Top 10) Worst Games from 1 - 100
- dpad200x
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
As a follow up to last week's top 10 best games from the first 100 I've covered, this week will be the opposite, instead focusing on the worst games I've subjected myself to for this site. I want to preface this by saying that very few of the games I've played are what I'd call "bad." Instead, most of the games on this list are simply those unfortunate enough to not be quite as good as the others. There are a handful that are genuinely bad, and deserve all of the ridicule they get.
While there's little that's actively wrong with this game, there's also not a lot to recommend. It's a short visual novel experience that has very little replay value as your choices don't carry a lot of weight. While there's certainly a good amount of humor, the writing leans more into cringeworthy territory more often than not, and a lot of the humor that is present relies on inside experience working in a shitty restaurant. Still, the game has its moment, knows not to take itsefl too seriously, and most importantly, those involved seem to have had a good time.
Another example of a game that's not actually bad, but instead short and lacking in replay value. Ratshaker accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is mostly subvert the retro horror game aesthetic that's been popular of late. Unfortunately, while it certainly isn't lacking in humor, the horror aspect is rather lacking. While I certainly found the voice work for our rat companion to be expertly done, there is a lot of screaming that makes the game especially grating to those in the vicinity. Even if I wanted to experience the game again, I fear my partner might well kick me out.
In all honesty, Merrily Perilly would likely rank much better if I had experienced it on mobile instead of on console. The experience is tailor made for playing in short bursts and is simple enough that playing on a phone or tablet would work just as well as a controller. However, as a console release, I can't help but feel it's a bit lacking. Still, the charm and humor on display is executed well, and it's certainly not a bad experience overall.
I'll fully admit that this game being here has a lot more to do with the frustration it caused me than any inherent failing on the basic level of gameplay. As point of fact, I must commend how well the game and it's mechanics work overall, and the bare bones story and striking artwork help the game stand out quite well. However, as it is my list, and the final section of this game is such complete and absolute bullshit, making most of your abilities useless and throwing shit directly at the player, abandoning the pattern memorization aspects at the finish line. It feels as though the final segment of the game was handled by a completely separate team, one that was filled with anger and spite.
To be clear, at least part of why this game is here is due to the shitty, predatory practices that Square Enix had in place when the game first launched which have thankfully been removed. Using a fan favorite franchise, one of the biggest ones associated with your brand, in such a way shows a complete disregard for your player base, and should be called out when it occurs. If those practices had still been in place, I likely wouldn't have even played the game, and it would rank even higher on this list. However, stripping that controversy aside, we're left with an aggressively mediocre kart racing experience that barely justifies its existence. The story, as batshit insane and self referential as it is, does little to salvage what is ultimately a bland experience.
Speaking of aggressively bland, Lunar: Silver Star Story is what I like to refer to as "Baby's first JRPG." Everything about the experience is so cookie cutter and predictable, with the handful of wonderfully animated cutscenes doing little to elevate the experience. Combat is boring, the party is mostly forgettable, and the story is exactly what you expect it to be. Add to this the confusing decision to have a mechanic that is used only in the first and last dungeons, meaning you're likely to have completely forgotten about it, and you're left with an experience that doesn't seem to know what it wants from itself.
To its credit, the gameplay present in Dark Void is actually pretty solid. The biggest issues I have come down to its incredibly stupid story, bland stand-in characters, and the fact that it has the audacity to heavily advertise flying sections that make up a relatively small amount of the game. The moment the characters mentioned the Bermuda Triangle, I was already checked out, but then they go even further by having ancient aliens be the root of actual Nazis. It's just so stupid, and not even in a fun way. It also loses points for having a single mission that is so unnecessarily brutal that the best advice I could find for it was to turn down the difficulty because it's such horse shit. Oh, and the fact that they had the gall to tease a sequel at the end, as if I hadn't been punished enough.
Nothing screams mid 2000's angst and forced edginess quite like The Darkness. It is such a product of its time that looking at it now makes it seem like a parody of itself, which makes the fact that it's trying to be serious all the sadder. Like many games of the time, it pads out its runtime with some needless wandering and exploration that ultimately doesn't pay off. Worse still, the underlying mechanics of combat are frustratingly limited with no clear explanations given as to how they work. There are times I wanted to sent my shadowy tendrils to scout ahead, only to have them reach a completely arbitrary limit. The story is serviceable, though it truly feels as though we're playing as Tommy Wiseau if he gained a combination of Spawn and Venom powers. Hell, that sentence probably oversells the experience.
Like a few other games on this list, the gameplay present in Eat Lead is actually pretty solid. Movement and cover work well, and the guns are varied and satisfying to use. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that I adore the general premise of the story, with a classic video game character being brought into a modern game and forced to adapt with new mechanics and try to appeal to a new audience. Where the game fails, however, is in what should have been its strength, which is to say in the humor. See, the game tries to be a satire of game development, video game stories, and the gaming community itself, which is an excellent premise ripe for humor. The problem is that the game spends the majority of its time punching down at the player. We get plenty of quips from Matt Hazard about how we have nothing better to do, how incredibly stupid a tutorial is, making fun of other genres, and of course the ultimate joke of an attractive woman actually being a man instead. Satire should never be used to punch down, and instead should be used to punch up or even sideways, but when it's revealed that the antagonist's entire plot and motivation is due to being a disgruntled gamer, it's hard not to take it at least a little personally.
Gollum is a game that, when first revealed, I don't think anyone was excited about. Nobody was clamoring to know what Gollum had been up to directly before the start of Fellowship, and fewer wanted to play as the little gremlin in a slave simulator. The game is an absolute mess, from top to bottom, which makes the handful of good things about the experience even more tragic. A stealth game set in Middle Earth has a surprising amount of promise, which the game immediately wastes by having shitty AI and allowing Gollum to single handedly kill enemies if he gets the drop on them. The level design is atrocious, with the way forward either being ambiguous or explicitly clear, and even when clear the game will sometimes just decide that you failed to parkour correctly. That's when you're lucky enough that the environments aren't pitch black and you can actually see what you're doing. When one of the few actually nice looking environments is on screen, the game clearly doesn't know how to handle it and chugs along choppily. The single saving grace of interest is the internal debates our lead character has with himself, which is ultimately wasted as the choices don't really matter. Gollum isn't just a bad game, it's a bland, barely functioning game that fully banks on the popularity of the associated license.
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