10 Critically-Acclaimed Video Games NO ONE Played - Commenter Edition

3. The Neverhood

While this list is largely compiled at this point of games that were a little too weird for their own good, but we still love them for it, The Neverhood is a perfect entrant into that category.

The 1996 point-and-click adventure game is a particularly curious one as it follows a claymation character called Klaymen as he journeys through a world made entirely out of clay.

You’ll generally solve puzzles through actions and employing elements of your environment as opposed to utilising items from an inventory, and watch video sequences that carry you through the plot. The unique adventure is quirky and genuinely funny and its visuals are charmingly different from what most other games have on offer. While the game was criticised by some for being overly difficult, largely it received rave review scores and much later in 2011 would even score the 35th slot on Adventure Gamers best adventures games of all time list.

All that success notwithstanding, the game greatly struggled to find an audience and was ultimately commercially unsuccessful.

It was reported that many large game retailers such as Target were not even carrying the game, and by April of 1999 The Neverhood had only managed to sell 41,073 copies, a figure that CNET called “embarrassing”. Curiously the game eventually found a large fanbase in Russia and Iran due to mass bootleg copying and distribution of pre-installed games on computers, as it was included on Gateway machines at the time.