It seems you can't get away from top-ten lists these days. When the end of each year rolls around, every magazine, website and blog pulls out all the stops to detail their ranked favourites of the year. At Hallowe'en, it's the Top Ten Horror Games. As Easter rolled around, I half expecting Top Ten Games Featuring Eggs And Bunnies, or something.

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But what about the games that fall just short of inclusion in these features? The games whose developers clearly poured so much thought, so much creativity and magic into their virtual worlds, only to fall just short of the mark? The games we love so dearly, but could never wholeheartedly recommend? It's about time, I feel, that someone made a stand for those games. So here they are: the almost-classics; the flawed gems.

Alone in the Dark (Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/PC, 2008)

More games should be so absolutely about fire. If there's one thing Alone In The Dark gets absolutely spot-on, it's the power of those shiny yellow flames. Sadly, much of the rest of the game didn't even come close.

There are so many stories about Alone in the Dark, this modern reboot of the classic franchise. Most of them are bad. They talk of game-stopping bugs. Of ludicrous puzzle sequences. Of horrendous driving mechanics. One of my favourite tales of all discussed the occasion on which the player's car completely disappeared, leaving the driver hurtling down the road at top speed, sitting on an invisible seat attached to nothing but thin air.

When you're making a horror game, it's usually not a good idea to release it so broken it turns into a farce. But for the fire-related puzzles alone, which approached genius at times, it deserves to be at least slightly fondly remembered.

American McGee's Alice (PC, 2000)

There's something timeless about Alice in Wonderland, something that's captured the world's imagination decade after decade. Of course, there's nothing wrong with shaking up the formula every once in a while. That was certainly American McGee's theory, anyway.

This is a dark, twisted take on Alice's tale. Set some time after the events of both Wonderland and Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass, it tells the story of a now grown-up and gothed-up protagonist whose parents have been killed in a fire. Distraught, she descends back down to Wonderland, to find it a rather more twisted place indeed.

The visual design is breathtaking - less so now than it was in the glory days of the Quake 3 engine, but nevertheless spellbinding to this day. And McGee's novel twists on familiar characters and situations meld together to create a vivid and glorious world to explore. Alas, the game itself more closely resembled a barely adequate platformer, with shaky sequences, clumsy precision jumping and far too much arbitrary lever pulling. A little more care on that side of things, and Alice could have been utterly spectacular.

The Nomad Soul (PC/Dreamcast, 1999)

Dubbed 'Omikron' in North America, The Nomad Soul saw you play as a nomad soul. Which might sound like a redundant statement to make, but it's a very real part of what made the first game from - who went on to create Fahrenheit and - so astoundingly forward-thinking. When you die in The Nomad Soul, it's only the body in which you - a spirit - were inhabiting that bites the dust. You simply respawn inside someone else. The game plays out regardless.

The Nomad Soul was an extremely shaky mashup of various different genres, clumsily drawn together into a whole that never felt cohesive enough. Part FPS, part adventure, part beat-em-up, part explorathon, none of its individual elements were in any way refined, and nothing collected them together into one neat package.

What it did have, though, was a dancing David Bowie. It also painted a hugely evocative picture of a seedy cyberpunk world after dark, with one of gaming's first convincing cities as its backdrop. Its brushes with non-linearity predated a great deal of open-world gaming's pioneers. It had a dancing David Bowie in it. That's important to remember.

Still Life (PC, 2005)

It's tragic that Still Life is on this list, and one one of - say - the greatest adventure games ever made. Still Life is beautiful. Properly beautiful. It's artful, and theatrical, and clever, and bold, and striking, and well written, and often genuinely magical. So. Why does it find its way onto this list?

Well, most immediately, the puzzles - the core mechanism of any adventure - are often quite hopeless. Some are fine. Others defy all known logic. It's not acceptable to release a game untested - though so many are - and when it feels as though certain sections of the game haven't actually been played by a human being prior to the game's launch, something rather severely grates.

Perhaps worse, though, is Still Life's ending. Although maybe that claim in itself is a stretch, since Still Life doesn't really have an ending. Tragically, developer Microids exploded before it had managed to finish the story, but - spectacularly - quickly tidied up and released their game as-was. The result was a murder mystery in which the mystery was never solved, and a sudden and unexpected departure of the protagonist. There's a cliffhanger, and then there's just... stopping.

A sequel, released last year, had the chance to round things off nicely. Instead, it emerged as a substantially worse game than its predecessor, rife with bugs, woeful animation, hideous voice acting and some of the most preposterous puzzle design known to man. It also dropped Still Life's extraordinary visual style, and ended up a massive disappointment. Even though Still Life fits loosely into that category as well, it at least had a remarkable creative spark to carry it.

Pathologic (PC, 2006)

A friend of mine always describes Pathologic to curious parties like this: "Playing it feels like doing your homework as a kid. You really don't want to; you know it's going to be tedious and difficult and you'd rather watch the telly... but if you sit down with it every night straight after dinner, you know you'll come away from it enlightened and educated, and be glad you forced yourself through it."

That's a perfect description. Pathologic's an oddity from Russia - part RPG, part adventure, part shooter, not quite any of them. Much of the game consists of walking around a single isolated town, talking to various people who dwell there, trying to fathom a way of stopping an unbearable plague that's so bad even the buildings are dying from it.

It's a fascinating, artful and fearlessly unique videogame whose technology just couldn't keep up with the creativity. Released first in 2005, then in English-speaking regions a year later, it looked at least five years out of date on release. On top of that, a collection of animation glitches and game-stopping bugs regularly ground things to a halt. Not that it was moving that quickly in the first place. It's a meandering, often painfully slow game, 40 hours long when it could easily tell its tale in half the time.

Then again, there's something compelling about how sluggishly it moves. You're forced to stay in this horrifying place for far longer than is comfortable, and it works to create the most extraordinary atmosphere. The final nail in the coffin for many was an utterly atrocious translation job which left much of the script barely comprehensible. But if you can get past the problems, Pathologic's decaying town is an enthralling place to visit.