 As this year comes to an end, I want to take a look back at the Nintendo Switch and give you guys my top 10, my personal, my favorite games on the eShop. This has probably been my most requested video of the year. It was brutal putting together this top 10 because usually in these eShop videos they aren't in any kind of order, they're just fun games I recommend buying. But this time they're actually ranked with number one being my favorite eShop game so far. If it was up to me this would be a top 50 list because I had so many games I wanted to put on it so of course there will be a load of special mentions. While I do feel like most of you are going to share the same games on your top 10, the order of my list is probably going to be very different to yours. So don't get upset by the order because it's a very strange order. Oh and please remember an eShop game is a game on the eShop that doesn't have a physical release elsewhere. That's why I do my buying guides and my eShop videos separately. The only exception I've made for this video is that a lot of these eShop games have since received physical releases most likely through limited run games or super rare games. They still qualify for this video because they were in the other videos because at the time they didn't yet you get it? Okay we're good. And something that really excites me about this video is not only can we take a look back at the eShop but we also get to take a look back at my channel over the last year in a bit. The channel has grown and changed so much and you're gonna see that both in the locations I filmed a lot of these videos but also just my demeanor when I went through the shy phase and then the why are you yelling phase and then getting to whatever phase this is. It should be a fun video and I'm very excited. Once again I want to thank you for this year for watching all of these eShop videos and the rest of my content and I can't wait to see what 2019 has in store for the Switch eShop. Let's get started with number 10. Right off the bat the number 10 game is one that a lot of you probably have in your number one spot and that's Stardew Valley. The next game on this list is arguably the most popular and one that I'm sure a lot of you have heard of already and that's Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley is a farming game inside a beautifully created vibrant world. It's an RPG mixed with a farm simulator and it works so well. Grow your crops on the farm, enter the mines to defeat creatures, use resources you find to upgrade your equipment and find new areas to explore. You never really know where your journey is going to take you next in this game but never feels repetitive there's always a mystery about it and I like that. Farm Fight Craft. There's a lot going on in this game and a lot going on in the town too. You can head into town and you can make friendships and relationships. I'm not going to talk about it much more than that because we all know it's fun. So we should all go out and play it. The ninth game on this list was an insanely ambitious title which somehow managed to perfectly pull off everything it was aiming to accomplish and that is The Messenger. The Messenger is a game that so many people wanted me to talk about so let's do it. This game is an 8-bit start- oh sorry it's a 16-bit start- okay actually it's both? Whatever. Anyway The Messenger is an action platformer just like Old School Ninja Gaiden and it's actually a Metroidvania game. Which game is it? Is it 8-bit? Is it 16-bit? Is it like Old School Ninja Gaiden or is it a Metroidvania? Make your mind up well actually it's all of it and that's what makes it awesome. This game seamlessly switches between 8 and 16-bit graphics throughout your gameplay and the first half of the game will be spent in an action platformer genre and the second half will open it up to allow you more exploration and even completing things like fetch quests. All the while you will be faced blasted with some of the best chiptune music I have ever heard in a video game soundtrack. Plus when you switch between the 8 and 16-bit styles the music has 8 and 16-bit versions as well. What a game, geez. From the start everything about the game's combat will look and feel just like NES Ninja Gaiden but fast forward a couple hours once you have loads of upgrades and new ability suddenly the game takes on its own gameplay style and it's freaking awesome. The platforming gets crazy thanks to the fact you can double jump but only if you're able to strike something with your sword first and so a lot of the platforming in the game is built around that mechanic. The Messenger is a very ambitious title and if you're a fan of the older NES and SNES games of this genre you owe it to yourself to check it out and even if you're not, if you're just up for the challenge the Messenger will be waiting for you. Number 8 is a gorgeous game that I had to wait forever to play on my Switch and that's Hyper Light Drifter. Oh and the list just keeps getting better and better people because we are at Hyper Light Drifter time. Hyper Light Drifter takes the pixel art visual style and transcends it to a more impressive or inspiring place. The music is just as breathtaking as the visuals and the world's atmosphere is eerie yet peaceful. The game is set in the aftermath of a war. The world is littered with corpses of fallen giants. All the while the main character appears to be dying constantly coughing up blood and experiencing weird visions. And my favorite part about the game is that there is no written or spoken dialogue anywhere. Talking to other characters in the game presents images leaving you to interpret the entire story for yourself. Everything is a mystery for you to solve from the story to its exploration and the gameplay and it feels really open leaving you to decide where you go or what you do first and the combat and controls are extremely tight. You are equipped with a sword as your main weapon as well as a gun. You charge up your gun by slashing your enemies with your sword which in a good way forces you to use an even mix of the two weapons. Also you can use your dash move to quickly avoid enemy attacks or to move in for a sudden strike. For me the entire game is captivating engaging and thought provoking. I am completely absorbed in the world in love with the combat and the game just gives off serious Zelda vibes and it won't disappoint you. Number seven on this list is a game that I put a lot of time into and it's a game I reviewed probably at the height of my yelling phase. So we get to stroll down that memory lane right now. This game is Enter the Gungeon. So let's start with my second favorite game on the list and that is Enter the Gungeon. Now if this isn't obvious to you already the word Gungeon is both gun and dungeon so we're already off to an amazing start with this game and it's called that due to having literally hundreds of different guns throughout the game. Currently there is 205 different kinds of firearms. You have your standard pistol, shotguns, rifles, your weird and wacky guns like a banana, a d-pad, a magic lamp but you also have guns from other games like Mega Man's Blaster or a super meat gun that shoots out sword blade. So that right there is more than enough reason to play this game but let's keep, let's keep going. It plays as a rogue like twin stick shooter where you progress through randomly generated levels with a boss fight at the end of each floor. The game controls are so tight, simple and on point that it leads to perfectly natural and fluid gameplay. The game is brutally difficult but in a way that just makes you want to keep playing and playing and playing and trying again. Every time you die it's almost exciting to play again because you get to play with different guns and you literally never know what you're gonna get. Obviously with it being a rogue like game plus all the unlockables, different classes and obviously all the different weapons Enter the Gungeon is well worth the price and has a load of replayability. That was a horrible joke, whatever, moving on. Number six, okay honestly at this point they're all number one. It was so hard trying to decide what went where from here on out. If it was up to me this list would go 10, 9, 8, 7, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. But after a lot of moving things around and pulling my hair out I've come pretty close to what's probably the correct order of my favorites and number six ended up being Transistor. The next game is the one that I said is probably my favorite game on the eShop and that is Transistor. When I think of Transistor the first thing that hits me is the music. Developed by Supergiant who also made one of my favorite games Bastion they always go all out with the soundtracks for their video games. In fact before I even played Transistor for the first time I was already very familiar with its music. I had already been listening to it on repeat the weeks leading up to playing. Next to the music it's the hand-drawn art style of Transistor that steals my heart. Set in a futuristic dystopia the cyberpunk visuals are heavily inspired by classic anime. Every location is breathtaking. Every character design is unique and interesting and all of this before we even get to the brilliantly smart and engaging gameplay the game has to offer. You play as a lounge singer named Red who has had her voice stolen. Armed with a talking sword you set out on a mission to regain her voice. The combat is extremely rewarding with the real fun being the ability to freeze time and strategically plan out your moves. Then once you restart time you get to watch the moves you selected either fail or succeed and that is a thoroughly addicting gameplay mechanic. But don't worry you still need to apply quick real-time reactions throughout the combat which combine strategy and action gameplay in a perfect way. And the depth of the game grows when it comes to unlocking abilities each of which can be used passively, actively or used to augment the strength of another skill. Transistor has so much to offer and I absolutely adored this game. I cannot recommend it enough along with all of super giants games. There's a new one coming as well called Hades and I can't wait for it. For number five I need you to remember what I just said about all of these being my number one and also what I said at the start of the video with a lot of your favorites will be on this list and maybe at weird spots. Number five is Hollow Knight. I'm sure that for most of you Hollow Knight is number one. So many of you keep telling me to play this like I haven't played it before in my life like any sane gamer hasn't played this game if you haven't played this game that's right I just called you an insane gamer. Well Hollow Knight is now on the switch and tonight's the night to play Hollow Knight because it's a really fun game and let's just talk about it and stop being stupid. Hollow Knight is an absolutely gorgeous 2D metroidvania game that critics and gamers have been praising ever since it released early last year. Finally finding a home on the Nintendo system it plays as beautifully as it looks. Whereas in most games if you're low on health you would possibly retreat and find more of it in Hollow Knight you regain health by engaging in combat and defeating enemies. This mechanic encourages you to stay in fights and battles longer than you otherwise would and take risks where otherwise you wouldn't have. A lot of people like to compare this game to Dark Souls because of course they do if a game's brutally hard it's just like Dark Souls but there are other similarities in this game like when you die you have to go and then find the shadow version of yourself where you died and then get your coins back kind of like in Dark Souls. Also different enemies have different attack patterns and learning how to fight them in this game gets easier and easier as you learn those patterns. For example the first time you find a thing it might kick your butt but then once you start to learn how to beat it it becomes a lot easier and the next time you see that thing you can beat it easier than you did the first time. Okay I will admit this game is actually pretty much a 2D metroidvania Dark Souls game but more fun I like this game a lot more. There are loads of different power-ups and abilities to unlock as you play and this is just one of those games that needed to come to the Nintendo Switch. You can't have the library the Switch has and not have Hollow Knight find a home amongst all its other metroidvania pixel art 2D side-scrolling brethren. Oh this is getting tough okay number four again number one please remember that I'm gonna brace myself for this one Celeste. I adore Celeste it feels bad putting it at number four and Hollow Knight at number five like it hurts me but it would also hurt me to put any of the other games any lower side they're all number one they're all number one Celeste. If you've seen my videos like this before you'll know that I always start with my favorite and walk my way back from there for who knows what reason so I'm gonna start with Celeste. Celeste takes place in the wintery snowy region that is Canada Canada. As I'm sure a lot of you have already heard this game has a reputation for being a very hard platformer they start playing as soon as I start filming quit fighting and I knew that going into the game I also knew the story which revolves heavily around depression and anxiety as a driving point and that immediately resonated with me and made me fall in love with the game as I do have depression and anxiety and I draw a lot of parallels to this game and I can see a lot of the hidden symbolism throughout the game you don't know what's going on yeah he is throughout the game your goal is to climb a mountain and as you climb the mountain it gets increasingly harder and sometimes it's made even harder still by having to face a coin of yourself in other words while you try and climb this mountain which is life it gets harder and harder as you try and fight with yourself and a lot of that symbolism definitely wasn't lost on me I managed to pick up on even the little hidden things that if you don't have depression you probably wouldn't even catch platformers like this aren't really ever known for deep complex stories especially not revolving around something as dark as depression you've had enough okay so I really appreciated that and as I said it really helped me fall in love with the game and connect with it so much more but fortunately you don't need to have experience depression to enjoy this game the fast-paced gameplay is incredibly exhilarating with extremely tight controls and no matter how many times I failed I just wanted to keep on going keep trying to best myself pick myself up dust myself off and try again this game also has a fantastic soundtrack from fast-paced to slower methodical tracks there are so many reasons to play celeste no matter who you are and it will for sure be one of the best games you play in 2018 I guarantee it number three on this list is probably this high just because of how much it shocked me I didn't expect to enjoy this game as much as I did I fell in love with it this is a game you have to play in my opinion and that's fury I want to come right out the gate swinging and talk about one of my favorite games that was released in 2017 and that's fury fury is a mix of two kind of games on one side you have a twin stick bullet hell style game and on the other side you have sword play that relies heavily on parrying the kind of style of this game lends easily to something like near-automato where you blast through all these levels destroying minions and enemies and waves and waves this game could easily have gone that way but it's actually not every battle in this game is just one big boss battle and I love it so much this game does not take it easy on you but the gameplay is actually pretty simple there's only four things you really have to worry about attacking with your sword parrying with your sword shooting and dodging but it's finding the right measure those things at the right time that's really important and that's hard when you just have everything being thrown at you this game reminds me so much of something like Dragon Ball Z both in the gameplay where you could be zipping around each other dodging and parrying and attacking and going so crazy that if anyone was watching you it'd be like Krillin watching Goku and self-fight and not really not knowing what the heck's going on every one of these boss fights the enemy has a health bar and you have a health bar kind of like Street Fighter every time you take down one of the bosses health bars he goes into the next stage where things get more difficult and more amped up and you rinse and repeat until you manage to actually take him down but on the other side if the boss depletes your health bar you'll have to start that wave again and if you fail a wave three times you have to go all the way back to the start and try the whole fight again that's when it gets really infuriating but a pro tip master that counter if you can master the parry and you can get good at it the rest of the game will actually be fairly easy as well as easy as this game can be something else I really like about this game is in between the really intense boss battles there's this walking stage where you just casually walk in fact you can even choose to auto walk where you just sit back and watch this character walk through the level into the next stage and the stages can get so trippy and mind bending and sometimes they just look really pretty that contrast between extreme action where you're just sweating and frustrated and you just want to pull your hair out because you keep dying and then all of a sudden there's just an auto walk and you're just kind of taking in the scenery there's such an extreme contrast but I love it while I'm fighting an enemy I'm I'm kind of looking forward to that passive walk and I'm looking forward to that cooldown and while I'm calling down it's amping me up for the next fight so if you're up for a challenge and just a really great game as I said one of the best ones to come out of 2017 I'm really happy furies on the switch number two on this list is very special because it's one of the only Nintendo switch e-shop exclusive games there's a very small handful of these games that weren't made by Nintendo they're not first party because typically Nintendo first party games get a physical release anyway but a game made by a third party that has only ever been sold on the Nintendo switch e-shop and even though limited run games is giving golf story a physical release it still counts for this list starting this list is a golf game but a golf game that fixes what every single other golf game has done wrong it added a storyline and not just a storyline but a fantastic one golf story is an adorable rpg that just so happens to be a golf game an absolutely beautiful game not just because of the amazing sprite work but the fact that the sprites seem to come to life they are so full of motion they are so animated and it just makes the entire world feel alive if you've ever played a golf game before which I'm sure a lot of us have most of us probably have the golf mechanics work the same as you'd expect utilizing traditional techniques like time button pressing and matching up your power and accuracy facing your typical challenges in golf like wind resistance during about the 60 now as a gameplay in this game you'll find yourself playing a lot of golf but also walking around meaning characters interacting with characters exploring the world doing challenges and quests for people and being blown away by how freaking beautiful this game is it's such a cute and unexpected game I when I heard about it I was like what a golf rpg but as soon as you play it you get it and I recommend playing it it's so much fun before we get to number one and if you've already guessed it that probably means you know me and you've watched a lot of my videos so I want to thank you for that it means a lot to me I want to go through all of my special mentions and I'm not kidding when I say that any of these games could have made it onto my top 10 a lot of them were on my top 10 initially and just got bounced around so much they ended up in special mentions so I'm going to go through these really quickly but to start with I want to say that both dandara and owl boy would have been 11th and 12th if this was my top 12 list but going on from there we have wizard of legend west of loathing broken age chasm kamiko I love kamiko that game released on the eshop right as nintendo switch launched and it's still one of the best and cheapest eshop games you can buy flame in the flood 60 seconds bloodstained curse of the moon crossing souls octodad battle chef brigade flint hook crypts of the necro dancer and everspace which also nearly made it onto the list oh and of course bastion actually walking into making this video I initially had written down transistor and bastion were going to be squeezed both in the number six and I still kind of wish I did that but I didn't want to cheat kept you all waiting long enough my number one game won't take a lot of you by surprise thimbleweed the last game on the list as I said is my favorite game on the list and probably my favorite eshop game on the switch so far and that's thimbleweed park I'm so so happy it came to the switch so so many other people can get the chance to play the game and I highly recommend it so much it's a point-and-click game so no wonder I love it if you've been following my channel for a while there'll be a no-brainer to you but here's the kicker is made by the same two people that created maniac mansion and secret of monkey island which is another one of my favorite point-and-click in fact probably my actual favorite point-and-click game well I don't know I have the game and I couldn't want to dig it out of the tub but I have both of these just showing off now thimbleweed park is designed to be similar to the graphic adventure games released in that time period both visually and gameplay wise the game is freaking amazing everything about the game is amazing the puzzles are hard and challenging but so rewarding to complete when you finally figure them out and all the pieces start coming together it's that same feeling from monkey island games or other point-and-click games like that the art style couldn't be done any better as far as recreating that old style but giving it so much extra life I I love the art style in this game so much there's so many inside references and jokes in this game which relates to monkey island or maniac mansion or games like that lucas art's games story is captivating the characters are captivating everything about the game is so engaging and you will have a lot of fun with it I just I guarantee it you'll recognize so many characters in this game from games like maniac mansion like there's a diner that you go to and Dave and sandy work there that's all I'm gonna ruin about the game other than that go and enjoy it for yourself go and experience it for yourself I love this game but of course I want to know your favorites leave your top 10 down below while you're heading down there make sure you have a lip all over that subscribe button like a tap on this video right here and hey let's get excited for the switch in 2019 thanks guys see ya