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It's been a wonderful year for gaming, though my record keeping this year for what I played was way, way worse than my efforts last year. I suspect there's inevitably going to be some smaller, neater experiences that I've left out because I've forgotten them, my memory is like a leaky bucket and the leaks are getting worse moment by moment. I have written way too many words about these games that I enjoyed. How many words? Enough that I've needed to split this over two posts so I don't hit the drat character limit. For Rarity's sanity, and for those of you who don't want to read my word vomit and just want to see what I'm ultimately voting for, here's just the Top 10 list: #10 - The Case of the Golden Idol #9 - Pokemon Violet #8 - Vampire Survivors #7 - Neon White #6 - A Dance of Fire and Ice #5 - Norco #4 - Citizen Sleeper #3 - Pentiment #2 - Return to Monkey Island #1 - Sifu If ye be stout of constitution and brave of heart, read on. Maybe take water breaks. THE HONORABLE MENTIONS #18. Best Shitpost In Video Game Form - Trombone Champ Can an entire game be a shitpost? Yes. Can that shitpost be very fun to play through? Also yes. The real magic is when the modding community gets a hold of it, leading to things like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJMNYpRikE As someone commented on the video - I don't know why, but I just assumed that they'd be able to play it perfectly. Of course not. #17. Best Game I Was Heavily Invested In For Two Months And Will Probably Never Touch Again - Marvel Snap Marvel Snap got its hooks into me hard. I was initially sceptical about the design of the game. A F2P Marvel-branded card game, utilising the lane/location based mechanics of card games like Smash Up, Gwent or Battleline/Schotten-totten. Nothing I read about the game in the earliest days of its beta seemed particularly engaging, not even the titular Snap cube that acted like the doubling cube in Backgammon, allowing you to take advantage of a strong position to try and milk additional points from your opponent - or bluff them into thinking you had a strong position in the first place. Slowly though, on gaming blogs, YouTube channels I watch and podcasts that I listen to, I started to hear whispers - that Marvel Snap was good, actually. So I grabbed it on my phone and started going through the tutorial. I came up for air two months later. I was playing multiple games daily, theorycrafting decks in my downtime, and any time that I couldn't play Marvel Snap I was hoping that I would have another 5 minutes to knock out a game of Marvel Snap. There's so much satisfying polish in this game. The interface, card animations and card sounds are all fanastic, even if they have all likely been designed to hook your brain into eventually whaling out on this free to play game. Deck size being so dramatically limited makes deck building simple and engaging even for an idiot like me. The drip feed of the first pool of cards comes at a satisfying rate. There's dailies, a battle pass, the usual stuff that Make Number Go Up while you play the game. The matches being so short and so frictionless to jump into means that any time you have a moment to kill, you can quickly be in a game of Marvel Snap. Three events coincided that broke the game's grip on me. First, I moved from the first card pool into the second, and the drip of new cards began to slow. The cracks in the free to play formula began to show as I understood the grinding I'd have to start doing. Either I was going to have to start playing games with decks of all my cheap common cards so that I could level them up so that I could earn new cards at any sort of speed, or I was going to have to resign myself to the fact that playing the deck I enjoyed playing meant that my progress would be significantly slower. The second thing was the devs revealed their monetisation for the game. The prices are beyond predatory and are absolutely ludicrous. It's also a bit grim that they boast that the microtransactions are 'only cosmetic' while glossing over the fact that the way that you boost your level - which is how you unlock new cards - is through the accumulation of these cosmetics. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Second Dinner, gently caress off. The final thing was that I got COVID for the second time (yay!) and was so ill that I couldn't play for a week. By the time I was well enough to game again, whatever hold the game had on me was gone. It ate a signficant amount of my gaming time this year, and I feel to not mention it would be doing it a disservice. There's a lot to like here, I just wish it wasn't a F2P game. #16. Best Games I Haven't Been Able To Finish In Time - River City Girls 2 / Roadwarden / Live A Live I've been enjoying all three of these but even if I had found the time to get all of them finished I'm not sure whether they would have cracked my top 10. Live A Live is a remake of a SNES RPG that I first played the Aeon Genesis fan translation of, back in the heady days of PC emulation where you still had to toggle graphics layers on and off to get through parts of Chrono Trigger because transparencies didn't work. It's a fantastic, compact little RPG with an interesting battle system, great music, and interesting and varied playstyles in each chapter that made it stand out from it's contemporaries. This remake seems extremely solid so far and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes that 90s era of classic JRPGs but hasn't given this one a shot. I'm only through the first two bosses in River City Girls 2 but it feels like a smoother, more polished refinement of the River City Girls formula, though possibly a bit more like River City Girls 1.5 than a fully fledged sequel. That said, the changes they've made have both eased a few of the more painful design points from the original game and improved the combat flow - air combos own. Marian owns. I can't recommend this on any other platform other than PC - for god only knows what reason, the game released locked to 30fps on every platform. The PC Steam version has a beta branch that patches it properly up to 60fps that immediately makes it feel better. Roadwarden is a very cool text based RPG game set on the ignored frontier of a fantasy world. As a Roadwarden your job is to travel the region for 40 days, and while you have an overall mission from your superiors back in the capital, you're given an extremely free hand on how you approach that and whatever else it may be that you want to accomplish out here. This feels very much like a digitised gamebook in the style of Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf. You'll travel around a map spending time as a resource, conscious of both the dangers of being caught out after nightfall and the need for decent shelter. Interactions with characters and monsters have random chance elements that can be improved or bypassed with your character background or certain items you might find on your quest. I'm still in the early game so I'm not sure how this is all going to pan out or how I'll feel about it once it concludes, but I'm enjoying the ride so far. #15. Best Game I'm Not Sure I Actually Liked Very Much - Immortality I don't think Immortality is a very good video game. I think it was an interesting experience that I'd still recommend people try. I also think it has artistic merits, it's just unfortunate that they aren't in the 'game' component or it, or in the game's overarching meta-plot. The latest FMV game from Sam Barlow, you are tasked with delving into the supplied footage to discover the story of what happened to the reclusive actress Marissa Marcel, who starred in three seperate films that were never released. The footage is a mixture of scenes from the three films, interspersed with behind the scenes footage and interviews of the cast and crew, and the player navigates through means of a match cut - click on an item in the scene, and you'll be jumped to another clip that contains a similar item/shot/person. Playing with this mechanic is initially very rewarding. You slowly piece together the plots of the three films through accumulation of their on-screen footage, and as you gather the behind the scenes material you begin to understand more about these character's relationships to each other. Rapidly, however, the limitations of the match cut feature start to show themselves - it's very hard to chase down a narrative lead when you don't have much agency over where a match cut is going to take you. Revealing new clips can become to feel arbitrary and grindy, and at its worst can lead to behaviour like just rotely clicking the clapperboard over and over to try and find new scenes. The second gameplay wrinkle, and I'm going to try and write about this as vaguely as I can so as not to spoil the experience for people who might like to engage with this with a clean slate, is that there's a meta-plot that ties together the three movies and the ultimate mystery of What Happened To Marissa Marcel. The mechanic to trigger this meta-plot can end up feeling extremely fiddly, to the point that even once I understood both the 'tell' the game gives you that there's additional material to be found and the method of doing so that I still ended up struggling to trigger what I knew was there. Where these two frustrations (the directionless or the match cut and the fiddliness of advancing the meta-plot) met for me was the game's ending/credits roll, which seems to have competing theories online as to what triggers it, whether it's obtaining a certain amount of the meta-plot or a certain amount of overall clips. Either way, I found myself in the painful position of knowing drat well what the mystery was, what had happened, and had zero lingering questions - but I couldn't trigger the ending. I had to sit there grinding away extra footage until after viewing a random piece it just triggered. An extremely wet fart of an ending. I suppose it could have easily gone the other way - I've seen commentary online from folks who had barely any idea what was going on and then had the ending trigger before they had much context to actually understand what they were watching. I think in some ways that would have been a better experience for me, I would have been more engaged digging into the rest of the footage if I still had mysteries to answer. Although perhaps not, because I think beyond any and all questions of progression and interface, the biggest thing dragging Immortality down is that it's big meta-plot and the questions it raises about art, fame, the relationship between artist and art and the search for immortality through art.... falls extremely short of any of these lofty goals. It's trite. It's dull. It has nothing original or interesting to say and the 'twist' of the game is utterly cliche and made my eyes roll so hard they tried to escape my head. Character relationships that feel like they would be interesting space to explore are immediately undercut once you understand what's actually going on. So if I didn't like the gameplay, or the plot, why exactly is this on my honorable mentions at all? The real amazing thing about this game for me is that the team behind it shot three partial movies, emulating different genres, and emulating being shot in different time periods. There is so much footage, and so much work that has gone into that footage, producing three interesting movies that I would 100% check out if they were real things that existed. So much of this rests on the shoulders of Manon Gage, whose phenomenal performance not only as Marissa Marcel but as Marissa Marcel playing numerous different roles is the utter highlight of the game for me. The Game Awards don't matter in any conceivable way but she was completely snubbed for the Best Performance award, regardless. The rest of the cast can be a little more hit and miss, though I would say generally lean towards hit, and the faults with the acting involved in the meta-plot are failures of writing, not of performance. These films were very clearly made by people who loved film as a medium and they did an exceptional job with them - it's just a shame they felt the need to awkwardly package it inside a mediocre video game to deliver it. #14. Best Retro Game Collection - Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection The Atari 50 collection sets the standard that I'd love to see all retro compilations hit going forward. It's not the collection of games itself, though with a total of 103 games from across Atari's history there's certainly a ton to dive into for any fans of the company. It's not the emulation quality or features which certainly seem fine. It's the way in which these games have been presented. Atari 50: The Annivesary Collection is, essentially, an interactive digital coffee table book about the history of Atari. When you load it up, you're greeted by a menu screen of chapter titles covering different eras of Atari's history. Select one of these and you'll be taken to a chronological timeline that you can scroll through, containing not only the games but a wealth of production material, clips and interviews with former Atari staff as well as current game developers who were inspired by Atari titles. This is what I want out of retro game collections. Anyone can slap a package of ROMs together and charge for the privilege. Hell, the games themselves are (almost) trivial, in that I can emulate them without any real issue so they're not super likely to drive my purchasing decisions to begin with. Let's be honest, I'm realistically not going to spend much time playing, say, Atari 2600 games for more than five minutes. What keeps me reading through this collection and playing the games contained within it is knowing the context in which these games existed; the history of the company and the people behind them, the stories those people have to tell, and the legacy that those games leave behind in terms of the new generation they inspire - that is the interesting part of video gaming history. Also now I can play Tempest 2000 on my Switch so frankly it was worth it just for that. #13. Best Nostalgia Bait That I Am 1000% Swallowing - TMNT: Shredder's Revenge This year saw an absolute explosion of beat 'em up releases to the point that I can name SIX released this year that I just didn't have time to get around to, which is frankly ridiculous. I've made no secret of my love for this oft unfairly maligned dead genre. Alright, mostly unfairly maligned, there's a lot of crap in the genre, both historically and in terms of more recent endeavours. What I prize in beat 'em ups is mechanically deep gameplay, varied characters and movesets, smooth controls and a general lack of cheap, unavoidable damage bullshit. Streets of Rage 4, for example, is the perfect modern representation of what I want out of the genre. That's uh, never really what Konami's licensed beat 'em ups offered back in the late 80s and early 90s, however. Konami's beat em ups are fast paced with bright, colourful sprites, gorgeous animation and kickass music. Managing waves of enemies, although an important genre staple regardless of developer, seems to take on a frantic pace in Konami's beat 'em ups thanks to a generally low time to kill for basic enemies. You don't need much combo depth when your standard opponent goes down in two or three hits. The best of Konami's efforts here was Turtles in Time, particularly the SNES port TMNT IV: Turtles in Time which I would rent every time my cousin came into town for some of the best couch co-op gameplay on the SNES. TMNT Shredder's Revenge strongly channels nostalgia for the original TMNT arcade game as well as Turtles in Time. How much nostalgia are we talking here? They got the voice actors for the original 1987 Turtles to do voice work for the game. I would have happily played a game that was just 'more Turtles in Time' and while Shredder's Revenge succeeds magnificently at capturing the core gameplay from those games - right down to the inclusion of Sewer Surfin'-esque autoscroller stages - it also does the important work of refining and updating those mechanics with small adjustments and tweaks for modern players. Difficulty levels! Special attacks that don't chew through your health! Online multiplayer! You can actually finally play as April O'Neil, and also she owns! This is a stunningly beautiful game, with so much care and attention to detail shown in both the character and background art, jam packed full of fun and funny moments and cute little details to Turtles history and lore. The soundtrack by Tee Lopes is catchy, memorable and upbeat, a perfect complement to the frenetic onscreen action. I cleared the story mode when it came out, then promptly bumped the difficulty up and ran through arcade mode for good measure. And yet... and yet. If there's a fatal flaw for this game, it's that it hasn't implemented one modernisation that would have given this game more longevity. There's a (fairly simple) scoring system but there's no real ranking system. Being able to shoot for S ranks on stages would have made me much more inclined to revisit it after my trips through the game, but unfortunately without that I feel like I've seen all I need to see from it. At least until my cousin has a spare afternoon to come over and sit down, and we can just lose ourselves in nostalgia and being kids again. #12. Best Low Stakes Relaxing Gaming Experience - Kirby and the Forgotten Land Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a perfect distillation of The Kirby Formula into 3D, and exactly the kind of smooth, pleasant, frictionless platformer experience that Nintendo excels at designing. I've always loved Kirby games with Kirby's Super Star being one of my most played SNES games as a kid. Kirby games have mostly settled into a design pattern of 'easier main mode, hard content locked in the postgame', though there's been a bit of a trend in recent releases for that easy main mode to be a little too easy to the point where it becomes bland and uninspiring. KATFL avoids this a little by having both selectable difficulty levels (Wild Mode is the 'normal' difficulty, giving you less health and throwing a few more enemies at you than the easy mode) and plenty of optional objectives that are not required to beat the game but also require a bit more skill and/or exploration than just simply completing the levels. Series mainstays like the Colosseum mode - a boss-rush mode that traditionally makes up some of the hardest content in the games - is available a lot quicker than many other Kirby titles allow. A set of post-game levels unlocks after the credits roll, there are time attack challenges on the Treasure Quest stages, and a True Final boss behind it all if you're willing to put the time and effort in to get to it. Or you can just chill out and play through the utterly gorgeous, almost diorama-like levels that the game has to offer, that's fine too. There's a lot to drink in here, with lots of beautiful detail in the level environments. The game is such a delight to play, Kirby's movement is responsive and snappy and his moveset, even the flying, translates well to a 3D playspace. The powers are fun and varied, though I do miss the bigger movesets for each power of games like Kirby's Super Star. Evolving them is a fun twist as well, though the power increases for doing so and the aesthetic benefits of doing so both vary wildly. KATFL isn't going to set the world on fire with a radical new interpretation of the Kirby formula, but it's a wonderful refinement of that style and will put a smile on your face all the way through. #11. Best Game That's Just Not For Me - Elden Ring Hoo boy. Souls games are always something that have interested me that I've bounced off every time I've tried them. I tried Dark Souls 2 and it just utterly failed to grab me in any appreciable way. Later down the road I had a PS4 and so I tried Bloodborne which had received rave critical reviews and again, bounced off hard. When Sekiro was released, much of the press surrounding it talked about how it wasn't your typical Souls game. Not wanting to drop the full game price, I pirated it and played for two hours or so and.... was intrigued by the combat. Enough so that I decided to add Sekiro to my wishlist to keep an eye on it for when it went on sale, and as time rolled on I got caught up playing other games. In the lead up to Elden Ring's release, a lot of the same discussions began to surface about how this might be the on-ramp that let people who had previously struggled with the Souls formula join the party and discover the joy of them. I'd argue very strongly that it succeeded. I didn't finish Elden Ring, but I sunk 25 hours in it and for the first time I get it. I get the joy that people get from these games, the careful exploration, the heightened sense of danger and mystery around each corner, the wonderful reward of feeling your ability at the game grow and being able to clown on enemies that an hour ago were gruelling encounters. FromSoft have made a phenomenal game here, the scale of creating an open world of this size is absolutely breathtaking. I'm in a love/hate relationship with it. It's too big for me. There's too much. The way my brain works struggles so mightily with the sheer level of complete and utter freedom that Elden Ring hands you from moment one. I managed to get as far as I did by having friends, forum posts and YouTube videos that helped me map out some clearer short term goals. And I'm going to always remember the sheer pride I felt when taking down Margit for the first time.... but I can't finish this, and I can't see myself sinking the 80 extra hours into it that I'd need to go further in the game. There's little things that really irk me - the smithing stones upgrade mechanic feels really bad, to me. Diving into a 'higher level' area and coming out with a Smithing Stone [4] doesn't help if I desperately need a Smithing Stone [3]. That's a very minor complain overall, though. I think it's mostly an iterative game rather than an innovative one, standing on the shoulders of what FromSoft has built in their past titles. I don't actually think the freedom of Elden Ring's open world is overly revolutionary - it's just that we haven't had CRPGs released with worlds like that in a very, very long time. I'm hopeful with the success of Elden Ring that other devs will reconsider their approach to open world design and break further from the Ubisoft formula. It's been 8 months since I last played Elden Ring, but I find myself thinking about it frequently recently. Maybe some of that is hearing so many GOTY discussions where people have talked through their experiences with it. I've found myself watching lore videos, random snippets of gameplay and thinking that perhaps, one day, I might find myself back in the Lands Between. But there's something else I need to do first. Elden Ring's true gift to me is solidifying for me that I think Sekiro might be exactly what I'm looking for in FromSoft's catalogue. I've bought it in the Steam sale and installed it, and come 2023 I'm going to dive in. So that's it, there's my Honorable Mentions done. Join me in the Top 10 a little later (I'm still finishing up my write up for my Game of the Year) where I at least break up my rambling with some screenshots. Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 02:46
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How does an elden ring randomizer even work? There's no order in which you're supposed to do things and almost nothing you're locked out of with prerequisites
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Dec 31, 2022 02:53
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haveblue posted:How does an elden ring randomizer even work? There's no order in which you're supposed to do things and almost nothing you're locked out of with prerequisites From what I remember seeing in the Elden Ring thread, it affects enemy placements including bosses. So you might walk into a small courtyard and find Radahn and his adorable little horse waiting for you.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:54
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:This happened pretty early on for me, too. Camera goes first person on Tifa's face in the slums with a dialogue choice right as a remixed version of the Kalm theme starts playing. I had to put the controller down. It came out April of 2020. I took 2 weeks off work cause the pandemic was just starting and everyone was confused and scared. I sat and played FF7R the whole time, laughed, cried. It was a crazy time
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Dec 31, 2022 02:55
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Long time lurker, first time poster. Starting with Disco Elysium, these threads have helped me find great games. I appreciate all the effort that goes into this event, so I'll do my best to effortpost! Honorable Mention - No More Heroes 3 (Switch) I have admired Goichi Suda from afar since Killer7. I decided to close the distance. I have resumed admiring Goichi Suda from afar. Dishonorable Mention - It Takes Two (PS4) My wife and I enjoy video games. We could use more quality time together and people said this was a top game of 2021. Those opinions were dead wrong. We suspected as much when we defeated an anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner by sucking its eyes out. Things continued going downhill. We couldn't stand playing such terrible people. To spare my wife I read the synopsis and found things would get worse before they got better. But I had no confidence the writing could redeem these characters, so we stopped. In my ending the parents divorced to spare the daughter the damage of their unhealthy relationship. The daughter would later emancipate herself. 10. Potion Permit (Switch) The smooth sprite animation drew me in and the thought of playing as a town doctor seemed interesting. However, it was not implemented well as progress at the beginning and end of the game is tied to how often you cure townspeople. Therefore, I was constantly wishing people would get sick. Hopefully real doctors are not like this. Potion crafting involves fitting Tetris shaped ingredients into a larger shape, and I never tire of seeing this mechanic. It had a few bugs upon release that were fixed and is a decent indie game overall. 9. Potionomics (PC) This game looks a lot better than it plays. People often highlight its Pixar-like character animations. I thought the 2D animation and art designs were more interesting and often focused on menus or my card deck when 3D animation was present. The game looks similar to Recettear, so I thought the goal was to make money. And there are a lot of systems dedicated to making money. Instead, progress is tied to winning competitions, which requires very little money and engagement with the systems. It does however require a lot of simple math. One of the villains shows up and asks, "Aren't you tired of math?" I wish I could have replied, "God, yes". Still, the systems and characters were compelling enough to finish the game. 8. Bear and Breakfast (Switch) What a great title! Animation and art were also great. The game has a very strong start and I loved optimizing hotels to maximize 5-star reviews. Constraints such as comfort, decor, hygiene, food, etc. were engaging but building campgrounds, rec. rooms, etc. felt like filler. The controls were designed well enough to easily construct and manage hotels. The game often crashed while moving between zones and it was not fixed during my playthrough. Even with auto-save I would still lose hours spent designing hotels. The food automation was also buggy. Despite the strong start the plot was not integrated with the gameplay well and I had mostly forgotten about it until the end of the game. My bear never wore a shirt because it would cover his beautiful chest hair. 7. Ring Fit Adventure (Switch) Technically game of the year if you consider physical health more important than gaming, which it technically is. I find further motivation in that staying in shape enables me to play video games longer. If you are not already familiar with the game, you perform exercises involving light resistance, body weight, stretches, and a whole lot of running in place. I follow playlists from Youtuber Master Trainer Peter and at my best put on 10 lbs. of muscle and got more impressed looks from my wife. I fell off the wagon and am trying to get back on. Its greatest accomplishment is gamifying exercise and I plan to continue playing this or future versions of this game for the rest of my life. 6. Littlewood (Switch) I enjoy farming more than town-building, so I was hesitant to play this game. But it has the most revolutionary innovation in farming games I wish would be included in similar games. Time only progresses when you take action. Movement is not included. Therefore, you can explore and think about what you would like to do at your leisure. I already consider these games as an escape from reality in that if you put in effort, you will be rewarded. This is not guaranteed in real life. Why not remove the steady march of time as well? Good plot, charming characters, spent too much time beating the Elite Four at card games. Highly recommended! 5. Stranger of Paradise (PS4) I'm bad at these games and playing the demo reminded me of this fact. However, I did enjoy learning to beat the first boss, and I'm a sucker for job systems. Then you add the memes? *psshh* Gotta play. Each of the levels is based on one of the entries in the Final Fantasy series and I enjoyed seeing the ones I've played and the ones I have not equally. The plot was hilarious, nuts, and endearing. The gear system was badly designed as there was little reward for optimizing your current gear when you immediately got better gear in the next level. But the end-game builds were cool enough for me to restart the game at the highest difficulty and try to learn the ins and outs of the system. But then some other game came out. 4. Final Fantasy XIV - Endwalker (PC) "Tales of loss and fire and faith." 2022 was all about Crystalline Conflict. It's never fun playing against a premade team coordinating over voice chat unless you are doing the same thing. Crystalline Conflict solves this by not allowing premade teams in ranked matches. The classes are relatively balanced, and I found several of them fun to play. I'm not particularly good, but with enough time and effort I reached the top rank of crystal. There was a hilarious period where Yoshi-P used his favorite but the "worst" class, black mage, to get crystal rank on several servers. Due to an in-progress patch however, black mages were buffed right afterwards. So much that they were banned from more organized tournaments. I'm taking a break from the game but plan to resume before July's FanFest. If you'll never play because of the time commitment, please try the soundtrack. I'm sure the game will continue to improve along with the music. "Our song of hope, she dances on the wind, higher, oh higher." 3. Blue Reflection: Second Light (Switch) My interest was piqued reading previous GOTY threads. I looked into the first game but found the gameplay lacking. This game looked more exciting, especially the battle system. Being a magical girl is awesome. You have your transformations, getting into duels, and wrecking bosses if you do it right. The game reminds me of Persona. The dungeons are related to characters emotions and memories. You go on dates with party members to improve their abilities and yours. The menu animations are snazzy. But it feels lighter and breezier. The character designs are also softer and more fashionable than those found in non-Gust games. This is not a masterpiece JRPG but it was masterfully crafted from the resources they had and exceeded my expectations. 2. Harvestella (Switch) Here's your masterpiece (farming) JRPG! I initially balked at the $60 price tag. But that says more about the ambitions of recent farming game developers. This game is flipping full of ambition and redefines what farming games can be. You would never guess from the terrible marketing. Parts of this game reminded me of other great Square Enix games. Later bosses start filling the screen with orange attack markers straight out of FF14. Writing is what sets it apart. It is not "cozy". Side quests can end on down notes or leave things unresolved. I laughed seeing the side quest name "Good Intentions Pave the Road to Hell". The battle system takes getting used to as it's initially face tanky and encourages you to use items you have developed on the farm. But later party members and the game's variation of breaking bosses offers room for strategy. The farming system had the right amount of depth for me. Every day I would walk out the door and be greeted with a view of my entire field full of crops, sprinklers, makers, and faeries. It may not be the best JRPG, but it may be the best farming RPG. It also explains the weird title. The developers would like to continue the franchise and Google says it's on sale for $40. 1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) Xenoblade Chronicles 2 killed my enthusiasm for the franchise. Didn't bother with the DLC follow up. Didn't follow any pre-release news and threw the game into my cart to get free shipping. Game starts with a long cutscene and then drops you in an ugly brown battlefield. But the voice acting is surprisingly strong. Women are bathing with men nonchalantly. The land becomes greener, the world opens up, a level 5 squirrel kicks my butt. The magic is back! The series continues to expand the breadth of its world while remaining interesting and offering appropriate landmarks for navigation. I loved being able to see previous zones off in the distance. The writing was vastly improved. I loved the first Ouroboros scene. The events leading up to it, character eye designs, and scene direction converged to beautifully demonstrate one of the core themes. It was also an excuse to add mecha. Everything had been heightened. Except for the music. It is good and compliments scenes well but doesn't stand on its own like in previous entries. Since I did not follow the pre-release, I was pleasantly surprised by many homages to previous games, which made me like them more in retrospect. But then they dropped that bombshell for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 at the very end. Writers, settle down. Simplified List: 10. Potion Permit 9. Potionomics 8. Bear and Breakfast 7. Ring Fit Adventure 6. Littlewood 5. Stranger of Paradise 4. Final Fantasy XIV - Endwalker 3. Blue Reflection: Second Light 2. Harvestella 1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3
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Dec 31, 2022 03:03
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OK, last time, I updated the list again lmfao. (stranger of Paradise in at 7, and everything down 1) I was really disorganized this year.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:05
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Real hurthling! posted:Ww is a triumph i'm making a note here: huge success 
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Dec 31, 2022 03:13
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Ack didnt know the deadline was so soon! kinda rushed the text a bit but the order is final 10. Kirby and the Forgotten Land  Kirby making a successful jump to 3D isn't very surprising since y’know its a platformer and Nintendo themselves have put out quite a few good ones in 3D. Though the game isn't a surprise it is a delight from beginning to end with fun “mouthful forms” and great bosses, can’t wait for an expanded sequel that brings back some of my favorite powers like Fighter and Suplex 9. Pokemon Violet  After playing Acreus in January and being very disappointed I had somewhat low expectations for this one, luckily the actual main games are still mostly consistent in their structure and Acres was just a weird anomaly. An iteration on the very good Sword and Shield this game fixed most of my complaints and made a seamless open world that is a joy to explore and actually added characters that I like and care about 8. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin  I came for the gameplay thinking the story would be awful but at some point I realized the story and characters are actually very good, very unexpected based on early impressions. I came to really like angry chaos man and his gang of misfits and the combat remained entertaining throughout. Loot was a pain to sort through but it didn't keep me from having fun 7. Xenoblade Chronicles 3  I’m an off again on again fan of the Xeno series But this one is near the top of the heap. The story starts off great and continues the momentum for quite a while quickly introducing us to our main group and to the enemy faction but the game stumbles towards the end and doesn’t stick the landing compared to its direct prequel. Even so the world is amazing to explore, the combat is the best its been, the majority of the sidequests are compelling and the main characters are all great 6. Bayonetta 3  I’m a big fan of the “Stylish Action” Genre and this doesn’t disappoint on that front with great weapons, fun enemies, cool new summoning mechanic, and set pieces that aren’t overly terrible. But what holds it back from being in my top 3 is the story is god awful just the worst. Usually a bad story doesn’t bother me but this one was just that bad I was punching the final boss at the end but could just not bring myself to care about any of it. Beating the game unlocked the extra combat focused missions which reignited my love for the game, but please Platinum, hire better writers or make your stories light and comedic like Wonderful 101 5. Splatoon 3  I don't really have much to say abut this one but its the best the series has ever been and the single player is a great mix of Octo expansion and standard Splatoon stages. Dualie Squelchers for life 4. Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of milk  This one came as a surprise to me, Helping this girl cope with her fears and traumas was quite the experience and was very touching. An unforgettable game with cool art and great character writing 3. Omori  I like Earthbound and Yume Nikki and this is a great mashup of both. A game about coping with guilt, and acceptance. Game is charmingly cute but will stab you with a rusty knife when it wants and knows exactly what to say to make you cry. The combat system is fun and consists of you emotionally manipulating both the enemy and your party members. I feel like there is one dungeon too many but I adored this game all the way through to its emotional finish. 2. Triangle Strategy  The strategy gameplay is aces and the story is compelling, there are countless way you can approach each encounter and each of them are valid. The story splits are very well done and the consequences of your actions make sense. A game I was thrilled to play through three times, enjoyed every minute of this 1. Elden Ring  A game I knew would be at the top of my list back in march, an absolute spectacular game. The best open world I've ever seen with an amazing art direction, fantastic enemy and weapon variety. Great build flexibility, love almost all of the bosses. Game is nearly flawless from beginning to end, might be in my top five of best games ever Short list 10. Kirby and the Forgotten Land 9. Pokemon Violet 8. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin 7. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 6. Bayonetta 3 5. Splatoon 3 4. Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of milk 3. Omori 2. Triangle Strategy 1. Elden Ring
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Dec 31, 2022 03:14
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Honourable Mentions   Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper and I Was A Teenage Exocolonist Mechanically very similar games in that you manage time, stats, and resources to pass stat checks in order to accomplish narrative goals. Roadwarden and Citizen Sleeper are built around dice while Teenage Exocolonist is built around cards. Both suffer from the problem with all stat check games in that it's possible to fall just short of a satisfying narrative because you didn't do things in the right order, failed an important check, or went wide instead of deep and so lock yourself out of the most cathartic experience. I liked I Was A Teenage Exocolonist more because the game in-narrative encourages replaying to have a better experience. Your very first play-through is inherently going to be scattershot with a lot of failure and unpleasant consequences, but as you timeloop shortcuts emerge and little bonuses stick around enabling better endings and more satisfying interpersonal results.  Fuser Harmonix's last gasp before Fortnite is a really fun and surprisingly powerful toy with an incredibly annoying gloss over it. The focus on basic as hell EDM festival "culture" is completely unnatural and grating. Everyone talks about the tech magic of mixdrop and it's true! Any idiot, me, can make half-decent sounding remixes and mashups (it's possible to make complete dogshit but you usually have to use the deeper tools for that). With December it's last month before being delisted, I finally decided to buy this neat toy (that's all it is and could be under the current copyright regime), The mixes people shared in its last dying days demonstrated an amount of proficiency that makes the game's pitiful nativing sharing functions and the closing of the community even more tragic.   Steins;Gate and World End Economica Episode 01 Of the two VNs I read this year on the subject, World End Economica had a better presentation of being a hosed up teen and the inevitable train wreck from being hosed up teens than the legendary Steins;Gate. Haven't finished the rest of the episodes but the first while not anywhere near perfect was still decent enough I'll probably finish the rest next year.  Leviathan Reading a gamebook that implements the features of a video game world is more impressive than playing the video game version of the same gamebook. Get the book out of the library before you purchase is my advice.   Raging Loop and Gnosia Raging Loop really fun adaptation of several games of Werewolf that gets confused at the last moment by incorporating insane poo poo that was never brought up previously. (A second playthrough with access to the characters' inner thoughts doesn't make it much better). Gnosia is you playing Werewolf, I'm not so good at that. It also drip feeds you very slowly unique character and setting details, but far too slowly and randomly for them to cohere into a full feeling story.    Yakuza 4, 5, and 6 These games never hit as hard as the best Yakuza games I played last year. 6 was the best but I still left it unfinished.      Squishcraft, CosmOS 9 Bundle, Jelly Is Sticky, Taiji and Bean and Nothingness This year's good puzzle games I never got very far into.   Norco and Immortality This year's outstanding narrative games that rubbed me the wrong way.  The Void Rains Upon Her Heart I don't like to repeat a top 10 so Void Rains goes here. But it's forever an amazing evolving perfect for newcomers run based bullet hell that everyone who plays at least appreciates. A true hidden gem, diamond in the rough. My Top 10 Games I Played this Years    10. Return To Monkey Island A bit bigger, a bit more narratively cohesive and a better ending would have made Return to Monkey Island an all timer. Instead it's merely pretty good. There's a story of Guybrush becoming responsible for his adventure game protagonist crimes, a new wave of evil replacing Le Chuck, and a cathartic reckoning between all these elements. Instead it just fizzles. Even playing on hard mode a lot of the puzzles feel like reprises of not Monkey Island but Thimbleweed Park (a game I also finished this year and was disappointed by). This is a nostalgia pick for me more than anything else.     9. The Looker Now that Jonathan Blow's gone as far off the deep end as you can get into right wing paranoia without being a complete monster it was high time for a good The Witness parody. Almost note perfect, the joke puzzles are better as puzzles than the real puzzles the author seemed to compelled to throw in at the end. It avoids all the most obvious jokes about The Witness instead going for a series of gags that happen within a Witness style setting and puzzle design. Nothing made me laugh harder this year in a game than the two hint buttons.     8. Scarlet Hollow It's not done yet, but Scarlet Hollow is an increasingly compelling journey through some creepy poo poo. Basically, a series of short horror vignettes with a consistent cast of characters set in an Appalachian gothic setting. Each chapter is short but that's a fact of life for a narrative game this reactive to your choices. A lot of tantalising mysteries that so far remain just out of reach. Completed this one is going to be an all time great.   7. The Stanley Parable Ultra-Deluxe The Stanley Parable is great, Ultra-Deluxe is more of the Stanley Parable. Might not have made me laugh as much as The Looker but it's overall more polished and hits more consistently. A little let down by obscurity of accessing the Ultra-Deluxe content.     6. Revita A Binding of Isaac clone done right. In Revita everything revolves around your health, it's your money and the resource you use to power up. Everything elegantly fits into a clockwork precise machine of risking death for more power to avoid death or injury so you can spend health to get more power. Easily the best of the BoI clone sidescrolling platformers. A little cloying with a post-Celeste mediation/metaphor on depression or whatever.   5. Elden Ring I don't have anything new to say about this one. It's amazing. No other open world game does exploration as well as Elden Ring. I burnt March and myself out just playing this one. Never touched it again and it still made my most played list on Steam.   4. Vampire Survivors There's a bunch of clones of VS and VS itself is a clone but goddam if this Italian mobile slot machine designer hasn't made the best version of the game so far. Pure joy in letting you get as overpowered as possible.     3. Patrick's Parabox Buttery silky smooth block pushing puzzle gaming. There was no smoother feeling main set of puzzles in a puzzle game released year and it still managed to make you feel like you were discovering something new with every puzzle. Add on to that the mind bending recursive theme and you've got an instant classic. If you liked Baba Is You this is a must play.     2. Pentiment The most best non-murder mystery game set in early modern/late renaissance Germany. Each and every choice you make is agonising. Who to have dinner with made my mind melt. The characters delightful. The art on point. So many delightful little touches and small ways it makes you feel like the biggest piece of poo poo in the world.      1. Perfect Tides Speaking of being a piece of poo poo, here's an absolute nightmare. Life is Strange is all about the angst and agony of our teenage years as we'd like to remember it. Romantic, courageous and life altering. Perfect Tides, in contrast, shows something close to how it actually is. Confused, cringe inducing, filled with pointless cruelty and lashing out at those who love us. What makes the pain bearable is the empathy the game extends to everyone featured. All of this stuffed into an ancient adventure game engine and formula. It's a beautiful game as well with superb limited animation, character design and backgrounds. Meredith Gran built something amazing and it's criminal how overlooked it's been this year. A sincere work of love. Don't take it from me: https://twitter.com/granulac/status/1608178806904217600 EZ LIST: 1. Perfect Tides 2. Pentiment 3. Patrick's Parabox 4.Vampire Survivors 5. Elden Ring 6. Revita 7. The Stanley Parable 8. Scarlet Hollow 9. The Looker 10. Return To Monkey Island fez_machine fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 03:27
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Oh there's veegys list. I can't believe he played like 25 years worth of the most critically acclaimed games in one year. No wonder this list was hard to put together. There's a reason those games are as legendary as they are. And they still hold up in the test of time. I'm hoping to get through all the final fantasy games on ps5 once the pixel remasters come out.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:33
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I didn't play a lot of games this year compared to most others. Nevertheless, here's my short and sweet list. Games that didn't make the cut. 1. Soul Hackers 2 - Bland dungeons and a boring story for SMT standards. 2. Valkyrie Elysium - Feels like half a game that was also very repetitive. Forced myself to beat this one. My top 2022 games: 7. Final Fantasy 6: Pixel Remaster - PC A classic that I've replayed more times than I can count. The pixel remasters are just really well done and the definitive versions imho. 6. Final Fantasy 4: Pixel Remaster - PC My all time favorite of the "old-school" Final Fantasy games. Again, these are just really well done and should be played by any FF fan. 5. Ghost of Tsushima - PS5 Beautiful game. Its amazing what they pulled off here and I can only imagine how amazing the next game will look. Decent combat, but a tad easy. Story was alright if predictable. 4. Live a Live - Switch Thank God we were able to finally play this game and a very well done remaster no less. Great story, super original, old school RPG. 3. Lost Judgment - PS5 I love the Yakuza/Judgment games and this one did not disappoint. Dozens of hours sunk into doing every little side activity, upgrading and just enjoying the story. The Lost Kaito files DLC is very good as well! 2. Death Stranding - PS5 Kojima at his finest. Honestly I didn't even try to keep up with the story because the gameplay was just so good and addicting. I even enjoyed the racing mini-game and spent way too much time trying to be in the top 1%. Acting top notch but should be expected with who they got playing the characters. 1. Yakuza - Like a Dragon - PS5 Combine Yakuza and Dragon Quest? Yes please! Probably one of my favorite Yakuza adventures and that's saying a lot. All of the characters are great, story well done and the gameplay super fun.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:35
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ffx is one of the best games ever made so i'm incredibly glad to see it top a list in 2022
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Dec 31, 2022 03:39
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It was the first Final Fantasy I ever played (and the only one I've ever completed) and I adored it. Even Blitzball, which at first I was annoyed by being forced on me before really getting into it. Auron is such a kick-rear end (35-year-)old man.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:43
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haveblue posted:How does an elden ring randomizer even work? There's no order in which you're supposed to do things and almost nothing you're locked out of with prerequisites there are still key items you need tho, and they all get shuffled. great runes included. but theres also an option to make it so you need all 7 great runes to unlock the final boss, and you can do enemy randomisation in various ways, like shuffling the bosses around. it also means your build is going to be based on what you find like a first playthrough bcos you dont know where any equipment is
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Dec 31, 2022 03:48
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The lightning dodges moment veeg talks about in his list was one of the best moments of his stream all year. Absolute king poo poo. He can’t keep getting away with this. Jerusalem you should drop by sometime
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Dec 31, 2022 03:49
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My honorable mentions are a little upthread, here we go as we dive into the remainder. THE TOP 10 #10. Best Temporary Fix To Ease The Pain Of Not Having More Obra Dinn - The Case of the Golden Idol  I'm going to spend the rest of my gaming life chasing the high I got from playing through Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn in the same year. I've hungrily devoured a number of mystery games since chasing the feeling that those two games gave me and although I've had some fun diversions (shoutout to Tim Sheinman's game Family, a sleuthing game where you're piecing together the history of fake 80s bands and musicians), nothing has really scratched that itch. The Case of the Golden Idol is the closest that I've come. The game presents you with a series of (very) sparsely animated screens of pixel art screens, allowing you to click around to inspect items and characters and read books and notes contained in the game world. As you explore you'll find words that can be clicked on that function as explicit clues, being added to your inventory, for lack of a better word. Once you've collected the clues and analysed the scenes in front of you, it's time to solve it by filling the blanks in a description of what has happened here, who has died, and how.  The 'how' can sometimes be a bit more puzzling than is depicted here This fill-in-the-blank mystery mechanic is both Case of the Golden Idol's biggest strength and biggest weakness. Having a case outline provided, even with the details missing, gives you a starting point to begin to dig in to the mystery. While you might think having all the words from a scene might render actually solving the mystery trivial, the game also relies on a lot of implicit deduction by looking at the scenes in front of you and reasoning out which person belongs in which slot. Some of the words won't be used at all and are there as red herrings, further aiding the feeling of sleuthing your way to a solution.  Each stage will ask something additional besides 'what happened' and 'who was here'. In this case, you need to work out who was playing in each round of cards. In some ways this mitigates the brute forcing that playing Obra Dinn can push you towards. Because that game solves everything in threes, a common strategy can be to lock in two identities that you know for sure and then take a wild stab at a third. Golden Idol's scroll system provides both a more rigid structure and let's you know when you have collected all words in a level, making it much easier to sit back with all the pieces in front of you and put the scenario together. I found the game a bit too easy because of it, outside of a few small moments. One that springs to mind is the dinner plan at one of the murders, which gave me a lot of trouble because I was too focused on what I knew about the participants rather than looking at what the scene was actually showing me. You don't exist diagetically in this world the way you do in Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds and perhaps that's why I'm much cooler on it than either of those games. This distance lends the game a very analogue feel, like it could almost have been released as a pen and paper product. It could certainly be very easily adapted to one. I enjoyed my time with Golden Idol and while it won't loom large in my memory the way that Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds do I'll always be delighted to see more games like it. #09. Best Poorly Performing Mess Of A Game - Pokemon Scarlet/Violet  If you had told me at the start of 2022 that a Pokemon game would make me GOTY list I would have laughed at you incredulously. Pokemon games have been providing increasingly rapidly diminishing returns for me with Gen V being the last high point that I was really on board for. I thought that the games just weren't for me any longer, that my tastes had moved away from them or perhaps that I was just burnt out on the safe, stale, glacial pace of the series. Even the whispers that Pokemon Legends Arceus was something new and different couldn't convince me to try it out. In the pre-release lead up to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, my initial impression was 'that looks like it runs like garbage'. People started to get their hands on copies early and so many of them repeated the same two things. "Yes, it runs like absolute loving dogshit, just a trash fire of a game." and "This is one of the best Pokemon games ever made." Like a world weary con artist pulled back into the game for one last heist, I picked up a copy at launch and booted it up to see if there was anything left in the series for me. At time of writing I'm about 15 Pokemon away from completing the Pokedex, a feat I haven't accomplished since Pokemon Platinum. This game has managed to lock in two things that I think elevate it to one of the best Pokemon games ever made. Firstly, it has made the process of exploring the world to find new Pokemon entertaining and rewarding in and of itself. Once you get through the first hour or so of the game, it opens up and lets you roam about as you please, giving you multiple different plotlines to pursue and a mount to speed your traversal up. Pokemon are visible in the world rather than hidden encounters, making the world feel a lot better populated and making it easier at a glance to see both the types of Pokemon available in an area as well as make a beeline for something you haven't seen yet. The opening areas of the game are saturated with a number of different types of Pokemon as well, shaking up the old dichotomy of the starting area having this generation's normal/flying bird, normal rodent, and two-evo bug type and nothing else. This loop of heading into a new area and voraciously hoovering up every Pokemon I could get my mitts on carried me headlong through the entire game and never stopped being fun.  Look at Maushold. Look at it! What a drat fine Pokemon. The second thing the game does right is the writing. It's not going to win awards, but it's far above any of the other Pokemon games and great at giving you engaging characters to interact with right out the gate. Nemona is my favourite rival that games have ever given you, because 'neighbour girl who loves Pokemon battling like Goku loves fighting' is a very, very good archetype. Director Clavell is a delight throughout the game, even if I did rapidly age into a pile of bones and dust because I had to go look up what the gently caress cheugy meant. Arven is a tremendous dork and I mean that affectionately, and he and Penny's sniping interactions with each other in the conclusion of the game's main plot are perfect. Rounding this out are the teachers at your school which serves as something of a central hub for the game and the gym leaders and Elite Four members who are all given actual personalities.  Larry is a mood. And Larry, who is now my favourite gym leader, hands down. 'Favourite gym leader' was not ever something I thought I'd have opinions on. None of this even starts to mention the competitive battling element which is far more accessible than ever before. I've played some ranked doubles battles with a rental team and had a blast! I hope this game gets DLC the way the prior generation did, because I would love for a little bit more of this game once I get that Pokedex finalised. If you're like me and have been out of love with Pokemon for a long time, come back and give this one a shot. Yes, it's a janky, ugly, poorly performing mess - and that doesn't matter in the slightest. #08. Best "Just One More Round Then I'll Write My GOTY List" - Vampire Survivors  I picked up Vampire Survivors when it first came out in early access because it was dirt cheap and there was some good buzz about it in the new releases thread. I played around ten hours of it, loved it, and moved on with other games throughout the year. Turns out the dev has been busy while I was paying attention to other things because the amount of content that has been crammed into this, and I cannot stress this enough, unbelievably low priced game is staggering. The game is very simple. Pick a character. Pick a map. Your character fires their weapons automatically, you move them around the infinitely scrolling map taking out waves of enemies and picking up the exp they drop in the form of gems. When you level up, you power up one of your existing weapons or grab a new one or a passive power. Bigger enemies drop chests that will level up one - or if lucky, several - of your existing weapons. Survive for 30 minutes to clear the stage. There are strategies to try, secrets to unlock, achievements to shoot for, challenges to engage with if you want them. Or you can just lose yourself in the reflexive dodging of enemies and let your brain enjoy the soothing waves of Number Go Up. The game is available for a pittance and has also been released on mobiles for free with entirely optional ad support.  It is very hard to show in screenshots why this is so addictive. My friend grabbed me the DLC as a birthday present. Installing it seemed to wipe my save file in the process so I had to start from scratch. I did not care in the slightest. I thought Marvel Snap had its hooks in me? Marvel Snap is like a little baby compared to Vampire Survivors. The core loop in this game is dopamine hits given raw form. The programmer formerly worked in the casino industry and yeah, you can tell. Whether it's the build in power of your character until your storm of bullets is demolishing hordes of enemies, the satisfying jangle of picking up experience gems, or the blatantly slot-machine-esque reels spinning opening a weapon upgrade chest, every moment of the gameplay loop feels enticing. There are games on my list this year that pushed my skills and reactions to their limit. There are games that left me thinking about them long after I finished playing them, or that had story turns that caused me to gasp out loud. Vampire Survivor isn't like any of those games. Vampire Survivor is what I played to just relax and bliss out in the comfort of a simple game for a little while. Sometimes, that's enough. #07. Best Game For Freaks - Neon White  Developer Ben Esposito said of this game "In 2018, I released Donut County, a wholesome game for kids and adults alike. After that, I decided that my next game will not be for kids or adults. It'll be a game for freaks." Guess I'm a freak then. A genre blend of anime-as-gently caress visual novel and movement based FPS speedrunning, in Neon White you play White, an amnesiac former assassin trying to earn redemption in heaven by clearing out demons infesting areas of it as fast as possible, alongside a cast of other sinners who seem to both know your identity and have a relationship to you. That might sound like a supremely dumb anime story and yeah, it is! Between anime I've watched and visual novels I've played I think maybe I'm just immune to this sort of writing at this point? There's been a lot of criticism of Neon White's writing and visual novel elements. I mentioned upthread that the writing here doesn't feel particularly egregious to me, it's no more cringe than Danganronpa or A.I. - though depending on what you think of those games I suppose I might be damning it all the more.  There are enough belts in these character designs to satisfy even Nomura. It doesn't matter though, the visual novel elements are just window dressing for the gameplay of the game and you can skip them with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. You're here for the gameplay, and the gameplay is perfection. Levels are short, sweet and have a straightforward goal. Get from the start to the end, killing every demon in the level on the way, and do it as fast as possible. Weapons are given to you in the form of cards, you can hold two types of cards at a time and up to three of each of those types. Left click fires them like a weapon and they vanish once the ammo is expended. Right clicking instantly discards the card and triggers its movement ability. This is where Neon White gets absolutely delicious. Your pistol is a double jump. Your rifle is a straight line dash. Your submachine gun is a ground pound. On and on the game introduces you to a selection of weapons and asks you to incorporate it into your playstyle, each of their discard abilities frictionlessly enhancing your toolbox of traversal options. You can't ignore their primary fire either though, the solution to fast times on several of the levels is to know when to just shoot something along the way, or how to balance shots and powers so that you get everything you need out of a single card. This is such a wonderfully simple concept and it's elevated to greatness by the insight system - as you replay the level you earn ranks of insight that begins to give you things like a speedrun ghost of your last playthrough, or a hint for a shortcut in the level itself - and by the design of the levels themselves. This game has the best level design in anything I've seen all year, I can only imagine the challenge that it must have been tuning these. Level architecture can be sparse and sprawling, tightly packed and dense, or wildly transitioning between these two extremes but it's always wonderfully clear and legible. There was never a point in my time with Neon White where I wasn't sure where it was that I needed to go. The signposting within these level designs, whether it's by leading geometry elements like ramps and windows or whether it's the placement of weapon pickups and demons, is immaculate.  This gif was yoinked from the Neon White thread here on SA and is what sold me on trying the game. Although I watch speedrunning I've never been good at it myself and definitely haven't ever had much success with advanced FPS movement techniques like rocket jumping. This game excels at teaching you how to play it as you go, however, to the point that by the end even my slow as hell gold medal times made me feel like absolute badass. The levels start straightforward and slowly build in complexity as the game progresses, stringing together different concepts that the game has taught you and asking you to execute them flawlessly and above all else, quickly. What could have been a clunky or frustrating experience is avoided by the ability to instantly restart at any point. It takes only half a second to be launching back into the level from the start again for another, hopefully more successful run. More than the inbuilt medal ranking system, the best motivation for improvement for me came from the social scoreboards that show you the times of others on your friends list. This was a late entry on to my GOTY list and I'm so glad that I gave it a shot. #06. Best Game I Don't Think I Have The Skills To Finish - A Dance of Fire and Ice  I think the last rhythm game that I got massively, massively into was Elite Beat Agents on the DS, a game that I still remember with a deep fondness to this day. Approachable and with fantastic theming, the game sank its hooks into me in a way that few rhythm games have ever managed. I embarked on some discovery this year, sparked by playing a bunch of Taiko no Tatsujin at a local arcade, trying out a number of different rhythm games to see if anything could ignite that same interest in me. A Dance of Fire and Ice is what came the closest. Incredibly elegantly designed, ADOFAI is a single button rhythm game where you control two orbs that spin around each other, proceeding along a track made out of the beats of the song. You press a button in time with the beat in order to move along the track, and if you're too far off the beat, you die instantly. While that sounds incredibly punishing, it's mitigated by a few factors. First, levels/songs are quite short, and longer ones do have some checkpointing so that you don't need to go from the very beginning while you're trying to progress. Secondly, because the track you move along is also the note chart, and the twists and turns of the track determine the timing that you need to hit the button on, I also found these charts super readable. Finally, the game does a fantastic job of introducing concepts to you gradually. Each world consists of a number of short 'snippet' levels that introduce a concept and test you on it, with the final level of the world being an actual song that challenges you to string together everything that you've just learned. At this point just linking a video example of one of my favourite levels (that I still can't beat, by the way, I'm just having a great time banging my head against it) might be an easier way of showing how the game works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5oC39ybi0I I don't know that I'll ever manage to finish the last couple of tracks in ADOFAI, let alone the Neo Cosmos DLC that was released this year that ramps up to some absolutely insane levels, and plays around with the fundamenetal formula of the game. That doesn't matter, though, the process of slowly grinding my way through successive tracks has been an incredible journey. The base game is like $5 at the moment on Steam, it's also available on Android/iOS, and if you're still on the fence you can try an online demo version over on itch.io here. It was also a part of the Bundle for Ukraine so a lot of you may already own it and just haven't gotten around to trying it yet! Very much the 'more people should try this game out' recommendation off my list besides my GOTY pick. #05. Best Evocation Of Nostalgia For A Place I've Never Been - Norco  Norco is a point and click adventure game that aesthetically and stylistically borrows heavily from first person adventure games like Snatcher. It blends weird fiction, near-future cyberpunk and Southern Gothic narrative into an exploration of topics ranging from the demolition of communities by the forces of parasitic capitalism, the nature of belief and spirituality, and the radicalisation of disenfranchised youth.  Norco's pixel art has some moments of haunting industrial beauty... You play as Kay, returning to the town of Norco, Louisiana after the death of your mother from cancer and subsequent disappearance of your brother. As you chase down leads as to what might have happened to your brother with the aid of your family's security robot, you reflect on your own childhood in this place and how it shaped your parents, your brother and yourself. Before too long this narrative will interweave as sequences where you play as Kay's mother Catherine, exploring her final days as she participates in gig economy work to try and help pay the exhorbitant cost of her medical care while chasing down a mystery of her own. Everything culminates in a grand union of what feels like a waking Gothic nightmare as the weird fiction and cyberpunk dystopian elements come crashing together into a suitably bleak ending. The end of the game is abrupt, nasty and not great about providing a sense of closure to the story being told here. I wouldn't have it any other way, it suits the genre and the atmosphere that Norco is channeling perfectly. Norco's gameplay does feature some light puzzle solving, and even some extremely rudimentary and simplistic combat encounters, but most of the puzzle design is simply taking an item from one location to another and is rarely arduous or monotonous in nature. I think enough of my interest was captured by the writing alone that this could have been a more visual novel styled experience, but the puzzle elements never feel like they're intruding over the top of the narrative.  Everybody like Lucky. I like Lucky. This has been a fantastic year for narrative games. Norco's prose can tend towards being languid and overflowery in places and not all of the comedic tonal shifts peppered in its writing land, so I ended up ranking it lower than a couple of the other games I played this year. I can't stress enough however that if you like narrative adventure games, I think this is an essential game to play from this year alongside Citizen Sleeper and Pentiment. The game has such an incredible sense of place in its writing. I've never been to Norco, Louisiana, but I've spent a lot of time in small, rural towns. I've known people who inhabit those towns who are reflections of the characters in Norco, and I've seen the impact of the decision of large corporations on those small communities. Everything written here feels incredibly true to life. It's a short game, clocking in at around 5 hours for a playthrough, and it's on Game Pass - check it out. For anyone who already played the game as well, I discovered while collecting my thoughts for this writeup that the devs have released what they've termed a 'lore app' for Norco called Ditch Whit, containing a bit more material relating to the game's lore and ending. You can find it here over at their itch.io page. #04. Best Surviving Under Capitalism Simulator - Citizen Sleeper  The hopeful, optimistic counterpoint to Norco's grimy cynicism. In Citizen Sleeper you play a Sleeper, an artificially constructed body implanted with an imprint of a debtor's memories, built to work as a slave to pay off their debt. You escape and arrive at the Eye, a space station desperately ekeing out an existence on the fringes, a refuge for the lost, the downtrodden and those with something to hide. Legally, you're considered corporate property, not a person, and without the proprietary drugs that your corporate owners provide your body is beginning to decay. How do you survive? Who do you trust? Ultimately, if you are able to seize a life for yourself, what do you want that life to look like? The game has gorgeous art by comic artist Guillaume Singelin and a soft, mellow and frequently haunting OST by Amos Roddy. Although the art is mostly focused on character portraits and much of the detailed description of the Eye is given through text, it and the excellent music help paint a vivid depiction of the Eye as a fragile light in the darkness, even as you navigate it from the zoomed out remove of an overworld map. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn-Qinpb5R8 Matsutake, from the Citizen Sleeper OST. My favourite track on the album. The real star of Citizen Sleeper however, is the tight bond between it's narrative and mechanics in the form of its incredibly smart dice allocation system inspired by tabletop roleplaying games. When you wake up, you roll a number of dice. The number of dice you roll is dependent on the condition your body is in - the more dire your situation, the fewer dice you'll have to work with. Completing tasks around the station, whether it be performing odd jobs for cash or advancing goals for yourself or other characters that you've encountered, will require you to allocate dice to them. Some tasks require numbers in certain ranges, others will ask for specific numbers, but many are random chances that are more favourable towards you the higher the number of the die that you allocate.  This game has a style and a vibe that I am utterly in love with. Very quickly as you begin the game you'll work out some extremely urgent priorities. First, your body is falling apart. You need medicine to stave off the decay, and that medicine isn't cheap. Secondly, you're being hunted by a bounty hunter determined to haul you back to your corporate owners for a payday, and you need to work out how to deal with it. Adding to this pressure, many tasks have a timing component that operates on a 'clock' system, where a circular gauge increments either through your successes or failures or simply by the passage of time. Successful completion of these clocks brings rewards and new opportunities, failing these clocks by running out of time or failing too often may saddle you with additional problems, and your position is precarious as it is. This mechanical heart underpins Citizen Sleeper's great character writing. As you explore the station you will meet a number of characters and find opportunities to build relationships with them. Norco shows the gaping hole left in an individual, a family and a community by the ravages of capitalism but doesn't have much to say on how to persist under it, or offer solutions for change. Citizen Sleeper at its core posits that the connections we forge with each other are the way forward, that opening ourselves to the people around us and working together is how we build lives for ourselves. But that has to be balanced with the relentless pressures of those same lives. You have four dice today, and you need two of them already to make sure you can afford medicine tomorrow, or you're going to drop to only three of them. How do you spend those last two die? Can you spare the time to help a friend renovate their bar when that bounty hunter is only two days off your trail?  Also, there's a cat. This balancing act works wonderfully for the first two thirds of the game. Unfortunately, by the last third of the game I'd advanced my Sleeper's skills enough that maintaining my overall condition was trivial. This immediately lifted any sense of pressure on me, and while I was still happy exploring the branches of the narrative because I thoroughly enjoyed both the world and the characters in it, I found myself missing the tight mechanical and narrative pairing that had pulled me so dramatically into the game at it's start. The other unfortunate blemish on my experience was that Citizen Sleeper has multiple endings, essentially giving you various 'off ramps' from the story as you unlock the requirements to take them, and the conditions for the ending I was chasing took me a while to unlock. So long in fact that I had pretty much exhausted the rest of the game's content in getting there, in a way that had begun to feel artificial. None of this, or some occasional mild narrative hiccups caused by the non-linearity possible in the game, was enough to dampen my enjoyment of the time I spent in this world. The developers have started adding some additional content post-launch, but given that I felt that the story of my Sleeper had concluded in a place that I was happy with, I'm not sure I'll want to come back to experience it. But I still find myself thinking about my playthrough, about the friendships that I forged and the ones that turned sour and bitter. About the choices that I didn't make, the paths I didn't walk and the fine tightrope walk of the early game where just managing to feed myself for the day felt like a massive accomplishment. I think I'll still be thinking about the game for some time to come. #03. Best Narrative Game In A Year Of Incredible Narrative Games - Pentiment Norco was my #3 game of this year until I played Citizen Sleeper. Citizen Sleeper was my #3 game of this year until I played Pentiment . As Andreas Maler, journeyman artist in 16th century Bavaria, work on your masterpiece illustration for an illuminated manuscript and get to know the colourful characters inhabiting the village of Tassing - and it's accompanying abbey of Kiersau! Exchange gossip with the peasants around the village, flirt with the nuns, correct the stuffy sacristan on their faulty usage of the word decimate, share meals with the people you have befriended and their families. And when a visiting nobleman turns up dead, work out which of those people you want to throw to the wolves to be executed. And do it quickly. Justice arrives swiftly, and if you don't have a persuasive case, the powers that be will execute your friend and mentor just to make the problem go away. Hope you're confident in your answer, because there are going to be repercussions from it all the way to the ending of the game. I can't sugar coat it, the gameplay of Pentiment consists of walking around, talking to people, and occasionally undergoing skill checks informed by your characters backgrounds, things you may or may not have discovered, and things you may or may not have said to people. If you don't like reading - and a lot of reading at that - you are going to struggle with Pentiment. Also at this point you probably hate me because we're something like 9140 words into my GOTY list and I'm still not done, and I don't apologise for it. Please play Pentiment anyway. Thankfully, easing the burden of all that reading is a unique art-style based on medieval illuminated manuscripts and early printed woodcuts. It's easy on the eyes, characters are distinct and memorable at a glance, and you'll rapidly get a good feel for the layout of Tassing, Kiersau and their surrounds. There's an absolute ton of delightful little touches all themed as though the game itself is an illuminated manuscript. Loading transitions are accompanied by page turns. Words that may be unfamiliar are highlighted, clicking on them zooms back out from the screen a little to reveal the surrounding book, showing ever changing marginalia that acts as an explanatory glossary. The same thing can be done with character names to display an image of their face, allowing you to refresh your memory of who's who around town and the abbey.  Come for the glossary, stay for the weird little beasties. You don't have time to do everything you'll want to do in Pentiment. While you can generally walk around and talk to a large number of people, sooner or later you will likely find multiple activities that will require a chunk of time out of your day to complete. Do you sneak into the abbey to inspect the corpse post-mortem? Do you have lunch with one of the peasant families in the village in the hope that they can tell you more about the feuds running through the town? You'll only have time to do one, and the clock is counting down rapidly before you'll be out of time to investigate altogether. One of the greatest magic tricks that Pentiment pulls over and over is giving you the feeling that if you just had one more day, or one more moment, you might have found that extra, definitive piece of evidence you needed to understand everything. But you're 90% sure you know the culprit. Or at least like, 70%. 60% at worst. Right?  This is going to turn out great for everyone involved. I don't think it's chance that three of my favourite narrative games this year have all had a hyper-local focus showing the impact of internal and external forces on communities. This is apparently my narrative catnip and I'd be good with more games exploring this pretty much forever. In Pentiment's case, the game spans 25 years of history which means that as you play through the game, unravelling its multiple mysteries, you get to see the impact of the actions of both yourself and others. Characters age, some of them die, and their surviving relatives grieve. Some people are trapped in the same cycles as their parents. Some manage to find a way to break out of them. Throughout its narrative Pentiment engages with a number of different themes. The nature of faith; the strength and comfort that it provides people, and what happens when people lose it. The impact and lasting effects of art and the role of the artist in its creation, a subject that it certainly covers much more adeptly than, say, Immortality. History, and the past, and the way that it can become malleable in the retelling or distorted depending on who is writing it. None of them feel underbaked or underserved by the text and while discovering the answers to the central mystery of Pentiment is certainly enough to keep you playing through the end of the game the real reward for me was simply to see the way Tassing and its inhabitants - and the player character, too - changed over time while being forged in a crucible of societal upheaval. I moused over the wrong spoiler in the Pentiment thread and had an extremely large part of the main mystery spoiled for me early - I cannot stress enough how little it mattered. It was never the point, and the journey there still had moments that left me slack-jawed in surprise. I'll be doing more playthroughs of Pentiment in 2023, wanting to see how things unfold as I make different choices and drinking in more of the historical detail. It's prompted me to add some books to my nonfiction reading list about this period of history, too. #02. Best Game That I Never Thought Would Exist And Is Everything I Wanted - Return to Monkey Island  I play through The Secret of Monkey Island at least once every year. It's one of my favourite ever made and was extremely formative for me, leading to a love of the adventure game genre that persists to this day. I'm also deeply fond of Monkey Island 2, and The Curse of Monkey Island, both of which are incredibly good games even though nothing can quite replicate the original for me. Tales of Monkey Island is enjoyable as well! And Escape from Monkey Island..... uh, well it has some okay moments in it. After the lukewarm reception that Tales of Monkey Island received and the collapse of Telltale Games, I figured that was pretty much it for Monkey Island. The rights were tied up with Disney who had shown no inclination to do anything with them. An then on April Fools, Ron Gilbert announced that he was going to make another Monkey Island game. Three days later he dropped a teaser trailer confirming it was real. He and Dave Grossman would be making a new Monkey Island game and that it would be releasing later in the year. I teared up a little seeing the teaser trailer, I won't lie. The point that I'm making here is that I really, really love the Monkey Island series. There's no chance in hell that I could even pretend to analyse this game objectively. Playing once again as Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate, you'll travel the Caribbean in search of an answer to the biggest question of them all. What actually is the Secret of Monkey Island, anyway? With a new game comes a new art style, one that generated so much backlash from lovely people when it was revealed that Gilbert shut off the comments on his blog and said he'd no longer share any insights into the development of it because people were being so abusive. The internet is wonderful sometimes. Gilbert later explained his reluctance to do the game in pixel art and have it be seen as a throwback or retro game because of it, and I think it was a good decision. The storybook aesthetic suits the story that Return to Monkey Island is telling, and looks great in motion. The audio is phenomenal too; between returning composers Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and Peter McConnell as well as the returning voice acting cast headed up by Dominic Aramato as Guybrush (though sadly without Earl Boen as LeChuck as he's now retired), the game sounds like a Monkey Island game through and through.  It's Wally! Hi Wally! While the gameplay is your standard point and click fare, Return to Monkey Island has done some fantastic modernisation however that makes it emminently approachable even if you don't have much of a history with these kinds of games. You can select your puzzle difficulty at the start of the adventure, and Guybrush carries a hint book on him at all times that can give you a series of nudges if you're stuck on how to get through a particular puzzle. I didn't need it, because my gaming skills are maximum, but it's a smart and sensible thing to include. The writing is the game remains light, whimsical and genuinely funny as always - the result of Guybrush's quest to get a mop makes me laugh just remembering it. The game's plot acts unmistakably as a conclusion of everything that has come before it in the series. I think inevitably a number of people are probably going to be dissapointed by the nature of it and the lack of definitive answers that it provides, but that hardly comes out of nowhere. A number of folks warn Guybrush over the course of his journey that discovering the Secret of Monkey Island might ultimately prove unsatisfying and unfulfilling when it's something he's spent his life chasing. Guybrush however is desperate to recapture what he feels is the fading glory of his youthful adventures, and presses on heedless of the cost to himself or those around him. The comparison is easy to draw between his journey and the metatexual one of the challenge that lies ahead of two designers returning to this game series 31 years later, carrying the weight of fan expectations that have built up over this time. This comparison is made explicit by a very heartfelt letter from the developers to the players that unlocks once you complete the game, and again I teared up a little from reading it. This isn't Ron Gilbert's sequel to Monkey Island 2. How could it ever possibly be? It's been 31 years, and he and Dave Grossman are different people than they were back then. Time waits for nobody. It is, however, a wonderful conclusion to the series. Getting to revisit the world of Monkey Island felt like coming home and seeing old friends again.  No notes. I love this game so much. When I write my GOTY lists, what I'm usually trying to do is communicate why I felt so strongly about this game, the things that I think are it's greatest strengths or at least most interesting points, all carefully calcuated so that you might go 'huh I'll go play that too.' Not Return of Monkey Island. I don't care if you play this or not. This was a game made just for me, and it was perfect. #01. Game of the Year - Sifu  It was kind of weird picking up Sifu on the 8th of February, playing it for an hour and immediately just knowing deep in my bones and soul that this was going to be my Game of the Year and very likely nothing was going to top it. I'm going to guess the sensation is not unfamiliar to a number of you who played Elden Ring. Sifu is a playable kung fu film. Your father is murdered by a group of his students who seek to harness the mystical powers that he guards. You are left for dead, saved by a magical talisman that you were holding at the time of your death. After spending 8 years training and researching your targets, you begin to embark on your quest for revenge. Your mystical talisman grants you multiple 'lives' to work with, but at a cost - you age every time you die, the more times you die in rapid succession the quicker you age up, and the older you get the less health you have but the more damage you do, turning you into a glass cannon. Once you reach age 70, your next death is permanent. Combat in Sifu is fast and punishing. Groups of enemies will fan out to surround you and cut off retreat options, and taking hits will rapidly see your health bar plummet. Dodging attacks is almost always the better option than just blocking them, and as you become proficient at the game you end up choreographing your own cinematic fight scenes, dodging and weaving around your adversaries as you snatch up improvised weapons, lunging out at one or two enemies to give yourself breathing room before delivering an instant-kill strike against a third whom you've staggered. https://i.imgur.com/E1CC3vQ.mp4 Is there ever a game where catching a weapon and tossing it back feels bad? No. The game definitely doesn't pull its punches - you'll die, and die a lot, as you work through its levels. And if none of the regular enemies do you in, learning the boss patterns certainly will. The second boss of the game, Sean, was somewhat of an infamous stumbling block for a number of players to the point where he was tuned down a little bit. Even after the balancing, he can still kill you extremely quickly if you misread an attack. The levels and environments are beautiful, with each stage taking you through a 'normal' environment - an apartment block, a night club, an art gallery, a corporate tower - before twisting and transitioning into a magical space. The greenhouse in the apartment block becomes a forest. The night club becomes an ancient, burning city. The peak of this is the art gallery where you find yourself transitioning between shifting paintings and exhibits as you approach the boss - one of my favourite visual designs for a level this year. https://i.imgur.com/0nBUZHj.mp4 Part of the latter half of the incredible art gallery level There's some inherent flaws to Sifu's quasi-roguelike design that, coupled with it's extremely uncompromising 'git gud or die' design philosophy, some people are going to find frustrating. Shortcuts are unlockable in each level, reducing replay time as you make progress through both the level and the game, as the keys for some of these shortcuts will be found in other levels. They come at a cost however - each level has shrines that allow you to gain passive bonuses like extra health, and if you're skipping fights you're skipping XP. New moves can only be learnt on death and only last for a run, unless you buy them a total of five times at which point they're permanent unlocks. I have played this game inside and out and this still feels like a messy, unsatisfying and difficult to explain system. If you persist though, if you stick it out, the rewards are absolutely transcendent. There's been a kung fu cinema training montage going on this entire time and it turns out that it's you getting good at the game. Suddenly, fights that you were struggling through you breeze through in moments. Boss fights that were frantic, scrappy affairs become you systemically picking apart the holes in your powerful opponents defence. Once you make it to the end of the game, you're given two immediate challenges - replaying to get the true ending, requiring you to add an extra layer of difficulty to the already challenging boss fights by sparing your opponents, and trying to complete a run at a lower age. For the record I first limped past the finish line at 67 which was cutting it pretty drat close. It's interesting reflecting on my top 10 as I finally write up my entry for the Game of the Year. There's definitely a strong narrative / adventure game bias, but I don't think it's a mistake that along with Sifu two other games here are A Dance of Fire and Ice and Neon White, both of which are games that reward mastery of their gameplay with wonderfully rewarding and transporting flow state experiences. I get that a game like this can be a hard sell. Developers Sloclap have tried to make it a little easier to gel with through post-launch updates - there's a little better tutorialisation that was added to the game after launch though it's still weak compared to the way that something like Neon White teaches you its concepts. They've done balance adjustments and passes on a number of pain points, and added both an easier difficulty to allow people to find their footing with the game as well as higher difficulties for those who have mastered what the game has to throw at them. I hope that it can encourage more people to take the plunge. Simply, I think this is one of the greatest beat 'em up games ever made, and it's my Game of the Year.
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Dec 31, 2022 04:07
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Stux posted:there are still key items you need tho, and they all get shuffled. great runes included. but theres also an option to make it so you need all 7 great runes to unlock the final boss, and you can do enemy randomisation in various ways, like shuffling the bosses around. it also means your build is going to be based on what you find like a first playthrough bcos you dont know where any equipment is Can you make it that the 7 great runes drop from any bosses at all? Even some random catacomb one? If that's the case I know what I'm doing tomorrow, that's a huge boost to make me explore everywhere all over again
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Dec 31, 2022 04:30
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Man I swear I looked for this thread a bunch of times and didn't spot it until today  . Time to type up my list real quick aaaaaaa!I don't tend to play many games throughout the year. I kinda play fewer games, but play them for longer. So my list is only 8 games. But they're good ones! 8. Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes Only reason this game doesn't rank higher is because I only got to play the demo for one day. It left enough of an impression on me for it to make the list. I love Fire Emblem, and I loved Hyrule Warriors, so I guess it's natural I would love this game, but I hated their previous attempt at a Warriors-like take on Fire Emblem. Turns out what it takes to make me enjoy one of those is to have an actual appealing cast. Who knew! 7. Pokemon Legends Arceus Surprising no one, I like Pokemon. I have always liked Pokemon and I've played it since the original Gameboy games. That said, Legends Arceus was such a breath of fresh air in a series that has stagnated for so long. Making the game just be all about filling the Pokedex made me feel like a proper Pokemon naturalist. Since that was pretty much spot on my dream job when I was a young'un, this game was perfect for me. I spent hours just tooling around on the deer chanting "Boing boing boing boing." 6. Shin Megami Tensei 5 Game from last year that I only got to play this year. I still haven't finished it, but it's still great. This series is kinda Pokemon for grown-ups, and I've increasingly gravitated toward it as I've grown out of Pokemon a bit.  It is very much to my taste, just explore, fight things, talk to demons to recruit them, and mash them together to make stronger demons. The demons draw from an extremely wide range of sources from folklore and mythology from all over the world. The dialog for them is especially funny and charming in this entry. I ended up legitimately laughing out loud at some of the things they say. Game's great. Well worth your time!5. Stray It may be clear from the rest of my list, but I am not much of a PC gamer. I don't like having to be tethered to my desk to play a game. A game has to be truly exceptional to make me tolerate that, and Stray is just that. It's just such a well-done, charming game that nails its aesthetic so much. I am a huge sucker for aesthetics. Did I mention the dedicated meow button? Cuz it has a dedicated meow button. I had so much fun jumping in places I wasn't supposed to go, scratching everything I found, knocking stuff over, meowing at people, and generally just being a cat. The range of expressions on the cat and its robot friends, and the variety of interactions you can do with the environment is just staggering. Truly, this game is a masterpiece. 4. Pokemon Violet It's Pokemon! This game takes a lot of the ideas of Legends Arceus and expands them into a "proper" Pokemon game. And the end result is the Pokemon game I have wanted for years. Is it rough around the edges and kind of half-baked in a lot of ways? Yes. Yes, it is. Is it still incredibly fun despite that? Also yes! Plus the graphical glitches I found to be more funny than disruptive, but that's just me. And in the end it manages to have a pretty decent story! Which was kind of shocking. The main characters are all cool/funny/appealing, the new Pokemon are good, the gyms are cool, and of course the sandwich munching dragon is just a delight. 3. Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak An expansion to a game that was on my GOTY list last year! Hey, guess what? It's still good! Even more monsters to kill, more hats to make from their flesh, more fancy moves you can do to style on them. What's not to love? I played this a bunch with my friends and had a blast! ---------------------------------------------------------- I'm going to preface this next one by stating that I put Persona 4 on my GOTY list last year, but didn't end up FINISHING the thing until this year, but it's not making the list again. I enjoyed the game overall, but there were a million things about it that drove me nuts: the terrible obscure requirements for quests, social links being hidden behind the otherwise ignorable part-time jobs, social links being hidden behind OTHER social links, not being able to do much as read a book at night if you put even one toe inside the TV world, the general gross creepiness that would blindside you out of nowhere (MULTIPLE hot springs scenes where the boys try to spy on/creep on the girls, EVERY SINGLE loving THING about the school festival), the terrible horrible no good very bad Golden exclusive dungeon that drains your MP after every battle and takes away all your items. I could go on, but the point is every time I would bitch about one or the other of these things to my friends, I would largely be met with the same response: Oh, that was much better/fixed in Persona 5. To which I would reply well bully for Persona 5. Call me when it's on a platform I actually own! (PC or Switch.) On that note... 2. Persona 5 Royal Not going to lie, my expectations were very high for this game. And it blew my expectations right out of the water. Holy poo poo, what an amazing ride this game is! I think what I liked most about it was it completely nails its aesthetic. Every aspect of it sells the main characters being "thick as thieves." The game just oozes style and charm from every pore. And the music is absolutely gobsmacking amazing. I love this game, and I love my anime children. And finally! 1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 I have played every Xenoblade game since the first one, thanks to a massive grass-root effort on this very forum to get the game more attention. We went from the humble beginnings of Project Rainfall, to this. Hoooooly poo poo this game. It is the best in the series yet, no question. Thematically and tonally it's closer to the first game than the second, to its benefit. I loved the second game too but tonally it's all over the place. Not Xenoblade 3. This game knows the kind of game it wants to be and it knows what story it wants to tell, and it goes HARD. The main cast are all fantastic, the music is amazing, the battle mechanics are SUPER great, and did I mention the music? HOLY poo poo THE MUSIC.
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Dec 31, 2022 04:32
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Hey y'all, here is pt 2 of my list! There will be... a third part.   Chalk this one up as a true hidden gem. ADACA combines the weaponry of Halo games with the campaign design and on-foot journey of a Half Life game. In addition to a three chapter campaign (the third of which should be ready in early 2023), the game has a separate but even larger side campaign in an open world, inspired by the STALKER series. The highlight of ADACA is not its lo-fi minimalist art style (which, as always, kind of tires me) or its story, but the triumphant return of gaming's greatest gift to mankind: the gravity gun from HL2. In ADACA, your gravity weapon is literally a part of you and can be used at any time, right from minute one. You can pick up most objects and fling them at enemies from afar and watch with joy as they careen off of rooftops with ragdoll physics, or you can steal a gun from an enemy and use it against them. It is every bit as fun as the original gravity gun, but with even less restrictions, and it usually is the best option in many one-on-one encounters. The rest of the weaponry is OK, but owing to the aesthetic and average sound design, can't hold a candle to picking up an oil barrel and blasting it into someone's face at 90 miles an hour like Randy Johnson destroyed that bird that one time. As such, it feels like maybe some better balance is in order, as well as just better sound design in general. The audio is inoffensive but unmemorable, and none of the cutscenes have voiced dialog. Some of this is due to the fact that the game was developed by a single person, but I still have to be fair in comparing it to the other games I enjoyed this year, as these factors do hold it back. The campaign is full of fun moments, from defending a scavenger town, to crossing towering bridges, to wielding what I will just call The Death Orb in a sure tribute to Half Life 2's final level. Though I did not play the open-world side mode, I have heard that its scale is quite impressive and has just as much love put into it as the main campaign. Maybe if I played through that mode I'd rank this even higher. All in all, though, an impressive debut.   The first Supraland was a bit of a surprise, combining Metroidvania elements with puzzles with first person combat and platforming that combined in the cauldron quite nicely. After a DLC that to some felt like it took away from those very elements, Six Inches Under marks a return to the game design of the original, delivering on the same sense of rewarding exploration, hidden secrets, and silly storytelling. The reason it doesn't rank higher, however, is because much like Subnautica's followup, Six Inches Under does not iterate or evolve the formula enough to keep the novelty fresh. It is described by the developer as Supraland 1.5, and it really feels like it, as though the game takes place in an entirely new region, not much if anything has changed to the overall gameplay. The mediocre combat has been reduced slightly but is still there, and still has a couple of quite annoying mob encounters. The upgrades, with some exceptions, are mostly the same as the first game, and you run low on them before even reaching the last third of the campaign. It builds around a central hub town containing a relatively basic set of jabs at capitalism, and you'll be travelling through it time and again as you eventually reach the higher floors. It's an okay setup, but it is not an exciting execution. Still, if you like to find secrets, there are plenty to find in this game. You won't be able to get on top of as many things as you'd like, but you can explore most nooks and crannies and be rewarded. Six Inches Under is still GOOD, but due to several factors it's just not as special as the original.   The second title on my list to not come from an indie developer comes from Atlus and the team behind Tokyo Mirage Sessions, a game with a very divisive reputation in the SMT fandom, but still brimming with creativity and style, if not substance. Soul Hackers 2 trades some of that creativity and style for a little more substance, but struggles against a small budget that works against it. You control Ringo, a human simulacra created by a sentient AI that has become so advanced it can predict the future, and sees a possible apocalypse that it has no choice but to intervene in. Ringo and her also newly-created sister save several individuals destined to die through the act of Soul Hacking, a process that dives deep into characters' memories and forms a co-dependent bond. Stripped of their usual demon-summoning powers, the crew relies on Ringo to augment their COMP devices and sets out to save the world. The cast is likeable, with Ringo in particular being a fun and up-for-anything protagonist that stands in stark contrast to many of the past, often blank player-avatar SMT and Persona protagonists. The rest of the crew includes a snarky shark-toothed mercenary, a cynical assassin, and a shonen-rear end secret society cop, and they play well off of each other, with many skits available at the local bar or through eating meals back at the base (which confer a passive bonus until the next return to base). SMT's past as a first-person dungeon crawler has had some distant Wizardry influence, but SH2, despite having the third-person trappings of other modern SMT and Persona games, is the first in the series whose gameplay loop calls Etrian Odyssey to mind (well, aside from Persona Q, obviously). You will dive into a dungeon and fight your way through until you reach a checkpoint, then head back to town to rest, eat, shop, and upgrade your gear with the money and ingredient drops you got from fights. The combat lacks the Press Turn system of the traditional SMT series, but has its own massive-damage factor called Sabbath that sends every demon in your stock at the enemy all at once, with the damage increased depending on how many times you hit weaknesses. To be clear, the combat in SH2 is not as good as SMTV, but it works fine and is decently up-tempo, especially after recent updates have included turbo and sprint options for the combat and dungeon exploration. What disappoints me more is the completely banal environments you explore, which amount to extremely plain boxes and 90 degree angles in the form of generic subway tunnels and office buildings. It's a major step down from the kinds of environments seen in SMTV or even other SMT spinoff games. But still, I ended up being surprised at how much I liked this offshoot. It's not at the top of the pile, but it does not dishonor the Shin Megami Tensei name. It's got uptempo combat, an addictive gameplay loop, a fun cast, and some sweet tunes. If it ever pops up on Gamepass, it'll be a no brainer recommendation.   Chalk this one up as AA gaming's biggest surprise this year. While the farming gameplay is mostly a means to an end, and the combat fairly middling, the setting and story is possibly the wildest one of any RPG released this year. You think you're settling down for a cozy slice of life sim about farming in a fantasy setting where a mysterious natural phenomenon called Quietus makes going outside dangerous between the seasons. And then a time traveler appears from the future. And then the entire nature of your world is flipped upside down. And that's just the start of the second act. In a story that takes you on a journey through plot beats reminisicent of Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and even Nier Automata, your farm still persists. It's like that Undertale quote, "despite everything, there's still farming." Managing your farm and selling crops is one of only two ways to make money in the game (the other being rewards from sidequest completions), so you have to keep it running and upgrade it no matter what the stakes of the plot are. And so you get this interesting mix of sci-fi drama and relaxing slice of life vibes that manage to avoid stomping on each other, somehow. I don't know how, but it works! The game even has a pseudo S-Link thing where every character has their own personal story arc you experience by hanging out with them, which also confers passive permanent bonuses to the party. What really disappoints me is that the gameplay itself is just average. Combat lacks dodge rolling or damage feedback, the fairies on the farm are annoying (I hope I never hear "hello little croppies" ever again), some stuff is just never explained (the loft seems to function as an achievement system but you can't actually interact/examine the statues to see what they represent) and the dungeons are fairly basic in their design. But all of that just means that Harvestella will be remembered as a cult classic rather than an all-time classic. And that's okay with me. At the end of the day it'll be the most memorable farming game I've ever played, easily. Way more interesting than any factory that manufactures runes.   Released all the way back in January, Strange Horticulture finds a nice space for itself in the blossoming 'deduction' genre by going in a very different direction from other recent investigative games. You're not solving a series of murders... you're selling plants to customers. Now, these aren't just your average everyday plants that can make people tell the truth, or pick locks, or determine if someone is poisoned. Some of them make you itchy. The deduction process in this game involves figuring out just what the hell any of your unlabeled plants are. This involves crossreferencing a book on botany, and using a weird device to detect magical energies within certain plants. You also go out on ventures to certain locations on a map based on additional deductions you make on notes and cards you receive. These plants then go to customers who have some, certainly interesting requests. You also have choices to make on which plants to give certain customers that can impact the fates of other characters as well as determine the ending you get. Definitely a cool little game, one I was super addicted to, to the point that I kept my broken Steam Deck for longer than I should have just so I could finish the game first, despite it constantly crashing. (The crashing had nothing to do with the game but my Deck's malfunctioning GPU.)    The year of the RPG continues! While I am not a huge fan of SRPGs (and thus, basically forfeiting a solid chunk of this year's bigger releases), there were more than enough traditional JRPGs to make up for it. And while it's a short experience, and certainly style over substance, Jack Move is pretty cool. A cyberpunk story about a woman trying to save her estranged father after he has been kidnapped by the largest megacorporation in the city for his research, Jack Move wastes no time with filler. It is a lean 7-8 hour game that takes you from dungeon to dungeon with no filler, with a simple but effective rock-paper-scissors elemental system and an interesting skill equipment component. This is all framed within cyberpunk terms, so your attacks are hacks, and your skills are installed to your cyberware's empty RAM slots. The visuals are vibrant and pop beautifully, with some really excellent pixel animation for attacks and spells. The titular Jack Move attacks all look really cool (even though I do wish there was a skip button for them after a while), and enemies are helpfully color coded to make weaknesses easy to read. NPCs in town have story arcs that run through the game like a Trails game, with dialog that updates after most plot beats. Ultimately a solid experience that doesn't waste your time and is a breezy cyberpunk adventure.    Anyone remember a certain Konami licensed arcade game? It was a 4 player cabinet... 'cowabunga' was a catchphrase... there were big bosses and moments of cartoony slapstick... that's right, I'm talking about The Simpsons Arcade Game!! Well, what if it had a sequel, but then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles showed up and said it was their game instead? You'd have-- well, you'd probably have some sort of Family Guy cutaway I guess, but anyway, boy Shredder's Revenge is kind of a Simpsons game in disguise, huh? It's got an emphasis on sight gags, like enemies finishing their shift at the cashier before fighting you, or answering calls behind a desk. April's got a super attack that is basically one of the Simpsons tag-team attacks. There's a level that goes to a theme park... THERE'S A MINIGAME WHERE YOU RACE TO SEE WHO INFLATES THEIR BALLOON THE FASTEST??? HELLO??? IT'S THE SIMPSONS ARCADE GAME 2. Here's the real cut of beef on this: TMNT... is fine. It's placed where it's at because it's fine. I like the cute-style of the character art and animation, the slapstick animations are fun, the music hits somewhere between Turtles in Time and Hyperstone Heist (with occasional 80s rock and tunes by Ghostface Killa and Mega Ran??), you go to a decent variety of locations and there are lots of bosses. It's not the best brawler I've played though. Part of this comes down to a beef I've generally had with Turtle games, which is the overreliance on foot clan soldiers. It doesn't exactly do wonders for enemy variety to just have a bunch of foot soldiers that show up with different weapons to separate them. I was happy with a level at a museum that introduced dinosaur enemies, and a later level that brought in stone warriors to fight, but it was kind of little kind of late. I also felt that the belty levels could have offered a bit more at times in terms of traps and events. There are collectables, but they are so hard to miss that they may as well just give them to you automatically. So as a game, it's good not great. But it is elevated by excellent production values, and a decent roster of playables including April and Casey Jones (who is unlocked after the first playthrough). So if you sit down with friends you should have a really good time with it.    Although this was a relatively weak year for Metroidvanias, there were a couple of notable highlights, one of which was this sterling tribute to Castlevania 2 from Berzerk Studio, the developer previously known for Just Shapes and Beats. Infernax is basically "what if Simon's Quest US didn't hate you?" NPC dialog is actually helpful, the game's challenge has a solid difficulty curve, and they also add some player choices that can cause changes in the world. Without thinking much about it you can knock down a wooden pillar that causes a massive flood, if you're not paying attention to what characters say and just smash something because it can be smashed. The music is solid, the gameplay is fun and it nails the feel of those classic NES Castlevanias but in an open world. I don't have a ton to say about this one because I played it all the way back in February, but I can recommend a playthrough of it on Gamepass while it's still there.    Okay, Ghost Song isn't perfect. It has a limited amount of bosses that often are just larger versions of regular enemies. The game should maybe NOT have drawn inspiration from Dark Souls for its currency and corpse run mechanics. And the biomes could've had a bit more variety to them. But very few Metroidvanias actually nail the feeling of isolation that Ghost Song manages to achieve, even with the population of characters you encounter on your journey. As a Deadsuit, you're not exactly sure what you are: person, robot or ghost. But you come across a group of survivors up on the surface of the planet you wake up on, who are trying desperately to get back into space before all the giant bugs and mutated humans come for them. Actually, it's weird to play a game that owes so much to the Metroid series but also has a lot of spoken dialogue and various people whose lives you learn about every time you return to base camp. It's something that helps set Ghost Song apart from the usual games in this genre. The setting is also interesting, with tidbits of lore detailing the collapse of the planet left as breadcrumbs for you to piece the science and history together. There are even characters that you come across at random just from exploring this alien bug-riddled fungal planet. One time I ran into an orc lady talking about leaving their home on a quest as is tradition, and it was the only time I saw them in the entire game! It won't be lasting or remembered like the Hollow Knights of the world, but it carved out a nice space for itself this fall and I enjoyed my time with it. And it was nice to see someone finally finish a project they had worked on for over 8 years.   Yes, it's the cat game. Yeah, a lot of your appreciation of the game will depend on how much you like cats. No, I don't think the robots/NPCs take too much of the focus. I think that it all comes together well. Sure, the premise requires some suspension of disbelief on how much a cat can understand the English language, but a little bit of disbelief is required for most video game protagonists, okay? This is one of the most 'vibes' games of anything released this year. It has some incredible lighting and color choices, managing to make a post-apocalyptic run down society stuck in a rut feel warm and inviting. The music is always on point for the emotional beats of the story, and the animations of the cat, of course, are heart-warming. One thing that really impressed me about the art direction was its ability to make every location feel lived in and contextual, which is hard for most non-cinematic media to pull off. The gameplay is maybe the one weak link, as it is just okay with a lot of N64 Zelda or Assassin's Creedy climbing (albeit without the irritating open world or towers) that requires you be in the right position for a jump to be possible. But is never dull or boring and it manages to hold together enough for the aesthetics and the storytelling to carry the game the rest of the way. Plus, it's included with Playstation Plus' game catalog. It's like the only reason to subscribe to it, unless you also have a burning desire to play Shadow Warrior 3 because I listed it earlier. At least, until Sony decides to remove it randomly.   Sokpop kept shuffling along releasing a small game every month to their Patreon until they struck gold with Stacklands. You can see the difference just by browsing their catalog on Steam and seeing the staggering and shocking disparity in review count between the entire rest of their catalog and this one single game. It's far and away their biggest hit and for good reason. Stacklands takes the gameplay style of something like Cultist Simulator and transplants it into the village builder/survival genre. You will stack card types on top of each other to produce certain results, like a villager on a tree to chop/harvest it, or two villagers in a house to reproduce. This is in addition to simple crafting recipes that involve pairing a group of different cards together, with Ideas being unlocked over time to guide you. The game also drives forward with lots of little objectives that reward you with pack unlocks, bought by selling certain cards for money. Buying new packs unlock new types of cards, from harvestable resources to enemies that threaten your townspeople. It's a formula that works really well, and has been expanded upon with additional post-release support, adding new locations and features like automation. This is the year of awesome cheap games, and at $5, Stacklands sits near the top of that category.    DrinkBox, formerly (and likely will always be) known for the Guacamelee series, and aggressively putting old memes in their games, decided to try something different: an ARPG with a completely unique metamorphasis-based progression system, and significantly fewer memes. Probably one of the most addictive gameplay loops of any game this year, Nobody Saves the World has an enthralling unlock system where you rise in grade from completing specific objectives for each of the different classes you can transform into (from an archer to a rat to a ghost and many more), which unlocks new classes as well as allowing you to mix-and-match abilities from different classes to make the specific build you want (which, of course, also feeds into additional objectives). It's a game with great discovery and experimentation, hampered only by relying on proc-gen dungeon designs that all look exactly the same. Luckily, the dungeons are only part of the game and you do plenty in the overworld as well. But had Drinkbox put more time into the dungeons, then this could've been a Hades-level success. As it stands, it's still a pretty good game about becoming a dragon that can warp around and raise the dead, and a good way to spend a couple of days cooped up during the winter.    Here's one I didn't even know existed a month ago. I've talked before about Demon Turf in the Steam thread, a 3D platformer with hand-drawn sprite art that is very movement ability-focused, but Neon Splash takes the series in a more Toree/Lunistice route, opting for smaller levels to be beaten quickly and testing your platforming skills, without the combat encounters that honestly felt like an annoying hindrance in the original. It's more of the gameplay that people liked, trimmed to its essentials. You still have the varied moveset of double jumping, gliding, turning into a wheel to go super-fast, long jumping, wall jumping, etc. And each level takes advantage of this moveset, with an additional unlockable set of harder remixes of each level that will require you to know and use every movement trick in the book to complete them. With a cheap price point, varied stages and fun movement, Neon Splash is a nice little appetizer to fit inbetween your big playthroughs.   Rhythm Heaven fans went from crawling in the desert under a brutal uncaring sun, to an oasis of musical Heaven-likes in just the span of a few months, with Melatonin releasing this month, and Bits n Bops being announced two weeks ago in a Wholesome Direct, with Rhythm Doctor likely to leave Early Access in 2023. Perhaps Rhythm Heaven IS a place on Earth! Melatonin is kind of like the 'lo-fi beats to relax and study to' of Rhythm Heaven clones. Its cool, creamy pastels and mix of chill, EDM and chiphop is a cozy way to spend an afternoon, if not the most exciting. Make no mistake, Melatonin understands exactly what makes a fun Rhythm Heaven level, with themes ranging from ringing up a credit card for shopping items, to swinging at baseballs that travel through portals, to working a musical crane catcher machine, all of the same kinds of notation and swerves are here, with helpful guides occasionally being obscured as you get used to the level, until you've earned enough stars from each level to unlock the night's Remix stage, which, much like Rhythm Heaven, brings back the previous set of stages and mashes them together with a new tune and challenges your reflexes and memory. But what makes the game relaxing is not just the music but the general vibes. The game is not very difficult even in the hard mode that unlocks for each stage after completing them normally. The themes of the stages are not too zany, just dreamlike and surreal. If you're looking for some of the madness of Rhythm Heaven's Wii entry (still its best, in my mind), you're not going to get big cartoony antics or marching flamingoes. This is a more laid back experience that is welcoming to casual players. That said, I think that the game's input window could be a little more generous for said casual players. On the Steam Deck, which is fairly friendly to the player latency-wise as far as displays go, I found that the game seemed to have more leeway for late inputs than early inputs. This makes eighth and sixteenth notes a bit annoying to input as the middle input has a decent chance of being called early. Yeah I know, skill issue, mad because bad etc. I long stopped caring about trying to perfect every music game when I finished Gitaroo Man back in the 2000s. If you love watching people play games like this but find them a little too fast-paced, Melatonin might be exactly your speed. Now bring on the normie music game revival!!   In 2020 I gave my GOTY not to a game made in that year but a game newly released to American audiences that year. That game was Moon Remix RPG and it was, despite its clunkiness, despite the tedium involved in its day-night cycle, one of the most unique games ever made. You could make a similar case for this next game. Bringing the 1994 cult classic to the HD-2D engine, Live-a-Live gives you a roster of characters to play as, each with their own setting and story, that seem unconnected at first until you see repeated elements start to stand out, and then everything comes together in one big finale where you assemble your favorite characters into a party and fight the ultimate evil. While I do wish there was more variety to the combat-- like, way more variety, holy poo poo the combat is repetitive and samey the entire time-- no game, not even the Saga Frontiers, do the anthology format as well as this. Every character's story is so completely different in tone and theme and, aside from a short description of the initial setting and time period, you really never know what you're gonna get next. One story is a Western that has base defense elements. Another is a sci-fi murder mystery. One is literally a hot-blooded shonen sentai. It's a wild ride through the JRPG ages and there's rarely a dull moment... with the longest dry spell maybe being the caveman arc, being one of the longest chapters and entirely dialog-less, but still cute and fun nonetheless. It's amazing that this game did all these things back in 1994, with the remake serving mostly as a major visual and aural glow-up. It may only be available on the Switch, but it's still worth going out of your way to play if you like JRPGs.    You may remember two years ago when a few posters led a pretty strong campaign to raise awareness about Anodyne 2. Mixing top-down Zelda gameplay with Dreamcast-style 3D platforming and exploration, Anodyne's heavy themes and strong style caught a lot of attention (if not a lot of votes....), so it is a bit unfortunate that the developer's next game would fall so completely under the radar, because it's another fascinating game. Sephonie follows scientists that explore an island that seems to have become sentient, as they catalog its various flora and fauna, and learn of an imminent disaster that they are unfortunately powerless to stop. It's a game with phenomenal prose, as each character has deeply introspective arcs that are very well narrated. The general theme of making and breaking connections hits harder knowing it was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. The gameplay is an unusual mix of parkour platforming and Tetrimino puzzling. Moving around the world is akin to playing a Tony Hawk game, if Tony Hawk could run on walls (IDK, maybe the later games could? I stopped playing after THPS4). You also gain additional abilities to get higher and further and find additional creatures and lore. As you catalog the different creatures on the island, you connect with them by placing tetriminos in differently shaped puzzle grids until you've filled the bar all the way. It's not difficult but it's a fun little diversion, and in addition to gaining an understanding of the local ecosystem, you'll also get a weird bit of dialog from each creature. On brand for the developers, Sephonie boasts a warm early PS2-era look and cozy musical vibes, and features secrets everywhere, including ones that involve intentionally clipping through walls and going out of bounds. These trinkets largely serve as story nuggets to flesh the characters out more, rather than tick off a collectathon checklist, so there's no pressure to find them but plenty of incentive to seek them out. The levels are massive with a lot of "how the heck do I get there?" and plenty of routes and movement discoveries. There's even a bonus collectable game that unlocks after finishing the campaign for another hour or so of platforming fun. But the story is the real star here (and, well, the style of movement in the game is honestly not going to be to everyone's tastes, it's quite different and will take some getting used to). Sephonie makes another successful entry in the Analgesic Productions catalog. It's unconventional, it's surreal, it's beautifully written, and if you can get a grasp on the controls, it can be a lot of fun too.    The Golden Idol makes you feel smart. Maybe less so if you type Curse instead of Case, but listen, it's easy to make that mistake. What's not easy is juggling all of the characters and story arcs that interweave over the years that make up CGI's twisting and sinister mysteries, but as you go back through previous chapters to put together the final epilogue, you'll see all of the subtle visual cues and foreshadowings that you missed and realize, drat this developer fuckin thought EVERYTHING through. It is a Pepe Silva board of connections and conspiracies and seeing it all laid out at the end is very satisfying. The glue that holds this precarious puzzle box together is a tag-team of delightfully strange art and friendly user interface. Evoking the European computer scene of the early 90s, Golden Idol's grotesque character designs are instantly memorable and fun to watch as they backstab each other and gawk at the supernatural. Placing the solution on your table like a children's activity sheet at a Denny's, you fill out what looks like the world's grimmest Mad Libs story column by column, identifying the suspects and victims, the timeline of events, and the various pecularities of each situation (such as a chapter depicting a society where merits and demerits are handed out based on a fascist set of 'virtuous' policies). At times the Golden Idol is even more in the hands of the player-detective than its obvious inspiration, the Return of the Obra Dinn. And while its presentation is a little simpler and its atmosphere not as strong, CGI still makes a case for being one of the top deduction games on the market.    In the boomer shooter renaissance, we've had pitch perfect takes on Quake (DUSK), Hexen (Amid Evil), Doom (Project Warlock), but there's one classic that has been overlooked by the burgeoning indie scene... until now. That game was Blood, the debut Build title that would put Monolith Productions on the map (nowadays people might know them for the Shadow of Mordor series, or F.E.A.R., or the Condemned series). I won't explain Blood, but if you know it, and love it, and have felt left out in this age of retro revival, Cultic is what you've been waiting for. Much like Dusk, Jasozz Games does not attempt to just mimic Blood 1 to 1. It knows you want to destroy cultists, it knows you like explosives, but it's gonna do it its own way. Opting for an intentionally limited color palette and earthy tones, Cultic's aesthetic is oppressive and raw, with a campaign taking you through an abandoned mining town, cave systems, and a mental asylum with trenches dug all around it that the cult has bought the rights to in order to conduct operations underneath it. Combat in this game is pretty awesome. In addition to a kick button, you have sticks of dynamite that you can throw and then shoot at to cause massive explosions that absolutely shred enemies into kibble. You can also upgrade your weapons and make them stronger and higher in capacity, which requires you to find weapon parts found in secret areas. That's right, a retro shooter where finding the secret walls/areas actually rewards you! Well, actually, there's another that does that, you just haven't gotten to that part of the list yet.  Though the game is billed as "part 1", it's a full standalone game that ends the same way plenty of shooters have in the past, with a sequel hook. Otherwise, there's no reason to wait on this-- it's not an Early Access title, it's a completed project that will have a followup in late 2023. At only $10, and featuring 10 levels, you get a reasonable entry point to a very polished and well directed game that doesn't replicate what Blood did 1 to 1, but offers one person's alternate vision that is just as entertaining.   If you like choose your own adventures with a touch of the supernatural, but think Uchikoshi games are a little TOO much for you, then Beacon Pines is a gentler, but no less dangerous tale. Sort of a Stranger Things for the talking animal crowd, two friends and the new kid in town uncover a conspiracy within their small, quiet town that could threaten the world. Within the narrative framing of a book, you and the narrator will guide the characters through story sections by selecting words to fill in the blanks, which you receive over the course of the game for doing certain actions or eaching certain plot moments. These can result in silly circumstances or entirely new story branches, and most branches are required to finish the story and understand what's going on. Despite being for all-ages, it is all-ages in the Goosebumps sense, where bad ends imply some pretty dire outcomes for the characters, and the narrator is just as frustrated as you are with the way the story keeps ending up, but just keep at it. The visuals are lovely, and the characterization is fun in a nostalgic 90s 'kid adventure' way. The secrets of the town are fun to discover, and there are some truly good twists in the plot and though some things are maybe a little too crazy (a couple of branches make some pretty... permanent changes to characters), I think that the tone of the game manages to pull off those moments. The reputation of visual novels made in the West has taken some hits, partially from overfilling the Steam marketplace, also from usually relying on stale comedic gimmicks or not offering the kinds of stories that people are really looking for (or worse, are just otaku-baiting trash). So it's nice to see a game that actually manages to have a unique voice and then just goes a little wild.    Take an RPG, a point and click adventure, and a strategy game, and blend them all together with a stack of Guy Richie DVDs, and-- DON'T DRINK THAT, are you loving crazy?? It's a metaphor. Holy poo poo. Okay, this is Sunday Gold, that's what I was trying to say. gently caress. Sunday Gold combines the fun of a revenge heist with some absolutely bonkers story elements (fleshy cybernetic dog fighting plays a major role), amusingly bad British accents, and a gameplay hybrid that defines "greater than the sum of its parts". No one aspect of the gameplay shines, but they balance each other out and keep things interesting the whole way. Whether in or out of combat, every action consumes AP, and ending a turn outside of combat increases the awareness level of security in the building, which affects the percentage chance that an enemy encounter happens between rounds. This in theory could mean punishing wanting to explore and interact with everything like a true adventure gamer, but the reality is that combat is inevitable and you can just play it by ear. If something seems important you should go ahead and interact with it. Like any adventure game there are puzzles to solve, items to pick up (some of which are needed for progression, some of which is gear, some of which are healing/support items) and sardonic examinations of hotspots, although unfortunately the characters don't react all that differently when on their own, so that's a wasted opportunity there. The game has panache for days, with a mix of stylized 3D models and hand-painted backgrounds. The combat is a little repetitive but is interesting when the composure effect factors in (the lower a character's composure, the less time you have to give them a command before they panic). Plus I'm a sucker for battle systems that involve careful banking and usage of action points. The bosses had way too much health when I played, but this has apparently been patched and rebalanced. It's a bit of a messy game, but I applaud it for giving such a wild mix of ideas a try.    What a feast for me this year, the retro shooter fan! And there's more to come. But let's talk about Fashion Police Squad, a game with its tongue firmly in its cheek but with gameplay that backs up the humor. As a fashion cop your job is to stop all of the tourists and businesspeople running around in horrific duds by literally shooting style onto them with your weapons, from whipping people's pants up, to stitching people's poorly tailored suits with a sewing gun, and other clever ideas. Each enemy requires a specific type of weapon to cure their fashion illness, so you have to constantly be switching weapons and hopping around, keeping you on your toes and invested in the combat. Your whip also can be used to wrap around poles and launch you through the air, which allows for some additional platforming challenges to be integrated into the level design. The theming is great and the game is willing to mix things up constantly, from a car chase level to a skateboarding sequence. The movement and level design call Wolfenstein to mind but in proper 3D and with the ability to get up and around with jumping and whipping. At launch, I commented on how Fashion Police Squad was notable alone for being a fully finished project instead of yet another Early Access retro shooter, but even putting that snide remark to the side, I think that the combination of silly setting, fun weaponry, and interesting (enough) levels makes for a highly entertaining game in its own right. In a year that had several notable shooters, FPS stands out for its sheer creativity.   gently caress I love Taiji. Taiji is an open world puzzler similar to The Witness, but without any of the pretention, and purely about the puzzle solving. It utilizes a grid format for inputting solutions, each area often starting out off with some sort of environmental clue or a brand new symbol, and expects you to decipher its ruleset yourself, with no help or handholding. I greatly appreciate this trust in the player, because I was able to complete the entire game without a guide (someday, I'll be smart enough to do the post-game), and anything that isn't provided for you can be divined with a little deduction (and since the game is non-linear, you can go always elsewhere if you can't figure a puzzle out). The world design is extremely well thought out, and this even plays into the previously mentioned post-game, which asks you to study the environment even further to discover hidden puzzles that have been designed INTO the world itself. It owes to the well-designed pixel art that you completely overlook this all until told to look deeper, and then, BAM, it's staring you right in the face. Every year I find at least one stellar puzzle game to crack my top 20 and Taiji was an easy choice this year. It takes a concept and explores it to its fullest, and it lets the player make the discoveries themselves. I can't ask for much more.   A charming all-ages game that could easily make a companion game to Stray, Spirit & the Mouse places you in CHARGE (heheheheeeeehhhh) of a mouse that has developed electrical powers after getting zapped by lightning and stealing the powers of an elemental guardian. He's then tasked with helping the people around the town in order to restore the guardian's power. The platforming is similar to Stray, with contextual jumping, but here it fits a lot better because you're a tiny mouse that is not jumping so much as climbing, and everything you climb is, well, looming right in front of you (for me, in Stray, it kind of annoyed me how some things just couldn't be jumped to, or that I had to be in a certain place for a jump to become possible). You also can travel through power lines and eventually get a teleport ability to warp through fences. This game is charming as hell, with a localization and character animations that have a Nintendo-level of polish to them. It's also fun to run around collecting the many lightbulbs scattered around, which unlock additional bonuses like fast travel. Nothing in the game is too challenging, which makes it suitable for kids to play. And it's also just 5-6 hours in length, so it won't trap you for too long. A perfect little family game.   A lot has been said about Tunic throughout the year, from its wonderful aesthetic, to its fun micro and macro puzzles, to its bizarrely tough difficulty. If I'm being honest, just in terms of sheer fun, I actually do think that its direct competitor on the market (Death's Door) is better, which is why Tunic does not rank as high as that game did last year. But that doesn't make Tunic any less special (a word I'll use a lot for these top-of-the-list titles). Finding player manual pages throughout the world is probably the most unique and interesting mechanic of any game this year outside of Nobody Saves the World's class system. It's a brilliant way of conveying exactly what information the player needs at the time, and each new page is a fun discovery... it might teach you a mechanic you didn't know about, it might give you a map to a location, or it might completely alter your understanding of the game. The gameplay itself is, like Death's Door, an intersection of Zelda and Dark Souls, with enemies punishing you for massive damage, healing potions that refill at a checkpoint (along with respawning enemies), big boss setpieces, large maps with many routes and shortcuts to unlock, and Zelda style upgrades that allow you to reach new areas. Where the game shines is its puzzle design, which calls to mind the indie classic Fez, with all sorts of cryptic rooms and patterns to study. There's some genius stuff hidden in plain sight, like a puzzle involving a wind chime that requires you to turn the music down in order to leave just the environmental ambience, in order to get the hidden 'instructions'. While Death's Door was the more exciting and entertaining game, Tunic is the more insightful and thought provoking game. It's the kind of experience you can have with a friend or roommate as you solve all the mysteries of the world and go for that true ending. It's still an easy recommend for me. And that'll do it for part 2 of my list! Part 3 is the one that counts! I'll see you next time! The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 04:52
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The 7th Guest posted:Hey y'all, here is pt 2 of my list! There will be... a third part. Holy poo poo. I'm in awe and also jealous that you got to play so many games.
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Dec 31, 2022 05:01
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Barreft posted:Can you make it that the 7 great runes drop from any bosses at all? Even some random catacomb one? If that's the case I know what I'm doing tomorrow, that's a huge boost to make me explore everywhere all over again i havnt done it myslef yet but you can customise it how you would like it. so you can have it use the basic key item locations (the medallions, raya lucaria key etc), the main bosses, golden trees and churches, merchants, all mini/world bosses, and talisman locations and pick any combination of them you want and the great runes go into this pool as an important item alongside the others. same with the enemies, so you can have only the bosses randomized, or have full chaos with anything anywhere, or even just have every enemy be the final boss if you really want lol u can also optionally have vague area hints purchasable from merchants
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Dec 31, 2022 05:32
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My Games of 2022 Bad Games 1) Far Cry 6 (PS5) I had not played a Far Cry game since Far Cry 3, but decided to give this game a try since I was able to get it for cheap. I loved Far Cry 2's gameplay, and Far Cry 3 really nailed the formula that would become indicative of Ubisoft's open world formula for the whole series, as well as many of their other games. Not only is that formula worn out by now, but Far Cry 6 is just a bad, unfun game. There are many elements that make this game bad, but its biggest crime is just not being fun. I quit after a few hours of gameplay, far enough in to know that I would not enjoy playing further. 2) Tribes of Midgard (PS5) As a PS+ game early in the year, I gave it a try with some goons. I enjoyed the concept of defending against hordes of enemies that get increasingly difficult, while you explore a map and build up your base. However, the combat is janky, unrewarding, and relatively non-skill based. We gave up on this game after a few tries at enjoying it. I truly wish that I had enjoyed it more. 3) Vigor (PS5) This game was on my top 10 list last year, I believe. Despite playing a decent chunk of hours in 2021, this game is not well made or fun. It's trying to go for a Tarkov-style extraction shooter, but ultimately doesn't have the gameplay, features, or player base to be successful. It's funny to joke about reinstalling and replaying this game, but otherwise does not still come up in conversation with gaming buddies. Did not make the Top Games List 1) Ace Combat 7 (PS5) I played one of the original Ace Combat games a lot on the Xbox 360 when visiting a cousin, but never owned one of the games myself. I enjoyed the concept and the game looks beautiful, but for some reason it just did not grab my attention. 2) Deathloop (PS5) This game is lucky it's not on my "Bad Games" list. For how much attention it got in 2021, Deathloop has way too many issues to be considered good in my book. The AI is bad, the story relatively uninteresting, and the gameplay uninspiring. What I was hoping for was a combination of a timeloop game with the modern Hitman games, wherein you can get creative with your killings but perhaps need to get certain elements correct to end the timeloop. Instead, there's only one 'correct' way to end the game and most of the changes that happen due to your choices earlier in the day just take place behind the scenes between map loads. The PVP invader element was a good idea, but 1) ultimately not good enough to save the game and 2) terrible for any new players, who will just be invaded by other players with much better weapons and powers. 3) Chivalry II (PS5) I think this was on my game list last year. The new maps and addition of horses this year were not great additions. Certainly was not enough to keep me playing the game further. 4) Gang Beasts (PS5) Despite being a fun, hilarious couch co-op or online fighter, this game suffers from performing horribly. Certain maps will literally run at just a few FPS. 5) Fall Guys (PS5) EPIC games ownership of Fall Guys has improved the game overall, with some good expansions and optimization of servers. I just didn't play this game enough in 2022 to really add it to the list. 6) Hot Wheels Unleashed (PS5) I did not play this game enough to add it to the bad games list, but it's really not a great game. The maps look like there's opportunity to interact with the rooms you're in, but instead you're almost 100% racing only on the hot wheels tracks, and the rooms are merely back drops. Speed is the most important trait by far, so cars that excel at other areas of racing at the expense of speed end up losing easily to the faster cars. The AI difficulty ranges from "5 year old barely reaching the gas pedal" to "professional drivers who never make a single mistake and perfectly optimize their boosting", with little in between. Online races have bad connection to the servers. Top Games 1) Hunt Showdown (PS5) I love almost everything about this game - the late-1800s setting in the swamps of Louisiana - the gun play with time-specific rifles, shotguns, and revolvers that forces you to be near-perfect with your aim, as missing means whole seconds before your next shot - the minimization of looting in an extraction shooter, so you can focus on the fun aspects of the genre - the mix of PVE and PVP, with generally PVE being utilized to bring teams together and create PVP opportunities - the focus on leveling up your hunter giving you additional traits that are helpful, but not game breaking, with death in a round resulting in permanent loss of that hunter - the balance of weapons so that cheap or expensive, anyone has a chance of dying to a headshot from any gun at almost any point. This game is not without its issues, including glitches, disjointed attention from the devs on monetization rather than in-game improvements, and the feeling sometimes that the AI are just a hindrance in the middle of PVP. However, this game is one that I never realized I would love so much. I hope that a sequel is made that improves on the formula. 2) Horizon Forbidden West (PS5) Forbidden West's predecessor was my number 1 game of 2021, resulting in me pre-ordering FW. While most of you all were hyping up some other game that released at the same time, I couldn't wait for FW. Largely, this game delivers on the hype I had for it. At its best, FW continues and even improves in many ways on the awesome robo-dino fights from ZD while telling a story that is still intriguing (though, admittedly, impossible to match the highs of the story from ZD). The side quests are largely still fun, and a lot of interaction with others is improved upon. That being said, FW has a lot of issues, most of which can be summarized as "bloat." The bloat of FW includes: 1) too many weapon choices within the same weapon type, rather than utilizing a system that allows you to choose ammo types that you want while upgrading or leveling up a certain bow. It sucks to be stuck using the ammo types that a certain bow has, especially if you need that bow for one ammo type but won't ever use the other two ammo types for that specific bow. 2) too many things to do around the map, such as collectibles and other activities. At the end of the day, you don't have to do many of these to enjoy and complete the game, but it's seriously unnecessary how many of them there are to do, and sometimes they detract from what could have been spent on more "value added" activities. The worst offender is probably the Horizon board game, which is so horribly designed and broken that I don't know how it was kept in the game. 3) General map size - although this game is gorgeous, a lot of the map is just unnecessary and underutilized. Again, many of the collectibles don't add enough to make them "fun" to get, so parts of the map just aren't worth exploring if you aren't going for those. Outside of bloat, this game still suffers from other issues such as human combat being terribly unfun, despite their attempts at improvements over HZD's human combat system. Despite my complaints, HFW is still a fantastic game overall. 100% recommend and I cannot wait for the third installment (in 5 years). 3) No Man's Sky (PS5) I got this on-sale for $5 last year, and finally got around to playing this year. I think I played 60-70 hours and enjoyed my time within it. The development team has truly redeemed themselves with added content from the time of release a few years ago. There is an incredible amount to do in NMS that makes it worth revisiting for those who played it around release and is worth picking up for those who are interested in the genre and find a good deal. Unfortunately, though there is lots of content, the depth of all of it is very shallow. It's incredibly easy to make a poo poo ton of money through various means, giving you access to everything fairly quickly (probably a good thing not to gatekeep content too much). But it also means experiencing a lot of the game quickly, which allows you to realize just how little there really is to each element of the game. 4) Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (2022) (PS5) MW (2019) was my first COD game since MWII (2009) and Black Ops (2010), and I'm really glad I got back into these games. MWII (2022) takes the success of MW2019 and adds to it with 1) improvements to Warzone and 2) the addition of DMZ. Otherwise, this is another COD game without any surprises, resulting in a mediocre single player campaign and multiplayer rife with the typical spawn issues. Still love the action of COD, though, and it's still better than most other action shooters. 5) Golf Story (Switch) I have yet to finish this game, but have played enough to include it on my list. Even if you don't like golf, this is a really fun game with a cute story. 6) It Takes Two (PS5) My wife and I have almost completed this game, and I really love it. It's amazing for a game of this type how many different mini-games they included and how fun going through the story and gameplay really is. Amazing creation! 7) FIFA 22 (PS5) Not much to say about this game. I love soccer and I love FIFA, despite it being mostly the same every year, including glitches that have been in the game for more than 5 years. I refuse to play online, though, which probably saves me from additional headache. 8) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1-2 (PS5) My neighborhood friends and I used to play the new TH games each year when released. Seeing the original two get a remaster and have them capture that original joy is awesome. 9) Fortnite (PS5) I played a lot of Fortnite on PC when it's BR was first getting super popular, and had to stop playing when the community got way too good at building. What made this game a unique BR (building) ultimately ruined it for me as most encounters involved dancing around a bunch of try hards who built giant towers within seconds of running into another player. Fortnite's no-build mode fixes that issue, and reveals that underneath the building that popularized Fortnite is still a competent, fun shooter that has a decent amount of replayability if you aren't worn out by BRs yet. Summary of rankings 1) Hunt Showdown 2) Horizon Forbidden West 3) No Man's Sky 4) COD MWII (2022) 5) Golf Story 6) It Takes Two 7) FIFA 22 8) THPS 1-2 9) Fortnite
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Dec 31, 2022 05:33
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I would like to thank this thread for the following:
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Dec 31, 2022 06:30
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Question for all the people putting Nirvana Initiative on their lists, how do you all think it compares to the original AI? There was something about Somnium Files that I deeply didn't like, so I only finished one path of it, but with NI putting up such a good showing has me thinking I need to give it another shot.
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Dec 31, 2022 06:51
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VideoGames posted:the Final Fantasy franchise is my favourite franchise of all time Folks, we got him 
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Dec 31, 2022 07:06
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Lethrom posted:Question for all the people putting Nirvana Initiative on their lists, how do you all think it compares to the original AI? It's pretty much universally agreed that the first one is much better.
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Dec 31, 2022 07:26
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a second 7th guest post has hit the thread 👀
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Dec 31, 2022 07:34
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So many great lists
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Dec 31, 2022 07:35
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  10. Warhammer 40,000 Darktide. This one was a surprise. I did not have any expectations for Darktide as this game's developer is chaos personified, but it turns out Fatshark can still make a game with some of the best first-person melee out there that's a lot of fun to play with friends. And half of the game isn't even implemented yet, so maybe I can include the other half on next year's list too!   9. Souldiers. I hope I can have at least one metroidvania like this on my top 10 every year. Souldiers was simply a solid full-length metroidvania with a lot of very high quality pixel art. Nothing more, nothing less. I think this one flew under the radar a bit and there are definitely some reasons it's not an alltimer, but I'm glad I heard about it.   8. The Pathless. I don't have much to say about this one. It was very beautiful and I liked the bird-rubbing minigame.   7. We Were Here Forever. The We Were Here series is still an experience it's hard to get anywhere else. As games that require two players with puzzles that are designed to test your communication by giving different tools and information to each player, I had a lot of fun working through the latest entry with my brother. This one is special for getting me to badly imitate monster noises over the mic.   6. Hunt Showdown. This was my #1 game from last year and still the most compelling competitive game I've ever touched. There's still nothing else like Hunt as all the pretenders to the throne have chosen to copy worse games instead of this. Unfortunately a serious drop in quality control from the game's developer means I simply can't rank it as highly anymore, but at the end of the day, there's a lot to be said for the fact that after 700 hours I've still never seen the same match of Hunt twice. Hunt is never boring.   5. Tunic. Some of most special puzzle solving and sense of discovery I've ever experienced. I love games that recontextualize things you've already seen as you gather more information, and I think this is the only game to get me to work out a puzzle solution on physical paper where the process was actually satisfying. Anyone who's finished this game knows the one.  to everyone who solved it legit.  4. Rune Factory 5. I spent way longer on this than I ever expected to, because as questionably-finished as it is, rune factory has an incredibly compelling web of complex farm mechanics that I strongly want to see applied to other games. This is definitely the only game I've played where I've had a treasure chest mimic and a giant spider do farm chores for me as I do mad scientist chemistry to grow terrifying ultra crops.   3. Monster Hunter Rise. This continues to be a fantastic series without competition. Capcom continued to make this smoother to play and less frustrating but without losing any of the depth that makes it rewarding to improve at. Just one of those games where really cool moments happen all the time. Also the cats are still really good.   2. HARVESTELLA. Waited a long time to put this list together and this game is the culprit, because I wanted to finish it first and it just keeps climbing higher and higher on this list the longer I stay with it. At this point I still haven't managed to finish it yet, but after 70 hours of the game only getting better and better, I'm comfy putting it here. All the mechanics mesh together in a compelling way even if they're individually simple, and balancing your time/stamina/money to get the most out of each day is just a very satisfying process with a lot of different avenues of progression to keep you busy. A+ soundtrack, professional 2D art, writing with more depth and personality than it first lets on, and a story that goes straight off the rails in ways that weren't advertised at all make this one of the most unexpectedly memorable games I've played this year.   1. Elden Ring. It's hard to express a single original thought about this game at this point. I'm just very, very glad I could experience this and I will never forget its world. Summary 10. Warhammer 40,000 Darktide 9. Souldiers 8. The Pathless 7. We Were Here Forever 6. Hunt Showdown 5. Tunic 4. Rune Factory 5 3. Monster Hunter Rise 2. HARVESTELLA 1. Elden Ring
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Dec 31, 2022 07:56
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the pathless is sick as hell, always good to see it
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Dec 31, 2022 08:42
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Rarity posted:Folks, we got him Owned.  My best FFfriend's VideoGame.
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Dec 31, 2022 09:09
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Just under 24 hours left to get your lists in people! 
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Dec 31, 2022 09:43
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Can't remember if I played it this year but disco Elysium if I did otherwise elden ring which I didn't finish it probably rimworld that I played the most. I like taking drugs and playing it on easy to chill out
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Dec 31, 2022 09:48
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I've never been able to game while high but I keep trying and one day I'm going to find the right game. I should try Vampire Survivors...
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Dec 31, 2022 09:52
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6. Arknights - This is already my third year of playing this stylish gacha game and it has only gotten better during that time, with a steady stream of interesting new events, characters, mechanics and even the addition of a roguelike mode keeping things from getting stale. I've put this game down many times, but so far I've always come back, because ultimately it's just a very engaging and fun experience. This is what all "games as a service" should aspire to be. 5. Suzerain - This politics-sim may look like a grand strategy map game at first glance, but ultimately it's a much more focused narrative CYOA type thing, and that's the type of game I happen to enjoy the most. It puts you in the role of president of Sordland, a nation in the midst of a democratic transition from a Franco-style dictatorship, and has you navigating a tense battle between the conservative elements of the ruling party/deep state, liberalising reformers, and the formerly repressed communist, fascist and ethnic minority groups rising up. All this set in the backdrop of a cold-war between superpowers and the imperialist ambitions of your aggressive neighboring regional power. It's fascinating stuff, I enjoyed it a lot. My only major criticism is that while the ironman-style "no reloading past decision ever" nature of the game helps heighten the tension on a first playthrough, it makes replaying the game to find all the many possible paths a pain, which is a shame. I think some sort of flowchart or checkpoint based system unlocked on New Game+ would enhance the lasting appeal of the game massively. 4. AI Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative - The latest of Uchikoshi's Wild Rides, with all the qualities, positive and negative, that implies. Ultimately, I liked the first AI game better, but the somniums themselves here are definitely a step above and the overall experience delivered on all my expectations, so I don't really have any reason to complain. 3. Life and Suffering of Sir Brante - An incredible stats-based CYOA journey through the life of a potentially influential figure in a revolt against an incredibly rigid fantasy caste-based feudalist theocracy. The amount of options and mutually exclusive narrative events here is staggering. The second half of the game is literally entirely different depending on which of the three major paths you are on, and each one of those paths has a lot of outcomes and variation in how things could turn out. I have played this game through four times and there's still a lot of content and events I have't even seen! All this with solid writing, immaculate worldbuilding and engaging character relationships. Anyone with even the slightest interest in CYOA-style experiences should check this out. 2. Triangle Strategy - I have never played Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre or any other SRPG of that ilk, but this game proved to be and absolute joy. Each unit brings a unique skillset to the battlefield. The story branches frequently, with unique maps and characters to be experienced in each branch. The plot is relatively grounded yet engaging. The unique party-vote mechanic is solid and brings a lot of narrative and mechanical heft to what would otherwise be a set of fairly straightforward choices. Most of all, the game itself feels very satisfying to play - successfully landing a follow-up back-attack or driving the enemy into a corner feels incredible, especially with the game being reasonably challenging. This is good stuff. 1. Citizen Sleeper - Played through it based on the many recommendations in this thread and it instantly shot up to the top of the list. The game mechanics, writing, art and sparse yet effective use of music combine to create a truly sublime atmospheric narrative experience about the crushing nature of capitalism and the great power of positive interpersonal relationships and communities to overcome it. It's great stuff. The last hour of the game did feel a bit too tension free, I'll admit, but that also slots into the theme - now that you're established and got some breathing room, you can freely pour your efforts into helping out others and reap the rewards from that. A truly great game. AFancyQuestionMark fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 09:56
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Stux posted:i havnt done it myslef yet but you can customise it how you would like it. so you can have it use the basic key item locations (the medallions, raya lucaria key etc), the main bosses, golden trees and churches, merchants, all mini/world bosses, and talisman locations and pick any combination of them you want and the great runes go into this pool as an important item alongside the others. same with the enemies, so you can have only the bosses randomized, or have full chaos with anything anywhere, or even just have every enemy be the final boss if you really want lol u can also optionally have vague area hints purchasable from merchants poo poo. that sounds too good not to put another 100 hours into
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Dec 31, 2022 10:14
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i'm also real hype for sifu to escape epic jail so i can finally play it.
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Dec 31, 2022 10:14
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We’ve come to the end of another gaming year and sadly for me 2022 was not a particularly great year for me on that front for a number of reasons. I’ve got a new job that I have to actually take seriously, my project to read the entire Marvel universe hit into major gear as I reached the 60s, VG played a ton of my favourite games on stream that I had to watch and I also went through multiple mental health breakdowns each of which killed my motivation to game for a period. Then even when I did get round to gaming most of my play time was sucked by two games in particular. So the games I bring to you today are not the best games I could have played this year but what they are is the best games I did play this year and for that I am thankful. 10. MORTAL KOMBAT VS. DC UNIVERSE (WARNER BROS, 2008) “I’ll take the ninja, you take the clown” I really wasn’t expecting anything from this one at all. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about it and the only reason I only put in on my list of games to play was cause I wanted to get a taste for the Mortal Kombat franchise and cause I could pick it up for a couple of quid. Now I don’t particularly consider myself an expert when it comes to fighting games. My collective experience can summarised as tons of Street Fighter II as a kid, the odd bit of button mashing through Tekken 3 in youth club and blitzing through Soulcalibur IV last year. I still very much consider myself a novice so the simple special attacks and combos that this game provided went down a treat. It was easy to go darting across the screen as the Flash or disappearing into shadows as Scorpion. The story mode’s elastic difficulty was also highly welcome and the story itself which while being nothing more than a bunch of action figures being smashed together still felt revolutionary for the genre in the way it was presented. I also liked that the addition of the DC characters, especially the villains, went a long way to balance the po-faced seriousness of Earthrealm. It’s hard to hate a video game when the likes of the Joker and Catwoman are having so much fun just existing within it. I never did pull off a fatality though   9. CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR (TREYARCH, 2008) “Perhaps heroes need not question their actions” I mean, it’s more Call of Duty. You can’t really go wrong with that, can you? (Or at least not in 2008 where I still spend the majority of my gaming). World at War faced a particularly tough challenge in needing to mine inspiration from a time period that had already been done to death in the franchise’s original three instalments yet the game still finds new ideas by heading to the Pacific theatre where treetop snipers and banzai troopers pose unique threats. What really got me however was the fact that the game refused to shy away from the repugnance of war – a far cry from the glorified violence the franchise has since descended into. The Russian chapters of the campaign are particularly grisly. At the start the protagonist awakens in a pile of bodies and things only get worse from there. As the Russians assault Berlin defenceless soldiers are slaughtered en masse while in the Pacific the use of flamethrowers and napalm is a horrifying addition to the series. It’s the signature of a different era, a time where media was still allowed to have something to say. Away from the campaign this game is also much remembered for introducing the beloved Zombie mode to the franchise, a unique twist of gameplay that I could easily see myself getting lost in if I didn’t have a gazillion other titles lined up. The idea of Call of Duty innovating on the formula has long since fallen by the wayside but it’s nice to remember that there was a time where the series earned the namepower that it has been coasting on for the last decade.  8. TALISMAN: DIGITAL EDITION (NOMAD, 2014) “If a 1, 2 or 3 is rolled the spell has no effect” Time to address the weirdest entry on my list this year. It’s a safe bet that if I’d managed a full year of gaming it would have been knocked out of my top 10 but life doesn’t always go the way you expect so here it is. A digital version of a board game originally designed in the 1980s, the goal of Talisman is to work your character across the land as you defeat enemies, build your stats and find useful items until you have the power to face the stronger challenges in the centre of the board all while other characters do the same. Once you reach the middle you have access to a nuke that you can use to wipe out your enemies and claim victory. It all sounds very simple but what makes things difficult is the sheer amount of bullshit the game can throw your way. One unlucky dice roll or card flip can negate all your stat growth, steal your key piece of equipment or leave you overstretched while your enemies knock on your door. For all of Talisman’s simplicity compared to those of a more modern ilk a game still manages to be racked with tension. In my first playthrough I made a brave push for the centre early, lucked through with minimal resources and then had to watch as everyone else went apeshit trying to stop me. My eventual victory came down to one roll, the tightest of margins between triumph and defeat. For all that this is a low-budget adaptation of an outdated board game it still managed to provide me with the ultimate moment of tension. Nothing else I’ve played this year has come close to the nerves as I rolled that final dice and the elation as I realised I’d won and for that reason alone Talisman has earned its spot in my list.  7. LEFT 4 DEAD (VALVE, 2008) “We just crossed the street. Let’s not throw a party till we’re out of the city.” Unfortunately I can’t say that I’ve had the complete Left 4 Dead experience. I played this on an XBox 360 with no online function so I couldn’t do a proper co-op campaign. I missed out on the joys of watching one of your partners go running off by themself while the others stupidly shoot you in the back. (Although when you put it like that…) No, instead I had to be content with playing Left 4 Dead as a single player experience with allies who dutifully wait for you to explore an area, patch you up when you need healing and take down a Tank while you’re running away like a little bitch. On those merits the game still provides a tense action experience that I found at times to be surprisingly terrifying. There were few experiences I had this year that were scarier than slowly creeping through a dark abandoned building and being faced with the rushing onslaught of a horde that was barely visible in the strobe-light of gunfire and then you’re yanked back by a Smoker and a Boomer pukes on you and oh god oh god get them off get them off!! And that’s before I even get started on the Witches. The first time I stumbled upon one I didn’t know what I was seeing so I shot at it and found my blood leaking onto the floor a second later. After that I knew better but even then trying to sneak past them as their haunted wails blast above the soundtrack had me about five second away from stained underwear. With each campaign coming in at the 60 to 90 minute length it’s the perfect fit for a gaming session and again it’s a game I could have played over and over again if there weren’t other demands waiting for me. Shoutout to Bill for becoming my beloved pill dealer.  6. LITTLEBIGPLANET (MEDIA MOLECULE, 2008) “An abstract plane of beautiful wonderment” One of the things about coming to a video game 15 years late is that sometimes major features of the game will no longer exist due to servers being sunsetted. This can be a particular issue for a game like LittleBigPlanet who’s entire USP is built around user created content. Luckily the base game comes with a story mode packed in developed using the toolkit in the game. Its intended purpose is to display the possibilities that can be achieved with some originality and ingenuity however it also acts as a solid platformer in its own right. All the classic platforming staples are here like moving platforms, electrified floors, explosives and more but the developers combine their gimmicks to the point of the refinement, turning every level into a finely tuned machine that at times provides a significant challenge. The controls take a little getting used to but once you have a feel for the game’s floaty momentum it becomes easy to glide around and stop on a dime, something that will be essential if you attend to collect all the items. The Sackgirls are adorable and the fashion game is strong. Even though I wasn’t sharing my experience with others I still found myself regularly updating my character to show off my latest bit of swag. Although some cultural depictions are, er, less than ideal under a modern lens. However for the most part the global traversal theme of the main campaign works well, providing a strong foundation to structure the levels around. The strongest of these are undoubtedly The Wedding, a set of levels inspired by Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos and The Temples, which is based around Hindu culture in a way that feels authentic rather than stereotypical. The Pixar adventure feel is further compounded by the vocal talent of Stephen Fry who’s narration feels like it’s coming right out of a CBeebies show. Yet for all the game’s visual language is speaking to children the challenge level seems very much aimed at adults. Or maybe I’m bad at video games. This could also be easily true.  5. TOMB RAIDER: UNDERWORLD (CRYSTAL DYNAMICS, 2008) “You just don’t know when to die” Up till now my experience with the Tomb Raider franchise has been somewhat of a mixed bag. I got about halfway through the original game before its esoteric level design became too inscrutable for me to keep going. I found Legend to be a fun action game with a decent amount of level variety but it was hampered by its status as a launch title for the generation and its tendency to get carried away with its settings. Later I was excited to get to Anniversary as it had been highly talked up but wound up disappointed by terrible controls and an awful camera. Underworld takes the previous two games in the trilogy and manages to tie them together in a way that pulls the best parts of its predecessors while letting their flaws drop to the wayside to produce what feels to me like the quintessential Lara Croft experience. The thing that impresses me most about Underworld is the way it wraps up a very disparate trilogy with a genuinely compelling narrative that is the dictionary definition of ‘that escalated quickly’. By the end of the game Lara has lived through the destruction of her home, the murder of her best friend, a reunion with her zombie mother and literally prevented the end of the world and she does it all with the same quiet confidence with which she shills Lucozade. It’s a lot for a franchise that’s all about going into caves to find treasure. But the story isn’t why we’re here for a Tomb Raider game. We’re here for the tewmbs and its here that Underworld really delivers. There are a gorgeous collection of levels pulling inspiration from Buddhism, the Incas and Norse mythology among others. However despite all these different ideas the concept of underworld pins everything together which turns the game into more than just a collection of levels. Themes around death, rebirth and the ways we honour those who have passed bring everything together. Of course none of this would mean jack if the game were dull to play. It’s fortunate then that Underworld provides the best gameplay in the trilogy. Gunplay is kept to a minimum with the game strongly focusing on tough platforming challenges. Pathfinding is a challenge without ever becoming incomprehensible and the camera and controls work with the player rather than against them. There is space for a number of memorable set pieces including an escape through Croft Manor as it burns to the ground, scaling the coastside cliffs of Thailand, traversing a broken bridge across giant swinging hammers and the game’s final “boss” which eschews the stereotypical shootout with an epic platforming sequence. Ok yes, Lara will die a lot but that’s just part of the charm. When I think of Tomb Raider this is exactly what I’ve always imagined the series to be.  4. GEARS OF WAR 2 (EPIC, 2008) “They’re sinking cities with a giant worm!” The first entry in the Gears of War series did not land with me at all. For a game that is known for defining gameplay for its generation all it presented to me as was a painfully generic cover shooter with no special mechanical flairs. It wasn’t even meat and potatoes, it was just potatoes. Potatoes wrapped up in a grey-brown sludge celebrating the most toxic alpha frat-bro attitudes garnished with a truly terrible final boss. In fact so generic was the first Gears of War that I played it and Resistance: Fall of Man at around the same time and the two games have melded in my head into one tale of a gruff action man blasting his way through an endless supply of bland disposable aliens. Gears had the Cole Train in it at least, I guess that’s something. All of this preamble is to say that when I got to playing Gears of War 2 my expectations were in the toilet. I figured I’d blast my way through another ten hours of non-eventful campaign and immediately file it away in the pile of video games I forget I even own. Instead I got a story that kicked the adrenaline up to max from the word go and then somehow only got higher from there. It’s like the developers at Epic looked at every stage of the game and said ‘ok, how can we make this more badass?’ and in doing so they’ve dealt with every one of my complaints from the original. While the first game told the predictable tale of mankind against an alien invasion GoW2 rides that setup to the point of ridiculousness. From gunfights on the backs of speeding land cruisers to an underground escape on the back of an alien pterodactyl and yes, cities being sunk by giant worms everything is as balls out as it can get. And while the cover-based shooting remains identical at its core they throw in enough wrinkles to keep things interesting including some genuine innovations such as moving cover. Oh, and they got rid of those bullshit insta-death zones with scores them about ten points right there. But wait, I said that this game deals with all of my complaints from the original and those were more than just the gameplay. So let’s touch on the graphics. The original game set a standard that this generation would come to be mocked for but GoW2 actually expands its visual palette to more than two colours. Sure it’s never going to be Mario but there are some segments with real blue skies and that alone is impressive. As for the story it is at least trying to make an effort this time. The saga of Dom and his wife may have been too melodramatic to land with me but the death of another Carmine legitimately got to me and the delayed arrival of Cole was the highpoint of the game. As for Marcus he’s… ok I guess he’s still a gruff action man but hey I guess they need something to improve on for the third one. All in all Gears of War 2 wants to be big dumb fun and it succeeds at exactly that. Time for my top 3 and man, I have gone back and forth on how to order these so much over the last couple of months. I still don’t know if I’ve got it right.  3. FALLOUT 3 (BETHESDA, 2008) “War… War never changes.” Welcome to the first game this year that sucked up the majority of my playtime this year. But then when you look at the sheer scale of Fallout 3 that can’t really come as a surprise. Bethesda’s update to the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise is an absolute beast of a game, a mammoth offering stuffed to the brim with content with whatever can’t fit inside bolted on to the edges as DLC. Trying to see every single thing there is to discover within the game should not be attempted by any sane person. ...Well, no one ever accused me of having full control of my mental faculties. Yes, when I say that I played Fallout 3 I mean that I have played Fallout 3. I have scaled every peak of the Capital Wasteland and scoured my way through every Metro tunnel. But how could I not when every corner of the landscape calls with possibility and the wonder of finding something new. Normally when I game I do it in one hour stints, that’s about as much time as I can commit before my brain starts seeking alternate stimulation. That wasn’t the case with Fallout 3. I would boot up my 360 and play for hours, from the moment I got home from work to the moment I was ready for bed. This devotion would be rewarded every time I stumbled upon a secluded refuge of survivors being menaced by vampires, every time I met a living tree desperate to end his own miserable existence, every time I saved a dog from being assaulted by scavengers (relatives of VideoGames I assume). Moments like these were a common occurrence in the Wasteland which leads me to what I believe is the game’s greatest strength: its incidental storytelling. Yes the game has a main story about the attempts to purify the Wasteland’s water and it’s very competently told but that’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m referring to here are the stories that you don’t see, the stories that already happened leaving you to piece them together from whatever scraps of knowledge you can find. Nowhere is this better displayed than in the various Vaults dotted around the D.C. area. In one you find the remnants of the world’s best musicians, the inhabitants annihilated after being driven murderously insane by a white noise experiment. In another you do find a survivor. You find him dozens of times in fact for he is the result of risky cloning procedures. Towards the end of the game in a vault that is tied to the main plot you learn that the source of the Super Mutants causing humanity so many problems is – you guessed it – illegal human experimentation in the name of progress. So many words already written and I’ve not even touched on the gameplay which is a fun update to the Elder Scrolls formula that does a great job of moulding RPG progression onto an FPS framework. It means that skill will always make things easier but those gamers less able to git gud they can still achieve their goals by beefing themselves up. I’ve also not mentioned the jaunty 1950s tunes that you can bop along to as you traverse the Wasteland. ‘I’m a mighty, mighty man, I’m young and I’m in my prime!’ still runs through my head on a regular basis. I’ve also not discussed the compass which so helpfully points out landmarks on the horizon (hmm, perhaps Elden Ring could have had one of these). I’ve also not touched on the fabulous Point Lookout and The Pitt expansions which provide hours and hours more content in entirely new environments while playing with the game’s mechanics in unique ways. Fallout 3 would be my GOTY in a heartbeat if not one simple problem, I played it too much. Like every Bethesda game the progression scale can’t match up to the scope of the game meaning that I spent the back half as an overpowered monster under zero threat of death. And sure, it was still fun to see everything but losing that feeling of growth dampened things a touch. I’ve only got myself to blame.  2. FINAL FANTASY XIV: A REALM REBORN (SQUAREENIX, 2013) “May she ever walk in the light of the Crystal” So close. It was so loving close. I spent most of the last few months telling myself I wasn’t going to put FF14 as my GOTY. Don’t get me wrong, I abso-loving-lutely love this game with every fibre of my being but I didn’t feel like I had the right to put it as my GOTY. Let me explain. This was the other game that sucked up most of my playtime this year because y’know, MMOs. Once I dived into Eorzea I wanted to spend every waking moment there and that’s what I did for about 6 weeks. The only reason I bounced off it was my sub was due just before payday and I was broke. The only reason I stayed bounced off it was because I only had 4 games on my GOTY list at that point and I needed to make sure I’d played enough games for a full coverage. So while I adored every single moment I spent with this game I don’t feel like I played enough of it to justify putting it in the top spot. Hell, I didn’t even finish the 2.0 MSQ before I moved on. How can I say a game is my GOTY when I have barely scratched the surface of what it is offering? Yesterday I said gently caress all that. As noted I really struggled to rank my top 3 this year. There were qualities in each of Fallout 3, FF14 and my actual #1 that all stood out to me as my favourite gaming experiences of the year but each game also had arguments against it as well. For the first time since starting these threads I found myself in a position where I didn’t have a clear #1 choice. But looking at it yesterday I realised the only reason FF14 wasn’t my #1 game was that I was refusing to put it as my #1 game. It was a dumb arbitrary rule of my own creation that didn’t need to exist so I removed it and decided FF14 was my GOTY. Yet here it is at #2. Yeah, I’m fickle like that. For reals though my actual #1 talked itself back into contention as I was writing it up but that’s a story for later. Right now let’s talk about Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (and best believe this is a vote for A Realm Reborn specifically and not Endwalker which I have zero knowledge or understanding of). I’ve heard goons talking up this MMO in these threads for the last 5 years and everything they’ve said has got me so excited. The Final Fantasy franchise is my favourite franchise of all time, I love the vast expansive worlds of MMORPGs and the ability to play virtually the whole thing solo fit my preference for single-player gaming. I was so, so ready to play this game but I knew it wasn’t going to happen for a long time. I have a system, everyone knows that by now. I have a list. I cannot break the sanctity of the list. ...Oops. I don’t even know what made me do it, what wild and reckless streak made me download the free trial. Maybe it was the catgirls. I was just going to dip my toe in, I said. I was just going to take a peak. Yeah, so much for that. One step into Eorzea and I was hooked. Twenty-minute play sessions became forty-minute sessions became an hour became an evening. I had been bitten by the MMO bug and it wasn’t letting go. The thing about FF14 is even by MMO standards there is so much to do. There’s the main storyline, there’s over a dozen combat classes to level plus crafting and gathering, there’s Triple Triad, there’s chocobo racing, there’s monster hunts, there’s dungeons, there’s a roguelike, there’s PVP, there’s Barbie fashion dressup, there’s hundreds of hours of content and I want to do it all. Now I don’t want to write too much about this game because I need to save words for next year and also every year after so instead I’m going to focus on the storytelling. What I love about this game is that I spent so much time in the world that the story feels like a sweeping epic. I know most players rush their way through the main story but that just seems wrong. Every plot beat hits so much harder when you have time to process and reflect on them. Every character’s presence feels bigger and more important because they’ve been part of your life for longer. Just before I dipped out the Empire invaded the Walking Sands and captured or killed all my friends. This felt like a violation. And all because I’d known this place as sanctuary for weeks. It’s like playing a TV show or a book series and as someone who values scope it’s directly made to appeal to me. I will return to this story in 2023 and I cannot wait to list this game again next year. So Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is my #2 GOTY in 2022. But as I said it was beaten out at the last possible moment by a game that talked itself back into contention as I was doing its write-up. What game could possibly beat the depth of FF14? What game could possibly have grabbed my imagination more? Let’s find out…  1. MIRROR’S EDGE (DICE, 2008) “The flow is what keeps us running” Imagine if you will a world in which control of society has been handed over to corporations whose only concern is profit. A world where civil dissent is stamped out with brutal authority. A world where corruption reigns in the halls of power. A world where the underclass are pushed into the margins, living on the fringes in a constant war with law and order. This world exists my friends, and in this world I played Mirror’s Edge. Ok so leaving my trite opening aside the first thing I noticed about this game when I started playing was how incredibly relevant it still felt to play. This game is almost fifteen years old and despite its super-sleek and stripped down neo-futurist aesthetic the world of Mirror’s Edge feels exactly the same as the world we live in today. DICE have done an eerily accurate job at predicting the path of the 21st century to the point that it takes zero effort to picture Faith or someone like her running across my own rooftop on the way to their next job. Leaving Faith’s home city unnamed was a masterstroke because it allows the player to project their own world onto her experience. It’s in this world – your world – that Mirror’s Edge tells its story. At its heart it is typical cyberpunk fare, the tale of a brave and relentless underdog striking back against the system that has done them so wrong. Specifically this is the story of Faith, a runner who uses her parkour skills to act as courier and messenger to those in respectable society for all their non-respectable needs. When Faith’s sister, a law-enforcement officer, is found accused of murdering a promising mayoral candidate it’s up to Faith to use those same parkour skills to climb, slide and race through the city as she unravels the web of conspiracies and lies that have led here. Along the way there is betrayal and there is loss; like any good cyberpunk the absolute worst of humanity is on display. But there is hope too, and compassion and aid from unlikely sources. Yes, the story of Mirror’s Edge isn’t doing anything new but it delivers its beats well enough and there is one thing that makes it stand out: its main protagonist. Faith is a character a decade ahead of her time. She’s a female protagonist for a start and even that is a rare commodity for the 00s. Beyond that she is refreshingly unsexualised. At the top of my list I talked about Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, a game where Wonder Woman’s breasts are as big as her head and Catwoman fights in high heels. Other featured games of the year include Metal Gear Solid 4 where the female bosses can be stripped of their armor and forced to pose for camera shots, Grand Theft Auto IV with its legion of disposable strippers and the also mentioned Gears of War 2 where the only women included are either hidden away on a helicopter all game or instantly murdered as an act mercy. Faith was the hero I needed this year, a hero who showed that strength and courage are not inherently masculine traits. All of that is great, obviously, but none of that is why Mirror’s Edge makes my list. No, the number one reason this game is here, the absolute best part of this experience, the main takeaway that I will remember year after year is the gameplay. And honestly? It’s pretty rare that I will put gameplay ahead of story in my consideration but the core loop of Mirror’s Edge it’s… it’s just unmatched. I’ve literally never played anything like it. Parkour is such an obvious gameplay hook and while it could be argued that a first-person perspective complicates platforming and makes for awkward pathfinding I would rebut that a first-person perspective is the only way to do parkour. Because when you’re racing from building to building, jumping up scaffolding and clinging to pipes and bouncing off walls and trying to spot your next direction all in the blink of an eye the sense of speed is so visceral and so immediate that it can’t be beat. No, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes it can be complicated, sometimes it can be frustrating, sometimes I had to look up videos for how to proceed but when it hits it loving hits. As Faith says the flow is what keeps us running and at its best Mirror’s Edge put me into that flow state, into a place where I didn’t need to think about where I was going or how I was getting there. I just got there, purely directed by instinct. Every year when doing these lists I say that I love games that make me feel. This year no feeling for me was bigger than the clarity of the flow and that’s why Mirror’s Edge is my Game of the Year for 2022. Also Still Alive is an all-time banger and when that piano hits in as the camera sweeps over the city in the closing cinematic… gently caress me it’s beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUXyoyuJZ8Y So that's my 2022. Here's hoping I manage to get more gaming in in 2023. Thanks to everyone who's participating in this thread, this is one of the major highlights of my Xmas holiday
Rarity fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 10:25
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So, this year was a bit different for me in that this was the first year of Sony's new and improved PS Plus, with me deciding to upgrade to the Extra tier. As a PS4-only haver, this has vastly expanded my gaming by allowing to catch up on titles that I missed out on years ago, so this list is going to be a bit longer and more of a mish-mash of older and newer titles than what I've normally done in the past. Not everything I played is on here, but not everything I played is worth discussing. Games released this year will be bolded. (Also not every game on this list is on PS Plus Extra/Premium, but a good chunk are.) TOP TEN SPOILER LIST FOR RARITY 10. Slay the Spire 9. Multiversus 8. Genshin Impact 7. Yakuza 0 6. Gravity Rush 2 5. The Messenger 4. Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon 3. Stray 2. Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut 1. Elden Ring HONORABLE MENTIONS -24. The Gardens Between (2018) - A short, sometimes sweet, other times somber game about two kids reminiscing about their friendship. It has a simple gameplay loop that I managed to complete in a couple of hours. -23. Assassin's Creed Chronicles (2016) - I'm cheating a little since the three games in this collection are listed separately on PS Plus, but tbh there's not all that much that's different between them. These are fun, if janky stealth 2D platformers that remind me a LOT of the salvaging sections of This War of Mine while requiring little investment in the rest of the AC series. If you had to press me, I'd rank the three games in the series as such: Russia, China, and India. -22. The Pedestrian (2021 PS port) - A fun platformer puzzle game. I really enjoyed linking together rooms in order to solve puzzles. Felt a little short, though. -21. Yugioh: Master Duel (2022) - YGO's answer to MTG Arena. I definitely appreciate the card game more now, but I think this would be better to play on a PC or mobile device. -20. The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018) - A game I desperately wanted to rank in my top ten. A wonderfully trippy experience and fun puzzle game, I unfortunately had to knock it to the HM list if only because I've been spoiled for gaming this year. -19. El Hijo - A Wild West Tale (2020) - A game that I don't remember anyone talking about, I had a lot of fun with this one. The stealth gameplay isn't anything new, but it has a wonderful, Western-inspired fairy tale motif that made it a delight to play through. -18. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (2017 PS port) - The first of several Metroidvanias on my list, this was also my first experience with the Momodora series. Fun game with cute sprite work, but not one I've really thought of since completing it. -17. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017) - It's always nice to revisit the Uncharted series, and if I'm being honest, I find Chloe a more interesting character than Drake. It seems the series is still done, but I think you could easily make Chloe the new lead. -16. Marvel's Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps (2018) - I'm a lot more burned out on superheroes now than I was when Spider-Man originally dropped, but I was still glad to jump back into the world of Insomniac's Spider-Man, which is still my favorite version of the character. Definitely not a fan of the new model for Peter, but there are few things more delightful than web swinging through NYC. -15. Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020) - Playing this right after the Spider-Man DLC made it a bit more of an adjustment than I expected, but still a great follow-up. It's a much shorter game than Spider-Man, but things feel different enough to justify it being a separate release. Just makes me more excited for Spider-Man 2. -14. Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid (2019) - You miss Marvel vs. Capcom? Play this game. -13. Code Vein (2019) - An anime Dark Souls. Level design is meh, but the combat is fun, and this has one of the better character creators in a Soulslike. -12. Blasphemous (2019) - Another game I wanted to put higher, this game unfortunately had too much competition and was forced down. A brutal Metroidvania with incredible art design, it is absolutely worth playing. -11. Dead Cells (2018) - Yet another game knocked out of my top 10, I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I do like rogue-likes and Metroidvanias, but for some reason I was never interested in playing DC. Glad I was able to change my mind. Whew! That sure was a lot of honorable mentions! Believe me, there's at least a few games I could have added to it that ended up on the cutting room floor, including a game that's been on a few people's top ten list! But that doesn't matter now! Time for the... TOP TEN GAMES OF THE YEAR (Gifs/images are not mine bc I'm not cool like a bunch of people here)  10. Slay the Spire (2019 PS release) - I agonized over this spot, as I pretty much had a good idea what the rest of my list was going to look like. But this spot... Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Power Rangers, and The Missing were all strong contenders for it, and if I were to write this list at another time, any of those games could get in over Slay the Spire. Slay the Spire won out over those games this time by hitting multiple things for me, but mostly with its deckbuilding. I haven't been in the mood for MTG in a minute, and while Master Duel tickled that deckbuilding itch for a second, Slay the Spire hit it full force by essentially letting you draft your cards as you go along. Trying to figure out what kind of build you want for your deck that go-round while navigating whatever the game threw at you felt immensely satisfying, and if you enjoyed games like Inscryption you'll probably enjoy this game.  9. Multiversus (2022) - If you were to just glance at Multiversus, the whole thing screams "cash grab." An assortment of characters from various WB IPs slapped into a Smash clone seemingly without rhyme or reason? There's no way it'll be good, right? ...right? A couple of minutes into the game, and it becomes clear that it's not just a mere cash grab. There's actual craft behind this work; characters are lovingly designed (Tom and Jerry might be one of the best designed fighting game characters ever made), the combat system is as innovative as a Smash clone can be (a focus on team battle, no blocks or normal throws allowing for greater mobility), and it has some of the best netcode for a fighter around. In a lot of ways, it's arguably the best platform fighter available, it's multiplatform with crossplay, and it's free. If you've been itching for some Smash but hate playing it online (or playing in bad online), give this game a shot.  8. Genshin Impact (2020) - I have bad news for you all: with the 3.0 update earlier this year, Genshin has entered the realm of being a good game, sometimes even great. This game has gone from being just something I play while I'm listening to podcasts to being a game I'm willing to recommend to people. The 3.0 update introduced a new region, Sumeru, to the game, and with it comes one of the most expansive and beautiful areas in the game. A combination of lush jungle, deep caves, vast desert, and desecrated ruins, there's much to explore and stumble up, including a side quest that's as long as many games' main storylines. Along with the new playable element, the game feels fresh in a way that it hasn't since launch. (Also, there's a new card game with the 3.3 update that's great, and with my possible hot take, is better than Triple Triad.) If you hate gacha, then yes, stay far away, because that aspect of it hasn't changed. But at its best, Genshin feels a lot like a single-player MMO married with Breath of the Wild; there's always something to do, somewhere to see, and all you have to do is maybe climb a mountain or two to find it.  7. Yakuza 0 (2017 English port) - My journey through the Yakuza series has been... inconsistent. Started with Kiwami 1, then jumped to Judgement, then to [#4 game on my list], then to this. This ranks pretty high on many people's lists, and I can see why. There are few, few game worlds that feel anything like Kamurocho, and every time I step into it feels both familiar and alien, in a good way. There's not much to say about the game that hasn't been said over the years, but of the Yakuza games I've played, this is my favorite leveling up system so far.  6. Gravity Rush 2 (2017) - Something I didn't think I'd play a lot of after [#1 game on my list] was open-world games, yet a good chunk of the games I played this year were exactly that. But Gravity Rush 2 stuck with me for a lot of reasons; its wonderful art direction, the unique world it created, and most importantly, zooming through the air at hundreds of miles per hour only to stop on a dime just so I can fly off in another direction. Getting used to controlling my own personal gravity took a minute, but once I got the hang of it, it stopped feeling like I was careening off haphazardly and more like I was flying through the air with the greatest of ease. This was my first foray into the series, so after finishing it, I was left wanting more. Maybe one day we'll get it.  5. The Messenger (2019 PS port) - Probably one of the best tributes to 8-/16-bit gaming that I've ever played. Tight gameplay, clever writing, and a fantastic Metroidvania; I knew that this game was gonna be good when I first saw it, but I didn't realize how good it was until I got my hands on it.  4. Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon (2020) - After I had played Judgement, I had decided that for the rest of the Yakuza games, I would go back and play them in order. I actually had purchased Yakuza 0 before 7, but unfortunately I just wasn't in the mood to play 0 at the time, and when I found 7 on sale... I couldn't resist. And I'm glad I didn't. I never felt like I was missing out on anything in the older games with the new cast of characters, and the gameplay being completely different from the others helped a lot with making me feel like it was a jumping-on point for people new to the series. Something that it's made me want to do is play more JRPGs again, something I haven't wanted to do in years. I probably would have put a lot more time into this than I did, but [#1 game] dropped and I never looked back.  3. Stray (2022) - This came out at a perfect time for me. After putting hundreds of hours into [#1 game], I was looking for a change of pace, and I got exactly that. There's been plenty already said about it, but this felt like delightful comfort food set in an interesting world that I wanted to see more of. The game and art direction were completely on point, and in any other year this would have been a strong contender for the #1 spot. Alas....  2. Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut (2020) - Probably the best open-world game Sony's ever published (and that's saying a lot). Great combat, a fantastic recreation of 16th century Tsushima, and an excellent story about a man who is forced to re-examine everything he's ever known in order to defeat a great threat to his home. Jin Sakai might be one of my favorite game protagonists ever.  1. Elden Ring (2022) - To the shock of few, my GOTY is Elden Ring. But instead of telling you about what I have to say about the game (which has been said ad nauseum at this point), let me instead tell you a story. I'm about 40-50 hours into ER at this point, and I'm making my way up to Caria Manor. At this point, I feel like I've been doing a good job exploring everything thoroughly that I've encountered, so when I get to the Kingsrealm Ruins, I don't think much of it. I start fighting with the enemies in the area, and during a scruffle with one of them, I hit a wall and it disappears. Now, if you're a Souls vet, you're no stranger to illusory walls. I'm certainly not. But, I had somehow convinced myself that they didn't exist in ER (mostly because I couldn't find any early on), and so when that wall disappears, I freak out. "How much have I missed?!" I thought. "I was so thorough! How did I miss this before?! ...do I need to go back and re-explore EVERYTHING?" It sent me into a spiral, to the point where I had to get up and walk away to process that new information; I couldn't play for a while because the game had done literal psychic damage to me. Anyways that's my Elden Ring story, 11/10, one of the best games ever made
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Dec 31, 2022 10:30
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| # ? May 20, 2024 19:05 |
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Rarity posted:
Fuckin hell yeah Mirror's Edge  Those two games are both in my top 25 of all time and have probably my favorite videogame soundtracks ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iinzHZmV5Kg BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 10:40
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