Connor's Favourite Games
Not ranked! My top 5 (and my GOAT) are on my profile, but that's the best you're getting. This is not a "Top 50" list or some other fixed number. Each game has a little blurb with random, unstructured thoughts. No spoilers are included.
I noticed the cover arts were very vibrant and varied so I organized them by colour! If any of these cover arts change I will scream.
I noticed the cover arts were very vibrant and varied so I organized them by colour! If any of these cover arts change I will scream.
45 Games
Took a while to sink me in but my god once it did,,, Been invested in Project Moon since. The abnormalities are super cool, I love SCP and the abnos all have cool backstories. I like Nothing There and Der Freischutz most. Super stressful and until I got really sucked in at the 40 hours mark it was hard to play more than 2 hours at a time because of constant setbacks. I say that with love. This game kicks you in the shins.
Riyuki, Valcez, Velasquez, and Camille, RIP you will always be my most beloved employees but I had to restart from day 1 <\3
Riyuki, Valcez, Velasquez, and Camille, RIP you will always be my most beloved employees but I had to restart from day 1 <\3
I binged this during finals. Like 6 hours a day when I was supposed to be studying. I did really well but it was a dumb idea at the time but I just couldn't put it down. So fun and stylish. Worth the wait to PC, glad I didn't just play the OG on PS3 emulator because the third semester is fantastic.
Like Immortality in that it feels like you're going insane the further you dig in. I had to use a guide towards the end to make sure I did everything. I really like the mystery and the resolution is so good. Who IS Lila???
I had a Word document open but I wish I was writing with pen and paper for that tactile feel. Feels like you're slowly spiraling into insanity. I was kinda annoyed that the ending triggered randomly for me though, I wasn't ready. Made me feel so dumb when I went online to read fan theories because here I was reading subtext while blatantly ignoring the literal text.
Really liked the theme of community. I liked the game well enough the whole time but act 3 really sold me during the Christmas scene. Won't say much bc spoilers.
They weren't kidding that hard mode was hard. Really fun continuation of the first game. I love the way characters leave your party. I minmaxed Magic and Vitality again lol.
I binged this during Christmas break of my first year at uni and that's a really cozy memory. Chose Empathy as my signature skill and went hardcore sorry communist. The vibes are immaculate. I remember starting with 5/5/1/1 stats and died grabbing my tie twice, so I reloaded and went 3/5/2/2 instead. I remember thinking there was a time limit because of a convo with Joyce, so I did the entire church questline at 2am in-game bc time doesn't advance past 2am. I did every single side quest except for one which I didn't think I had enough time to do. If you haven't played this yet, no there is not a time limit.
Everything about this is undefeated. Christ how I love games about good people (I use "good" loosely...) in bad times. Amazing gameplay. Amazing story. Amazing music. No complaints. Everything you could want in a game is here. It's the full package. The difficulty curve is vertical.
I love the setting over the first game and the cast are all really cool! It's brutal and unforgiving and so satisfying when I replay and demolish the early game that gave me so much hell. I love how it's an amalgamation of a bunch of things the creator likes. Great art is built on the back of what came before.
In my first playthrough I was Marina and lost my legs to a bear trap. I was stubborn and played almost the ENTIRE game without my legs. It took FOREVER to actually get them back. I'm amazed I actually did it. It genuinely felt impossible at points. Fuck the mob they spawned every single time.
In my first playthrough I was Marina and lost my legs to a bear trap. I was stubborn and played almost the ENTIRE game without my legs. It took FOREVER to actually get them back. I'm amazed I actually did it. It genuinely felt impossible at points. Fuck the mob they spawned every single time.
The story is bad 😭 but the atmosphere and the vibes... get Mudo-ed loser fuck you reload half an hour of progress (complementary). So so edgy I love it inject this straight into my veins.
This game's got style in abundance and there are lots of secrets packed into its short run-time. So charming and it's like 3$. Respect the craft!
Made me smile :) There's so much value in just preaching empathy. "Oh you had to learn empathy from a video game" SHUT UP not everything needs to be a PhD philosophy dissertation level themes. There's value in being told something you already know. The final song is beautiful :)
One big beautiful MESS. Episode 2 is a straightforward tragedy and this one really focuses on the author's cynicism and disillusionment with the series but in a loving way? Not like "fuck you people for liking this" but in a "WHY did I make this i'm in way over my head" kinda way. Like your creation taking on a life of its own and kind of mad but kind of proud. Yelling into the void and super angsty in a way that just HITS.
Beautiful. It's only like 90 minutes long and it's FREE! Go check it out! So imaginative with beautiful art. Made me cry. Full of wonder and whimsy. This is what speculative fiction is all about!
Great detective gameplay no game has really gotten close to. Some puzzles were frustrating (I'm awful with accents) but the free-form approach was cool. Tbh it's been so long and I've forgotten a lot I wonder if I could play it again?
I think the dated vibes and jank of this game are so important! It's charming! I get that's not an "objective" metric but I don't care! It's nostalgic and fun. The Napoleon board game world was my favourite. Obviously it's messy as all hell by today's standards but its approach to mental health is interesting for the time. Fuck the meat circus tho
Fun combat and so edgy I love it. Story and characters are wonderful. I adore press turn and being able to customize my party. I was minmaxed to all hell and always took 2 Mag and 1 Vit on level up.
Normally I really dislike platformers but this is the exception. The tight level design with lots of checkpoints rewards precision and risk-taking because you're never losing more than a minute of progress. I played this during back-to-school COVID protocols in my last year of high school during class breaks and sometimes at lunch and it's actually kind of a nice memory :)
Does this fit in better in purple or turquoise hmm...
Does this fit in better in purple or turquoise hmm...
Builds on everything I loved about BotW. I will admit the sky and the depths are underdeveloped, but as someone that played BotW back when it released, the ability to go back to Hyrule with completely fresh eyes was amazing. BotW was always one of those "I wish I could play it for the first time" games and that was what I got with TotK!
So important to me. Genuinely formative to my early teen years. So full of love and charm. This is what indie games are capable of.
Plot twist after plot twist, it's a fun wild ride. Great story and I love some good convoluted time travel shenanigans. Watched my sister play it after I beat it and it was really interesting seeing everything fit together with the context I had and her reactions and theories.
I'm that guy that thinks The Answer is really good. I love you Aigis and Yukari so much. I get that it's a little contrived but if it works, it works. Also I think the PS2 charm really works in this game's favour. It's dated but that perfectly matches the aesthetics. Not controlling party members is also perfectly fine, set them to Knock Down and remember that when healing, Yukari will only cast Media if two or more party members have HP below 50%. I don't hate Reload or anything and I haven't played it so I'm not gonna be annoying but I love P3FES for what it is and I don't see anything I need "fixed" in Reload?
Everything I loved about Octopath 1 but even better! Even the story goes from boring as all hell to just okay. But everything else man! I love this series! I am bloom's strongest defender I don't get why y'all think this game looks overproduced it's gorgeous.
I'm gonna say this counts as both the original and The Re-Up just because The Re-Up is an awkward beige that looks out of place in either colour. It's fine because The Re-Up is a continuation of what makes this game hilarious. It's so mean-spirited which I usually hate but here it's charming. Man the 2000s were weird. Probably, I was literally a child in '09.
I love how casually gay it is. The vibe and art are amazing. Love how the 80s anime visual style communicates this is a prequel to Pocket Mirror. I understand why the puzzle design might be frustrating for some but I love the whole "girl dies horribly in haunted house" RPGMaker genre and I thought it was charming. Just the right difficulty. I really liked the time management aspect too.
So magical I love this and there will never be another game like it. Environmental/naturalistic storytelling peaked here. I have so many little anecdotes about my playthrough floating around in my head. "I wish I could play it for the first time" is something I feel for a lot of games but if I had to pick one and only one to reset my memory of it's Outer Wilds. The DLC was such a vibe too.
I remember playing this with the Switch me and my sister got for Christmas. I was so in awe of the console. I'd never played a video game like this and it was probably the first game I ever called my favourite? I've played video games basically my whole life but I mostly played whatever my parents bought me, so I didn't have the ability to really curate my tastes like I do today.
Fantastic sense of place, I love magical realism and the game being set in Indonesia was fun. Love the story, that final chapter had me sobbing. I also appreciate how easy it was to do all the side quests. When you're about to progress the story and move to the next chapter or lock yourself out of exploration there's always a character that says "hey we might not be able to back out of this once we start, are you SURE you're ready?"
So beautiful. I played this on my TV and WOW the colours pop. Such gorgeous blues and purples. Love the music, sets the atmosphere.
Hit really close to home in a weird way. The webcam controls are super creative! I'm actually really good at staring, but it turns out keeping your eyes open when they're full of tears is hard.
So beautiful. Fiction peaked and it's only downhill from here. I was actually uncontrollably sobbing for the final like, 5 hours. Yes, I was crying the whole time straight. So evocative and emotional. Love it so much.
Very poignant reflection on sacrifice and how what we choose to do with our life necessarily burns as many bridges as it builds. I loved that the game deleted your save after choosing an ending, it added a sense of finality to your choice and made you kind of doubt/regret it. They changed it so the game autosaves before you make a final choice which IMO compromises the weight of that choice. When I first played, I manually backed my save and have seen every ending, so I say this knowing what there is to miss out on: if you want to play this I strongly encourage you to pick a SINGLE ending and stop playing after. You can also reload for the secret/bonus ending (which I consider a non-standard ending, you'll know what I mean when you get there), but do NOT just reload to see everything. Elsinore's beauty lies in what can no longer be. I really want to write a full review of this game about that but I need to replay it first to make sure everything's accurate.
I HATE GACHA I HATE GACHA but Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina gave me brain rot so now I'm obsessed with Project Moon games. The story is phenomenal. Love Mili's songs, Between Two Worlds is PEAK. Love you Ishmael <3
Really fun and one of my first forays into untraditional RPGMaker games! Cute and was like nothing I'd seen before. I want to be vague for fear of spoilers and say I've seen a lot more like it now, but OneShot's tone really sets it apart from more horror-oriented contemporaries. Love you Niko <3
I wrote a review for this game! Very proud of it, go check it out :) Since that was pure praise I'll complain a bit here and say as much as I love this game I think the characters are a bit too archetypal, but I think I overstated the issue in my first playthrough because Cal's the worst of it and he was the very first character I focused on. "I don't like competition I just want everyone to be happy" you're sweet Cal but shut up.
I love Ace Attorney and it's such a formative series for me. Changed the trajectory of gaming for me. Chronicles is everything I love about the series. The characters and engaging mysteries that strips back the feature creep of previous games to the bare essentials and is better for it. The jury cross-examinations are also so fun. Susato is awesome in particular. Magnus McGilded will always be Cosney Megundal to me <\3
I love this trilogy and how each game is so wildly different in tone. This game is the most straightforward of the three. Really fun RPGMaker psych horror. Love you Charlotte <3
I was an edgelord in middle school and I think that will always stick with me as I mature. I played this in my final year of high school (IIRC?) and it felt like a mature take on the dark and edgy shit I loved before. For a time this was my favourite game! I think as my tastes change I've lost interest in it a bit (not that I think less of it, it's just fallen out of top 5) but I'll always value this journey.
I look at this game and think "I can make a game too!" So charming. I love these characters. I also love the subversive nature of Siffrin's character arc, it reminds me of Jacob Geller's "Time Loop Nihilism" video and I think Siffrin is a complete rejection of that idea.
This was the first proper review I wrote on Backloggd! I also wrote a better review here.
This was the first proper review I wrote on Backloggd! I also wrote a better review here.
So reactive, it's magical. That first playthrough when everything is guaranteed to be new is pure bliss, but even on replays I'm surprised by how much input I have. Love the approach of multiple routes with a clear cause and effect rather than modular scenes with variable text, it gives a fantastic sense of progression. Loading so many choices upfront with chapter 1 is genius both for scaling back choice in future chapters (chapter 1 can lead to 10 routes and each chapter 2 has 2 or 3 branches) as well as minimizing repeat text on replay. I really like the way the game gates text you've already seen, on my newer playthroughs I've deliberately used this to block off paths I don't want to repeat so I can try new stuff.
I had an Undertale phase in middle school and I will not pretend to be embarrassed. This was like a peek behind the curtains of what video games were really capable of, as well as maybe the first game to get me into the indie scene?
It was hard to get into at first but once it clicked I was so invested. I will die on the hill that games don't need to be fun, just engaging. That's what Fear & Hunger is. The brutality and unfairness is why I love it so much.
FANTASTIC atmosphere and style. Beautiful prose and endearing characters. Pentiment left me hungry for more abbey murder mysteries and Misericorde delivered. So excited for the rest. I did think the secret epilogue was very weak though and I hope it doesn't reflect the direction going forwards, but I'm really optimistic.
This is peak JRPG right here (except for the story that was boring)! Looks gorgeous, not really open world but open world-ish? Great music, fun combat with flexible job system. Everything that isn't the story is so good it more than makes up for it. And mini-rant, the stories not being connected isn't inherently bad. There's potential there, it's just they're so paint-by-numbers it's boring.
I think 999 is the "better" one since it stands alone and has better internal structure, but VLR is my favourite of the pair because it's so FUN. It knows that we know what we know about 999 and wastes no time pushing it to the extreme. The AB game and the way choosing teams works are such genius narrative devices for the route splits. I still love 999 in its own right though!
Side note this game is too colourful to put anywhere. I'm actually kind of surprised how well organizing by colour works overall and that this is the only outlier.
Side note this game is too colourful to put anywhere. I'm actually kind of surprised how well organizing by colour works overall and that this is the only outlier.
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sirconnie
1 month ago