Probably one of the worst habits I’ve developed over the…one (and definitely not eleven) years of doing this podcast is that whenever I do something new, or just something that I like, I start to treat it like it’s a tradition. The episode descriptions starting with lines from the game with a word replaced, episode announcement jokes, “final thoughts” turning into “word-that-begins-with-f thoughts.” All of these have become obligations, stylistic choices though they are, and things I hope reflect our personality in what would otherwise be mundane aspects of the production, but things that I now think about before, during, and after every episode. And the Top 100 list is one of my personal favorite things I’ve ever done for the podcast, and I do really want to follow it up with something similar, but obviously it would be irrational to try to do another list of that size every single year. So, having given it some thought, and realizing that trying to make the Top 100 a living document would sort of destroy what I think is cool about it, I’ve decided to do a more scattershot update based on the games I’ve played in the last year. What follows is a list of games that would have a genuine shot at making my top 100, but I’m not going to go through the process of ranking them very specifically, along with a writeup and a link to an episode if we have one on the game. It’s going to be very cool, and casual and I’ll be so blasé about the whole thing that it will come across clearly that I care very little. So without further ado:
Chad’s Top 100 Favorite Games of All Time - 2026 Update
Demon’s Souls
Released 2009
Developed by FROM Software
Episode 22 - Toilet Flap Maneuver
Having played Demon’s Souls before, I—by the way these are in alphabetical order—I was honestly a little surprised that I liked it as much as I did this time around, but getting to play through the game with so much of it being unknown to me actually felt very refreshing. The sense of danger and the imposition on the player to explore and experiment that Souls games create is much more potent before you just know everything about the game, so I really enjoyed creeping around with a shield up, poking and prodding at the different areas and bosses a lot like how I played Dark Souls for the first time. The more puzzle and gimmick-oriented elements of the game probably felt more natural at release, and definitely did hurt my overall enjoyment of the game when compared to later FROM Souls games, but really helps cement Demon’s Souls as a unique and pioneering experience of its own. I do think that fans of the Souls games should get through it at least once.
Where does it fall on the list?
…but probably not more than once. It is still Demon’s Souls, meaning that the Valley of Defilement is something you have to contend with and too many levels are set in narrow corridors that make combat more cumbersome than it really had to be. By my original rules of the Top 100 list, Demon’s Souls would have probably been qualified for feeling different enough from Dark Souls that I would have more to say about it, but I may have left it off anyway for the sake of variety. That is to say, I do really like this game, but it falls pretty low on the list, probably somewhere between 90 (Halo 2) and 81 (Super Mario Bros. 3).
Elden Ring Nightreign
Released 2025
Developed by FROM Software
This is, by a pretty wide margin, the game in this update that I have played the most of by sheer hours (30% of my PC game time in 2025, according to Steam) and also one that I feel a little conflicted about. I think the concept here is a slam dunk. In sharp contrast to Demon’s Souls, Nightreign is a Souls game focused almost one hundred percent on combat, with movement abilities that get you in and out of fights incredibly quickly without compromising the deliberate flow of combat found in base Elden Ring too badly. It’s also a roguelike and a multiplayer game, and as such encourages you to play it for a very long time, and this is where the design of Souls games kind of butts heads with what Nightreign is doing. Difficult bosses are a lot harder to learn when it takes 45 minutes per attempt, and while this wasn’t too much of a problem in the base game, the updates it has received have added harder bosses and more difficulty levels (in a ranked system that I have other gripes with that I just don’t have time for here), making many runs feel like going through the motions for a very long time to get an attempt at a boss that you might not even find that fun. Still, it takes a while for that malaise to set in, and if I said the game only got boring after 200 hours you would understandably probably not view that as much of a criticism.
Where does it fall on the list?
Honestly, the reason this game isn’t already on the list is because I made the cut off for the final list in March 2025 and this game didn’t come out until May. Especially if you have a friend or two to play this with regularly, Nightreign is an incredibly good time. Learning routing and meta decision making can be fun for nerds like me, but if you’re just a fan of Elden Ring’s combat system, being able to essentially boss rush with the added superpowers of each of the Nightfarers is a great time too. I don’t put it on the level of FROM’s single player output, or at least not the ones that made my list, but I feel very positively on this one and would rank it around the mid-forties (mingling with Persona 5, Life is Strange 3 and Super Mario Sunshine).
Hades II
Released 2025
Developed by Supergiant Games
Episode 5 - A Fresh Island Song
The core question for this entry is undoubtedly how it compares to the first game in my eyes, and it’s genuinely so hard to answer that. I played the game less than I did the first one, but I am also in a different place in my life now than I was then, and I still played a lot of it. I think the combat flows in Hades II in a way that almost no other action roguelike can compare. The new casting mechanic allows for a much richer and varied gameplay experience on the higher end that prevents it from just turning into a bullet hell. Taking away some of the control you had over your build and even rewarding you for relinquishing it entirely is some of the best design in the game as it directly addressed what could make the first game feel stale after so many hours. Dialogue, music, voice acting and character designs are all still stellar. It’s a really fantastic game with an enormous amount of actually unique content and I would recommend it to literally everyone.
Where does it fall on the list?
Twelve. Right after the original. Hades II is extremely good, has two different paths, effectively doubling the amount of unique rooms and biomes to clear, and I think I generally like the new weapons more than the old ones, plus the witchy aesthetic is cooler to me than the ancient martial weapons of the first game (also gun). Still, Hades is a more important game to me. It got me into roguelikes and the story is a bit better from a writing and relatability standpoint, but also in the way it contextualizes the gameplay in the world. I wouldn’t have included both on the list with my original parameters, but Hades II absolutely deserves the shout out and is a near perfect game on its own.
Immortality
Released 2022
Developed by Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid
Immortality, while similar in style to Barlow’s previous games Her Story and Telling Lies, ditches the desktop simulation pretense for a more experiential match cut system. If you haven’t played any of these games, the best way to describe them is that they are mystery titles with live action video segments that you must jump between to pick up clues and patterns in order to solve said mystery. However, none of the games outright confirms what happens in their plots, forcing the player to settle on an interpretation themselves. And as a more supernatural, abstract, and, to put much too fine a point on it, filmic game than its predecessors, Immortality does a really good job of creating a story ripe for interpretation. The snippets of film included in the game are beautifully shot, well considered, and created with an attention to accuracy in time period and cultural context, genre, writing, and about everything else you could judge it by. Still, as much as I love it as a piece of art, and one that just gets more incredible the more you think about it, I think the way that the player interacts with it makes it very different as game, and as such doesn’t do the same things for me that Her Story was able to.
Where does it fall on the list?
Well, I kind of cheated and had it on there anyway. My writeup of Her Story includes the line “So go play it. Right now. And when you’re done, play Immortality, too.” However, I don’t think Immortality quite reaches the heights that Her Story did for me, not the least of which was because of its less intuitive form of clip discovery and just because it was the third game like it I’d played from the very same developer. I do think it’s an incredibly impressive piece of work and definitely easier to get into than Barlow’s previous games, so I’d put it in the early twenties (near Balatro, Inscryption, Lunacid).
Indika
Released 2024
Developed by Odd Meter
Episode 21 - A Chef Dances Out
Indika is a puzzle adventure game focusing on a nun as she struggles with her faith and the cruelty of those around her. It is also a deeply funny game with comedic side characters, sight gags, and a surreal element to the world that grows more absurd as the game reaches its climax. It is even further a game with very few repeating mechanical systems, puzzles, and dramatic shifts in perspective and style which uses video game tropes and minigames to emphasize its narrative and philosophical points. It is, in short, a little bit of everything, but all in service of a cohesive narrative of a character who is fundamentally good, but is betrayed by life and the systems to which she shackles herself. I love the way Indika embraces the medium of video games to get its points across (literally and figuratively) and the constant shifting between gameplay styles.
Where does it fall on the list?
I realize that sounded like a lot of praise, and to be fair, it was. Still, the one thing that holds me back a little is its tone. I don’t think it hurts the game holistically, and its messages come through regardless, but it is still fairly lighthearted and maintains a detached approach to the characters (overcome very intentionally in the last scene of the game) which didn’t connect with me quite as much as it could have. It definitely belongs on the list near Dujanah, as I think they are spiritually quite close, but I still give Dujanah the edge. So I’d put it somewhere between 68 and 70.
Mouthwashing
Released 2024
Developed by Wrong Organ
Mouthwashing is a strange game. The amount of actual agency you have as a player is pretty heavily limited, the space to explore is small, and the low fidelity graphics leave much of the detail up to your interpretation. All of this is in service of one of the most sinister games I’ve played in the last year or otherwise. Mouthwashing tells a very claustrophobic story about flawed people and betrayal, a lot of the horror in the first half of the game coming from the overall griminess of the setting and the slow realization of the reality of what happened. It then goes into a, at this point, classic descent into madness situation, causing the visuals to abstract to metaphor in a dreamlike sequence leading to the game’s climax. And all of this can be reasonably played in a single sitting, which makes it even more of a singular experience.
Where does it fall on the list?
You might be starting to understand the difficulty I had ordering the original list in the first place. This a very cool, very creepy narrative-based game that does a lot of things right and handled sensitive subject matter in a responsible way while not shying away from the real harrowing aspects of it. It will not be anywhere close to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on my list. I kind of fluctuate on how jazzed I am about Mouthwashing on any given day, though, so I’ll say it sits in the wide range between Iron Lung at 52 and Doom 2016 at 39.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
Released 2026
Developed by Three Bees
Episode 19 - Scrappy and Independent
I have spoken a lot about this game on the episode, and wrote about the original Perfect Tides in its own entry on the Top 100 list, so finding new things to say here is maybe a difficult thing to do. What I will say is that compared to other games on this list that are part of series, I think Station to Station almost unequivocally outshines its predecessor in my eyes and I find it to be just as relatable, heart wrenching, hilarious and fun as Perfect Tides but with 100% fewer frustrating mechanics. Certainly the point and click interface of the original was design language that expressed something about the world of the game and the era in which it was set, but the mechanical aspects of Station to Station do a better job in my eyes of connecting the player to Mara and staying out of the way during the whirlwind narrative sections.
Where does it fall on the list?
I had such a good time not just playing this game but unpacking its themes and ruminating on the relationships at the center of the narrative in a similar way to how sitting with its original made me appreciate it more and more. Thus, this is easier than most, I think I like this game even more than the existing game from its series which sits at 32, so somewhere around 30, near Celeeste and Undertale.
Pokémon Lazarus
Released 2025
Developed by Nemo622
ROM hacks and mods are an area of the wider gaming landscape that I would like to have more experience with. I have played precious few of them (Pokémon Black and the Earthbound Halloween Hack have episodes, but I haven’t branched out much beyond them), so when I saw Lazarus release last year I made it a point to actually give it a try. And it was shockingly really good. There is a bit of an experience difference coming to a Pokémon ROM hack having not played one in a long time as there are certain elements of the games that almost every hack changes (newer Pokémon, leveling is less tedious, I think moves were changed but I don’t have the knowledge to claim that for certain), but Lazarus in specific played shockingly like an official Pokémon game that made it very breezy to play through. Being able to put together an interesting team with difficulty rebalanced to be more satisfying without being an outright difficulty hack made it feel like a modern design take on the most classic of Pokémon titles. Which I guess is what it literally is.
Where does it fall on the list?
While very cool, and I’d say probably my favorite Pokémon game since the seventh generation, there is still something very pedestrian about Pokémon games playing them as an adult. And no matter the changes made, it is still a less engaging gameplay style for me fighting against the powerful nostalgia that the series invokes. Because of that, and because it lacks the personal history other games in the series have, I’d land it in the nineties in the zip code of Ghost Trick and Vice City.
Silent Hill f
Released 2025
Developed by NeoBards Entertainment
I was surprised to see Silent Hill f when it released, as I figured the series was more or less over at this point, but f really breathed some new life into the franchise in a few ways. First, and most apparent by looking at it, the setting has moved in both time and place away from the almost Lynchian American small town (small city?) of past games and into a Japanese small town (prefecture?) in the sixties. This change of scenery is more than aesthetic, with the plot centering on societal norms of the time that directly affect our protagonist both in and out of the more supernatural parts of the game. And the reason I end up liking this so much is how it handles its plot, both in thematic elements which the Silent Hill franchise is expected to take seriously and in the way it is told through gameplay, dialogue and especially the surprisingly well-directed cutscenes.
Where does it fall on the list?
So Silent Hill f is a shockingly well told story and a game that exceeded my expectations by a lot, but with some wonky combat that would be fine if there wasn’t such a heavy emphasis on it. I don’t find it heavily comparable to Silent Hill 2 in how different it is both stylistically and mechanically, and the novelty of it makes me want to push it a little higher, but maybe that’s me being a bit of a provocateur. Let’s call it somewhere just below Shadow of the Colossus (44).
Slay the Spire 2
Released 2026 (and beyond!)
Developed by Mega Crit
Technically speaking, Splay the Spire 2 is in early access right now, so maybe this is a bit speculative to put on the list, but it gives me a round ten games to talk about and that’s pleasing for everybody. Still, StS2 is already an impressive sequel to what was already an incredibly impressive game. With two new characters and big changes to the way the old ones play, not even mentioning that the sort of meta understanding of how to build decks has changed, it has significantly shaken up the formula enough to be judged on its own merits. While still in flux, the new cards and enemies make deckbuilding a new challenge, the change from boss relics to the much more varied ancient rewards is actually maybe the most exciting change, and the characters have distinct archetypes that make them fun to play even in tandem in a new multiplayer mode. My time with the game so far has been what I would have hoped for from a sequel and then some.
Where does it fall on the list?
I’m going to be a little more measured with this ranking just due to the fact that the game is still changing and the next time I will probably get to talk about it will be after the full release (unless I stream it or something). New character(s?) and alternate acts, not to mention some impactful fights in the forms of new bosses and elites, are going to both change the way the game is played significantly as well as introduce a lot of new avenues for balance during the early access period, so I will tentatively place this in the eighties, nestled somewhere between Jak and Daxter (89) and Gitaroo Man (84), not because those games share anything in common, but just based on vibes alone.
And thus ends my first annual update to the Top 100 games of all time based on my stupid preferences and experiences. Every year lately has given us at least a few gems, so I want to know what you think should be on this list. What games came out or what did you play that you had never played before that made a real impact on you. Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord. I’d be happy to keep the conversation going. Until next year!