 10 eShop Games Worth Buying. This is my series where I dive into the eShop, I play a bunch of games, I find the ones that are actually worth buying and I show them to you. It's usually a bunch of games that you could have easily missed and I know that because this is my job. Half of the games in this list I didn't even know existed a month ago. But now I've got to play them, really enjoy them and hopefully that's gonna happen for you too. Like the video, subscribe if you want. This is episode 32 in a series of hundreds of games that I've reviewed so you can go back and watch all of those. Alright, I know you came here to look at some cool games, so let me show you them. Shout out to my Twitch chat for this first one. Balotro? I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. I've been addicted to it recently and it's a game created by a team of one person. I think a large reason why I enjoy this game other than my general obsession with roguelites lately is because the worst part about poker is building a cool hand showing it off just to find out the other player has smoked you with an even better hand. In Balotro, Balotro, I feel like I'm saying it wrong, there is no other hand. You're playing for blinds or rather to beat the ever-increasing score goal each round. You do that by not only building the best hand you can by discarding cards until you get the typical, you know, pairs, four-of-a-kind flushes, straights and so on. Maybe you've played poker and you know all of that? Doesn't matter if you have or you haven't because this is where it gets wacky. Like utilizing a large array of unique Joker cards that alter the gameplay by increasing score multipliers, giving you extra abilities like being able to discard more cards and after each round you visit a shop to spend your money. Here you can buy more Joker cards to stack those crazy effects one-time use cards that have their own unique effects like changing a hand to be all hearts or upgrading certain cards in your deck to a higher quality. You can also enhance cards with bonuses like turning a card into a wild card which is considered to be every suit simultaneously or a glass card which is a two times multiplayer when used but has a one and four chance of breaking each time and for me it seems to break every time. All of that is before we even get to cards that have seals attached to them. I'll leave the seals for you to discover on your own but at the shops you can also buy deck packs and then add all of those cards and more into your current deck. So between all these crazy jokers enhanced and bonus cards one time use cards and more you begin to build up an insane deck with loads of multipliers and ways to rack up serious scores. Crazy how simple of an idea it is but how good it works in practice. Speaking of eShop games on the and I am in the kitchen. Hey kitchen boy you want some coffee just got some new beans in fresh from trade these ones were locally roasted in philly. Well I'm here so sure. Great you want it like regular or I can make it a little fancy. Just regular is fine. Okay watch this. Trade sources the best coffee across the country and brings it to your doorstep. They've built relationships with over 55 roasters nationwide so you can enjoy fresh roasted when you order coffee from the comfort of your own home. You know it really seems like you're making it fancy. Trade is a subscription service that allows you to experience tailored for you coffee delivered straight to your door. Really you don't know I had a friend once that brought beans to my house that came from a grocery store. I throw them down the stairs the beans I mean. No longer will you have to throw your friends down the stairs for bringing crappy quality coffee to your house. Oh this is the good bit. Coffee you deserve today at drinktrade.com forward slash beat em ups. Thank you I highly doubt it was worth all that work. It was worth all that work. Wow that's really good and you're saying you got these beans by going to drinktrade.com forward slash eat em ups and getting $15 off select plans and a free bag of coffee. You said that with trade I'm like the Willy Wonka of coffee. I'm making the best coffee in the world. All right well now I have the energy to finish the video so let's go talk about some more e-shop games. I still don't know how I ended up in the kitchen. Next we have Risk of Rain Returns. My first experience with Risk of Rain was with the sequel Risk of Rain 2. I loved that game. Four player co-op waves of enemies with a giant boss battle at the end of each world literally over a hundred unique items to attach to your body and stack abilities and traits boosting your godlike power into another dimension throughout the run as the difficulty spikes all the way up to maniacal laughter mode. However I never played the original game. It released in 2013. It was made by two university students and a dream but thankfully I don't gotta go back and play that. That's old now. Ew stinky. I can play the remake which is called Risk of Rain Returns. It released recently and fun fact it's actually a switch console exclusive right now with no word on when it's making its way to PlayStation or Xbox. We're winning these console wars boys. If you played the original the remake includes higher resolution graphics, new music, better networking for four player online co-op and new characters monsters and items that were introduced in Risk of Rain 2. And if you never played any Risk of Rain I would say you could either start on this one or Risk of Rain 2. They essentially are the same game with the same gameplay loop just two very different styles of game. They will both suck you into the same just one more run mindset. Destroying monsters leveling up and hopefully not losing to the same boss for the fifth time in a row and having to start again. My favorite part is just all the items. They're not just stat increases each item offers a legitimate upgrade like an extra jump exploiting rounds extra lives chain lightning I mean it just goes on and on and on there's over a hundred of them and you can stack all of those too so if you wanted to pick up five extra jumps you can do that. The game seemingly has no limits on what you can combine and I love that it's so much fun. Swigger games seem to take the internet by storm a few months ago and I would honestly be surprised if anybody watching this hasn't at least heard of the watermelon game but I'm pretty sure many of you like me at one point looked at this gameplay footage and went really but yeah I hate to admit it but it's pretty fun for only $2.99 this might be the cheapest game ever in my e-shop series and it's one that Kim and I spent countless hours playing together. It was actually really sweet we would just play on one console and pass it back and forward in between rounds whatever one of us would lose we'd hand it off and we'd just try and compete for the highest score and get so excited for each other if one of us got a watermelon. It's obviously a puzzle game you drop fruits into a container and you can't have them overflow out or it's game over and that is much easier than it sounds because when you combine these fruits they often come together in a big sudden pop and because it's all momentum and physics-based it can blow some of the fruits out of the container. It's shockingly addictive trying to manage the placement of fruit and organizing where everything is put to more efficiently build towards hopefully maybe getting that watermelon which by the way getting the watermelon is not the end goal it's just a very hard to do the actual end goal is just to get the largest score possible there isn't even a way to wipe the screen or get rid of any of the fruit so eventually you will just run out of space but it always feels like you can do better if you just try one more time there's an online leaderboard which is the reason why the game demands to always be online makes no sense and recently they even added paid DLC which introduces competitive modes as well as time limit and attack multiplayer mode some people were really upset that it was paid DLC the base games three dollars and the paid DLC is two dollars and then come on you want to you want them to work for free well that's weaker game how about we talk about penny and her big breakaway developed by evening star the same creators of the arguably best sonic game ever sonic mania and here i believe the story is that they wanted to make a 3d sonic game and they were even being considered by sega to do just that but plans fell through so instead they shifted gears and created penny the whole game does feel and look like something that sonic team would have created for the sega satan back in the day and even more special penny's big breakaway was first revealed during a nintendo direct and later released during that recent nintendo partner showcase we just had and that's despite it releasing on all platforms by the way they just decided to give this to nintendo to show off i think it's because they knew that we would really appreciate something like this all the past 3d sonic and gotta go fast inspiration is clearly here to see but for me this game actually reminds me more of mario odyssey than anything sonic related purely due to its controls and movement it's so flowy with you being able to jump dash yo yo swing through the air and move all in combo succession stringing together crazy moves to essentially fly around the levels utilizing your speed and momentum and i love that kind of freedom it's similar to the feeling of mario odyssey and how you use capi also pennies yo yo is not just for platforming you can also use it to beat things up around all that fun movement there's also a classic 3d platformer flare here with collectibles to be found around the world making you feel like you didn't really beat a level if you're missing half of the stuff there's also npcs with side quests that i didn't expect also angry penguins many levels have these emperor penguins that will chase you down and trigger a game over if they catch you so you just gotta go fast to avoid them these developers clearly have that nostalgic love for a different time in video gaming and they are nailing recreating these classics for us you want to talk about nostalgia i had nintendo systems growing up i never really talk about the fact that i did have a playstation one but i had a very small handful of games i had the die hard game and then we had the tomb raider trilogy but i spent countless hours playing those tomb raider games mostly just roaming around lara's mansion and diving into the swimming pool but now just like metroid prime they're calling this a remaster i would like to argue once again that this is almost a one for one remake whenever i hear remaster i think you've just thrown it into hd but no there was serious effort here every single asset texture model enemy has been remade from scratch they wanted the game to look how you remembered it looking because honestly when i first saw this remaster i was like oh it doesn't look that different but then you see the original and you're like ah that's not how i remembered it lara's character model being the most obviously improved the way that i said that sounds like i'm referring to something in particular no i just mean because that's what you're looking at the whole time that doesn't help there's new shadows and lighting you can even switch between the old and new graphical style instantly they added camera lock on even health bars for the boss battles they even added lip syncing and it all runs at 60 fps on the switch and if you're thinking man i'd love to play these games again but i can't handle those old tank controls they actually improved those too taking inspiration from the future tomb raider games that came later they implemented that style in here but if you're thinking i really wanted those old tank controls they even added those in as an option in the menu you can just toggle them back on hopefully this set of remasters does well because the developers aspire have already expressed interest in remastering more tomb raider games in the future like last revelation and chronicles and they did such a good job i think they deserve to do that big water bottle recently xbox decided to take all their games and release them on all the other consoles because you know i don't really know i don't really know what's happening over there on that sinking ship but good news for us we're getting a couple of great games grounded and pentamin grounded doesn't come out for another month so we're talking about pentamin i've been putting off playing this one for a while i heard about it when it dropped on xbox and not just because it's one of the very few exclusive games the series s and x actually had but because it received essentially perfect scores across the board but i've got to be honest every time i looked at it it was kind of like looking at swiker games really pentamin is all about the narrative which shouldn't be a surprise since it was directed by josh soya who previously worked on fallout new vegas and pillars of eternity it's a role playing game in a 2d perspective where you play as a journeyman artist who becomes entangled in a series of murder mysteries it's very point and clicky and style which i'm known to love so i find it weird it took me so long to try it out pentamin aims to be incredibly historically accurate from its setting plot environments even the in-game dialogue which at some points i did have to double read just to make sure i'm understanding the old yee english at the start of the game you pick your background you can be a craftsman bookworm businessman each one will affect the conversations you have later in the game and how you can navigate situations moving forward and i can't really say much else without spoiling the game again it's mostly just very narrative driven so if you just want to try out something new or maybe this style of game is for you check it out backpack hero man if they didn't do marketing with jukebox hero that would be a waste backpack hero i am constantly impressed with how creative indie games can be with backpack hero literally taking one of the worst and most frustrating parts of video games in general and making that the entire game but somehow making that fun the game is described as an inventory management roguelike and it's all about how well you can organize your bag based on a grid system similar to resident evil 4 you pick your character at the start of the run then you start moving through crypt locations and the locations might have an enemy to fight a shop to buy things at or other surprises then the fights are turn based and play out depending on how you packed your bag and how much energy you have weapons or shields you're carrying the special items that carry bonuses or synergies depending on where they're positioned in your backpack for example an item might give your sword an attack boost if it's placed next to it but that item might not be able to get placed next to a magical item or something or else it nullifies it so you have to make sure you put everything in the right place certain armor might even be stronger if the space above it is empty so now you have spaces you can't use you have items that will fall to the bottom of the backpack no matter where you put them there's a lot you have to consider there are so many ways to build out your character based on what you find in the dungeon and depending on how you organize it can completely change up your build it pays well to battle every enemy on a level explore every area and collect as much as you can before visiting the final boss on the floor as these fights are very hard and if you aren't well prepared or organized probably not going to go well in between runs you can use things you find in the crypts to build homes shops towns and more for the NPCs around the world and that's satisfying in itself but of course doing all of that builds up your strength for the next run down in the crypt the game is so creative and really rewards you for trying and experimenting with new ideas and it's all about inventory management it's like some people hear boring and take that as a challenge all right this next one has a huge caveat caveat caveat i can't talk today caveat yeah that's it i'm sure and that's that the game isn't out yet now i'd love to say that i received an early copy so i've played it but that that would be lying pepper grinder releases in just a few days but there is a demo out right now and man it's awesome so yeah obviously the caveat here is that i haven't actually bought this game and i'm recommending it's worth but you have to remember at this point i've bought and played like 350 e-shop games i'd like to think i have a good barometer of when something is going to be good and this is absolutely that when this was first revealed at a nintendo direct it was a total head turner and stole the limelight of the whole showcase another fantastic game brought to us by devolver digital pepper grinder is an action adventure side scroller that plays pretty similar to something like celeste where you use a drill to traverse through various obstacles puzzles and even as a weapon to defeat enemies and lord even though this is a short demo the controls felt buttery smooth it's as fun to control as it looks being able to swim through the environments and use the momentum to shoot out the other side and land back in somewhere else the levels are also filled with secret areas you can find containing extra rewards or optional pads collecting all of the golden gems really feels nostalgic like an old school super nintendo game so too does the art style and bright colors the level is just in the demo got pretty complex too with you needing to flip these switches in order to open different paths but then that would close other paths creating a puzzle to solve the final climb upwards towards the end of that demo was so satisfying to pull off and felt really epic i've never done this before so i hope you can forgive me for recommending a game i haven't fully played but i gotta tell you i was so upset when that demo finished because i was so ready to play more if for some reason it ends up being really bad i'll make an apology i don't see that happening another reason why i put it in the video there were two other games i thought of putting in this list and i wrote full reviews for them and i just wasn't convinced myself they were worth the money and that was star wars battlefront and far-changing tides star wars battlefront i thought it was so cool that it released with 64 players online like that was awesome to replay those games but the more i looked into it and the more i looked at the $35 price tag and all the bugs and issues that came along with the game i just could put it in the video for 35 even for the nostalgia and then far-changing tides i love far-loan sales it's one of my favorite games i've talked about in my eshop videos and i really wanted to feature the sequel in one of these videos and funny enough it's been in my last few videos list it's always just getting edged out because of how short it is and it's just not as good as the first one so i thought rather than recommending either of those games when i'm not sure they're a hundred percent worth the price i would take a gamble on one that's not even out yet because i loved the demo anyway next cue the beautiful music because we have a highland song that's the name of the game not just the song you're hearing a highland song is a beautiful art piece turned into a magical adventure you play as moira a teenage girl running away from home to visit her uncle hamish who lives in a lighthouse on the coast the gameplay may present itself at first glance like a flat standard 2d left to right adventure but it's anything but it becomes almost a fight for survival at times with you needing to find warm and dry places to rest when you become tired or when the weather takes a turn for the worse the visuals aren't the only gorgeous stand out here as the music also exceeds itself with certain areas even kicking up the volume allowing you to sprint alongside the beat of the Celtic soundtrack as you explore you also find items that you can pick up and hold on to none of these are really needed but it's worth exploring and finding them because they might come in handy later to create a shortcut or open a barn for you to spend the night in or many other secrets you can uncover along the way the voice acting is really well done and carries most of the story as you explore there are tons of optional branching paths with no set way of moving through the game which not only adds to replayability but really makes it your specific adventure as you move towards the lighthouse each person exploring is going to have their own unique adventure and then you can play it again if you want to see what you missed the animations are all hand drawn and very studio ghibli there's a lot to appreciate here I will say though it's not super video gamey kind of similar to pentamin you're not really playing an action game you're experiencing an adventure you're going on a magical adventure in this one it was short but it was sweet okay but forget all the other games because now it's Dave the freaking diver time this game combines an action adventure with restaurant management it's like two games in one the main bulk of the game has you diving into an ever-changing ever-expanding ocean gathering ingredients catching fish and discovering mysteries drowned deep beneath the sea then by evenings you run a busy ever-changing ever-expanding sushi restaurant serving up your fresh catches and trying to turn the biggest profit possible to continue funding your deep sea adventures it's such an interesting concept with such an addictive gameplay look the deep sea diving has you equipped with a harpoon gun for attacking and reeling in fish there's an array of other weapons you can find as well as melee weapons and other wacky items you can find to pommel sharks with you have a limited amount of oxygen and if you run out before returning you'll lose everything you found on your dive so you use that money that you earn in the sushi restaurant to improve your equipment where you find new fish materials and even other secrets the sushi restaurant part has you select the evening menu according to what you caught the sushi chef will start creating the mills people order it's your job to bring them their food and serve them drinks this is manageable at first but as the restaurant grows you'll need to hire people to help out serving or in the kitchen occasionally VIP customers will request specific dishes or ingredients which will require you to go and hunt in the ocean but doing so will give big rewards and then further into the game you even get a farm to grow rice and vegetables extra mini games and all throughout there are multiple side characters each with side quests like there's a whole side plot with an outer shape ash ketchup who rewards you if you catch them all the fish i mean not like you know pokemon the pixel art style speaks for itself here but it's beautiful and full of vibrant color and charm there's been so much cool doc for this game already i don't think we ever talked about dredge another sea base game on the switch but they did a doc collaboration with dredge which is really cool to see there's also godzilla doc dave the diver is an unbelievable gem in fact i can tell you now if we do another 300 of these games and i make another shirt dave would probably be right here in the middle right now he's winning that spot and that is another 10 e-shop games worth buying actually i think it's 12 if you want to count star wars and uh i've already forgotten oh loan changing time we'll say nine and a half because one was a demo but hey that's just a theory no that's what it sounded like i was about to say what am i doing i've been sick for like a week now i am delirious man i'm surprised i even got through this video but i will say one last thing at the end here every time i make one of these videos it's usually really easy to find 10 games especially when i hadn't made one in half a year but i can see that the e-shop is clearly slowing down and i think at some point this year we're gonna see the switch to get revealed and apparently it's coming next year i'm very excited for that and i can't wait to start making these videos for a whole new console mysterious times almost as mysterious as the ocean dave the diver i'm gonna get out of here subscribe maybe do what you want i love you bye