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drat VG you may legit have had the best year ever in terms of the amount of stone cold classics you beat for the first time. Mad respect.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:28
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Zaggitz posted:drat VG you may legit have had the best year ever in terms of the amount of stone cold classics you beat for the first time. Mad respect. And they're making him start off next year with Gollum The monsters
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Dec 30, 2023 22:30
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Rarity posted:HER EYES ON DEEZ NUTS 
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Dec 30, 2023 22:33
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Regy Rusty posted:And they're making him start off next year with Gollum Expectations have to be reset. You play nothing but the best and you start to forget why they're special.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:34
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Regy Rusty posted:And they're making him start off next year with Gollum I am partly responsible for this and hell, I'm glad 
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Dec 30, 2023 22:34
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Regy Rusty posted:And they're making him start off next year with Gollum VG's 2024 list: "This game was a wild adventure, I loved exploring the environments of Middle-Earth and Gollum was an enthralling protagonist, #3 Game of the Year"
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Dec 30, 2023 22:34
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Regy Rusty posted:And they're making him start off next year with Gollum Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:36
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Man this thread always loving delivers. Love reading everyones lists! Especially the write ups
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Dec 30, 2023 22:37
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sirtommygunn posted:Expectations have to be reset. You play nothing but the best and you start to forget why they're special. Exactly. Plus I did lose the challenge. Also BeanpolePeckerwood posted:2023andMe BP I loved your post so much and read your #1 aloud to LVG and she thought it was wonderful. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself in this one.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:43
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The REAL Goobusters posted:Man this thread always loving delivers. Love reading everyones lists! Especially the write ups 
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Dec 30, 2023 23:05
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This is the best thread in the world All your lists are amazing and I am so glad I gifted Gollum to veeg and then made sure his wife forced him to accept it so it will be his first streamed game of 2024 when you fall for 365 deez nuts jokes in a year, despite knowing this competition is happening the entire time, you really loving deserve it
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Dec 30, 2023 23:09
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Escobarbarian posted:I gifted Gollum to veeg and then made sure his wife forced him to accept it You're doing the lord's work 
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Dec 30, 2023 23:20
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playing Gollum is probably appropriate punishment for putting Sunshine over Galaxy
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Dec 30, 2023 23:29
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I appreciate you all very much
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Dec 30, 2023 23:40
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VideoGames posted:Also apparently I have to 100% DK64 or something? wait no don't do this
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Dec 30, 2023 23:40
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Love the games, love the lists
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Dec 30, 2023 23:45
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Kerrzhe posted:wait no don't do this For some reason he won't listen to me when I tell him this
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Dec 30, 2023 23:47
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Kerrzhe posted:wait no don't do this Absolutely do this
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Dec 30, 2023 23:49
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So I’m going to break my typical rule for this year, normally I only include games that I’ve finished, but because poo poo kept coming out and because I was pretty busy for a quarter of this year, there’s a ton of stuff that I dropped that I’d feel remiss if I didn’t include. Only two of those made it to the top ten (I put an asterisk on those), but I played those enough that I feel comfortable commenting on them and I will be going back to all of these at some point. Games not in the top ten that were started and remain unfinished: [X] Wo Long - I kinda ruined this game for myself, I had great fun going through Stranger of Paradise trying on each boss to get runs where I didn’t get hit, so I thought I would continue that with this game. Most of the bosses I fought were way more excruciating than SOP, and this culminated in one of the least fun bosses I’ve attempted to do that on. By the time I managed it after something like 500 deaths I just couldn’t play anymore. When I get back to this I won’t be caring about no damage crap, but I finally loving beat Zhang Rang without being touched, you scum of the earth cheating gently caress, and I’m including the recording so others can see my folly. [X] Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn - Despite me thinking Arise isn’t the best, and that this DLC is pretty nothing and built by dully repurposing the main game, I still played quite a bit of this but just had better things to play. I’ll have to come back to this later. [X] Star Ocean: The Second Story R - I really didn’t have time for this game, but the demo was so powerful I immediately bought it after running out the 3 hour clock even though I maybe played it for a single hour after that, lol. This will be great when I actually get to it. [X] Knuckle Sandwich - This seemed cool enough to kick it $15 back when they had their kickstarter, but it came out in the middle of a move and also immediately got a poo poo ton of updates to problems people had with it, so I didn’t touch it much. As a bonus, games I didn’t even loving get to that I’ll clearly play at some point: [X] Armored Core 6 - Like, it would be stupid at this point to say I want to play all the games that led up to this before playing 6 - none of which I’ve really touched - but, like, I want to at least play and beat one of the older ones first? It’s not like I ever hated this series but when I was younger they were coming out all the time (well not really, since a lot of those I know were basically expansions now), so it felt like the second I could get into one another would be coming out. Funny to think of now that 6 came out after, what, a decade since the last game? Most of my experience with these games is loading up a demo, spending entirely too long building a mech wrong, and immediately getting punked in a mission. Made it easy to put this off for now especially with this packed year. [X] Lies of P - I was not expecting anything from this but immediately people seemed to fall in love with it and are gladly putting it on their top tens, so I’ll get to this, uh, whenever. [X] Hi-Fi Rush - This was probably dumb on my end, but right after coming away from my immense disappointment with Bayo 3 and wondering if I even cared about character action games anymore this game just randomly came out. People instantly jumped on it in a way that made me feel like it might not maintain that energy, I wanted to wait to see if that excitement would hold up. But it looks like those worries were unfounded. Alright, time for the actual list: 10. Super Mario Wonder https://i.imgur.com/KSUPCIA.mp4 This is the first 2D Mario game to follow Nintendo’s forays with the Mario Maker games, and it really shows. There’s not that much difference between this game and how the NSMB series plays, but committing to a gorgeous art style and having a significant gimmick in every level goes a long way towards making everything feel fresh and interesting. My only complaint is that I may have played too much Mario already, this game slotted nicely into the time I had available and somehow I still managed to get 100% completion after maybe 4 play sessions. It felt like it ended right as it was getting started, and so hasn’t held itself in my mind as much as I want it to. 9. Super Mario RPG Remake  An incredibly charming remake of an already charming game. It would have been easy to redo several things that don’t necessarily fit with modern Mario - and there is a tiny bit of that to be fair, but what made this game special back in the 90s is preserved and enhanced with modern graphics and some helpful updates that smooth over the incredibly small wrinkles the game had. It does sort of make an already easy game just a little too easy though. The bestiary writer is a bit deranged. 8. Tactics Ogre Reborn*  Another casualty of this year in regards to being unfinished. I’ve had this game in some shape or form since the late 90s, when I first rented the PS1 version from a Blockbuster, and have treated it as this perpetually backlogged game since. I bought and then subsequently never played the PSP version, because it never felt like the right time to play it. Honestly I don’t actually think I like tactical RPGs for the most part, the only ones that I’ve managed to clear so far are Final Fantasy Tactics and the first two Arc the Lad games, and like one arc of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. Heck does Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter count? If you know about some of these games, most of those are not really standard tactics games either. I just think maybe these types of games are a little slow in general, between gearing up an army and meticulously planning every turn. But I found myself with this version of the game from a Christmas present in 2022, and felt a little obligated to actually get into it. Turns out the few plays of this I did in the 90s never got past like… the third or fourth mission? I’ve basically not actually played this? And that’s a bit of a shame, as I’m not really running into the same issues I do when I try a lot of Tactics games. Yeah it takes a little bit of time to clear out a map, but since the focus of a lot of maps is to clear one enemy, it means if I get tired of something or don’t like my odds against the enemy group, I can focus myself on that single target and also not get penalized because of how the EXP works in this game. And this is to say nothing of how interesting the story has been. A lot could be said about the greater narrative, but I’ve been invested in how variable some events can be. It might have been signposted a little hard, but I like that there was a mission that could play out very differently based on what I brought to the battle. The second I was able to peaceably clear a mission by bringing only myself with no equipment, I knew I was hooked. Just need to find the time again, turns out moving has a way of derailing things, who knew? 7. God Hand https://i.imgur.com/8CDJRKY.mp4 I’ve played through God Hand before, but I limited myself to easy back then because I wasn’t used to the flow of the game and wanted to keep it simple while I learned. After seeing a streamer play through it earlier in the year I knew I wanted to revisit it with the normal difficulty which lets the difficulty gauge actually hit the maximum. I also learned that you can mash all the face buttons to count for mash prompts, which made it easier on my hands (though the mashing in this game is still out of control). God Hand is still great. The big dumb cheesy cutscenes are perfect excuses to just have fun fights against a large cast of weirdos with diverse movesets. And the constant customization and upgrading of your moveset is still a good time as you gradually get better both in and out of the game. 6. Kirby and the Forgotten Land https://i.imgur.com/RdzPhO5.mp4 One of the first games I completed this year, and probably also the comfiest. Kirby games are pretty timeless, and despite the camera shift the controls and gameplay are just as familiar and well done as they’ve always been. Mouthful mode gives a good excuse to have additional wrinkles in the levels and the separate challenges provide a nice chance for you to master them and the copy powers. It’s a bit of a shame that the copy powers themselves seem to be less varied but letting you upgrade them does take the sting off that a bit when you get ridiculous versions of them. Just, you know exactly what you get with these games, and they’re still nice and chill. 5. Metroid Prime Remastered  The definitive version of one of the greatest games of all time. Having all the previous control schemes, as well as a new modern dual-stick control scheme, and even editing how you shoot so that you can sort of feather the button to do rapid shots instead of having to mash. It’s great, it looks wonderful, I bought it instantly and played through the second it was announced. Hell yeah I’ll do a new playthrough of Metroid Prime Nintendo. Let me know when I’m doing new playthroughs of 2 and 3 as well, let’s loving go. 4. Resident Evil 4 Remake https://i.imgur.com/2iv62TA.mp4 I’d say I’m not sure that RE4 needed a remake, but I think I’d also say that of a lot of the RE games, even the old ones. So another in this vein of high-quality remakes they’ve been working on is appreciated. It’s been a minute since I touched this, but I did a handful of playthroughs earlier in the year. The format they’ve created for these games has been fantastic for basically tricking me into the promise of the original games, where you’re meant to replay them over and over. I also played this from the start on the harder difficulty, which made me have to engage with the new parry and knife mechanics more than I think I would have otherwise. I dunno, I could say enough with the remakes, but I think I’ve enjoyed every single one and also the newer games, so hell, keep ‘em coming. 3. Final Fantasy XVI  I don’t think I was particularly looking forward to this when it was coming out. I don’t want to say “this doesn’t look like final fantasy” because I never thought that was the issue, but it might go back to my general wariness of character action games coming into 2023 and with me being wholly unfamiliar with how this team operates considering I never cared about the MMO. In any case, the demo absolutely sold me on the potential of this game and where it was going, and for the most part it didn’t disappoint. I could make the case that the game’s low points are pretty dull, or that the RPG bits are pretty vestigial, or even that I’d have liked the party to take a greater role or even for the gameplay to go even weirder with it, but those all ultimately end up being minor gripes to me. The sheer spectacle, the combat, and even some of the quiet parts, when they want to land a moment, they nail it, with some of the best scripted moments in the industry. As for how Final Fantasy it is… if you see the final boss, that is a Final Fantasy-rear end final boss fight. 2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgv0G-4Pqq4 The game that made me break my rule of only listing beaten games, I’d have felt awful about this list if Tears of the Kingdom couldn’t be included. I played this for over a 100 hours but put it aside in order to play FFXVI, and then the flurry of releases in the fall and my own business made it difficult to get back to this year. You’d think with that hour count that maybe I had made some sort of significant progress, but I still have like half of the map uncharted and only two dungeons cleared. I was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild, and even finally got to that game’s DLC before the release of Tears, so there’s a mass of joy at just revisiting the areas I got acquainted with in that game in Tears’ map. It makes my progress a little slow but no less satisfying. And that says nothing of the layers of verticality that were added to this game, or the building mechanics, the complete changeup of your tools which somehow all feel better than BotW’s, and the way that they integrated the materials you were getting in both games into the weapon system. Everything gels together - literally and figuratively - in a way that should not be possible for a game console that often struggles to run relatively simple remakes of old games at a constant 60 fps. I’d comment on the story and how I like finding and piecing together clues of it through finding landmarks and completing dungeons but I left that half-done. Don’t sleep on this, even if you weren’t particularly enamored with Breath of the Wild. It may use the old map as a base, but there’s enough new things here to at least try it and see if it works for you. 1. Street Fighter 6 https://i.imgur.com/Rmd7aFS.mp4 I think I’ve been wanting to get into a fighting game for something like 12 years now. Because it wasn’t a genre I was intimately familiar with and hadn’t really touched except for Soulcalibur single player modes or watching my brother in the arcade in like the 90s, I never really got that far. If I wasn’t that invested, why would I buy some new game for $60 that I might not play? This was a problem from the get go, in that I’d only try a fighting game when it was really cheap, which subsequently is often after it had been abandoned by the community so any multiplayer was long dead, or just populated by god-tier players, all with bad netcode. And since a lot of those games just didn’t have single player for like a decade (unless you were Mortal Kombat), it just led to me continuing to write them off. Even on the chance a game would have an open beta, it would often be online matches only, with no chance to even see how a character would play before going against other people, which always felt infuriating and pointless to somebody effectively out of the loop. There’s more than a few fighting game betas that I’d load up, realize I couldn’t effectively test anything, and just immediately close and delete them without playing a single match. A couple games would have a free version with rotating characters, but they’d be ones that I didn’t care about in the first place (sorry Killer Instinct). And even if I got past all this, rarely would I connect with any character that I’d want to play. Along comes Street Fighter 6. I had heard about how little people cared for 5 and was prepared to write 6 off as well since I was effectively still ignoring the genre. But they ran that first closed beta, and I was able to watch a ton of glowing praise coming off of people I wouldn’t have expected it from, and decided absentmindedly to register for the second closed beta, and somehow ended up with a key. I wasn’t really going to play it, but then I saw a ton of people sad they didn’t get a key and almost felt… guilted into loading it up? I also almost closed it, but then found out you could just kind of enter an empty lobby and jump on the extreme battle cabs and just practice. Now if I hadn’t immediately gelled with Kimberly, I probably still would have bounced off, but for all that SF6 does absolutely right in getting new players into the game, I think just letting me try things out by myself was all it took to actually get me comfortable enough to seriously try online matches. I never was really looking for Modern controls or their equivalent (even if I instinctively gravitated towards a character without a DP and no charge moves), and while I played through World Tour and enjoyed my time it honestly wasn’t the draw for me. Heck, rambling about all this I’m not even sure the reasons I’ve provided are the reason why I got into this game in particular. I just know that one of these games finally drew me in far enough to play multiplayer as the main game mode I touch, and it deserves all the praise in the world for that. I’ve had my rear end handed to me often in this game, but it’s all worth it the second you have a single match where everything just gels for you and everything goes your way, there’s no better feeling. Quicklist 10. Super Mario Wonder 9. Super Mario RPG Remake 8. Tactics Ogre Reborn* 7. God Hand 6. Kirby and the Forgotten Land 5. Metroid Prime Remaster 4. Resident Evil 4 Remake 3. Final Fantasy XVI 2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom* 1. Street Fighter 6
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Dec 30, 2023 23:49
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I want to see VG bothered by beaver
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Dec 30, 2023 23:49
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I had a weird year in games. I definitely did not play nearly as many as I thought I would, and my To Play list just grows ever more oppressively long. The highs were very high, though. 10. Enter the Gungeon This is maybe the best game I played this year, but it's at number 10 on account of the fact that I beat it 100% years ago. What happened this year is that I found myself wanting a rogue lite that I could veg out to while I listened to podcasts of academics talking about nerd poo poo. So I bought this on my PS5 and drat near 100%'d it again. It's harder on controller than it is with mouse and keyboard, but it's still a pretty much perfect rogue lite on both a moment to moment tactical level and an overall run strategy level. 9. Murder Dog IV: The Trial of Murderdog A free, short adventure game on Itchio, this thing really delivers. Funny, cutting, and filled with delightfully weird aesthetic choices. 8. Tunic The puzzle and exploration aspects of this game are sublime. The combat is pretty awful. Luckily the game lets you tweak some options to make the combat less annoying so you can focus on the magically immersive puzzle stuff. 7. Midnight Suns This is basically a Marvel version of Mass Effect. You go on a mission that uses a certain set of gameplay mechanics. It's pretty fun. Then you walk around your base and talk to characters and enjoy their personalities. It's also pretty fun. Depending on who you are and where you are in the game, one of the halves might appeal to you more than the other. Having to switch between them makes for some compulsive gaming. Blade's book club will live in my heart forever. 6. EvolveIdle I really like idle games and clicker games. I still think that Universal Paperclips is the pinnacle of the genre, but the ambition of this one is really impressive. You go from primordial ooze to space conquering empire. And probably beyond. There are still at least a couple of layers of gameplay that I haven't gotten to yet. 5. Super Mario Wonder This is such a great argument for the power of animation. This game oozes with charm, and it's all thanks to the joyous, lavish animations. I thought the platforming itself was only solid, but I was having fun the whole time. 4. Lethal Company I have only played this a few times so far, but god is it good. Horror and comedy complement each other so well, and audio is often underutilized in games. Not here though. I hope I get to play it a lot more, because this thing is doing a lot of really cool stuff with its 865 megs of game files. 3. Cruelty Squad Art. Ugly, funny art that also doubles as a pretty good immersive sim. I fell off after getting the first ending. The harder difficulties are really hard, and the annoying prep you have to do to get to a run in the harder difficulties just knocked me out. Everyone should play this though. 2. Baldur's Gate 3 This is a very good game. It's huge. It's ambitious. It makes exploration and combat a lot of fun. Pushing and jumping are just really well realized verbs, and they go well with the charming character writing and strong voice acting. 1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Really adore how densely packed with compelling stuff to do and explore this game is. Truly a joy for most of it. I think silver enemies have too much health, and the final boss being a pure combat gauntlet is an uninspired letdown. I also really hate what they did with Zelda herself, storywise. Eh. Not the Majora's Mask style weird and wonderful experiment I was hoping for, but very good regardless. Much better than Elden Ring.
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Dec 30, 2023 23:50
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Hell yeah VG!
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Dec 31, 2023 00:16
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Kerrzhe posted:wait no don't do this Yeah!! 101% it. 100 is pointless.
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Dec 31, 2023 00:37
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 I like talking about things I like maybe a little too much.... Strix's GOTY 2023 Top Ten 10. Sherlock This is my list, I get to write about the games I want to write about. I get to write about Sherlock, a logic deduction puzzle game from 1991. Everett Kaser made that, then like twenty more games in the same vein, and he's selling them on his website and for shall we say 1990 prices. 20$ for Sherlock, or you start buying his bundles - 44$ for about 10 games, and there are three of these packs. These are not easy to justify. Like, don't get me wrong: these are incredible games. They all have demos, you can see for yourself: they're satisfying logic puzzles. Even the non-Sherlock games are all interesting - but I'm going to stay focused. I like Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson, Reichenbach Falls and the Queen's Gambit best. As every game in that series is basically a variant or evolution of the original Sherlock, I'll talk about it.  Confusing, sure. The weird boxes and icons on the top left are the puzzle. The columns and horizontal rows on the right and bottom are the clues. You're supposed to pick one item per box with no duplicates - sudoku! Use the clues, think it through, solve the puzzle. This kind of puzzle isn't necessarily difficult, even on the highest settings, but it is satisfying. Just slowly untangle the puzzle and put everything right in place. I love unwinding to a puzzle like this. It's my podcast puzzle, or just music. It's all calming and perfect and aaahh. Good stuff. And the settings! Everything is customizable! The appearance, the size and complexity of the puzzle, everything. The same flexibility exists in all of Kaser's games, and I appreciate it. Here's the unplayable mess I have my Sherlock set to:  There are no games directly like these on steam. Lots of sudoku clones, or other logic deduction games, but nothing with the same kind of deduction, let alone the weird twists the sequels have. There are, in fact, no games like this anywhere else that I know of. Someone please, please clone these and put them on steam! Anyways they're on my GOTY list because I've spent so much time unwinding with 'em, and they make me happy. 9. Avernum I'm going to just repost the review I put in the steam thread: Avernum Beat this today! It's been eating my mind for the last forty hours and spurring all kinds of monomania. I want to play the sequels, I want to play everything else the dev has made now. Avernum is a classic rpg with an emphasis on tactical turn-based combat. It has an interesting setting, a well-written if thin plot, and thoroughly addictive explore-fight-loot-sell/talk-repeat loop. It feels, in a lot of ways, like a computerized version of sitting down to play a tabletop rpg with your group; specifically the classic Dungeon and Dragons. (No, I don't know which edition. I am, alas, not into D&D enough to care about editions.) You can practically feel the DM rolling the dice behind his screen, going 'uh oh' with a smile and then telling you that your party feels like it's being hunted. Same deal with 'you arrive at the goblin fort!' as he sets out the hand-drawn maps with the tokens and asks for initiative. This also applies to the plot structure - it's effectively the DM saying 'here is the setting, here's the worldmap, where are you going?' and it's very modular. Arriving at town A, you find out that they're under siege by zombies. Arriving at town B, you find out they have problems with the mayor's missing necklace. Solving these problems can be done in any order, and it doesn't really change the setting much, so to speak? This is not a linear narrative that has you eager for the next plot beat, it's a roadtrip as you decide to find out what's over there. This is not to say that it's without a plot or coherent setting! This is not to say it lacks character! I am being clear about what Avernum is, and this game specifically feels like the developer wanted to share his really good D&D campaign with you - but not in the sense of "look at my special OP protagonist with dual blades and a magic panther!" but in the sense of "I wrote the BEST adventure but all of my players are out sick  will you let me run it for you? please? I even premade character sheets!"It works. It absolutely works and it oozes charm to the point where I forgive the rough edges and some of the glaring balance problems. So, details! Jeff Vogel, our sole developer and DM, released this game in 1995. It was called Exile. It had a top-down perspective, a rough (antique) UI, and it sold well enough that Vogel went into gamedev as a full time career. He made Exiles 2 and 3, other games, and then in 2000 he fully remade Exile into Avernum. New engine, it's isometric perspective now, a decent UI, etc. I personally think this was a great idea: at the rate of technological progress, Exile looked antique when it was released, and no one in 2000 wanted to touch it, let alone buy it. It also couldn't run on then-modern systems. The remake made it marketable again - and vastly easier to play. Like, to be completely honest Avernum still looks rough. You can tell it doesn't have the AAA polish even for the time and genre (compare and contrast Baldur's Gate from 1998) - but unlike Exile it looks solid. You're playing indie, not something from the early 80s. Vogel goes on to remake Exile 2 and 3, makes more games, then makes a sequel to Avernum! Avernum 1-3 are now followed by 4-6 for a full saga. Vogel then decides in 2011 to shake things up and gets a brand new engine... and yes. He remakes Avernum. Avernum 1-3 are remade, and... I'll be honest. It's a full top-to-bottom remake, but not the major upgrade Exile to Avernum was. It's nice to have them available on tablet for mobile play, but... well, personal preference. I don't like that the new Avernums feature less in-depth skills, they changed how secret doors work, etc. The graphics are - instead of straight better, they're different. It's the same style, and honestly you can overlay the games and they're close. The script remains the same. I personally believe that the early 2000s Avernums are better to play, BUT if you told me you started with Avernum 2011 I'd be happy anyways, it's the same game and we're picking flavors. Anyways. In conclusion, Vogel remakes Avernums! But not all six, just the first three. He makes more games, and as of this writing he's working on remaking his Geneforge series and making a new game, and I'm looking forward to them. Avernum! The plot, the setting, is simple: evil Empire has conquered the entire planet, rules with iron fist. There's a huge cave system underground called Avernum, and the Empire decides to make their own underground Australia and exile criminals there. They run around sealing up all of the entrances and exits, declare it off-limits, and use a magical portal to send people on a one-way trip to the caves. Your party of four (six in Exile) is the latest set of criminals, and the game opens as you stumble out of the portal. The starter town gives you basic gear, tells you about nearby cities, and warns you to be wary of Nephilim and Slitherizaki and Bandits. You step out into the overworld, and the game begins proper. See, even from the start, you can go basically anywhere. Go left and find a town. Go north and find a fort, or skip it and find a cave. Or bandits. Or.... well, it's one of those overworld maps that encourages you to poke around and just fill out the minimap. I think it does a great job balancing "go explore!" with "you found a dragon that bit your head off" by using the excellent worldbuilding. The starter area? It has bandits, sure, but they're low-level. You're safe poking around as it's a quote-unquote civilized area of Avernum - local soldiers have swept out the worst monsters. They'll set up camp near rough spots and warn you (sometimes) if there's something awful. (Later on, for example, you can try to go to a cavern but soldiers will warn you there's a bandit fort in there, and they're setting up an ambush. Either help them or leave.) Using common sense and paying attention will keep you from certain death - area full of skeletons? Weird pink monster spotted on the map? Maaaybe turn back - or better yet, save. Saving in Avernum is free and highly encouraged. Keep multiple saves, explore, and that way if you do mess up, you're not redoing too much. But, right, the setting - leaving the nice farmlands and towns and going into the unexplored area leads to high-level encounters. It's simple but it works super well. So far so generic, right? Towns, farms, caves, bandits. But it's all nicely fleshed out with lots of text: visit towns, talk to people. Find out that the farms are mushroom farms, and the mushrooms exist because a mage modified the species to be sustainable food for humans. The towns are ruled by mayors who sit on a council headed by a king. This society takes whoever the empire exiles and integrates them freely - settle down with a farm, become a merchant, become a soldier, whatever. Those who don't want to fit in become bandits - or, in a fascinating reflection - are exiled from Avernum to an even worse part of the caves. You can visit these exile settlements too, and meet people who just don't fit in - either by being evil or disagreeing or... yeah. Avernum is not a utopia, it's basically a struggling civilization desperately surviving in a harsh environment and you get this interesting juxtaposition of normal generic fantasy town, but the blacksmith is there because people need weapons more than they need their horses shod. (Not that they have horses...) The setting is well thought out and interesting, and supported by interesting, charming dialogue. I never felt like I was wasting my time talking to everyone in town - partially because I read fast, but partially because it's a good read. Nothing that will make you go "this is Shakespeare! I must write an English essay on it!" but instead stuff you smile at or think about and just, y'know, good. Additionally, I really like how the setting handles mages. It fully embraces D&D magic: anyone can learn magic and cast spells... and most wizards are assholes. Why is this random pair of pants cursed? Wizards have no sense of right and wrong! Most mages are at the Mage Tower, and you'll find all kinds of people - mages who want to help, mages who are power-mad, mages who are just weird. Some are involved with the big plot, some aren't. Wait, big plot? Oh yeah. It's a slow build, but in the true tabletop rpg style there is an overarching villain and you do build up to defeating him. I won't spoil this - but like, the king has a quest for you. So does at least one mysterious wizard in their tower. And doing these quests gets you closer to finding a potential way out of Avernum - which is your overall goal, after all. This brings me back around to game design. The overworld has dungeons as well as towns, and you're incentivized to explore them not just for the experience and loot - but because in every single dungeon is at least one item or piece of info that you will need for the big plot. Is goblin fort locked? Another dungeon has the key. Wizard needs something? A dungeon has it. Not everything is in dungeons (explore towns! talk to people!) but you never walk out of a dungeon feeling like you wasted your time grinding. (You CAN grind, if you want, the overworld spawns enemy groups you can fight repeatedly!) I love this. I love feeling focused like this, even as we're zipping around looking everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. I won't lie, I had my partner with a walkthrough nearby so I could be all "I can't find the dragon's key " and they could answer "you should search the throne room again" - or be vague or explicit. I can't offer you my partner, alas, so you can't get custom hints, but I can tell you that Vogel is SNEAKY and finding some of the plot-crucial stuff in the endgame especially was a nightmare of "I've been looking for X and you mean it was THERE how was I supposed to figure that out" - but hey. This is end-game, and you've been trained the entire game to look for secret walls and check, because in most cases Vogel DID put something where you thought he did.The game ends with some really satisfying plot beats and setpieces and it really works. I love it. I've neglected one final piece of the game: the combat, and how it's unbalanced. It's fun, by god it's fun, but it inherits a lot of problems from stealing from D&D wholesale. Combat takes place on a grid and everyone gets an amount of action points during their turn. It's surprisingly similar to X-COM, but instead of guns we have wizards. Now, the game's character creator has a point system - you can pick a pregenerated class, or you can dive into assigning all of the points yourself. Make a fighter, put their points into strength, endurance, melee weapons and maybe a point into luck, pick a perk, there you go. In combat they have a lot of hitpoints so they can survive walking up to an ogre and hitting it. Fighters are straightforward: crank stats, give good weapon, walk up to enemy and bonk it until dead. But the other classes - I'll be honest. You have four character slots, you need specific skills just to survive, I defaulted to the standard party: fighter, thief/rogue, mage, priest. You can multiclass freely and teach your fighter spells, but for the most part I stuck to these archetypes. As the victory screen rolled, well, how was it? Was my party balanced? Yes and no. The Fighter: vital, 10/10, perfect. Having a really strong tank who can take and give hits for free was SO useful that in some points they made the mage seem useless. I love this. I love breaking out of wizard supremacy - not all the time, but having a solid meathead was vital to my victory. The game also has at least one magical sword, so having someone who could use that sword was huge. The Thief: sighs. You NEED points in tool use, because there are a LOT of traps in the game and they do not screw around. I had more total party KOs from opening a chest wrong or stepping on the wrong floor tile and failing the trap check, because traps can be 'you've been poisoned' and oh no, guess I'll cast cure, but more often they're 'a knife flies out and impales you!' and suddenly someone is dead. Or, worse, higher level explosion traps where everyone takes 40 damage three times in a row. Traps are bullshit and if you can't neuter them with tool use, there's a giant difficulty spike. Now, since you can't split tool use among the party like some other skills, it has to be piled on someone. Now, without checking, I believe it also gets a bonus from dexterity, so - well. I can already see myself doing a new character build where they're a second fighter with more DEX than STR, but no no, let's stay focused. I built my thief around DEX, Tool Use, and Bows. This, hm. It meant that they were surprisingly flimsy, so if anything got into melee range my priest would be tied up healing them. Bows range from exceptionally good to "oh man c'mon" depending on your luck and ammo. Ammo. It's manually tracked and there's no free refills. Early and mid game this was fine - I'd pick arrows off of enemy archers to keep my quiver full. I even hit points where I found out you can only carry 100 arrows in a stack. But - and this got to me - you can sometimes pick your arrows out of corpses after a fight, but it's never 1:1 to you're always running at a deficit. Which meant as the game got harder and less full of archers, it became common to run out of arrows and then I'd have a squishy thief standing around being useless in combat. Which - well - being an archer is great! Ranged attacks are amazing, especially as you run into mages who will summon waves of rats to prevent your fighter from reaching them. But without ammo, well, I ultimately decided to multi-class. My thief got points in endurance and pole-arms, and while they never caught up to my fighter, they were at least able to stand next to them and take blows and dish out decent damage. (Numbers: Fighter would hit an enemy for 70, Thief would hit for 40. That varied, but that was the gap I was working with.) It worked out well in the end - thief was real good at sniping mages and used their spear on melee dudes - but it's something to keep in mind if you try to go pure archer... and if you're going to spend that many points into tool use. The Mage: lol, lmao, what's game balance. Mages are OP and if you do not have one you will not keep up with the enemies and you will die horribly. Why? Because this game has haste and slow. Yep. Your fighter may have a billion hitpoints and hit like a truck but they will die when an enemy mage slows them repeatedly, hastes their allies, and even rats will chew you to death if you never get a turn. If you are not keeping up with haste/slow, you are going to lose. Sometimes entire fights would be determined by my ability to counter slow. Now, I'm not sure if you can mitigate this by giving your entire party basic mage training so they can all cast haste/slow themselves, but having a focused mage has other benefits. Mages have about 20~ spells ranging from utility (cast light!) to mass damage (lightning spray) to crazy buffs (arcane shield) to - wait for it - summons. Summons are so important they're getting their own paragraph. In the game of X-COM where cover is important and you want clear shots at the enemy mages, you quickly realize Avernum has no cover, kind of. You can hide a mage behind a wall sometimes as DPS spells need line of sight, but that's never guaranteed, nor are chokepoints. Your fighter can tank, but there's no taunt skill. The solution then is to summon your own minions. Early game summons are trash. Useful trash, but they die in one hit to anything and meh. I ignored summons because of this. But mid-game - as enemy casters are beginning to come into their own - even the trash became useful. Having six rats on the field as the enemy casts lightning spray... well, it can only target so many people, and if it chooses even one rat instead of your mage, there you go. This goes doubly for slow, or even worse late-game debuffs. Now, well. As your mage levels and finds the higher level summoning spells, the game balance flies out the window again. You can summon your own mages. Your summoned mages can then haste/slow... or summon their own critters. Yeah. None of your summons are controllable so there's a chance they'll spend three turns in a row casting fireball at an enemy immune to fire, but since there's no limit to summons, just summon another mage. In some very silly fights I wound up with three summoned mages who would summon their critters and my party was able to basically sit out the fight and then pick up the loot afterwards. Yeah. Mages' DPS isn't anything to sneeze at either. Remember fighter hitting for 70, thief for 40? Mage cast lightning spray and did 40 to the entire enemy group, and then since they were hasted they could do it twice in a row instantly. This is silly. Mages are broken, wizard supremacy, etc. Except... except. And here is the balance that keeps the Fighter relevant: mana. MP. There is no way to regain it in combat outside of potions, the big spells are expensive, and since most dungeons are sieges where you need to chew through a lot of enemies before you can rest and regain mana again, there is a serious element of resource management going on. A mage without mana is kind of useless, and I didn't really put any stats into strength or endurance outside of enough to keep them alive. Making it to the boss of a dungeon as your mage is out of mana is really bad. You also have to do some big thinking as you choose between keeping their mana reserved for haste/slow and summoning and DPS and well, I really like that your mage is a big useful toolbox but you have to think about how to deploy them. The Priest: vital, no notes. Going without a priest is suicide. Even if you're winning a fight you're taking damage and that has to be healed. Debuffs are plentiful and nightmarish. On top of that, priests deploy some insanely potent buffs that can boost your damage to ludicrous levels - or slap on some magic armor that keeps your squishy mage alive. And then! And then, because priests are awesome, they do the highest damage spell to undead - it's cheap to cast, huge DPS, and can multi-target - AND priests can do some summons. In other words, priests are busted and you should have one. Now - why am I not complaining about game balance here again? Because unlike a mage/haste/slow/summoning-other-mages, I think you could probably get through the game without a dedicated one. Huge challenge mode, you will need a huge amount of potions and someone should learn at least the level one priest spell heal, debuffs are gonna suck - but I think you could do it. Don't, it won't be fun, but - yeah. Priest summons, by the way, while great, will not cast spells. If I had to play Avernum again right now I wouldn't replicate my party exactly but I'd still need the same set of four. Someone has to fight, someone has to cast haste, someone has to heal, someone has to disarm traps. There's not much wiggle room there, and I think this is a reflection of how Avernum reduced the party count to four - Exile had six, originally. Oh, well. It works, and there's enough flexibility and loose skill points that I could probably build a solid trap disarming mage. That said, there are some hard skill checks through the game that you just have to roll with. You will need to be able to make a potion to finish an important quest, so someone needs at least a few points in potion making. Stuff like that. It's not sign-posted, it's - well, it's a symptom of what kind of game this is. You're either up for this or you aren't. Last bit: potions and the economy. In general this works great. You're tight for money so you're incentivized to pick up loot to sell, but you're never so tight for money you're scraping all the heavy armor off the floor to sell for a pittance. I got very good at skimming the loot window to go 'ah silver ring that's light and sells, that's just another shield heavy and not worth it' etc etc. As you do more quests and get better loot you'll begin to swim in money - but buying new spells is very expensive (and worth it) so it evens out. There's also a cap on how much money you can carry, so you're encouraged to make regular trips to buy spells / items / etc. My only complaint here is that arrows are expensive and you can't carry enough. And I mean expensive to the point where part of the reason I dual-classed my thief was so I wasn't spending hundreds of coins on arrows after every major dungeon. Right. So. Potions. Lifeblood of the mage, and the only way to cure some awful debuffs. I did not hoard enough of these. Putting points into potion-making is not meant to be a dump stat: the game is balanced around you actively making and using potions, and I challenged myself by not doing this for a long time. I drat near made the final boss fight impossible because I didn't stock enough potions. (I won anyways, but BOY it was hard!) Potion-making ingredients can be harvested in the wild for free, respawn, and are so useful. Please do not make the same mistake I did! Overall.... yeah I loved this game. I've talked too much about it already. I could keep going - boy I want to talk about Erika, or the Spiral Pit, or Dumbfound, or what I think about the dragons - but really? Avernum is good and it deserved no less than two remakes. It deserves to be popular and played by people who dig it. That eager, enthusiastic DM who wants to show you his module just shines with passion and excitement and interesting ideas. I finished this game happy, and I'm thrilled there's five sequels. 8. Project Zomboid   Single-player, this game excels in being a hardcore, dark survival simulator. Bites are death, you will die, and the zombies are coming. Creeping around suburban Kentucky and scavenging supplies has never been more tense or interesting. For years I've happily called this game the best zombie game, tied with State of Decay 2 - pick the one you want based on if you want more action or tension. I've tried it and died and loved it and used it as an infrequent horror game to sate my urge for zombie survival. Would've been the same this year - fantastic, worthy of a spot on this list, but probably not going to make it because I've played other stuff that left stronger impressions. Then, this year, I played Project Zomboid co-op. Two hundred hours later... This game absolutely shines if you have a buddy, like, drat. I've heard of this phenomena before, where having friends livens up a game, but I've never seen it take effect this strongly before. Survival became easier, which meant that we could turn our attentions to the medium and long-term goals in the game, and then coordinating became an entire game in and of itself. So we effectively broke the game into two halves: first, base management. The joy of picking a building (or picking a clearing and building from scratch) and turning it into a zombie-safe haven, then a storage warehouse, then decorating it and turning it into a home. Project Zomboid looks like the original Sims game, and well, playing it like that game's build mode is really satisfying? Especially if you get the mods that let you add all the furniture/wall styles/floor styles/etc... I turned into the living embodiment of HGTV as I happily created a perfect kitchen and reinforced the fence and carried corpses to the parking lot for a fire. Heads up! Cement in this game can burn for some insane reason, so if you do a corpse bonfire, do it AWAY FROM THE BASE. Second, leaving the base! Scavenging for supplies, killing zombies, car management...the rest of the game! Now I, in my full HGTV mode, basically turn into the furniture hunter. But there's stuff like bringing fresh food home, or bullets, or other supplies - and not to mention how neat it is to explore. The map in this game is hand-made and full of little details, and on top of that, there's a lot of mods that seamlessly add in new areas, replacing unused areas with new stuff - or just straight expanding the map. I loved exploring these places, vanilla or mod, as it let me engage in another fantasy: just exploring normal places. I sometimes dream that I could temporarily make everyone in the world vanish so I could go into random houses and look around and just, y'know, look? I can fulfill this dream with stuff from photos from Zillow, but this game really lets you live out the ultimate breaking and entering fantasy, and there is such joy in the mundane. Fiddle with someone's kitchen, take the town library all for yourself, sprint naked around the mall's food court. So there's that neat aspect alongside the, y'know, scavenging - will this kitchen have canned food that hasn't spoiled? Will this library have that one book I'm looking for? Can we FINALLY find some shotgun bullets? And oh right, zombies! They're here, they're great. The vanilla zombies are great, but we're mod-hungry and we gave them more variety of outfits and types... and since we were having fun, we put in the ultra-rare ones that carry the cure vaccine. Cheaty, but it really made some encounters incredibly high value: holy cow there's a cure guy in that building, but he has a crowd with him, is it worth the risk to kill him and get the cure? We experimented with several variations of handling the zombie virus: fully infection proof is boring. Vanilla is too annoying, because if you're infected your character is on a timer and while the first few deaths are interesting to manage, having to restart with grinding stats gets old. (Especially if you had enough carpenter stats to build fancy stuff, and suddenly you need to saw a billion planks to get back there again...) We found our balance by adding these methods: 1) if you're really mad at the game, just cheat the stats back in. 2) Mod that adds a chance for you to recover from the virus by taking care of yourself. Lots of sleep, food, staying warm, etc. Fun RP chance as you get to be, well, sick? And this tests your resources and defenses, as you really can't be scavenging if you're sick. 3) The cure is out there! So, the zombies: if you meet one or two, no problem. Combat is fun and once you're used to it, easy. As long as you're paying attention you can beat a zombie to death with a baseball bat no sweat. But - as appropriate for zombies - as soon as there's a group, you're hosed. It becomes a test of your ability to split them off from the pack, stay mobile, and keep your stamina up so you're not so tired you can't push them back. Guns are fantastic: rare, powerful, and loud as hell. You may have killed that pack, but 500 zombies are approaching you now. But - oh yes - we modded this too. There's a modder out there who basically added every single gun he could think of to the game, to the point where we started playing gun pokemon in one run. Our armory at the base became a veritable museum of weird gun variants and ammo. The trouble with this mod is that guns become so frequent it becomes a parody of modern America, but, well, I think you can tweak that in the mod config, and also we didn't care at this point. Having a lot of guns didn't solve the zombie summoning effect, and it let us explore more aggressively - clearing a building became easier, and added a new twist of "this is now clear, but we have a timer running before more descend" - and we never stopped using melee. Guns became the ultimate backup weapon, where if you realized you were going to get into trouble, time for the shotgun. And so we come to the trinity: vehicles. Vanilla is good, modded adding even more is better, alongside adding a few new ways to access them. In the base game you basically have to find a vehicle's key, which is pure RNG. In modded, you can make keys yourself, or just hotwire the car. A little cheaty, but in a way that worked for our playstyle... and honestly, it takes a LONG time to walk anywhere. Like, a realistically long time to walk anywhere. Which is fine in towns, but I am never spending 30+ minutes walking down a highway again. So with cars we could actually get out and explore (how American!) and this also turned into - cars are noisy, and attract zombies. You can kill zombies by running them over, but it damages the car. Cars are fragile, and need repairs and fuel. Fuel is at gas stations, but are they safe to use? Ever been bitten while pumping gas? Yeah. So - yeah, it's a super super fun experience with lots to do. Survive! Build! Collect stuff (guns, cars, garden gnomes, exercise equipment, books, etc... mods even let you add more stuff like tarot decks, ALL the clothing, even more movies, etc) and explore! And the risk is real - even with guns you'll still get swarmed and killed. You have to judge where and how you're going to approach a dangerous place like a mall. It's just a huge happy survival sandbox that I poured so much time into and will again. The best, worst part? This isn't even all of the game. You can turn it into Stardew Valley with farming. There's fishing. Crafting gets elaborate. There's the Ten Years Later mod, and even more in the workshop. And the devs are still - still! - working on the game, with regular updates about the update. Slow, but they're still at it. By god, this game is good. I'm so happy it exists.  7. Space Engineers   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnRKOp-Cq8c Here's a weird one! This should not be my game. I struggle with sandbox games, I struggle with games that have no plots, and I struggle with games that feature flying due to how easily I get motion sickness. Space Engineers is a game defined by being, effectively, a physics engine with a bit of gameplay wrapped around it. You come to this game to build vehicles, fly them, get them wrecked, and build new vehicles. If you enjoy this loop - there's a lot to do. There's mining, building weird fun structures, and combat. Okay I feel a little bit like I'm lying, the game is still - weirdly - barebones? After ten years, there's a lot to do, but the game still feels empty. There's no reason to explore because the terrain is proc-gen and not in the somewhat interesting way in No Man's Sky. There's no story to pursue, no weird stuff to find. Even when the devs added space stations and an economy, it's still lightweight, weird. So wait, you might ask. Where did the ten years of development go? Into the toolbox, I say! Do you want to build fully functioning vehicles - trucks, starships, more - all with working physics? Do you want to taunt KLANG HIMSELF as you install pistons to your ship? Do you want to build a fully working space elevator? Yeah. It's a game for engineers who want a bigger, better lego set and they think Minecraft isn't complex enough. I, unfortunately, am not an engineer. I never had many legos as a kid, and I don't think in 3D space. "visualize an apple, now rotate it" can't do it. I found my fun anyways, because with the aid of a fan of the game and mods, this game turned into one of the neatest "chill and do busywork" games I've ever played, with a side of Satisfactory for good measure. So here's how it works: first, we turn off voxel deformation. This effectively disables mining, but it makes driving and flying a lot safer: crashing into the ground doesn't do damage to vehicles. This helps solve my "I suck at flying" problems. We replace mining with static mining drills that with some tweaking turn electricity into raw resources. Next, we use a big industry overhaul mod that adds a lot of intermediate components and asks you to build huge bases that can accommodate your now ludicrous factory. This gives me a bigger sense of progression as I can work towards expanding the base, and it takes a lot more work than slapping some structures down. And god help me if I want to make the base pretty. (I DO.) Add in a mod that spawns in vehicles and structures at random times, and tweak it so it doesn't spawn in the "killbot 9000" type stuff that would just vaporize us. We definitely can't afford base defenses at all yet, let alone for stuff trying to kill us from orbit. (For protection, have at least one person with admin powers so they can delete anything that spawns in that slipped past our filters. Or if the RNG gives us 5 of the same wreck in a row and we're bored.) Finally, add stargates! Make the admin put a working stargate on every planet (with its own power and admin safezone so they won't be destroyed) and you're all set to go. Gameplay becomes - work on the base, realize that you want to build X but it needs Y, so to get Y you either need to mine it or scavenge it, and since you're not ready to go build another new mining outpost, time to scavenge. Some wrecks are safe to approach and just start dismantling. Some are, uh, not. Some are armed and want to kill you. Either way, this becomes the heart of the game: building vehicles that can answer these challenges. In Space Engineers, even modded, you have a small inventory and you are not durable. The game is all but begging you to build stuff, please, it has all of these cool mechanics engage with them! And so - you do! You build a lovely starter truck so you can drive to these wrecks instead of walking for 5-15 minutes to reach them. You build a new truck with armor and horrific grinding stuff on it so you can drive up to a wreck and just start grinding it down into materials with your truck, instead of your hand-grinder. You realize that driving, while fun, is really difficult on this planet full of trees. You put thrusters on it instead and make a hover-bike. You make an airplane built for cargo. You build a flying base. You build a flying base that can enter orbit. You dream about doing these things as you hosed up and got your truck obliterated by a hostile Halo tank that the mod imported, and you sigh as you put the blueprint of your truck (that you saved before leaving the base, right) into the base so it will remake your truck for you. You realize, halfway through, that it's out of rotors. Again. The gently caress. Who's been using the rotors? Your beloved friend used them all to make their own giant-rear end grinder motorcycle that can fly? And there won't be more rotors until you fix the base's power supply because SOMEONE crashed into the giant windmill that was powering the whole thing? And while the solar panels could cover this, it's currently night and won't be day for another few hours because this planet sucks? You angrily sigh and build scaffolding and repair the windmill, but on your way back down, you accidentally fall off of said scaffolding, hit the ground and take 99999 damage. You were maybe 3 feet away from the ground, but, well SPACE ENGINEERS When it works, it's sublime. We've watched AI-controlled capital starships have fights in orbit that we could see from the ground, and then flown out to find their broken wrecks and harvest them. We've built ludicrous structures and made vehicles that Just Work. I'm extremely fond of my fold-out staircase ramp into my starship. When it doesn't work, it's a janky piece of poo poo that has everyone running for the admin, begging them to fix it. And sometimes that means "aw poo poo, we have to reboot the server". And sometimes that means you break open the wrong cargo container and a giant mass of ALIEN LAKE ICE explodes into reality and sends your corpse into space. SPACE ENGINEERS: someone should have admin powers. No, seriously. Even if they never use them and play the game like a regular player, they should have them in their back pocket for when something will break. But - god. It's so goddamn satisfying to watch that windmill spin as I fly away on my stupid looking brick, heading for the stargate, because I built a working mining outpost on another planet and I want to see how much naquadah it's harvested for me. It's so cool to fly up on a starship you built yourself and leave the planet and fly out at warp speed to go see the space station your friends are building, or the base they're building into an asteroid. It's so cool to listen to your railgun turrets hum to life and obliterate something you didn't know was a threat. I don't know of any other game that can do that, let alone on this scale. 6. PUBG I suck at shooters. Can't aim worth poo poo, get motion sick easily, and my reflexes aren't what they once were. Yet somehow this is the perfect multiplayer FPS for me, because it's almost entirely based around tactics? Yeah, who knew? PUBG is actually really good and still fun after all this time - even with the dumb F2P mechanics and billion battle royales that were made after it. The premise: 100 people are parachuted onto an island and there's an advancing wall of death that will slowly shrink until there's only room in the middle of the island for one survivor. There are also guns and gear all over the island. Your job is survive! What makes this work for me personally is that the wall shrinks slowly enough that a huge portion of this game is based around positioning. You see, movement is slow enough that you can't snap-shot people (assuming you have the reflexes), and players are durable enough to survive multiple shots, so a fight isn't determined by reflexes and getting the first shot off - it's about being able to sustainably pour fire into your target without being murdered by other players. There's a lot of ducking into and out of cover, there's a lot of straight up hiding from others... I never appreciated how important it is to have the high ground until this game beat it into me. As a single-player experience, it's a horror game. Noise is death. Being found is death. But getting a kill on someone feels incredible. And buildings are this weird/wonderful mixture of safety and death trap, as you can finally narrow your sightlines and know exactly where people are... but it's real easy to pin someone in a room and kill them, because jumping out a window takes time. Or they set up a grenade or C4 and yeah. The game becomes even better with a team (voice chat mandatory) where it's less rocket tag and more an elaborate game of mental chess and bullets. You killed one guy, but where's his team? poo poo, they're getting him back up, and they know where you are. Oh man, time to just leave and come back later. I'm dead, but my teammates got my revival chip and are uploading me so I can respawn in a few minutes. I have played way too many hours of this with my partner and our friends, and we're honest about our ability: we suck. We get a fair amount of wins we don't deserve. But that's okay! We play and have fun and when we get mad we're losing we swap to casuals and kill robots and maybe a few people and end the evening happy. I also confess I'm living out a teenage dream of mine: play a team based FPS with a team like one of the guys. I'm a shy autistic lady who always liked seeing people happy playing games together but never thought she'd be able to participate, and... here I am, finally living that dream, playing games and having fun and not just participating, but contributing! I suck at this game, sure, but I call out where enemies are, act as a decoy for the better players, and sometimes I actually get kills. It's SO much fun! Intermission oh hey there is a character count limit and I've hit it at the perfect time! See ya in the next post! StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 00:48
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Strix's GOTY 2023 Top Ten Part 2 5. Silent Hill I have seen multiple LPs of this game and the rest of the franchise, but never played it myself. And this year, I settled on the couch and played through it, getting the best possible ending. Wow! What a good experience! I was shocked by how genuinely fun to play this game is, despite its age and somewhat archaic design. The tank controls, the limited resources, the weirdness of the puzzles... didn't matter! The loop of exploring the overworld, then delving into "dungeons" for focused exploration, combat and puzzle-solving was really satisfying, and that's not even touching the actual joys of this game: the writing and atmosphere. How much ink has been spilled on this game? How influential is it? Why am I asking rhetorical questions again? I'll pretend that you, dear goon reading this, don't know what Silent Hill is for the next few paragraphs. Here's why it's great and why you should play it: Silent Hill is a survival horror game for the Playstation that is about a man who gets into a car accident outside of a small town in America, stumbles out of the wreck, and discovers that his little girl woke up first and has gone ahead of him into the town. He proceeds to go after her, and walks into a horrific nightmare, full of blood and fog. The core of the game is the quest of that dad to find his daughter, and it's an effective justification for why you're walking headfirst into hell. Or, in the slower parts of the game, why you're busily exploring this town. Now, without spoilers: the town is haunted, there are skinless dogs everywhere trying to eat you, and there is something hosed up going on. It's also an American town, so there's fuckin' guns and bullets EVERYWHERE. I found a shotgun in an elementary school! The game proceeds to be a weird mash-up of an old-school adventure game (i.e. explore everywhere, grab items, solve really obtuse puzzles) and Resident Evil (i.e. shoot monsters, but not all of them because your supplies are limited). Playing on normal I never felt strapped for ammo, but I also varied up what I was fighting with and ran if I didn't have to fight. So - again, without spoilers - I think the game pulls off the horror. The fog is close and claustrophobic. (Hardware limitations turned into art, the ultimate example) The monsters look awful, even with the PS1 graphics. It feels like a waking nightmare - and with a really David Lynchian type dream atmosphere. Every conversation feels disjointed and strange in a good way. The plot never actually coalesces into something that makes sense, with different hints as to what's really going on. You finish Silent Hill going "... what just happened?" and this encourages (in a good way!) replaying it, thinking about it, talking to your friends and theorizing. You lose some of that now as you can just hit up wikipedia to find out what happened, but the game standalone just works as a really tantalizing puzzle. The gameplay even encourages replaying it, with four endings and a secret joke ending. It's also short - no more than 15-20 hours, so it's easy to settle in and blow through it. I loved it. I loved the whole experience. I see why it left such a huge legacy, and I'm happy I finally played it myself. I really recommend it to anyone who hasn't! ps I will be playing Silent Hill 2 in 2024. I've seen LPs of it but, well, same thing! No idea how it feels to play! I'm excited for it! 4. Age of Fear: Undead King Okay, a little prelude before I get to why this game is on this list, let alone why it's as high as it is. I live with my partner, have ADHD, have a dog, and while I've got a surprising amount of time to play video games, it's nowhere near what it was when I lived on my own. I divide my games between stuff I play directly with him, stuff I play around him, and stuff I play on my own, and there's less crossover than you'd think. This also makes stuff I play on my own tough to finish, as there's no outside incentive pushing me to see the final credits, and I can hop around games as much as I want as it won't disorient me. My ADHD tendencies are in full force on my own, and it shows. Age of Fear is a game I play on my own... and most significantly to me, it is a game that I beat entirely on my own. I didn't get distracted away from it, I didn't get intimidated by its difficulty, I actually played it from beginning to end and I had a drat good time. Now, specifically: Age of Fear Total is the version of the game I played, and specifically it was the Undead campaign featuring our necromancer Krill. It is a tactical turn-based strategy game featuring a top-down perspective and free movement. Think Phantom Brave or Makai Kingdom and you're there - but with a European fantasy aesthetic instead of anime. It's a game made by one man named Leslaw Sliwko, and he turned it into a series with multiple sequels, DLC, and plans for more. I like small-scale squad tactics, building my army and leveling them up and figuring out how to distribute my resources (equipment, potions, etc) and then the puzzle-solving element of trying to figure out how to defeat levels - so yeah, this game is for me. The necromancer campaign is straightforward evil: you're Krill, an ambitious young necromancer who wants to kill people and raise their corpses. Story missions are basically Krill trying to do that, being stopped by fantasy cops, killing them, killing their reinforcements, and so on. Krill is finally slain by a paladin, but is raised by The Undead King (woo!) as a Lich, and well it takes all of one minute before Krill decides to usurp him and become the new Undead King! Yeah you're not here for the plot. It's straightforward and fun to be bad (mwahaha) but yeah. Yeah. What you are here for is the combat and rpg mechanics and boy o boy is it fun! Given the free movement, you're asked to form cover out of your own units - and thus build units that can be capable tanks. Especially since any ranged units (mages especially) can't cast/shoot/etc if an enemy unit is standing directly next to them. It's an interesting set of rules to play with, very tabletop wargame type of thing, but it works... ...and the AI is really clever! I never felt like I was winning because they were dumb. You can tell the dev has spent a lot of time working on making the AI smart and interesting to fight against. Now, well, I still have gripes: undead armies versus undead armies suck to fight, the final set of fights in the campaign were bullshit hard (on normal difficulty), you can savescum to win a fight if you need to cheat (I could've disabled this but I am not always a good gamer), and there are some other quirks about undead armies that are frustrating, but ssh this is my goty list and none of these complaints prevented me from having an amazing time or from wanting to play more. And there's a lot more to play! There's like ten more campaigns (all with stories!) and the open world/proc gen battles are extremely fun. There are oodles of factions and it's just, this game was made for me. Especially the TOTAL edition, which has all of the stuff in the franchise plus the promise of all his future stuff. I am so happy I picked this up, I'm having so much fun with it, and it's an easy GOTY candidate. And honestly it might not quite deserve to be this high, given the caliber of game lower in the list, but I really, really want to emphasize how important it is to me that this game was so compelling I played and beat it on my own without any outside pressure. 3. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri I suck at 4Xes. They're too complicated, too difficult, I never understand what I've done wrong to explain why I'm losing, and they never have a real incentive to try again, as they lack plots. They have cool settings, sure - Endless Legend I see you - but like, why bother? Why try another 4X when I know I will enjoy learning it, and then leave disappointed as after the tutorial I lose? Because my partner made me try this anyways, and oh. Oh I get it now. Who would think a game I picked up for a dollar and two quarters from GOG would be the best 4X out there? Why hasn't anyone made a better game in the decades since it released? I don't know, I'm no game dev. Doesn't matter. I made SMAX work on my modern computer and played it and fell in love. Now, full disclosure: I did this back in the first half of this year. I don't remember details at this point. 4X are extremely granular games that demand attention to details and I wish I could describe them to you, but I can't. Anyways, what is this old game? Fiddly details: it's SMAC, aka SMAX. The X means I played with the expansion pack installed (but deactivated so I could focus on the core game/factions). It is a Civilization clone (if I have to explain what Civ is, I'm logging off) with a sci-fi skin and a lot of tweaks. The premise is, Earth in the future sucks so they sent a cool colony ship off to colonize a planet. But everything went wrong, and what arrives on the planet is effectively separate landing pods all over the place. Planet - it's deliberate that it's a proper noun now - has become a warzone as the colony ship is full of factions who think they should be the ones to colonize the place. Cue Civilization! Build cities, expand your infrastructure, build units, find resources, fight your enemies, research, trade tech etc etc etc. You know the drill. The twists are these: 1) Instead of Civilization's problematic barbarians acting as random unaffiliated enemies to fight, there are now worms. Masses and masses of psychic alien worms. 2) There are actually cutscenes. The whole screen is taken over by slides with text on them explaining some weirdness that's happening. There is an overarching plot that any faction can access and complete. 3) Research now ties into the plot. You can focus on expanding your own human science, or learning more about Planet, or the worms... 4) The writing - for everything - is really, legitimately good. They seriously thought out everything. Every faction has its own flavor and philosophy. Every technology has commentary - in-universe commentary from these factions. You could strip all the text from this game and enjoy it as a work of interesting sci-fi. You could play the text-less game and it'd be fun anyways but it would lose a lot of its magic. 5) You can alter the terrain. Like, literally you can terraform this planet and reshape it. OK this isn't a huge part of the game but it's still mind-blowing that if you want to pave the planet you can do that. So here we go: with all of this cool stuff going on, I was compelled to play. And play. And then I won on easy mode, and I went "well that was super compelling but I want to do it again" and I did. I formed new alliances, learned new things, and discovered that this game's victory conditions are - imho - more interesting than regular civ, because instead of a military or economic victory, the real one is the research victory. Why? Because it lets you finish the plot. And yeah it has the late-game problem of all 4Xes: once you're winning you stay winning, so you kind of have to leave your angry rivals alone so you can research, but it doesn't change how tense and interesting the early and mid-game was. The eternal question of expansion versus building military forces so you can defend your holdings - plus research, plus regular exploitation - it's a 4X. There's a lot of questions. I wish I could explain how or why this was the one where I made the right decisions, most of the time. I won both on easy and normal, and I'll happily do it again when I'm in the mood to play again. I've never won a Civ game - none of them! - on normal difficulty. But in this one it made sense what to do, what to focus on, and who to antagonize and who to befriend, and I can only thank my intuition. Anyways - SMAX. Wow. I had an incredible time. I understood why people put so much time into this genre now. It unlocked doors of understanding to me, and I had a ton of fun exploring the genre afterwards. I still haven't won a Civ game, but I've now enjoyed a lot of time with Warlock 2, Masters of Orion 2, Shadow Empire and others. So - yes! Yes, this game gets to be on my GOTY list! From 1999 here is the best 4X I've ever played, complete with the best writing. I love it. I love it so much. Y'all should play it! 2. Endless Dark - available now on steam What's the opposite of a comfort game? What happens when you play a game so distressing that you quit it crying tears of stress? How the hell does that game make a GOTY list? Endless Dark was my catharsis. It felt like I had bared my naked heart to someone and had them not just utterly understand, but offer me a supportive hug. The broken smile from your friend on the gallows, the shared laugh. It is a silly looking little game. RPGMaker-esque in its graphics and UI. You run your little robot sprite around, navigate menus, and read. Its premise is that you play as that silly robot, who is a maintenance robot. Their job is to keep this starship working: did a pipe spring a leak? Gotta fix it! Glitch in navigation? I'll fix it! Door jammed? We've got a crowbar! That's it. That's the whole game. The ship is breaking and you are fixing it. Day after day after day you are fixing this ship. It is the most tedious task in the world. It is imperative that you do it. There are even human consequences for failure: there are human passengers in cryo who will die if you don't fix their pods. I started playing this game all optimistic and cheerful and ready for whatever this horror game would give me. I wasn't expecting it to understand how much it goddamn hurts to wake up and for the 100th day in a row, do dishes. Sort your meds. Do the laundry. Get the chores done. Walk the dog. Brush your teeth. Get dressed in the morning. These are important and valid tasks and doing them makes you feel better! Your little robot is going insane. You are going insane. Another day, another broken pipe. Maybe there's a reason why it's like this, why things are breaking. You investigate, but you're just a cleaning robot, you don't have clearance to go into these restricted areas. You'll damage yourself if you try to get that clearance. Fail to get the clearance, and everything still needs fixin'. Get the clearance, and oh there's another obstacle. It's possible to seek answers in this game, and I refuse to spoil them for you. It's built around roguelite progression, too - succeed or fail and you get to start all over from day 1! There are unlocks, and new secrets to find, and new storylines, and the same core of doing these tasks and understanding exactly why your little silly robot wants to kill the humans in the pods so they can stop loving fixing them. I, well, met this game at the right time. e/n bullshit, my partner away on a business trip so I'm alone in the big house full of chores, therapist on vacation, and all of my problems ready to make it impossible to get out of bed in the morning, let alone wash another loving plate. I got out of bed and washed that loving plate and played this game and cried about it and it was everything I needed. I don't know if this game is fun to play, but it is compelling, and dark, and has some of the most clever writing I've seen in a game. It was healing to play, and I know I'm not done with it... but in 2023, it helped me in a way few other games did. 1. Fate/Grand Order.  It is unethical for me to recommend this game. Its central mechanic is gambling with real world money, and it has multiple tools to encourage gambling, addiction, and giving into the desire it creates to spend money. It is, genuinely, dangerous for me to even mention this game here, as there's a real risk of infecting someone with gambling addiction. I'm being extreme in my wording, but I genuinely cannot emphasize this enough: for all of the praise I am about to heap on this game and its influence on my life, do not spend money on this game. Its central mechanic is the summoning system, where you feed 'saint quartz' tokens into it and receive either characters you can use in game or equipment for them, with the odds set that the chance of pulling the rate-up character is under 1%. Literally most of the gambling you will do will result in worthless trash that you sell for in-game money. The only way to guarantee that you get the character you want from a given summon is to save up over 900 SQ and roll 330 times. That's it. The only way, and I need to impress on you that a single SQ is a dollar. Fate/Grand Order wants you to spend nearly a thousand dollars on a single character, unless you're obscenely lucky, and then it insults you by telling you that in order to fully power up your character, you need to obtain them four more times. The perfect irony for all of that is that I started playing this game specifically to prevent myself from spending money. ... And it's worked! Is working! I swear to god I'm not saying this to boast, I just want to now step away from the big-rear end warning to say that this game is fully enjoyable if you take only what it gives you and spend nothing. Treasure every single time you get lucky and never press for more, because that way lies debt and tears. Alright, got all of that? Good. Here's the reason why this lovely rear end gambling game is my game of the year. It contains some of the finest writing I've ever seen in the medium. Multiple storylines in this game have moved me to tears, to better myself, to furious affection for their characters. I've been driven to insane conspiracy theories and speculation, entirely based on how an artist drew some accessories on Sherlock Holmes' coat. It's driven me to read even more nonfiction and learn more about history, because it's given me a (stupid, anime) personal connection to those periods. (Yes, jesus christ, I am aware that I am the living embodiment of that stupid My Little Ponies in WW2 meme. It's embarrassing, but I've already put a goddamned gacha game in my goty. I take heart that I was already a huge fan of reading nonfiction for fun before this.) The premise is, in a world where magic is real and the masquerade is mostly in place, a bunch of mages set up a cool hidden base in Antartica called Chaldea. Here, they use wacky magic to look into Earth's future and make sure it's still there. The day you, a lovely replacement mage who can barely do magic, transfers to Antartica to join up, their magic says "whoops humanity stops existing in about 5 minutes". Minutes later, a bomb goes off and kills all of the other mages, leaving only you and some side characters alive. Humanity itself is also gone! Whoops! You proceed to be given the welcoming tour really, REALLY quickly: as the only mage left, in order to save humanity, you need to use magical coffins to time travel to random points in history, find out what's breaking history there, and fix it, hopefully before it deletes the Antartic base. No pressure, y'know. I appreciate that you're explicitly a poo poo mage. While the game has a rotating crew of writers and they try not to give "you" any personality traits so you can self-insert easily, I still love that the base premise is that you're a lucky idiot. So you team up with Mash, a purple-haired girl who is a homunculus, who has spent her entire life here. Due to mage bullshit she is fused with a powerful ghost and your first Servant. You can feel the gambling approaching, at speed. I swear to god I'm trying to keep the proper nouns from taking over - but this is mandatory for understanding, and I'm so sorry. In this universe, magic is real and Earth itself has a kind of magical immune system. It records the lives of famous heroes and saves them to the 'Throne of Heroes' and deploys them as a kind of white blood cell system. Humans are counted as heroes because they're, well, famous and known for their deeds. The more famous the person, the more powerful the heroic spirit. Mages are cruel, stupid, and ambitious, and they've tapped into this system to summon heroes for fun and profit. This side of things is mostly explored in other works in the Fate/ franchise, but here in Chaldea we're summoning heroes to help us save humanity. But we're still using that system, so - these heroes are summoned as 'Servants'. They're ghosts powered by magic and controlled with command spells, and you, the protagonist, are now a 'Master'. (I appreciate this whole conceit as it's bullshit... and also exactly the kind of bullshit a bunch of mages would do. It works in and out of universe.) So you - the protagonist you - are a poo poo mage, but you're REALLY good at summoning servants and powering them up. As you slide around history, you will summon more servants and hang with them and they stick around to hang out in Chaldea. The deeper you get into the game, the more Chaldea is basically a "famous person" hotel as they hang out inbetween missions and help out with the cooking. While the game gives you some free servants, you can see the gambling arriving. Yeah. So that's the premise! You, Mash and your crew of summoned heroes go on adventures through time. Unfortunately, no matter how much you enjoyed the prologue, you're about to realize a series of problems: 1) The guy who wrote the prologue left and won't be back for a while. Welcome to the worst writing in the game. It's a combination of the writers not knowing how to write for this format (so many scenes end with "oh no we're being attacked by wyverns for some reason!") and just not being good at writing. Story Arcs 1-5 range from hot garbage to OK I guess. That's a lot of hours of reading really dire writing. 2) While the rpg gameplay is fun and engaging, you are in the worst part: low level, small roster, at the beginning of a really long grind. Characters have three skills, but only start with one unlocked. Leveling up takes EXP items and in-game money (QP). Leveling up skills takes specific materials and QP. 3) There is no way to speed any of this up. You cannot skip the story, because it will be called back and referenced later. You cannot skip the grind, because that's the game. 4) There is a stamina system that recharges in real time, so you can't rush anything without spending money. welcome to hell! welcome! to hell! strix why the hell is this your goty again Because I did exactly what this game wants: I committed to playing it daily and treating it like a marathon. I read my way through all the trash. I leveled Mash. I patiently gambled with the SQ the game gave me, and got lucky as it gave me characters. I asked goons to be friends with me, so I could borrow their servants. 500+ days later I am caught up on all main story content, most side stories, have a really big roster, and think the slow burn worked. I look back on specific story arcs with profound nostalgia and affection, and I'm still recovering from the emotional roller-coaster that was the latest one. Because the writers got together and figured out how to tell a story with this silly rpg format and proceed to seriously think about what kind of stories they wanted to tell. The writers even get wise to how time travel can be kind of boring if they do it too many times, and when they finish the first major story arc and you save humanity, an in-game year later there's a new arc and instead of time travel, you get to visit alternate realities. Welcome to a Russia where the Ice Age never ended, and Czar Ivan decided to save his people by turning them into furries. Welcome to a Britain ruled by Fae. Welcome to Mount Olympus, where the Greek Gods have established a cyberpunk utopia. And because this is how it works: you are here to save humanity by putting things back to normal. The game looks you dead in the eye, shows you a cyberpunk utopia with people in it you care about, and tells you that you need to pull the trigger. And because this is how Fate loving rolls, you step out of the visual novel segments upset and shaken by what you the protagonist have been doing, but also it's October in real life and that means it's loving Halloween Event time, so it's time to put your tears aside and find out how an anime jpop dragon idol has broken reality and put pumpkins everywhere and fix it with the power of your own jpop. It is, effectively, a daily chore where I grind some levels I've already beaten to get more stuff, go "Oh I'm out of stamina", and close it for the day after 10-20 minutes. And then, when I'm ready for it, I go into the main plot and read... and read....and lose to incredibly hard boss fights...and complain on these forums and get advice...and win, so I can keep reading. Fate/Grand Order has been a genuinely helpful companion for me through one hell of a poo poo year. Sick with COVID? I can play some levels in bed. Devastated by e/n bullshit? Finally leveling a beloved character to max can make me smile a little. It's a stupid little incentive for getting a chore done, and more importantly: instead of randomly browsing ebay or etsy on my phone, I'm instead opening FGO to play. I've hijacked my own ADHD and replaced it with anime wikipedia historical articles. And so here I am, at the end of a shitload of words about this, still heartbroken over goddamn Morgan Le Fay, keenly aware that this is a mistake. It's unfair to make this my GOTY when it's a nightmare for new players, the best content is hidden behind hundreds of hours of play, and it has extremely problematic character designs. I hate this game. I love it so much and it's impossible to share. gently caress. Fuckit. Please watch this animated video celebrating human history (anime edition) and maybe tear up at how goddamn meaningful it is that you reach out for help saving the world, and these long dead heroes are still willing to take your hand and step up and fight. All of human history, all of our legends and achievements are worth celebrating! And they deserve to be remembered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlj5Z3wWE_U
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Dec 31, 2023 00:50
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^ love Silent Hill, so awesome. Just updated my post to add another game to the mix, from Dec 22, 2023 3:18 AM. Here's that new entry. 3. Cyberpunk 2077 Gotta bring Cyberpunk back into the list, it's too good. One of my fav games, and jumping back in after beating it 3 years ago really reinforces that. Before doing Phantom Liberty, which is really well done, I had fun messing around in the main game on my old save for a few days too. Just a really cool game, so up my alley. The characters, the vibe, the quality and enjoyment of the level design and how much care goes into the missions. Even little ones, it's just wild how much character and charm it has compared to a lot of open world contemporaries for me. Masterpiece.
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Dec 31, 2023 00:54
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The REAL Goobusters posted:Man this thread always loving delivers. Love reading everyones lists! Especially the write ups 
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Dec 31, 2023 00:59
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I beat a few more games after I'd instituted a cut-off for the year so that I could start writing everything out... but after mulling it over a bit, I figured that the decision was kind of arbitrary and it makes the book-keeping for next year a little confusing so I'll just toss them out here now. New Entries: 46. Omori (7.2) - Earthbound-esque JRPG Depression Simulator - This is a much better game than its ranking on my list would suggest. The gameplay is solid and the story is engaging but it made me sad, which loses a lot of points. 40. My Time in Sandrock [Multiplayer] (7.36) - Gameplay hasn't changed much since My Time in Portia. You still gather materials, turn them into processed materials, and then use those for building projects and machines. They've added Firearms as a weapon type and they're pretty good even if ammo is kind of expensive. Leveling up your character and your workshop was kind of a hassle. It bothers me that disappearing into the mines and mining the terrain for in-game days straight while hopped up on stimulants seems to be the best way to gain XP. They really need to beef up the rewards for commissions (less food, more xp, thanks). I'll probably start up the single player next year after I get through some of the rest of my backlog. Sidenote: I don't think anyone knows what the hell is going on with Catori's accent but I still ended up marrying her. 20. Remnant II (8.2) - Souls-Like Shlooter - Did not like this as much as Remnant I. The design philosophy for the game seems to revolve around the players Trial-and-Erroring their way through encounters, boss fights, and the map and sometimes you die in one hit until you figure out what's happening. Yeah, there's no penalty for dying other than losing time and there's almost always a respawn point next to bosses... but sometimes it doesn't feel fair and I didn't like that. The shooting feels good. The game is stingy on ammo. Melee is much better than you'd think. My initial thoughts on Remnant II were pretty negative but I've been coming back to it sporadically and now that I've got my visual settings in a place that I like (or maybe because I just updated my video card drivers) and I'm running through adventures with weapons that are upgraded, skills, and mod powers, I've been enjoying it a whole lot more. 18. The Roottrees are Dead (8.2) - Internet Sleuthin' and Snoopin' - I saw this pop up a number of times in the Mystery and Detectives games threads with pretty glowing reviews (and we've all seen it pop up on a number of lists this year), so I figured why not give it a shot and see how it goes! Genuinely solid mystery in the same vein as Obra Dinn. Completely solvable through the use of good investigative work and thinking things through logically. Also, it doesn't really take that long to complete. 6. Astroneer [Multiplayer] (9.2) - "Open Worlds Build, Explore, Survive - What a beautiful little game about traveling through space and gathering materials and building things. Astroneer might be one of the most intuitive games that I've ever played. Once you get past the initial learning curve, everything clicks. How things are built, how things attach to each other, how the machines work, it's all so simple and consistent. Masterclass Game design. The multiplayer was really smooth despite our host's internet not being particularly good even when all of us are off on different worlds doing our own things. There seemed to be a story but I'll be damned if I knew what was going on. I was robusting up a base and then I was all Galactic! Very mysterious. 1. The Talos Principle 2 (10) - Philosophical Tech-Puzzles - This is why I'm adding this last batch of games. I just beat this game about an hour ago after playing the hell out of it over the last week. Recency bias may have played a small part in this decision... who's to say? All I know is that I put numbers in my spreadsheet and the science checks out, it beat Baldur's Gate 3 by half a non-normalized point. As a direct sequel to the first game, it's more of the same and then some. The puzzles are (excepting a f5358w) very intuitive and feel rewarding to complete. Mechanics build over the course of the game as new gizmos get introduced and you have to combine them in different ways. It never felt overwhelming until maybe the very last set of puzzles. Sometimes, you enter a puzzle room and everything just clicks and you complete it in 30 seconds and you feel like the smartest person in the world. That's always real nice. The narrative and story-telling elements of the game have expanded greatly. There are other androids running around and you can engage in dialogue with them and you can also make decisions that impact the story, which caught me completely by surprise. I read every log in the game. I consumed all that delicious philosophy. I always got really excited coming up to one of the terminals and there'd be a Trevor log waiting there for me, like it was Christmas. The Lifthrasir logs were pretty good too but in a different way. The game ended on an incredibly hopeful note for humanity (at least the ending I got did) which is nice considering that Talos Principle is technically a post-apocalyptic setting. The game is very pretty even on medium/low settings. Unreal Engine 5 seems to kick the absolute poo poo out of my PC but it's doing a lot of work. Some of the environments and set pieces are quite epic in terms of scale and aesthetics (West 2 is amazing). The soundtrack is good. Chasing the Spark is easily my favorite and always got me pumped and hyped. The Arrival is also very good. As was mentioned previously, the game features a cat shrine in New Jerusalem and it's got some good cats. Updated Top 10: 10. Chained Echoes 9. Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince 8. Pokemon Scarlet 7. Cassette Beasts 6. Astroneer 5. Monster Sanctuary 4. I was a Teenage Exocolonist 3. Library of Ruina 2. Baldur's Gate 3 1. The Talos Principle II
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Dec 31, 2023 01:19
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Thanks for your list Strix, shame you didn't go into a bit more detail ...I am wishlisting many things.
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Dec 31, 2023 01:25
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HopperUK posted:Thanks for your list Strix, shame you didn't go into a bit more detail You want more detail?! ... Okay tell me what I need to write more about!
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Dec 31, 2023 01:28
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Lots of good games this year that I'm sure will end up on my 2024 list when I've finally acquired them at a 30% discount during the next Steam Summer sale. In hindsight I honestly think this is the most boring game on my list. I appreciate how they revilatized the franchise but I think they could have done a bit more with their intricate open world physics simulator. In the end, I played this game for a good while until I realized, whenever I see something cool from a distance, I will go there and find that there's nothing to do. So the whole experience ended up kinda disappointing. I guess it deserves a spot on my list for time spent, but really it just made me want to play Tears of the Kingdom and SSX Tricky.  I slide my mouse left and right and yell "WUB WUB WUB WUB". My space bar begs for mercy. The bass drowns out its pathetic mewlings. Fifteen years ago, a guitar hero craze sweeped the nation. But this is a new age, and I rock out sitting down.  I binged the whole series over a couple of days. It has this really cool thing going where you deal with different types of puzzles in the course of unlocking mysterious contraptions and somehow they make it feel very tactile, and really any switch could open up a new layer with cool gadgets to figure out. What makes the third game stand out to me is how it combines the best parts of all the other ones. It has the intricate machineries of 1, the different locales of 2 and the inter-conntected multi-room puzzles of 4, all combined through a hub world with its own meta puzzle. Every solved level feels like you just fixed a massive machine working from inbetween its cogwheels, and its so satisfying to see it click into place.  When I was young I played the everloving crap out of Snap on the N64 and I think this game does a somewhat good job of emulating that feeling, except some of the tracks feel a bit empty and get repetitive quick. Maybe they could have condensed the game a bit more, or maybe they are staying true to the original and I have my nostalgia goggles on. I love the new rating and request systems as they give me a good idea of what else I can still discover. It really does capture the magic of those olden days, where you'd catch rumors about how there's probably some way to summon Garados by throwing an apple into a waterfall at 3 AM or whatever. So all in all I'll say this has its flaws, but if you can learn to love it for its strengths it's a neat little timekiller that lets you be creative and has many hidden surprises to find.  Beat the stage. Beat it again in reverse. Do it again. Do it a third time. The controls? Smooth like tomato sauce. The music? Shreds like a cheese grater. Peppino? Losing his loving MIND up in here. Zonked out. Pizza Tower is a gateway drug into speedrunning, because going fast feels good, and going faster feels better. The levels are varied, like a best-of compilation of jump 'n run gimmicks. I think it's a metaphor for trying different pizza toppings? drat I could really go for a pizza right now.  There's been some criticism about how this is more like a puzzle game and I'm like, yeah, duh, it's a city builder, you're supposed to manage resources and zoning. If you follow the progression path and try to build a functioning society I believe you also get some really nice looking towns out of it, but it's obviously a different vibe than Cities: Skylines, because it's much more about making numbers go up and much less about simulating traffic jams.  Somehow got 100 hours in this when I always hated Street Fighter before. I guess World Tour is a pretty good single player mode that eases you into a lot of the concepts, but there's also something about the fighting that feels fast and punchy in a way I don't remember from the old games. Popping off with a combo hits so good that I'll suddenly spend hours practicing in training mode to figure out frame data and cancel windows. Really there's something beautiful about how Street Fighter takes simple moves and turns them into a game of extreme rock-paper-scissors and if SF6 doesn't make you appreciate that, I don't know if anything will. It's the first fighting game I ever played seriously and my personal gold standard. I love it, even though I suck at it, and if you play Ken on modern controls I WILL skip your victory animation.  Scarlet brings a few very important additions to the Pokemon formula, the most important of all being that you can now skip most fights. Seriously, if you hate the fighting system you can almost treat this as a really cool game about collecting zany battle pets with the occasional NPC battles strewn in. It adds a lot of long-overdue quality of life, and it got me hooked to the whole Pokemon ecosystem to a point where I now have Pokemon Go and Pokemon Home on my phone and Pokemon Fusion on my PC and four different Pokemon games on my Switch and hey guys, did I mention that I'm kind of into Pokemon now? Do you want to see my shiny Ditto? I use it to breed funny colored monkeys. Where is everyone going? Oh look, an email from HR--  My most played game on Steam this year, Grim Dawn has kicked off a period of multiple weeks of my life where I binged hard on the ARPG genre. But even in the presence of industry titans like PoE and D4 and rising new stars like Last Epoch, there's something that keeps me coming back to this. It feels comfortable, like a warm blanket in a cold room. It's focused, it's straightforward, it's a game about killing monsters and getting gear for your build and that's what it does well and there's little else it does. What I love most is the build variety. Be a rogue wizard who freezes enemies and then backstabs them into crushed ice. Be a pyromaniac who throws firebombs and the firebombs spawn volcanoes that throw more firebombs. Be Captain America and throw your shield into a gaggle of demons but your shield is also a holy nuke and you are immortal. It gets whacky. There is a point to be made that the endgame isn't quite up to snuff these days, but hey, we just got a big 1.2 patch and they're somehow releasing a new expansion next year so who knows what the future brings.  They say this is an MMORPG for people that hate MMORPGs and if that is true then GODDAMN do I hate MMORPGs. I've been addicted to this game for the last three months and I still play everyday. There's a ton of stuff to do - the buzzword here is "horizontal progression": there's many game modes and systems and maps with their own special event chains and currencies and you don't need to invest a lot of upfront grind to do any of it. It's like a buffet of gameplay choices, where one day you might want to try your hand at some casual PvE instances and the next day you want to get into hardcore PvP leagues and inbetween you can just screw around in the open world. There's a wide variety of distinct classes and subclasses, a dynamic combat system and a world filled to the brim with massive public events, some designed around groups of 50+ people. There's just so much to do every time I log on and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I also love how chill the game is. I can play it casually or really binge and fall off the theorycrafting, benchmark-breaking deep-end. The only real difference is how long it will take me to unlock cosmetics and QOL stuff. It's forgiving, it's alt-friendly, and it encourages cooperation over competition so the community is notoriously nice and supportive. They now plan to come out with a new expansion every year, with their latest, Secrets of the Obscure, supposedly having been such a success that they are greenlit for the next years of production. I am stoked to find out where this journey is going. This is starting to sound like an ad so I'm gonna close by saying the core game is completely free and there's no subscription fee. e: added short list 10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 9. Spin Rhythm XD 8. The Room Three 7. New Pokemon Snap 6. Pizza Tower 5. Urbek City Builder 4. Street Fighter 6 3. Pokemon Scarlet/Violet 2. Grim Dawn 1. Guild Wars 2 Entenzahn fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 01:53
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This year I focused on going through some of my backlog and as a result I played through quite a few games that I didn’t enjoy that much. I should probably give up on games I’m not feeling that much but I pushed through so that I could check them off in my head, and as a result, dishonorable mentions to Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster, and Majora’s Mask 3D, all of which I found extremely frustrating to play for the first time in 2023. I’ve managed to mostly stop buying new games unless I’m going to play them right away, and I’m looking forward to most of the backlog I have left, so I expect 2024 to be a bit better. I’d like to sprinkle in a few more small/indie games next year too; I focused on mostly established series this year and four of my top ten are from long-running series that I’ve been playing for 15+ years, with another two from series that I haven’t been personally playing since the start but are even older. Honorable mentions Card Shark (2022, Switch, 7 hours): Fun series of QTEs that feel like doing card tricks on the edge of being caught. Story was kind of a miss though. Spiritfarer (2020, Switch, 30 hours): Chill game with great art and animation. The emotional angle didn’t really hit for me though and there was a lot of backtracking. My 2023 GOTY list 10. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (2021, Switch, 50 hours) I’ve been playing Ace Attorney since the first game on the DS, and I finally made my way through the Investigations games and the Professor Layton crossover over the last couple of years. I didn’t love any of the spinoffs and I kind of felt the same about TGAA. The logic and connections seemed less obvious and more arbitrary to me (or I’m just misremembering the original games), the music is worse, and the cases didn’t feel very satisfying. The lack of witness breakdown sequences may have contributed to this. There were a couple of interesting twists with the jury system and Sholmes’s deductions (and Sholmes himself is easily the highlight of the games), but neither of these games grabbed me the way the main series did. Not sure how much of that is just me changing though. 9. Return to Monkey Island (2022, Switch, ~8 hours) I’ve been aware of the Monkey Island series since the beginning but I didn’t make any serious attempts to play through any of the earlier games. I did play a couple of other LucasArts point-and-click games back in the day, with Day of the Tentacle being my family’s favorite. I received this new Monkey Island as a gift and loaded it up with vague knowledge of the series and some catchphrases. I don’t know too much detail about the development, but it definitely felt like a love letter to the series, full of callbacks in basically every single scene. Even with my limited knowledge of the series it still landed pretty well and the hint book system made it a nice low-friction playthrough, albeit pretty short. The visual style can be a bit jarring at first glance but I think it looks amazing both in motion and in screenshots. I feel like this would rank much higher for someone who played all of the previous games, but I still enjoyed my short time with Monkey Island. 8. Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth (2019, 3DS, 65 hours) I started off with the Persona series with P3 FES on the PS2, but eventually went back to 1 and the 2 duology, and now I’ve finally worked through just about everything released in English except for a couple of P5 spinoffs. I think I played Q1 about 5 years ago and I remember liking it quite a lot, despite not having much experience with Etrian-Odyssey-style dungeon crawlers. I played through Q2 almost exclusively while commuting or on an airplane or otherwise occupied, and it did the job well enough. The music is excellent, as is par for the series. The start was pretty tedious and it took a while for me to get into the rhythm, but the systems had enough depth to make the grind somewhat interesting after I dropped the difficulty to Normal. Q2 is pretty much the definition of fanservice, with all of the characters from Personas 3-5 all together for no reason and nothing happens, and I think the Q1 roster was a better and more manageable size. Q2 felt a bit unpolished as well, with some odd design choices that made little things like saving personas during fusion extra annoying. The lack of English voice acting also forced me to hear Teddie’s Japanese voice, which knocks off a couple of points for sure. 7. Citizen Sleeper (2022, Switch, ~6 hours) This was one I picked up mostly based on last year’s GOTY thread, and I blasted through the whole thing in one long playthrough one night. It does a great job of building atmosphere with just text and a few static images, and the gameplay system makes it feel like some kind of story-focused pen and paper RPG. A few other people in this thread have noted that the tension in the early game falls off in the second part, and I definitely felt the same thing. Perhaps making it a bit more difficult and encouraging multiple runs to reach the ending would have been helpful; as it is I’m not too pulled to replay but I really enjoyed my single run. 6. Superhot (2016, PS4, 3 hours) I also played through this one in a single playthrough and I’m not sure what I was expecting other than hearing it was good, but it wasn’t really what I was expecting. In a good way. I don’t want to say too much because I feel like Superhot should be experienced without knowing too much about it (and it’s short!), but I will say that it’s definitely the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years. 5. TOEM (2021, PS5, 10 hours) This was one of the free monthly games on the PS Plus lowest tier at some point, and my non-gamer wife saw it on the PS5 one day and booted it up. After watching her go through some of the game, I decided to give it a try myself and I’m glad I did. The goal of the game is to go around and take photographs of stuff to fulfill a quest list that pops up as you progress through multiple areas, and that’s about it. The flat 2D rotatable art style is kind of like a black-and-white Paper Mario and the photo-taking mechanics are well integrated (obviously important since that the whole point of the game!). It’s definitely a chill hangout vibes kind of game that reminded me of A Short Hike although not quite as good. 4. The Last Of Us Part I (2013/2022, PS5, 20 hours) This is the part of my list where I feel there’s a pretty substantial jump from “pretty good” to “great” games. I skipped the PS3 and PS4 generations so I missed all of the discourse about The Last Of Us, and the PS5 remaster was a great opportunity to check out what I knew to be a generally “important” game that I didn’t know too much about beyond that. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight about how game development has moved in the past decade, I can definitely see TLOU pushing the trend of games as cinematic experiences. Arguably something like Metal Gear Solid started that much earlier, but the MGS series was always kind of intentionally wacky and self-referential and meant to be played tongue-in-cheek, and also specifically took advantage of the game medium. TLOU is more like a movie (or “prestige TV show” now, I guess?) that you can play part of it. The game part is actually not that great, with the map design obviously on rails with a single path that nonetheless I couldn’t find a lot of the time and just ran around in circles. The gameplay also breaks immersion because the enemies are pretty dumb and there are way too many of them (especially humans). Despite all of the flaws related to the gameplay, the foreboding post-apocalyptic atmosphere really permeates and the story and characters feel more believable than 99% of all games that came before it. I was about to start on TLOU2 when I saw that it’s being remastered for PS5 as well, so I’m very much looking forward to starting that in a month. 3. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023, Switch, 80 hours) Breath of the Wild was the first Zelda game that I really got into, perhaps due to never having had a non-portable Nintendo console. Even without a long Zelda history, when I finally got around to BOTW in 2020 I quickly devoured 100+ hours and loved it. I bounced off TOTK pretty fast after release; it really felt like just more of BOTW to me and I was left thinking “six years for an expansion pack?”, and I dropped it after 10ish hours. I came back a few months later and pushed through my initial hesitations to find that, although it still felt like more BOTW, more of one of the best games of all time is still pretty good. The physics engine in TOTK is amazing and I love the creativity that it allows, whether that’s building some extravagant contraption or just gluing together 15 planks to make a super long bridge (I did more of the latter than the former). Shrines and temples really benefited from this flexibility, to the point that I’m not really sure what some of the “intended” solutions were since I just put together some weird contraption that got me where I needed to go. Shout out to the fire temple where I launched one of the carts off the track and fired the Goron guy in midair to hit the gong The underground part initially annoyed me a lot, but later in the game with more resources it felt like real exploration, with just a few points in the distance that you’re trying to get to by one way or another. I was less enthusiastic about the sky parts but it was fun to mess around there and discover a few interesting places as well. The reason I’m only putting TOTK in third is because there were just too many small things that frustrated and/or annoyed me, most of which were probably just in direct comparison to BOTW and some of which may be because I played exclusively in handheld. A short list of things that I didn’t like: the economy, almost every boss fight, the gloom hand things, gloom in general, the gameplay of any set piece where the mechanics are changed, finding only 1 or 2 pieces of every armor set, any aerial battles. But even with all of these complaints, I can still recognize TOTK as a masterpiece and it’s super fun to just groove around Hyrule and go wherever you want using whatever method you want. TOTK is a technical masterpiece with the draw distances and physics engine and I loved the freedom to figure out my own solutions to any puzzle. 2. Fire Emblem Engage (2023, Switch, 135 hours) I’ve been playing Fire Emblem since “Fire Emblem” on the GBA (although I only played Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn well after release), and it’s been interesting to watch the series evolve from a focus on tactics to a focus on characters and relationships. I’ve enjoyed pretty much every game in the series, and even went through 6 of the 7 routes in Fates and Three Houses. Engage felt like a huge pivot after Three Houses, with fantastic tactical gameplay that’s maybe the best in the whole series, and a dumb and uninteresting story full of lovable idiots for characters. At least the story is dumb in a Saturday morning cartoon way and not dumb in the Fates deeprealms way. I played on hard/classic mode with no DLC and the difficulty level was just about perfect, with maps requiring real thought and planning instead of just ramming my best units at everything. The emblems available on both sides add a great layer on top of normal FE gameplay, and the break system also disincentivizes relying on a couple of overpowered units. Even after 135 hours I’m thinking about doing another playthrough to check out the DLC. 1. Persona 5 Royal (2020, PS5, 120 hours) Like I wrote above, I skipped PS3 and PS4 and so I’ve been late to Persona 5, although Persona 4 Golden is one of my favorite games of all time. I still think P4G has probably the best party in any RPG I’ve played. With P5R, my reaction to every single character as they were introduced was initially “yeah, not as good as the P4 version”, and then 5 hours later “I love this character so much”. I think ultimately the party and characters are a tiny step down from Persona 4’s more organic high school friend group, but P5R’s style and huge amounts of content makes up for it. Adding some gameplay benefits to progressing social links is a great change, and the music is of course phenomenal. The game truly oozes style, from the iconic menuing (how many other games can that be said about?) to the feeling of putting on that phantom thief outfit and sneaking around. The story starts off very strong and mostly carries through to the end, and I loved the characters added in Royal even if that whole story arc was a bit obviously tacked on later. Having lived in Tokyo for some time in my past made it pretty cool to see some of the locations, which is something I think I share with the other poster who put Persona 5 Royal as GOTY 2023 earlier in this thread! This was my year of playing games from long-established series that I’ve been following since early adulthood and I’d like to say I’ll focus on a bit more novelty next year, but I fully expect my GOTY 2024 to continue the trend with either Baldur’s Gate 3 (I was waiting for PS5 physical release) or FFVII Rebirth. Short list: 10. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 9. Return to Monkey Island 8. Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth 7. Citizen Sleeper 6. Superhot 5. TOEM 4. The Last Of Us Part I 3. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 2. Fire Emblem Engage 1. Persona 5 Royal
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Dec 31, 2023 01:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:3. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Yes! Love the SMAC pick! Great write up too.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:05
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I'm a tight-arse gamer, so most of my list is limited to stuff on GamePass (the best deal in gaming, Xbox stays winning), and stuff I picked up on sale. Firstly, the honourable mentions:
AND THE ACTUAL LIST 10) Stardew Valley Still the absolute GOAT of farming/life sims. Amazing that even after all these years, the one man team is still working away with patches, updates, and more content. I really love that with the millions creator ConcernedApe made from it, he could do anything he wanted. Turns out what he wanted was to keep working on Stardew Valley. 9) Planet of Lana Sweet little platformer puzzle game with a cute story and beautiful art. Well worth checking out! 8) Tetris Effect: Connected Again, not a 2023 game but an incredible time-waster. Superb graphics and gameplay, very engaging and a lot of fun. True spiritual successor to the original Tetris. 7) Vampire Survivors Loads of fun. Nothing quite like zoning out and just laying waste to screens of enemies in weirdly-named zones like Inlaid Library, Moongolow, and Boss Rash. 6) Forza Horizon 5 Another game that’s a couple of years old, but I went back to it after the disappointment of Forza Motorsport and sunk a bunch more hours in. Mexico is great fun to cruise around in, the driving is fun, the graphics and soundtrack are great, and I’m looking forward to whenever they release Horizon 6. 5) Disco Elysium Finally got around to playing this and had a great time. Not much I can say that hasn’t been said already! Had me hooked in the first 30 minutes when I decided to flirt with a witness by saying the unforgettable line “I want to have gently caress with you” 4) Baldur’s Gate 3 Late on this one, as it only launched on Xbox in December. 40 hours played this month, and I’m still only halfway through Act 1. Loving that seemingly inconsequential choices have long-term ramifications, and finally understanding why people used to complain that World of Warcraft was “on rails”. 3) Anno 1800 Loved this on PC a few years ago, and was super happy to see a console release. Overall it translates pretty well, and if you’re a fan of engaging city builders you absolutely need to give this a go. Beautiful graphics, engaging gameplay, a fun story, and years of post-launch support and DLC – none of which is predatory or overpriced. 2) Red Dead Redemption 2 Played through it a third time this year, and holy poo poo it’s still the absolute gold standard for open world games. Yes, the missions are quite “on rails” and have to be done how Rockstar want you to do them, but they’re fun and engaging and cinematic and that’s all that matters to me. Even if you hate that aspect, you can completely ignore missions because the world itself is jam-packed with things to see and do, without saturating the map in icons like a Ubisoft title. Ride off into the sunset to explore a mountain and hopefully find an eagle to literally put a feather in your cap, stumble across a shack full of dead bodies and no signs of violence. Look around (with no prompting or QTEs) and realise their chimney is blocked and they all suffocated  1) Hi-Fi Rush Everything comes together perfectly – visual design, soundtrack, gameplay. Enjoyable boss fights and fantastic style; hard to believe it came out of literally nowhere (announced and dropped onto Gamepass on the same day!)
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Dec 31, 2023 02:17
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It simply wouldn’t be a proper GOTY thread without
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Dec 31, 2023 02:24
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Hello! The OP says:VideoGames posted:As such, the results will be a little into January - probably Saturday the 9th at the earliest if all goes well! Definitely no later than Saturday the 16th. I will start at 2:00pm UK time whichever Saturday it is! Did you mean the 6th and the 13th? Or maybe the 20th??? Thank you.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:25
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Aipsh posted:It simply wouldn’t be a proper GOTY thread without Don’t forget this clip https://clips.twitch.tv/SpeedyGoldenHamburger4Head-gXCvW3OzRps9nc3C
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Dec 31, 2023 02:26
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I made a "soft" resolution this year to finish more media. Read more books, watch more movies, finish more games. And I was largely successful. I finished 60 books and watched 50 odd movies, and I rolled credits on 20ish games, which is a lot for me. I don't know that there's inherent value in rolling credits, but I think the resolution did keep me more focused on seeing games through to the end and pushing past soft sticking points that previously would have led me to dropping a game. In some cases, like the game that finished number 1 for me this year, it was well worth the extra effort. Overall this was a really great year for gaming. Let's start with the games that didn't make my list, but which were cool. And because the steam sale is still on, links and prices are included in the list. One thing to note is that there is a ton of good gaming to be had for very little money these days. Kona (4.49CAD on Steam) - I played this with my wife. A narrative adventure game where you’re a private investigator in the 70s in rural Quebec. Great voice acting (in French). A bit like Firewatch but with combat and a more directed story. Combat kinda sucks but you don’t have to do much of it. Find All Series 1-3 (8.65CAD on Steam) - Cute hidden object games with colourful little worlds. Not like the adventure style HOGs (which are also good), instead this is literally just finding cute animals and items in a white and black world. When you find, the world starts to gain colour. I played the series on the steam deck in bed with my wife and we both loved these as wind down games. Still need to play #4. Grim Dawn (8.69CAD on Steam) - Dumped a boat load of hours into this with my son and my brothers in the summer. Click click click. Legend of Grimrock 2: Lost City mod (7.80CAD on Steam) - I love LoG2 and I’m finally getting around to playing the mods made by Adrageron. Lost City is the first one. They’re really well made adventures, honestly at par with the main game. He makes interesting balance changes that keep the game really fresh and stuffs his maps with both traditional and navigational puzzles and secrets. I stalled out towards the end of this one but will move on to 7 Guardians at some point next year. The Talos Principle (5.84CAD on Steam) - I replayed this in anticipation of Talos 2 coming out. Got most of the way through but hit some puzzles at the end that I struggled with and moved on to other games, but I’m looking forward to getting into Talos 2 next year. Momodora (4.39CAD on Steam) - I wish I had space on my list for this. A tight 3-4 hour metroidvania that does everything right. It doesn’t leave me wanting more, it leaves me impressed by a developer who knew the scope of what they were making and cut it at the right moment. Elderand (12.99CAD on Steam) - Similar to Momodora in that it's a fun small pixely metroidvania. A bit bigger though. I got sidetracked right at the end by one of the other games on this list. I’m almost done this one so I’ll probably finish it when I’m done the game I'm currently playing. Assassin Creed Brotherhood (4.99CAD on Steam) - I read Foucalt’s Pendulum and wanted more Templars. This hit the spot. I didn't quite finish it but I don't think that's the point with these big open world Ubisoft games. Even the more focused older titles like this one just have so much content, my approach is to play them until I'm bored. Tape to Tape (20.79CAD on Steam) - Hockey!!!!! It’s a bit underbaked and the roguelike look is absolutely the weak link, but the devs are working on it and the core gameplay is good. With some improvements I Desktop Dungeons Rewind (18.19CAD on Steam) - This was the remake of the year. A worthy update to a stone cold classic. Broforce (3.89CAD on Steam) - I finished this with my son, it's just awesome local coop gaming. A great game. Don't sleep on the free prequel. Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (7.69CAD on Steam) - A really cute small adventure game. Cozy. Lil Gator Game (15.59CAD on Steam) - Same as above, even more bite size. It gets compared to a Short Hike, which is a reasonable comparison, though I think that one hit more, if only for the novelty of being a cozy game back then. Cache Grabbers (6.49CAD on Steam) - A unique concept that hits the exploration notes I crave. Tight little navigation puzzles. I didn’t finish this yet but plan to go back to it. And now on to the top 10 list. [10] Siralim Ultimate (Early Summer) (12.99CAD on Steam) Siralim Ultimate is the fourth game in this independent creature capturing series. You run around a world fighting monsters, collecting resources, using those resources to summon those monsters and upgrade them and your base, and rinse and repeat. Siralim Ultimate is the culmination of many years and work on these different games. It brings in SO MUCH STUFF and is absolutely the game to play if you are at all interested in Siralim. You have a castle that you fill with people who do different upgrade systems, you have multiple goals to achieve (and checklists to tick off), you can combine monsters, etc. The fighting system is a fairly standard console RPG style turn based system but it’s taken to the next level with the sheer number of options at your disposal. You can create absolutely wild strategies, as I’ll describe below. I’ve played every Siralim game for varying lengths of time. I think 3 on my iPhone was the most. I never beat the story, which is really just a precursor to the real game - the endgame, in any of them, but I always had a good time creating wonky team compositions and plowing my way through levels. This summer I was pretty addicted to the game for about a month and I did manage to clear the story. My main party was the most fun I’ve had with one of these games in a long time. The way it worked is that when my monsters died my other monsters got to take actions like buffing themselves or attacking the enemy or raising others monsters from the dead. It would create these ridiculous action chains where one monsters would die and then everyone else would do things, including die, which would create a new chain, and by the end of that first monster’s turn I would have 4/6 monsters alive with 10x stats and most of the enemy field wiped. I rarely took more than a turn or two to win fights. The story is whatever and the writing isn’t very good but the meat of the game is making crazy combos and tweaking them to overcome escalating challenges, and I don’t think there’s anything quite like this game out there. [9] Legends of Amberland (Fall) (12.99CAD on Steam) Do you like Might and Magic 3, 4, or 5? Have you tried playing them with a controller? It’s not great. It’s too bad, too, because MM3-5 was pretty unique in terms of its dungeon crawling design. It’s an open world blob style dungeon crawler, like the Wizardry series but much more colourful and much easier. It’s about mowing the lawn and demolishing what’s in your path, not grinding out incremental improvement. The MM series was always about exploration and adventure and was whimsical. But it controls like rear end on a controller and my attempts to get it to run well on the steam deck were always middling. That’s where Legends of Amberland comes in. This is a legit spiritual successor to that era of Might and Magic. You get 7 characters and an open world to explore. Have at it. Monsters on the critical path aren’t too tough, but there’s a lot of them. Quests and writing aren’t particularly impressive, but that’s not what you’re here for. There’s just enough to keep you moving forward, just enough upgrades for your weapons, just enough monsters outside the critical path who you aren’t strong enough for yet… it’s about mowing the lawn and I love it. And it controls great on the Steam Deck. [8] Bloodstained (Late Autumn) (13.37CAD on Steam) Pretty early in the year I played Castlevania SOTN for the first time. I’m gonna be honest, it didn’t work for me. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think I just didn’t enjoy backtracking through the world once I had opened up most of what was available to me. I made it to the bad ending and didn’t like the game enough to keep playing so I closed it and moved on with my life, chalking it up to missed nostalgia and a game that doesn’t hold up for me personally. I was actually pretty disappointed in it, ranking it somewhere in the bottom of the games I played this year. Anyway then I played and finished a number of other metroidvanias, some of which also appear on this list, and I wanted more. Bloodstained has been in my steam library for years and I knew it was a more direct SOTN clone, but I thought it was worth a shot. I ended up really enjoying this one and when I hit the bad ending I wanted to keep playing so I made it through to the actual ending. It didn’t hit the highs of some other games on this list, but I enjoyed traversing the world and the sheer volume of combat options available to me. It helps, I think, that the game is pretty easy on the normal mode. I liked Bloodstained enough that I think I’ll go back and give SOTN another shot at some point. [7] Blasphemous (Summer) (7.24CAD on Steam) This game got its hooks into me hard out of nowhere. I picked it up in some bundle sale at some point and don’t remember why I decided to start playing it this summer. According to my Steam Year in Review I played this over 8 sessions in the space of like a week. I distinctly remember being at a cottage getaway with some friends and my wife and my wife going for a nap on the Sunday while I played this Blasphemous on my Steam Deck. A contrast between the relaxing weekend and the fairly punishing gameplay. Like other games on my list, this succeeds on the basis of its exploration. I love the way the world holds together, and the way the world feels. Blasphemous is the sidescroller that most evokes the feeling of a Souls-like for me despite the mechanical differences. I think it comes down to the story, which feels deliberately obtuse and vague, and the weight of the combat. You hit the button and wait as the animation plays, but then it hits like a truck and is ultra satisfying. The platforming apparently was pretty bad at launch but it’s reasonable these days. I didn’t end up getting the real ending for this one. I looked it up and I missed a step along the way and didn’t feel like doing a NG+. Maybe I’ll come back to this one day, but in the meantime I have Blasphemous 2 to get to. [6] Ara Fell (January) (5.24CAD on Steam) I loved CRPGs as a kid and saw the attraction of their console cousins, but I never had consoles growing up so I don’t have any kind of nostalgia for classic console RPGs. And while I’ve dabbled with the genre a lot over the years, I’ve never really had one connect with me. Chrono Trigger on the SNES (a decade ago) is probably the closest but even that I only stuck with for a dozen hours. So imagine my surprise when the first console style RPG that I made it all the way through was an independent project originally made in RPG Maker and remastered in the developer’s own engine. Ara Fell: Enhanced Edition was the first game I played this year (though not the first I finished) and finishing it is part of what encouraged me to make a real effort to finish games this year. Ara Fell’s art style and game feel betray its origins but the game runs well on the steam deck and adds a lot of visual flourish and polish to set it apart from the other RPG Maker games that clutter Steam’s storefront. It looks good, sounds good, and controls well. After Ara Fell I tried to play some other RPGs like FF6 but I again struggled to stick with them. I’ve thought about it a bit (because of Chained Echoes which is also awesome) and I think I’ve arrived at what I want in a console style RPG and what Ara Fell delivers. An interesting world, with lots to explore. Ara Fell is set on a series of floating sky islands and the entire story is centred around that concept. It leads to some cool settings and exploration puzzles. There’s a good amount of exploration in the game - lots of chests and small side quests to tackle. There’s also a bunch of traversal abilities that you gain to give yourself more exploration options later in the game. It’s not a metroidvania by any stretch but it does hit some of those same notes in a way I didn’t expect a console RPG to do. A relatively tight story with decent writing. Ara Fell ran me about 22 hours to compete and had a focus on one main character plus a small number of side characters. Despite the relatively open world, there was still strong positive momentum to the story to push things forward. The game escalates well - you don’t dethrone god but you do some pretty awesome stuff by the end. I’m interested enough in the story and characters that a sequel would be a day 1 buy for me. No random battles. You can see the enemies and fights start when you run into them. That means you always know when you’re going to start a fight. I don’t know what it is about random battles in these games but they just stress me the gently caress out. I want to control when I start combat. Full regeneration between combat. This is a big one for me. I can get with chip damage trash fights in games like Wizardry where long drawn out death matches are the entire point, but in a game like this I really appreciate being able to put everything into one fight. I struggle to use special abilities when I might need them later, and this kind of system lets me go hog wild every single battle. Plays good on the Steam Deck. Non-negotiable these days. 80% of my gaming is on the deck and sitting at my PC for a 20+ hour RPG is a recipe for me not finishing it. I’m about 20 hours into Chained Echoes and it hits basically all these notes (except the tight story, though I’d argue it has positive story momentum which helps a lot). Other that that, and the other game Stregasoft put out (Rise of the Third Power) I don’t know of any other RPGs that hit these notes. If you know of any, please tell me. [5] Chained Echoes (Now) (21.74CAD on Steam) I struggled with whether or not to include this because I’m not done. I was hoping to finish by the time I posted this list but I’ve probably got 10 hours left. But as I wrote up my entry for Ara Fell and explained all the reasons I liked it, I realized that Chained Echoes needs to be here because it does what Ara Fell does, but has a more engaging combat system. The overdrive system keeps me on my toes, changing up my skills to stay in the green and shuffling characters mid fight (I love this btw, being able to use 8 characters in a fight makes the large cast actually valuable, rather than just camp fodder). I think the length is a bit of a downside vs Ara Fell but on the other hand I’m enjoying it still 20+ hours in, so that’s a huge credit to the game for keeping the story and combat interesting. All in all, a great way to end a year of games. [4] Demon Souls (Spring) (Not on PC because ????) In what was a common theme this year for me, DS is a game that I’ve put enough time into to finish over several aborted attempts that stalled out somewhere in the middle. It’s even the reason I bought a PS3, but I just never stuck with it to the end. This year, with my resolve to finish games, I was able to clear the hurdle and see this through to the finish. I played it on my PC, emulated. Great experience, runs buttery smooth at 60FPS, and I was even able to join the pirate servers for a while to get online play in TYOUL 2023. Demon Souls builds off King’s Field and sets the stage for Dark Souls and I love it for that. The combat is weighty and deliberately paced, and the levels are fun to explore, but it loses something for me with its level structure and I miss the single cohesive world. Dark Souls 2 is probably my favourite Souls game (other than Elden Ring), and I see a lot of similarities here in terms of the hub and spoke design but I prefer the way Dark Souls 2 handles the hub by incorporating it directly into the world rather than being a warp location. Other than that, what is there to say? It’s a Souls game and it rules. My most memorable moments were making the run to Firelurker by dropping down the cave tunnel (a lot of times), everything Latria, many runs through the Altar of Storms, and dummying some of the later bosses like the Storm King and King Allant. [3] Lies of P (Early Fall) (63.99CAD on Steam) This is the first non-From game that does Souls better than at least one From game. Combat has that weighty feel that I associate with Souls, but is fast and furious. People compare this to Bloodborne and Sekiro and those are valid comparisons but unlike Sekiro, Lies of P isn’t just about parrying. Dodging is equally viable and actually needed in many cases. You don’t get the iframes but just getting out of the way of attacks works really well. The weapon combination system is the thing I want From to steal. It rules. I loved being able to switch up my handles and try new movesets without needing to do a whole of investment into the weapons. The robot arm ruled too, I mostly used the one that let you grapple to the enemies. Combined with my massive sword, it made traversal of the back half of the game fast and fun. On the other hand, the upgrade system for the weapons felt kind of pointless. Very “1% damage increase” and lacking impact. The exploration is the other thing lacking here, as the levels don’t have a ton of nooks and crannies and are definitely closer to Demon Souls in terms of being fairly discrete spaces. The game does a great job of having you backtrack in a directed manner, though, and there are some levels that are pretty fun to run through despite being discrete spaces. I enjoyed the Barren Swamp for that in particular. They do a good job of mixing up linear pathing through the cities with more open outdoor areas. The boss fights with their multi phase health bars are something you’ll either hate or love. Luckily I loved them. The only one I really didn’t like was Simon Manus. Hated that second phase and struggled really hard to get through it. The story was surprisingly clear for a Souls game and played straight. It was predictable but fun to get through and I enjoyed having a more linear Souls experience. I wouldn’t want all my Souls gaming to be this style of storytelling but once in a while it’s nice. I’m looking forward to DLC and a sequel. [2] Kings Field 4: The Ancient City (Late Last Year / Early January) (not on Steam because ???) I started playing KF4 right at the end of last year when I was fooling around with emulators on the steam deck. I only meant to see if it was running well and if I could find a good control setup for it, but I ended up falling in love with this game. It controls amazingly well on the Steam Deck, and once I got into the rhythm of combat and exploration I was hooked. Like the #1 game on my list, it hits the notes from the Souls series that make that my favourite series of all time (exploration, progressive combat mastery, minimally directed narrative). The Ancient City is maybe the best realized version From has ever done of the looping world that captivated me in Dark Souls. The gameplay loop of exploration and puzzle solving and combat carried me through what ended up being a pretty tight 15-20 hour game, and the dreamlike story really contributed to my enjoyment of the whole thing. The one sour note was probably the ending, I really don’t enjoy that style of final boss. KF4 set the stage for what my year would be - heavily focused on games that revolve around exploration. I wish there were more games like it (I have to get to Lunacid next year). [1] Hollow Knight (Summer) (9.74CAD on Steam) I tried to get into Hollow Knight maybe a half dozen times. It’s one of my youngest brother’s favourite games, and I knew that it borrowed heavily from the aspects of Souls design that I loved, but for whatever reason I always bounced off of it pretty quickly. Last year after I got my Steam Deck I had my most successful attempt at the game, making it to the second or third biome, but ultimately I stalled out and lost interest. This was the year of finishing games though, and I finally managed to get Hollow Knight to stick. And man did it stick, ending the year as my most played game on Steam. I ended up doing almost everything you can do until the final boss summon area. I even managed to make my way through the white palace and I enjoyed the hell out of it. The platforming hits absolutely right. Tight controls and speedy traversal are the two biggest things for me, but I also appreciated the ability to gain lots of upgrades to give myself extra wiggle room. I didn’t find it too punishing, the difficulty was just about right for me. The thing that actually puts this so high on my list isn’t the platforming though, it’s the exploration. Hollow Knight has the best side scrolling world I’ve ever played. It’s sprawling and circuitous, has lots of secret areas, feels super interconnected, and maintains a sense of discovery basically through the entire game. It’s the last point that sets HK above other games in the genre - constantly creating that sense of discovery from the start to the finish is something most games struggle with, but which HK nailed. I didn’t actually go back and finish the final boss - after the white palace I futzed around in the boss summons area a bunch and then got pulled into other games. Notwithstanding that blemish on my gamer record, this is still one of the best games I’ve ever played, and honestly it’s ok because it means there’s something left for me to come back to. All in all, it was a good year for games.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:29
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Hollow Knight is really fuckin amazing, huh
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Dec 31, 2023 02:37
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It's been a good year for Hollow Knight finally clicking for goons. I credit the inordinate amount of Dark Souls and Elden Ring I played between my first attempts and my most recent. From taught me that I didn't actually dislike a whole genre, I just dislike tediously overlong Cinematic Experiences, and once I realized Hollow Knight had a lot of the same DNA both it and a whole new genre was open to me (not because I dislike MVs I had just never really played any) HK is also extremely great to just jump back into since it starts with all the stuff you like about the end game, minus movement skills which gives you something to do. The true final boss is absolutely worth going back to or doing another playthrough for later. Such a fantastic boss, you'll never not feel incredible once you finally get it down.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:43
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