Games That Punched Way Above Their Weight

Today’s games were made by developers who punched way above their weight class, whether that’s the mechanics they pioneered, the scale of their game despite their own scale, or the wild swings they took. Some of them did end up like Johnny Knoxville vs Butterbean, though.

 

Bright Memory Infinite

There’s a lot of examples of games that have been developed by either a one-person dev team, or at least a handful of people, and while this is said with no disrespect to those projects, most of them do end up as pixel-art games. Think about Stardew Valley or Undertale, games with mostly one person on the dev team that are certainly punching above their weight, but use 2D art styles. Absolute trash, only joking. I’ve got like 100 hours in Stardew.

A game like Bright Memory Infinite however, mostly developed by the Chinese developer Zeng “FYQD” Xiancheng, is a lot more impressive as it’s a full 3D FPS game complete with Unreal Engine 4 graphics, excellent gunplay and even Devil May Cry inspired scoring. Punching above its weight is an understatement.

Playing as the protagonist Shelia, which is almost the funniest name they could have picked for the playable character in this kind of game that’s perfect for Arsenal Football Club fans – what do you mean that’s a different kind of gooner – you find yourself in the Land Of Sky, a levitating landmass over the Arctic Circle. The Land Of Sky is home to a variety of ancient creatures, along with a mysterious power that a military organisation called SAI is looking to harness for themselves.

Bright Memory Infinite is certainly a looker, but it does have the fast, frantic gunplay to back it up. Use Shelia’s arsenal of weapons and cool powers to lay waste to everything before you throw another shrimp on the barbie in this brief but action packed and enjoyable campaign. It doesn’t outstay its welcome — not every game needs to feel eternal, after all.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Going from a game developed by one Chinese dude to a game developed by Silicon Knights in the early 2000s when they were at the peak of their powers is certainly a bit of a jump. SK at that time certainly had the talent and the manpower to compete with the big boys, as evidenced by their incredible work on Blood Omen: The Legacy Of Kain. Ooh what a whipper, remaster that next please.

But that was six years before the release of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and Silicon Knights hadn’t developed or published anything in that time. Silicon Knights needed to make a huge mark with their next game in order to stay relevant, or, well, alive, and they aimed for the biggest dogs in the yard by making a horror game to surpass Resident Evil. Quite the target.

The result, Eternal Darkness, could arguably be described as one of the most ambitious horror games ever made. The plot alone is a bonkers take on Lovecraftian horror, complete with a time-hopping, perspective shifting approach to story-telling, while the game’s approach to losing your sanity leads to some hilarious and terrifying conclusions. Being told the demo is over when playing a full priced game, or that the game was prematurely over to bait a sequel both deserve to be in the fourth wall break hall of fame.

It’s a real shame that Silicon Knights’ well-documented legal troubles will likely mean we’ll never see this game again, as Eternal Darkness really punches above its weight class for there being 12, yes twelve different playable characters and multiple story paths, a whole decade before Capcom would bring six characters and four story paths in ermmm Resident Evil 6. Chuck in the fact that it was originally set for the Nintendo 64 before a last minute scramble that required close to a remake of the game, and 9/11 making them completely rewrite one of the characters, and it’s nuts what a team of roughly 50 pulled off here.

 

Iconoclasts

This slightly forgotten gem basically took twice as long to make as the Vita was alive for. Wait, the Vita was around eight years? Why does it feel like the Vita was only around for like…four years?

Developed by Sweden’s Joakim “Konjak” Sandberg, Iconoclasts casts players as Robin, an unlicensed and self-trained mechanic who lives in a world that’s under the authoritarian rule of the One Concern, a religious group that dogmatically controls mechanics. The whole world runs on a substance called Ivory, which the One Concern are hungry for, and Robin ends up caught in the crosshairs of the Concern themselves.

One trip to prison and subsequent prison break later, and Robin finds herself on a planet-spanning adventure trying to put a stop to the Concern’s diabolical plans. With her trusty wrench and stun gun in hand, you’ll blast and smack your way through the game’s levels, partnering with various characters along the way as they can help with the game’s over 20 boss fights.

The gorgeous graphics, deep gameplay and awesome story all help to make Iconoclasts a Metroidvania experience you shouldn’t skip, and the fact that it was developed by one man over the course of eight years makes it all the more impressive. Yep, that includes level design, character design, all the music, writing, animation and more, just the one guy.

Iconoclasts’ one-man dev team still managed to compete with the big players in the Metroidvania space, and is now considered by some to be one of the better 2D platformers of the 2010s, but it does feel like it’s been just a tad overlooked as the years have gone by. You do see a few solo dev retro platformers these days, but it’s nuts to see how much Iconoclasts punched above its weight, so the fact that it’s been outcast from a more modern lens is a pity.

 

Outcast

Trying to develop an open world 3D sci-fi RPG is hard enough in this day and age, so developing one back in the mid to late 90s, when the genre was still finding its feet and game development was somehow 100x more volatile than trying to move a single image in Microsoft Word, was practically unheard of.

Attempting that ridiculous feat as a relatively untested developm ent team is genuinely astonishing, but that’s what the guys at Appeal did when they developed the original Outcast for PC in 1999. Sure, they might have had some weight behind them, with Infogrames acting as publisher for Outcast during their more successful and prolific periods, but the idea of creating an open world game on the scale of Outcast back then was ambitious to say the least.

As the impeccably named Cutter Slade, you’ve been stuffed into a spaceship and sent off to the planet Adelpha with a group of scientists, but the ship and probes have been separated, leaving Cutter stranded alone on this alien planet. Across the open world, Cutter has to work with the native species, the Talan, in order to try and repair the probes, learn what happened and figure out how to get back to Earth. Outcast had a full reputation system in play, with the Talan changing how they treat Cutter depending on his actions, and there was a full combat and stealth system so players could choose how to approach combat, and the results led to a very well received RPG that was way ahead of its time with tonnes of technical stuff that I’m way too dumb to explain. Something about heightmap engines and bump mapping?

Outcast could have taken all the bumps in the world and it still wouldn’t have sold that well.

 

Immortal: Unchained

Yes, some games can punch above their weight and then just kinda end up punching themselves in the head a bit.

When you hear about a group of developers who are fans of a certain genre getting together to create their own take on it, it’s hard not to get excited or at least root for them to succeed t. Swedish company Toadman Interactive got plenty of excitement going with Immortal Unchained, their sci-fi Soulslike-inspired shooter, and while the execution left a lot to be desired as far as critical reception goes, particularly on consoles compared to the PC release thanks to some performance issues and mega clunk, there’s no denying that the team at Toadman took a big swing in trying to create a new take on the biggest RPG trend in recent years. At this point, pretty much anyone going up against FromSoft is punching above their weight, and Toadman were doubly outmatched in that regard.

Set in a world that blends dark sci-fi with Norse-inspired mythology, players control an unnamed prisoner in a world that is slowly but surely crumbling around them, so the only answer is to shoot everything. There’s a Monolith, and the caretaker, Aras, has freed you so you can try and repair it in order to save the world. Of course, this is a Soulslike game, so you do that by grabbing the nearest weapons, finding the biggest bosses you can and bashing your head against a wall until you break or they do.

While there’s some traditional melee weapons available, the addition of guns did help Immortal stand apart from the competition, though Remnant: From The Ashes would launch a year later and do Soulslike with guns a bit better, unfortunately.

 

Trespasser

Sometimes, you’re punching above your weight because even though you’ve got all the resources behind you, you’re trying to do too much. Dreamworks Interactive and Electronic Arts are arguably two of the biggest companies you could find in the late 90s, so it might be difficult to try and convey just how much they were punching above their weight, but Trespasser is not like any other video game project.

We did publish a video about it a while back, which you should watch as our older videos are our own hidden gems — not even 1000 views, brutal —but if you’ve never heard of this Jurassic Park game before beyond a health bar being on the main character’s boob, let us explain why Trespasser probably would’ve been enough to tank any development team, let alone one made up of about 15 designers and programmers.

Serving as a prequel to The Lost World, you control a lone survivor called Anne as she tries to survive on a remote island filled with dinosaurs. There’s no HUD at all, so you have to listen to Anne’s dialogue as she manually tracks ammo counts, and her arm has its own controls and physics that make it feel like it was lifted straight out of a game like Hand Simulator. Naturally, trying to aim and shoot a gun when you have to properly align your arm and wrist, and even account for the physics of the recoil, made playing Trespasser a bit of a miserable experience for anyone looking for simplistic dino blasting.

It’s ambitious as hell, but too much for almost anyone to achieve in a fun way, meaning they punched way, way above their weight. Really, this is probably the video game version of Icarus. Sometimes the sky is a limit for very good reason.

 

No Man’s Sky

Speaking of attempting potentially too much, Hello Games’ relatively diminutive team stating in the mid-2010s that they’re going to give players a procedurally generated universe that players can explore to their heart’s content was a big ask.

It’d be a big ask for a massive, well organised dev team, but a few folks from the UK? Where we have our legally mandated tea breaks every hour? The fact that No Man’s Sky managed to launch at all is still staggering, but as you likely don’t need reminding at this point, No Man’s Sky wasn’t exactly stellar at launch. Promises and ideas that were mentioned during the pre-release hype never materialised, or were janky as hell, leaving everyone pretty disappointed when the game finally arrived.

What really establishes No Man’s Sky and specifically Hello Games as a dev that not only punches above its weight but actually succeeds in spite of everything, is how dedicated they’ve been to updating the game post launch.

Since 2016, Hello Games have been prolific and determined to turn No Man’s Sky into the best space exploration game ever made, and with smart updates like proper multiplayer, VR, awesome player and ship customisation and so much more. I think I personally prefer Elite Dangerous a bit more just for its vibe, but the whole package as of 2025 in No Man’s Sky is kinda insane.

When it first came out, many were quick to write off No Man’s Sky as an ambitious project that flew too close to the sun, and while their wings have been burnt a bit, they’re flying higher than ever now. Right, Sean, try to remember to not field too many questions for your next game.

 

King’s Field

We established earlier in the episode that trying to compete against modern FromSoftware is an uphill struggle, but even early FromSoftware were punching above their weight too.

Consider, if you will, King’s Field. Not King’s Field as it is known in the West, which was actually the second King’s Field game, but the original release from 1994. King’s Field might have only been released in Japan, but it was a launch game for the original PS1, a 3D first-person RPG and it was from a studio that, before King’s Field, had spent their previous 8 years as a company creating business software. Imagine, right, I dunno, ermmmm QuickBooks making a dungeon crawler, and that’s how nuts it was. Clearly, it’s a pivot that worked for the Japanese developer, but at the time, people probably thought they were out of their minds.

What’s even more nutty about King’s Field is the fact that FromSoft’s internal development team managed to turn around King’s Field in about six months, which is just ludicrous to think about. As for the final product, it’d be hard to say it’s not aged in some spots, but King’s Field and its approach to RPG levelling, eerie world building and hostile dungeons helped to inspire FromSoftware’s golden age with Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. There’s even a few modern retro games that take after King’s Field specifically.

Never mind punching above their weight, FromSoft achieved a first round knockout with this one, and they haven’t looked back ever since. No one asks about their business software these days, huh? Right, next up: who remembers making stuff in games?

 

Stunt Island

Do you remember those console games like MTV Music Generator and the like, that were all about trying to get kids into music production at a basic level? There’s a case to be made Stunt Island was that but for budding filmmakers in the early 90s, as the game was marketed as “The Stunt Flying and Filming Simulation”, providing players with their own personal sandbox modelled after an area in Southern California. Sure, it was published by those indie upstarts ummmm…Disney, but compared to some other projects from them, Stunt Island’s more modest dev team feels like a lightweight.

It’s not a looker today, granted, and has more jagged edges than Adam Copeland at an Alanis Morrisette concert, but 3D simulation games in 1992 weren’t exactly photorealistic, to say the very least. In Stunt Island’s defense, photorealism wasn’t quite the aim.

Stunt Island is split into two modes, with Stunt Co-Ordinator giving you 32 pre-made stunts to complete and earn various rankings in, but where the game comes alive is with its set design and editing room. Here, you can place various cameras, props, explosion triggers and more before running through your own flight stunt. Once you’re finished, you can then hit the editing room to splice footage together and add sound effects and music to create your own movie.

Putting tools like this into more accessible hands is always a good thing, and honestly, there should be more games like Stunt Island in the future.

 

Dwarf Fortress

If No Man’s Sky’s small dev team creating a simulation game is bonkers, the development of Dwarf Fortress is another story entirely. Primarily the product of one man, Tarn Adams, though his brother Zach has also contributed, Dwarf Fortress has been worked on consistently since 2002, though Tarn moved onto full time development in 2006 and hasn’t looked back.

The game has been given way more public notoriety in recent years thanks to Dwarf Fortress’ release on Steam, but the simulation sickos have been singing DF’s praises for years at this point. The fact that the game is available now on Steam, and has been upgraded beyond ASCII graphics so it looks better than ever, just means even more people can get sucked into this abyss.

Dwarf Fortress relies on random generation, with the main mode of the game being Fortress Mode. Here, you’re given complete control of a colony of dwarves, and you’re free to decide how little or how much influence you want to have over this colony. Each dwarf within the colony has their own thoughts, feelings and aspirations, so you’re essentially watching your own mini civilization play out before your eyes, only for them to be completely wiped out by one of Dwarf Fortress’ many threats. That’s all part of the fun though, as DF thrives in the stories it creates as you play. Remember folks, you don’t need a massive dev team to create something infinitely replayable, just a remarkable amount of dedication.

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