10/10 Video Games The Public REJECTED

Remember Tearaway? I played this whole game and its sequel and completely forgot about it until I started researching for this list. Though I also have no idea where my PlayStation Vita is.

The 2013 platformer with a bevy of papery graphics and Vita-specific gimmicks that actually worked really well was a hit with critics and players. It won a pile of awards and spawned sequel Tearaway Unfolded which arrived just two years later. The follow up scored pretty much the same level of critical acclaim that was levied upon the first game except this time around, nobody bought it. While loads of us who invested in a Vita and had played enough of Gravity Rush for one lifetime decided to at least give Tearaway a go, because good games for the platform were getting pretty thin and our giant-screened handheld console was starting to look like a $350 paperweight, Tearaway Unfolded was a whole other story.

The sequel launched in September which isn’t a terrible time to come out, especially when there’s not a lot of games quite like it and you’d assume the original’s fanbase would mosey on over to check this one out on the PlayStation 4, gamers were a little preoccupied in the back end of 2015.

Charming, though Unfolded was, it absolutely fell apart commercially. It tanked so very hard that it didn’t even chart on the vast majority of top sales lists in the West or in Japan. Some speculated that Sony sent their first-party kid out to die but having a look at the release calendar I’d say that even with the greatest marketing budget known to man, very few gamers would have been electing to tuck into the Tearaway sequel when just one week prior Mad Max and Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain had come out. If that blow wasn’t already fatal, Super Mario Maker landing three days later quickly followed by Forza 6 and indie darling Undertale would have handily scooped up any remaining idle gamers.

The writing was on the wall and unsurprisingly we never did get a Tearaway 3.