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Rarity posted:Reading through the thread now. We wouldn't have so many blasphemers making ascending lists if we were still under the Rarity Regime 
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Dec 18, 2023 00:14
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10. Resident Evil 4: Remake I’ve listed this one mostly on sufferance. Resident Evil 4 is a contender for my favorite game of all time, so I was leery of the remake from its announcement. And sure enough, RE4R remake is a little bit worse than the original in nearly every way. The gonzo, anything-goes excess is gone, and the setpieces and characters nearly all suffer from the dreary emphasis on “realism” (or what counts for realism as far as RE is concerned) and maintaining continuity with future entries. The new combat mechanics mess with the unique shooting-gallery flow of the original and the crafting system interrupts combat and resource gathering, so that it’s like you’re being flicked on the head every ten minutes. But if you take the best game of all time and make every part of it suck a little, then what you have is still pretty good. What pushes it over the top is that RE4R meshes beautifully with the speedrun style that RE2’s remake did so well. Each run’s reward eases your path on the next run at the higher difficulties, pushing you forward to that fabled S-Pro rank and the full suite of rewards. The new stages are full of little tricks and exploits to shave precious minutes off your time until a 15-hour run becomes a svelte two-and-a-half with enough practice. Even as I was irritated by all its faults, I kept going back to it again and again until I unlocked everything. RE4 lost a great deal in its remake, but at least it gained something in return – though I’ll still be mourning what they did to Salazar. 9. Super Mario RPG  Another remake of a game close to my heart. SMRPG is the first turn-based RPG I ever beat as a kid (though not the first I played; that goes to Final Fantasy for the NES, which broke me before I even made it to Astos), and while RE4R’s felt inevitable for years, this one took everybody by surprise. The main question was how modern design sensibilities might apply to an entry-level RPG released twenty-god-drat-seven years ago. The answer was “very well, actually.” Developer Artepiazza (whose repertoire consists mainly of handheld Dragon Quest games) hit the sweet spot of adapting a classic game for modern times, without losing the original’s appeal or making the adaptation feel superfluous. The timed-hits system SMRPG pioneered is often imitated but rarely duplicated, with most of its successors making the action commands so drawn-out or the combat so difficult that it just gets laborious, but the remake wisely goes in the opposite direction. Perfectly timed attacks now hit the entire enemy party at once, and there’s a super bar that fills with successful timings; while this makes the already-gentle difficulty even less of an issue, this game was never known for being tough to beat, and there’s a roster of postgame bosses that actually do demand some level of effort from the player while still remaining within the difficulty curve. There’s a seamless level-select option that lets you hop from one zone to another without having to go through the map, the rigid item limit has been expanded, and party members can now swap in and out of the frontlines mid-battle without wasting a turn. All these gameplay innovations are small, but significant enough so that you’d have trouble going back to a version without them. Meanwhile, everything that matters is preserved near-flawlessly. The maps are recreated down to the last tile, nearly the entire Woolsey script has been carried over, every Easter egg and hidden interaction is still there no matter how ludicrously obscure (did you know you get some frog coins for staying in the Marrymore suite 200 times? I sure didn’t). The iconic Mode 7 graphics are a loss, but the characters are as expressive as ever, with the occasional brief cutscene allowing for much more personality during their introductions – special credit goes to everyone’s favorite cloud-in-a-cup Mallow, whom the developers clearly had a blast animating. Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack is every bit as appealing as it was almost three decades ago, and while the new compositions are also great, you can switch back to the classics with a button press. I replayed the original game so much that I knew almost every inch of this one by heart, and going through it was just as good as it had been in grade school. 8. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom  I’ve often been frustrated by the Switch and its Saltine cracker of a processor, but certain games get a frightening amount of mileage out of that little console, and none more so than Tears of the Kingdom. It might be the most stunning technical achievement of its generation. Three world maps of varying complexity stacked atop one another, with barely a frame hitch when traveling between them. A physics engine that by all rights should melt the system down into slag. That draw distance, Jesus loving Christ! On a console that can barely manage anti-aliasing, Tears of the Kingdom is a game unbound by hardware limitations; faced with its menagerie of physics and traversal puzzles, you can think to yourself, “I wonder if this will work,” and nine times out of ten the answer will be “yes.” I never much liked the dungeons from classic Zelda games; they were fine, but my best memories all revolve around falling down holes in Hyrule Field. TotK gave me the biggest, most gaping hole of all – the Depths map is essentially a single gigantic dungeon in its own right, and while its limited scenery was a turnoff for some, I never got tired of poking around down there methodically lighting the place up. As more of the Depths are revealed, the ways in which it mirrors the world above become clearer, which helps you to explore the Depths further. It’s a lovely form of progression, and the mini-quests and shrines up above also tend to be more varied than those found in Breath of the Wild. TotK does struggle at providing context to explore its world. Its story might be the worst in the entire Zelda franchise, not just bad but badly told; its cast is even thinner than BotW’s, with unmemorable newcomers and dull interpretations of returning characters; it’s bizarrely allergic to continuity, seeming almost embarrassed of its connection to its predecessor. But the scant handful of tools it gives you and the plethora of smaller stories can support dozens of hours of fresh discovery across a once-familiar map, and the Switch handles it all with aplomb. 7. Turbo Overkill  Turbo Overkill made me feel my age. Frenetic movement shooters have been increasingly trendy for a while now, but I could only clear two or three stages of this at a time before I had to take a break and recharge. From the blistering movement speed, to the neon-soaked cyberpunk locales, to the voice acting where every cast member (including the Duke himself Jon St. Jon) is chewing so much scenery it’s a marvel they don’t choke on it, every part of Turbo Overkill is a celebration of excess, and it keeps all those plates spinning until the credits. Some games that spend ages in Early Access suffer for it, as they become so focused on appealing to the early adopters that they alienate people who jump on when the final version is released, but I didn’t start Turbo Overkill until it was in 1.0 and I’m glad for it. Its lengthy development time can be felt in the ridiculous amount of innovation it keeps throwing at you – at heart it’s a lower-poly Doom Eternal with a far less restrictive weapons system (no “use x to kill y” proscriptions here, just point your meanest guns in the general direction of whatever you want to gib) and an even faster movement pace, but it keeps changing things up with a huge variety of locales and gameplay gimmicks, all of which mesh well with the core shooting. There’s at least three vehicle sections and all of them are a blast. Even the sewer levels are fun to navigate. Meanwhile the movement and weapon upgrades keep rolling out at a steady pace, until you’re so kitted out that you can barely move without dismembering something. And Turbo Overkill justifies its excess. The base pistol’s alt-fire can lock onto and insta-gib multiple enemies from across an entire map, and that kind of power is a necessity for the encounters it throws at you – hordes of stampeding melee fodder buff out the huge roster of more sophisticated enemies, and the final kill count for every stage tends to reach the triple digits well before you’re finished. In the last of the game’s three episodes, after I fought through an interspace war between galactic military and the cyborg hordes that culminated with surfing a nuclear missile into an orbital weapons platform, I had to go have a lie down. The episode wasn’t half finished. 6. Remnant 2  No game out there does quite what the Remnant series does. In some ways that’s its biggest failing, because while its influences are clear to see – especially in the sequel, where one of its main biomes borrows so closely from Bloodborne that I’d call it shameless if not for a certain other entry on this list – the way they’re used and play off each other tend to throw players unfamiliar with their loop. Dark Souls with guns. Looter shooters without loot. Myst, plus violence. In Remnant, you and up to two other magical cowboys go through a campaign that consists of three worlds, plus a shorter midgame and finale zone. The worlds are always pre-set but the areas within them are mixed and matched from a variety of challenges. In Bloodborneland, for example, you could end up climbing a perilously dilapidated clock tower in one run, only to start another to find the clock tower’s missing, and instead there’s a new district populated by maniacs who have gotten really enthusiastic about arson. There’s plenty of dialogue and backstory (maybe too much; Remnant 2 gives you the impression that it really likes to hear itself talk) but most of it can be bypassed if you’re more interested in the shooting, and the shooting is pleasantly meaty, augmented by the usual selection of mods and perks and with dodge i-frames that will feel very familiar to anyone familiar with Souls. Whereas the first Remnant was a meat grinder for anyone who didn’t have friends to back them up, the sequel has several classes dedicated to pulling aggro off their user, which makes for a smoother solo experience. Where Remnant really diverges from its peers is the puzzles, which range from fairly straightforward action/adventure fare to “get the gently caress out of here” obscure – while several special items and accessories drop from boss fights, with different drops depending on how the boss was dispatched, many others are gated behind these puzzles instead, and they’re packed into each zone with remarkable density. I’ve never been thrilled by RNG drops or loot tables, so stashing these items behind these secrets instead was a hugely refreshing change. Coupled with the varied and inventive biomes – the Bloodborne-sendup world is actually a Victorian-era elf kingdom being encroached on by a more lethally whimsical variety of fair folk, and another world is a planet-sized spaceship trapped in the event horizon of a black hole – the sense of discovery in Remnant 2 is among the best I’ve experienced this year. It’s a stellar example of a AA release, something that might lack the polish of industry giants but sets out to do its own thing and does it exceedingly well. 5. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line  Final Fantasy fans are engaged in an endless and bitter war over which entries were the best/worst, but whenever they want a ceasefire, they speak the magic phrase: “good music though.” Final Bar Line is one of the most comprehensive collections of Square Enix music out there, boasting almost 600 tracks if you include the DLC, and it’s telling that there are still some crucial omissions from that list. It’s a tragedy that Kingdom Hearts’ music got shunted off to another, worse rhythm game a year ago. This is the one I kept coming back to; when there wasn’t anything else in my library grabbing me at the moment, I booted up Theatrhythm. Some of its charts are better than others, and the new Supreme-level difficulty in particular prefers to make you break your controller and your fingers with endless lines of 1/16-time beats rather than following the song, but the second-hardest difficulty is still perfectly fine, especially if you’re going for SSS ranks. I’ve managed to do that for every song but one, and I still go back to run up my score. The basic gameplay plus the gargantuan tracklist probably would have earned Final Bar Line a place on my GOTY, but there’s a lot of creativity in how Square remixes their handful of backgrounds and enemy sprites to fit the scenarios of each track, and a surprising amount of depth in its mission mode – if you want to complete the secret objectives for each song and don’t feel like simply grinding for hours, you’ll have to do some meticulous party building to take advantage of each character’s unique skills. I finished them all, ran through the special challenge mode, and still dip into the basic track selection mode just to run through this museum of Square Enix’s musical history. After all the time I’ve spent on these songs, my biggest criticism of Final Bar Line is that there aren’t even more of them. 4. Lies of P  It’s always nice when your first impressions are vindicated. Lots of people gawked at Lies of P when it first premiered – how could you not, when it might as well be subtitled “American McGee’s Pinocchioborne” – but when the demo came out, I gave it a try and felt like there was something special under the ridiculous premise and borderline-plagiaristic Fromsoft homage. The combat was pleasantly weighty, the stages labyrinthine without being confusing, enemy layouts and ambushes had the playful nastiness I’ve come to expect from Souls. Unlike the more po-faced imitators, the fallen city of Krat also showed the mix of dilapidation and faded grandeur that characterized many of Souls’ environments, especially the gorgeous hotel that served as the demo’s hub zone. Fast forward to the final release, and after a few mechanical tweaks, Lies of P is a fitting candidate for this year’s Souls entry while Fromsoft is off reminding everyone that they dig giant robots. Lies of P’s influences go well beyond the surface level, but it understands what it’s borrowing from and how to use those mechanics to achieve its own unique vision. At heart it’s more of a stage-based action game à la Team Ninja’s offerings, just with a continuous world instead of a bunch of disconnected map nodes, and that’s reflected in the tightly designed stages and ease-of-access traversal features; checkpoint warping is available immediately, and if you missed any important items in a particular zone, the game helpfully highlights the checkpoint nearest to those drops so you don’t have to poke around for them. The handle-switching system effectively lets you take one weapon’s moveset and glue it to another, letting you do things like swing a 150-pound axe blade around like it’s a machete, and the boss weapons lack this feature but make up for it by being some of the most stylish killing implements since Bloodborne’s switch weapons. P can lob throwables half a kilometer and simply bombarding faraway enemies to death is acceptable and encouraged. Enemy weapons can shatter with successful parries, vastly decreasing their moveset and attack strength. The parry and dodge mechanics play wonderfully with each other, to the point where common criticisms of the game’s difficulty usually come from people who rely too much on one or the other – there are some bosses hopelessly confounded by proper dodging and some whose weapons will shatter like a Saltine if you successfully block. There’s a whole suite of robot arms with additional powers that you can swap in and out. The enemy variety is superb. There is an extremely pettable cat. As a new IP from a studio unfamiliar with the genre – Round8 Studio’s sole credit before this is an MMO – Lies of P does show awkwardness in a few places. The script is kludgy and rambling (though the voice actors do their best with it), there’s a handful of half-baked mechanics which mainly relate to the assist AI, many of the bosses feel overtuned, and the final lengthy area has all the aesthetic charm of a Quake map. But overall it’s a knockout hit, a great entry in a subgenre that’s notorious for lousy design and a hard-to-please fanbase, and it’s gratifying to see how it was able to win over the general public. 3. Clash: Artifacts of Chaos  ”It’s all random in the end.” This is the best game of the year that you don’t remember. You’ve probably already forgotten about it in the time it took to finish the last sentence. That’s because Clash: Artifacts of Chaos has a title that slides off the memory like a raindrop down a windowpane. Here, let’s make a minor adjustment that’ll help it stand out a bit more: ZENO Clash: Artifacts of Chaos I have no idea why ACE Team released a third entry to their cult hit series and omitted the most distinctive part of its title. I have no idea why they made the rest of the title sound like one of those mobile games scraped off a Youtube ad. This one slipped under drat near everybody’s radar and I’d wager the title is at least half the reason why, and it’s truly a shame, because Artifacts of Chaos is the best entry in the Zeno series and one of the best AA games of this generation. A distant prequel, Artifacts of Chaos takes us back to the early days of everyone’s favorite anarcho-primitivist Chilean fever dream Zenozoik, where every character looks like they stepped out of a Hieronymus Bosch mural and beating someone half to death with your bare hands is how you say “hello” and “goodbye.” The main character this time is mountain hermit Pseudo, who stumbles across one such fistfight that goes too far and ends up having to take in a child orphaned during the brawl. The child, a little ball of feathers simply named Boy, is a figure of interest to the local warlords, and Pseudo has to traverse the landscape to find out a way to fend off his pursuers and give him and his new ward some peace and quiet. The first-person perspective is gone, replaced by a behind-the-back open-world brawler rendered in gorgeous cel-shaded colors. The famously stilted voice acting is gone; every character in Clash can switch between buffoonish comedy, snarling menace, and exhausted pathos on a dime, with the protagonists both being standouts. The plot and environmental structure borrow heavily from the God of War reboots, but the dynamic here is considerably less abrasive – Pseudo is gruff but good-humored and accommodating, without Kratos’s emotional constipation, and Boy’s chirpy naiveté is both far better-acted than Atreus’s mumbling and lacks any of his adolescent temper tantrums. The combat now allows the player to switch between two different fighting styles with around a dozen to equip, from standard kickboxing to Crouching Tiger-esque chi strikes to the drunken headbutt-centric anti-style of the insane forest hermits called the Corwids; this is further buffed out by equippable super moves, and while it’s not as robust as God Hand’s dial-a-combo system, it’s the closest we’ve seen in a while. There’s a Souls-esque continue system with a neat twist, where on “death” Pseudo will reawaken as a skeletal mannequin in a nighttime version of the map that allows him to find new equipment and challenges on the way to reuniting with his corpse. Few other sequels have been such a comprehensive overhaul of their predecessors while retaining the spirit of the original. Finally, because this takes place well before the other Zeno Clash entries, instead of a world with no law this is a world with One Law – namely, before engaging someone in combat, the fighter can first challenge someone to a game of dice. The dice game comes with “totems” that inflict a variety of penalties for the loser, and the loser must consent to the penalty. This law is absolute, to the point where it’s the lynchpin of the warlords’ power, and the arbitrariness of the One Law and the desolation of a world with no coherent moral framework gives Artifacts of Chaos’ plot a level of depth and evocativeness that the rest of the series could only occasionally touch. Of course the dice game is also available to Pseudo, and any brawls can be preceded by either bringing out the game or just charging in and pummeling his opponents senseless. If there’s one entry on this list everyone needs to try, it’s this one. Artifacts of Chaos is a beautiful sendoff to one of the oldest indie series in the Steam era, and does a better job with its mechanics and message than games with vastly bigger budgets. 2. Alan Wake 2  ”Water finds its way.” It would be fair to say that the first Alan Wake was when Remedy Entertainment’s creative vision suffered its first reality check. Releasing a whopping seven years after the Max Payne duology, its troubled development was clear to see – it had the same little meta flourishes and ideas as Max Payne but compromised in almost every aspect, with the central idea of a writer affecting reality being reduced to shining flashlights on ammo caches, a repetitive and limited structure, and far too much combat. Sam Lake must have been miffed by the whole ordeal, because in all of Remedy’s output thereafter you could see him patiently laying down tracks for a sequel – a namedrop here, a callback there – where Remedy could show us what they had in mind for their first draft. Thirteen years later, that sequel is out, and it might just be their magnum opus. Alan Wake was more or less fine with a few high points, but the sequel’s improvement is evident all the way down to its basic structure. The eponymous protagonist has been widely derided for being kind of a crotchety bore compared to other Remedy stars like Max Payne or Jesse Faden, so here he’s accompanied by new co-protagonist Saga Gunderson, a pleasant Swedish-American FBI agent with clairvoyant powers and a morbid streak a mile wide. She’s an excellent contrast to Alan, in both characterization and gameplay; while Alan’s sections are confined to menacing nightmare-scapes full of combat, Saga’s are more exploration-focused, as she methodically combs through the town of Bright Falls and surrounding environs with the game’s shadowy ghoulies only really taking center stage at the end of her chapters. The environments themselves are fantastic, especially Bright Falls itself, which has gone from an Americana Stephen King pastiche to a town laboring under severe economic blight. The shuttered storefronts and clear desperation under the inhabitants’ quirky greetings are great for the game’s tone, pushing it closer to a proper horror story than the first one ever managed. Every great horror story contains some appreciation for the absurd, and while the quality of scares in AW2 is debatable (it’s way too reliant on screamers, almost to the point of parody), the absurdity is present in spades. All of Sam Lake’s favorite gimmicks and flourishes are pushed to their limit here, creating a tone that you rarely see anywhere else. Characters flicker in and out of full-motion video, with their actors playing and sometimes becoming new characters in themselves; blood-smeared cult rituals are interrupted by a showstopping musical number. Remedy’s always liked blending different media styles and properties, and their personal bibliography’s grown big enough so that they’re now able to do that with their own properties, creating a baffling mix of genres and styles held together by Saga’s mission to unravel the plot that Wake is drafting out before it rewrites her own life story. Self-indulgence can be an art form in itself, and Alan Wake 2 is clear evidence of it. The combat is ropey, bugs are prevalent, and the story frequently labors under its own gimmicks. But Alan Wake 2 is a superb piece of high-budget horror in an industry sorely lacking in it, and a happy ending to what’s clearly been a long and meticulous endeavor. Remedy has become one of the most distinctive developers out there, and it’s great to see them hit the mark on a shot they took well over a decade ago. 1. HI-FI RUSH  "You've got a killer track." Now that the industry suits have apparently dusted off their hands and decided that having actual employees was strictly optional, we might never see a year in gaming like this again. The development pipeline, clogged by COVID, spewed out all its contents at once, drowning us in genre standouts, multi-year labors of love, top-quality remakes of classic titles, and more indie hits than you can catalog. And yet in this single ludicrous year, my personal best was one of the very first to come out, with no fanfare, no foreshadowing, and no precedent. Hi-Fi Rush is a character action game from Tango Gameworks, which despite being led by Shinji Mikami had never even touched this genre before, and it smacked down every one of the innumerable challengers that came after it. I’d given up hope of seeing a game like this again. Metal Gear Revengeance is one of my favorites of all time (that’s kind of been a running theme on this year’s list), and while I enjoy Devil May Cry just fine, it never quite achieved the heights of giddy spectacle that Platinum Studios did in their prime. Now Platinum’s in its doldrums, and Tango innocuously pushed out a game that rivals their best work. Hi-Fi Rush is dangerously hype. There are moments here that might make you headbang yourself into a spinal injury, and not just because every attack, every movement, every piece of the environments, every single thing follows the music’s beat. This might be the peak of the entire rhythm action genre – I’ve played a lot of them, and none have made the music so pervasive without having it constrict the flow of gameplay. Mute Hi-Fi Rush and it’ll seem like a fairly typical brawler where you’ll get a score bonus if you hit attack buttons on the beat, but main character Chai is constantly tapping his foot to the background music, every attack gets its own unique sting that adds to the songs, and entire cutscenes play out in rhythm. There are times when it feels like Hi-Fi Rush can barely contain its own energy. It’s endlessly exuberant. The style and torniquet-tight design would make this one of the best action games of the year, but one of the things I loved best about Revengeance was the ridiculous amount of incidental detail via its hours of codec calls – compare to the DMC series, which tended to have a much narrower focus. Hi-Fi Rush’s stages are jampacked with that sort of detail. Every stage has scads of non-hostile robots going through their workday, all with unique gags and reactions to getting bopped on the head. Every time you quit the game and reload, you end up in the hub, where the central cast has different commentary for every major part of every stage. There’s a giant mural in the center of said hub that fills up as you complete in-game achievements. There’s special challenge stages and a whole new combat-arena mode reserved for the postgame, along with a host of character customization options for the entire cast. And the cutscenes themselves are brisk, flawlessly shot, and have some of the most side-splitting comedy of anything released this year. Hi-Fi Rush is one of those rare games that almost gets monotonous to write about, because ultimately you’re pointing to every single aspect of it and saying “that’s perfect.” My only criticism is that something so unabashedly inspired by FLCL doesn’t include any tracks by The Pillows in its repertoire, and even that sets off a whole new wave of gushing; not only does it have some of the best use of licensed music ever, Bethesda and Tango recorded a whole tracklist of original soundalikes to prevent copyright strikes against online uploads. And that’s good, because Hi-Fi Rush needs to be seen. It needs to be heard. And in this unprecedented, near-tragically overstuffed year, it needs to be played. List summary: 10. Resident Evil 4: Remake 9. Super Mario RPG 8. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 7. Turbo Overkill 6. Remnant 2 5. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line 4. Lies of P 3. Clash: Artifacts of Chaos 2. Alan Wake 2 1. Hi-Fi Rush Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 00:26
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Hi-Fi Rush is just so much goddamn fun. Fun and good humor and enjoyment just shines out of every pore, and I can't believe it just got dropped out of nowhere back at the start of the year: hey here's a game we made, it's ready now, and it's really good!
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Dec 18, 2023 01:14
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Bad Parenting posted:
I had not seen this video before and now I can't stop watching it. Thank you for this gift.
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Dec 18, 2023 01:40
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I liked DMC, loved Revengeance, and I am a huge fangirl for when games do clever things to integrate the music and the gameplay. Unfortunately, I don't actually like Hi-Fi Rush's soundtrack, which is kind of a problem since it's such a central part of the experience.  I'm glad other people are enjoying it, though, that game deserves success.
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Dec 18, 2023 04:10
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1. Tears of the Kingdom - This was a real blast from the past 'do not walk away for six hours at a time' kind of game, the sort of experience I haven't had since college. It's still gorgeous, quiet, full of weird emergent stories, but it has traded the quiet sense of mystery and wonder of the first game for rip roaring stupid engineering choices. Ultrahand is one of the most incredible gameplay mechanics I have ever experienced. 2. Baldur's Gate 3 - I stepped foot in Baldur's Gate, looked up a map, and have not gone back since. Just a rich stew of characters, ridiculous opportunities for roleplaying, and silly builds. I had a great time and finally understood the rule about not casting spells with both your action and your bonus action. 3. Spiderman 2 - I quit the first spiderman game halfway through but for some reason this game held my attention. Miles and Peter have a fun dynamic, the game never sits still long enough to get boring, and flying over New York rules. 4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - I admire the developers' absolute commitment to just telling the craziest story they can. Telling a story out of order and with so many protagonists shouldn't work this well, but the game does a good job of holding your hand just enough that you feel like a genius puzzling things out. The strategy game part is...fine. 5. Fire Emblem Engage - The exact opposite of 13 Sentinels: really engaging strategy gameplay, lots of systems that give you enough of a view in to let you experiment and find interesting things, utterly discardable story. 6. Disco Elysium - This was a year of me playing beloved visual novels pretending to be other genres. Disco Elysium is an amazing detective game that lets you play a drunken moron chasing down everything he sees and presents every possible combination of choices in an interesting way. 7. Case of the Golden Idol - This one doesn't quite fit with the theme of Visual Novels in other forms but Case of the Golden Idol is such a cool little game. It knows exactly what it wants to do with style and tone and just nails the entire presentation. 8. Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp - Just a really well done remake of a classic Nintendo game. The strategy gameplay is still tight, the artstyle found the perfect console leap from GBA to Switch, and it has online multiplayer that I will fantasize about using but never actually do on account of my cowardice. 9. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord - I worked through a lot of backlog games this year. Bannerlord still has that satisfying loop of castle/kingdom management and real time strategy combat, while keeping enough of the eurojank of the original. 10. Starfield - It is very mid but also I played 40 hours of it without realizing and that has to count for something. I should go play Oblivion again. 13 Sentinels, ranked: 1. Yuki Takamiya 2. Natsuno Minami 3. Nenji Ogata 4. Tomi Kisaragi 5. Keitaro Miura 6. Takatoshi Hijiyama 7. Juro Kurabe 8. Iori Fuyusaka 9. Ryoko Shinonome 10. Ei Sekigahara 11. Renya Gouto 12. Megumi Yakushiji 13. Shu Amiguchi
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Dec 18, 2023 05:04
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Thordain posted:2. Baldur's Gate 3 - I stepped foot in Baldur's Gate, looked up a map, and have not gone back since. Just a rich stew of characters, ridiculous opportunities for roleplaying, and silly builds. I had a great time and finally understood the rule about not casting spells with both your action and your bonus action. I'm a D&D nerd and this bit jumped out at me. Just to clarify, you can absolutely cast a cantrip and a spell as your action and bonus action. So for instance a Warlock could do Hex and then Eldritch Blast on the same turn no problem. You just can't cast more than one actual "spell" (the kind that use up a spell slot) per turn.
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Dec 18, 2023 13:08
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Silver Falcon posted:I'm a D&D nerd and this bit jumped out at me. Just to clarify, you can absolutely cast a cantrip and a spell as your action and bonus action. So for instance a Warlock could do Hex and then Eldritch Blast on the same turn no problem. You just can't cast more than one actual "spell" (the kind that use up a spell slot) per turn. it's actually worse than that. You can cast two spells if they both use an action (i.e. you cast fireball, action surge, and then cast haste). But if you use a bonus action spell slot *then* your action spells need to be cantrips.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:18
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There are a bunch of exceptions and in-house rules for what can qualify as an action and bonus action in BG3. Typically in 5E both spells and cantrips will cost an action. Spells are more powerful and require a spell slot to use, cantrips are weaker but can be spammed every turn at will. And there are of course various ways to make your cantrips hit really hard and your learned spells usable on bonus actions through gear, class, permanent buffs, consumables, talking to a random NPC, etc.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:59
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yeah that rule is dumb anyway and a lot of DMs in my experience will just ignore it and say yes, the cleric can cast cure wounds and healing word in the same turn, who cares
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Dec 18, 2023 19:24
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1. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove I was not familiar with the original, but decided to finally give this a try a month ago, and I've been totally hooked since. The game oozes humor, and while the concept is simple, the gameplay poses some frustrating challenges. A good mix that has kept me coming back again and again. For anyone not familiar, you need to traverse the shattered universe, try to find all your ship parts, get presents, watch out for bad guys and bad food, and be prepared to laugh. If you've got a copy, give it a try. If you don't, put it on your wishlist. 2. Super Mario Wonder I kind of fell out with my Switch over the summer, but this game brought me back in hard. A modern 2.5D Mario was a promising idea, and in addition to top notch music and controls, they added brilliant visuals to the mix. Truly a sight to behold. The gameplay hasn't let me down either. It's easier than I remember sidescrolling Mario ever being, but I don't mind. Nice to chill out and just have fun. 3. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze My first exposure to Donkey Kong was some yellow cartridge I played on my parents' Gameboy (you read that right). I remember never getting very far and falling down a whole lot of pits, but I also remember never really giving up on it. Luckily, I'm a little better at the game now, and while I've had plenty of frustrations, I kept coming back for more soon enough. 4. Absolute Drift The predecessor to art of rally, and no slouch itself. I always liked hooning around in the old lovely cars I had as a teenager, so it's no surprise to me that having free reign to do so (and none of the moral dilemnas) has been thoroughly enoyable. Killer soundtrack too. 5. Broken Reality ]Vaporwave and the worst parts of the internet in game form. You also get to kill computer viruses with a katana. There's enough of a plot that this isn't a total gimmick, but you probably need a bit of soft spot for the strange. Not an issue for me in the least. 6. Pinball FX3 I've been hooked on digital pinball since the days of Windows XP. I thought I had it made when I figured out how to get that on Windows 10, but then I found out people have made more than halfhearted efforts at bringing the wonderful world of pinball to life. This is in a league of its own. Even if you don't have a particularly great understanding of the game (that's me), there is so much to enjoy here. 7. F-Zero 99 I have loved pretty much all of the 99 games. They've all proven to be cheap and cheerful multiplayer fun without all the typical trappings. I just hope this one sticks around. If you've been sleeping on this one, stop and play it now. 8. Spiritfarer I lost a relative late last year and had started playing this game a bit as things seemed to be heading downhill. I couldn't get right back into it, but once I was ready, I had plenty of tearful moments. Easy to play, and a joy often, but remember it packs an emotional punch. 9. Kingdom Two Crowns Maybe not my typical genre of choice, but it's just so easy to pick up and play. By no means am I a skilled player, but you learn you just have to make a choice and do your best to protect your stretch of land and take care of the people who help you do that. 10. Everything Rounding out my list is Everything, which I probably spent more time letting it play itself than anything. It's entertaining, don't get me wrong, but I think I enjoyed it most when I could let it run wild on my Steam Deck and sit back to take in all the layers of the world this simulates.
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Dec 18, 2023 21:15
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12. Star Ocean Second Story R I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan of the series, but the second game's insane progression system is legendary. The remake loads it with so many QoL features that it almost feels more modern than actual modern rpgs. The increased tutorialization actually makes the various crafting systems digestible for the average rpg gamer, and for a returning player it did a great job of reminding me of all the various tricks for getting buff. It can often feel like you're playing Menus: The Game and yet it remains strangely compelling to engineer a web of crafting interactions where you enter the menu screen weak and poor and exit strong and rich. 11. Pizza Tower Sort of the Yin to Mario's Yang this year for me, the art and music are completely sick but the platforming itself takes a lot of getting used to. Its sloppy, chaotic and sometimes quite frustrating, but it definitely contributes to this fever dream experience that I would still wholeheartedly recommend. Its not the sort of game that I put a lot of time into getting good at but even a brute force casual playthrough still leaves you feeling like you saw and did a lot. 10. Resident Evil 4 Remake Capcom with another remake that expands and remixes the original to the point where it becomes its own whole new thing. For what its worth I appreciate that they took a lot of liberties with the structure and pacing, bringing it more in line with the current main releases while still retaining plenty of sly call backs. Sure the camp of the original is mostly lost but the story still manages to be playful despite now taking place in the hyper-realistic modern Capcom world. I can't get enough of how these recent RE games look and feel to play, so while I don't think it could ever truly surpass the original, I was still totally enthralled. Capcom please stop after CV though, thanks. 9. Risk of Rain Returns The Risk of Rain games are my favorite rogue-lites, the esoteric power scaling and overall vibes just really work for me. The original was in desperate need of a refresh though and Gearbox actually managed to go above and beyond with this one. The art is fantastic, hemming very close to the originals while still incorporating a ton of extra flair. The new content is actually quite fun imo, the trials are a nice diversion from the main game and the additional characters are very appreciated. Will probably not change your mind if you did not care for it back in the day but for fans of the original it feels like everything you could hope for. 8. Octopath Traveler 2 Honestly almost gave this game a pass based on how let down I was by Octo Path 1. The sequel though really does make good on the promises of the first game. Super comfy with some actually interesting character stories this time around. The battle system remains fun and punchy with the wonderful art and music wrapping the whole thing in a super polished package. An incredible refinement over the original though I do hope they reimagine the whole structure for their next game as I think they've done everything they can with it at this point. 7. Talos Principle 2 A wonderful meditative experience that I loved retreating to. Solving puzzles and musing about philosophy not only makes you feel smart, but hell its pretty fun too. Improves over the first game in a few subtle ways, mainly in how the pacing of puzzles feels. I never felt like I was out of my depth as the game does a great job of building up the complexity. It took a bit for me to warm up to the story and characters as the VO felt a bit amateurish at first, once I did though I really enjoyed having them around. 6. Super Mario Wonder Proabably the most consistently fun game on this list, just an absolute joy to play from start to finish. They nailed the new art style, the controls are tight and the level gimmicks are some of the best in the series. Kind of embodies everything that makes a great Mario game while also having a strong identity of its own. I especially appreciated that all the difficulty isn't totally backloaded and that they incorporate a mix of challenges throughout the whole game. 5. System Shock (2023) Actually my first experience with System Shock 1, despite being a big fan of the genre it had a hand in spawning, and its kind of blown me away. No doubt helped by the fantastic (even by their own standards) remake that Nightdive has created which blends the vintage elements into a sort of approximation of what it would look like had the immersive sim genre standards of today had been codified at the time. I can't speak to what exactly they've changed or kept the same but the whole experience still feels like it has the bite of a 90's niche release, with the navigation and puzzle solving being particularly tricky. Top notch atmosphere with a really satisfying gameplay loop of strategic combat, resource management and exploration, pretty much exactly what I'm looking for in an imm-sim. 4. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty They fixed the fuckin game alright. I thought CP2077 was pretty good before, it made it onto my '21 goty list, but this version of Cyberpunk feels so much more cohesive and fun. The Phantom Liberty content would just be the cherry on top, if it wasn't also some of the best stuff in the whole drat package. Totally essential expansion imo 3. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom So good it retroactively made me appreciate BotW in a new light. For whatever reason I just wasn't in the right headspace for BotW to really click with me back in 2017. I liked it, but I didn't love it. TotK did a better job justifying it's gameplay loop right off the bat to me. Durability makes more sense when you're fusing weapons, exploration feels more rewarding, constantly changing world layers in search of materials feels organic. This lead to me becoming a lot more invested than I ever was in BotW and finally "got" the high praise that this iteration of the Zelda formula has garnered. 2. Armored Core 6 This was a surprise hit for me, I did not expect a mech action game to get in my head as much as this did. The story has this understated bleak tone that immediately captivated me, and kept me hooked over the course of three playthroughs. It was interesting to see Fromsoft work with a different structure than I'm used to seeing with mission screens, checkpointing, loadouts etc. but it all comes together really cohesively. I especially liked how fast the missions were, as it gave a great excuse to continually cycle your builds. Trying out all the various things and picking the right tools for the job is one of my favorite parts of From games and this one makes it incredibly easy to do. Of course the sound design in this game is absolutely spectacular, "I won't miss" is the most hype moment of the year bar none. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 The sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, over two decades later, is also one of my favorite games of all time. Its so cool and funny that this is The Game right now in a way that not even the originals could have achieved. Lots of things to love but my favorite is probably the continuation of the fantastic environment design from the DOS games. The super intricately detailed maps were such a joy to explore from the very start of the game all the way to the end. Larian did an incredible job merging their own brand of crpg with the classic D&D fare that defined the original trilogy. Major criticisms with the ending, difficulty and performance were addressed before the year was even out so I really can't help but hand it to them here.
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Dec 18, 2023 21:57
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I really was worried talos principle 2 was going to get overlooked because of all the amazing games that came out this year but I see plenty of folks with it in their top ten! And yeah I really think the harshest criticism you can have on that game is the average puzzle difficulty is easier which isn't a bad thing. It's more easily enjoyable by a larger audience!
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Dec 18, 2023 22:18
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I initially thought the puzzle difficulty might be a bit too low compared to the first game but with 132 of them to get through I think it’s good you breeze through some of them or the game would feel exhausting by the end. the gold puzzles definitely had a lot of the original difficulty and a couple of them took me a good half hour to figure out so the game still isn’t exactly easy.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:24
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Owl Inspector posted:I initially thought the puzzle difficulty might be a bit too low compared to the first game but with 132 of them to get through I think it’s good you breeze through some of them or the game would feel exhausting by the end. the gold puzzles definitely had a lot of the original difficulty and a couple of them took me a good half hour to figure out so the game still isn’t exactly easy. Yeah absolutely agreed, if you really miss that original difficulty, just go for 100%, and it'll be exactly what you wanted. Like the statues, and gold and yeah.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:40
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talos principle 2 was a victim of poor timing for me, it came out at the same time as Slay the Princess and (tp2 third act story spoilers) imo StP took the concept of building a Socratic dialogue out of your own thoughts and actions in a much more interesting direction
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Dec 18, 2023 22:46
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Thordain posted:13 Sentinels, ranked: I'm playing through 13 Sentinels right now and I agree with your top pick. Sukeban supremacy.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:13
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Hooray, it's time for another one of these! This is always my favorite thread of the year. I finished 18 games in 2023, including DLC and expansions. That's two more than my completed total of 16 games from last year and two below my all-time record of 20 in 2020. Let's start with some stuff I played in 2023 that didn't make the list for one reason or another: Citizen Sleeper Vampire Survivors Batora: Lost Haven Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (DLC) Valkyrie Elysium Diablo IV Final Fantasy XVI Mortal Kombat 1 Now let's move onto some HONORABLE MENTIONS. These are games I mostly enjoyed but wasn't enamored with enough to provide a score ranking. WANTED: DEAD This is not a very good game. In fact, it's quite shockingly terrible in many ways. But it is certainly a very memorable game, one that compelled me to think about it long after I had seen everything there was to see. It's kind of rare to see a major release that's as bafflingly uneven as Wanted: Dead anymore and for that reason it has gained my appreciation and undying respect. I loved the claw machine, the exceedingly difficult karaoke minigame that only had one song despite cassettes being a common collectible, the awful AI-voiced NPCs in the four-story police station. All of it. CHOP GOBLINS I chop da goblins, they don't chop me. EN GARDE! Charming little action platformer with a beautiful art style, fluid swashbuckling combat, and a cute sense of humor. The story is a bit on the short side, but it's engaging the entire way through with a few survival style maps to tide you over after you've completed the main game. I've never heard of Fireplace Games before but I hope they continue to make tidy bite-sized projects like these. LIES OF P Fine I guess but they never tell you what the P stands for, kind of disappointing. Well that's that! Let's move onto my  TOP FIVE GAMES OF 2023!!! I'm proud to say that this ended up being a very diverse list of finalists, each belonging to its own (I think) genre. 5. ALAN WAKE 2  𝅘𝅥𝅮Follow You Into the Dark ft. RAKEL𝅘𝅥𝅮 Control was my 2019 GOTY and simply one of the most satisfying gaming experiences to go into completely blind, so I was absolutely going to buy anything that Remedy did next without hesitation. And while I still generally enjoy the kind of game Control is a lot more, I'm glad that Alan Wake 2 just conceptually exists as a product and that Sam Lake gets to continue injecting his own particular weirdness and humor into a creative space that is often critiqued for being so cynical and sterile. You don't get too many games in the AAA sphere that fully commit to a singular artistic vision, and despite it vast confluences of media referents and genre-bending, AW2 always feels like its own cohesive flash of brilliance. 4. OCTOPATH TRAVELER II  𝅘𝅥𝅮Partitio's Theme𝅘𝅥𝅮 After feeling somewhat disappointed in FF16 this summer I did what any responsible consumer would do and gave Square-Enix even more of my money to play another high-profile JRPG series that had always caught my eye visually but never quite had the time for. Despite my reservations, this ended up being a sound investment because Octopath Traveler II managed to consistently surprise and delight. The inventive combat, engaging cast of characters, and incredible soundtrack all contribute to a wonderfully complete retro "as you remembered it, not as it actually was" experience. Partitio is almost cool enough to make you think capitalism maybe wasn't such a bad idea, after all. 3. AGE OF WONDERS 4  𝅘𝅥𝅮Our Work Shall Commence At Dusk𝅘𝅥𝅮 I'm a somewhat lapsed 4X fan, having grown up playing a ton of HoMM III but never being a particular fan of the Civ and Endless Space branches that tend to dominate the genre. HoMM V was the last truly good game in that series, and since then Triumph has been the only other developer really taking an earnest shot at the RPG 4X with Age of Wonders 3 and the sci-fi themed Planetfall. I played a bit of both in their time, but Age of Wonders 4 stands head and shoulders above them as Triumph's finest game to date. The main innovation that Age of Wonders 4 brings to the genre is the ability to customize nearly every detail of your fantasy races, allowing for a ton of player expression and creativity. Industrious halflings that build sprawling structures all over the map. Plundering goblins with a fascination for trinkets and gold led by a fiery dragon lord. Reclusive space crystal-huffing elf babes that rain down devastating magic upon the battlefield. Insufferably pious toads that subjugate other kingdoms by holy decree. These are just a few of the stupid tropey factions I've spent hundreds of hours developing in my time with Age of Wonders 4, and I'll gladly spend hundreds more when all is said and done. Triumph has also done a wonderful job implementing new features and taking community feedback into account with their patch schedule. AOW4 is the definitive fantasy 4X experience. 2. HI-FI RUSH  𝅘𝅥𝅮Whirring - The Joy Formidable𝅘𝅥𝅮 This game is pure joy from an entirely different time and place. It feels like something that could have been released in my teenage years alongside Jet Grind Radio and Viewtiful Joe, but we're blessed to be getting it now. The dynamic rhythm-based combat, fluid cel-shaded visuals, madcap Saturday morning cartoon humor and  licensed music all combine to create something truly memorable, joyous, and cathartic. Hearing the wide open snares of Whirring by the Joy Formidable unexpectedly kick in at just the perfect moment in the story was a truly emotional experience for me. At every level, this game has that creative spark of life that you rarely see in today's risk-averse environment. It's already gotten some critical recognition, but whatever the extent, it deserves a lot more. Hi-Fi Rush is an instant classic.1. BALDUR'S GATE 3 https://i.imgur.com/qCFZav7.mp4 𝅘𝅥𝅮Raphael's Final Act - Borislav Slavov𝅘𝅥𝅮 Where to even start. Baldur's Gate 3 is a game where you can convince a group of spiders that you're their Goddess Lolth and command them to fight for you. It is a game where you can pickpocket explosives from a suicidal gnome to prevent her from blowing everyone up, and there is unique dialogue that acknowledges this incredibly specific and unlikely scenario. It is a game where having your 7 ft tall demon muscle lady throw Halflings at enemies is an effective combat strategy. It is a game where you can make a goblin kiss your foot, push him off a cliff, then accuse his corpse of having a foot fetish. It is a game where one of the main villains gets his own theme song, except when you cast Silence on him, then his vocal parts are absent. It is a game where you'll be 80 hours deep already thinking about what character builds you'll be bringing to this same exact point in the story on your next playthrough. It is a game where you can roll the same character, make 99% of the same decisions and still witness several wildly different outcomes through sheer luck of the dice. It is a game that consistently makes you wonder how in the world this got made, mostly for the better. There's a lot to appreciate about Baldur's Gate 3 -- its involving story and great performances have already been mentioned many times. So I'll zero in on something that I feel Larian does better than anyone else in the industry: Encounter Design. Across the hundreds of potential fights in the full 100+ hour span of this campaign, there is not a single encounter that I would qualify as filler. Every battle has its own specific combination of enemy quirks, party composition, and environmental gimmicks that require your constant attention and observation, lest your entire party wipe to a single thunder arrow. It manages to combine the same depth of roleplaying options you'd expect from any epic CRPG, alongside the often surprising interactability of items that you'd see in an immersive sim, with all the emergent and chaotic storytelling of a memorable tabletop session. You will oscillate wildly between moments of feeling like a tactical genius and a total idiot as you repeatedly, often unintentionally, set fire to everything in the room including yourself. I'll attempt to illustrate my point with a very early scenario in the first act. In most RPGs, you get a quest to go kill some big monster in a cave. Maybe you can squeeze through a crack in the wall if you're a dwarf, maybe you can jump to high ground if your Athletics score is high enough, maybe you find a cool little trinket off the beaten path, but the same basic structure remains. And that's totally fine, I've done that a million times before and will gladly do many times in the future. But in Baldur's Gate 3, you can come across an owlbear cave by way of two nearby NPCs that were attacked. Through dialogue, you can learn that they were actually hunting FOR YOU, and have the choice to send them on their way or fight. But maybe you don't do either of those things, and ask for their help to go fight the owlbear instead. Maybe while you're inside the owlbear cave, you solve an obtuse puzzle that opens up a whole slice of backstory for one of your companions. Or maybe you miss this because you don't solve the riddle, or fail the dialogue checks, or that companion is simply not there with you. Maybe you decide to get the jump on that owlbear and have your hunter shoot down a stalactite on its head to initiate the battle. Or maybe you drink a potion of Animal Speaking to negotiate and find that the owlbear matriarch you're hunting is injured. Maybe you use your intimidation or persuasion abilities to convince her to leave you alone. But maybe you also spot a valuable owlbear egg hidden at the back of the cave and decide to steal it. Now the owlbear matriarch finally gets fed up with you and the two NPCs that don't even have to be there leap into battle, with their own unique combat barks. After a grueling battle, you finally take down the owlbear matriarch and its consort, but maybe through no fault of your own, you left its hatchling alive. Maybe you decide to spare it, and many scenes later after another series of optional events it will join you at camp. Maybe one of the NPCs that helped you was killed in the battle, and you know from playing this segment before that her dialogue when you cast Speak With Dead is slightly different than had you used it after choosing to fight them yourself. Maybe one or both siblings survived, and you'll run into them at the Goblin Camp hours later, with unique dialogue acknowledging if the other one died or lived in an exchange that less than 1% of players might ever hear. Maybe the prized owlbear egg you've stolen can later be exchanged to a merchant for a storyline that flows all the way into the third act. Or maybe you just accidentally used the egg as food supplies at camp. Whoopsie! Except I wasn't being entirely truthful, because that whole exchange isn't actually part of any marked questline. It's just simply a small episode that the player can come across within a vast, sprawling, intricately connected story that you'll only start to appreciate the full extent of your second or third time through the game. Like any great tabletop campaign, BG3 allows you to orient yourself in almost any direction and become wrapped up in a boundless adventure. The densely packed secrets and surprising interactions on every corner of the map both reward and test your curiosity in equal measure. It's a tremendously ambitious and landmark CRPG, but it's also easy to identify the same exact DNA in the Divinity series Larian has been iterating on since 1999. It's funny to me how a game like Baldur's Gate 3 has gotten so swept up in The Discourse around AAA gaming and the state of the industry in 2023. I find these arguments to be mostly tedious. Every week I have to unrecommend some clickbaity thumbnail with Shadowheart on one side and a crying Todd Howard on the other with a title about how Larian is DESTROYING AAA gaming or whatever. It's stupid and I want no part of it. But I do think the success of Baldur's Gate 3 feels sort of important at a moment in time when all the publicly owned studios are laying off half their workforces to move up quarterly profit margins by single decimal percentages and most game developers seem to be treated like disposable circus monkeys. Larian themselves were on the ropes financially about 10 years ago, but instead of slashing personnel and chasing whatever trends were popular in 2013, built upon their internal strengths and community outreach to kickstart the Original Sin series. I've read some comments online that make it seem like Larian just lucked into making Baldur's Gate 3, and while every success story is by definition exceptional, I don't think that gives nearly enough credit to the prudent decisionmaking and talent development that even put Larian in a favorable position to acquire the IP. After a decade of being told that gamers don't actually want deeply reactive, branching narratives and... well whatever the hell Bioware has been doing, it does feel like a small bit of validation that a game like BG3 can achieve not just mainstream popularity, but its own cultural moment. All hail Larian.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:37
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ET you've done a bang up job this year making me extremely hype about my eventual BG3 playthrough. Thank you!
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Dec 19, 2023 00:59
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MMF Freeway posted:5. System Shock (2023) It's pretty faithful to the original, overall. Presentation and UX got a complete overhaul, of course, with new graphics/sounds/controls (but still based on the original art direction, concept art, etc). Gameplay-wise, some redundant guns/tools got cut/merged, and some things were made harder, like adding an SS2-style inventory system (which means inventory limits, which the original mostly lacked) and use animations for grenades and patches (which add polish, but also means you can no longer pop them instantly with a hotkey while firing a two-handed weapon). Bossfights got kicked up a notch too, they were much less spicy in the original. Puzzles got a complete overhaul to be both more difficult and more fun, a welcome change. And, notably, the level layouts were almost completely unaltered; a few items got moved around but in general you can take maps generated from the original game and use them to navigate around and find important items and level features in the remake just fine. LGS was absolutely killing it with their level design even with their early games.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:59
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drat that's a great write-up on BG3, and makes me want to start another playthrough except I have so many other games to play first! What a problem to have 
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Dec 19, 2023 01:15
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i scribbled this together
games I started playing but haven't played long enough to form a better opinion than "is good" - Balder's Gate 3, Super Mario Wonder games I bought but haven't started (poor financial decisions ahoy) - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Fire Emblem Engage, Monster Hunter Rise, Metroid Prime Remastered, Tales of Symphonia Remastered, Like a Dragon: Ishin!, Octopath Traveler 2, HFW: Burning Shores, Pikmin 4, Armored Core VI, Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 Remaster, Spider-Man 2, MGS Master Collection 1, Persona 5: Tactica
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Dec 19, 2023 03:30
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I don't think I've done one of these before but I felt a bit compelled by the sad news about James McCaffrey to write my praise so... 10. Escape Simulator By no means a great game - but one of my favorite experiences this year was playing this game with my wife. We're both big escape room fans and this captures the feeling drat near perfectly. 9. Wario Ware Move It For much of the same reasons as above - this game is already becoming a "we have friends over and half an hour to kill, let's bust this out" sort of staple in our household. 8. Advance Wars 1+2 At times very frustrating, but also always satisfying for a puzzel strategy RPG fan like myself. I'm glad to see the series alive again and I hope they make many more. 7. Dave the Diver I had no expectations for this game, but as a lover of good times and sushi, this game hit the spot as a relaxing cool down sort of fish capturing restaurant sim. 6. Fire Emblem Engage I just got back into this at the end of the year and after being very chilly towards it on release, I have been finding it very addictive and satisfying. Maybe it was just anemic at launch in a way the DLC managed to fill out or maybe I was more receptive to it, but in any case, this is a very good Fire Emblem game. 5. Pentiment I saw this marked as played at the beginning of the year so I was late to it but it's definitely going to stick with me for a long time. At times utterly frustrating but unique enough to justify any slow spots or annoying design decisions. 4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Nintendo finally cracked co-op Mario with this one. What more can I say? It's a perfect couch co-op game with family and friends. 3. Tears of the Kingdom Any other year this would be a clear number 1. I definitely spent the most time playing this this year, and had they made a new map that might have been enough to make the difference to make it #1, but for every delightful discovery there was a twinge of "I've seen this already" that holds it back from the next two. 2. Baldur's Gate 3 A perfect CRPG by the best in the loving business. I will sing it's praises from mountaintops and play through it many times in the future no doubt. Larian has supplanted CDPR as the new god in my pantheon. 1. Alan Wake 2 I could, and should, write about this for pages but I'm going to keep it concise because it's been praised to death at this point. Remedy is a special studio and they created something magical with this game. By my reckoning it is not entirely pleasant to play - I don't like being scared in games and the constantly respawning enemies and survival horror elements are absolutely not a thing I enjoy. Yet somehow it doesn't just rise above these problems but entirely transcends them to become the sort of metatextual narrative I will be turning over in my mind for years. Any rabid fan of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" will see its DNA in this and I can't praise it enough. It's perfect. Good Soldier Svejk fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Dec 19, 2023 |
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Dec 19, 2023 04:24
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I had my list set up but it was surprisingly hard to number them, I did my best though. 10. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line  If you like rhythm games and Final Fantasy musics this is almost a must have. It keeps your attention and they put so much in the game, even older and obscure FF games like Mystic Quest. Some of the challenges do feel like which characters you need to plug and play, but otherwise it's great at letting you mix and match whoever you want and just relax and have a good time. 9. Fire Emblem Engage  In terms of story this is very cut and paste and nothing to write home about, and I'm not huge on how much they push the old series characters, but in terms of gameplay it's up there for my favorite FE game. Each level felt different and nice to play except for one or two, and the emblems themselves were okay gameplay mechanics. Also I was content with one playthrough, not feeling burnt out like I did with 3 Houses and needing to play the same part of a game 3/4 times to get the full story. 8. Live a Live  Each scenario the game presents you with is unique, charming, and fun. Some are shorter and more story based, and don't have a lot of combat, but outside of one they feel like they fly by and don't have a lot of filler in them. Unless you're going for superbosses there's also not a ton of challenge in a good way, where you don't need to sit around and grind. 7. Spider-Man 2  In terms of accessibility and tech this game is amazing. The fast travel is instant, along with switching characters and anything involving loading. The story itself is a bit disjointed, there's roughly a three act structure but it doesn't move between them super well, and like a few big Playstation games recently suffers from being part 2 in a planned trilogy. They did make the Mary Jane parts a lot better, instead of being instafail stealth missions you now can fight back really well. I'm excited to see what part 3 has. 6. Kentucky Route Zero  I played this after all 5 episodes came out, and I know there were lengthy waits between them as they were being released, and I do think this game benefits from all of them out at once. The game fumbles the last episode a little mechanically more than story wise, but there are some really great ambient moments in this game, and has this midwestern folklore vibe that's present but never really commented on, and the weird and not so weird people you meet on the journey are always interesting and worth listening to. 5. Super Mario Wonder  This game is probably the closest I've felt to playing Super Mario World as a kid. Everything about it feels charming, though some levels focus too much on a gimmick to where replaying it for 100% isn't the most appealing. 4. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name  When this game out it was treated as too short, but honestly I found this to be a great 25-30 hour experience. Outside of the live action hostess parts, which are needed for trophies, all the minigames are fun, and it's a nice sendoff for the Kiryu combat games as they move to a more RPG focus, after 6 was a game that was fun, but narratively not the best for a send off for someone like Kiryu. 3. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor  I played this on PS5, when I know this had a pretty bad PC release, so I avoided the worst issues people had at launch. I really liked Fallen Order, and this game fixed almost every problem I had, with the addition of fast travel, blaster combat, and those funny droids from the prequels. Cal himself isn't the best character, but he's good enough and the surrounding cast in this game is great. Turgle was a bit of a meme when the game released, but he's a genuinely enjoyable character and he's just one in a whole bar full of mostly great characters. Scoova Stev is the one I didn't like for whatever reason. 2. Final Fantasy XVI  In a reverse from Jedi Survivor, this one is built on the strength of Clive, the main character, who's Voice Actor arguably gives the strongest performance of the year. The game has some amazing highs, but also some low lows when there's not much going on. The combat is basically DMC-lite, with no rankings until New Game plus, and I honestly think the game should have had those as an option from the start. But this might have the best music of the year, the main bosses are such a great cinematic and gameplay experience, and Clive himself is a really great character. 1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom  This game improves on almost everything from Breath of the Wild, adding a sky and an underground, and massively improving on the abilities. I'm someone who usually hates more detailed crafting and building in games because I suck at it, but this game is great at letting things work if it's close enough or good enough. Three wood boards badly attached to a wheel can solve so many problems, and while I'm always impressed with the elaborate things people have done and built with this game, I'm also impressed at how they let you do the same thing with so little. Fusing weapons and shields together was also a great improvement for comment.
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Dec 19, 2023 05:21
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Oh poo poo Pocket Circuit racing is back in the new Like a Dragon game!?! 
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Dec 19, 2023 05:26
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Best year for gaming ever? Possibly, and I still haven't even gotten around to playing Baldur's Gate 3. Honorable mentions: COCOON First project from one of the developers of LIMBO and INSIDE, solid ~4 hour puzzle game with a familiar minimalist graphical style. Sort of game I'd expect to see half off in some near-future sale, worth it if you want something casual that never really brick walls you with overly cerebral puzzle design. DREDGE Don't think it really lived up to the vibe it was trying to convey but an enjoyable game nonetheless. The underlying mechanics make the horror aspects kind of trivial after a while but the basic fishing/selling loop is satisfying. Hardspace: Shipbreaker Never got terribly invested in the story but the gameplay is unique and relaxing. Scratches the same itch that something like Powerwash Simulator probably does for other people, liked this enough that I ought to try that out some time as well. HUMANITY Excellent puzzler reminiscent of the old Lemmings games, gave me my only excuse of the year to dust off the VR headset. Unfortunately I can't stand having it on for more than about an hour at a time so there's still a lot to do, maybe this would have been in my top 10 if I'd made it farther. Void Strangers A game I need to force myself to play more. Never been particularly fond of sokoban style puzzles in general but I managed to get down to floor ~150 or so before falling off. Apparently full of incredible secrets, I just need to push to the point that the game starts to reveal some of them. TOP TEN 10. DAVE THE DIVER  Delightful game all the way through, packed with endless game systems which unlock steadily and build on each other until you roll credits. Running the sushi restaurant is complex enough that you remain invested without it ever being overbearing, the diving sections have a good balance of relaxing fishing and more tense moments of combat. Wasn't a fan of the button mashing innate to the default spear gun but they patched it recently to allow those to autocomplete so that's a major downside gone whenever I decide to replay it (want to see the new DREDGE tie-in content as well). Decent story to keep you moving along which gives the devs plenty of excuses to throw in even more game modes and there aren't any clear misses that I recall. Maintains the vibe of an indie game despite coming from a larger studio, a great example of what can be done when you have a development team with lots of ideas and the budget to actually implement them all. 9. Armored Core 6  My Playstation 1 came with a demo disk which had a few small sections of the original Armored Core on it (also Parappa the Rappa). I played a lot of that back in the day, none of the intervening titles, and now this. FROM is clearly taking what they've learned as developers over the last decade or so and imparting that on the game without it losing any of its identity, it's still the same series of short missions in a bleak cyber-future but with a lot of refinements to the combat. An impressive granularity of customization is allowed, even if I ignored most of it for the duration of the campaign and dedicated myself to pile bunkering as many mechs as possible. Certainly going to go back to it for another playthrough at some point so I can make different choices at critical moments in the campaign and see what changes. 8. Resident Evil 4  Never played RE4 until a year ago when I went through the whole thing in VR on my Quest 2, even without the nostalgia it still held up as a great experience (even if not being balanced for VR made it a bit easy). The remake was even better, refining the more janky Gamecube-era mechanics with QOL changes that over-the-shoulder games have learned over the years. RE Engine ran perfectly even on my somewhat dated rig, could even turn on ray tracing and fancy hair without the framerate taking too much of a hit. Knife parrying is a great addition and makes for some absurd moments, Leon maintains his action hero swag and gets a fun nod to the backflipping through lasers section of the original. A blast to play through beginning to end. 7. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart  I don't have any consoles so Sony's decision to port a bunch of their major titles to PC has let me play a lot of games that I thought would pass me by. Only other R&C game I've played was Up Your Arsenal back on the PS2 but that was a lot of fun so I had high expectations. Just a really high quality, extremely fun game from start to finish with few complaints to make. Weapon selection is as creative as ever and enables a lot of fun combinations (always open up by turning all the enemies into topiaries), difficulty is ramped up enough at the top setting that it offers a decent challenge at times. In an era of shoddy ports, this stands out as well for having all the options you would want alongside solid optimization. Going to keep this in mind as a go-to for benchmarking future PC builds, certainly the most visually spectacular game I played all year. 6. Dead Space  In late 2022 I upgraded from a GTX 1070 to an RTX 3070 specifically so that my computer would be ready to play Callisto Protocol. That game was...ehhhh, but it turns out I was actually upgrading my computer so I could play the Dead Space remake, which at the time seemed a more uncertain product. The original already held up well enough and a remake felt potentially unnecessary, the team at Motive managed to add enough of their own influence while remaining faithful to the source material that it probably eclipses the originals. I was already a major fan of the games, even 3 to an extent, but this is probably the one I'll go back to most often now and not just because it has the benefit of modern graphics (though those certainly add to the atmosphere). Dead Space is to me what RE4 has long been to a lot of other people, this knocked it out of the park. 5. Returnal  Another Sony exclusive I never expected I'd get to play, this was in my periphery for a long time as something that looked uncommonly gamey for the level of graphical fidelity it offered and I didn't really know what to think about it. Bought it on a whim when they finally ported it (after leaking that they were porting it on at least 3 separate occasions) and quickly got sucked in. Extremely fast paced, responsive combat that rewards mastery and manages to remain comprehensible even when the screen is littered with 1000 projectiles. Recognizable enemy design with clear attack tells so the game maintains a high level of challenge without ever feeling unfair. Only downside is that the pickups can be a bit uninspired for a roguelike, the escalations of power will generally come more from bonuses on the weapons themselves rather than whatever passives you're gathering. Played this one enough to get the true ending for the main campaign, then the additional tower mode enough to get the true ending for that as well, then some kind of additional complete ending which combines both. Absolutely worth a look if you were ever curious about it and are in the mood for an arcade-y "game-rear end game". 4. Lies of P  Steam shows that I've played For Honor, a game which is stupid and bad, for roughly 450 hours. Sekiro is probably my favorite FROMsoft game, or at least the one which I felt had the most concise and satisfying combat system. Kind of a sucker for any game which requires perfectly times strikes in its combat, something which first clicked for me with Legend of Dragoon back on the PS1, so this was always destined to be one of my favorites of the year even if it's kind of a bizarre concept. Hits a perfect mid-point between its most direct influence of Bloodborne and the precision parries of Sekiro while adding its own twists to the formula with the head+handle weapon system. Most of the bosses were incredible, with a wide variety of attack patterns with specific timings which are satisfying to learn. Going from getting your rear end kicked to perfect parrying full combos until the boss's weapon breaks and they have to fight you in at a disadvantage never gets old, with the regenerating final potion system adding even more tension. They even included a nod to FROM in the form of a single bad boss fight which relies on a dumb gimmick. For a first attempt at something like this from a relatively unknown studio it's incredible that they managed to produce a game of this quality. Never manages to reach the grandeur of something like Elden Ring but that's kind of an impossible aspiration, besides a somewhat uninspired final dungeon I'd put this about on the same level as any of the mainline Souls games. Certainly going to dive back in whenever they release DLC for it and excited to see what they do with the teaser they added at the very end. 3. Alan Wake 2  Remedy was never really on my list of major publishers. I played the original Alan Wake back in the day but didn't remember much about it besides shooting a bunch of shadow guys at a rock concert and covering a car with Christmas lights towards the end. Played Control after that which did a lot of inventive things merging live-action elements and might be the only game to ever make telekinesis actually fun to use, though it didn't hit with me to the extent it did with others and I was surprised to see it get GOTY from IGN. In a lot of ways Control is a more fun game to play than Alan Wake 2, I might even say the the combat here is a bit of a chore at times, but it's going to be a much more memorable game for me than the others. A game everybody should play just because it's such a unique experience despite being built on what is essentially a typical Resident Evil style over-the-shoulder shooter framework. The sort of game where you'd expect an executive to intervene and force the developers into more tested game formulas, it feels entirely uncompromised and features my favorite moment of any game released this year (anyone who played can easily guess what that is). It's certainly not without its flaws, one of the later sections for instance features so many back to back jump scares that it started to be legitimately annoying, but I respect Remedy for having the nerve to make something like this. Stunning game to look at on top of it all, inexplicably featuring enough graphical options to rival something like Cyberpunk if you have the computing grunt to crank the settings up. Best game I played out of any new releases this year, unfortunate to hear that it received relatively low sales. That probably has a lot to do with the EGS exclusivity on top of its weird niche of a genre but more people should play this even if they skipped the original. 2. TUNIC  This was on my wishlist for a long time, I never really knew many details besides it being an isometric Zelda-type game with secrets of some kind. Had a sudden urge to pull the trigger on it without doing my usual thing of waiting for a sale, just didn't have anything lined up and decided it was a good time to give it a try. Having finished it and completed the final puzzle (not counting all the ultra-secret ADR level stuff which is its own rabbit hole) it immediately rocketed to one of my all time favorites. The basic game I'd rate somewhere in the 8-9/10 range, perfectly solid in its own right although the Zelda style combat can be relatively shallow. What pushes it over the top is the focus on what has been referred to elsewhere as "knowledge-based gameplay," beginning with the obvious quirk of all the text and instructions being written in an incomprehensible language and expanding to everything hidden underneath. I consider Outer Wilds to be the ultimate example of that type of game and my personal choice for the best game ever made (its expansion Echoes of the Eye being the second best since it's almost an entire new game in its own right), a game which runs the average person somewhere around 15 hours but can be beaten in under 20 minutes from a fresh save if you know what to do. TUNIC still follows a more typical powerup based progression and isn't knowledge-based to quite that extent but the final puzzle is the only other moment I've experienced in gaming which managed to reach the same heights as what I felt playing Outer Wilds. There's a big door up in the mountains which seems impassible, what you need to do to open it and the realizations you need to have to get there are nothing short of genius. An 11/10 puzzle, absolutely incredible. 1. Satisfactory  Won't come as a surprise for anyone who reads the Satisfactory thread. The question "What's the best game" gets broken down into three categories for me. For the most direct answer, Outer Wilds is the best game. It's a magical experience completely unlike anything else but comes with an innate drawback where you can only really play it once, any further engagement coming in the form of watching other people play it so you can attempt to relive that same process of discovery. Favorite multiplayer game is a separate category where my all-time favorite is probably Deep Rock Galactic, a game that consistently avoids the toxic pitfalls of other online communities and continues to release free updates, although the devs seem to be moving to a stage where their focus starts to split between other projects. My *favorite* game is Satisfactory, a game which still hasn't seen a 1.0 release despite several years in early access, has no story, has a game world full of work-in-progress trinkets which do nothing, and is based around production goals which ultimately don't result in anything more than a few trophies and a golden coffee cup at the highest levels. Still, it's grabbed me unlike any other game. I tried Factorio but ultimately bounced off it around the time I reached the third science variant, I'll probably go back to it at some point but I never found it very compelling for whatever reason. Dyson Sphere Project is an excellent entry in the automation genre and is next on my list of things to play now that the Dark Fog update released (once my computer is done being upgraded) but tends to become highly repetitive beyond the mid-game. The expansion of that underlying automation loop into a fully 3D hand crafted world just inspires me more than the others which end up feeling too restricted by comparison. I've started and completed multiple saves with each new major update the devs release, finding new ways to exploit and abuse the basic game functions each time. I've played it so much that with each new save I deliberately handicap myself by building things in idiotic ways, be it transporting raw iron ore and bottled water by automated drone or moving supercomputers between factories with flying Cybertrucks. I've built three different nuclear power plants which use up all the uranium sources on the map in addition to two smaller ones before those, at this stage probably producing more power in total than any other player. The latest update was centered around the massive task of updating the entire game from Unreal Engine 4 to 5, I celebrated it by building a 1.2 terawatt plant 600 meters in the sky. An absolute abomination of anti-efficiency.  The game enables my bullshit unlike any other, tolerating projects which grow larger and larger in scale until they're the size of the entire game map, my FPS is in the mid-low digits, and it takes 10 minutes to load a save file. A game I've played enough that I can close my eyes and reconstruct the entire world from memory. I want the devs to focus on getting to the 1.0 release as much as anyone but I'll keep playing each new update if they think they need an Update 9 before then. They're Swedish, being a fan of the game requires some acceptance of a relatively glacial pace of development. I already have ideas for new, stupid things to build before they've even teased anything new, probably going to keep playing this game forever. NoEyedSquareGuy fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Dec 19, 2023 |
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Dec 19, 2023 07:26
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bobjr posted:1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I am similarly tepid on building stuff in games. I just don't have that kind of imagination or motivation! I am definitely in the boat of "good enough" in TotK. Glue a bunch of tree trunks together to get up a wall/make a bridge? Yep. That was my go-to.
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Dec 19, 2023 13:53
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That gif reminds me that I never really took advantage of the Monster Masks in TotK, and I love the animation of them sniffing at this weird little version of themselves trying to figure out what's going on 
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Dec 19, 2023 15:14
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2023 truly was a great year for games! Maybe not the best year for the games industry, but let's focus on celebration for now. I played 16 games this year, so some are going to have to not count here, but I had words to say about everything, so words you shall have. Let's begin! HONORABLE MENTIONS  I hope I never have to learn IRL. OWLBOY Owlboy is a game with really good graphics, and pretty interesting puzzle design. But it’s also a game that didn’t really impress me beyond that. The story, while decently well written, has a bit of dissonance in its lesson of folks traumatized by abuse from different sources when there’s also a shopkeeper that loves to physically abuse little Prinny knockoffs. “They’re not humanoid so it’s okay, right?” That’s the impression I got. I also ended up not finding the combat and boss design very compelling, and at times there was a very distinct lack of control during platforming. Your main character gets knocked around a LOT when they get hit, so in narrow corridors it can end up throwing you way back or getting you into all sorts of trouble. And while I understand that there’s a story reason for Otus being physically weak, it doesn’t mean I find it any less annoying. I dunno. I think this game is a bit overhyped, I suppose? At least there’s a spider lover in it.  Naturally coming into some immense power through your own brain is always satisfying. COSMIC STAR HEROINE The first indie I played this year was an interesting one. I snagged this for basically zero monies using nintendo funbux on the Switch several years ago, and got around to it because I wanted to clear a shorter RPG. The game uses a resource-based battle system where you start every battle fully healed and have a limited amount of uses of your various skills to clear battles with until you decide to use a “recharge” skill. While it devolves into “superbuff the main character and use their giant fuckoff AOE” by the end, as you go there’s a lot of depth to the combat even on lower difficulty levels, especially if you wander into sidequests that are a bit above your paygrade. This game’s major flaw is that it tries WAY too hard to be funny all the time. The script is like 80% jokes, and especially repeated common jokes about the usual RPG standbys. What is there when it’s taking itself seriously isn’t much either, really not that complicated of a plot. Honestly sometimes it went a bit too quickly for my taste as well. I did yearn for more content by the end, though, so it had to have been doing something right!  Now please don't throw me off this precarious rock! NEXOMON: EXTINCTION The original Nexomon, a mons-collecting game, was a hastily designed simple experience with mobile game smell all over it from its original release platform. While Nexomon: Extinction feels like it was made from the ground up for consoles moreso, it really doesn’t change that much in the grand scheme. The story still breaks the fourth wall like mad, gameplay is still rocket tag with barely any strategy, and late-game battles pump up numbers beyond what a legitimate Nexomon ought to have. But, like the first game, I came away from this with a positive feeling in my heart. It’s fast-paced, so nothing boring lasts too long. There’s a LOT of optional exploration one can do, and plenty of fun passive buffs you can get as treasures as a reward for doing so. A proper sidequest system and trades scattered around the world encourage you to remember your travels and how to easily get things you need. And the plot, when it isn’t being too self-referential, was a worthy followup to the first game’s story. These guys can’t keep getting away with this!  Elephants are looking stylish these days. SUPER MARIO WONDER Caring about a Mario game is rare for me, but I was taken in by the massive hype train that was Super Mario Wonder easily. It ended up delivering on its promise of the weird and wacky, while also delighting me with its Talking Flower nonsense. There was a good bit of fun dialogue besides those audible fellows as well, which I enjoyed. At the end of the day, though, it’s a simple game without too much bite to it, similar to Kirby - and while Kirby gets away with it due to its immense charm and slower-paced active puzzle solving, Mario feels like it shouldn’t really be drifting in that direction as much. Not that it wasn’t without its very challenging levels here and there… In any case, I definitely rate this well, it’s merely a little short of the “best platformer ever” thoughts I think many other people have. I think I’m just not much of a platformer guy at the end of the day? Or at least, 3D always feels a bit more impactful, cause of exploring and stuff.  Who would win, the embodiment of badfeels, or one otter boi? POKEMON MYSTERY DUNGEON: GATES TO INFINITY Real superfans of the Pokémon series will remember that we had a “dexit” long before the release of Sword and Shield with this Black and White spinoff game. I was outraged that I wouldn’t be able to play this game with many of my standby favorites from Sinnoh and prior. (Even some Unova mons are missing like Reuniclus - what’s up with that?) And so I skipped this game despite my utter love of the Mystery Dungeon style, instead picking up Super Mystery Dungeon when it came out some years later. So now that I’m using Citra more often I decided to give this game a go and what was waiting for me was a poignant, if childishly written, story about how easily it is to think pessimistically and negatively and how that can spread amongst people to create self-fulfilling prophecies of despair. Also the gameplay loop is, as always, addictive as hell. The game allows you very early on to say gently caress the story I want to be not my main characters, which I really appreciated - being able to strut around the hub and dungeons as a Leavanny or Archeops or Larvesta adds to the immersion of being who I really wanted to be. No surprise, the ending got me a bit choked up as well. All of this is to say, I really should not have skipped this game when I was young. And if anyone else is on the fence, I urge you to give it a try!  I'm okay with this interpretation of my life. FIRE EMBLEM ENGAGE After the pain that the superfans of Three Houses caused me, I was truly looking forward to this game so much, and it became the first Fire Emblem game I ever played on launch day. This is a simple plotted game that doesn’t go too out of its league, and instead focuses all its efforts on making a colorfully weird cast and an extremely tight strategic system that we haven’t seen the likes of in years. The crucial new gameplay element, the Engages, felt like “win” buttons before you get your hands on the game and realize the game constructs challenges and complications that turn the Engages into tools to solve problems that would otherwise be immensely challenging for your average Fire Emblem army. Combine that with lots of other possible shenanigans with staves, skill inheritance, and delightfully campy Saturday morning cartoon moments, and this ended up being one of my favorite games in the series. I never bought, played, or even watched someone else play the DLC, nor do I feel the need to. I’m satisfied with the package that was given to me and will hold it in my heart. And now, for the actual top ten! NUMBER 10  I think this line is new to the remake. I love it. ADVANCE WARS 1+2: RE-BOOT CAMP Put simply, they knocked it out of the park with this remake. Advance Wars was always a series I enjoyed, but at the same time felt a bit too big brained for me. There’s been little changes here and there to make it more palatable. A “casual” difficulty which gives you some extra pre-deployed units for more oomph in battles makes muscling though a lot more easy. Also, the CPU respects Fog of War way more than they originally did, which is very welcome. While the script isn’t rewritten too much, seeing the characters have their little voice acted blurbs, and the expressiveness of their animated portraits and CO Powers… man, it sure does feel like a lot of love went into it! It’s a great set of games and really felt like coming home after all the overly complicated strategy games of the past. I wish it had gotten more attention and love, but evidently not even reaching 1 million sales at any point this year it just goes to show, vocal minorities are still minorities at the end of the day, and we probably won’t be getting much more Advance Wars love in the future. Still, I had so much fun with this and still want to go back to it, and I encourage you all to do the same! NUMBER 9  It's not always quite this gamey and blatant about it. RADIANT HISTORIA: PERFECT CHRONOLOGY Revisiting Radiant Historia is something I wanted to do since this remake came out. I even bought it physically! But for whatever reason, I didn’t play it until just this year. And as I went through it, I was reminded why this game left such a mark on me back in the early 2010s when the DS was in its true prime. It’s such an intelligent story, with characters that have real agency and that approach things with logic more than basically anything else that looks as animesque as this. The battle system is really good too, rewarding clever use of the battlefield to speed up encounters and encouraging you to utilize your skills without hoarding all your MP all the time. As for the new changes to this version, it’s a mixed bag - some of the new story is kind of interesting, but it really veers into villain redeeming golden ending territory after a while and that rubs me the wrong way a bit. I do appreciate the added actual battle content being a way to keep the levels of your less-common party members like Rosch and Eruca more caught up, at least. Overall, still a solid game I’d recommend to almost any RPG fan out there. NUMBER 8  Such a beautiful little game we have here! BLASPHEMOUS Seeing as the sequel to this game came out shortly after I finished it, it feels appropriate to tackle it now. While this is a search action game like your Metroids and your Vanias, it has a certain uniqueness to it owing to its setting and its upgrade systems. This is the first game of this genre I played that doesn’t have a double jump, for instance. While the combat took some getting used to, I didn’t struggle in this game nearly as much as I did in Hollow Knight, often killing bosses save for the final and bonus bosses on my first attempt. I really enjoyed this game overall, my major flaws with it owe to the instant-death spikes scattered about. Instant death is never ever fun and I hope they realized that for the sequel. There was also some janky platforming stuff in the Bloodstained crossover areas that I did not much care for, but that can’t be levied against it too much. So, overall, pretty good game. NUMBER 7  I loving love this turtle. POKEMON VIOLET: THE HIDDEN TREASURE OF AREA ZERO The ever-contentious Scarlet and Violet got their story DLC this year in lieu of a third version game, as what happened last generation. But unlike Sword and Shield, this DLC was a full, continuous story, a Part 1 and Part 2, focusing on the timid Kieran and his character development as he runs into the one person that makes him question everything about life - you, the impossible-to-defeat prodigy champion. And I think that’s so fascinating, coming up on someone with a major case of Main Character Syndrome that isn’t actually you. His desperation to become as strong as you was so well realized in both the Teal Mask and the Indigo Disk and I gotta give them props for that. I honestly do believe that the writing in this generation has likely exceeded that of the lofty Black and White. As for the gameplay, though, it’s more of what one would love normally about Pokemon. Catching and battling in new zones, new customization options for fashion, various side tasks and fun new characters are all present. Indigo Disk stands out more here, because the repeatable Blueberry Quests provide an incentive to engage with every act of exploration, and an additional incentive to play with your friends rather than just by yourself. I really enjoyed my time with these DLCs, and I’m greatly looking forward to what further Unova shilling they will have to offer us in the coming year. Also Terapagos is my perfect little baby. NUMBER 6  One of my proudest moments in this game is earning this goober. Taking screenshots of it is difficult, so you'll have to bear with not seeing something quite so exciting. ANOTHER EDEN: THE CAT BEYOND SPACE AND TIME I have never reviewed a mobile game on one of these things, even ones I played quite a lot... so if this is here, you have to imagine the kind of impact it had on me. Well, to begin, this game is an RPG first and a gacha second - the vibe kinda reminds me of Final Fantasy XIV, in a way, which also prioritizes its storytelling and worldbuilding over its MMO trappings. While yes you do pull for characters and yes things can get pretty hard without getting a little lucky, the game has a fully explorable world you actually walk around in and explore and get treasure and find secrets in. It’s not a menu-based level select, which is already incredible. Then, the story goes to some wild and weird places - to be expected, since it’s written by Masato Kato of Chrono Trigger fame. (There are many CT references in the plot, as well, including Frog and Lucca lookalikes named Cyrus and Ashtear.) While it doesn’t feel like anything super special at the end of the day, having a game like this in the palm of my hand at all times is something I never could have imagined, and I’m kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. It’s on Steam, too, if any of y’all non-mobile gamers are intrigued by what I’ve spoken of so far! The mobile version does have advantages in being able to watch ads (aka mute and put the phone down for 30 seconds and check Discord) for items and free continues if you lose against a boss, so there’s that. Some flaws are that it definitely has a small budget; animations for characters can be a bit samey, and the english text is riddled with typos and errors. Even within the span of this year I was able to catch up to and see all the story content, main and side, that currently exists, and just that that’s even possible is an achievement. I’d love to see more people give it a try, as well! NUMBER 5  This line lives rent free in my head eternally. SUPER MARIO RPG (2023) Nobody expected SMRPG to come back in as big a way as this. This remake is one of the greatest repackagings they could have done. Asides from some sparse frame drops in certain areas, it runs perfectly, the added thought peek scans of every enemy adds a lot of potential nuance to fighting and exploring… oh, and there’s a bunch of neat postgame challenges now that are mostly gimmicky but still pretty interesting. I was afraid it’d be too easy with the changes they made, but there are ups and downs to the additions and genuinely missing timed hits due to the updated animations was refreshing when it wasn’t frustrating. Mallow is best boy now and forever. Oh, and there weren’t that many script changes, mostly little tweaks and certain additions that help direct folks that don’t know where they might be going. The added flavor text for every enemy on the monster list is so charming. The remixed music as well is oh-so-stellar, but being Yoko Shimomura that’s no surprise. If you’ve somehow not played SMRPG before this, you might as well start here with the remake! Okay, gushing over! NUMBER 4  Some say this squad is still looking for those last lousy CollectaCards to this day... THEATRHYTHM FINAL FANTASY: FINAL BAR LINE There isn’t that much to say about Theatrhythm that hasn’t been said for all its previous incarnations. It’s addictive as hell. And adding on the massive amount of new songs didn’t change that one bit. This game played a lot more with making your party compositions for questing in the music stages more meaningful, with tough challenges that require mastery of loadouts and strong execution in the stages themselves. While it doesn’t have as much legs in terms of repeatable content, it does have higher difficulty charts that I have only barely scratched the surface of. And with new songs coming out every few weeks for most of the year, it remained on my mind for quite a long time. I only wish it could have become a platform for eternal updates, but I know Square has their sights set on bigger and better things. NUMBER 3  But did you stop? No. We wouldn't have had a game otherwise though, so thank you for destroying the world. TRANSISTOR Continuing the theme of “playing sequels to games I played a couple years ago” this year, I finally got over my fear and anxiety on how different this game was and played Transistor, Supergiant’s follow-up to Bastion. While, yes, the new battle system was a bit to get used to starting off, the game design gives you a lot of room to experiment, get used to things, and not punish you too harshly for being wrong or inefficient. By the end if you’ve given the game the respect it asks for, you feel like a god running around and efficiently destroying everything. But that’s just the gameplay - the game’s real praise needs to go to its plot, which was a much more poignant and personal story than Bastion. While Bastion felt a bit far removed in its fantasy setting, its somewhat “live” apocalypse, and more artistic storytelling, Transistor’s narration is very clearly directed at your player character as someone in the setting, and it also allows other people to be allowed to talk to you asides from the end of the game. It also felt more real, despite it being quite different from reality, if that makes any sense? I don’t know. I’m a sucker for a good love story, and the way Red feels about her significant other feels so unbelievably amazing. Ideals to aspire to. Except maybe without all the bloodshed I guess. NUMBER 2  Most of my other screenshots are giant chain attack numbers, so enjoy this one. XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3: FUTURE REDEEMED As a microcosm of Xenoblade 3’s best features, this short prequel story DLC gave me a renewed appreciation for what made the game so good. The main gameplay changes involve a large checklist system for things like killing certain amounts of enemies, collecting items, discovering landmarks, and rescuing and assisting the citizens of the main settlement with their problems, which all feeds into ability points you can spend on improving your characters’ strengths. There’s also the freedom to choose combos between your team of 6 in order to trigger different effects at the end of chain attacks, or used whenever they’re charged up in normal combat. It’s simpler, but it’s cleaner. The story is great, as is to be expected from this series at this point, and comes with some really shocking and interesting revelations. This is definitely where they hid all the fanservice and nostalgia one would have expected the base game to have with its conceit of the two worlds merging into one. But I’m a sucker for that, so… yeah. NUMBER 1 (SURPRISING NO ONE)  This questline for Tarrey Town made me so emotional... THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM Tears of the Kingdom is perhaps one of the most anticipated video games of all time. I loved Breath of the Wild, any faults people brought up with it were either meaningless or viewed as positives on my end. Bad dungeons? I always thought the dungeons were the weakest part of prior Zelda games anyway! Weak story? Who cares, I’m ‘splorin! It’s amazing to think about all that, and look at this game, and then see that not only did they do their best to fix what they thought needed fixing, but also beef up its greatest strengths as well. This is a game where everything feels like it matters. Your main quest of tracing the trails of Princess Zelda to find where she’s gone takes you everywhere, and it all feels so fun to explore! Every town has its problem to solve, whether it’s related to the main story or not, whether the stakes are high or low. Exploring caves and finding clothes and shrines all over, earning Korok Seeds because of course, adding creatures and items to my compendium, completing meaningful sidequests for various people, many of which I remembered from the old world of Breath of the Wild. Some of them are up to their old shenanigans, others have grown in surprising ways. And it’s all tied together with that main plot, goodness… it pulled on some very specific heartstrings that not much mainstream media does these days. There’s no question in my mind that this game is my game of the year. A game like this… it’s special and creative in a way few studios can even hope to match. Can’t wait for what comes next! And that'll do it for me this time. There are games I wish I could've had the time to play but didn't, like Sea of Stars, Baldur's Gate 3, or Octopath Traveler II... but it only means there's more greatness awaiting me. And while Silksong didn't end up releasing this year in the end, I have a good feeling about next year. I only wish Monster Hunter Wilds would come out sooner, too! For now, I await the inevitable Switch 2 and the release of FF14's next expansion as well, along with whatever else will throw me for a loop in 2024. Here's to a great year and many years to come! Quick List 1) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 2) Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed 3) Transistor 4) Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Final Bar Line 5) Super Mario RPG (2023) 6) Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Space and Time 7) Pokémon Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero 8) Blasphemous 9) Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology 10) Advance Wars: Re-Boot Camp
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Dec 19, 2023 21:08
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this was such a lovely list to read, thank you for sharing such precious memories
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Dec 19, 2023 22:53
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10. Mario Wonder- I really liked this one. The platforming was all great, it was nice to see Daisy and noted girlboss Toadette in a mainline game, and it was dripping with wonderful art design and level building. I was always being pleasantly surprised by what I saw and enjoyed looking for the wonder seeds to see what weird rule-breaking section the game would throw my way. The big negative of the game is the airship segments, though; those were pretty boring and ended with a weak hit button section copied between all of them. 9. System Shock - Really beautifully crafted remake of the original System Shock, in a way that makes it actually fun to play and not something an insane person would put themselves through for nostalgia reasons. It almsot bankrupted Night Dive, because the studio head had this as their baby and wanted to make the perfect game, but what eventually came out was more than great. 8. Slayers X - A fantastic little shitpost, oozing with the same humor and goofy irony that was in the original Hypnospace Outlaw, and an endearing look into Zane's growth as a person affter Hypnospace. 7. Dredge - Good, nice little spooky fishing game. A bit dull near the end though, as the character quests and writing slows down (you can see the budget start running thin pretty quick). A DLC or a remastered edition with more writing would help the game a lot, but I enjoyed puttering around and doing some night fishing while hallucinating eyeballs attacking me. 6. Lies of P - It's Pinnochio Bloodborne. It's good! The writing is neat for the idea it's approaching and the combat feels good, and I liked the weapon combination system they had. 5. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood - Pretty good little VN. Lots of the card creation mechanic is neat, and it has a decent amount of reactivity to it, though the plot doesn't stray too far from its baseline. Your choices can have effects, but don't expect it to be Slay the Princess. 4. Myhouse - When I played this I could not believe the amount of poo poo the game was pulling. Tons of secrets, every time I thought I had something figured out the game opened up a new insane secret that changed a bunch of the levels around. Not to mention the sort of weird plot it had going on and the mysterious way it got dropped onto the internet. Also you fight Shrek and it's scary and not like, funny. Well it's kind of funny but it's also startling. 3. Slay the Princess - A well written vn with an absolutely insane amount of reactivity to it. They give you so, so many choices and all of them do something different and thanks to the way the story is structured you're able to just do tons of things and affect the story in fun ways that really feels great. After a full game playthrough I haven't even seen 1/4 of the different versions of it, so there is a LOT there. 2. Hi-Fi Rush - It was nice to see a Rhythm game come out again, and a character action one? it's one of my dream game ideas and it was made phenomenally well, with lovable characters, challenge levels for postgame, and just so, so much. And it got shadow dropped! Incredible that something so good just got thunked out onto gamepass with zero fanfare. 1. Pizza Tower - It's really hard to mention all the things that make this game great, because there's so much of it. The animation (did you know pepino has over 1600 individual frames of animation?), the incredible soundtrack, the love and care oozing from every fascet of the game, the pure adrenaline rush of P ranking, the ending being such a nice little wrapup. I 100%ed this game and then went back and played it again, which should be all you need to know. ------- Extras: 11. WORLD OF HORROR - WORLD OF HORROR. It's good, you know what this is. 12. Atomic Heart- Ah, Eurojank, how I love thee. Well put together (shockingly), looks good, extremely weird setting, baffling design decisions, it's all here! 13. Aliens: Dark Descent- I was really shocked at this being good, but hey, it was good! The strategy was interesting and the game didn't drag too long. 14. Robocop- I was really surprised at how good this was. It held together well and was an interesting look into the Robocop world, and you get to fuckin explode some dudes nuts with an exploding sniper rifle while the robocop theme blares. It's brought down by the completely unnecessary ending boss fight and the Deus Ex style walkaround areas being a bit slow to trundle around (which makes sense, because you're a human tank, but still.) 15. Amnesia: The Bunker - Just a perfect little game. Quick, does what it wants, doesn't let itself get too bogged down in what it's trying to do, hits all the notes you want. In and out, no problem. 16. My Friendly Neighborhood - You can tell the care that went into this, and for a first time dev it's not bad; the characters are all fun and memorable and the setting is fairly unique, and it doesn't try to do the stupid mascot horror tropes you see lately, rather sticking with the theme of them just being kid's show puppets. 17. Dave the Diver - Good, but the mid game had some significantly long boring stretches that needed something else in them or new areas to visit or something. The game gets really samey quick. 18. Starfield - A game without an identity, with the usual Bethesda Slop™. People have finally wised up to the fact that Bethesda is actually a garbage studio, it seems, so maybe they'll actually get their poo poo together this time around? The art style I actually really liked, but that's about it. And they flub the actually interesting ending somehow! 19. Advance Wars: Re-boot Camp - It's literally just the first two games with a new artstyle. No real changes, the online is kind of bad (just play Advance Wars by Web) and it's just... not great. Emulate the originals and do AWBW for your multi. --doesn't count but I'll talk about-- Gamedec - Not from this year but boy howdy what a cool little game! An adventure-y kind of game in the style of Disco Elysium, you solve crimes in various internet worlds while getting wrapped up in a mystery. One of the worlds you go to is a farmville world that has all sorts of hosed up problems like slavery in exchange for farmville currency. It's great, play it. Payday 3 - Boy let me tell you they REALLY hosed up what is otherwise a slam dunk here. The servers were completely loving busted for the first two months and they only barely got it under control at this point, and the DLC and balance are starting to come into question now. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. quick list: 1. Pizza Tower 2. Hi-Fi Rush 3. Slay the Princess 4. Myhouse 5. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood 6. Lies of P 7. Dredge 8. Slayers X 9. System Shock 10. Mario Wonder
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Dec 20, 2023 01:59
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Alxprit posted:NUMBER 7 i have only watched the current season of the anime and not played S/V but i will wholeheartedly agree that terapagos is a sweet precious baby boy
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Dec 20, 2023 04:45
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Going back through my playtime to compile this list, I played way more games this year than I thought! 2023 has been a banger of a year for game players (not so much everyone else, but take what we can get). I really struggled on the ordering on the top ten and had way more than ten great games in my list this year when I usually struggle to fill a list. I even ended up cutting games from the list just because my fingers were tired from all the typing! But first, Honorable Mentions: Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend An excellent card game in the vein of Slay the Spire, but with just a splash of Magic: The Gathering color combinations. Routinely getting major updates and unafraid to change or revamp core mechanics as they go to keep the game feeling balanced and fun. I played this a lot and will continue to dip back in every time they update it for a long time to come. Lost Branch of Legend was my first foray into the Touhou oeuvre and I am glad it was good enough to make me start paying attention to other games in the setting. I have alreay found other cool games I never would've looked at otherwise. Absolutely a testament to the killer year that this didn't make the top ten! Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia Artificial Dream is a love letter to the first Shin Megami Tensei. It does incorporate a few small twists on the SMT format; like the fact you play a bullet hell minigame instead of doing conversation trees to recruit demons. The art and music are so authentic an homage it verges on "legally distinct" territory. The only real knock is that it's maybe too authentic to the first SMT. The automap exists but depends on a resource that depletes over time and the menu system is exactly as clunky as a game launched in the 90s to name two. Overall, a fun little dungeon crawler that lives up to what it wanted to be. You just have to go in knowing what you are getting and maybe have a big heaping dose of nostalgia like the creators clearly did. Civilization VI Civ VI isn't as good as Civ V, but with the DLC it's close! I still come back to this for a campaign or two every few months, and 2023 was no exception. A great way to lose eight hours at a time without realizing. Some of the new scenario modifiers in VI are fun, like the secret societies, and some are kind of bullshit, like the zombies. Bloons TD 6 I am not normally a tower defense guy, but Bloons pulled me in pretty hard last year and I still find myself popping back in from time to time. I felt like it deserved a mention specifically this year because its still routinely getting content patches and releases! Starfield Starfield is a game I played to 100% completion. I did every side quest that wasn't procgen. Its not a great game but I think its still a good one overall. The main story had potential but kind of ended up falling flat as it became yet another "protagonist is the center of the universe" tale. Several of the side quests had fun world building or story beats, but they were almost entirely tucked away in logs and notes. The ship combat is too simple to be fun long term. They force you to go back to the ship to fast travel, but only sometimes, and you can't fly the ship between planets either, so it just adds more steps to fast traveling for no reason. There is no map on foot. Ultimately I still had fun with Starfield as a game I played mindlessly while listening to podcasts. I don't regret my time but I doubt I will ever come back. Most of what's broken is fundamental enough to the design I am not sure the modders can fix it, but maybe! Total War: Warhammer 3 I played the absolute piss out of Warhammer 2. I sank about forty hours into the Kislev campaign at launch and came away frustrated. The bones, the potential, was clearly there but some of the design decisions they made were just unfun in practice. They also had a problem where the base races felt like there needed the DLC to be complete, which was largely untrue in TWW and TWW2 even though they had a million DLC packs each. They've since made some patches resolving some of my issues, and promised more, but I think it will be a while before I take another run at this one. Still hopeful though! Lunacid I've only got a few hours in to this but the game seems fairly short so fair play. Overall very simple gameplay for a 'modern' game but it was clearly made with love and a lot of reverence for Kings Field, which is a series I love a lot. I want to go back and finish this in '24 for sure. I think the only real knock I have against it is, like so many homage games, they decided to keep some of the bad parts of Kings Field too. Make sure you save at every save crystal you see and be prepared to backtrack to one on occasion! You will absolutely get your rear end handed to you by a random dude and lose progress, you can only decide how much progress! Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (OpenMW) I love the hell out of Morrowind, and OpenMW finally got to a good enough place this year for me to jump in and play for another few dozen hours. The big thing here for me is it makes controller support good enough to do almost everything without being too clunky. Most of my playthrough this year was on a gamepad, with only the occasional reach for the mouse when more involved inventory management fiddling was needed. Horizon: Zero Dawn I finished all of Horizon in 2023. The setting is nonsensical but fun. Some of the story beats and worldbuilding stuck out of the way in notes and logs were great. I sort-of enjoyed the twist at the end, even if it made no sense at all. Overall I think this is one step below Starfield for me. The feel of the action was much better but the variety was much worse. I think Aloy was meant to be charming but she never clicked with me and she just would not shut the heck up on the overworld. I heard those voice lines so many times I came to dislike the character actively by the end. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Super well put together and a semi successor to one of my favorite series, Tenchu. Ultimately I bounced off this year due to the difficulty. Or rather the kind of difficulty. I found the bosses required timing, reflexes, and pattern memorization that my hands just can't do well. I think I will try this again someday but for now I am glad I at least dipped my toe in. Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters I 100%ed this game, including the side stuff. Overall I think it was a positive experience but there were definitely rough edges in the design that didn't become apparent until quite far in. Almost all of the classes have "correct" paths in their skill trees. Several of them are so much better than any other class that you are fairly heavily incentivized to ignore team diversity and just have 2-3 copies of the exact same dude on your four man squad. Mission and enemy diversity starts to run thin by around halfway through. The final mission is insanely long and, well, just kind of boring. The music and sound design are both quite good and the visuals are decent even if they picked some of the most well trodden and uninteresting parts of the setting. I think if this game was about 2/3rds as long it would've been better. A solid 7/10. Very interested to see if they get a chance for a Chaos Gate 2. Definitely lots of potential here that just didn't quite make it all the way from a good game to a great one. Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen I've tried several times to get into Dragon's Dogma, and 2023 was the year it finally clicked! The game has a shitload of jank and a couple of design decisions that are wild. There are very few games like it though. Combat is simple but fun and the world has that fun sense of mystery that makes you want to poke around and try things. Maybe the best bow and arrow controls in all of gaming? Very excited for DD2 in 2024! Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age A revisit for an old favorite this year and another 100% game, which is rare for me. I adored FF12 but had not played it since the original PS2 version. Zodiac brings in a lot of the old International Edition changes and a handful of other small tweaks. Some graphical polish and better load times, but otherwise the game you remember. Still just as fun as I remember but I suspect probably just as divisive. For modern players with no nostalgia I would probably recommend grabbing the mods that let you unlock the entire job board and respec more easily. Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi Undernauts is an old school "blobber" first person dungeon crawler. The art is gorgeous but largely static. The map designs were all pretty decent and didn't have any of the more egregious stuff you still see in some of these. Still a teleporter maze from time to time but just barely still on the right side of bullshit. Mechanically solid and well balanced but nothing particularly new or novel in the combat. Some nice quality of life improvements for the genre like limited fast travel points that don't eat resources. Overall I would put this pretty solidly in the top quarter of the genre, but maybe wait for a sale since I think the $60 asking price is a bit much. Etrian Odyssey HD Collection Another blobber, but this time the first three Etrian Odyssey DS games in HD. These games were great then and are still great now. They didn't make many forward facing changes to bring these up to date but they did take the time to do a balance pass and fix things that were just broken in the originals. Notably they left the stuff that was broken but fun in and balanced the un-fun stuff up instead, so kudos there. I finished the main campaign of all three games this year but found myself dipping out of each before the true endings. The last dungeons in all three games are still a bit much, just like the originals. Mechanically more interesting in moment to moment battle than Undernauts but some of the very late game map design definitely leans harder into the old school bullshit than that game. Ultimately still enjoyable if you got the right kind of broken brain, like me! And the Top Ten: 10. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin I think this is definitely my favorite Team Ninja game and its high in my rankings for Final Fantasy games in general. The story is campy as heck but does some interesting stuff in the back half that explains more about exactly how this game fits into the overall series. Legitimately one of the more interesting Final Fantasy stories. The first loop of the game can be slightly challenging but nothing too bad. Unfortunately the first loop is maybe 1/10th of the game. There are jobs, mechanics, unique levels and enemies, and story all locked behind more loops past that. The game very sharply goes from tough but fair into balls hard and sails on to controller-breaking rage difficult by the end. You can, and probably will have to, grind out content to get more levels and better gear to get around this to an extent but you can never make the fights easy outright. The only other knock I have against it is that some of the most difficult and unfun bosses are the ones they pick to refight 6-10 times each before the game is over. Each time they give them some additional new mechanic that is even more tedious than last time. I'm looking at you Hero of Light. Cid is a Tonberry in this one, 10/10 9. Monster Hunter: Rise My first Monster Hunter! I came to this one late but was pleasantly surprised to find there was still a small but active online community. I lost somewhere north of 200 hours of my life to this game and will absolutely buy the next one whenever that comes out. I mastered every weapon. I learned monster patterns. The traversal is super fast and fun. Very reminiscent of Infamous or Prototype from the PS3 era. A little bit grindy on the back end when you have to start farming monsters for materials to make your sick duds, but I can just get on my exercise bike and run a hunt or two and the time just vaporizes; I look down and ten miles have gone by without my knowledge. 8. Jagged Alliance 3 After decades of failed attempts we finally got a good sequel to Jagged Alliance 2! Tactical gameplay is fun and the strategic level, while simple, provides a good change of pace. Most of the game felt well balanced until machine guns and silenced sniper rifles became readily available. The big knock here is the writing can be...dated in rather severe ways. I think the intent was to mimic the 1980s action movie pastiche of JA2, but even in its day that was treading on thin ice. Still, if you can look past that, a very fun game I played multiple times and got all the achievements for. 7. World of Horror World of Horror has a crystal clear vision of exactly what it wants to be and it nails it. The UI is a mess in the way that many 80s and 90s pc games were. The gameplay can be obtuse. I still don't care, I love this game to pieces. The art style is sublime in its confidence. The music sounds like it came straight off a PC88 synth. The writing is simple but beautifully atmospheric. The main game is challenging but fun and almost always winnable once you come to grips with it. The only problem with the game is the challenge mode is way too reliant on RNG in a way the main game isn't, even on higher difficulties. It simply becomes an un-fun slog of re-rolling until the game feels like you should win, something the main game never does. This game got me to make a mod for it, something I have never done before! If you can get over the hump to get started this game is amazing. That singular focus on what it wants to be is so rare in games that it deserves recognition any time we see it. 6. Dwarf Fortress And speaking of singular visions. Dwarf Fortress is maybe the single most concentrated example in all of gaming about being true to its vision, despite the fact that the vision is to be an insanely sprawling simulation or anything and everything. Initially I bought the Steam version of DF just to support the devs. I'd gotten so many hours of joy from their game over the years that it only felt fair after all. But the new interface and tiles really sucked me back in during 2023 in a way I wasn't expecting. Many a fort has now fallen by the wayside. Occasionally into lava. Sometimes the sea. The adventures are as great as ever but the UI streamlines some of the sloggiest bits and the music carries you along without ever getting monotonous. 5. Tactics Ogre: Reborn Tactics Ogre is one of my all time favorite games, so I was especially excited that it rose like a phoenix from the ashes. Seemingly from nowhere! The remake has some odd decisions and a handful of problems, but by all rights it is better than we had any right to expect. The entire game got a full top to bottom voice acting treatment. Many of the rough edges in the translation were fixed up and most of the PSP version's improvements and extra content are present. The card system introduced in this version is well intentioned but can make some boss fights somewhat more RNG dependent than they probably should be. I am very hopeful that this sold well enough we see some patches from the dev team in the future and that the modding community adds their own touches, but even as it stands today I think this is easily one of the best tactics games ever made and well worth a play! CODA 2 is still poo poo though 4. Resident Evil 4 (2023) If Tactics Ogre was a sea change for what a tactical game could be on consoles, Resident Evil 4 was a complete re-imagining of what a survival horror game could be for games as a whole. The remakes for 2 and 3 are truly excellent and 4 proves no exception there. They looked at everything that made 4 unique and kept everything that was fun while throwing out what wasn't. The action feels better and more frantic than ever. The new performances by all the cast are great. The only downside is that some of the camp of the original was lost to the polish in the new version. The remake was clearly made with a lot of love and attention to detail, but with an understanding that a good remake is not about solely doing everything the original did. I played through this multiple times, got all the achievements, and even did challenge runs. The fact this isn't number one on my list is absolutely insane and speaks volumes to how good the games were this year. 3. Super Mario RPG (2023) Super Mario RPG stands out in my mind as perhaps the single most charming game ever made. The characters are all wonderfully nuanced despite very little explicit dialogue ever being involved. The animations alone do such an amazing job of conveying personality. Every cutscene has little jokes and tidbits tucked off to the sides. The gameplay is briskly paced and snappy without ever requiring grinding or feeling so simple you can just sleepwalk through fights. The little mini-games break up the pace without ever overstaying their welcome. The music is wall to wall bangers and the re-orchestrations are amazingly faithful to the spirit of the original tracks while still being fresh and funky. The new translation fixes some of the actual errors while still keeping the most unique parts of the original. The Resident Evil 4 Remake was about envisioning what the game might have been if it was made today, while the SMPRG remake is about trying to be as faithful as possible while polishing the absolute piss out of the game. Every rough edge is sanded to a mirror sheen. In a game any less tightly designed than SMPRG I might decry this decision but the quality of the core carries it here. The only complaint I have is the new post game content they've added feels like a jarring departure from the original game. The new fights are hard. Hard in a way that almost requires grinding out levels and meta-gaming in a way the original game never did. Even with that the new content adds some nice extra character bits to enemies that didn't get much air time in the original game, like Punchenello. 2. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Armored Core is a weird series. I loved the PSX games to pieces but the pivot to fast action above all for the PS2 and onward era left me cold. That being said I was cautiously optimistic about Armored Core finally making a return. I'd been burned before but it had been long enough, and From had published so many good games since, that I was willing to try again. And I am glad I did! Armored Core VI is everything I wanted from a new armored core and more. It includes a lot of the lessons learned from more recent From games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring while still remaining uniquely Armored Core in feel and tone. The robots are faster and more animated than ever before but the combat feels like it has flow in a way the previous entries lacked. Even in the most hectic fights I knew exactly where the enemies were and who I was shooting at. I always felt like if I died, and I died a lot, it was a mistake on my part and never the game being unfair. The atmosphere was excellent and the storytelling, for as thin as it was, did exactly what it needed to do and no more. I also need to shout out From here for doing an excellent job making the game short enough to be easily digestible but making so much new content for NG+ and NG++ that you are incentivized to replay the game in addition to wanting to. Any other year I can think of this would have easily sailed to my number one spot, no questions asked. 1. Baldurs Gate 3 Let me prefix this: I love Baldurs Gate. A lot. I replay BG1 and BG2 every few years. I have played the first two chapters of BG2 through so many times, with so many character builds, on so many platforms, that I can probably recite the entire script for that section from memory. Bladurs Gate 3 is a truly excellent game. The combat can be straightforward if you want it to be, but if you want you can engage with all sorts of subsystems that interact in interesting ways to make it so much more elaborate. The characters are all genuinely interesting and the performances from the voice actors push them over the line from good to great. The game is utterly massive and the moment to moment never feels dull, even if you hit a stretch that feels merely good instead of great from time to time. I spent a hundred hours scouring every single corner of this game, sucking every bit of marrow from the bones, and immediately started thinking about a second playthrough. The only thing stopping me is knowing that Larian is very good about their Definitive Editions being, well, definitively better. The one single knock I have against BG3 is that it is maybe a little too referential to BG1 and BG2. As silly as it is to say that, and I doubt new players even noticed, I was ever so slightly disappointed to see some familiar faces return even when it made no sense for them to be around. Even with that tiny nitpick, the returning characters have some really great moments of writing of their own that characterize them above and beyond what you already knew of them and help fill in the gaps in time. At the end of the day what I come back to with BG3 is that it enthralled me the same way BG2 did. The hours just melted away and I lost myself in a way that no other game on this list could quite match. Objective Action fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 05:32
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I played 40 games to completion this year (ignoring a lot of stuff I was already playing like XIV, Fortnite, Warframe, Smite, etc, and ignoring a lot of games I started but never got far in or ended up putting down without beating), so I'm going to be splitting my list into two posts because I want to talk about most of the games I played this year since a lot of them are probably not going to show up in this thread otherwise. 40. Bear and Breakfast    Bear and Breakfast is a game that is at the bottom of the list primarily because of how much of a letdown it was for me personally, but I think it’s definitely a game for other people…I’m just not one of those people. I think what really soured me on this was the fact the game set an expectation for me that it was going to have, uh, any kind of actual story to it in addition to what seemed to be a pretty by the numbers management sim game. The more I played of this the more hollow the whole experience started to feel for me because of how completely disconnected I’d become, because of how little was actually happening outside of the mechanical gameplay; story's usually a pretty big deal for me unless a game by design has no story/narrative attached, so going into one expecting something only to basically end up with nothing left me feeling kind of dejected. Still, if you like management sims and the lack of a story isn’t a dealbreaker for you, who knows, this could be your thing! 39. Re:THM - once upon a time    I actually really liked what I played of this, but the reason it’s near the bottom of the list is because this was for all intents and purposes basically just a tech demo and the “game” isn’t finished at all (they’ve said they intend to release story chapters as DLC in the future), but it’s also free on Steam, so hey. Mechanically it’s a rhythm game where you alternate between attacking the enemy and defending against their attacks, but the real draw is the story setup and framing device. This game starts at the end of a journey where you, the hero of the land, have just finished murdering your own king, and the game itself is actually time reversing from that point as you witness the journey working backwards, slowly moving towards the events that led to the hero turning on his people and pushing through countless former allies to kill the king, his father. It’s probably one of the more fascinating ‘clearly inspired by Undertale’ games I’ve played to date, if nothing else; the reveal trailer is here if you want a sense of what the music/gameplay looks like. I really hope this gets a full release in the future, because I was really charmed by what i experienced here. 38. Distraint    What if the horrors were not only manmade but also involved [looks at smudges on hand] property eviction? It’s fine. It was a decent little indie horror game I got in a bundle with a different horror game that isn’t on this list bc I haven’t gotten to it yet. There was a sequel I tried to play but just couldn’t get into remotely. It's one of many small 2d indie horror games, and it's fine at what it does. I didn't hate it. 37. Mycopsychosys    A game jam VN about a strange natural phenomena called “sporestorms”, where heavy clouds containing the spores of a parasitic mushroom occasionally hit the country of Spain. The VN involves you taking precautions to keep yourself safe while interacting with the people near your home, and the endings you can get are based on how - and how well - you handle these interactions. It’s a game jam game, so it’s pretty short, but the production values are really solid and there’s enough here that I could easily see a larger story being written in this setting if the devs are so interested. 36. Ace Attorney Investigations 2 /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/34398729/k-bigpic.0.jpg) I know I’m basically going to be crucified for having this game so low on the list, but legitimately I don’t understand what it is about this game that everyone loved. (Note this feeling has nothing to do with the fan translation, it’s a good translation, that’s not my issues with the game.) I just couldn’t get past how extremely long and plodding this game is, which is a problem I also had with the first game - there’s so much unnecessary padding in pursuit of nothing, especially in regards to how many characters force you to jump through a million hoops just to get the most basic information that you would’ve gotten in like a third of the time in any of the mainline games, and stuff like logic chess just absolutely obliterates the pacing, especially when dealing with the limitations of the DS. I think both these games would benefit the hardest from an actual remake in the vein of GAA, esp if they cut down on a lot of the fat, because there are interesting story beats that are just flooded with a lot of tedium that burned me out long before I’d even gotten to the finale. I hate feeling like I’m not giving a game a fair shake, but I just legitimately found this the worst of the entire franchise front to back, and I know that puts me in a pretty small minority.  35. Move78    What an absolutely baffling game. I picked this up during a sale because it looked to be a weird supernatural horror slant to games inspired by the Zero Escape series (and based on my LP track record literally any indie game even remotely ZE inspired is either already on my wishlist or in my steam library  ), and, at time of purchase, I was even possibly considering this for a future LP, but the final result was just… a frankly baffling experience that I think I described to a friend as ‘Zero Escape, but it looks and plays like one of those weird fake mobile game ads you see all the time’. The high point are the escape room segments, which are actually fully rendered environments you walk around in, closer to stuff like Escape Academy, but the low point are some frankly absurdly low-budget minigames between story segments that are reminiscent of really dogshit Newgrounds flashes from 2006. The story itself is… a bit of a clusterfuck in a lot of ways with a lot of poo poo just thrown together - demons, apocalyptic events, serial killings, and more - but it really feels like they just made the escape room segments first then tried to figure out a way to connect them second. This game was very funny to experience but absolutely not good and I can’t really recommend it, though if the devs make something else I might take a peek at it. I dunno, it’s also pretty short, so maybe I’ll still do an LP of it if nothing else to dissect what went wrong with it along with the thread 34. Saints Row (2022)  God am I sad about this one. I was so excited for a new Saints Row game, and I was actually pretty excited about what I’d seen of the reboot, too! I know a lot of the reboot decisions were, uh, controversial, to say the least, especially in regards to how much the game seemed to be trying to be ‘how do you do fellow millennials’, but my feelings on the series had pretty much always been ‘this is kind of cringe but every so often a joke will hit you when you aren’t prepared for it and that’s a good enough experience’, and also you do a lot of crazy poo poo. This game… well, it was certainly TRYING to be all of those things. It honestly just felt like a really forgettable 7/10 experience, which sucks, because you can also really tell that the developers themselves were really passionate about the game - just for some reason none of that passion showed in the game itself. Tehsnakerer did a video about this game that pretty much puts into words my feelings about this game in a way more expanded manner, if you’re interested. 33. Behind the Frame  A quiet, unassuming point and click adventure game following a painter and her experience with finding inspiration in her room (and watching her neighbor across the way, another painter, in the process). It’s fine. It’s cute. It’s the peak of cozy gaming, I guess. It’s a game I’m probably going to have completely forgotten by this time next year, but honestly, it’s not always a bad thing to have those kind of palate cleansers here and there. Comparing stuff to Ghibli is super overdone, but it does evoke those kind of feelings just in terms of the sleepy, quiet moments those movies often use to give a breather between the more energetic setpieces. 32. Redtape    It’s a lovely day in Hell, and you are an accidentally fallen angel trying desperately to find a way back to Heaven. Redtape is a game that falls into the category of short and funny art games where you see screenshots and go ‘woah, that’s weird looking, what the gently caress is THAT’, but it’s also one of those games that’s pretty much a short breather between bigger games - the game only lasts about 2 to 3 hours tops, which means it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either. It’s mostly just a dark humor walking sim “adventure” game of poking your way through the different floors of Hell, with a lot of jabs at office culture along the way. Missed opportunity in the fact it’s not $6.66 on Steam, by the way. 31. Friends vs Friends  Friends vs Friends is a game about shooting people with cards that turn into guns but also sometimes you’re throwing down turrets, or making people’s heads really big, or turning into a kaiju. It’s a first person arena shooter, and I am very bad at it.  It’s a game I keep telling myself I need to play more of to get better at, but just keep forgetting to, but it’s also the kind of game that if it hooks you then you’re in for loving good. Go to the Steam page and watch the video and if it looks like your kind of thing, wishlist it! 30. Cassette Beasts  This is another one that a lot of people love that just didn’t click for me like I wish it did for others. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very solid game with a lot of love and great production qualities (especially the music!!!) but there were just a lot of weird design things that just subtly put me off in a way I can’t really quite put my finger on even now (mostly in terms of mechanical and exploration terms). I think what really settled it for me that it just wasn’t for me was seeing DLC come out and going ‘oh, ok’ instead of ‘oh hell yeah’ like my friends were. Don’t take it being this low on the list as a knock against the game if you’ve been considering, this one’s absolutely a purely subjective placement. 29. The end is nahual: if i may say so     Hey can you tell I play a lot of really bizarre poo poo yet? Anyway this one was on my radar from a past Steam Next Fest, and even now I feel kind of bad putting it so low on this list, but that’s mostly because this game is one I have been kind of chewing on and trying to figure out how I feel about it months after I stopped playing it. This game is just loving weird, man. It’s the kind of game that completely disregards, like, general game design rules? It’s like the video game development equivalent of flying by the seat of your pants, and it changes gameplay genres multiple times, shifting from point and click to an endless runner to a third person brawler at one point, and so on. The story itself is rough but in a way I’m willing to forgive because the devs are ESL and it’s practically gushing with inspiration from their home country of Mexico, but the game is also going for a type of irreverence that I don’t think it really nails? I think it would also be higher on the list if a massive stretch of the final part of the game wasn’t a weird dexterity-based fighting gauntlet you aren’t able to skip if you can’t keep up with it… 28. Deceive Inc  Deceive Inc is a game I have a very love/hate relationship with, because while I absolutely love the vibes and the broad concept of ‘a bunch of spy groups all try to break into a vault while taking each other out’, there’s been a lot of rough stretches where things have dragged and I’ve found myself taking extended breaks from the game. Obviously stuff like hacking/cheating is just part of multiplayer games for better or for worse, but even stuff like a specific agent overwhelmingly dominating the others or a map having exploits that make it difficult to play around have been issues. That being said, the devs recently put out a roadmap for game changes they intend to prioritize over the coming months going into 2024 and if they accomplish everything they’ve said, this game has a pretty good chance of pulling up and hopefully getting more of a playerbase again. 27. MalViolence    A game jam VN where you find yourself kidnapped by the teenage sidekick of a recently deceased supervillain, and the things you discover while trying to escape from their secret base. I’m being really coy/vague here because I’ve been considering doing an LP of this as a palate cleanser since, well, it’s a game jam game, it’s not that long, but I do actually think this game is really well put together visually and mechanically. The fact it was made in a month but somehow manages to have fully animated sprites for the characters you encounter through the monitors in the base, some actual voice acting in places, and actual puzzles is incredible. They recently released a prequel for an October game jam but I haven’t played that one yet, and if I do end up LPing this I’ll probably just do both in the same LP. 26. Yurukill: The Calumniation Games  Man, I was really excited for this one, because the idea of a survival game/escape room VN crossed with a loving bullet hell shooter was too weird to not check out, but the end result is shockingly… bland? The setup is interesting enough: a group of teams composed of criminals and someone connected to their crime are all competing for the opportunity to have their criminal record wiped and any wish they may have granted, respectively, while having to work through literal reenactments of the crimes they committed in the form of puzzle escape room. The actual production values are really high - the soundtrack is really good, the art (both sprites/illustrations and environments) is exceptionally high quality, and even the voice acting is pretty good, but its in service of a story that seems incredibly afraid to take any risks or push into unfamiliar or risky territory, and the end result is just a pretty mid experience that I don’t regret playing, but can’t really find myself wanting to recommend to anyone else. 25. Midnight Subway    I wanted to like this game a lot more than I ended up liking it. I feel really bad that I didn’t like it as much as I hoped I would. The vibes are incredible, the art is really cute, and the initial stuff is pretty engaging, but as I kept playing through it more and more I just kept finding myself hoping I was reaching the end, which is never a good sign. And it sucks, bc this game is cool, especially if you like horror games where you’re just wandering around a place the whole time! Ultimately, just wasn’t for me, but I 100% will pick up whatever this creator makes because again, if nothing else, it's a really COOL game to look at. 24. Remnant 2  Did you like Remnant? Hey, guess what, there’s more of it, and it’s just as rad as the first game, but with some good QoL stuff. Many other people in the thread have already sung its praises enough I don't really need to get into it, and I did really love my experience with it (though, like the first game, the final boss is some hot bullshit lmao); I have it low on the list moreso just because of how much it’s like the first game, for better or for worse, and I like to push new or standalone stuff up more in general, but... really they didn’t really need to fix what wasn’t broken, so it being high on other people’s lists is completely justified and I agree with how high a lot of other people in the thread have put it  23. Risk of Rain Returns  Take a look at the paragraph above and replace Remnant with Risk of Rain and those are my thoughts on this remaster of the original game. Frankly these two could probably be tied for the same spot, if I’m being real. Somehow I managed to avoid getting completely sucked into this one after basically playing it daily for two weeks with friends the moment it dropped, but I know its only a matter of time before that itch comes back… 22. Collar X Malice  I have a pretty big backlog of VNs to get to, so this ended up being the only otome game I actually had time for this year, but it was a pretty solid one all things considered, especially for a game where basically the entire main cast are fuckin cops, lmao. The setup is that the protagonist finds herself in the crosshairs of a terrorist organization who have been pulling off a string of dangerous, borderline paranormal murders once a month for most of the past year while slowly counting down, with the game taking place in December, the designated ‘final month’. A life-threatening encounter results in her being left with a strange collar around her neck with the ability to inject her with poison should she reveal the collar to anyone outside a designated group of ex-cops who are investigating the terrorist organization, who she is to work with over the course of December to try and uncover what the organization is and why she was attacked initially. Each love interest from the investigation group is focusing on a different set of months and the strange murders that happened within them, so each route puts focus on a different piece of the overall timeline and as you go through the routes you start to piece together the bigger picture, with the final route basically resulting in everything coming together and fully connecting the earlier answers you uncovered in a greater sense. It’s a surprisingly well written story, and I wasn’t actually expecting the game to actually be kind of anti-police in regards to not shying away from just directly saying ‘there are a lot of times where the police have made a situation worse, and the victims of crime aren’t necessarily wrong to hold a grudge when their pain was amplified or exploited by cops trying to find a quick answer with the least amount of work possible’. Most of the love interests left the force out of disillusionment with how corrupt things had gotten, or from seeing firsthand how there was no justice to be had within the system itself - even one of the two still working for the force is pretty direct about how he dislikes most of his coworkers because he’s seen firsthand how willing they are to throw another under the bus for the sake of keeping the status quo. The protagonist herself is also pretty decent - she can hold her own in a pinch and even when her life is at risk she doesn’t automatically require one of the men to bail her out, and the game also isn’t afraid of letting her develop non-romantic relationships with other characters - a recurring bit involves her and some of her other female coworkers going out for drinks and bitching about their job/male coworkers together, something I found myself excited to read each time she’d get a text asking to meet up. Ultimately, I think this is a pretty strong VN that, while not exactly revolutionizing the genre, shows how a solid concept and a willingness to put the effort in writing-wise to let that concept shine through can result in a memorable experience… even if at the end of the day it is still kind of a cop dating sim lmao. (Also I chose to not show any actual screenshots because I think this is one where it's actually great to have no expectations going in) 21. Loretta     It’s the 1920s, and you are a housewife whose husband has been missing for a few days now - and people are starting to ask questions you don’t have a good answer for. Loretta is a point and click adventure thriller game that feels like a successor to some of the early Telltale games, in that a lot of the game revolves around how you react to situations, and the choices you make can have ripple effects on how future scenes play out. From the neighbor you think your husband was having an affair with, to his publisher back in New York wanting to know when his finished manuscript will be sent out, to the detective who just arrived in town and is poking around, there’s a lot of tension in how you handle situations, especially ones where you’re flying by the seat of your pants while trying to buy yourself enough time to prepare for the next one. Loretta was a pretty short experience, but it’s the kind of experience you can only get with video games, and I think anyone with an interest in these kind of interactive storytelling games should give this one some consideration. Second half here. Mix. fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 05:44
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Mix. posted:
i did a double and triple take because i kept confusing this for "Bear's Restaruant" as i read it. took me a moment to realize you were talking about an entirely different game, haha
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Dec 20, 2023 07:01
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Objective Action posted:Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend Oh goddamnit this sounds amazing. Adding it to my wishlist...
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Dec 20, 2023 07:39
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Objective Action posted:2. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Eh? I played through the whole series for the first time while waiting for 6, and the games didn't get fast until PS3. Hell, I'd say most of the PS2 games are clunkier than the PS1 stuff.
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Dec 20, 2023 07:40
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Sally posted:First quarter of the year was all Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. A replay for me, but I never did any ME3 DLC outside of Javik, so the Citadel was a very welcome capstone. Big fan of the series but I was soured on the ending when it first came out and the hamfisted attempt to improve them. Yadda yadda, been said before. But unlock a lot of fans, I ended it there. Could've really used Citadel back then, haha. Like I say, very welcome capstone. The ending was once again such a forgettable wet fart that I am to know that I will soon forget it only for the Citadel DLC to take its place as the game ending in my memories. 10/10 gaming experience. Fantastic trilogy.  Having played most of the Phoenix Wright trilogy and having been reminded of games I forgot I played by the Steam Year In Review and having been inspired by the love and care put into some of these posts, I wish to revise my TOP 5 to a TOP 10, because I realize I now have enough games I absolutely loved to make a full one. I have added text to new titles: 10 - Pokemon: Shield 9 - Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battles 8 - Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition 7 - Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition Sometimes the classics are still the best... forgot I played hours and hours of this game until Steam pointed it out to me. I guess I've been playing this off and on for so long that it all just blends together. Almost forgot by Return of Rome came out this year. Not the best DLC release for AoE2, but I had fun with it. I bounced off playing AoE1 Definitive Edition, so this was actually a great way for me to relieve the weird jankiness of that game. There was a lot of controversy when it first dropped because it wasn't exactly clear that they weren't remaking the ENTIRE Aoe1 campaign collection in the AoE2 engine--just a couple of them. When it released and that was evident, there was a lot of negative backlash. I always wish we get more content for AoE2, but maybe this was a good thing, as those old campaigns were rough to play. The new civilization added, the Lac Viet, didn't even get a new campaign to go with it. It did add Western Rome as an AoE2 faction separate from the Byzantines, but there was no new AoE2 campaign to go with it. A middling DLC all around, though there are now plans to add four more AoE1 campaigns. But still, because I reinstalled it I just wound up replaying some of the older better DLC campaigns. And I loved it. Every minute of it. This game is evergreen for me and I look forward to playing future DLC for it. 6 - Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury 5 - Metroid Dread 4 - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy This trilogy has been excellent and I can't believe it's bumping Metroid down a notch... I thought I'd take a break from trying to get the last few energy tanks before finishing off Raven Beak and JUST play the first Phoenix Wright. However, I got so thoroughly hooked that I'm binging the whole trilogy. I'm currently on the third case of Trials and Tribulations. Just fantastic games all around. Totally captured my attention. Visual novels are not usually my thing, but the way Ace Attorney plays out is just so compelling. I still have to say that I'm not having as much fun doing the investigations as I am when actually in the trials, but also concede that the slow boil set up is what really makes them pay off. If I were to rank the games individually, I'd probably go best to least best in chronological order. The first Ace Attorney is just a such a wonderful little gem. Such great character moments. The writing has such charm. I was grinning from end to end even when the strange logic got in the way. I had hoped Justice For All would iron out some of the strange logic consistencies for me, but instead felt like more of the same. Not a bad thing, but I'd hoped for a more noticeable improvement in the sequel. There wasn't much new added aside from the truth mechanic and that was at the cost of some of the other one-off mechanics of the first game. One particularly annoying example for me was in the circus case: There was a moment where it was clear to me that the accused had used the trained circus monkey to help them transport objects used in the murder. When asked in the courtroom if the suspect had an accomplice I said it was the monkey and was penalized. The game instead wanted me to say the suspect had NO ACCOMPLICE. But then moments later, when the prosecution pressed me to explain how all these heavy objects were moved without help, only then could I point out there was a trained monkey. Really not a big deal, but it was sometimes hard to follow the game's logic. Still fantastic. Trials and Tribulations is where I'm starting to feel it drag more. The first case playing as Mia in the past was a great intro, but the subsequent cases have just been missing that certain something. Some of the characters are offputting in uncomfortable ways and the silliness is getting a bit convoluted even in a game that had used a parrot as a witness in past cases or had a serial killer testify via walkie talkie. That said, still great overall and this has easily been a Top 5 gaming experience this year. 3 - Mass Effect: Legendary Edition 2 - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Remake 1 - Case of the Golden Idol
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Dec 20, 2023 08:12
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Honorable Mentions from this year: (Any of these could have been listed for 8-15) Final Fantasy XVI Hi-Fi Rush Horizon: Forbidden West – Burning Shores Yakuza: Ishin Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name Older games I also played and enjoyed this year (I didn’t want to include older games in 2023 game list): Witcher 3: Remake Psychonauts 2 The Longest Journey McPixel 3 The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow Hitman 1-3 Resident Evil 3 Remake Her Story The Sinking City Remember Me -- 10. Deliver Us Mars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwV0RcqbfIA (Rtx demo reel) Sequel to Deliver Us Moon. Basically it is a walking sim with light puzzles and climbing, but you’re walking IN SPACE and ON MARS. It looks really pretty with ray tracing, thus the money shot trailer for the RTX tech. Had really fun time just walking and exploring. -- 9. Resident Evil 4 – Remake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwHP2bDhkeo (just cool music) I haven’t played the original, but I’ve been rediscovering the series since the RE7 and RE8 were such great survival horror games. Playing the RE2 and RE3 remakes for the first time didn’t prepare me for this. Early parts up to the first village is very survivalist feeling, but after that the horror takes 2nd place to action gameplay. Which is fun too, but I would have liked little more survival horror too. Great action game and 4th best of the series after 7, 8 and 2. -- 8. Hogwarts Legacy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Io-LxofgGk (Just walking around the hogwart in 4k) a Perfect fan product for all the fans. I have only read the first 3 books back in the day, when they came out (so 20+ years ago), but Hogwarts Academy feels so fully realized and perfectly designed. Lot of little details and things to explore in a smallish space. Early parts exploring in the academy and the nearby village would have been 10/10 game and be a GOTY contender in any other year and maybe 5th in this year, but rest of the game doesn’t hold up to this. When the world opens up with you getting a broom it turns more into a boiler plate Ubisoft open world game with repetitive side activities and less detailed areas. -- 7. Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhnY1PkQUMw (The Game Trailer) Intra-apocalyptic clan management and choose-your-adventure game. Your gods are dying and so is the world. This is bit harder game to play than previous one, but managing lives of your clan is still fun. The kingdom you built in the last game is gone, but some of your clan members still cling on to your past glories, including your “king” that can rule your clan or be sidelined outside the ruling ring. Glorantha is such a fun world to play as there is no single truth or right answer. Plenty of wrong ones of course. -- 6. Dead Island 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7sNX-aHX98 (Just music from game) Blast from past!. OG Dead Island was such a fun zombie shooter/slasher game and this ain’t different. Literally! Dead Island 2 is a retro-style game, except retro here means Xbox 360 era gaming. No open worlds, there’s levels with sidepaths and crossroads. You can and will return to levels with side missions and sometimes with main mission, but they are separate maps. There’s plenty of zombies to kill and they have enough variation to keep killing them fun. And if you don’t want to fight, you can usually just run where you want to go and leave the zombies behind. (except runners. gently caress those guys.) Weapon customization is back and fun. Plenty ways to tune your melee and later on your guns. And weapons feel really nice to use. Lot of cool splatter style stuff. Campaign is about 20 hour long, which is good for this kind of game. Story wasn't anything special, but did its job to move the zombie train along. Survivors were mostly good. -- 5. Rogue Trader https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5R0oN00ODE (Just main theme) Rogue Trader is such a hot mess right now. Lot of broken stuff and unbalanced skill and abilities. Just like in any other Owlcat game. Definitely playable and god drat fun. You play as a Rogue trader, a ruler of a tiny empire of multiple planets. Lot of fun combat and exploration of the Koronus Expanse and little things to find. Some of them are just mini notes or choose your adventure stories, some of them are full on away mission. The world design in this game is just right. It really feels like Warhammer 40k kinda brutal dystopia. You can play as a good guy (nobody except plebs like these), bad guy (Aka Imperium of the mankind) or the worst guy (aka Chaos heretic). I’m still in middle of the chapter 4, but still having a blast. -- 4. Jagged Alliance 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t09aNdl18c (feature trailer) Jagged alliance is back  !Jagged Alliance 2 was such a classic tactical combat game. You managed a group of mercenaries to liberate a fictional country from the rule of *bad guy*. You’re doing that too in JA3. This time in a country of Grand Chien, a francophone African country that had its President deposed and kidnapped by the Legion. a group of local militants. On strategic level you choose which way to send your squad(s) and which sectors you liberate first. Usually the important routes, Military post, cities and mines are guarded by enemy soldiers. On Tactical level you fight the enemies on a turn based combat. Combat system is really fun in that you can exploit enemy weaknesses and the fact that you choose where to take contact with them. Also the mercs. All the Mercs in the game are unique and have fun personalities and their own likes and dislikes. M.D was my early medic, because I liked him, not because he was a good merc. He couldn’t hit barn from medium distance with his pistol! Fidel I liked too. Such a A-grade psychopath with automatic guns, but he didn’t like how I did my attacks carefully, so he refused renewing his contract with me.  Or Steroid, who definitely wasn’t using any enhancement products. Such a patriot dummy, who really hated all the Russian mercs. I loved all my mercs. And most of the NPC:s, who were as crazy as my mercs. This was my GOTY in JULY. -- 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NhaB_ycw3k (Just a fun sketch video) Everyone else has pretty much covered everything there is to say about this game. Such a perfect DnD game. Complex, but also easily accessible. (Please learn from them Owlcat) I started as a Wizard, but Gale was such a perfect amoral wizard that I rerolled into a Fighter. So many cool places to explore, people to meet and combat. The combat was so good. Didn’t trust the Illithids or the worms and refused them at every point. Just say no to drugs worms. The game felt a bit too long though. 100+ hours is a bit too much, but I don’t know what to cut though. Other than the sewers though. gently caress sewers in any game. This was my GOTY in August. -- 2. Cyberpunk 2077 – Phantom Liberty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJbexcm4Trk (<3 Idris Elba) Cyberpunk was my GOAT since its release in 2020 and I’ve been waiting for expansion since then. First of all such inspired casting choices for the expansion. Idris Elba is such a perfect tired black-ops guy and Songbirds Minji chang too <3. The new area of dogtown is a great neighbourhood to walk airdash around. The main story is great diversion from the standard Cyberpunk fare to a cyberthriller/spy story. I loved every moment of it. Oh and the 2.0 update for the main game was fun too. Such a great rebalancing of the game mechanics and the story is still superb. This was my GOTY in September. Only problem was whether to count it as a whole with the main game or just consider the expansion. I ended up with latter. -- 1. ALAN WAKE II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMmU3mZ5gBc&t=8s (Live musical performance in game awards) “And the award goes to ALAN WAKE (II)!” Such an incredible experience. Survival horror with live action segments with plenty of Finnish nonsense on the top. I’ve always been fan of Remedy games and this is their best game ever. Survival horror games have always balanced between “Horrible combat” vs being too action. I don’t like my horrors games to have great action. That means I’m looking forward to the next fight and not being afraid of what’s behind the corner. AWII has ‘Horrible’ combat in that you are always almost running out of ammo and I preferred to avoid combat when possible. That gives the survival horror games their tense feeling. Story is a masterclass of nonsense that just makes sense. FBI agent Saga Anderson explores the Bright Falls real mysteries, while getting drawn into the horror story bit by bit. Meanwhile the other main character Alan Wake is exploring the nightmarish world of fictional ‘New York’, while trying to write himself back to the real world. Mixing between these two heroes stories until they combine was so hard. I wanted to continue Wakes journey, but I also wanted to see what Saga would do next. Such hard choices. Oh and the live action bits. First time they’ve fully mixed live action segments and some mixes between LIVE and CGI parts. And they work so well too. Oh2 and the music. Music has always been a big part of the Remedy games, but here it is in front and center. Lot of great bangers From Old Gods of Asgard (Poets of the fall) and others. Oh3 there’s a full 20 minute Finnish live action short film in the game to watch. Those crazy Finns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S478Ni0wWI (20 minute Finnish short film made for just the game) Just finished my New Game+ run of the game called The Final Draft and it confirmed that: Alan Wake II is my GOTY and GOAT. -- Such a ride from the July onwards. A literal GOTY game each month, topping the previous one each month. Or almost. Rogue Trader was “just a #5”, but in another year it could have been GOTY TLDR list for those in hurry: 10. Deliver Us Mars 9. Resident Evil 4 – Remake 8. Hogwarts Legacy 7. Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out 6. Dead Island 2 5. Rogue Trader 4. Jagged Alliance 3 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 2. Cyberpunk 2077 – Phantom Liberty 1. Alan Wake II edit: Added some Honorable mentions I forgot. Issaries fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 15:17
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Grapplejack posted:--doesn't count but I'll talk about--  I played this earlier this year too I think, completely forgot about it when I was doing my list. Pretty great little detective story! The caveat is that in the grim darkness of the not-so-far future, the world sucks so much that a lot of people spend most of their time in VR, and you're a private investigator who specializes in solving crimes that intersect with VR worlds, so you're off to Farmville or whatever to collect evidence and interrogate the suspects. Does some pretty interesting things with the premise and comes together pretty nicely at the end. Would highly recommend it.
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Dec 20, 2023 17:02
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