Look out, Expedition 33, a weird sitcom tie-in game from 2008 is coming for your Metacritic crown

In 2024, most of Metacritic’s top spots seemed comfortably cemented. In 2025, however, a JRPG from France rose to the user ratings’ #1 spot. Now, there’s a new challenger in the form of Cory in the House, a dumb TV show tie-in that is obviously driven by memes.

Ratings analysts woke up shaken by a bonkers shift in the Metacritic user ranking balance. Out of nowhere, there was Cory in the House, nearing Expedition 33’s tremendous 9.6 score. While the 0.3 points separating the two are quite the mountain to climb, being at 9.3 means it took Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater’s previously held #2 spot, as well as kicked every other game in existence one step down the ladder.

What is even Cory in the House?

With very rare exceptions, video game tie-ins can only ever hope to capture a minimal percentage of what makes the main property resonate with audiences. Cory in the House was originally a Disney Channel show from ’08 about a kid moving into the White House. The DS tie-in game was destined to be forgotten. And yet, the 2010s saw the game—not the show—become a huge meme.

What’s weird is that while the game’s original huge surge in popularity in the past decade could easily be traced to 4chan and Reddit campaigns, the new one seems, as far as any currently interested Internet sleuth can tell, entirely organic.

Knowing 4chan, you’re likely to expect this to be a bad game. Your assumption is correct. But did you expect it to be a stealth game? Well, it is, supposedly. And that’s just one of the many baffling decisions that make Cory special. In an interview with Kotaku, the game’s lead dev—who got the role for having three more months’ worth of experience than the rest of the team—explained that the game was made in over a gruelling seven-month period. There’s no unifying core to Cory. It plays like a set of broken minigames, an amalgamation of leftover gameplay ideas the studio had from other games, because that is exactly what it was. Cory in the House was, if anything, a lesson in how not to pursue greed to develop a game, one that will now seemingly forever haunt the Metacritic Hall of Fame.

The Expedition 33 achievement that Cory is unlikely to beat

Expedition 33 also became one of the highest-rated titles in the critics bracket, having reached a massive 9.2 from them. So even if Cory in the House ends up teaching us some dark lessons about Metacritic’s user rating democracy policies, its score is unlikely to rise much from “TBA out of 10” in the critics category, because not even four gaming outlets cared enough about it to review it upon release.