I decided to start properly going through my backlog of owned games and avoid replaying anything I've already finished before until I've at least tried all of these others to my satisfaction first. We can think of that rule as part of my incentive to play all of these if a lot of them suck: sit down with all of the unknowns sooner than later and I can return to stuff I know I already like that much sooner. I think there's about 872+ games I've somehow accumulated over many, many years that I still haven't played.

I went ahead and did some very mild research on the majority to get a sense for what public opinion (if any) existed for them. Then I ordered my big list from most positive reception to least positive (or unknown reception).

I decided to start from the bottom of the list. That's because half the time stuff that sucks either isn't actually as bad as most people say it is, or if it's genuinely really bad it'll become obvious to me quickly and I can easily move on from it satisfied that I've seen enough. I'll probably keep a better pace starting with what's likely not so great, and hopefully I'll find some hidden gems along the way.

Stones of Sorrow is not a hidden gem. It kind of feels like punching down to dump on a project that's likely made by just one guy for cheap, but if you're going to sell your game for money...

Something I've never really liked about modern roguelikes (or "roguelites") is that they usually don't have very good gameplay. To me, modern roguelikes tend to feel like shallow clusters of 1-3 components from a more developed game that are presented as a standalone gameplay loop. They rely on the misdirection of frequent unlockables ("a red sword that deals 5 more damage than the other swords with a 2% chance of poisoning enemies has been added to the pool") and modest progression elements ("you now have 1% more max health") to fool players into thinking they're always getting somewhere meaningful. Play long enough and you might actually unlock enough things to discover the average game it always was.

My favorite thing about Stones of Sorrow is that it presents its characters in the style of ancient cave paintings. That's pretty unique for an aesthetic. The game also comes with an unintentionally funny opening narration in which a guy tries growling at you in an edgy voice about how your brother has betrayed and thrown you into this labyrinth, so you must now find the Stones of Sorrow™ and bash his skull in with them for revenge. Metal music plays in the background.

This is a very repetitive side-scrolling dungeon crawler roguelite with wonky controls, confusing hitboxes, shallow combat, and a tacked on progression system. There are many, many little irritations and annoyances here that don't come together into an interesting challenge as much as a poorly thought out and tedious one. You would think that if combat and walking through a labyrinth are the main highlights of your gameplay that we'd want to keep those things sharp throughout.

But no, this is a game where nothing you do feels responsive or precise, and it's often not visually clear whether you or the enemy will get hurt by a given attack. Sometimes, attack animations won't even be occurring yet and you will take damage anyway. You can do a single swing or a three-swing combo with seemingly every weapon and it always looks the same. Enemies seem to have one attack they can do a piece. Most of the unlockable progression elements are things like "gain +0.5% chance of recovering 5 health after killing an enemy."

This is a game with an instant kill button ("execution") that consumes most of your stamina instantly to violently murder an enemy, but it's unclear about how you need to be positioned relative to an enemy to do it correctly. I found that standing completely still and mashing the execution button as the enemy approached until the execution triggered worked best. Otherwise, a lot of the time it just doesn't work and I get beaten on or killed instead. Also, executions give the most gold of anything, so you want to do them so you can hopefully make a lot of money quickly and buy your way into a slightly less crappy version of the game. Better hope that you only get one enemy at a time coming at you slowly enough to do an execution animation and let your stamina refill before the next shows up.

You have to unlock the ability to heal at all by collecting enough gold on a given run and then purchasing it when you die. This (modest) heal requires cannibalizing the corpse of an enemy you've killed, but there's a chance (which felt like 25% to me) that your character will choke on the meat and instantly die every time you attempt this. What kind of risk-reward is that? Play long enough and you can improve this heal bit by bit, so maybe one day it will become worth considering. There's another progression unlockable where you can increase the chance that enemies drop a modest health pickup on death by 0.5% at a time. I think the chance caps at 5 or 10%.

You have to make your way through visually similar levels fighting hordes of the same enemies with ever increasing health and damage until you find the final boss (your brother) at the end and kill him. The best way to play is slow and cautiously, taking advantage of the enemies' poor pathing, which occasionally gets them stuck and bunched up in a corner where you can kill them all in a couple of hits.

Every time you die in this game the final boss gains 1 extra max HP. In a better game with a more satisfying combat system, amongst other improvements, that could be cool. Here, it slowly discourages me by slowly raising the likelihood of me having to spend even more time with a weak game in order to finish it. I don't need to see more. This one sucks.