Two great games that go great together: when awesome games mix to create something even better
Written by @Kef
We all know about how amazing it can be to play a game that totally changes how you view a genre or opens your eyes to new possibilities. For example, Doom popularized first-person shooters, while the original Final Fantasy introduced the wider world to a distinctly Japanese take on the role-playing game genre.
Sometimes, though, that incredible level of innovation isn’t needed. Sometimes it can be just as fun to play a game that mixes together elements from two or more other games you already love.
For this week’s collection, we’re celebrating the hybrids, the games that successfully blend together pieces of previous beloved games to build something new and wonderful. And just for fun, we’ll also look at a couple of times when that didn’t work out.
Result: Death’s Door (Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X)
Though it’s at the bottom of our list, Death’s Door might be the most ambitious of all of these titles. After all, A Link to the Past and Dark Souls are probably two of the most common games to pop up in “best game of all time” conversations. Both of them absolutely changed the face of the industry and inspired dozens of wannabes. Many games have tried to combine these two, and almost all of them have fallen short. In fact, developer Acid Nerve tried it previously themselves with 2015’s solid but limited-in-scope Titan Souls.
Nevertheless, Acid Nerve tried this combo again when it launched Death’s Door in 2021...and this time, it actually paid off. This hybrid game may not change gaming forever the way its dual inspirations did, but it has absolutely blown away gamers. It achieved a high Metacritic score of 89 for the Switch version, as well as a Steam user review average of “Very Positive.” The top-down view and world exploration of Zelda is combined with the punishing-yet-so-satisfying difficulty of Dark Souls to great effect.
It may not be an industry-shifting titan (so to speak), but I’d be hard-pressed to find any developer that has demonstrated its ability to pull the best parts from Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past quite this well.
RESULT: Puzzle Quest (iOS, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, PC, Xbox 360)
Match-3 games, as popularized by Bejeweled, are notoriously one of the most casual types of game possible. We’re not talking trash either! Everyone needs a game they can just chill out with sometimes. But in 2007, developer Infinite Interactive, a studio primarily known for creating PC strategy games, dared to ask: What if we mixed one of the most casual types of game with one of the most hardcore?
The brilliant result of this pairing was Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlord, a fantastic RPG-lite experience that reimagines turn-based battles in the form of a deadly game of match-3. Puzzle Quest exploded in popularity almost immediately, becoming one of the early hits of downloadable games on Xbox 360 and also finding a ton of handheld players on the Nintendo DS.
Since then, Puzzle Quest has remained an active franchise, although its most recent mainline entry, Puzzle Quest 3, has received a lot of negative feedback due to some controversial free-to-play design choices. Then again, perhaps the most successful Puzzle Quest spin-offs is also free-to-play—the fantastic Marvel Puzzle Quest, which has been running for almost a decade now and which I wrote a review in praise of earlier this year.
Alright, time for a break from the good stuff to remind you that it’s not enough to simply take game A and game B and mash them together. Developers still need to know what they’re doing. Case in point: Babylon’s Fall, a stunning failure of a title from publisher Square Enix and developer PlatinumGames that just launched earlier this year.
That pedigree is perhaps the most baffling part here. For its base, Babylon’s Fall seems to use a combat system and visual style very comparable to Nier: Automata...a game that Platinum also developed! You’d think they’d have that part down. But they tried to combine that strong foundation with a structure seemingly inspired by the Monster Hunter series, where players could take on quests cooperatively to build up loot to allow them to take on more challenging quests, and so on. The goal was to create a live-service game that could keep players engaged for years to come.
So just how bad was Babylon’s Fall? Well, the game released on March 3, 2022, and Square Enix has announced that its servers will be shutting down on February 23, 2023. It won’t even make it to a year old, and since it’s online-only, it will be one of the only PlatinumGames releases ever that will simply be no longer playable in any form.
I guess at least Platinum kind of redeemed itself with Bayonetta 3 last month. You can check out Jay’s review of that here.
Back to the good stuff! Here’s one that was totally not on my radar until it launched last month: Signalis. The debut game from two-person studio Rose-Engine, Signalis takes the tense inventory management and scare factor of old-school survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, and paints over it all with the aesthetic of Cyberpunk 2077—which is arguably the best part about Cyberpunk 2077!
It’s not just these two games that serve as inspiration for Signalis, though. As JB points out in his excellent review, the game also seems to borrow ideas from books (The King in Yellow), films (Blade Runner), and anime (Neon Genesis Evangelion). That it pulls from themes and concepts explored in such extremely well-regarded sources and doesn’t end up looking disappointing in comparison is proof enough that this is a great achievement that’s well worth checking out.
Blizzard itself tried to mix its popular brand of loot-heavy action-RPG with its popular brand of MMO in the form of Diablo Immortal earlier this past summer. It had already been beaten to the punch, however, by Amazon Games and Korean developer Smilegate.
Though it launched in South Korea in 2019, Lost Ark just made its way to Western countries in early 2022, but the wait was well worth it. While there are valid criticisms to be made about Lost Ark’s endgame and the capacity for pay-to-win shenanigans in its free-to-play design, there’s also no denying that this is the most polished, satisfying, and content-rich mix of Diablo-style loot and combat with World of Warcraft-style structure and storytelling.
That masterful blend seems to have paid off too. Within a month of launch, Amazon announced that the game had passed twenty million total players worldwide, with around five million of those estimated to be from the Western release. Current estimates put the daily player population at around 1.5 million, and a steady drip of new content has kept pulling back lapsed players. If you have any love for MMOs or action-RPGs, I strongly recommend giving this one a shot.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodline is one of the secret best PC RPGs ever made, due in no small part to its fascinating setting in the World of Darkness tabletop RPG universe—a setting shared by Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood.
Batman: Arkham Asylum has one of the most satisfying combat systems ever made, switching out a simplified beat-em-up style in favor of a system of counterattacks, dodges, and special moves that makes each fight play out like a ballet. And yep, that’s a system that Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood borrowed as well.
So how did things go so disastrously wrong? Well, for one, Earthblood’s take on the Arkham Asylum combat just isn’t as polished or fun, and it’s also interrupted by repetitive, annoying stealth sequences. More damningly, though, the game completely wastes its setting and doesn’t feature anything close to the level of writing and player choices that Bloodline had. What a missed opportunity!
You know what absolutely wasn’t a missed opportunity? Evil West, our number one choice and the inspiration for this list! This is another one that came out of nowhere and surprised a lot of people when it launched this week, but it’s now high up in the game of the year conversation for a lot of gamers here at TapTap.
JB once again wrote a wonderful quick review for Evil West, which I strongly recommend reading. But what really stood out to him here is a game that combines the fantastic Wild West theme and style (and voice acting) of the Red Dead Redemption games with the tight level design and delightfully over-the-top, gory combat of the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3-era God of War games. It’s not a formula we were expecting, but it turns out it’s a heck of a winning combination!
💬 That’s our list, but let us know in the comments if there are any great hybrid games we missed, or any examples of games that tried it but failed! Also, I’d love to hear any ideas you might have for two great games that haven’t been mixed together yet but you think would make for an excellent hybrid.
Mentioned games
