Tails by the Foxfire

Tails by the Foxfire’s Top 6 Games with Nostalgic 90s and 2000’s Vibes

Put on your jelly bracelets and your cool graffiti coat, the 2020s are a certified hellscape and I’m just popping out to the 2000s for a bit, 1990s at most. Cool? Cool. In case you want to come with me, I’ve laid out our itinerary below: these are my top 6 games that feel authentically enough like more colourful days that I think we can get pleasantly lost in them for a while. There’s a good mix of sugary fun and edgy gothiness in there that I think it’ll keep us occupied too! Importantly, this isn’t a list of my favourite games that released in the 90’s and 2000’s, as that was a real gaming golden age and would call for a much longer list than this. This list should give you the boost you need to make you feel like bead curtains and inflatable chairs that look like bubbles are still readily available, like Buffy’s still kicking ass on TV, and like you still remember your Neopets login, though.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

1. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage by DON’T NOD
2. Life is Strange by DON’T NOD
3. Ink Inside by Blackfield Entertainment LLC
4. Kingdom Hearts by Square Enix
5. 1997 Reloaded by Gaigo Studio
6. My Perfect Nails by Lya Mgtt

Read More Nostalgic Reviews & Deep Dives at Tails by the Foxfire:
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Review
Why Final Fantasy X Still Matters 25 Years Later
Cinders: Cinderella as You’ve Never Seen Her
You Can’t Go Home Again… Or Can You?

Set mostly in the summer of 1995 (with the 2020s as a framing device), DON’T NOD’s Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is a love letter to the Riot Grrl era and to those wild and free female friendships where you’d go to the woods with your best girls and make pretend magic rituals like you were secretly witches. It sounds like I’m kidding here, but I relate to this so much as a girl from rural England where if you were too young to drink and too broke to shop, then punk rock and making movies in the woods and by the lake were just kind of what you did. Bloom & Rage represents this beautifully in a way that I found completely nostalgic and charming, with a believable variety of characters within the Bloom & Rage friend group who all felt real and true to themselves in their own ways. They disagree, they butt heads, they love each other, they’ll say edgy dumb kid things, and they’ll break your heart, all in a way that feels alive and adds validity to the found footage fear factor when looking back at Swann’s recordings.

Read my full review of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage by DON’T NOD, and show the team some support by shopping the game on Steam!

I guess I really will use any excuse to talk about the original Life is Strange by DON’T NOD, but honestly, it was impossible to leave it off this list. As with Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the original Life is Strange captured bittersweet nostalgia in a way its contemporaries just haven’t for me, which isn’t to say they aren’t good (I enjoyed Life is Strange: Double Exposure and Life is Strange: Reunion a lot, for instance), but that their sleek sharp looks just don’t capture the same time capsule vibe of the original with all its soft edges and painted aesthetic. As well, given their announcement of probable bankruptcy in Q1 2027 if things don’t change, this is me showing up to support them however I can. I don’t know that it’s much, but it’s the best ‘Thank you’ I can offer to some of the most memorable adventure games I’ve enjoyed as a weird artsy girl finding her way in the world.

For those who haven’t played Life is Strange, it follows Max Caulfield: a photography student at Arcadia Bay’s esteemed Blackwell Academy where she studies under famous photographer Mark Jefferson. Just one thing, though: studying at Blackwell means facing the hometown she left behind, and the best friend she lost contact with as well. As Max, you’ll rekindle a friendship with Chloe (helped by a handy helping of time travel), nerd out about classic sci-fi, and find the perfect pictures to take on your manual camera. It feels indie, it screams nostalgia, and it’s one of my all-time favourites.

I also wrote about Life is Strange in my top games with back to school vibes, which you can check out here!

What else was synonymous with the 90s and 2000s? You’re darn right: Cartoon Network and dodgeball! (I was kidding initially, now I think about it a little, whether we’re talking about the movie of the same name or Bombardment in The Simpsons, Dodgeball was everywhere, wasn’t it?)

Ink Inside by Blackfield Entertainment LLC is the brainchild of ex-Cartoon Network and horror developers, and mixes in a dose of occasional live-action footage hearkening back to the days of FMV games for an added nostalgia factor. In Ink Inside, you follow Stick: a stick man with only one arm, who wakes up one day to find himself in a world he doesn’t recognise. In the opening movie, we see a man packing away a child’s belongings in a box and putting them away in a storage cupboard with a leak in the ceiling. As the ink runs, the worlds drawn in those old sketchbooks get blended together, and characters within the pages turn into sogs: mindless monsters who Stick has to brave with the power of dodgeball! There’s plenty of mysteries surrounding Stick besides his missing arm, though, and with the help of Detective Fuzz, you’re sure to find out more about Stick and what’s happening to the drawn worlds.

[Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co]

I’d be remiss to talk about the 90’s and early 2000s without mentioning Disney, and there’s no better gaming representative for that, in my experience, than the very first Kingdom Hearts game by Square Enix & Disney. I was around 10 years old when I first played Kingdom Hearts on the PS2, and I still love it to pieces as one of my most formative and favourite games. When I can, I’m planning to replay the series in honour of Hayden Panettiere and to celebrate the upcoming release of Kingdom Hearts IV, but for now mentioning it on my top list of games that feel like the 90’s/2000’s feels correct.

In Kingdom Hearts, you play as Sora: a happy-go-lucky boy growing up on the Destiny Islands with his best friends, Riku and Kairi. One day, a storm and a terrible swarm of shadow monsters (called Heartless) overrun the island and sweep Sora away to an unfamiliar place. As he searches across the worlds for Riku, Kairi, and a way home, Sora learns to wield the mysterious ‘Keyblade’ and befriends a whole host of classic Disney and Final Fantasy characters who have also had their homes threatened by the Heartless.

Kingdom Hearts feels like the classic coming-of-age story with Final Fantasy-esque stakes (and, of course, familiar faces like Aerith, Yuffie, and Squall) thrown in. The presence of Disney favourites like Jack Skellington, Peter Pan, Hercules, and Beast are what really sell it for me as a game that feels like childhood though, as it puts me right back in front of the TV as a kid when I hear the remixes of tunes like This is Halloween and Under the Sea while I navigate each world.

If your memory of the 90’s/2000’s was mostly rooted in the music, then I definitely recommend 1997 Reloaded: a visual novel by Gaigo Studio that takes place in an alternate universe whereLos Angeles was the epicenter of the alt-rock revolution. Featuring vocals by Jessie Wagner and tracks by Ken Gordon and Rosa Helena, 1997 Reloaded goes all in on creating an authentic snapshot of the 90s music scene, complete with fully-written articles covering in-universe beef, scandals, and mysteries such as the tragically untimely and mysterious death of artist Andy Quinn.

In 1997 Reloaded, you’ll follow Marco, Federico, and Shirley: 3 teens living in Hove who discover an old answering machine with the tape still inside. Listening to this kicks off a globe-trotting coming-of-age adventure for our heroes who jet off in pursuit of a decades-old truth long hidden. The story is linear and feels like reading a dynamic graphic novel. Definitely worth reading, and you can read my full review of 1997 Reloaded right here! Thanks again to Gaigo Studio for providing me with a review copy!

I was recently lucky enough to playtest My Perfect Nails by Lya Mgtt, which in part actually inspired this entire article (so thank you to Lya for both of those things!), as it had occurred to me just recently that with the boom of cozy and nostalgic games, and the popularity of elaborate nail art, that I’d never seen those worlds intersect. Enter My Perfect Nails by Lya Mgtt: a relaxing game where you paint and decorate each client’s nails to order, with just a candy shop of polish colours, patterns, and 3D decorations to play with. The format of the game is simple in a way that pleasantly reminds me of decorating those Barbie hairdressing bust things (are there any games like that, actually? I’d absolutely update my list to add them here if so!), and doesn’t overcomplicate things with prices and business strategy mechanics like many games would be tempted to. There was a part of me that thought, ‘Hey, that’s absolutely how Lya Mgtt could scale this, and maybe you could use the money to buy new polish colours and decorations’ but then I thought, ‘I also kind of like it the way it is, though; I like having all my toys right from the start and just playing without limits with the things that I have, just like I would with my fuzzy felts and sticker kits when I made my Barbie cars as garish as possible’. There are more than enough combinations to keep you busy after all, and the only limit really is your own imagination. If you’ve got about 20 minutes, I definitely recommend giving it a look.

Video Game Reviews, Guides, and Deep Dives at Tails by the Foxfire

As fun as that was, it’s time to return to the present. What did you think of our trip back in time? Were there any games I missed? Sound off below with your favourite games with 90’s/2000’s vibes!

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