PS1 Games If They Were Made Today

You like old games? You like newer systems? Here are some modern games released for current systems that feel heavily inspired by the PS1 era.

Cruel

Plays like: Blood, Hexen, Post Void

Guys, I’m gonna level with ya, we’re barely into 2025, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found one of my games of the year already.

Developed by James Dornan, Cruel is a brutal FPS roguelite, please no eyerolls at the back, that feels like a blend of Hexen, Blood, Hotline Miami, and Post Void.

You have to climb 10 increasingly tricky floors in a low-poly, crusty arse building littered with cultists, angry bald blokes, and monkeys for some reason, with the ultimate goal of killing your mortal enemy. Who, for your own, narrative purposes, can be Janice from Friends.

Very much run and gun in spirit, you’re constantly being chased by a fire, so you have to think quick on your feet. Or your arse, with you able to slide into enemies and then boot them out of windows, deflect bullets with your axe, then chuck that axe at them and kill their weird mates with an uzi.

The roguelite elements come in pretty gently, with you able to use sodas to give to a small dog (don’t worry about it) to choose from one of three upgrades, ranging from simple stuff like reloading quicker to farting enemies away upon damage. However, you also need sodas in order to heal, and considering how easily you can get hit in this brilliantly hectic game, you’re gonna need to constantly be weighing every action up. It’s fantastic.

Available on Steam, CRUEL is simply, a whipper. It is a boomer shooter on the strongest of acid, and I really cannot recommend it enough.

Lunacid

Plays like: King’s Field

A new Souls-like coming out basically every week is to be expected by now, and Iron Pineapple reloads his gaming fists each and every time. FromSoftware’s industry-changing action RPGs aren’t the worst games to emulate, but considering how varied and eclectic the rest of their catalogue is, it’s surprising how little modern devs dip into it. Still waiting on more Cream-alikes, gang.

So it was a nice surprise to hear about Lunacid from Akuma Kira, a dungeon crawler that very proudly wears its King’s Field influence on its sleeve, with a little bit of Shadow Tower to really sell itself to the freakazoids.

After you’re chucked down a very large well, you embark on a very large quest to find the Old One. You’ll be battling your way through a whole bunch of bastard skellingtons, bastard ghosties, and bastard stingrays (we will never forget what you did), among countless other bastards that want to make you the Dead One.

Certainly quicker-paced than its PS1 inspirations, Lunacid is still a bit more deliberate than most action RPGs of its kind, with you not able to spam dodge roll to help you win the day. Luckily, you have tonnes of thicc with two cs melee weapons at your disposal, and the game makes hucking them at beasties feel amazing. You can also unlock spells, including one where you bring objects to life and they just end up screaming in confusion.

Lunacid is one of those games where it’s as deep as you want it to be. Like most FromSoftware games, sorry Deracine, there’s loads more going on under the surface here for those who want to engage with it. There are so many secret areas to find that at any second you feel like you might come across a few too many bottles of baby oil in strange paces.

Even if you don’t have mushroom in your backlog right now, check out Lunacid on PC if you wanna get weird.

PsiloSybil

Plays like: Crash Bandicoot

Honestly, PsiloSybil looks more like a PS1 game than most PS1 games, and even more than its most obvious inspiration, Crash Bandicoot. That’s quite impressive really, and bad_vertex has done an incredible job of bringing back those vibes. It has big Net Yaroze energy, and I love that for it.

You play as Sybil, a mushroom lady whose partner is sto len by a bunch of angry boars who just seem to stand there, menacingly. To get him back, you’ll be travelling between different levels from an overworld map, jumping on and over stuff, and also punching smart guys in the mouth.

PsiloSybil has good music, vibes, and just a general aesthetic. It’s as faithful as one of these games could ever get, and you can even use outfits inspired by other PlayStation icons like Lara Croft and Crash Bandicoot. However, I just want to show you a specific sequence, real quick, on its own.

Yeah, so in that little bit? There are like 25 different ways you can die. 25! And this is the second level! It doesn’t look like much, but PsiloSybil really punishes anything but, like, millimeter accuracy with such brutality that I’m pretty sure it’s really only for people who regularly 100% Crash Bandicoot games.

I’m not sure I’d have it in me to get through 25 levels of PsiloSybil without my brain seeping through my ears, but I appreciate what it’s going for a lot and think platformer obsessives will get a real kick out of it. You can check out PsiloSybil on PC.

Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia

Plays like: Action Bass, Dredge

You’d struggle to say the PS1 was famous for its fishing games, right? For some reason, I always see it as very much a Dreamcast and then PS2 kinda genre. I know there are Action Bass fanatics already swimming their way down to the comments, but let me tell you about Mysteries under Lake Ophelia first before you have a nibble.

A “cute” little fishing game, Bryce Bucher’s Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia is one of the most quietly impressive modern PS1 games I’ll cover today. While mechanically it’s hardly, I dunno, Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2, there’s something to the way that it all comes together that makes it so easy to lose a few hours in.

You play as a young boy, who I’m pretty sure is wearing a Dreamcast t-shirt, as he camps out at a lake and fish. That’s it. There’s definitely nothing else going on here. Nothing sinister deep in the lake that makes my toes feel weird. No sir.

The fishing mechanics themselves are pretty simple: cast, pull, catch. You can unlock new rods and upgrades to allow you to fish into deeper waters by selling to the Eggman looking trader who comes to your camp to help you fill out your fish inventory, fishtory?, and also cook yourself up some meals to give yourself some small bonuses.

And again, that’s basically it. Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia nails the PS1 look and vibe magnificently, with a wonderful lo-fi soundtrack, and has a frankly ridiculous amount of specific fish for one developer to design. Just to reiterate too, there’s absolutely no reason to be worried about anything going on in that lake, don’t worry, it’s fine probably! You can find out for yourself by checking out Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia on PC for the price of a nice fish finger sandwich.

BallisticNG

Plays like: WipeOut

Considering how often I rabbit on about F-Zero, it’s quite surprising I don’t often bring up WipeOut. These fast-paced racers are kinda cousins after all, and it’s just as weird that Sony hasn’t even bothered to do anything new with WipeOut in the same way that Nintendo hasn’t with F-Zero.

Until WipeOut is woken up from the PlayStation tombs, though, BallisticNG is probably the next best thing. While it’s just about on the edge of still being classed as a modern game, seeing as how it came out in 2018, basically 20 years ago at this point, I’m gonna let it slide as they are still updating this thing. The most recent update came out in December 2024!

BallisticNG is not afraid of showing off how much it’s inspired by WipeOut, with even the developer being called Neognosis being a very obvious nod to the now long gone Psygnosis responsible for melting off many teenage faces in the 90s and early 2000s. Honestly, if Sony just wanted to save themselves some money, they should just hire these guys.

An anti-gravity racer with a tough but fair learning curve, especially thanks to some very friendly assists, BallisticNG nails everything from the look and feel of classic WipeOut to the electronic music that’ll crawl into your ears and stay there for hours.

BallisticNG is absolutely packed with content, from modes to ships to classes to tracks to track editing to weapons to VR and even multiplayer if you truly hate yourself a bit. It’s available now on PC. If you want a slightly different flavour of anti-grav racer, be sure to check out Redout as well.

Dread Delusion

Plays like: King’s Field, Morrowind

If I said “Morrowind but on the PS1 and also acid” to you, how many copies of Dread Delusion would you be willing to buy?

A magnificently eye-catching open world RPG that isn’t afraid to lash a bit of pink about the place, Lovely Hellplace’s Dread Delusion is a choice-based adventure set in a world where the undead roam.

Much like classic Elder Scrolls, it’s up to you how you approach the story, with you able to just wander off and make your own story beyond the main narrative. You will be presented with moral dilemmas constantly, with you even being able to join specific factions and approach different situations from more than just an angle of violence. It nails the wonder of exploration better than a lot of AAA open world games, and even leans on old school mechanics while lacking modern crutches to make every inch of exploring this bonkers world meaningful.

Dread Delusion looks gnarly with the PS1 polygon wobbling and low texture models we’ve come to love, though you can give those a fiddle if they’re a bit overbearing for you. And, bear in mind, you don’t always need to do things the “right” way here either.

If you miss the early 2000s era of role-playing games where everything wasn’t spelled out in painful detail, this is the weirdo for you. Had Dread Delusion had come out during the initial run of the PlayStation, it probably would have been among the console’s very best RPGs.

Among Ashes

Plays like: Resident Evil, Frictional’s stuff

Now this is a cool arse game, and one that I’m not sure has quite found the audience it deserves. Imagine, right, the movie in a movie nature of Stab in the Scream universe, except you go from playing a PS1 survival horror game to a late 2000s psychological horror.

The basic gist of Among Ashes is that you’re playing as a teenager who’s home alone, when they’re recommended a free game called Night Call by a friend from a sketchy forum. Night Call is a classic PS1 horror like Resident Evil but from a first-person perspective that feels very authentic, right down to the “recorded in a tin can submerged in beans” audio quality of the dialogue.

However, it gets super interesting when it comes to your interactions outside of Night Call, with your friend even popping up to give you puzzle hints on your messenger app. This pretty brilliantly reminds you that you’re playing a game within a game, and then you can take a step back from your classically chunky IBM computer and realise that there’s something not quite right in your apartment.

Among Ashes is a brilliant idea, and Night Call just on its own with its brutal resource management requirements would be a solid horror, but chuck in the extra meta wrap-around and it’s honestly yet another example of how horror is the place to be to find most innovation in gaming these days. Check out Among Ashes on PC and PS5.

Motordoom

Of all the games featured today, Motordoom is the one that I’m surprised doesn’t have more attention. A Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater homage with a bit of Dave Mirra chucked in, except instead of hunting video tapes, you’re hunting the forces of Hell while also doing a cool flip.

It kinda reminds me of the extremely underrated Rollerdrome in that maybe it’s too hard to sell simply, but Motordoom is absolutely a game for the sickos among us. If you like horde shooters, roguelites, extreme sports games, and soundtracks that will make your ears bleed, you will probably love Motordoom.

Motordoom is very much angling for an aching back audience who remembers booting up Tony Hawk on PS1, as the first level feels like a very intentional stand-in for Hangar. This is a pretty full-bodied homage though, as you’ll be able to perform in-air tricks, grind, manual, and just like Tony Hawk himself is known for, push abc the forces of hell while also keeping your combo going.

Motordoom has a very interesting Survivors-like loop in which the higher points you score, the quicker you can choose one of three special skills that let you do things like shoot flames out of your vehicle, hit harder etc etc. The riders themselves all have different baked-in abilities too, including one that just shoots demons for you. You can even unlock permanent add-ons for your vehicle over time, which is neat.

Motordoom is a lot all at once, and that, along with its brutal thrash punk soundtrack — ? I think, I dunno, I’m old and uncool — makes it probably not for everyone, but Motordoom is still a fun concept that you can check out on PC.

Alisa

For as many very obvious survival horror throwbacks as there have been in recent years, you aren’t going to find many more obvious than Alisa.

Developed by Casper Croes, you’ll realise that this is very much meant to feel like a lost PS1 game the second you notice that the resolution defaults to 480p with a 4:3 aspect ratio on top of tank controls. Chuck in what might be some intentionally (question mark?) poor voice acting and this is basically The Artist of survival horror games, but a bit less wanky.

Playing like a mix of Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, and Alice in Wonderland, Alisa pits you as the titular Alisa after she wakes up in a strange mansion after chasing a very naughty person down. The game waits about 8 seconds before the first mechanical enemy turns around at you almost exactly like the first zombie in Resi 1, and you should know what to expect from there.

Alisa is extremely faithful to survival horror of the late 90s, down to the pre-rendered backgrounds and awkward controls, though you can switch to slightly less clunky modem controls if you like. It even has a weird merchant like in Resident Evil 4, but to mix things up the game does include costumes to improve Alisa’s stats, and also a fishing mini-game?

It’s very, very weird, and I like weird, but personally, I didn’t immediately fall in love with Alisa. It’s very easy to appreciate what it’s going for though, and the sheer adoration its developer has for its inspirations seeps through every pore. If you like your survival horror to be jaggy, check out Alisa on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, and Switch.

Sorry We’re Closed

Plays like: Parasite Eve, Fear Effect, Soul Reaver, Killer7

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: this is probably the best ever era for horror games, especially if you’re willing to dip out of the mainstream, as proven with Alisa. Horror as a whole has always tried new things, and you won’t find a game quite like Sorry We’re Closed anywhere else.

A survival horror game that calls to mind stuff like Parasite Eve and Fear Effect in terms of how it’s presented, with a lil bit of Soul Reaver sprinkled in, Sorry We’re Closed is really bloody weird, and it is very happy to be really bloody weird.

You play as a lonely young woman called Michelle who’s hounded by an extremely clingy demon who opens her third eye, basically allowing her to see between different worlds (that’s the Soul Reaver) bit.

The Third Eye is a really ingenious bit of game design, as it not only lets  you explore past blocked off areas and solve puzzles, but also highlights weak spots on enemies when you go into first-person view, though these are the only places you can hit them. You gotta hit your shots, or you’ll be in trouble.

While I don’t think the game quite nails the creepy part of being a horror game, the fixed camera angles, super unique setup, and brilliant soundtrack will make this a dream for fans of PS1 horror like Fear Effect, and if they keep on cranking out modern retro games like this, we’re gonna be feasting pretty good.

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