Adjusted for 2021, this is my top 30 games of all time. The only rule is: one game per franchise. (Where necessary I will also list other games from entry franchises that are important to me.)
Spiritual. PlayStation Home
Is it cheating a little bit? Sure. Originally this was 30th, but it was not a game. But I have such fond memories of PlayStation Home, and (perhaps against most people’s perception) is one of the most important things I ever played. I got my legal name from PlayStation Home, spent hundreds of hours with old and new friends on it, and got to explore so many video game locations in such a unique way that I’ll remember PlayStation Home forever.
30. Far Cry 5
A series that was mostly entertaining to me had its peak with its latest major entry so far, Far Cry 5. I loved the new aesthetic, the incredible pause music, the ability to finally play as a woman, and the memorability of all four major antagonists.
29. Crash Team Racing
I’ve always had an appreciation for the Crash Bandicoot series, but never got on with their difficulty. To date I’ve only managed to complete three of them - Crash 3, CTR, and with great pain (and owing to the infinite lives), Crash 4. Crash Team Racing definitely takes it for the series as a whole thanks to its accessibility, nostalgia, and how fun the original remains even in the wake of the also-excellent Nitro Fuelled.
28. Uncharted 4
In the future, I think Uncharted 4 is the game most likely to be knocked off my favourites list by something else. A phenomenal ender (nb. I’ve not played Lost Legacy) to a trilogy that helped define the PlayStation 3, and a breathtaking showcase of what PS4 could do with a lot of fun set pieces that was broadly made fantastically.
27. Hogs of War
Hogs of War is my favourite Worms game. There’s just something about it - it’s not flawless, but the roamable worlds, the pick-up-and-play that ensures I can play it with friends even after 10 years of not doing so, and perhaps most importantly, the impeccable voiceover work from Rik Mayall, one of my favourite human beings.
26. Burnout Paradise
I wanted to put this a lot higher. The reason I didn’t? When only choosing one game per franchise, Burnout suffers - I have always kept copies of Paradise AND Revenge around. They’re a total power couple, offering everything that the entire Burnout franchise ever excelled at between them. So sure, special note to Burnout Revenge, but the place goes to the one I probably played a little more, Paradise.
25. Crazy Taxi
Ya ya ya ya ya! I’ve not got a lot of pure nostalgia spots on this list - as games get bigger and better, they tend to override my favour. But nothing has ever beaten the feel of a 10 minute session of Crazy Taxi every now and then, it’s a timeless experience even 23 years after its original release. Just have to make sure I play the version with the Offspring and Bad Religion soundtrack.
24. Pokémon Shield
Some what of another victim of “one game per franchise”. Pokémon Shield is not the most important instalment of one of my most important-definining game series. It’s not the one that was the best at the time. But, for me, it’s the best one now. It’s the one I’d pick up for a 2021 session of Pokémon. It’s the closest to my dream Pokémon game - big explorable expanses with hundreds of monsters to catch and breed for hours.
Special credit goes to: Pokémon Yellow for being my first; Pokémon Silver for being my second; Pokémon Gold for being the one I got in France and completed anyway; Pokémon TCG (GameBoy) for the immesne soundtrack; Pokémon Pinball for being superb for pick-up-and-play; Pokémon Snap for being a monstrously playable videogame even to this day (the sequel’s great too); Pokémon Ranger for nearly knackering my DS; Pokémon Black for being my reintroduction to the series; Pokémon Omega Ruby for housing the birth of my love of shiny hunting; and Pokémon SoulSilver for Voltorb Flip.
23. WarioWare! Touched
I was torn between this and the GBA original, but I think Touched got the longer playtime for me. I still have my original DS copy, completed and played up to the eyeballs. What a perfect, perfect portable experience those first two games were - WarioWare just didn’t quite have the same magic in the GameCube console version, and newer versions have tended to be a little messed up by their gimmicks. Gold was a bit of a return to form, but playing so many of the old games with such a mix of gimmicks all at once made it pretty incohesive. Fingers crossed for the Switch WarioWare coming out this year.
22. Mashed: Fully Loaded
This is my favourite multiplayer game of all time; I couldn’t exclude Mashed. A stunning little title, expanding on the ideas of the Micro Machines games with a little shade of realism, Mashed is instantly pick-up-able and yet so, so competitive to play that you constantly feel like you’re developing new tactics. I wish the game wasn’t so hard to play these days - the PC version on Steam lacks the bells and whistles of Fully Loaded and takes a bit of poking to play in high resolutions, while console versions are stuck on PS2. And the pseudo-sequel, Wrecked: Revenge Revisited, was broadly a bit of a downgrade.
21. Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto, for a time, was my favourite franchise. It’s still stunning - it’s just that my priorities have changed, and the gritty “everyone is awful” atmosphere every GTA either side of Vice City isn’t so much my thing any more. Furthermore, while the most influential GTA for me is III, my favourite setting is Vice City, and the best at the time was San Andreas, I find the entire PS2 GTA anthology in modern times is almost unplayable thanks to frustrating difficulty spikes. IV is the best balance of the old and the new for me - I can still play it, I still get the feeling from it I used to, and thanks in no small part to the two major DLC packs it got, it’s a stellar all-rounder.
Special credit to GTAV, but IV takes it for soundtrack, story and DLC reasons, as well as filesize annoyances. I can’t often find enough interest in playing GTAV to install 100GB+ of hefty game including online gumpf I don’t care about, whereas GTAIV is a fraction of that. Also special credit to GTA 1 and 2, which introduced me to the series, although didn’t compel me in quite the same way (the immersion of the 3D world was what really brought me into the series).
20. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Deus Ex is one of those series I got into late. Completely missing the first wave of instalments, my introduction to the series was 2012’s Human Revolution. That was a fantastic game which I can no longer play because of how unconventional its controls are - iron-sights on L3 will never not break my brain.
Mankind Divided rectified these issues while providing an equally compelling experience, with wonderful semi-open areas I can while away hours in cracking open every door and safe, hoovering up little slices of lore and scavenging. It seems like Mankind Divided may (against the original intention) have been the swansong for Deus Ex, which is heart-wrenching if true - there was so much more for this series to give, and to see Mankind Divided these days sell for so little when it’s given me so many hours of enjoyment is a shame.
19. Psychonauts
Once, in the late 2000s, a contender for my favourite game of all time, Psychonauts has significantly dropped these days but is still very firmly and deservingly in my top 30. A fiercely memorable, breathtaking platformer, let down a little by a couple of shaky levels and an infuriating difficulty spike with an annoying point of no return that makes finishing the game the low point of it. Still, that cannot take away fully from its highlights, the highest being the Milkman Conspiracy, which is probably still my all-time favourite level in a game.
18. Portal 2
Portal 2 is a rare case of a game I felt nostalgic towards days after first finishing it. It’s the expansion and improbable perfection of the formula the first Portal already knocked out of the park. New characters that match GLaDoS on sinister comedy, an array of settings and new mechanics that keep such a basic core idea remarkably fresh, and even an entirely separate equal-length two-player campaign with its own story and characters. One of the greatest puzzle games of all time.
17. Spyro: Reignited Trilogy
If you consider this cheating, replace it with just Spyro: Year of the Dragon. But all three are a joy to play in Reignited, with its beautiful enhanced graphics, superior controls and consistency (I rarely touched the original Spyro game in the PS1 era because I found his voice and the different SFX strange, having been introduced to the series with 2 and 3). It also takes the edge off a couple of the difficulty spikes, notably the bit in Spyro 2 where you’re catching crystals against Hunter and the awful mole escort mission in Spyro 3. There’s still one brutal bit - Agent 9’s on-rails western shooting gallery - but one side area in one mission of one game does not sour a stunning trilogy of games that were my first true gaming loves.
16. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Ooooh I wanted to put this in a higher spot. So much. My favourite system of all time is now the Nintendo Switch - for my money, it already has a mix of the most diverse, modern-era and retro library any console can legally provide. And Breath of the Wild was my introduction to that. I’ve only played it in one period - the month of March 2017 following the console and the game’s release - in which time I spent 200 hours immersed in the world of Hyrule, enamoured with the game as a whole.
It’s a game so strong that it dethroned Minish Cap from its original safe spot in my favourites. It’s so strong that it knocked Skyrim out of contention. The only reason it’s not higher? I don’t know if I ever want to play it again - that first run through was a breath-taking voyage of discovery, and despite being four and a half years removed from it, I still remember it like it was yesterday.
15. Tony Hawk’s Underground 2
This and #13 can be considered joint placements because I can’t separate my two skating babies. The arcadier of the two series, Tony Hawk’s has been with me since I first owned a PlayStation in 1999 and it came with a demo disc that included a demo of Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding. I followed the series near-religiously from then until the dark Robomodo days, and find it extremely difficult to pick a favourite from the series with all these contenders:
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 is nostalgic for being the first full Tony Hawk’s game I owned, but nowadays is pretty stiff to play and lacks many core moves like reverts
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was my second-ever PS3 game and is much more playable but again lacks a lot of the newer move pool
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 is the earliest game that contains a move pool where I don’t miss any newer moves too much (spine transfers baby!) and was the first to ditch classic mode, but has some very iffy missions and the levels aren’t the best selection of the series
Tony Hawk’s Underground contains the best story and the best levels, let down by awful often-mandatory driving and non-skating missions and difficulty spikes towards the end
Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 basically perfects the move pool at the cost of the compelling story that only THUG1 really tried, although I do have a lot of nostalgia for Jackass so it works for me at least a little
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland has the “ultimate” move pool and I’ve always loved one big open world even when it’s reasonably compromised, and there’s even BMXing that is remarkably fun, but it’s very bloated and the story is weirdly easy and short
Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (PS3) is the most explorable single area of the series and was one of my first PS3 games, but the humour swings and misses more than any previous entry and a lot of the THAW additions were carved out
and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, which was an incredible return to form, is beautiful, expansive, replayable, and also is limited to classic mode, which hurts it for me - I always preferred the singular goal format introduced by THPS4
Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 takes it in the end - just by an inch. It’s the finest balance of what I love about the series.
14. Skate 3
As stated above, this and THUG2 are equals - and so are Skate 3 and Skate 2. I’m giving the spot to 3 purely because it feels like 3 takes a lot of abuse compared to 2, and I’m calling it now - bs, Skate 3 is a phenomenal entry.
More of a sim series, Skate started off shaky (literally - the camera in the original game is nauseating) but you could toggle to a more normal one in Skate 2 and by Skate 3 the better camera was straight-up default. And the games are just superb - a wonderful move set to get to grips with, fabulous expansive open worlds (one large location in 2, three still-formidable separate areas in 3), and to boot, a lot of fun features that make Skate 2 and 3, for me, two of the best games you can have for on-the-side distraction and aimless relaxing time-killing. The only thing I never liked were ANY of the actual missions - the games are strictly sandboxes for me.
13. The Witness
My favourite indie game of all time, my second favourite puzzle game of all time, and one of my favourite “let’s just be in a world and do what we want because it’s directionless” games goes to The Witness. I’m actively jealous at how simple the premise is and yet how much utility it has across this entire game - it’s used in so many ways throughout The Witness that your brain starts melting.
What I really love about The Witness is how deep it goes - not in terms of the (slightly pretentious) readings of classic quotes, but by just how much the game has to offer if you’re willing to dig. You can complete like half of the towers and waltz over to the exit and reach an ending, sure, but the harder you look, the more the game gives you. This digging kind of culminates in a sequence known as “The Challenge” which puts you through a procedurally-generated stress-inducing gauntlet from hell complete with that part of the Peer Gynt Suite that I burst into tears before I completed it.
But I did complete it. And I will never do it again.
12. Hitman III
Taboo fact of the day to any Hitman fans: Absolution was my entry point into the series. Less taboo fact: okay yeah after I’d played Hitman (2016) and seen how the more open formula fared, I’d never go back to Absolution.
The World of Assassination trilogy of Hitman that ended with this year’s Hitman III was a trio of stunners, ticking the majority of my boxes - “here are expansive places”, “most of the doors are openable”, “there is no time sensitivity, spend hours exploring and collecting if you want idk” and “yeah sure kill literally every NPC in the map if you want to, I don’t care”.
And what a trilogy, with so many level, story, and dynamic high points. The first time I killed everyone in Marrakesh. Hiding in a cupboard in The Isle of Sgail and eliminating the level’s entire security staff one unlucky entrant at a time. The first time seeing the beautiful underground nightclub in Berlin as one of my first PS5 experiences. All three games had levels I’d never want to be without - for any other such strong trilogy, the three games would have been fighting for my favourite. But with this series, you can import the entire level pool and story from 1 and 2 into III, so III wins by default - it’s the third game, and all three games, at the same time. And by the end of it all, it’s probably the biggest single tied experience on this list.
11. Ape Escape 3
Hitman III nearly knocked this out of my top 10, but… it couldn’t. Ape Escape 3, the pinnacle of the main trilogy of Ape Escape games (and all three games are 9+/10 for me), is one of the most interesting, surprising games out there. The series as a whole has such a unique feel and gameplay loop - traditional 3D platforming, with open-map exploration, and then tactics and stealth as you work out the best way for any given monkey to get close and capture them with your net.
Every monkey has its own name, personality, and tendencies, which you can discover with a radar, something that gave the Ape Escape games a crazy level of depth that I don’t feel like really became the norm until things like Watch Dogs added NPC profiling. But on the whole, yes, Ape Escape is a trilogy of wonderful games that take a little getting used to but broadly haven’t really aged at all - I can still pick up any of them and complete them happily.
10. Tearaway Unfolded
Just squeaking into the top 10 is, in lieu of the Vita’s Tearaway (which I didn’t ever manage to play), the PS4 port Tearaway Unfolded. The love was instant - Tearaway is a beautiful, diverse game that uses a lot of gimmicks but all to fantastic effect, with an awe-inspiring soundtrack and a perfect game length that pairs fun gameplay with remarkable atmosphere. The game is like Nintendo at their A-game mixed with the technology of Sony systems, and I’d recommend it to anyone in the market for a platformer.
9. BioShock Infinite
Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt. BioShock Infinite was a total surprise to me - I bought it on a whim despite the horror elements of the original BioShock and its sequel making those two games unplayable for me. What I ended up with was a beautiful game, with a setting I adore, gameplay I find fun with that “explore in your own time and clear out areas of loot that feels actually useful and usable” je ne sais quoi I’ve mentioned loving in other entries and that will continue to dominate a lot of this list.
A lovely story and a unique (at the time - I’m aware this theming has since found its way into several other games) complete the package. BioShock Infinite also ousted the likes of Dishonored from the list - I loved that game as well, but any time I’d want to play that, I’d always probably just play BioShock Infinite instead.
8. The Outer Worlds
This was my surprise entry of the entire list. I honestly wouldn’t’ve pegged it for an entry here, but every time I paired it with games that have already been here, it kept being favourable. It’s the damn genre.
The Outer Worlds takes some of the elements of what I love about Fallout and puts them in a collection of smaller, sometimes denser, locations, largely to great effect. There’s the odd duff location, but they’re made up for by so many other amazing ones - the sinister glitz of Byzantium and the small civilisation of the Groundbreaker spring to mind as game highlights. Anything that lets me create a version of myself wins a lot of points for me, too.
The Outer Worlds is imperfect as a game in its own right, but the last thing that really elevates it for me is hope (pun not intended but the Hope elevating is a great pun so ner) - it’s a phenomenal establishing game. I couldn’t be more excited for The Outer Worlds 2 if I tried. Knock out the point of no return, make it a little more expansive (TOW ended fairly abruptly when you’re used to Fallout’s length) and throw in some settlement stuff so I can Allie and The Outer Worlds 2 will be a force majeure.
7. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
The representative of a septet of stunners - I don’t have a true favourite, but Miracle Mask had a beautiful location and was the series’ 3DS introduction. The Professor Layton series as a whole, though, is about as tailored for me as anything could be. Lateral-thinking puzzles accessible through an explorable world tied together with a story - absolutely divine.
I just hope the series comes back in some form. It’s a shame Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy still had a lot of what I loved about the six preceding Layton games and Katrielle was an amazing protagonist but was let down by a lot of rough puzzles, a butler that kept trying to escape the friendzone and a dog called (I wish I was lying) Sherl O.C. Kholmes that would not shut the f**k up.
Even just a port of the first six (or the first three!) to Switch would be a phenomenal start.
6. Super Mario Odyssey
This was the game that made the Nintendo Switch feel immortal. Already having possibly the strongest launch year in a console’s history, with Breath of the Wild, a new Splatoon, a deluxe port of Mario Kart 8 and some promising weird stuff like Arms, Super Mario Odyssey came along and blew me away.
It’s that formula again - “here big world do whatever”. But then Odyssey is so much more than that - because all those little nooks and crannies lead to reams of challenges of various shapes and sizes, from little separated platforming areas to whole 2D levels to unique control style challenges. It’s all tied together with the game’s signature character, Cappy, allowing you to capture things temporarily for a wider specialised move pool. And everything’s just done so perfectly that it broke my heart to reach the end of the game and know I had to go back to the average 2017 experience again.
Super Mario Odyssey is an absolute beast of a game, from a series that continues to inspire with every generation it’s a part of.
5. Bully
Oh, how the mighty fall.
Bully, until I decided to crack open Notepad and start ordering by my 2021 gaming preferences, was my #1 favourite game of all time. Rockstar’s signature open-world format established in GTA, but condensed from bloated cities with entire streets of nothing to do to a smaller town and school campus that still packed in the activities, and in a unique setting I’ve yet to see replicated successfully.
Bully’s bank of missions covers some of the quirkiest topics that no other game’s ever touched, including a stealth raid of the girls’ dormitory for a dodgy PE teacher, to the takedown of a sports team via mascot sabotage, to more leftfield later-game stuff like exploring a power station and fighting King of the Greasers in a junkyard. But it doesn’t stop there - the game has a wealth of side missions, school lessons, collectibles and activities that add to your abilities and your inventory and really complete Bully - on any given in-game day you can be fully productive towards story advancement, or do lessons, or explore, or just mess around, and you’ll have a good time whatever you plump for.
Why isn’t Bully still #1? Age. It’s suffered just a little bit - it has some of the PS2 Rockstar traits that prove a little frustration in modern times, like a mission failure resulting in a total boot-out back to the open world even when said mission is 20+ minutes long.
That doesn’t detract a lot, though - Bully is still absolutely worthy of #5, some fifteen years after its original release.
4. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
And this is the reason the mighty fall.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is two things - my favourite platformer game of all time, and at time of writing, the last game I finished. There’s definitely at least a little “new game sheen”, but I can say with confidence that Rift Apart is my absolute favourite Ratchet & Clank game, a series that for me is the most consistently-entertaining (counting the main line entries at least) out there. I can always pick up a Ratchet & Clank game and know I’ve got 10 or 20 hours of great fun ahead of me.
But Rift Apart adds so, so much to that formula. The old’s still there - you get the expansive diverse arsenal of exotic weaponry to kick the crap out of hordes of eviltons with. But the new is evolutionary - the ability (once unlocked) to zip around at high speed on hover skates in any location makes level traversal a joy. The actual rifts are oftentimes an amazing addition - the biggest highlights for me are when boss fights are randomly interrupted with an instant scene change or the racing level in the arena (the arena’s back!) takes you through chunks of every setting in the entire game in a minute flat.
And it looks stunning. It’s a technical powerhouse and a PlayStation 5 showcase, but that’s not all it is - it’s also a masterclass in world design. There are fewer planets in Rift Apart than previous entries but each one is about a hundred times more alive and deep-feeling than anything before it - and you can see all of it, all the time.
Super Mario Odyssey may have a few more nooks and crannies, but Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart topples it in my list - by a whisker - by the sheer scope and the second-to-none atmosphere consistent throughout the entire game.
3. Watch Dogs 2
My favourite “crime sandbox” game, and it’s not close. I’ll give love to the other contenders - Sleeping Dogs, the rest of GTA, Saints Row 2 and The Third, and Watch Dogs Legion, but the second game wins for a very specific, very silly reason.
The qualities true across all three Watch Dogs games first - I adore an explorable open world, and the more to do in it, the better. And it turns out that giving people a name, job, income, tagline and small back story? That’s all I need for hundreds of hours of exploring, scanning and imagining. But there’s a lot more - the world hacking makes for a load of great possibilities I find myself yearning for if I play any other crime sandbox game.
What elevates Watch Dogs 2 above 1 and 3, besides San Francisco being a far brighter and more diverse experience than either Chicago or London, for me is how missions are structured. For one, almost every mission is the same basic idea - area, full of baddies, complete object with or without baddies dying. So you’re never stuck in some dodgy mandatory side-mission like having to defeat an AWFUL boss in Legion. For the other, you can unlock a few key things - a jumper and a drone, both deployable, for remote objective completion, and gang and police APBs to falsely have baddies in the level taken down.
You can complete a lot of Watch Dogs 2 without ever setting either of Marcus’ feet into the boundaries of the level you’re on. And I find that captivating. I will absolutely spend an hour on something I could rush in five minutes if it means sitting a little jumper on a truck and remotely guiding the truck outside with a bunch of little hacks here and there.
These hacks can be used outside of missions too for some of the wildest chaotic dynamic moments. Like if there’s a little Bratva-controlled area guarding a bag of money - call a rival gang on one of them, call the police on another one, stand back, watch the chaos ensue.
In five years of owning Watch Dogs 2 I have completed it four times, and I hope that is the ultimate testament to how much I love it.
2. Fallout 4
My ultimate action-RPG-Bethesda-em-up, Fallout 4 adds a few things that absolutely blew everything else away for me.
On top of the standard fantastic gameplay, Fallout 4 introduces settlement building. The moment I saw that, I knew my time was screwed. Across three major save files I’ve probably built up 50 areas as far as the object limit would allow me, with a few biggies taking 10+ hours by themselves - my original save file’s Taffington Boathouse springs to mind, which is where I painstakingly optimised things to get the Benevolent Leader trophy and finally platinum the game on PS4.
There are elements of 3 and New Vegas I do wish had propagated into 4, but on the whole, 4 is so far up my Hangman’s Alley that the decision to put Fallout 4 #2 all time was extremely easy.
Honourable Mentions
I’ll be quick:
Miitopia and Animal Crossing New Leaf miss out because it feels weird to me putting something so “experiential” in my favourites. They’re almost not games to me - they’re just part of me.
Tetris Effect is not here for a similar reason. I just can’t compare it to anything I have on this list, it appeals to me in such a different way.
Jak 3 and Spider-Man Miles Morales miss just for being in genres I’ve already got so many favourites in.
Gravity Rush and a handful of others miss out because I have a huge fondness for them, but realistically, I can’t see myself ever wanting to play them again.
A few games missed out as I limited the number of spots multiplayer games could take up in favour of games I could rely on continuously enjoying regardless of my company. This impacted eg. the Worms franchise, the Jackbox Party Packs, Rocket League, Unreal Tournament GOTY, board game adaptations etc. There are occasional exceptions where games are so important to me that I couldn’t exclude them.
Beat Saber, Gitaroo Man, Frequency and Amplitude are all games I want to give nods to for being my favourite rhythm games - I haven’t included those on the list purely because my increasing terribleness at rhythm games means I play them a lot less.
A couple of games are disqualified for being too difficult for me to appreciate as much as I’d want to - here’s looking at you, Baba Is You.
Lastly, anything I suspect I will like but haven’t finished or reached yet is obviously not eligible yet. I’m still partway through Cyberpunk 2077 and have been more impressed than I expected - this might end up squeaking in later on.
Let’s go!
1. Tombi
Fallout 4 was, at the time I started compiling my list, the definite unshakable #1. The more I thought about it though, the more there was only one #1 in my mind. It’s the one where no other game matches it in gameplay style or gamefeel.
If I wanted an action RPG, I could play Fallout 4, sure. Or I could get my fix with The Outer Worlds, or Skyrim, or even BioShock Infinite. Crime sandbox? Watch Dogs Legion or Sleeping Dogs are perfectly adequate if I’ve had too much WD2. I have options, there are plenty of contenders.
There isn’t a game like Tombi (Tomba in US). It did get a sequel, Tombi 2, but that feels like it exists as somewhat of an inferior extension of the original, with uglier more-badly-aged 3D graphics and weirdly awful music - the original Tombi’s soundtrack contains earworm after earworm.
In over 20 years, Tombi hasn’t aged a day beyond the resolution it runs at. It’s still as fun, it’s still as appealing, the art design is still as eye-catching, unique and varied across the entire game. And every little scrap of it, down to your move set, is totally unique to Tombi. You don’t jump on enemies to kill them - you jump on them to grab them, then you frontflip and throw them with the might of Zeus into walls, cacti, off-screen, or even into other enemies for combos. Or you clonk them with a mace. Or you jump on a puffball and yeet it into their stupid faces.
And this silly, funny platformer RPG also has an inventory and quest mechanics with unique challenges.
I don’t want to say anything specific, because if you’re reading this - please play Tombi if you haven’t. It was on the PS3 store last time I checked. It’s expensive as hell to actually buy an original copy. But we’re living in the age of high-speed internet, and it’s a 20-odd-year-old video game. Just… you know. It’s like 200 megs. ePSXe is tiny. No shame when it’s so impossible to buy for a reasonable price on any system you’d still have plugged in.
Tombi is my favourite game of all time.
Shown: the proudest item in my game collection