Criticall acclaim doesn’t make a thing automatically good. The criteria are way too arbitrary, and sometimes boils down to “a well-known publisher has done a thing” simply because it attracts more eyes and journalists have a financial interest in playing nice with those publishers.

A Hat in Time was released around the same time as Odyssey. It’s the first game of a small indie studio and it beats the living piss out of Mario in terms of gameplay and style. The only reason it wasn’t more of a breakthrough was timing and getting eclipsed by Mario’s shadow.