10. The 9th Charnel

There’s a sense that the development team behind this had grand plans. Multiple playable characters with different backstories, survival mechanics, stealth, “realistic graphics” (their words, not mine) – it seems intriguing enough, until you actually play it. Poor performance, terrible voice acting, awful controls – that it even runs feels like a miracle. Minimal expectations aside, there’s just a sheer lack of redeeming qualities that would make you hope for better. Which sounds like a good time to segue to…

9. Code Violet

On the one hand, what can one expect anything from Teamkill Media in this day and age? Quantum Error was awful, but at least there was some sense that the studio was trying. Failing, sure, but trying all the same to make…something. Son and Bone was a waste of time, and with Code Violet, it appears to have given up even attempting to make an entertaining game. Awful story, awful gameplay, bland characters – the only reason it isn’t higher up is because of the negative hype going in.

8. Bubsy 4D

I wasn’t much of a Bubsy fan back in the day, but I admit that he’s had a rough time of it over the years. So seeing a 3D comeback like this from developer Fabraz was a nice feeling, with some decent humor and an intriguing, if ultimately uninteresting premise. But as it wore on, it became evident that Bubsy, annoying as he could be, was the least of the game’s problems, whether it’s the barren levels, occasionally iffy platforming, or a janky camera. Knowing what the developer is capable of, Bubsy 4D couldn’t measure up, even under little pressure.

7. Aphelion

Aphelion struggles to make a strong impression. Its story may have moments that pull you in, but it never reaches the level of intrigue or emotional weight it seems to be aiming for. The bigger issue is the gameplay, which quickly becomes a drag, with poor controls making even basic interactions feel more frustrating than they should. No one was expecting a sci-fi masterpiece, but it is still surprising how flat and uninteresting Aphelion feels overall.

6. Atomic Heart: Blood on Crystal

Speaking of “uninteresting,” if this were the first DLC for P-3’s bizarre adventure, I could see the reasoning for not expecting much. But this is the finale, the one that sets up the future, never mind the conclusion to the conflict between P-3 and CHAR-les. Instead, we get repetitive combat, annoying and tiresome traversal, and the same awful dialogue that marred the base game. If anything, at least it’s over, and we can move on to better things, even if Blood on Crystal doesn’t inspire much hope for the future.

5. Kiln

Maybe this hits more personally than the others, because you can see the sheer charm and originality in Kiln’s universe. But there’s still no denying how much of a bad idea it was from the word go. I’m all for supporting a studio’s creativity, but a multiplayer arena brawler in this day and age, that too from a team renowned for its single-player efforts? Did Double Fine not see what happened with Ninja Theory and Bleeding Edge? As a whole, Kiln doesn’t even muster above interesting. It’s as insubstantial as they come and all the charm in the world can’t save it.

4. Romeo is a Dead Man

If there’s anything you should take away from its placement on this list, it’s that I very much wanted to like Grasshopper Manufacture’s latest. The style, the atmosphere calling back to Tokusatsu greats like Ultraman and Kamen Rider, and the trippy narrative, which went beyond your average intergalactic hunt for space-time fugitives into something more surreal, were all pretty strong. It’s just that the actual gameplay left so much to be desired, especially with repetitive combat, underwhelming level design, lackluster enemy variety and shoddy performance. While it’s not the worst game of all time, it definitely needed more polish to match its overwhelming sense of style, especially given what the studio has been capable of at its peak.

3. Dead or Alive 6: Last Round

Far be it from the base game to inspire much love, either from long-time fans or fighting game nerds, but you would think in 2026 that Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo would attempt a clean slate. Dead or Alive 7 has been announced, after all. Surely they could revitalize Dead or Alive 6 with revamped mechanics, balance changes, less awful monetization, rollback netcode and a Tag Team mode that fans have been craving for years and years.

Last Round doesn’t offer any of that. In fact, it demands you repurchase all those characters and their costumes at higher prices. And to rub even more salt in the wound, the 2019 version has been delisted, which means you’re paying for a buggier follow-up that’s also trying to fleece you. Is this the same Koei Tecmo that released Nioh 3 and Pokemon Pokopia, two of this year’s best games? While the controversy will likely die down when Dead or Alive 7 rolls around, it’s amazing how well the publisher has effectively killed interest in the series, making anyone who cared about it feel like an utter fool.

2. Starfield: Terran Armada

While it’s only $10 – a far cry from the awful Shattered Space that cost $30 – and Bethesda clearly wasn’t aiming very high, Terran Armada is still frustratingly disappointing. After a year of relative silence, it should have offered a worthwhile narrative to accompany Free Lanes’ many new systems and quality-of-life improvements. It should have been Bethesda overdelivering for the fans in terms of storytelling.

Instead, there’s a new faction, enemy robots, some new ships to battle and commandeer, and Incursions to partake in. Imagine if the menial tasks in Fallout 4 actually became main mission content, against the backdrop of an initially promising story that, once again, flops on the execution. And if you’re a new player, especially with the recent PS5 version, the sheer number of bugs for the DLC alone would make you swear off Bethesda games entirely. Terran Armada may not be Bethesda’s worst ever, but it should have been an opportunity to do better rather than phoning it in.

1. Highguard

Some games fail because of unreasonable expectations, which usually emerge from extensive hype. Which is what made Wildlight Entertainment’s raid hero shooter such a fascinating anomaly. Everyone audibly groaned when it closed out The Game Awards, but the sheer audacity of it all actually drove some manner of anticipation, even if it was to watch the game fail.

The lack of communication leading up to its January launch was equally interpreted as the studio avoiding backlash and perhaps cooking up something special. Then Highguard actually dropped, just as it promised, and it was…not great. A mishmash of wildly conflicting genres, coupled with mostly uninspired heroes, painfully long matches, horrendous optimization, and more, ultimately sullied some interesting environments and solid gunplay.

Less than two months and numerous layoffs later, it was dead. You would think expecting anything from yet another dry live-service title would be folly, but given the studio’s experience, the years in development, and its funding (which may or may not have come from Tencent), it wasn’t your average project in terms of scale. If it ended up enjoyable, who knows how many of those players who checked it out on day one, expecting a massive failure, would have stuck around?

So long, Highguard – we hardly knew ye, but at least you made everyone question that one last announcement at every Summer Game Fest, Game Awards and so on going forward.

Quick disclaimer: I played the PS5 version, and I couldn’t finish the game—even though it’s short—because I hit a progression-stopping bug. I went into the game with a clear board, expecting a psychological horror experience that was only mildly interesting right off the bat, only to find my time with protagonist Michael cut short by the bug. Here’s what happened.

"Could the story or gameplay have improved later on? I want to say yes, but everything I’ve seen so far makes me hesitate to do so."

A computer that seemed vital to progression around the midpoint refused to register any interaction, locking me out of progressing further. I couldn’t fix it no matter what I tried, even reinstalling the game and restarting my PS5 to see if that could help. It didn’t, but do I really care about Michael’s fate?

I couldn’t honestly say I do, since the story is so vapid that it just fails to catch your attention. The 9th Charnel tries to do so many things that other games have done before, and done better, that the only thing scary about its attempt at horror was how laughable the entire thing was. The cutscenes look generations behind, and they’re intercut with Michael’s predicament—stranded in a remote valley and stumbling into something deeply off.

With no means to get out and only a trusty flashlight in tow, Michael soon enters into a tedious series of fetch-and-carry quests, slowly uncovering a story of corporate apathy from the Charnel family and encountering mutated creatures that feel lifted from better horror games.

I pushed past a few enemies, hoping the game would introduce a weapon, but it didn’t in the portion I played, right up untilI found myself in the house of the man from the cutscenes, his computer being the one that brought a premature end to my playthrough. Could the story or gameplay have improved later on? I want to say yes, but everything I’ve seen so far makes me hesitate to do so.

"Could the story or gameplay have improved later on? I want to say yes, but everything I’ve seen so far makes me hesitate to do so."

A lackluster story could be offset by solid gameplay in most cases, but The 9th Charnel is actually more frustrating than tense. The controls are a major part of my angst, with clunky movement made worse by an awkward sprint input that quickly becomes tiring, which makes giving Michael directions a literal thumb ache.

Controls aside, interacting with important key objects or switches in the environment is too inconsistent and finicky to be reliable, and even something as simple as getting down a ladder becomes a matter of trial and error. The inventory system makes things worse, because you have to dig through the menu and ‘equip’ an item before the world will acknowledge it. Details like these matter, especially in the current generation of games and even more so when there’s a highly anticipated horror experience right around the corner.

With exploration this tedious, the game might have been bearable if there were things worth discovering in it. Your paths are largely linear with minor deviations where important items, or completely redundant assets, are strewn about. The choppy framerate is something I’m willing to overlook, but it’s there if that matters to you. But the game’s very first chapter hides an important item so darn well that it took me a very long time to find it.

The next chapter, however, was nothing more than a crawl through a space where spike traps did nothing to me, and then a sprint through a short hallway with a monster chasing after me. That ended with me having to rotate a crank for a door and then make my way through it, at which point the monster could clearly see me but couldn’t pathfind around the obstacle and follow me through.

"On the visual front, the characters in cutscenes seem to have their faces carved from stone and move so unnaturally that I found them to be as scary as the monsters Michael was facing."

The next chapter introduced me to a Lovecraftian horror that clearly saw me diving under a nearby bed and decided I was not worth the trouble it had to go to in order to make a meal out of me. But the second I came back into the open, it rediscovered its appetite and how! That’s largely been my experience with the enemy AI, each enemy being so braindead I could only laugh at how easy it was to evade them. You might have more fun just trying to find ways to cheese them, honestly.

The distinct lack of weapons early on was a sore spot – I didn’t find a single one in the portion I played, which makes the pacing feel glacial for something sold as survival horror. I’m estimating I was a little past the halfway point of the story, and that’s a long time to leave you helpless in a survival horror experience, even if the terrors you face are nothing more than salad dressing.

On the visual front, the characters in cutscenes seem to have their faces carved from stone and move so unnaturally that I found them to be as scary as the monsters Michael was facing. In the present, while you explore the world, the game’s all over the place. It all looks like a PS2 game, and a bad one at that.

I suppose looking for DualSense integration is just me being unreasonable at this point, and the game’s audio design and soundtrack are nothing to write home about either. Hell, Michael doesn’t even utter a sound, even as a hulking brute of an enemy came crashing through a wall in front of him, or at the sight of the corpse of a man he had just spoken to, sprang at him. As far as silent protagonists go, Michael’s clearly a pro.

"It gives me no joy to criticize a game as much as I have with this one, but it’s hard to make me feel actually bored when I play a game."

The only good thing I can say about The 9th Charnel is that it’s a short game. Its concept isn’t interesting enough as an opening hook, and things would only go downhill from there. It gives me no joy to criticize a game as much as I have with this one, but it’s hard to make me feel actually bored when I play a game. I got through Code Violet for crying out loud. This one felt like an early build of a concept, much less a full game.

All in all, based on what I played, The 9th Charnel isn’t a game I can recommend. But it might be worth keeping an eye on as a rough debut from Saikat Deb Creations, a newly approved PlayStation Partner. If that’s the case, this one is simply a bad beginning to an interesting journey. And I sincerely hope my theory is right.

But as a game you’re paying your hard-earned money for, it’s too buggy, lackluster, and unintentionally campy that it’s only worth it for a laugh. I’d suggest saving that cash for other popular horror games if you’re looking to scratch that survival itch.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.