Modern technical advancements in gaming can feel a bit… underwhelming at times. Ray tracing only seems to exist so I can briefly admire an FPS-tanking reflection or puddle I would have otherwise walked straight past. Chromatic aberration is mostly there to be turned off. My once-spacious SSDs are quickly clogged up by multi-gig patches that either add something I'll never find the time to see or fix a problem I didn't know existed. I thought the future was going to involve a lot more shiny people taking over cyberspace and hoverboards, and far less sitting hunched over a keyboard updating my drivers or elbow-deep in a settings menu fussing over various forms of AA.
During these disappointing times I like to run back into the creaking arms of ye olden dayes. Which to me is anything between the era when games spanning four floppy discs were considered a luxurious extravagance and 800x600 was an excessively high resolution, to the time we all got excited about some weird new Quake clone with textured grass and vehicles (surely that'll never catch on) called Halo.
These older games aren't automatically better—plenty of this year's new releases have been incredible, and there's a steaming mountain of old games best left forgotten—but the games below can legitimately hold their own against anything else already in your digital library, and feel as fresh and fun today as they always have.
Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug (1982)
Namco's game may be older than time itself and possess none of those fancy modern details like "scrolling" or "a main character with a proper face," but it's perfect for a quick five minutes of gaming when nothing else in particular feels like it's worth loading up. The lively dirt-clearing scratches the same itch as neatly lining up Tetris's blocks, and cleverly squishing the monsters pursuing poor heroic digger Taizo Hori with a well-timed big, heavy rock is always deeply satisfying.
It's the sort of game that most people would play for a bit of fun and then walk away from, but underneath the cute flower-covered surface and happy little tune lies a classic score-focused arcade challenge just begging to be mastered.
Alternatively: Mr Driller DrillLand (2002)
Taizo's back and this time he's brought his arguably more famous son, Susumu (Mr Driller), as well as a selection of family and friends along for the ride. This was originally a Japanese GameCube exclusive before finally being translated into English and released on Steam, ready to surprise and delight with its moreish mix of puzzle-drilling action and adorably daft hats.
Thief (1998)
Don't let the pointy faces and angular interiors fool you: this game is as detailed as they come. Thief's dark steampunk world is my playhouse (and often my graveyard too): every well leads to some fully mapped-out underground waterway, every ordinary room has aboves and unders and blind spots just behind the door for me to hide in, blackjack raised and ready to strike. Important conversations are overheard by actually sneaking close enough to eavesdrop, and burning torches are meant to be quietly doused from afar with water arrows.
If I can imagine it, Thief will probably let me try it. Nothing beats the thrill of a sticky-fingered run through a building crawling with guards, or picking the exact key I need off someone's belt as they obliviously pass by.
Alternatively: Wing Commander (1990)
If skulking about under the stars doesn't sound appealing, how about looking out of a spaceship's cockpit while flying among them? Wing Commander somehow made combining epic action space battles with impressively sim-like flight control and damage modelling look easy. Then they added an incredibly reactive story that continues on whether I succeed or fail a mission. All this complexity, even though it was designed for hardware with barely double-digit CPU speeds and 1MB of RAM.
Love for D&D games, dungeon crawlers, and, um, a certain vampire spawn of Larian's inspired me to seek out further dice-rolling adventures of the gothic fantasy kind this year. I was a little surprised I had to go so far back in time to play an RPG based on this setting, considering that Ravenloft's popularity is almost as undying as its vampiric master is. It's a shame too, because even something as old as Strahd’s Possession shows how much potential is locked up in this cursed land.
The level-draining vampires and spooky cemeteries crawling with monsters are creepy enough, but there's something truly unsettling about exploring a village filled with people too scared or plain worn down by it all to help. The cherry on this ghoulish cake is an incredible automap system, one so good it not only lets me annotate my maps in-game but also allows me to export them to Notepad, or even print them out on paper. Paper! Imagine looking at maps drawn on tree pulp. Incredible.
Alternatively: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (2004)
Sometimes all you need to have a good time is a bit of character building, a lot of loot grabbing, and some of the most impressive water effects 2004 had to offer. This is one of those action RPGs that makes it very easy to promise myself just one more run for the fourth time this evening, especially as it plays so well on Steam Deck. The last boss of Dark Alliance 2 is immortalised as a tasteful marble bust on a small table in Baldur's Gate 3's Szarr Palace.
Castlevania Dominus Collection (Haunted Castle, 1987; Dawn of Sorrow, 2005)
I eagerly downloaded this on launch day because I loved the thought of having a flimsy excuse to play through the wonderful Portrait of Ruin one more time, and then stayed for what was billed as pretty much some neat little bonus: a completely reworked version of the series' pariah, Haunted Castle.
Nobody actually liked Konami's old arcade take on their classic vampire whipping series—it was unbearably unfair and stiffer than a frozen zombie—yet this remake has quietly gone and done the impossible, turning the rightly reviled game into a new classic with redesigned stages, incredible remixes of some of the series' most iconic tunes, and beautiful pixel art that looks authentic and refreshed all at once. If I'd wished for a new-old Castlevania it wouldn't have been as good as this.
Alternatively: Alone in the Dark (1992)
Before Resident Evil ‘invented’ the survival horror genre, there was Alone in the Dark. I played this through to refresh myself on the original adventure and its pointy people/charming pixel art backgrounds before I dived into this year's Harbour/Comer-starring reimagining of the Derceto mansion incident. I'm a little sorry to say this old game was honestly the better of the two, thanks to the puzzle box nature of the mansion's design and the unnerving feeling of actually being, well, alone in the dark.
OK so these next two are technically the exact opposite of retro, seeing as they're both brand new releases and made with modern PCs in mind. But they so effectively embrace old ways of doing things that they fit right in with the classics of yesteryear, offering something familiar without simply copying some famous dead game's homework.
Skald: Against the Black Priory (2024)
Skald's an eldritch horror themed RPG that looks a lot like a recently unearthed Commodore 64 adventure, with an interesting battle system that encourages thoughtful positioning and making tactical use of a heavily customised party. The best thing here though, apart from everyone being driven mad by incomprehensible horrors and the presence of grisly sacks of flesh that defy all logic, is the amount of narrative choice on offer. Sometimes this can have immediate (and potentially deadly) consequences or reveal new plot threads, sometimes it is just enough to give me the option to react to a painful memory in my own way—or not eject my lunch all over the floor when I see (or smell) something terrifying.
Alternatively: Devil Blade Reboot (2024)
This Japanese indie game looks and plays like a lost Saturn shmup, possessing the perfect mix of crunchy pixel art and '90s arcade-style visual flexing. Everything's explosions and bright blue lasers and gigantic slabs of metal. And like all the best Saturn shmups it can be enjoyed as a simple bit of fun or played and replayed until your thumbs hurt, every second of every stage bursting with points-scoring opportunities.
