Came for the fallen Catholic visual design. Stayed for the slow growth of the player characters from unlikable pricks to expansive people by PSX standards.

Strange mechanics and candy-coated color palettes delighted completely. Grabbing and snapping may be the best mechanic EVER.

Clown-core shmup with a shockingly high difficulty. The ship throws pies.

Slightly stiff beat-em-up with amazing art and theme; murderous children's toys?

Grief as comfort, distraction, burden, and communal experience. Helped me escape an existential crisis.

Fat-shaming bad, but weight-based mechanics that change as you eat? Extremely fun!

Pokemon Snap for the Mothman generation. Photograph eerie fellas, uncover secrets.

A noir-styled "how-dunnit". Many branching paths can be repetitive, but a perfect run feels impossibly good.

Forever virgin samurai kills a bunch of guys to be the number one guy-killer. Also mows lawns and captures escaped scorpions. Suda51 doesn't miss.

Smash TV but you turn guys into pinballs and shoot em into targets. Fast and fun with friends.

David Cronenburg's Rainbow Six Vegas. Tactics meets tactless as vomit-inducing deep-fried visuals meet tight and movement-heavy FPS precision.

Alien: Now with more anime girl. It's cunningly illustrated despite its simplicity. A great example of a developer using the Famicom for non-typical design.

Spin to win. Charge up your body to deliver multi-hit moves. Half beat-em-up, half fighting game, all a fever-dream power trip for the player.

Pac-Man paints the town in this updated arcade title. Demonstrates the amazing design philosophy of the Wonderswan really well. Is short, but has branching level paths for replay value.

For kids who can't shut up about FLCL. Hapless kid falls for a space girl, becomes an intergalactic guitar warrior, and plays rhythm segments to zap enemies to ash. Endearingly whiny and naive. A pure experience.

Everything is a baseball and you're a bat. WHACK WHACK WHACK. Team up with friends to play a surprisingly competent beat-em-up about baseball ninjas.

A perfect sequel that says "We Made This Because It's Fun. Your Enjoyment is Nice But Isn't Our Main Goal". Variety for days, amazing soundtrack, and the usual confetti aesthetic charm.

90s MTV CG Animation + Light Guns + Manic Stream of Thought Dialogue. It's intense and bursting with grungy nostalgia and weird creatures.

Confusing, inaccessible, and aggressive towards the player to a degree that approaches hatred...Somehow I still fell in love with it. It has an oppressive and compelling sense of dream-like confusion to it that made it stick despite a thousand failings. My favorite game I can't recommend.

Dropped into a vast wilderness. Eat leaves and build a tower to touch the sun. Silly, strange, and beautifully directionless. Like getting lost in the woods as a kid.

A PSX love-letter in Escape Room form, The Tartarus Key can be a bit all over the place, but has unbeatable visual design and well-balanced puzzles.

Everything you've been told, good and bad. Drown in a digital ocean of dadaist psychedelics in what may be the PSX's greatest experiment.

A simple puzzle game with lots of hidden depth based around basic programming philosophy. Cute little monkey moon-walks through danger.

Mighty one-year-old fights everything and wins. Unhinged and satisfying to platform through.

He is a very good bear. Beautiful body horror, sickening tension, and puzzles that feel near physically real in interface. So good.

A classic for a reason but still loaded with grind. Made me understand why lots of RPG players wish they were playing it for the first time again.

Maximum camp, genuinely disgusting, genuinely frustrating to navigate. Lots of beautiful art and thrills hidden behind a UI that can't communicate.

An isometric immersive sim reminiscent of early Fallout. Be incompetent. Be sneaky. Watch everything fall apart, even when it goes right.

French language mental health adventure. This guy has a lot of problems and he'd rather sleep in a graveyard than go to therapy.

A storybook toybox of pointless interactions and charming asides. Receive kindness from animals, explore the deep sea, and wander till you can't stand it anymore.

A game, in the classic sense. It's ALL about play. Toss food around, light the set on fire, warp time and space to photograph the perfect noodle bowl. Like a trip to the gallery.

Cringe potty humor made tolerable due to INCREDIBLY well thought out movement mechanics, with emphasis on speed and efficiency. Steals from all of the best and is damn proud of it.