5 Games Everyone Should Regret Not Playing

In many cases, great games often find a sizable audience, but that’s not always true. Every once in a while, a phenomenal game falls through the cracks. Whether bad marketing, poor timing, or just being unlucky, these games fail to capture the audience despite being objectively some of the best games in their genre. Below, you’ll find a list of three such games that never found the audience they deserved. If you do yourself a favor and play through them, you’ll quickly regret that it’s taken you so long to do so.

Here are five games that everyone should regret never playing.

5) Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line had to be nearly impossible for publisher 2K to market. On the surface, Spec Ops looks like any other shooter from the era. It’s got that quintessential brownish-orange tinge. You’re leading an elite Delta Force team on a secret mission in Dubai. Heck, there’s even a multiplayer mode you could theoretically jump into.

However, Spec Ops slowly throws all your expectations out of the window. It becomes a thoughtful exploration of violence in video games, playing with your expectations to tell an engrossing story that’ll make you feel things you didn’t think possible in a 2010s shooter. Oh, and that multiplayer mode? It was tacked on by the publisher by another developer and was mostly seen as a waste by the fans and team.

4) Jade Empire

Developer BioWare is responsible for many of the biggest RPGs of the era, giving fans games like Baldur’s Gate 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Jade Empire should be mentioned in the same breath as those other games, but most players completely missed its launch in 2005.

For the record, it’s not Jade Empire‘s fault. The game is exceptional, featuring an imaginative world and tons of replay value. The combat is a bit shallow, but it’s solid enough. Instead, the issue comes from Jade Empire‘s release timing.

BioWare partnered with Microsoft for Jade Empire, making it a console exclusive for the original Xbox. The problem there is that by the time Jade Empire launched in 2005, most players were looking ahead to the Xbox 360’s launch in a few months. Launching on what was soon to be old hardware turned out to be essentially a death sentence for one of BioWare’s best.

3) Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Eternal Darkness had one of the great innovations of the GameCube era, but Nintendo patented the concept, so when many players skipped the horror game, we didn’t get to see “Sanity Effects” expanded in future games. It’s similar to what happened with the Nemesis System in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. A team made something that could be game-changing, but the patent meant the game was left unchanged.

Beyond “Sanity Effects,” Eternal Darkness is a standout horror game. Despite many attempts, we’ve never gotten a sequel or spiritual successor, and Nintendo has yet to bring it to Nintendo Switch Online. Hopefully, that changes someday soon. More players need to experience one of Silicon Knights’ best games.

2) Ico

Sony’s Japan Studio isn’t a stranger to underappreciated gems, at least outside of Japan. From Wild Arms to Um Jammer Lammy to Dark Cloud, the studio routinely put out great games that didn’t get enough love. That said, Ico is probably the best example of the studio not getting the commercial success it deserved.

Ico was the first game Fumito Ueda directed. He and his team went on to make another underrated gem with Shadow of the Colossus before leaving Japan Studio to create The Last Guardian. While SotC has gotten its flowers thanks to a relatively recent remake, Ico remains an underrated masterpiece.

Ueda’s game is the visual inspiration for some of your favorite games. Creators like Eiji Aonuma (The Legend of Zelda), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid), and Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) specifically list Ueda and his team as an influence for some of their best work. Heck, even director Guillermo del Toro touts Ico (and SotC) as big influences on his directorial style. It’s a shame so many players never played it.

1) Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Ninja Theory’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a loose adaptation of the Journey to the West novel set in a post-apocalyptic future. Andy Serkis voices the main character, Monkey, delivering a strong performance alongside Lindsey Shaw’s Trip, who you might know from her role as “Moze” in Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.

Enslaved stood out at the time thanks to its colorful environments, great voice acting, and exceptional score. In an era where everything had a coat of brown thrown over it, Enslaved’s vibrant greenery was a breath of fresh air.

On top of that, the relationship between Trip and Monkey is one of the more believable partnerships that players had seen to that point. The combat might’ve been clunky, but Enslaved was a game that deserved so much more love. Unfortunately, we’ve never gotten a sequel thanks to poor sales, and it feels like the Horizon series has essentially taken its place. Enslaved was just a case of a game being ahead of its time.

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5 Games That Were Way Ahead of Their Time (and Paid the Price for It)