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Honorary mention to Vampire Survivors, the feel-good success story of the year, Pentiment, a brilliant passion project that I wasn’t able to finish, and Powerwash Simulator, for reasons that should be self-explanatory. As for the others… 10. Returnal: Ascension  A preamble: many of my GOTY choices have been informed by other games I’ve played this year. I’ve waded through three games (or two and a half, gave up on one of them halfway) that were so-called “frictionless” experiences filled with stats, loot, crafting, and characters who are far too eager to shepherd your dazed mind through every step of the experience; all of them were also sequels to games I liked, and as sequels they were either mediocre, gratuitous, or utterly terrible. I’m weary of it, and especially how that style has near-fully colonized singleplayer games at a certain budget tier. They drove me back into the arms of Returnal, which many people loved at the time but I was tepid on, and Returnal answered my desperation with one of the best expansions I’ve seen in recent memory. And for free, too! It makes you want to cry. The Ascension update has hapless protagonist Selene scaling an infinite dungeon called the Tower of Sisyphus. If this was a mere score-attack mode then I would have been fine with it, because Ascension strips Housemarque’s outstanding gameplay down to the bare essentials, shuttling you through tourniquet-tight platforming and combat challenges with enough secret areas and optional goodies to keep you engaged. But Ascension also has its own sizable chunk of story content, which I was warily onboard for – Selene’s actress Jane Perry is outstanding and Returnal has some of the best horror prose I’ve seen in some time, but the main campaign’s conclusion was a thumping disappointment. Ascension drills down into a few key details of Selene’s backstory that were only alluded to in the main campaign, and has one single line, shown only in environmental detail, that re-contextualizes everything about the story. It turned my disappointment into a begrudging thumbs-up, and I don’t change my mind easily. As homogeneity slops across the AAA space, Returnal stands apart as a high-budget game that did something different – not always successful, occasionally frustrating, but its stripped-down roguelite style and lush space-horror background is more novel than ever. Ascension lifted it to new heights. 9. Sifu  Sifu has the most satisfying Platinum trophy I’ve ever gotten. A tough-as-nails brawler whose main conceit has you ageing a little more every time you die has only one conclusion for your first playthrough – you’ll keel over from heart failure before you get past the second boss. I did, but I brought back some keycards! They let me take shortcuts, so I reached the boss with a little more spring in my step. And then I died again. And again, until I didn’t. The game’s philosophy is exemplified in its very first setpiece, which is literally just the famous corridor fight scene from Oldboy. The first time you go in there, the ten or so miscreants occupying that seedy hallway will probably play handball with your skull. The tenth time, you won’t even break your stride as you punch them all to sleep. Like all great brawlers, Sifu asks for perfection through attrition, going through its levels again and again until they no longer surprise you, and then can no longer out-fight you. The soft, almost pillowy sound effects that accompany your basic punches and kicks are counterpointed by a thunderous bass beat for the knockout blow, and eventually you’re playing a dubstep track for every mob of badguys that comes your way. The shortcuts and secrets you take back from the Game Over screen further shave down the continues you have to spend, until finally, you reach the ending as a creaky old man. Now to do it again. Sifu’s final trophy demanded that I die no more than five times for its entire nails-hard duration and it was such a joy to play that I didn’t bat an eye at it. The only disappointment was that all the shortcuts I took kept me from fully enjoying its beautiful stage design – burning and hallucinogenic nightclubs, a four-story museum where the camera angles shift and mutate along with the exhibits. It’s the best pure gameplay experience I’ve had since Sekiro – gradually overcoming brutally challenging stages, until you barely notice them as they fall at your feet. 8. Cyberpunk 2077  I broke so many of my rules for this one. I thought CP2077 was a laughable fuckup at release, I’m tired of the open-world icon-hunting formula, and everything that was revealed about the game’s tortured development cycle covered it with stink. But when the 1.5 patch dropped, which allegedly made the game fuctional if not necessarily good, it was accompanied by a 50% price drop that made me shrug my shoulders and give it a try. Seventy hours later, I had to re-evaluate some things. CD Projekt Red did not know what they were doing when they developed this. CP2077’s first act is a tight series of narrative-heavy missions leading up to a grand heist, all contained within a single district; after that’s done, the entire map explodes into a glut of picayune icon hunts that might make some players recoil and drop it like they just saw a spider crawling up their hand. The skill tree is badly lopsided even after patching, the economy is hosed beyond belief, damage feedback is so weak that you’ll often drop dead without even realizing you were being shot at. But I found its scrappiness weirdly compelling, especially because the catastrophic bugs were mostly absent, and it held me long enough to see the flashes of brilliance underneath it – flashes that became more common with time, not less. When it gets out of its own way, Cyberpunk has some incredibly engrossing and varied missions, usually funneled through its side cast, a wide array of noir-classic no-hopers who are all excellently acted and mo-capped. Keanu Reeves is the weakest link, not really able to sell his lines as a sneering punk anarchist, but he still does a fine enough job, and he’s a consistent but not overbearing presence in the story. The main campaign is surprisingly brief, but those special side missions – a quiet underwater trek through a drowned city, a frantic horror-themed forensic investigation as you try to thwart a kidnapping – cover a variety of genres and gameplay styles and they’re all surprisingly deft. And while the gunplay’s not so great when you’re getting shot at, the guns all kick like a mule and have great feedback and animations, when you’re not electing to just fry everyone’s brains from the other side of the street. Night City itself is a fantastic environment, one of the few that I’ve been content to just walk around in without icon-hunting. Winding back-alleys and multi-tiered night markets give way to sweeping plazas and skyscrapers, and the outskirts are marked by fields of gently glowing hydroponic farms or mountains of electronic trash. But the game’s fundamental flaws always make you feel like you’re merely looking at the city rather than living in it; there’s nothing to do here but find icons and shoot guys. Nevertheless, the plot and the performances convincingly sell the personality of the city itself, its allure and its menace – it’s a predatory organism in itself, and as you get further into each of your companions’ quests, they all express some desire to escape or at least insulate themselves from Night City’s malignant influence somehow. That’s reflected in the excellent Edgerunners spinoff, one more broken rule. Multimedia adaptations of video games are usually not great and seldom affect the base property at all, but that hail-mary anime not only drove CP2077’s disastrous release out of the public consciousness, it was a great encapsulation of the desperation that turns at the heart of Cyberpunk – these people whose hopes and ambitions placed them in the belly of the beast, who risk everything on the chance to get away another way. 7. Know by heart…  Icepick Lodge, one of the greatest and unluckiest indie developers out there, have had an especially bad time of it lately. Pathologic 2 pushed them further than ever into the mainstream but didn’t sell well enough to support the dev costs for the remaining 2/3’s of the campaign, and then recent geopolitical unpleasantness compounded their woes. In that time, they were able to release Know By Heart to nonexistent fanfare, in an attempt to build up their coffers for the rest of Pathologic. Know By Heart is one of those stories that’s difficult to describe without spoilers. It’s a gentle top-down walking sim about provincial homebody Misha, whose routine is interrupted by a surprise homecoming from his childhood sweetheart Asya. Over the next several days his old friend group knits itself back together, but things fall apart due to a strange pandemic of amnesia that exclusively targets people’s connections to one another. Misha and Asya try to hold on to each other as everything around them falls apart, and the question is raised: what remains of a place when everything you find personally meaningful about it falls away? Rendered in primary colors and buoyed by a piano-only soundtrack that ranges from playful to deeply melancholic, Know By Heart isn’t nearly as stressful or punishing as Pathologic or The Void, but follows the formula in some ways. The player is encouraged to become intimately familiar with Misha’s hometown, literally piecing together the map from optional wanderings between landmarks, and you can catch glimpses of the townspeople’s own stories and struggles as you strike out from the critical path. There are dialogue choices and plot branches, but no fail state and no deviation from the story’s final conclusion. It’s haunting, but not stressful. Icepick are known for their surrealism but prove no less deft at making the everyday feel extraordinary. The story’s tonal high point comes when Misha and friends push a stalled car, laughing and joking as the backing piano lifts into a light arpeggio that becomes brighter and more energetic as they gain speed. Know By Heart is full of these moments, and it’s another work of art from one of gaming’s most unique and treasured voices. 6. Kirby and the Forgotten Land  Kirby might be the most consistently pleasant franchise in this entire industry. You almost always know what you’re getting – a breezy pastel platformer with level design that’s familiar but varied, secrets that are well-hidden but not aggravating, and just enough tweaks to the power-copying system to make it stand out from the last one. When you finish, you can enter a postgame mode and be annihilated by a sudden sky-high difficulty spike. It’s all in good fun. When it was announced that Kirby would be going full 3D and showcased environments that resembled an E-rated Fromsoft game, some people were side-eyeing it, me included – it looked like the series had just decided to be derivative in a different way. The final result was more iterative than I expected, and more successful than I’d hoped. Forgotten Land is unmistakably Kirby where the fundamentals are concerned. It trades in the traditional side-scroller format for much larger open maps, and abilities are fewer overall but sequentially upgraded through some of the collectibles. Its secrets might be some of the most rewarding yet – most of the power upgrades are very cool and visually distinct, and freeing the caged Waddle Dees scattered throughout the stages has the side benefit of upgrading your hub area from a sad huddle of shacks to a thriving little town with shops and minigames on display. Kirby takes extremely well to the added plane of movement; the little puffball is lighter on his feet than ever, with the newly-added Witch Time (Kirby Time) quick-dodge mechanic letting you keep up with the familiar enemy roster’s own upgraded techniques. This game’s format transition from side-scrolling could have been awkward in a plethora of ways and they knocked it out of the park on their first try. And the aesthetics are razor-sharp. Forgotten Land’s stages mostly consist of overgrown or decayed commercial environments, but Kirby’s size relative to these places gives them a beautiful sense of faded grandeur, with the misty bridge above being my favorite of the bunch. This is one of the best-looking and performing games on the Switch, with barely a single hitch as Kirby dips and dives through it challenges – culminating in, yes, a postgame difficulty spike, whose ultimate boss might have the most memorably sinister intro in the series. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is just like its namesake, taking the best parts of its influences without losing its core identity. 5. Live a Live  Somebody must have wished upon a star to get this thing made. I’d heard about Live a Live for years – a 90’s-era JRPG with multiple protagonists and gameplay styles across several different eras, that could only be enjoyed in the West with emulation and translation patches. I thought it sounded neat, but never got around to trying it. So when Square-Enix excavated it from their back catalogue and gave it a full remake, I jumped on the chance to try it out at last, and my conclusion is that this game is ridiculous. It's innovative even for today, let alone 1994. The only reason I can think of why it wasn’t a genre-defining mega-classic was that the market back then wasn’t ready for it. “Different gameplay styles” is an understatement if anything. At its heart it’s a turn-based RPG with grid movement and attack patterns, similar to the Lunar series, but every chapter of Live a Live radically overhauls its aims, aesthetics, and storytelling style. The Prehistory chapter, being pre-language, is told entirely in emoticons and pantomime. Feudal Japan takes place over a single sprawling dungeon with a totally optional full-pacifist run that would later go on to influence Undertale. The contemporary era is a fighting game where your level 1 Ryu sendup brawls with a series of colorful bosses, learning their attacks for his own use as he goes on. In the Old West chapter, the camera lingers mournfully on the dusty plains outside a beleaguered tavern, and the Far Future chapter is an ensemble cast puzzler/horror thriller in the vein of Alien. Each one of these sections would be a decent indie game in their own right, and they’re given a fantastic graphical overhaul from their original pint-size sprite work. And the localization! The writing team had the time of their lives penning Live a Live’s English script, and it elevates the relatively simple stories and characterization of every scenario. The Old West’s protagonist is terse and bone-dry whereas the villain quotes Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian almost verbatim, and the Medieval Chapter’s dialogue is entirely in iambic pentameter. Mood, tone, writing, even gameplay – every part of Live a Live is unique and memorable in its own way, and the remake only emphasizes its strengths. It’s not perfect, with some chapters being weaker than others (the Near Future chapter meanders and is dragged down by a weak ENG voice cast, whereas the final chapter leans way too hard into random encounters), but overall it’s one of the best JRPG’s I’ve played in recent memory, and a much-deserved resurgence for a game that was decades ahead of its time. 4. Norco  ”I wanted to outlive you, but if just an echo of my memory haunts your lonely days, that will be enough.” Half of Norco’s story is spent playing as a woman with terminal cancer, as she runs errands through the eponymous New Orleans district in a last-effort bid to secure some money for her family. She can only make her way around town with a ride-sharing app, and every time you place a call, her paltry bank balance dwindles on her phone. If you check the phone’s messages, you can see an astronomical hospital bill that updates as often as her bank account decreases, as well as texts to her estranged daughter, plaintively asking her to call home. The texts are unanswered; the call will never come. A point-and-click adventure rendered in truly gorgeous pixel art, Norco joins other games like Kentucky Route Zero and Night in the Woods as a magical-realist tale about the corrosive influence of capitalism and its cast’s attempts to survive it. The district huddles under the shadow of the Norco Refinery, whose chemical processing sickens the population and poisons the soil, and the nameless protagonist has returned home after the death of her mother to find her brother estranged and the rest of the town tragically the same as she remembered. At one point early on, she reflects on the three floods that ran through her family home, and then envisions the fourth and final flood, which will destroy the house long after it’s been abandoned. In her backyard, the family’s helper android fixes up a beater pickup truck. A local mall is populated by a juvenile cult that seeks utopia in outer space, and the bayou is haunted by a sentient power source that may or may not be a wayward fragment of God. Kentucky Route Zero and NitW are two of the most profound games I’ve ever played – the former dryly eloquent, the latter irreverent and terse. Norco is just as text-heavy but with more literary flourish in its narration, in a way that sometimes feels self-conscious, but the character voices are strong and distinct, wistful and vulgar by turns. The narrative follows in much the same vein, tinging its human desperation with filthy, fantastical occurrences that don’t always click together but never fail to be memorable. Same with the gameplay – the point-and-click puzzling is simple and occasionally broken up by a somewhat baffling QTE-based combat system, at one point, you can take part in a shadow puppet show that has you steering a top-down boat in the bayou, narrated by a wrathful alligator whose shadow is made by a pair of clenching hands. It’s messy and wonderfully unique. As it approaches its conclusion, Norco’s surrealism takes over more and more of the narrative, and the ending is uncomfortably abrupt. But at its core, it’s a story about arbitrary acts of human kindness and cruelty. Families hurt each other for nothing more than the masochistic gratification of bringing one another pain, and just as suddenly dive in to save each other even though it destroys them. That core keeps Norco from being totally lost in its bizarre happenings, and in that way, too, it’s much like the other entries in this strange little sub-genre – desperate people holding on to one another as the floodwaters rise. 3. Ghost Song  ”A success. In this moment, always a success.” Ghost Song’s Kickstarter was the first to actually catch my attention, upon its debut a whopping 9 years ago. The pitch promised a moody Metroidvania in the vein of Fromsoft’s Souls series, and unfortunately, that space has become absolutely saturated in the years between the game’s pitch and its final release – it came out about a month ago and quicky vanished into the indie churn. But I remembered how it originally caught my eye, and gave it a spin day one. Of all the many, many Metroid-likes I’ve played, this is one of the closest homages to Metroid itself. The character’s resemblance to Samus is unmistakable, and the setting bears more than a few resemblances to Zebes, a barren moon knotty with secrets and derelict machinery. Some of the secrets are ludicrously well-hidden – the answer to one of the plot’s key mysteries is concealed in a corner of the map that you’re not even given any reason to think is accessible, behind several difficult jumps that require all the traversal upgrades at your disposal. The usual point-and-shoot combat is innovated by a simple but effective heat-buildup system, where your gun gains heat and loses effectiveness with continued use and increases the power of your melee attack, encouraging you to alternate between the two as you cool down. Weapon upgrades are varied and interesting, there’s plenty of neat accessories to change up your play style, and the painterly art style has an excellent soundtrack that’s heavy on mournful guitar licks and menacing synths. Ghost Song is solid overall, but for me, the writing made it exceptional. In its earlier builds, Ghost Song was apparently much closer to Souls plotwise, with the player character scavenging a lifeless world alone – you would be searching for the dispersed crew of a wrecked ship, only to find them all mutated and insane. In the final release, the ship’s crew is alive and well, and getting them off the moon becomes your central objective, gathering parts from the distant reaches of the environment and returning them to the base camp. Their dialogue updates with every part returned, and unlike the terse portentousness of Souls games, most of the dialogue is playfully baroque and philosophical, similar to Failbetter’s games or certain sequences from Kentucky Route Zero. A badly damaged android works to build herself a new body before she shuts down, fretting over the shape of her new nose and whether her habits and identity will change with her form. An incompetent inventor wants to make art but is hesitant to trade in her inventions for sculpture, because if she fails at something she wants to do, “it isn’t funny anymore.” An itinerant spaceman offhandedly confesses to being the one who destroyed the planet; later you can find him overlooking the blasted plain that used to house a bandshell, wistfully reminiscing about a childhood picnic he once spent there. The crashed spaceships’ AI’s are gentle, blustering, and for some reason believe the player character is one of them. All of this takes place in a setting where ghosts dwell in puddles, and the stars house leviathan worms that attract and devour the souls of the dead. It’s a beautiful contrast of the fantastical and the mundane. Ghost Song ultimately cares for its personal stakes more than the grandiose ones, and its conclusion can feel abrupt given its backstory and its setting. But despite its troubled development and belated release, it still managed to stand out in a field that had become far more cluttered since it was originally proposed. A success, in this and every moment. 2. Signalis  ACHTUNG. ACHTUNG. DU HAST ES VERSPROCHEN. I’ve been a horror fan ever since my dad made the perhaps ill-advised decision to let me watch Clive Barker’s Lords of Illusion at the age of ten. It can be a difficult genre to like – in my experience it’s especially vulnerable to trend-chasing, everyone trying to copy the Latest Popular Thing with the lowest budget possible. And this is especially true for horror games lately, a field that’s been clogged full of copycats, also-rans, “guilty coma dream” stories, and gossamer-thin Steam releases that exist mainly to sell tie-in merch and make some gawping putz on Youtube pull a stupid face. Konami’s tangibly desperate Silent Hill “revival” didn’t encourage me – just one more example of publishers today constantly retreating back into safe and familiar convention, something antithetical to the disquiet that good horror is meant to evoke. Signalis, which has been in development by a two-man team since 2014 and finally released in late October, is one of the greatest horror games of the last decade. A top-down sci-fi shooter with clear influences from the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, it nevertheless quickly becomes clear that Signalis has an identity all its own. The player controls military android Elster as she searches for someone on the derelict mining station of Sierpinski. Puzzles consist of finding various flavor of key to fit in various shape of lock, and the enemy roster is further complicated by everything’s apparent reluctance to stay dead; unless you set a fallen enemy on fire, there’s always a chance they’ll come back up on your next trip through a room. Most of the tension comes from a punishingly strict inventory limit. There are no jumpscares or aggravatingly overbearing soundtracks a la Dead Space; aside from the occasional discordant screech or burst of radio static, it’s oppressively quiet, and that reserved nature seeps into all its other aspects as well. The graphics are blocky PSX throwbacks that leave just enough to the imagination, interspersed with highly detailed character portraits and unnerving first-person exploration sections. The soundtrack consists of mournful keyboards and occasional snatches of licensed classical music. The characters take in their horrific circumstances with exhausted resignation. The cutscenes are interspersed with Evangelion-esque frames of German and Chinese text smeared across a bloodred screen, as though the terror the characters feel is banging its fists against the walls of the story, trying to get out. Throughout the exploration of Sierpinski, we get bits and pieces of the setting outside the station – it’s an original and compelling piece of worldbuilding that ironically unmoors the player further, because the science-fiction elements excuse and bulwark the fantastical, nightmarish occurrences on the station. Cancerous, insane androids wander the corridors; the miners predictably dug too deep. But time and space become more fragmented as Elster delves deeper (the Nowhere sequences from Silent Hill are predictably homaged), and we’re left wondering how much of what we see is actually unreal and how much is excusable by the mechanics of the setting. In other words, Signalis threads the needle of depicting nightmarish events without descending into “it was all a dream” allegory, something that precious few stories can actually claim. Underneath all the genre trappings is a core plot that’s achingly relatable and personal; Elster shows little emotion during her descent into the planet, but Signalis in the end is about its characters more than its events, and conveys that very well. The inventory limit can chafe, there’s a lot of backtracking, and the ending requirements are frustratingly opaque. But overall Signalis is a triumph, a piece of horror that dodges every pitfall and cliché that’s frustrated the genre in recent years and presents something thrillingly new. If there’s any justice, it’ll be talked up and referenced for a long time to come. 1. Elden Ring  ”The way ahead is pleasingly simple.” Of the first ten hours I spent in Elden Ring, at least two of them were spent fighting the same three enemies. I was under-leveled, under-equipped, and my reflexes were not nearly up to par. I might as well have been trying to kill a tiger with a toothpick. And throughout my many, many restarts, Elden Ring quietly stood by until I was ready to get on with things. Elden Ring is a magnum opus, the culmination of ten years of work and inspiration by one of gaming’s most influential and creative developers. Every idea that Fromsoft and Hidetaka Miyazaki ever had found a place somewhere in the massive, messy expanse of the Lands Between. It’s breathtaking, it’s immersive, and most importantly, it’s quiet. Elden Ring shoves you into this huge and hostile world and then has the confidence to leave you alone in it, and this year, there were so many games where I so badly wanted to just be left alone. There’s going to be a lot of posts made on this game already and I don’t want to be redundant, but one point I do want to make is this: Fromsoft’s environments are about their enemies as much as their assets, and Elden Ring’s overworld is made unique not just by the architecture by what you encounter there. I remember one totally unremarkable canyon because I spend a good half hour wading through a skirmish between puppet monsters and magic ghosts to get to the other side. One of the many cave systems is unique because it happens to house the angriest bear in the world. The more willing you are to take on Elden Ring’s challenges, the richer its world becomes; you remember its locales not just by the scenery but by the blood you’ve spilled there. And if you don’t want to engage and have the skills or the kit to tear through its challenges, then in finest Fromsoft tradition, a 90-hour experience can be chopped down to five as you gallop from one end of the massive map to the other, slaughtering everything that isn’t smart enough to clear the path. Amidst all these “frictionless” experiences, Elden Ring gave me plenty of friction on my first time around, and that made it stand out all the more in retrospect. One of my favorite experiences in games period was in the original Dark Souls, when I first discovered Ash Lake – dropping down through a grueling secret area that was basically one giant elevator shaft to find this enormous vista, heralded by its very own background music. Elden Ring dropped similar sights on me every six hours or so. The elevator to Siofra River, the transcendently repulsive tour of Caelid, and even the more-maligned endgame northern wilds – at least at night, when everything’s turned bone-white and marked by herds of roaming ghosts. It’s all endlessly hostile, and always guiding you towards something new. There are flaws, as there will always be for an undertaking of this scope. The crafting and upgrade systems are half-baked. The difficulty in the last few areas felt overtuned even by my generous standards. The plot’s grand arc works fine but becomes increasingly less coherent as you get into the fine details, and the quest requirements are often impenetrably opaque. But all of those issues have faded with time, and instead I remember those vistas and everything they offered, and the fact that I was able to enjoy them in silence and at my own pace. The tarnish fades. The gold remains. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 21:39
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 04:13 |
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will you jump? or will you die like a dog?
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Dec 23, 2022 16:41
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pentiment was made for exactly one person and it was nice of him to share it with the rest of us
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Dec 26, 2022 22:16
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there's a few coming onto the scene like kayleigh mckee but she's not in video games yet to my knowledge
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Jan 1, 2023 19:11
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fortnite has you play against dumbed down bots on the first several matches to get you addicted before it throws you into the grade-schooler piranha tank
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Jan 7, 2023 15:57
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i started and finished tinykin last week and it's one of those games that's delightful from the go. you hit start and you're all
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Jan 7, 2023 18:03
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 04:13 |
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lunar detritus posted:amazing wrong
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Jan 8, 2023 02:12
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