Five Games That Break Every Comparison

Let me be upfront about something: none of the games in this piece are mobile titles. That's fine — I cover mobile as a beat, not as a religion — but I want to address it directly, because mobile is actually where this conversation hits hardest.

Here's the thing about app store discovery: every game gets a tag. Puzzle. RPG. Action. Casual. The algorithm won't surface your game if it can't be filed. On Steam, at least, you can browse curators and community recommendations. On the App Store or Google Play, if your game doesn't fit a tag, it essentially doesn't exist. The genre label problem that Daryl Talks Games explores in his latest video — Games That Are Beyond Comparison — isn't just a fun philosophical question for console players. For mobile devs, it's a commercial death sentence. The games that most need discovery are the ones the ecosystem is least equipped to surface.

So when Daryl opens with: "Our entire lexicon as gamers is built around something being like something" — I hear that differently than his PC audience probably does. He's describing a cognitive habit. I'm watching it play out as a structural barrier in real time, every time I open the App Store.

Anyway. The games.

Critters for Sale is the one I want to talk about most, because the way Daryl describes it hits at something my generation has a specific relationship to that his framing only partially captures.

He connects the game to early-internet conspiracy dread — Illuminati forums, reptilian government theories, the particular terror of being 12 years old, alone, and falling down a rabbit hole at 11pm. That resonates. But here's the Gen Z version of that story: we didn't just stumble onto conspiracy forums. We grew up inside platforms algorithmically designed to keep us in the spiral. YouTube's recommendation engine wasn't pushing us toward the conspiracy — it was the conspiracy. We watched flat earth, then hollow earth, then something about the moon landing, then something I won't repeat, and the whole time the interface just kept autoplaying the next thing like nothing unusual was happening. Critters for Sale, from what Daryl describes — morphing faces, celebrities as occult figures, multiple routes that each circle some unknowable cosmic horror — sounds less like a game about conspiracy theories and more like a game that is the recommendation algorithm. The next route always promises more. You keep clicking.

That's a different kind of dread than nostalgia. That's Tuesday.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is the one I'm least surprised to see on this list, and I mean that as a compliment to the game and mild skepticism toward the framing. Daryl's right that 13 simultaneous unreliable narrators spanning multiple timelines is structurally wild. The comparison to Vantage Point — a 2008 film that Daryl describes as retelling one event from multiple viewpoints — is doing useful work here, though I'd note that specific details about that film's structure (the exact number of perspectives, the precise runtime of the event it covers) are Daryl's characterization, not ones I can independently verify. The point stands regardless: Vantage Point is a short loop replayed. 13 Sentinels is a multigenerational web. The scale difference is real.

What's genuinely interesting is the mechanic Daryl describes: the game strategically locks character routes until you've hit story beats in other timelines. You can't just mainline one character. The structure forces you into a reading order that isn't an order. I'd push back slightly on the "beyond comparison" claim here — Vanillaware games live in a specific aesthetic and tonal DNA that fans recognize immediately, and Daryl himself concedes the fan service and occasional weak dialogue. That's not a dealbreaker, but it is a fingerprint. I think what's genuinely uncategorizable about 13 Sentinels is less its genre and more its ambition-to-execution ratio. Most games that attempt this scale collapse. This one doesn't.

Before Your Eyes is the one Daryl calls a masterpiece, and the mechanic is genuinely clever: the game tracks your blinks via webcam, and every blink risks jumping you forward in time. You can't pause life. You can't linger. The moment passes before you're ready because you blinked — which is, as Daryl notes, "poetic as hell."

I want to be honest that my competitive instinct fires a little skeptically here. Blink-to-progress is a mechanic that reviews brilliantly — it's extremely easy to write about — and I wonder how much of its reputation is the idea versus the execution. Not every player has stable webcam conditions. Some people blink more than others. Is the mechanic a meaningful emotional tool or an accessibility-challenged gimmick wrapped in beautiful emotional content? Both things can be true. The emotional content is clearly real. Daryl's description of the scene where Benny stands frozen at a funeral — no metronome, blinking does nothing, no escape — that's a genuinely sophisticated design inversion. The game uses your expectation of the mechanic against you. That earns its reputation.

Children of the Sun is the one I keep thinking about from a pure mechanics standpoint. You get one bullet. You bend its trajectory between targets. Half the strategy happens before you fire. Daryl pitches this as "a shooter that feels like a puzzle game" — and then catches himself, because Portal exists, and then dismisses Portal's relevance and moves on.

I don't think he should move on that fast. The one-bullet constraint is genuinely interesting, but "puzzle game with a kinetic fantasy skin" is a real genre, and I'd want to know whether Children of the Sun stands up as a puzzle game or whether it's coasting on the visceral satisfaction of the bullet-bending fantasy. Those are different games. Daryl describes the aesthetic — violent purples, burning reds, fish literally on fire, a soundtrack that makes you feel bad about what you just did — and that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. The moral discomfort is baked into the presentation. But I'm genuinely curious whether a player who strips out the style finds a puzzle game with real depth or a looker with shallow routing. The description of the "Main Street" level — mapping every window, building, and gas tank into a single trajectory — suggests there's real there there. I just want someone to stress-test the claim.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme is where Daryl's video stops being a games recommendation list and starts being something else entirely.

The setup: you play as the final boss. A hero keeps returning, keeps improving, keeps finding new strategies. You have three moves. You will always have three moves. He gets better. You don't. The game is about the experience of losing control in slow motion — which is an inversion of every souls-like loop where you're the one incrementally improving.

Daryl connects this to a Bane line from The Dark Knight Rises, which he delivers as: "Peace has cost your strength. Victory has defeated you." I need to flag this: that specific phrasing doesn't appear in the film's documented dialogue. Bane's memorable lines from that movie are well-catalogued — "You merely adopted the dark," "Then you have my permission to die" — and this one isn't among them. Daryl may be paraphrasing, or misremembering, or condensing something adjacent. Whatever the source, the idea is real and sharp: stability rots the hunger that built the stability.

Daryl uses it to talk about nine years of making YouTube videos, the numbness that comes with success, the way comfort becomes a limiter. It's a vulnerable and, honestly, kind of brave thing to put in what started as a games recommendation video. A queen dethroned is a queen no longer — but maybe the dethroning is the point. Maybe you need to fall to remember why you were climbing.

The indie label question comes up in a different register here. These five games are all indie or near-indie in origin. What they share isn't just genre-defiance — it's a development context where no one was optimizing for comparability. Nobody at a major studio greenlit "blink-controlled emotional narrative" or "you are the final boss and you will lose." These are games that got made because someone didn't run a focus group.

That's what mobile discovery punishes most. The App Store wants to know what your game is like. The most interesting games are the ones that can't answer.

— Jordan Mercer, Mobile Gaming Reporter, BuzzRAG