If we’re known for anything, it’s probably either a) very, perhaps too long lists b) forced segues or c) being absolute hidden gem sickos who talk about games time forgot. Well, we asked you for your hidden gems, and you didn’t disappoint, buddies. We’re your guys, fwends.
Team Buddies – PS1
This one has been mentioned a lot by you guys before, but we’ll give the nod to our buddy Zacuk03 for finally making us talk about it. Use this power for good, Zac.
Now, there are plenty of games about building an army. But Team Buddies might be the only one where you do it by stacking boxes like Tom Cruise stacks his shoes. Released for the PS1 in 2000, this strange little Psygnosis game when they were releasing two games per week mixes third-person shooting, light strategy and multiplayer into something that still doesn’t have many obvious comparisons.
So, the basic idea is that each map is littered with crates, which you carry back to your base and arrange on a stacking pad. How you stack them determines what gets built. You can create new Buddies for your team, weapons and increasingly ridiculous vehicles, before sending your little army off to batter everyone else.Matches quickly turn into fights over crates, shrieking attempts to defend your base and occasional moments where your real life friend goes a bit too Jaeger for comfort.
You see, it’s particularly good in multiplayer, with four players able to fight over the same maps while no doubt crowded around a CRT and arguing over which Digimon you could take in a fight. Tentomon, easy.
And despite looking like it was designed for small children, Team Buddies has a surprisingly filthy mouth. The European release is packed with swearing where cockneys are treated as their own race, while the North American version was heavily sanitised. Apparently tiny coloured blobs calling each other bastards was too much. Bunch of bellsniffers.
Team Buddies never got a sequel and has never received a modern re-release, leaving the original PS1 version just stupidly expensive to be honest. It’s good, but that’s a tough price to swallow.
Monster House – GBA
Licensed games used to be treated with about the same level of care as a Vinted seller shipping literally anything, which makes Monster House on the GBA a particularly nice surprise for both us and Mannaman. Fun to say. A guy on Vinted once sent me a modded Xbox 360 in a Tesco bag.
Released alongside the 2006 animated film, it really is not just a decent licensed game, but also a surprisingly solid little take on survival horror.
Developer Artificial Mind and Movement went with an overhead perspective that suits the GBA perfectly. You explore the titular house as DJ, Chowder and Jenny, searching rooms, solving simple puzzles and fighting the various bits of bric and brac that have suddenly decided they would quite like to kill you. Each character has their own abilities, so you’ll regularly swap between them depending on what’s blocking your progress.
The result looks and plays a bit like Zelda after someone dumped it inside a haunted IKEA. Rooms are packed with possessed chairs, lamps and other household rubbish, while your main weapon is essentially a water gun loaded with cold medicine. It’s obviously nowhere near genuine survival horror territory, but the limited resources, exploration and creepyish mean it probably ruined a handful of childhoods.
It’s also surprisingly good-looking for the hardware. The detailed environments capture the grimy interior of the house nicely, and the overhead viewpoint allows it to cram quite a bit onto the tiny GBA screen.
Instead of feeling like a compromised port, it’s its own weird little adventure, but easy to overlook on a handheld that adapted basically everything in its short lifespan.
Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 – GBC
Despite that bitch ass Tentomon’s best efforts, Pokémon completely owned the monster-catching craze around the turn of the millennium, which meant plenty of perfectly good alternatives ended up fighting for whatever scraps Pikachu left behind. We’ll agree with DylantheWizard and say that Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 was one of the best, arriving on the Game Boy Color in 2001 with enough monsters, breeding and general RPG faffing around to keep Duracell in business for years.
Like Pokémon, it was released as two versions: Cobi’s Journey and Tara’s Adventure. Both follow essentially the same adventure, but feature different protagonists and some version-exclusive monsters. The setup involves travelling between different worlds to find magical keys and save the island of GreatLog, which is what I usually do every morning. Better still, you can find randomly generated keys that lead to additional worlds, giving the game far more to poke around in after the main story.
The monster system is what you’re here for though. Rather than simply catching creatures and filling a box with them, you can breed monsters together to produce completely new ones, inheriting abilities and potentially creating much stronger offspring. There are hundreds to discover, and building increasingly ridiculous family trees is way more fun than questioning why you haven’t seen your dad in six months.
It also helps that underneath all the monster collecting is basically a proper Dragon Quest RPG. Battles use parties of three monsters, there are towns and dungeons to explore, and the series’ familiar creatures give it way more personality in an army of Pokémon imitators.
So, if Pokémon was the obvious monster RPG to own on the Game Boy Color, this was one for the real sickos.
Severed Steel
I always, always have time for indie FPS games. If AAA publishers cannot be arsed with making anything single-player because you can’t monetise, I dunno, a Street Sharks crossover, it’s where games like Severed Steel step up. Boomtown stepped up to recommend it to us, too.
Released in 2021 and developed largely by solo developer Matt Larrabee, Severed Steel is a fast-paced FPS built around keeping yourself moving. You play as Steel, first name Severed, a one-armed sharpshooter taking on the corporation that discarded her. The story is just there to let you jump through windows.
Diving, sliding and wall-running activate slow motion, giving you time to line up shots while flying across a room. Steel only has one arm, so she can’t reload either. Once a weapon is empty, the sensible solution is to throw it away, steal another from an enemy and continue making an absolute bloody mess. Put a bib on Steel, honest.
Its voxel-based environments are highly destructible, letting bullets tear through walls and explosives open entirely new routes. Later on you get an arm cannon capable of blasting holes through surfaces yourself, turning levels into increasingly battered chunks of architecture. It is a short game, but I kinda prefer that in my FPS games honestly. Keep it concentrated, you know?
Severed Steel reviewed well and has since appeared on pretty much everything, yet it still feels overlooked. Maybe that’s the downside of being an indie FPS released into an endless torrent of indie FPSs. But if you’ve ever thought a shooter would be improved by doing a backflip through a window before stealing someone’s gun, this has you covered.
Bujingai: The Forsaken City – PS2
For a PS2 action game starring one of Japan’s biggest musicians and released to celebrate Taito’s 50th anniversary, Bujingai: The Forsaken City has become remarkably easy to forget. But not for VerdantBears, who’s been flying the flag since he was a cub.
Released for the PS2 in 2003 in Japan and later brought West as Bujingai: The Forsaken City, it was developed by Taito and Red Entertainment. Its biggest bit of stunt casting was Japanese musician Gackt, who provided both the appearance and voice of protagonist Lau Wong. If you’ve ever wondered why your impossibly beautiful swordsman looks suspiciously like a J-rock star, that’s because he literally is one.
Fortunately, there’s more here than celebrity casting. Bujingai is an extremely flashy hack-and-slash built around sword combat, counters and ridiculous aerial movement. Lau can run along walls, glide through the air and chain attacks together while batting away incoming strikes. Sword fights turn into rapid exchanges where both characters repeatedly parry each other, making even fairly ordinary encounters look flashier than abandoned Adobe software during Mardi Gras on a Hawaiian island. What’s Ezra Miller even doing these days?
There’s also magic to mix into combat, while levels send you bouncing between rooftops, temples and ruined environments. Yeah look, I am kinda padding it a bit here. It’s just a basic, straightforward, but fun game. It isn’t as mechanically polished as Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, and the camera occasionally feels like it’s fighting its own private battle, but the sheer spectacle carries it.
Bujingai arrived during a period when the PS2 was absolutely drowning in action games, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it disappeared underneath bigger names.
Still, if your main requirement from a PS2 action game is “let me run along a wall and look beautiful” Bujingai is very difficult to dislike.
Arcus Odyssey – Genesis
The Sega Phil Collins has no shortage of games that get dragged out whenever its hidden gems are discussed, but Arcus Odyssey still seems to slip through surprisingly often. Not for Des-Zee though. Released in 1991 for the Genesis, it’s an action RPG from Wolf Team that looks really great still.
You choose between four characters, each with their own weapons and magic, before setting off to stop the sorceress Castomira from getting her hands on the Sword of Leaty. The story isn’t going to keep anyone awake at night, but it is an excuse to batter some monsters.
Combat happens entirely in real time, with ranged attacks, spells and character-specific abilities making it feel closer to an arcade game than a traditional RPG. There are items to find, NPCs to rescue and some light puzzle solving along the way, but Arcus Odyssey is briskly paced and you don’t need to be arsing around in menus.
A particularly nice addition is two-player co-op. A second player can jump in and tackle the adventure alongside you, with different character combinations giving you a bit of room to experiment. For an early-’90s console action RPG, being able to play through the whole thing with someone else is still a pretty decent selling point.
It also has some pedigree behind it. Wolf Team would later develop Tales of Phantasia, while composer Motoi Sakuraba went on to become one of the most prolific names in Japanese RPG music.
Arcus Odyssey isn’t some enormous forgotten RPG masterpiece. It’s relatively straightforward, occasionally awkward and very much a product of its era. But as a fast, colourful action RPG with four distinct characters and full co-op, there’s plenty here worth rediscovering. Right, time for the next game.
Singularity – PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Now, granted Singularity isn’t obscure in the traditional sense. Activision published it, Raven Software developed it, and it arrived on three major platforms in 2010. Yet somehow it has spent most of the last 16 years being half remembered in the occasional tweet. Mark simply won’t stand for it. We got your back.
So you’ve popped off to an abandoned Soviet research facility where experiments involving the fictional element E99 have gone predictably badly. After being thrown back to 1955 and accidentally changing history, protagonist Nathaniel Renko finds himself bouncing between different versions of the island while trying to undo the mess he’s created.
Its big gimmick is the Time Manipulation Device, which gradually turns a fairly standard FPS into something much dafter, and it’s brilliant for it. You can rapidly age enemies until they crumble away, restore broken objects to their previous state, manipulate the environment and eventually fire off some particularly nasty time-based attacks. Combined with Raven’s typically punchy weapons, there’s a lot of fun to be had finding unnecessarily horrible ways to deal with a room full of Soviet mutants.
There is a noticeable BioShock flavour to the whole thing, from audio recordings and environmental storytelling to abandoned laboratories filled with experiments that should probably have remained on the napkin. Singularity isn’t quite as ambitious and doesn’t have much to say, but it does have a lot to shoot at.
Unfortunately, it arrived during an absurdly crowded period for shooters and didn’t sell particularly well. Raven were subsequently sent to the Call of Duty content mines. Those Street Sharks skins come for us all.
Despite having a gun that can literally manipulate time, Singularity wasn’t quite as fun as that single level from Titanfall 2 but it was a clever, compact FPS from a studio extremely good at making them. Next game.
Wandersong – PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Gang, I was so happy when Marcus recommended Wandersong, a really nice game about being a bard. You see, a remix of one of the game’s songs used to be the intro music for the channel. I won’t subject you to an old clip because I simply cannot watch my old self, but The Crater remix is the song name.
As mentioned, here you play as a bard who discovers that the universe is about to end. Unfortunately, you’re not the legendary Hero chosen to save it. Instead, your solution is to travel the world collecting pieces of the Earthsong, a magical tune that might convince the goddess Eya to stop everything from being wiped out.
Holding a direction brings up a colourful wheel of notes, which you use to interact with characters and the environment. You might copy another character’s melody, manipulate platforms, communicate with strange creatures or solve puzzles, all without suddenly producing a sword and deciding violence was the answer after all. It so often is!
There are platforming sections and plenty of puzzles, but much of the fun comes from meeting its enormous cast of oddballs and seeing how your increasingly elaborate singing abilities interact with the world.
It could easily have become unbearably twee, and occasionally gets dangerously close, but there’s a surprisingly thoughtful story underneath all the bright colours and relentless optimism.
We’re all maybe a bit too cynical these days, and the hopeful message of it may be a bit cringe or whatever for some, but if Wandersong passed you by in 2018, it’s absolutely worth giving the little singing idiot his chance to save the universe.
Guns of Fury – PC, Switch
Being a hidden gem usually takes a few years. But when Distantfoot recommends a game because it’s like Symphony of the Night and Metal Slug, we’re going to listen right now. Released in 2025, this indie mash-up of run-and-gun shooting and Metroidvania exploration barely seemed to register outside its niche, which is a pity.
Developed by Gelato Games, Guns of Fury follows special operative Guns Fury, no sorry, Vincent Fury as he attempts to rescue a scientist and recover an energy source capable of solving the world’s energy crisis. Naturally, an evil corporation gets involved, and the sensible response is apparently to shoot several thousand people.
Vincent carries an expanding arsenal of pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers and other weapons, while enemies explode across chunky pixel-art environments. But you are exploring a large interconnected map filled with locked routes, secrets and upgrades.
New abilities gradually open up previously inaccessible areas, while defeated enemies provide experience that can be used to improve Vincent’s stats. There are bosses, optional upgrades and plenty of reasons to double back, giving the familiar run-and-gun action a much broader and funner structure
The two halves fit together surprisingly well. The shooting is immediate enough that exploring never feels like trudging between upgrades, while the Metroidvania structure gives all that blasting an actual reason rather than just going full deVito.
If the idea of Metal Slug crossed with a proper Metroidvania sounds even remotely appealing, this is an extremely easy recommendation. It’s fast, satisfying, packed with things to find and deserves considerably more attention than it received. Don’t let this one haunt your wishlist.
Haunting Starring Polterguy – Genesis
Plenty of horror games ask you to survive a haunted house. Haunting Starring Polterguy has the considerably better idea of sort of doing a Beetlejuice. Released for the Genesis in 1993, it’s an odd little EA game built almost entirely around making one unfortunate family shit skedaddle. I imagine that’s why colddogs recommended it to us. The scariest idea of them all is uncooked hot dogs.
You play as Polterguy, a dead punk who has a score to settle with businessman Vito Sardini and his family. Rather than simply attacking them, you follow the Sardinis through their home and possess everyday objects to scare them senseless. Tables sprout faces, furniture comes alive, and the fridge gets a right attitude.
Part of the fun is simply finding an object you haven’t possessed before and seeing what horrible animation the developers have hidden inside it. Some are funny, some are surprisingly gruesome, and quite a few feel like they were snuck in by a cheeky writer.
The goal is to keep terrifying each family member until their fear meter fills and they flee the house. Polterguy’s ectoplasm gradually drains while he’s in the human world, however, occasionally dumping you into underworld sections where you have to replenish it while avoiding enemies.
Those sections aren’t nearly as entertaining as the haunting itself. Also, the controls can be a pain in the backside, and the game gets repetitive once the novelty starts wearing off. But what a novelty it is.
It’s weird and unlike almost anything else on the Genesis. If you’ve never played it, spending a few hours ruining the Sardinis’ day is absolutely worth it.
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