Sleeper Sell: The 25 Best Games You've Never Heard Of

It's safe to say that Zork is considered the quintessential text-based computer game, where typing in commands is the basis of the gameplay. Amnesia follows that game model, but throws in a good measure of horror and intrigue as well, which makes it a stirring exercise in video game storytelling. Speaking of story, this one is written by Thomas Disch, one of the most celebrated science fiction writers ever, and follows a man who wakes up with a bad case of amnesia and finds out that he's engaged, is on someone's hit list, and that Texas wants to put him on death row. We'd say that qualifies as a bad day.

No, it's not what you're thinking. This game, which shares its name with Valve's classic 2007 title, was a text-driven interactive novel and game about an astronaut who returns to Earth only to find that all signs of civilization have vanished. After finding an open computer network, the player must use clues hidden inside various computers to piece together what happened to his fellow homo sapiens. Sure, this would be a long-winded way of telling a story nowadays, but the premise is quite solid and—back then, at least—books were made out of paper and real ink, so this was innovation at its finest.

Of the more than 500 million cartridges sold for Nintendo's flagship handheld console—many of which belong in the Mario, Pokemon, and Tetris franchises—perhaps the most underrated were the ones with this polar dweller emblazoned on them. Amazing Penguin was admittedly a title that attempted to ride the wave of games like Pac-Man, yet provided hours and hours of fun unlocking swathes of land by kicking balls at monsters. At least until the later levels, when the difficulty reached "talking to yourself" levels, as seen above.

The NES had a lot of hidden gems on it, but Clash at Demonhead never seemed to get its due. A traditional sidescrolling platformer, Clash was one of the toughest, as enemies often came hurtling at you with little time to react. The many text "cut scenes" may have put gamers off as they were a distraction to the flow of the game, but not to Bryan Lee O'Malley, the writer of graphic novel-turned movie Scott Pilgrim—he named one of the bands in the story after the game. Nerd props!

It wasn't exactly a good thing to be associated with Atari's Jaguar handheld console; after all, the thing essentially knocked them out of the video game hardware industry. But Tempest 2000 was one of the few exceptions. Here simply for the fact that it was a game on a quickly defunct console, the game was a remake of the original 1994 Tempest, which challenged players to strafe and maneuver their way around a tunnel with various types of enemies incoming. It was essentially the Geometry Wars of yesteryear, requiring trigger-finger reaction timing and a love of all things polygonal and colorful.

If you're not familiar with the Tex Murphy adventure game series, you're missing out on some post-apocalyptic World War III San Francisco action. No, it's not a prequel to Fallout—rather an investigative series, with this title featuring disheveled private eye Tex Murphy trying to get to the bottom of a local area cult. The third story in the series, Under a Killing Moon was the first to deploy full 3D environments, but kept intact the cheesy full-motion video cut scenes from the previous iterations and early 1990s wardrobe straight out of Blossom. Whoa!

The Neo Geo console pumped out a number of classic games in its short-lived cycle, but perhaps this oft-forgotten mish-mash of Dodgeball and Ultimate Frisbee was the most addictive of the bunch. Windjammers was as addictive as it was frustrating, with its progressively scaled difficult levels—but that's exactly why it kept us coming back for more.

Killed off abruptly by weak sales, BioForge was nonetheless one of the best games to come out of the incipient PC explosion of the mid-1990s. The game featured a fully 3D-rendered environment that housed a fantastic story about a cyborg attempting to escape a space station ravaged by a mysterious alien force. Unfortunately, nobody received any closure with this one—the game halted on a cliffhanger and subsequent attempts at continuing the series through an expansion pack and a sequel never came to fruition. Consider the game's inclusion here a call for EA, who disbanded the developer Origin Systems in 2004, to get on the stick already.

Making money was never easier than in this stock market simulation game (that predated the tech bubble by several years). Capitalism allowed you to set up your own operations, and forced you to use your business savvy and acumen to perform hostile takeovers and corner markets in order to snuff out potential competition. And, when you eventually went bankrupt, getting back in the game was as simple as clicking the restart button. Bernie Madoff would be proud.

The point-and-click adventure genre, made famous by games like Myst, had its golden age in the mid-’90s when game developers were really just beginning to properly harness computers' horsepower. One game that nobody picked up on, and perhaps the saddest entry on this list, was The Dark Eye. Calling it a game is a loose interpretation; it followed closely and essentially retold the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, notably "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "Berenice." Because even classsic literature needs the TL;DR treatment.

Long development cycles have killed many a game before its release, and others—like Duke Nukem ForNEVER—stay in production so long that it becomes a running joke. Somehow, The Dig made it out into the wild after more than six years in the making, with credit due to a crazy number of people including director Steven Spielberg and sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card. All that time in the lab didn't pay off, though, as The Dig's story—about a space crew sent up to plant explosives on an asteroid heading for Earth—didn't catch up. Yet, that same plot worked wonders for Michael Bay and J.J. Abrams' crapfest Armageddon three years later. Where's the justice?

A game which barely saw the light of day—it was only available on Macs of yesteryear—Escape Velocity was all about dogfighting in space and traveling to various star systems in order to beef up your ship's firepower. There's a throwaway plot mixed in there, driven by the various missions you take on, but who needs story when you can settle things with laser cannons?

What do The Material Girl and the actual material clay have in common? This game! Madonna's cousin was one of the lead animators of this claymation creation back in 1996, which unfortunately never got off of the ground due to the decline of the adventure game genre (which also killed off the fantastic Grim Fandango). Nevertheless, the story of Klaymen, and his adventure to stop the treacherous Klogg from abusing his power as Neverhood's ruler, lives on.

Yes, yet another point-and-click game makes this list, and with good reason: The Last Express is one of the few games to complete its storyline in (nearly) real time, which meant that production costs for the game skyrocketed accordingly. That wasn't exactly a formula for success back when the gaming public and the industry in general was still tiny compared to what it is today. Despite its eventual failure, the game's ambition garnered a cult following over the years for its unique take on the genre and the open-ended nature of the narrative.

This was really more of a flight simulator than a game, but we guess throwing in some open-world missions can qualify Hardwar as such. You play as a pilot of an aircraft called "Moth" in a city called "Misplaced Optimism," which sounds more like the name of a band than it does a metropolis. Anyway, the game tasks you with earning money as a pilot in the city, either by staying on the straight and narrow and becoming an honest trader or by fitting into the shady crowd and pirating cargo for yourself. One of life's many choices.

Kurt Hectic & co. did not enjoy the same amount of commercial success for Murder Death Kill as they did in the game's reviews, but BioWare took up development duties for a sequel regardless. The result was another cult classic that saw the janitor-turned-superhero helping to rescue his killer robot dog sidekicks and his eccentric scientist friend. The third-person action series didn't sell enough to keep itself alive, but there've been recent rumors about another sequel. Frankly, if Leisure Suit Larry craptaculars can continue to find seed money, we're optimistic about this one.

With a development team led by three members from the original Fallout, there were high hopes that Arcanum would be the start of another role-playing franchise that would break sales records. While it did meet some initial success, we now know that didn't happen. Still, the game deserves props for keeping the traditional RPG genre alive with its impressive array of collectibles and adaptive conversations, which future games like Elder Scrolls III employed effectively. Luckily, most of the developers found jobs at other places, and you can see some of their work in games like Brutal Legend, Prototype and the much-anticipated Diablo III.

In a genre dominated by World of Warcraft, it's easy for other RPG efforts to go unnoticed. Divine Divinity was just that, offering up plain ol' fun hack-and-slash RPG action that wasn't meant to blow you away with anything too novel. You were one of six nondescript character types, you could level up according to your fighting experience within the game, and you're thrust into a story about the aftermath of a great cataclysmic war that threatens to break out once more. The game eventually did get a sequel in Divinity II: Ego Draconis, but neither that nor this game garnered much attention. Shame.

Type-Moon, a developer of a Japanese visual novel called Tsukihime, decided to take their talents in a new direction by creating the fighting game series Melty Blood. The games feature an orthodox 2D fighting engine that allows players to use combos, aerial attacks, and other moves to fight against each other. It's no Street Fighter IV, but it's still featured at fighting game tournaments throughout the world, so it's got some street cred to make up for its freakish name.

If Worms joined the army, you'd essentially get this game created by a one-man army of a developer in Michał Marcinkowski, a Polish computer scriptwriter. The multiplayer and free-to-play shoot-em-up is the perfect remedy to a hard day at work, allowing you to take our your office frustrations out on a battle arena full of rocket launchers, machine guns, and grenades. In the words of one wise Rambo: "Sometimes, killing is as easy as breathing."

There's nothing like unrepentant killing to get the blood flowing. (We mean in video games, of course.) Indie developer 10tons, whose work is probably better known in the iPhone/iPad games market, got a taste of success early on in their existence when they put out Crimsonland in 2003. The game challenges players to blast their way through increasingly difficult levels of monsters as they attempt to surround and overwhelm you. After more than half a decade of developer support and expansion to mobile devices, the game is supposedly in the process of getting a much-needed sequel. Hell, if Wii Fit can nab a sequel, Crimsonland can too, right?

Perhaps no other game has ever been this aptly named. ObsCure was a title that hardly made a blip on the radar, but if one did happen to experience it, they would probably need a diaper change to get through the survivor horror game. The game focuses on a group of annoying high school seniors who uncover a secret laboratory where experiments are done on other students. Taking a page out of Alan Wake (or vice versa, considering its release date), you must use various flashlights to keep the infected army of students and guards at bay while escaping the facilities in order to warn the rest of your classmates. Yes, somehow there was a sequel to this, which was horrible, and a third in the series is in the works. Get. Excited.

Any game that features email spam as the main boss character deserves a spot on this list, hence Darwinia. The war against renegade inboxes begins in the computer lab of Dr. Sepulveda, the game's main character, as he attempts to save years of research he has houses within his computer, powered by artificial intelligence beings named Darwinians. We're going to go ahead and postulate that this game went under the radar because we all play the real-life version of it everyday—damn you, Microsoft Outlook!

We love a good scare in our video games, and Penumbra doesn't disappoint. The series, which began in 2007 with this title, is developed by Frictional Games, a small indie development house based in Sweden that specializes in games of the pants-wetting variety. The series follows Philip, a physicist who receives a strange missive from his once-presumed dead father. Tracking down the origin of the letter, he finds himself trapped in an abandoned mine in Greenland full of juiced-up spiders and rabid canines. Not exactly the European vacation he was hoping for.

Whenever classic fairy tale characters take a turn for the murderous or psychotic, we get weirdly excited, which is why The Path is a must to play. The interactive story follows one of six sisters, who is sent to go see her gravely-ill grandmother. The ending is dependent on what path you take to get there, whether you stay on the pre-determined pathway or choose to stray into the hinterlands full of big bad wolves.