Cory in the House for the Nintendo DS. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. See, this 2008-released ‘adventure stealth’ game – as well as the TV show it’s based on – has been a meme for more than a decade. In the past, I’d often see Cory in the House being described as the ‘best anime of all time’. I’d also read Amazon reviews of the video game, which would hail it as a true ‘masterpiece’.
And now, in 2026, the meme seems to have been reborn. Users have taken to Metacritic and flooded it with positive reviews for Cory in the House on the Nintendo DS. And now, its user score sits at 9.3, which is indicative of ‘universal acclaim’. That score is so high, in fact, that the title is genuinely posing a threat to the top-ranked game on Metacritic by user score. And that game is none other than TechRadar’s Game of the Year of 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
After hearing all of this, you may be wondering: is Cory in the House on Nintendo DS actually good? Well, it’s your lucky day. See, back in my teens, a friend of mine jokingly gifted me the game for Christmas, and thankfully, I still own it to this day. So, I dusted the cartridge off, put it in my Nintendo 3DS console, and played through it for the very first time. Here’s what I made of my time with the ‘universally acclaimed’ title.
Genre-defining…in its own special way
My game card didn’t work at first, but after a few blows and re-insertions, I was finally in. When I reached the main menu, there were a few options to choose from, including Story, an arcade mode, and a gallery. I got straight into the Story mode, and well…it was quite something.
In this campaign, you play as Cory Baxter, a teenager whose dad works as the head chef at The White House. As an aspiring businessman, Cory decides to sell bobbleheads of the President to the people of Washington DC – but trouble is afoot. See, an evil toymaker has turned the bobbleheads into hypnotic devices, and it’s your job to foil their malign scheme. Ridiculous? Absolutely. But I came into this experience with an open heart and an open mind.
However, as soon as I got into the game, I was instantly struck by frankly horrifying visuals. No, really, I have a feeling Cory’s face will be haunting my nightmares for the foreseeable future. See, characters are so unrefined and blurred that you can’t even see their eyes or expressions. And that’s not inherent to the console – plenty of DS games pulled off nice-looking character models in spite of the handheld’s technical limitations.
Anyway, that’s not the end of the world, at least the gameplay could still be fun! Right? Well, I suppose in a sense, Cory in the House truly is a genre-defining title; in that it defines exactly how not to make an adventure stealth game. Movement is janky, throwing exploding fictional pastries is, somehow, totally mind-numbing, and the various settings are unbelievably bland. You play the occasional mini-game to progress the story, but even these are so laughably basic that I can’t even imagine a child having fun.
Oh, and one more thing. You have a lot of conversations with characters like Cory’s father, bandmates, and store workers – many of which are intended to be funny…at least I think they are? Sometimes I was unsure whether Cory was trying to crack a joke, but luckily, a laugh track would play when it was time for me to giggle. Artificial laughs even seem to play when characters don’t say anything remotely funny, which in itself was actually kinda entertaining. So, I guess there’s that?
Some final thoughts
So, there you have it, folks. Cory in the House for the Nintendo DS is – in spite of its 9.3 user score on Metacritic – a pretty terrible TV show tie-in, and it’s no wonder that its two critic review scores are listed as a 30 and a 40. Ouch.
Still, I’ve been finding the explosion of ironic meme-fuelled positive reviews pretty funny, even as a massive lover of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And while we’re here, it only seems right to recommend this actual masterpiece to anyone who hasn’t tried it yet.
Yes, Expedition 33 is a phenomenal RPG, with one of the best stories that’s ever been told through the video game medium, in my view. It plates up incredibly addictive gameplay, with an excellent parrying mechanic that’s a joy to master. Combine that with a jaw-droppingly gorgeous visual style and generational soundtrack, and it’s simply a must-play.
No matter how good it is, though, it may not be able to stop the immovable force that is Cory in the House for the Nintendo DS, which, in its own ‘special’ way, is a game that I won’t be forgetting in a hurry.
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harry.padoan@futurenet.com (Harry Padoan)
