging Sixties, Driving on the Left: GTA London 1969
An expansion pack, a free sequel-of-sorts, and a spin-off built by a different Rockstar studio. The strangest corner of early Grand Theft Auto.
3 min readOverlookedPlanescape: Torment and the RPG That Asked a Question Instead of Handing You a Quest
A game about an immortal amnesiac asked what could change the nature of a man, and answered mostly through conversation.
3 min read