The best underrated underdog games

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...

Hugo's House of Horrors is an adventure game developed by David P. Gray and released in the early 1990s. The game is a text-based adventure with simple graphics, and it gained popu...

1893: A World's Fair Mystery is an interactive fiction game developed by the American studio Illuminated Lantern and released in 2002. Set during the Chicago World's Columbian Expo...

In Altered Destiny, a perfectly average guy named P.J. Barrett gets sucked into a bizarre alien dimension because he answered a phone call. Seriously. What follows is a classic poi...

Magic Carpet is an action shooter game set in a fictional Middle East developed by Bullfrog and released by Electronic Arts in 1994 for DOS and Macintosh. Your goal is to fly aroun...

Zyclunt is a side-scrolling action game developed and published by Phantagram in 1995. The game is set in a dystopian future where incurable diseases and a rise in criminal activit...

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...

Paganitzu is a classic puzzle-adventure game released in 1991 by Apogee Software. Set in an ancient pyramid, the game follows the exploits of its protagonist, Alabama Smith, who mu...

Released in 1992, Dylan Dog: Murderers brings Italy’s most famous nightmare investigator to the DOS screen with all the moody atmosphere you’d expect. It’s part p...

Epic Pinball is what happens when a small team says, “Sure, let’s make a pinball game,” and accidentally creates one of the most addictive shareware hits of the d...

Super Cauldron is a platforming game developed by Titus Interactive and released in 1993 for platforms like MS-DOS, Amiga, and Amstrad CPC. In the game, you play as a witch on...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea....

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

Dive into Aquanox (2001), where post-apocalyptic submarines battle it out beneath the ocean in a world that’s half Waterworld, half neon rave. With moody lighting and dialogu...

Part puzzle, part platformer, part “what is even happening,” Bombuzal (1989, DOS) is a game where your job is to blow up every bomb on the screen—while not accide...

The Typing of the Dead is a distinctive video game, essentially a typing adaptation of the classic rail shooter arcade game, The House of the Dead. Initially debuting in 1999 as an...

No guns. No glory. Just two invisible players navigating a weird Tron-like maze to steal each other’s flag. Capture the Flag is what you get when someone says “let&rsqu...

Zeitgeist — also known as Jupiter Strike in some markets — is a PlayStation-era space shooter that boldly says: "Let’s do Star Fox, but with less personality and ...