Rings and Skulls: A Critical Look at This Year’s Most Disappointing Science Fair Submissions

This article does not represent GameGrin's Game of the Year awards. I would recommend reading my reviews of Skull Island: Rise of Kong and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum before any further reading.

Another year is almost over, and the Game Awards have come and gone, but there’s still a question that has been circling the drain of this year’s game releases. Out of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Skull Island: Rise of Kong, and The Walking Dead: Destines will get the title “Worst Game of 2023"? All three come from much-loved IPs, but I have only played Gollum and Kong.

I feel as though, this year, the games under the line of fire are almost as bad as each other.

The best analogy for this is to imagine a school science fair. The developers are the students, the publishers are the help they got from their parents, and the judges are the public and critics. You have students like Remedy Entertainment who have spent weeks on their project on alternate dimensions in space (mathematically speaking) and are getting the recognition well deserved for it. Then you get students like Daedalic Entertainment who use science kits bought from stores like National Geographic (or your country's equivalent) in their presentations; it’s hard to get the experiment wrong when the instructions are written down for you.

However, Daedalic Entertainment made many mistakes in developing the project, resulting in a substandard science presentation. In front of the judges are three A3 beige pages duct-taped together on the back with all the information and title, Precious Minerals, written in pencil — and a box of dirt with a few rocks in it. While the information is factual, even having the names of gems both in English and Latin, the content only explains what minerals are, is impossible to read, and is full of spelling errors. Daedalic Entertainment knew a lot about the subject to talk about but had trouble stammering and began to freeze halfway through the discussion. But, what about the box? I hear you ask me to connect the second half of this long paragraph. The box of dirt has minerals in it. Maybe not the ones expressed in the writings, but minerals nonetheless. Compared to the other projects, ‘Precious Minerals’ by Daedalic Entertainment is a science project that doesn’t demonstrate scientific methods of analysis at all, making it dull to look at.

The judges walk to the next table, thinking to themselves that the previous project was the “worst” they’ve seen that day, but there is one student in the back. Most of you know this kid. Some of you were this kid. The student didn’t start until the night before the fair to cobble together something about early humans and apes, as he didn’t have enough time to do a proper job. IguanaBee’s dad, GameMill Entertainment, and its friend, who knows a lot about Hominidae, pressured IguanaBee to do the project on the subject but didn’t contribute enough help on the presentation at all.

On the day of the fair, as the judges meet IguanaBee, they see printed-out pictures of early man, current apes, and a Tyranid from Warhammer 40,000, accompanied by multiple A4 sheets of paper with dot-point lists of information and a sign written ‘Island: Apes and Some Prehistoric Stuff’ lined the table. IguanaBee knew it would get a bad score at the fair, so it didn’t present at all; it just let the judges look over the table in confusion. When a question was asked, it answered broken, mumbled sentences about the subject but didn’t elaborate on it any further. Someone asked why a picture of a fictitious alien was among the other images. IguanaBee answered, “No, that’s Gaw, a dinosaur that eats apes.” Obviously, this isn’t the best IguanaBee can do, but it is what he made by rushing to hit the deadline.

At the end of the fair, the winner gets the prize, and everyone is packing up. People are still talking about who between Daedalic Entertainment and IguanaBee had the worst project. And there lies the issue of 2023’s worst game of the year. Between Daedalic Entertainment and IguanaBee, their “projects” and the way they were presented share similarities, with an exception. Both are conveniently bad games, are poor quality for what they’re priced for, and most of all, were riding on the backs of giants to trick people into buying them. The exception is that Daedalic Entertainment knew what they were talking about when it came to representing Gollum as a character, to a point, while Kong isn’t treated as a king in any regard, no matter if it’s meant to be a ‘coming up’ story.

But then again, Skull Island is a rushed mess that anyone who worked on it knew would get a bad reception, while Gollum spent years making it only to come out half-cooked. So, it begs the question: who deserves the wooden spoon this year? That will be decided in the GameGrin Game of the Year awards.