Ahem. I promise to keep things shorter and less dark for the next few entries. Here's some more hints.

#39 - What is a rival?
Hint 2 - This is an indie game whose entire world is centered on the idea of the 4 elements (fire, water, air and earth)

#38 - The second of two games in this series whose lack of a Switch port still puzzles many.

#41

Change YoY: NEW!   My Rating: 9.1 / 10

I'm not even going to pretend to be even remotely objective when it comes to judging the quality of this game, as it basically feels tailor-made specifically to my personal tastes. I've always enjoyed a good music rhythm game, Guitar Hero and Rock Band took up a sizable chunk my friend group's multiplayer gaming time back in the late 2000's and early 2010's, and though the genre fell of severely due to factors such as oversaturation I always felt like there was always a place for good rhythm games on the market. I've played other games from the genre on occasion over the last ten years, but the first one that truly struck a chord with me was Theatrhythm Final Bar Line just earlier this year.

Much of the reason behind that is the thing that any great game like this needs, the music, and As far as I'm concerned, the Final Fantasy series has the best music in all of video games, so a game largely built around it was always going to appeal to me. Every single main installment and numerous of the series spin-offs are featured here, amounting to hundreds of songs from the series' entire history, and through DLC you can expand that to include numerous other franchises with excellent music. What it then just needed was enjoyable gameplay to anchor the music, and luckily Final Bar Line has that as well. It's not the most complex or difficult of rhythm games, but playing is still thoroughly satisfying, and what it might lack is more than made up by the music. Obviously, you can always argue about song choices, and there were certainly some tracks I missed and others I found underwhelming or over-represented (if you include the DLC, there are seven different version of 'Battle at the Big Bridge' in the game, which is just pointless in my opinion), but when 95% of the songs are great I can't complain all that much.

I spent nearly 150 hours playing this game in the month or so following my daughter's birth, and it provided me with exactly the kind of relaxing experience I needed at the time. How much value anyone gets out of a game like this depends entirely on your personal affinity towards the music of Final Fantasy, and for me it couldn't really have a much better set of songs to play.

#43 - A base-building game where your handful of people must survive the end of the world, as hell has taken over.

1. First you just need to survive, but after a while your group of survivors will do things like farming, crafting, both scientific and occult research, build shrines for rituals and an alchemic table complete with a philosopher's stone.
2. Research needs sometimes some specific items that you can scavenge, as in scientific books, research kits, scientific data to progress in that tech tree.
3. The more survivors you rescued and the more buildings you constructed, the more the forces of hell are aware of you and will attack your base more often.
4. Each survivor belongs to a class, but they will also have some additional talents that can influence a survivor in different ways.
5. Last hint for this game: All the maps and survivors are procedurally generated

#42 - A very long turn-based Fantasy game with clear influences at Civilization, Master of Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic.

1. The game world consists of a planet that has been blown to bits to avoid the forces of chaos to take it over, and the main story consists of assembling those shards and combining them with yours to recreate the planet.
2. This game has been made twice, once in 2D and then immediately they recreated it in 3D, although to this day with piss-poor performance.
3. Battles are turn-based in a manner similar to Heroes of Might & Magic, but every unit is singular instead of a group of troops and the hero is actively fighting along with them. Also, how many units one can bring along depends on the hero's command skill, and how high this can go depends on his class.
4. In the campaign, you fight for shards of the planet that once was and got broken up into many little maps. Each fight over one of those shards, no matter how many turns it took to conquer it (or get defeated and booted from it), counts as one turn in the grand scheme of things, and depending of the difficulty level chosen you'll have up to over 50 of those "turns" which each can take as long as an entire Civ playthrough.

#40 - A Pinball game with 3 tables that would be pretty much impossible to make in reality

1. It has a halloween/dark fantasy setting
2. "FEED ME!" says the castle

#39 - Stealth, Sniping or big guns, whatever approach floats your boat in this game is possible.

1. When it came out, the game was absolutely lauded for it's story and storytelling, and it's only real gripe among reviewers was that the graphics were a bit outdated.

#38 - Thwart an Alien Invasion with a team of soldiers and some researchers trying to reverse-engineer the alien tech into something useable by humans.

1. You start in the late 1970's and with according tech and weaponry, just somewhat adapted for your specific needs. Later on, you'll research laser weaponry, plasma rifles and coilguns, but psionics won't do anything.

#37 - "It is a world, of darkness"

#36 - This series is one of the most-cited successors to the classic DOS game Master of Magic.

Slow day, huh...

#40

Change YoY: -4   My Rating: 9.1 / 10

In some ways, it's quite surprising just how popular Stardew Valley and other so-called cozy games like it have become in recent years. Obviously, these life-simulation games have been around for a very long time, with the likes of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing having gotten their start decades ago now. Yet, for a long time they were very much a niche genre, beloved by a small minority of players but largely ignored by most others. But then something changed, and earlier this year Stardew Valley had sold over 35 million copies, and the most recent Animal Crossing has sold another 10 million copies on top of that number. As far as video games go, those kinds of sales figures are reserved for a very select few titles.

So, what exactly changed? Who knows, but I can take a few guesses. First, the average age of people who play video games rose significantly, most recent reports stating that it's around 35 years now, and constantly rising. Second, the pandemic happened, and people needed something less stressful to spend time with and take their minds off the outside world. And third, video games are being played by a much wider range of different types of people than before, and as such it makes sense that genres that may not have been massive successes in the past have found much wider audiences in these new players. There are probably dozens of other reasons too, but those would make sense to me at least. I first encountered the genre back in the late 90s when I played the original SNES Harvest Moon on an emulator. I certainly liked it, the slow-paced, relaxing gameplay providing a nice counterbalance to all the action titles that tended to rule the gaming space at the time (and still do today), but it wasn't the kind of game I would necessarily go out of my way to play after experiencing it once.

Then came Stardew Valley, and it not only retained the stress-free gameplay of games like Harvest Moon, but added other features to give the experience much more variety. Suddenly, it wasn't just about managing and developing a farm, but also dungeon diving, relationships between characters, improving the town, and a number of other features that in other games could have served as the core of the whole experience. There's a staggering amount of content to be found here, but much of it is also optional, so if you prefer to focus on just one or two aspects of the game, you can do that. This also makes the game great for co-op, as different players can focus on different things depending on what they enjoy the most. Stardew Valley is a game that is easy to go back to even after a long absence, and one that always provides a nice, relaxing experience for however long I might feel like playing it that time. I haven't been actively playing the game for a few years now, but it is still installed onto my computer so whenever I feel like it I can go and spend a little time tending to my farm and completing other tasks.

No. 39 God of War 3 Remastered

The pinnacle of the original God of War series. Amazing game made more amazing by the highest difficulty and an amazing Platinum trophy. Not to difficult but just enough to test your skills and patience. Rip out the story and the game is still great but the story is very cool, just based on pure rage from Kratos and does a good job at making you despise the God enough to rally with Kratos against them. The combat section during Pandora section will stick with me for life for triumphing over them for the platinum but that said, many of the bosses don't, aside from Zeus of course which is just immensely cool. The game refines everything that made GoW 2005 great and corrects many of the misteps of GoW 2 where things became a little too non formulaic and loose and convoluted. 

Bonus game. DmC: Devil May Cry

I considered this game for around this spot but eventually gave up trying to fit it in. The game on the highest difficulty has an absolutely incredible combat system and the level design is brilliant but because of the style of the game I can not add it to my list, it simply doesn't gel with DMC and aside from that on it's own it's fairly lack luster aside from the parts where the style choices make their way into the level design, some cool stuff done with it but it foesn't hit the mark for me. That flaw aside, this game is a really underrated gem and I just know people hating on it aren't bringing out the games amazing combat mechanics and the skill it takes to get high scores on those difficulties, it is super rewarding and I'd recommend anyone who loves the genre and has no allegiance to DMC to try going for the platinum with this game, the second playthrough on the highest difficulty trying to get some of the trophies tied to it, it is one of the most difficult things I've done in gaming and is so worth it for the reward it gives despite the frustrations along the way. It'll show how well the game is designed at it's core. Just a pity about the soft core punk vibe they brought to it and failed to understand why DMC is so cool. In it's defence, DMC 5 almost made the same mistakes ripping out the Catholic background that made DMC4 so memorable along with some pretty modern day European settings that very nearly put the vibe off. 

#38: Last Window: The Secret of Cape West?

38) Ahh, Twilight Princess?

#38 NES REMIX maybe?