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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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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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Entenzahn posted:
I keep thinking about this post, and this entry. What led you to find this game? Did you know about and skip the first one? ... I'm tempted to pick it up as its trilogy is on sale for 8$ and well, I'm weak and curious.
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Dec 31, 2023 03:35
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Entenzahn posted:I played Guild Wars 1 back in the day and even attended a couple Guild vs Guild matches. I'm not sure how I originally got into GW2, but it was back in 2015 and it didn't stick. I only rediscovered it now through YouTube recommendations while I was on a Grim Dawn binge. That's way more detailed than I expected - thank you! I'll have a look, see what I want to check out. I'm an extremely solo player in MMOs so anything I can do alone sounds good.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:58
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wuggles posted:the girl reading this 
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Jan 1, 2024 15:24
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I just wanted to say. This thread is good. I enjoy reading it and seeing why people like games. It's done horrible things to my steam sale cart and I appreciate it. 
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Jan 1, 2024 21:59
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yo, thank you to this thread for bringing up Curse of the Golden Idol a lot, I finally got and played it and loved it!
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Jan 3, 2024 01:15
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webmeister posted:Everybody loves Bethesda bugs, so if we're doing top 10 lists, here's my favourite 10 features from this year's official Most Innovative Game, Starfield! This list made me laugh out loud. Never change, silly video game bugs, never change. 
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Jan 3, 2024 16:05
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yo Mike Duncan might be one of the best history podcast guys out there, great stuff!
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Jan 4, 2024 20:00
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Jerusalem posted:Yes Pentiment absolutely loving rules and it delights me that this thread has convinced a few more people to get to experience it, it's so drat good. Loved how sometimes the most stressed I got in the game was deciding who to go and have a meal with +1 bought Pentiment due to this thread
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Jan 5, 2024 15:40
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I'm happy my GOTY made it as high as it did despite no one else voting for it  Dude this thread is always so cool though, I love the presentation and I love seeing everyone's fervent passion for games I have never heard of
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Jan 13, 2024 15:08
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Kay Kessler posted:
yep lol, well, I might have put it in my goty list but I just don't really buy brand new games these days without reason (and I'm not a musashi fan....)
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Jan 13, 2024 16:02
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ing that the Fate mobile game scored higher than the actual Fate game that came out this year.
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I appreciate that one person going rogue and putting an oddball game as #1 can rank a game that's objectively better than Starfield
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Jan 13, 2024 16:05
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okay well Void Stranger is going on the wishlist
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Jan 13, 2024 16:06
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I'm surprised FF16 made it this high given that I have seen 0 discussion about it and know even less about it. Been a while since an FF failed to penetrate my gaming circles.
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Jan 13, 2024 19:04
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Making me regret not getting Phantom Liberty, I only have the base cyberpunk game...
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Jan 13, 2024 19:25
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This was so much fun thank you!!!!
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Jan 13, 2024 19:53
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holy cannoli a very kind goon gifted me Phantom Liberty??? goons are the most generous people I can't handle this 
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Jan 13, 2024 20:40
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I should go back and read previous years lists
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Jan 13, 2024 22:05
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Waffleman_ posted:I gotta play more obscure anime poo poo this year Fate/ccc got a fan TL out!
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Jan 14, 2024 01:05
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Waffleman_ posted:I gotta play through the original!!!! Don't, it's bad gameplay, read Bisby's LP instead!
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Jan 14, 2024 01:07
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Okay but who doesn't like Doom (1993), my overlapping social group is literally everyone!
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Jan 17, 2024 13:56
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I'm okay with that though, talking to lots of different goons is really neat
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Jan 17, 2024 13:58
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fridge corn posted:Working on a personal top 50 games of all time list and really struggling to remember back to the old school mac gaming days lol. I'm sure there's games out there that I've spent significant time with that for the life of me I can't remember at all lol I have to recommend this book, it's so cool: Secret History of Mac Gaming
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Jan 17, 2024 14:36
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The other cool resource for old mac games is this website: https://macintoshgarden.org/quote:Welcome to The Macintosh Garden You know it's a good website because its UI looks old and functional
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Jan 17, 2024 15:30
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quote:StrixNebulosa I enjoyed Yakuza 1 but not 0 and ADHDed my way away from 2. I'd like to return to the franchise at some point but no rush. I don't enjoy Disco Elysium. It's well-written and clever and it's just not a game I mesh with? I have no interest in Hat in Time. Hades is pretty good but I really suck at it. West of Loathing seems neat but I refuse to play it due to crimes by its dev.
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Jan 17, 2024 15:39
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OK if you made me make a list of games I like and would make my 2024 goty, based entirely on stuff I've played in 2024, here it is: - baldur's gate 3 (very impressive so far) - trails from zero (i like talking to 500000000 jrpg npcs) - total annihilation (wrote about this in the steam thread, game good despite being an rts from the 1990s) - magic the gathering arena (very chill deckbuilder that I play a few matches of daily, fun) - king arthur knight's tale (rpg xcom w/ darkest dungeon structure and cool grimdark king arthur undead lore) - elden ring (hard but satisfying combat) - banished vault (fun math homework in religious space horror) - half life 2 (playing for the first time, incredibly tight game design but it has too many explosive barrels)
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Jan 17, 2024 20:00
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:28 |
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I'm helping good luck
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Jan 18, 2024 00:51
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