As part of a joke that is perhaps going too far, the markedly terrible Cory in the House game is not only closely trailing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in user ratings, but sealed copies of it are priced for hundreds of dollars online.
There are numerous listings for the Nintendo DS game on eBay, with prices ranging from $50 to $1,420.69 (har, har). One listing even has 44 bids and currently prices the game at $1,025.00.
This bizarre event appears to stem from the Best Games by User Score list of GameSpot sister site Metacritic, which currently has 2025 Game of the Year winner Clair Obscur sitting at the top with a 9.6 user score. But because the internet loves a good gag, Cory in the House has recently surfaced as the runner-up with a score of 9.3, tied with The Witcher 3, two versions of Metal Gear Solid 3, the original Silent Hill 2, and a couple of other classics.
Released in 2008, a year that graced us with Grand Theft Auto 4, Fallout 3, and Dead Space, Cory in the House is based on the Disney Channel show of the same name.
Players fill the shoes of Cory Baxter from the classic kid-friendly sitcom That’s So Raven, whose father works as the White House head chef. The handheld game’s epic tale follows Cory as he fights an evil toymaker who threatens to hypnotize the people of Washington, D.C. with modified bobbleheads depicting the President of the United States.
As with most tie-in games of the day, the very few reviews of the DS game were negative. Somehow, the game got a resurgence of attention years after its release, with people ironically praising as a masterpiece deserving to be enshrined and jokingly categorizing the show as anime. In other words, Cory in the House is the video game equivalent of the Morbius movie.
There’s no telling if people will actually purchase copies of this notorious game at absurdly high prices, or if Metacritic will intervene and put an end to this Cory-mentum. For now, we can sit back and see how much higher the numbers can get.
