The Rogueies: Most Innovative Game nominees

Video games are nearly 50 years old, but that doesn't mean there's not room to try something new. We wanted a category that recognized games with an unexpected or novel mechanic, twist, or experience.

The Alters

As much as the zeitgeist is suffering from multiverse fatigue, The Alters approaches it in a new way. It's kind of a base-building and survival game — of which there are many — but the twist come from how you staff up your base.

Your character, Jan, is stranded alone on a planet, so the only way to add new workers and new expertise is to recruit other Jans from other quantum timelines. Recruiting the Jan that went to trade school instead of medical school helps you repair the engines. The graduate student helps you research. The psychologist helps you oversee the complex interpersonal relationships that come from having clones with such similar, but still conflicting personalities.

Throughout The Alters, Jan has to quite literally learn to live with himself and The Alters explores it so thoughtfully.

— JP

BALL x Pit

Every game feels like it falls under the “what if this THING – you know, that thing you’ve played – what if it was that but it was also a ROGUELITE?! Lol, can you imagine?” and it’s getting a little tired generally, even if I’m personally not quite tired of it all yet. But BALL x PIT broke through that tired-ass wall to bring a brick breaker game into the Roguelite genre.

BALL x PIT succeeds for just so many reasons, from the unique characters to the weird meta progression with the town, the the exploration-based evolution of all the unique ball-types, there’s just a lot of creativity going on there. The game is a grind, which is something I could see someone critiquing it for. But if you’re going to make a grindy game, you should make it really innovative, which is exactly what Kenny Sun and Friends have done here.

I played a lot of BALL x PIT this year, but I never grew tired of it because it felt like something fresh the entire time.

— RG

The Bazaar

The Bazaar is so innovative that it’s extremely hard to explain what it is. I could say it’s like Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra, but both of those are actually quite poor comparisons. I could tell you it’s like Teamfight Tactics or Auto Chess. That gets us a little bit closer, but still not close enough to fully understand what’s really happening here. The closest you can really get is something called Backpack Battles, but even that doesn’t quite have the same flair and pizazz, in my experience.

The Bazaar is truly unique, and I’ve never played a game exactly like it. It’s also something I’ve tried (and succeeded, in about three cases) to get friends hooked on. But I’ve tried a lot of other times and the game hasn’t quite stuck because it’s a bit of a difficult climb up the mountain of understanding. 

That unique factor can be as much of a blessing as it is a curse, but damn if it’s not worth it in cases like The Bazaar. I can’t remember the last time a game hooked me like this, and I wouldn’t trade all of the things that make it unique for a few more friends being able to understand the obsession.

— RG

Consume Me!

Consume Me! is a game about growing up, and it blends the pressures of homework and chores with the simple, stupid joys of burning away the summer as a teenager. It’d be downright idyllic if protagonist Jenny wasn’t also dealing with the beginnings of disordered eating, playing a game of stomach-Tetris with every meal. Every in-game day has a calorie goal – represented as bites – that ends up dominating everything else in Jenny’s life.

Growing up sucks, and it’s not easily represented as a game. Consume Me! blends visual novel style segments with inventive mini-games and RPG elements, and it does an excellent job at representing a turbulent and emotional time in life. Games like Florence have done similar work in representing interpersonal conflict via visual novel mechanics, but Consume Me! builds off that foundation, and it works well enough that I felt teleported back to my teen.

— CM

Pokemon Legends Z-A

When I pitched Pokemon Legends Z-A for this list, I could feel the judgement from my co-workers. I could feel it through those monitor screens. But here’s the thing: I’m right.

Innovation doesn’t just come from awesome new games built around creative ideas. Arguably, the hardest innovation is inside of a beloved franchise that comes with a lot of expections.

Pokemon as a franchise is only two years younger than me, and I’m almost 32 years old. I know how hard it is for me to change, OK, and I’m not a franchise that prints money every time it comes out with a new squishmallow or releases a booster pack to its trading card game. 

Pokemon has proven itself to be a very slowly moving ship in recent years, but the Legends series offer such a breath of fresh air. Z-A is a weird game that I ultimately liked quite a bit, but the best part by far is the real-time battling. It gives an entirely new perspective on these Pokemon and how they move and how they attack. And it’s the first time in years that Pokemon has made me feel like it did when I was growing up with it. 

I hope Pokemon continues to iterate and change and break up the formula in years to come, because even if neither Legends game is perfect, they’re a lot more interesting than the mainline series has been in 20 years.

— RG