Games Beaten 2026

[TheSSNintendo]

1. Deja Vu: MacVenture Series
2. Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series
3. Earthworm Jim 2 (SNES/Switch Online)
4. Crash Banidcoot: The Huge Adventure (Gameboy Advance)
5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch) - Pretty decent considering the long wait. Only thing I wasn't a fan of was the tedious chore of having to collect the green crystals. And I didn't mind the side characters.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2026!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA)
2. Knights of the Round (SNES)



I beat Knights of the Round on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System this evening!

Knights of the Round is one of those classic Arcade Brawlers that I have played several times on the SNES port and on MAME. However, I have never owned a copy for myself and I have never tried to beat the game legit by myself. So, in 2024, when I was at my local retro gaming convention, I found a really beautiful copy for sale. I know the carts have gone up in price recently, but I always wanted one for myself and I decided to finally take the plunge and purchase it for myself. Well, I was looking for something short between my RPG's and I wanted something that wouldn't be too difficult, so I thought this would be a perfect game to play for an evening!

Knights of the Round is a brawler, but it has many other interesting aspects that sets it aside from others in the genre. For one, you use weapons instead of your fists. Unfortunately, this means that you can't grab enemies nor can you throw them, but it does mean that the game can feel like a hack and slash at times as you swing your weapon around. Also, it has some light RPG elements in it as you are able to level up during the game. This means that your sword can grow bigger and that you can take more damage. It is a little small nowadays, but back when this was released, this was a novel concept. I love this aspect of the game as by the end, your character is this massive powerhouse wielding this giant weapon. The aesthetic change also really helps in making you feel powerful and grow throughout the game. With some beautiful colorful graphics and excellent music, the game has a wonderful look and feel to it as well.

My main problem with the game is that the controls can feel a little stiff. Your characters don't move as fluid or as easy as I would like. Your character's swing takes a lot of frames of animation, so it is easy to get ganged up on as well. Finally, since it is an arcade port, the arcade cheap bosses are here and especially near the end.

Overall, Knights of the Round is a solid and one of my favorite brawlers. I don't think its in the same category as Streets of Rage 2 or Turtles in Time, but I think it fits perfectly in the step below it. The game is solid and it is a fun time to go through the game as one of King Arthur's knights. If you looking for another good brawler for the Arcade or SNES, this is one that needs to played and experienced!

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Knights of the Round is my favorite first underrated, then overrated, now underrated game

[REPO Man]

Just beat The Exit 8 for PS5.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

05: Grim Fandango

It's hard to not love Schafer's most ambitious click 'n' carry, recognizing his legendary humor and creativity, while at the same time knowing that this one nearly ended his career. But with skyrocketing production values also came extravagant design choices. The 3D graphics often make looking around and navigating a chore. And the puzzles, wowzers, one can only assume that its galaxy-brain solutions were there mostly to extend its play time. Everything you see and hear in this game is spectacular, up there with the best of LucasArts. But everything you have to do is encumbered by annoyances. How good is a game when it's more enjoyable as a video walkthrough?

6/10

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2026!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA)
2. Knights of the Round (SNES)
3. Fight'N Rage (NS)



I beat Fight'N Rage for the Nintendo Switch this evening!

A friend of mine is a large Limited Run Games fan as they make a lot of simple games that he loves to play. He has picked up many Beat'em Ups and Run and Guns from them because we both love physical versions of games. Many years ago, he picked up Fight'N Rage and we have played through it a few times. I absolutely loved it and always wanted a copy for myself. After many years of searching at my local retro convention, I could never find a copy. So, last year, I decided to do some Milestones treats for myself and in celebration of my Birthday, I bought the game for myself. Since I bought the game on my Birthday, I decided to beat the game on my Birthday with another friend of mine.

Fight'N Rage is one of the best Brawlers that have come out in the last few years. TMNT: Shredder's Revenge and Streets of Rage 4 are some great modern Brawlers, but Fight'N Rage should be in the conversation as well. It is non-stop frenetic action that never lets up until the game ends. It is very rare for any Brawler to have almost 8 enemies on the screen at all times, but that is very consistent during the entire game. And the game never stops or slows because of it. With so many enemies, your characters have so many different ways of attacking. Besides punches and jump attacks, you have dash attacks and you have special attacks that can be used frequently. To be able to chain attacks and combos into large numbers is on the most exciting and satisfying feelings in the game. I love playing the Girl character and just dashing across the screen doing combo and avoiding every attack. The game is present some beautiful pixel art and beautiful visuals that is a real treat to be seen. Add in some perfect controls, different characters and so many unlockables and you have a wonderful package.

Overall, I obviously loved Fight'N Rage as I have before. It has some annoying enemies and I wish the reach of your characters was just a little bit more, but those are small and minor complaints. Fight'N Rage has been one of my favorite brawlers that I have played in the last couple of years. It has a perfect difficulty and just a great experience for anybody that enjoys the brawler genre. The game is made by two people and one of them did the music. This is a love letter to brawlers before and to fighting games as well. This is an intense and fantastic game for the genre!

[Ack]

1. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (FPS)(PC)
2. Doom 3 (FPS)(PC)
3. V Rising (Adventure)(PC)
4. Teardown (Action)(PC)


Teardown is a heist game, but one with an important twist: you're from a demolition company. Shady characters and overzealous police officers want you to break in and steal or destroy things. They're willing to pay, and your mom's gotta eat, so you take the jobs. And then you smash, build, blow up, destroy, whatever it takes to get the job done. For each objective you complete, you gain score, which unlocks more gear and eventually money. You can also find valuables hidden in each level, which you pawn for additional cash that lets you upgrade your gear for more items, bigger bombs, better range and so forth. It's a vicious cycle of working for bad guys using you to play off against each other. I enjoyed every minute of it.

As a first person action game, you may think this wouldn't involve a lot of planning, but it does. Most missions involve a key first step of prepping the map. No one is around, so you're not going to hurt anyone, but you often need to plan the route you'll take to try and grab all items, by ripping out walls, destroying furniture, positioning vehicles, and whatever else you need to do to ensure you can swiftly move through the large maps. Why? Because once you set off an alarm by starting your stealing, you have a minute to make your run, grab all the items you need, and get to your escape vehicle. Plan accordingly, and expect to do a lot of prep runs that will fail as you tweak your path and figure out your best method for winning.

Most levels involve a required amount of items to steal along with optional ones that net you bonus score. You want this score though, because as you go higher and unlock new materials, you can also return to previous levels and use those items to make better routes and grab more bonus objectives. You'll be revisiting locations a lot for new levels, and they change over time, but you will likely revisit many heists to do better and better as you go. For example, one of the items you unlock along the way are planks, which enable you to build ramps. Why bother with stairs when you can instead make an incline that leads you right to your target, shaving off key seconds in your route?

Once you finish the story, you can also revisit the locations to tackle fun challenges or simply enable sandbox mode to destroy whatever you want. Feeling frustrated? There's a catharsis to lining a building with nitroglycerin, popping one from far away with a rifle, and watching the series of explosions reduce everything to ruins. Teardown excels at providing the joy of pure destruction. It's like if Blast Corps and Payday 2 had a brain child that knew exactly what you wanted. And if you still want more, there is built in mod support for new levels, new items, new vehicles, and many more. Steam users have made a lot of additional content, so it's worth checking out.

The only complaint I have? Currently, there is no multiplayer in the base game, which would have been a delight. However, the devs are currently working on this and have it enabled in a beta branch on Steam, so it's coming for regular users. Which means in reality I have no complaints. Teardown is fantastic, and it's continuing to get even better.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

06:
The Last Guardian

Ouch, where did this go wrong? Ico aggressively didn't tell the player what to do (even had the most important NPC talk to you in a foreign language), and Colossus upped the ante by making it ambiguous if what you were doing was even honorable. Perhaps Sony executives were worried about their return on investment and demanded another hand-holding-cinematic-triple-A-third-person-action-adventure-with-edge-hanging-and-excessive-context-sensitivity. Either way, we have an adventure that hardly has any sense of awe or, indeed, adventure, since what you have to do is constantly being told by level design, camera angles, and when patient enough, Trico. Said animal usually takes a minute or two before they actually do the thing, which gives them a pet-like personality. You'll probably feel for the beast and one cannot deny that's a unique experience in games. Is it worth all the hassle though? Yes, but barely.

6/10

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *

6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)

Continuing our journey through the We Were Here series, my partner and I finally finished this one last weekend. We’ve gone through the games in a 3, 1, 2, 4 order here, so we were very excited to hop forward in time again after finishing We Were Here Too, and we weren’t disappointed. Heck, one of the reasons that this particular review has come so far after the other earlier ones has just been down to how long this particular entry is compared to the others (nearly being as long as the previous 3 games combined!). It ultimately took us around 8.75 hours or so to play through the English version of the game on Steam.

We Were Here Forever is (seemingly) the concluding chapter in the frozen kingdom story that makes up the first four games in this series. Waking up already in containment but dressed differently (and even using a different looking walkie-talkie from your co-op buddy), the insinuation is that you’re actually the respective members of the first two We Were Here games who didn’t end up escaping. Captured by the cursed, immortal jester from the previous game, you’re at his mercy for trying to escape this place. However, he’s got a plan! While the similarly immortal, cursed king of this keep can see everything in his realm, he can’t see you! While the jester is hardly the trustworthy sort, you’ve got no choice but to trust him as you venture ever forward, hoping to find an end to all the madness as much as you are just to find an escape!

The story in this is really fun! It takes the more mythology and backstory-heavy approach from We Were Here Together and turns it up a notch to make it even grander, creepier, and engaging. In an interesting move that I nonetheless appreciate, they’ve abandoned the approach that they used in the previous game where each character got different views of particular bits of exposition. It would’ve been hard to do again, and it also makes the climax of this game hit that much harder because the two of you are going off of all the same information. The voice acting is still great and full of energy to bring this haunting story to life, and they still manage to give your quest a narrative while not bogging down the puzzle solving gameplay in the process. While I’m a little bummed to see this setting go (presumably), it’s been a really fun ride, and I’m happy to see that the developers let this particular story go out with such a bang~.

The gameplay is still the first-person co-op puzzle solving the series is known for. Each player has tasks they can do and a walkie-talkie to talk to one another with (if they don’t just use another voice client to chat), and it’s really impressive how they’ve managed to polish things up even further this time. We Were Here Together already had only a small handful of puzzles which were a bit too confusing or just ill-suited for potentially bad latency. With this game, they’ve managed to smooth things out even further to the point that there’s only one puzzle I’d say is even lukewarm rather than simply good or better. I think a couple puzzles that rely on doing everything within a time limit are perhaps a *little* too tight on the timers they have, the penalty for failure is just restarting at the beginning of the puzzle, so it’s not like you’re ever meaningfully punished for being wrong.

While a good handful of the puzzles still have that kind of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes-type of flavor to them, with the two of you explaining information back and forth to help one another solve respective puzzles, there’s a remarkable amount of different approaches here too. Given how rare being able to walk around in the same space was in the older games was, we were really surprised at just how many puzzles have you operating side-by-side to solve something that simply requires more focus/hands than one person can manage. I still kind wish that there was a “help me, I can’t do it ;w;” puzzle skip option for folks who truly can’t deal with a puzzle (either for being too scared, unable to do it in the allotted time, etc), but the puzzle design has genuinely never been better, and anyone who enjoyed the puzzles in previous games will no doubt love these ones too~.

The aesthetics of the game are yet another step forward in how the graphics have been improving game to game in this series. The creepy, kinda cartoony graphical style that the third game pushed is refined even more in this game, and it’s particularly impressive in the cutscenes with the jester. As I mentioned earlier, the voice acting is very quality and fun, and the sound design all around is very well executed. These aren’t exactly horror games, but between the ambient sound and occasional use of music, they manage to create a really solid atmosphere that also compliments the respective puzzles and scenes as is necessary.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. It’s such a shame that this is the most recent fully fledged adventure in this series, as we’ve just had so much fun with them time and time again! It’s a fantastic co-op experience if you and your buddy love problem solving, and the cross-play options and in-game voice client make it easy to pick up any of these games and play with a buddy no matter what hardware they have. With every game in this series we play, I’m continuously impressed at just how many fresh, new puzzles they manage to fill each new adventure with, and this game has once again passed my expectations with flying colors. We Were Here Together set a pretty darn high bar to clear, but from the entertaining story to the well-tuned brain teasers, I’m pleased to say that We Were Here Forever is a game extremely worthy of its lineage~.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Neat! Now my girlfriend finds Split Fiction / It Takes Two challenging enough, do you think she'd be able to pull off the puzzles that require dexterity?