The best underrated underdog games

Before Remedy Entertainment was known for moody shooters and mind-bending narratives, they gave us Death Rally in 1996—a top-down racer with a mean streak. Imagine Mario Kart...

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1995 as a sequel to the original Gabriel Knight...

Redneck Rampage is a 1997 first-person shooter that takes the genre into deliberately ridiculous rural territory. Players battle through bizarre environments filled with hostile re...

Terminal Velocity is all about speed, freedom, and blowing things up while flying at ridiculous velocities. The open environments give a sense of scale rarely seen at the time, and...

Shadowgate (1988, DOS/Windows 3.x/Mac) is a point-and-click adventure that politely invites you into a castle and then gleefully kills you for touching the wrong thing. Armed with ...

Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a 1995 platform adventure that brings back the classic Pitfall name with a modernized design, colorful graphics, and a new generation of jungle dang...

Utopia: The Creation of a Nation challenges you to build and manage a society, which sounds noble until everything starts going wrong at once. Released in 1992, it blends simulatio...

Sanitarium is a 1998 psychological horror adventure that follows a mysterious protagonist who awakens in an asylum with no memory of how he got there. As the story unfolds, players...

In Airball (1987), you don’t play a knight, a space marine, or a plumber - you play a literal ball of air. Trapped in an isometric nightmare of spikes, fans, and poison gas, ...

In Auf Wiedersehen Monty, our favorite marsupial is back, and this time he's taking a very pixelated Eurotrip. Released for Windows XP in 2001, it's a nostalgia-fueled platformer t...

With a name like Dink Smallwood, you’d expect something ridiculous—and you’d be right. Released in 1998 for Windows XP, this action RPG follows a pig farmer with ...

Elona looks innocent, almost cute, and then immediately proves it has no interest in your comfort. This roguelike RPG is bizarre, unpredictable, and gleefully cruel. You can become...

IVAN (Iter Vehemens ad Necem) is one of the strangest and deepest roguelikes ever created. Released in 2001, it combines brutal difficulty with extraordinary detail, from limb dama...

Legend of Cao Cao turns the turbulent history of ancient China into a tactical role-playing adventure centered on the famous warlord Cao Cao. Instead of simply marching armies arou...

Overdrive is a fast-paced driving game built around the pleasures of speed, aggressive maneuvering, and trying not to turn your vehicle into an expensive collection of pixels. The ...

Roadwar Europa is a 1987 DOS strategy game that moves the post-apocalyptic road adventure into a devastated European landscape. Players command a convoy through a continent where r...

Stellar Trader is a space trading simulation that puts the player behind the controls of a starship and asks a deceptively simple question: can you make money without getting yours...

Thomas the Tank Engine brings the cheerful little blue locomotive to the computer in a game aimed primarily at younger players. The experience revolves around controlling Thomas an...

Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space is a compact space strategy game built around exploration, discovery, trading, combat, and the delightful possibility that your carefully pla...

D/Generation is a slick blend of action, puzzle-solving, and corporate dystopia. You’re a courier dropped into a high-security biotech facility to deliver a package, only to ...

Welcome to Alter Ego: Male Version, where your life begins with a cry and a diaper and only goes downhill - or uphill, depending on your choices. This text-based simulation lets yo...

Fast Food Dizzy, released in 1989 for DOS, is exactly as chaotic as the title suggests. Starring the famously round egg hero, the game drops Dizzy into a world where food falls fro...

The year is 1995, and Abuse brings us one of the slickest, darkest run-and-gun shooters ever to crawl out of a DOS/Linux/Mac basement. You play a guy in prison for a crime he didn&...

In Knight Games (1988, DOS), the Middle Ages meet joystick warfare. Think of it as a digital renaissance fair with fewer turkey legs and more sword clashing. You can joust, fence, ...

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and originally released in 1995. The game is heavily inspired by the likes ...

Virus is a fast, strange little arcade game that feels as though someone took a futuristic flying machine, dropped it into a hostile landscape, and then removed any concern for sen...

Snood is a charming puzzle game built around matching colorful creatures and clearing them from the screen before things get out of hand. Released in 1996, it looks deceptively sim...

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a grave-robbing dwarf with a flair for interior dungeon decoration? Cadaver grants that peculiar wish. As Karadoc, you’ll wander an eer...

In the neon-lit corridors of cyberspace, you're a "decker," infiltrating corporate mainframes like a digital ninja. Released in 2002, this roguelike RPG offers a tile-based cyberpu...

NetStorm: Islands at War is a 1997 real-time strategy game with a wonderfully unusual setting: floating islands suspended in the sky, where rival factions wage war using buildings,...