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[alexalexok]

The 75 Best Games of 2024, Ranked

By which I mean, all the games I played in the year 2024. Who cares about when they came out. What are you, the time police?

75 - Photographs

A series of five trite short stories told line by line between various mini-games of varying quality. At the end you get to choose who is most worthy of redemption between characters such as a diver who took some sports drugs and a colonial collaborator.

74 - Sail Forth

The great appeal of forming a little seafaring fleet lasts only about as long as it takes to do that. It was interesting to discover that originally you just clicked on map squares to teleport there and the open-world sailing between locations was added in later, because yes you can absolutely feel that's what happened. The fishing is quite fun. 

73 - Soulstice

The humble character-action game, where have they gone? What a sad state of affairs. I don't even like them that much, but it's a matter of principle - will acquaintances not form part of the mourning procession? Here's one, anyway. It's not very good. Potential, yes - I bought a stinger move, started doing some air juggles, nodded at the acceptable colour-switching ghost-sister energy field mechanic, enjoyed a boss fight. But then, while a massive skill tree opens up for support stuff, there's only three upgrades for your main sword and very little synergy with the samey secondary weapons. That's the wrong way around. And as the camera rose for the tenth time to frame a sky-rending rift I was supposedly moving towards before sending me into yet another dark tower or across another big bridge, it all began to feel rather purgatorial. 

72 - Interior Worlds

A spooky photography game where the photography itself is diminished to near pointlessness results in a walk around some maps to click on floating markers. They are nice maps though – empty Mall, Airport, School, Suburbs - and I do like walking around, so that's alright, isn't it?

71 - Fairy Bloom Freesia

No offence at all. I am a massive fan of Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, please play it etc. etc. - Fairy Bloom Freesia came first. It is essentially a proof of concept for the combat system, and a very rough one even at that. There's one stage, a paper thin story, and a lot of bouncing guys around into each other which is incredibly fun as we all know. More of a bonus treat for Sakuna enjoyers rather than a game in its own right.

70 - The Flower Collectors

This never really lives up to its own pitch as a Rear Window style detective game set in 70s Barcelona. It's a story game, there's no actual detective puzzling to do on your part despite the corkboard coming out. A pleasantly grumbly voiceover keeps things mumbling along as you wait for events to occur in the neighbouring streets and buildings. The environment is probably the game's biggest strength, a joy in just seeing the small square below in different weather and at different times of day. The story is evocative enough as tension and peril rises through the intertwined lives of the neighbours, but the historical political setting does most of the heavy lifting - the fictional specifics are rather broad and blunt. Glad the cop feels sad about being a violent fascist though.

69 - Session 

In my head I am spending several hours perfecting the art of doing one kickflip down two stairs and making a little video to like Plague of Onces by Future of the Left or whatever and winning an award of some kind for my revelatory talents. In reality, I went through the tutorial and got kinda bored. Maybe later.

68 - The Surge

This was my choice for the growing desire mid-year to play some kind of methodical action game - something 'like' a 'souls' game, you might say. I gave it a good honest shot, and it completely failed to do anything for me. It's really ugly which doesn't help but does have some cool ideas. I ran out of energy. I'll just play Dark Souls 2 next time.

67 - Minami Lane

A pretty neighborhood-creator with very little else to offer once you've seen all the buildings. But they are nice to look at. 

66 - Cleo – A Pirate’s Tale

It's definitely trying a bit too hard, but if you were a pirate-themed point-and-click adventure game you'd probably be trying pretty hard as well. It's light and silly, enjoyable rather than incredible, but sometimes that hits the spot. Good job okay. 

65 - Milo and The Magpies

You're a little cat trying to get home through a row of gardens. In the game, I mean. It's very lightly puzzley with a unique hand-painted style, perfect for a Sunday afternoon. 

64 - Go Mecha Ball

A lovely idea for a game, smashing stuff and zipping up ramps as a ball then unfolding into robot mode to shoot stuff like one of those Star Wars guys. It's a quality game, polished and fun, but I didn't find a hook to keep me playing all that much.

63 - Gungrave Gore

To play a new Gungrave game after 20 years is an honour in its own right, and - to begin with at least - I was standing, saluting, shedding a tear. We used to make action games in this country. Unfortunately, there's not enough depth or nonsense to carry the game much beyond its halfway mark. There's rarely enough enemies on the screen or stuff exploding everywhere when ideally there should be so much crap happening that the framerate recovers only momentarily after clearing a room with a super attack. Worst of all, there's exactly one cool cutscene in the whole game and it's CGI where there should be a dozen dark anime inserts cooler and edgier than a winter-season don't-cum competition at the open-air rhombicosidodecahedron factory. 

62 - Summon Night Swordcraft Story

An entirely competent GBA action RPG thing, set mostly in a very drab samey industrial tower town for some reason. It was very funny when you get to visit another location, a snowy village, and might think the game is about to open up - only to go straight home again two minutes later. I enjoyed the very simple combat once I understood it's about precise positioning and learning exactly how to deal with each enemy rather than doing cool combos. There aren't any cool combos. If you try anything you will end up on the floor. Anyway if you play as a girl there's a basic gay romance with your tsundere rival - pitiful scraps, but we have dined like kings on less.

61 - Lost Ember

Flashes of fun here as you shift between different animals and propel yourself through pretty chunks of landscape. Birds fly and wombats roll along nicely, there's some good bits chucking a big fish down a hill or stampeding along as a buffalo. The wordless, ghostly flashback lore-reveal cutscenes are as turgid and off-putting as an Only Connect intro and best skipped, as are the absurd amount of collectibles for the sake of retaining any pace to proceedings.

60 - MO Astray

A pretty and pleasant (well, unpleasant) side-scrolling puzzle / platformer of the type that would have hit a lot bigger like a dozen years ago. You're a blob who can fling yourself around onto such things as switches, platforms, and the heads of unfortunate humans. They're already very unfortunate before you meet them, in this ruined lab spilling out into a dangerous world. It's all very well put together but not very exciting.

59 - Bzzzt

It's not a genre I seek out often but I do enjoy a Super Meat Boy or Celeste very much from time to time. I find it quite meditative to throw myself at the short levels until the correct sequence of moves becomes a little dance on a controller. Bzzzt seems like one of those to begin with but then instead of the levels getting harder they get longer and starting over became tedious. So I reduced the difficulty to get three hits instead of one, and then I stopped playing because that made it more of a normal platformer and I don't like those as much. If you're not weird in this particular way I'd say check it out though, it does play very nice. Double jumping and dashing and so on.

58 - Blackwood Crossing

A decent small-scale walking around game that feels like it might fall apart at any second. You play as a kid's older sister and through some very light puzzling piece together a muddled and traumatic past. I always enjoy revisiting locations but they're different or fucked up in some way which worked out well for me as that happens a lot. 

57 - Ninja Five-O

A game notable mostly because they didn't make very many copies of it. As an actual thing that you play, it's very short and fairly sweet. You're a ninja with a grappling hook, these babies sell themselves.

56 - Dungeons of Hinterberg

Delightful puzzle design gems sparkle occasionally through the game's many and mostly pedestrian dungeons. It's enough to keep you going. You get a cool magical snowboard in the mountain zone which also helps. Your time in this alpine town turned monster-tourism resort is split between day-dungeoning and night-socialising, although the balance is way off and you might manage to max half the friendships unless you start skipping daylight excursions all together. Unfortunately, most of your options of people to socially link with are not interesting enough for that to be particularly appealing. It's still pretty good though.

55 - Chop Goblins

A perfectly enjoyable one of these I understand they're calling boomer shooters now. I don't like it, but I'll have to go along with it. Shoot a lot of goblins across varied locations slash time periods, it's fast and fun and the level design is pretty good too. A snack.

54 - Another Crab’s Treasure

I never quite got a comfortable hang on the combat here and only really started to enjoy myself once I switched to an incredibly overpowered magic build towards the end of the game. Or, what I thought was the end of the game because there's like four more big areas where I thought the end of the game was going to be. The end of the game is half the game.

53 - 20 Minute Till Dawn

I wrote about this last year, I think it was the smaller demo version. But anyway yeah it's good. I'm a fan of how Vampire Survivors has caused people to think 'what if this was slightly more complicated?' and so reinvent the twin-stick shooter from first principles. Fun range of weapons in this one, nice art. The meta upgrades come a little slow and late builds ended up a little samey - maybe my fault - but that's okay.

52 - Quake

Good to answer the Doom v Quake question for myself in 2024. I think I played a demo for the PS1 version of Quake 2 a very long time ago but that's about it. Anyway, sorry to Quake fans - it's a cool game, it's fun. But it's not Doom is it. Come on.

51 - Monster Hunter Rise

I guess I am a Monster Hunter toucher rather than a player. I like seeing all the zones and the monsters, I like playing with all the weapons and getting familiar with the reliably charming hub area. No different for Rise which is also very pretty if noticeably slight between the two massive grey bores of World and the next one. But then it gets to where I'd actually need to put some work in, set a goal and repeat missions, and the black claw rakes across my brain saying why are you wasting your time, why aren't you doing something productive with your life. I have no idea why here moreso than anywhere else but there it is. But so I end up with a very cursory appreciation of the game clearly not indicative of its actual quality.

50 - Firework

A short horror-adventure game investigating some old murders in a remote Chinese village. The specifics are not all that incredible but there's a well-realised creepy atmosphere and an ever-growing tension as you dig through various layers of truth and the supernatural element becomes more pronounced. Definitely worth checking out just to luxuriate in a pervasive fictional dread for a while instead of a real one.

49 - Infinity Nikki

I decided I don't have the time for this because I like playing real video games you can actually finish too much (although... I am also still playing Genshin Impact a little bit. One is enough. One is too many.) But! It's really well done, as weightless and beautiful as a gossamer ball gown. For a dressing up game, the range and quality of the clothes even at launch exceeded my high expectations but the rest of the game really surprised. I got through two unique dungeons (for want of a better word) - a bright storybook sewer where the frogs live, and a library of origami wishes where a vocal track unexpectedly kicked in during a flight on a giant paper crane. It's all very fairytale fantasy, warm and mellow, every conflict of course resolved by putting together a really nice outfit. Okay, I'm making myself want to play it again so I'll stop writing now.

48 - Webbed

A really cute 2D platformer where you play as a little jumping spider. Which means, of course, you get to swing around everywhere - one of gaming's purest delights. You may wish to stay on the ground though because of the adorable animation and taptaptap sound of your tiny leggies.

47 - The Room 3

A third room? I can't believe it. It's more clicking on things and then a little cog goes whirr and a little wooden door opens and there's a gem inside you can use to refract light onto a horrible darkness from outside reality or whatever the story is supposed to be, I forget. The best part of this one is a singular puzzle that threads through all the different branches of the hub area, so you can go 'ohh so that thing was for this' about a weird drawer you tried to fiddle with a few hours ago and nearly forgot.

46 - Chants of Senaar

I do love how translation games have become their own little sub-genre, it's a good type of puzzle to me. This one's alright. The fact you are starting from scratch with each of the languages of  the harshly segregated classes of society was a slight but repeated disappointment, I'd rather something more interconnected that builds on itself.

45 - Penny’s Big Breakaway

We are certainly in a golden age for platformers, seems like there's something new constantly coming out ever since indie developers discovered how to jump in three dimensions. Penny has some incredibly fun movement with her yoyo simply going in a straight line - flinging the momentum of a midair grapple-swing into a rolling ride. The game is not entirely successful - platforming without the yoyo isn't great, the power-ups are a bit crap, the optional objectives take more away from the experience by killing momentum than they add, and the end-of-level mini-game should just be removed. The bosses mostly suck too, but that's an authentic experience for the genre so I'll give them a pass. Still, complaints are swiftly forgotten when you're flying free and fast through a good section of obstacles. This is the way. 

44 - Talos Principle 2

A quite absurd increase in scale from the first game, kicking off with an optional hour of walking around the city a bunch of robots have built and not even doing any puzzles. Then you're off on an expedition to some incredible landscapes, from warm and winding forests to an icy-bright mountain, often loomed over or cut through with gargantuan concrete structures. Much appreciated if entirely unnecessary splendor in which to situate a load of puzzle rooms about pointing lasers at stuff. Each zone introduces a new device or mechanic like colour changing prisms, cloning machines and anti-gravity beams - to varying levels of success. There are quite possibly way too many puzzles in total, and the ratio of those revelatory moments of realisation you want a little low. I was also disappointed by the small amount of times you have to break the rules and shoot a laser halfway across the map to solve some other secret puzzle, which is still my favourite thing in these games.

The narrative philosophising is much improved from the first game too - perhaps not in actual content but certainly in presentation. Various viewpoints on humanity, progress, and responsibility are embodied in your expedition crew and put to the test facing an imminent disruption to their small post-human civilization. Personality-driven arguments are much more dynamic and interesting than reading computer logs, although there is also a fair bit of that as well to skim through.

43 - Kunitsu-Gami

A desperate scramble to save villagers, set up defences, place troops and cleanse evil before night falls and a stream of beautifully grotesque yokai attack. If that kinda sounds like a tower defence game - yes. I wish it was either a bit more of a tower defence game, because you can also run around on your own doing light-light-heavy attacks and that part is not very good. Or I wish it was a bit less of a tower defence game and more of a Pikmin situation where you have to run around with your gang and think on your feet rather than mostly just telling the different classes to stand in obviously useful spots. Good game though.

42 - Final Fantasy 14 - Dawntrail

Ah, yeah. Many of Dawntrail's flaws are far from new to the game but perhaps more annoying for their continuation and more glaring without the previous expansion's arc-finale bluster to hide behind. Beholden to the rigid structure of the six zones and the rhythm of trials and dungeons, and the levelling curve, the main story can feel sluggish and stalling while simultaneously frictionless as you glide through areas with no reason to stop or do any side-quests or fight anything. I did think the final, completely urban zone was very cool conceptually even if it is incredibly ugly, but the open-world areas feel more pointless than ever. All that space used for very little. The dungeons and boss fights are excellent though, I must say - the two optional max-level dungeons in particular. In the patch before the expansion they did a little mission set in an dungeon which was a nice mix of action and story - I thought they might be setting up to do more of those. They didn't.

My main problem is I hate the Scions, I am so sick of them. They don't even have the decency to die or change their outfits these days (okay, Erenville did finally get a new fit in the first patch and... it sucks!) I was pleased with Endwalker apparently wrapping things up, and then delighted when everyone agreed they were all breaking up and doing our own thing for a bit, only for this to be slowly walked back in the subsequent patches. Everyone is here! Go away. They make a negative contribution in the game, taking up time and space that new characters should fill so we can actually get to know them. It's often just quite odd as well - for example, this was supposed to be a big step up into a central role for Krille and she often simply has no lines in a scene. The twins are here with laughable excuses about how this experience might be useful for rebuilding Garlemald, instead of perhaps any comments regarding sibling rivalry? It should have just been you, Erenville, Krile, and Zero (the best new character they introduced for ages, now left behind) heading out for this expansion. As Men With The Hide Headgear Option Toggled said, you can leave your friends behind.

But if you like thinking about how something could have been much better there's plenty to work with here. Like what if Zoraal Ja drops out early having found the city himself but, still needing the keys, tries to get Koana on side with found technology promises then Bakool Ja Ja with blackmail about his origins. Ketenramm is your pal and accompanies you from the start until actually killed by Zoraal Ja (seriously what was that about?) Oh and then the big empty wasteland Shaaloani gets fucked up and looks completely different as I thought was going to happen. Things like that. I liked that zone anyway - Estinien can stay, he understood the random cameo is the most polite way to show up. It has that one good song too. Dawntrail is not great, but it's also not dramatically worse than anything else before it.

41 - Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

A super-stylish puzzle-house game I'd very much recommend playing alongside someone if you can, but I suppose that can be said of anything. Maybe sharing some time with a loved one could energise your mind and body? This game is incredibly absorbing and occasionally spooky as you make your way through countless doors, into computers and video games, mazes and memories. The variety of puzzles to solve is really quite impressive, as is the direction in the cutscenes. The story is a twisted, rhyming thing with names and dates endlessly reappearing until it spun out of my grasp, leaving only the sharp presentation and an incresingly hollow pattern-recognition. There's only so many times you can go 'aha! it's that year again!' without also asking '.. so what?' But the thing about puzzle games is that it's always good to do puzzles. I'm happy. 

40 - A Castle Full of Cats

Sometimes when there's a sale on I'll sort all the cheapest stuff on Steam by user reviews and see if anything catches my eye. Due to maths the highest-rated games are always those serving a self-selecting audience in their indulgence of the three base human conditions - fear (jumpscare meme horror streamer bait), horny (incredibly low-quality porn for pitiful creeps) and looking for things (noble, beautiful hidden object games.) This is, of course, the latter. You are very much just looking around a big picture clicking on things, but that is a perfect experience in the same way as spotting a ripe fruit, a pretty stone on the beach, suddenly seeing the face of your loved one in a crowd.

39 - Lunacid

The combination of King's Field style first person dungeon exploring and some more modern inventions such as 'a stable framerate' and 'what if it didn't take ten seconds to turn around' is very welcome. It's somewhat frictionless perhaps, a little easy and the areas a little too short to lodge in the memory. But, by the same token, the variety of locations is very welcome, they're all very nice to look at and atmospheric thanks to the wonderful soundtrack. Finding secrets is of course a draw  whether it's an invisible wall, a delightful side route up to a spindly treetop canopy, or an entire castle. A bit too pleased with itself in some ending and meta aspects - better off without, I feel - but yes, the genre still has the juice. Please squeeze it.

38 - Picayune Dreams

Another Vampire Survivors type but this one has a story so it's good, and you're floating in space getting horrible murder upgrades grafted to your face and body so it's doubly good. 

37 - TWWWR

Oh yes, this is exactly the kind of gleaming gem you like to find in a sale amongst all the crap. A small moody action game with bullet-hellish bosses and some incentive upgrades it's fun to play around with. It's just cool and good, and there's secrets. Gaming that makes you say, 'gaming'.

36 - Mega Man

Probably one of the quickest 'oh yeah, I get it' you can experience that isn't Doom. They made a guy jump and shoot really good on the TV screen. The rest of the game is a bit ropey and absurdly difficult in places, but you can feel the simmering potential there from day one. They should make about one hundred of them.

35 - Snake Farm

And the twist from Vampire Survivors here is that you pick the snakes you're going to fight in the next round, and so control the difficulty and risk/reward depending on how strong you're feeling. Which is a nice idea, isn't it? We all know the most important thing about these games anyway is how stupid ridiculous they get, a billion enemies and effects flashing on the screen to tingle your baby brain like... is Cocomelon still the reference for the latest thing that's ruining all the children? Like Cocomelon for adults? Sorry, all my friends are too gay and/or poor to have kids so I don't know about these things. I only know about Snake Farm.

34 - A Little to the Left

Difficult to say much about this cute neatly-arranging-stuff game, my sympathies to any reviewers who had a word count to meet. What elevates it is that the pencils or pots or books scattered on each screen can usually be arranged in two or three ways, providing a pleasant brain itch when you may be missing something or the lightest tickle to simply observe what you considered the most obvious method of order. Know yourself, even in the most pointless of ways.

33 - Granblue Fantasy Relink

Can't believe this actually exists #1. I was into Granblue for a time like nine years ago, during which Relink was announced. And while I haven't played the mobile game for at least seven and a half years, the Relink hope burned gently all this time. I simply find the art style and the characters very appealing, and couldn't resist seeing everything rendered so well in this breezy action game. Action games! They're good. It would have been nice to have more than two missions in a slightly open area but running along in a straight line is fine too. There's a lot of fighters with varied kits, and a couple of gorgeous towns, and the story is alright too. I played Vane the most, he's got a big halberd and an invincibility dome so you can check your phone while the boss is trying to do a big attack at you.

32 - Elden Ring – Shadow of the Erdtree

A focussed and self-contained chunk of Elden Ring could have been the perfect video game (and they absolutely should have designed & and sold this as a standalone thing in my imo) - as things turned out, it's merely very good. The highlight for me was the Rauh Ruins, a horrible maze of a place in a rare and welcome mid-scale between the tight dungeons and broad open world. The rest of this is rather too familiar, and the fresher ideas often don't quite work - many of the new weapon types are novel rather than useful, and the huge stealth/horror woodland section is cooler in theory than practice. I will always love a big library level though, that one can stay.

The bosses feel like the final culmination of fifteen years of combat design - a spectacular capper if you're feeling generous, a dead-end if you're not. I miss puzzle bosses so much dude, give me something stupid to play with. I miss, more seriously, the possibility of a scrappy back-and-forth, time to enjoy the atmosphere and music of the arena and the palm-sweaty tension of the fight. The big guys here are more all-or-nothing than ever, their moves more varied and complicated, the opportunities to counter smaller, and mistakes more severely punished. Rather too much for an old man alone, rather too easy as soon as there's anything else for the boss to focus on even for a moment. Something needs to change in the fundamentals, and maybe it would have if Elden Ring wasn't so damn popular. I hope they have space in the future to make something smaller and more focused again like lovely Sekiro. Now that's fighting. What if you had a whip instead of a katana and were fighting like skeletons and werewolves and maybe a vampire in a big castle?

31 - Dragon’s Dogma 2

Can't believe this actually exists #2. Dragon's Dogma is right up there for me, top ten of all time for sure. Could they possibly do it again? Well, no. But it's a decent attempt. Everything that's the same is good, and everything that's new is about half good. Still the best that simply swinging a sword around has felt. New class mystic spearhand almost too good, new class trickster so bafflingly useless I can't believe it made it to release. World great - new deserty area fantastic - story fine - cities nice. Sorely missing any kind of interesting NPCs, there are zero little freaks in her, zero devious shopkeepers. The end-game is an effective surprise, a broad transformation to the world that more games should really reach for - though rather less exciting after the reveal and running around for a little while. A big dungeon would have been nice. I also adore the dragon plague concept where your companions can basically turn evil and wipe out entire villages if you don't pick up on some incredibly obvious signs - but I wish it was more gradual and subtle, perhaps a simple murder here and there which you might just put down to something in the game going wrong. On the whole it's a little wary of leaning fully into friction and permanent outcomes. The sphinx is the best shot at that kind of thing, setting mildly meta riddles about game mechanics like which character likes you the most or where you found your first collectible 20 hours ago, leaning in with a drawn-out glare so threatening you start to doubt your answers.��That kind of truly unique enounter makes the whole game sing.

30 - Soul Blazer

After having a very good time with Illusion of Time and Terranigma in the last few years it was obviously time for Soul Blazer. Have you played your Quintet game this year? I adore how completely fixated they always were on the same basic concept - a ruined world slowly pieced back together between simple, pacey action sections - and approach it in radically different ways from game to game. As you'd expect, Soul Blazer is slighter than their later games, but it's still vibrant and snappy, and returning to a little village or whatever as you rebuild remains one of the best concepts to this day, a pleasure to see in any game.

29 - Sylvie RPG

Sylvie fans continue to eat well. Sylvie fans are strong and handsome and respected by the animals of the forest. You say bump combat and you've got a sale. This top-down RPG is full of fun and secrets (some of them a little too obtuse for my old brain unfortunately) - compact and complex at once. I didn't like it as much as Sylvie Lime which I only mention because that's the opposite way it would usually go. Anyway it's just incredibly good to be in it with some smart and thoughtful goddamn game design.

28 - Copper Odyssey

Always a pleasure to enter someone's mindscape and just enjoy their art and ideas. In this sharp little RPG it's chaos at the print shop as the various art supplies have been stolen... and it's finals week! The theme is the game, all hand-crafted and artsy, from the environments to the characters, your abilities in the turn-based combat and the enemies themselves, the bosses and their colour-coded kingdoms all based on the specific printing material they stole. It's a wonderfully specific focus and the tight frame gives rise to great creativity. Of course, with this kind of game, the best bit is finding secret areas and talking to little weirdos - and you'll be very well served here.

27 - Final Fantasy V

Memories of FF5 have kinda slipped away from me since I played it many years ago, in stark comparison to FF4 which immediately and permanently lodged itself in my brain as a favourite. Replaying, it's obvious why - the narrative is thin and cursory as though sacrificed to make the job system as good as it is. It was probably worth it, even if it takes a little long to get going. Still, there are plenty of charming even affecting scenes and, of course, Gilgamesh remains a guy of all time. They should make Final Fantasy V Origins where you play as Galuf and his original crew. 

26 - Moonleap

A whole game based around that one mechanic in every platformer where stuff changes when you jump. You know, blocks turning solid, platforms moving, things of that nature. I will always enjoy this kind of idea exploration - you know, how restrictions can foster greater creativity - and the game does a commendable job squeezing as much juice as possible from this particular orange. It's just really good, check it out.

25 - Kinki Spirtual Affairs Bureau

Something a bit special here, really really dragged down by an unavoidable five-second pause at the end of every line of dialogue. Such a tiny thing but oh my god. Okay anyway, so you're a government exorcist on a ghost hunting mission in rural Japan. And not hunting in the sense of tracking, investigating, methodically piecing things together - hunting in the American sense of the word, shooting things with a really big gun. The action is an series of short, varied, barely-holding-together set-pieces such as stalking a toilet-cubicle maze with a shotgun and blasting Hanako-san grunts as they burst out of the stalls, a rather impressive stealth infiltration though a town and into an office block, and facing down waves of soldiers in the woods alongside special-ops shrine maidens. Everything has been cobbled together with any useful assets that could be found, and the doll-like character models only heighten the sense that this is less a video game and more a peek at someone playing with their toys. It's really good though is the thing, a decent yarn about corruption and revenge and girls, with a few moments of incredible comic timing. There's one particularly good, charming and melancholy section where you're just going round the shrine talking to everyone before a big battle. You should get this.

24 - Dungeons Encounters

Made with about twenty quid and a grin, this bare-bones abstracted map-crawler shines brilliantly with the energy of a devious DM. A game of tempting you into trouble - or simply letting you get yourself there - and shrugging when you ask for help. A game of 'well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen?' The absolute highlight for me was discovering the 'greater descension' ability which will punch you down any number of floors until you land on solid ground. Suddenly the game is not about methodical progress but using every ability you have gathered to find and rescue a bunch of high-level allies who are lost somewhere in the depths. And you will inevitably make some kind of mistake along the way and yell, sigh, then laugh, and start a rescue mission for the rescue mission from the beginning.

23 - Arctic Eggs

Sometimes something can be laser targeted at you and still not quite hit, but that's okay. It's not a bad game by any measure, my love is just illusive and mysterious like that. You are frying up big yolkers amongst other things (bacon, bullets, beer) for the loitering residents of a tiny icy settlement. The increasingly absurd requests for physics-based frying pan flipped feasts were incredibly fun to me, only occasionally infuriating. Between big breakfasts, snatches of dialogue hint at the pitiful state of the world, until your over-easy prowess earns you an audience with the saint of six stomachs. There's a good little nightclub too. Love a shitty little nightclub.

22 - Resident Evil Remake

You know, the one they did for the Gamecube. This is about my limit for spooks but I had a wonderful time. What else can you say? It's absolutely gorgeous obviously, the inventory management is still a little much. Jill sandwich, dog window, Barry Burton my love. The fucking zombie coming back to life. And then, you know, the rest of the game - outskirts, woods, the inevitable secret lab - less iconic as we go perhaps but strong to the finish. (Resident Evil voice) Resident Evil.

21 - Ihatovo Monogatari

A lovely little SNES game based on the works of Kenji Miyazawa, structured as a series of short fables about love and greed and sacrifice with you as witness to the storybook lives of people and animals. You begin each chapter in town and talk to everyone, picking up the latest gossip before you can head out into a new location in the countryside. A single, changing setting is always a heartwarming treat and certainly charms here too as you get to know everyone, as the bar closes and the cinema opens, as the two sentient railway signals grow closer to confessing their love for each other. The stories are pleasant enough on their own, but really quite touching in the game's dreamlike finale which draws everything together, all helped along by an excellent and fitting soundtrack.

20 - Flintlock

I was going to play this no matter what as I'm rather fond of the studio's previous game Ashen, despite some massive flaws. They're about as different as games could be while still being a bit like Dark Souls I suppose. Flintlock isn't as good or as bad as Ashen but, you know, sometimes you play mid for long enough and eventually it kinda rules. After completely failing a desperate plan to seal gods and the undead in their rightful place via giant explosion, you have to start from nothing for another swing at it, this time with the power of a god (but not anime) on your side. There's a few flashes of unexpectedly intriguing design such as the masked multi-armed hosts who float and reform at reclaimed coffee houses in neutral zones, but on the whole it's a fairly grounded fantasy gunpowder/magic stylistic melting pot. I leant into the guns side of the traditional three-pronged skill tree and progressed pleasantly from Bloodborne esque counter-shooter to an absolute menace with the iron. I did find the game fairly challenging to begin with but there was a swift and enjoyable power ramp into completely bullying a whole gang of skeleton guys with special moves and counters, grenades and secondary weapons. There's an impish joy to spotting an obvious ambush ahead and simply blasting heads off at great range with a rifle instead of dealing with any of that nonsense. A strange case too where the snaps into canned animations for finishing moves or a cinematic parry sequence with a boss actually really worked for me. There's a handful of dusty sun-bleached locations to explore with just the right amount of openness and side stuff to intrigue rather than bore, and I even feel positively about the banter between the main character and her godly chaperone. They even made me laugh once. It's not a great game but you can never really tell when something will hit the spot.

19 - Leap Year

A really fantastic platformer where you will die from fall damage if you jump normally on a flat surface, which is just an excellent joke to kick things off with. The rest of the game is similarly delightful, learning to overcome this obstacle first of all and then discovering, in a very natural and revelatory way, new mechanics which were actually there the whole time. If only you knew! Pure, excellent game design. 

18 - UFO 50

As impressive as it is overwhelming, they really did make fifty whole games. I'm gonna say UFO 20 might have been better for me. Luckily I'm not quite old enough for all the arcade-style competitive games and shoot-em-ups to have a great appeal anyway, but of course we'll have a look. The standouts are obviously: Warp Tank, a puzzley-shooter based around the ability to warp to the opposite wall/ceiling at will, a mind-expanding mechanic from screen one. Night Manor, irritating chase sequences aside, a Shadowgate-style horror game that should hopefully just make everyone go and play Shadowgate. And the genuinely outstanding Mini & Max, a wide-open platformer set in a single room where you can shrink down to explore the bookcase, the potted plants, the light fixtures as you please. Find a bunch of cool upgrades and meet the factions of little guys hiding all over the place. Probably one of the best games of the year on its own. Otherwise, I'd like to check out more of the western-themed RPG Grimstone at some point, but quite happy to have merely dabbled with the rest of the collection.

17 - Dragon Quest 2

You really can't beat a well-balanced JRPG, and early DQ gets down to business with a bracing pace. You start off tentatively, scurrying back to town if a couple of drackys look at you wrong, then there's huge and significant jumps in confidence from getting a new party member, new equipment, the Zoom spell to just bounce back to town if you ever get into trouble. There's a particular well-known reveal in the second game which I won't spoil just in case - but it still hits, still rules. Obviously the game is charming as all hell with iconic designs and a delightfully verbose script. The open-ended questing in the second half was a pleasant surprise as well, even if I did have to look up what to do a couple of times. I think they might be on to something here.

16 - Planet Laika

Another banger from Quintet, although I imagine we really have co-developer Zeque to thank for this wild departure in the form of a psychological PS1 adventure game. This was sadly the second and final game with their name on it, details lost to time. Anyway, as you crash into Mars the text narration explains: "Long ago, Earth and Mars made a pact where humans surrendered their faces to the Martians in return for peace. As soon as the Martians wore these faces, they went extinct." And if that doesn't make you go 'hell yeah' we can't be friends any more. An evil seeps through the red soil, and the small crew of dog-faced scientists immediately begin losing their entire minds. The main character Laika already has a head full of trauma and three separate identities, a lot for the planet to toy with. So, off to a small settlement with as many coping mechanisms on offer as residents - destructive, sinister, or benign. Progress is very obtuse (derogatory), mainly just talking to everyone until something new happens, occasionally switching out personality for a small puzzle and cheering when foul-mouthed Yolanda comes out. The story is very obtuse (complimentary) of the whirling dreamscape, reality-warping iconographic kind, a ride to enjoy. Singular and worthwhile.

15 - Parasite Eve

I think I could very happily play nothing but Playstation games until the end of time, they're so pretty. Here's one of the most beautiful shitty police station offices you've ever seen. There's some wicked early CGI from the jump too as a humble city rat mutates into an elaborately-toothed monster, its skull stretching out through its skin. A moody mosey around New York follows, with combat a little too basic for its own good until the customisation options get more interesting in the last few chapters. Wonderfully atmospheric, and there's basically a sorceress from FF8 here which is obviously fantastic, and you get to fight an evil baby. Now I'm one step closer to playing The Third Birthday, the only objective measure of how good a person someone is.

14 - Linelith

What if you could complete neat little line puzzles like in the Witness without the risk of getting a big stinky whiff of Jonathan Blow's opinions? You're right, it would be very good, and it is.

13 - The Tower on the Borderland

I was really struggling to enjoy this moody beauty for a while, before I realised I was just playing it completely wrong. It's not a combat game at all, it's a map game. Just run past everything. It's about mentally ticking off paths once they're cleared, remembering where you haven't been and recognising when you return to somewhere else from a different angle. I suppose that might sound boring to you but it's good actually. What the hell do you know? The tower is a foggy monster-strewn maze which feels like modern ruins have somehow grown through ancient magic. The action is not very good, but as said you should try to shoot things as rarely as possible. There's oddly one very normal Dark Souls type boss, and then a series of Metal Gear Solid type bosses down to their cryptic speeches and gimmick arenas which is much better.

12 - Mega Man 2

We've only recently developed the vocabulary to describe what Capcom did here - it's called locking the fuck in. 

11 - Sudden Death

A dense, frantic shot of queer Australian sports drama on and off the field. One of the single best half-hours of gaming I had last year, give it a whirl. The presentation is exceptional, a shifting picture-in-picture collage which always frames the writing in interesting ways and makes the switch into different narrative perspectives such as a string of internet comments feel entirely natural.

10 - Misericorde - Vol 1

Playing as Hedwig, an anchoress in a remote English convent, you are dragged from your life of pious solitude to investigate the murder of one of the sisters. The accompanying transition of style and tone from this visual novel's sombre, self-flagelating prologue to the bright, busy, playful dialogue in the game proper is quite masterfully done. The absolutely blistering soundtrack cements the promise - this is going to be good. There is a fantastic cast of weirdos with wildly varied reasons for joining the monastery and Hedwig's shock induction into modern (15th century) life is wonderfully delivered as she's forced to develop a personality for the first time. The balance of light and dark, comedy and horror is basically perfect. And volume 2 is out now! Play em!

9 - King's Field 2

My very pleasant recent tradition of playing an old From Software game over the holidays continued. While the first game had this fairly straightforward floor-descending structure, KF2 just drops you on a big island facing a complex web of tunnels and no particular idea of what to do. You'll work it out. There's a wonderful escalation in this game - you start out pathetically munching on weeds to get some health back and simply have no MP after accidentally casting a spell, then you can get a handful of healing flasks, then suddenly there's a dozen full heal, full MP, cure any ailment drinks sitting on your shortcut button. That's when you start playing around with magic and really make some skeletons have a bad day.

My favourite thing is all these doors which open using the same keys, and you have to leave the key behind in the lock to go through - and there's a lock on both sides - so you have to think carefully in case you get yourself stuck somewhere with no way back. So I had a lovely time planning out a route using all the secret passageways and convoluted paths to circle around and collect as many keys back up as possible to bring forward into a new area, it was a great way to cement the map in my head. You could also just dupe the keys for a relatively small amount of money but shut up.

8 - Planescape Torment

This game sucks so much the only good advice is to cheat in a debug super-weapon for everyone so you can play as little of the combat as possible. But don't worry about that, and don't look at the credits either. Just focus on reading the words on the screen, that's the way. Yes, it's simply some of the best games writing ever written in a game. On their surface, many of the broad ideas here from high to low - a cosmos of planes defined by the moral alignment system, a nameless, immortal and amnesiac main character - could cause eyes to roll with disinterest, but everything is strikingly creative in its details and soars for the evocative, literary delivery. A particularly memorable section occurs in the private rooms of the sensorium (where general or highly specific experiences are magically passed along) and you trigger a trap set by yourself in a previous life which kicks you into a perspective-flipping flashback, inhabiting both the woman desperately in love and your own manipulative self as you twist her feelings to your own ends, and your current self observing.

You know, stuff like that. Even the most routine of RPG side-quests have some interesting slant to them. I will always love a game where you just walk around a big city talking to people - especially funny here when you do actually travel elsewhere for the last 10% of the game and everything immediately becomes hurried, messy, and simply not very good. That's why you never leave London. Anyway, one of the greats, it's nice to understand these things. Regretfully, the CRPG guys were right about some things.

7 - The Misadventures of Tron Bonne

Playing Mega Man Legends a while back was something of a revelation, so I just had to go back for some more Tron Bonne. This is a game that manages to transcend not being very good by sheer force of will. There's a few different mission types you keep repeating - the block puzzles are quite fun, everything else is forgettable at best. And it doesn't matter at all. There's a forty-one cute robots to pick up and look at on your ship, Tron wears swirly scientist glasses in the mech lab, all is forgiven. Why didn't they make one hundred of these.

6 - Final Fantasy 8

I suppose replaying one of the best games of all time is rather unfair to everything else on this list but what are they going to do about it. I had not really engaged with Triple Triad before beyond a few cursory matches so I decided to do all that - get every card, do all the little quests, exploit the mod system to become absurdly powerful. It's very pleasant to go through a familiar game in a completely new mode with new goals and focus, spending a lot of time in locations I'd only swept through before until the rules and the numbers finally bent to my will. Thank you, thank you, goodbye.

5 - Shenmue 2

Unfortunately you do have to ask 'is it as good as Shenmue?' and the answer is no of course not, what a ridiculous question. Idiot. The first game is a gift from heaven, a sacred object, and I think every time either game is reflecting on an aspect of this depressingly determined revenge quest the first always does it better. Shenmue 2 certainly has its own lights to shine though - away from Ryo's home town and into Hong Kong, the sense of being alienated and alone comes across very effectively. No friendly 'yo, Ryo!' for you, just gruff directions and people taking advantage and no money. You finally get a job and it fucking sucks, absolutely pointless activity. 

There's sadly only a couple of the focussed room-scouring investigation sections but they're great every time. I love to rotate an object. On the whole this is a much bigger and brasher game, and funnier too. An entire building in Kowloon exists entirely for an extended joke about finding a bird shop. A long tower climb action sequence with your insufferable husband culminates in a rooftop showdown, the ultimate target of your revenge hanging from a ladder on a circling helicopter for no particular reason but the drama of it all. And then, the ending. No simple denouement but several hours of decompression, Ryo (who doesn't know anything) and Shenhua (who also doesn't know anything in a different way) making awkward small talk as they walk across mountains to reach her village. It's fantastic, Yu Suzuki's brain is impossibly big. They don't even get to the village. Then a big flash of magic in the last two minutes and no more game for eighteen years.

4 - Ghost of a Tale

This one got me good - rare is it to sink so completely into a game these days. I was strongly reminded of Eastshade, another favourite from a few years back, and not just because they're both fantasy games featuring animal people, and both a little rough around the edges. They each have this wonderfully light touch with the quests, open enough to make you actually think about what to do, and all nicely intertwined with each other. While Eastshade is an transcendentalist Oblivion in miniature, Ghost of a Tale is more like a tiny Thief by way of Don Bluth. Certainly not the best of first impressions, scurrying around the prison cells wrestling with the slightly wonky stealth system, uncertain exactly what kind of game you're dealing with. But by the time you're outside beside a friendly enough blacksmith in a sun-dappled courtyard, after passing a number of intriguing locked doors, everything begins to settle in nicely. As a mouse in a world built for rats, everything is whimsically oversized and threatening, a scrappy subversion given to your movements through the compact fortress. As the world unfolds - a crypt, sewers, forest, shore - and grows both darker and more magical, you feel drawn into a fairytale.

3 - Boku No Natsuyasumi 2

A fan translation from the outstanding Hilltop was released in late 2023 for this much-desired Japan-exclusive PS2 classic. Young Boku is staying with his relatives in their tiny tiny village for the summer, and that's the game. Wake up and have breakfast with everyone, hear a little gossip perhaps, and then just go out and play until you're called back for tea. Catch bugs with your cousins in the woods, go swimming, chat to the neighbours and the visitors who come and go from the guesthouse rooms. Stop dead in your tracks as you shortcut through the clinic to the river and notice the door to the recovery room is suddenly standing open.

Beyond its incredible beauty and peerless atmosphere of slow summer nostalgia, the game's grounding in Boku's perspective is its most remarkable commitment. He is present but not really participating in the events that nudge along day by day. The adults realistically talk over and around him, the wistful teens may confide but don't expect understanding. You, the player, will obviously piece together many mysteries, but Boku has no power here, he's just a little baby. His confused head-tilts and naive diary entries at the end of each day are violently adorable. I played the game through in August with my husband, one day in the game every day in real life. I would highly recommend doing the same because it was a wonderful experience. You will need to get your own husband though, this one is mine.

2 - Pseudoregalia

Simply some of the best 3d movement ever created here, a joyful expression of acceleration and momentum. Every ability gives you a new option to combo together with everything else and there's a decent nuance to all the moves - by the end of the game you'll be expertly flying through rooms which took five minutes to traverse the first time. It just feels really, really good to get around, it touches something emotional. The action is paired with twisty interconnected level design, a dreamlike castle just big enough that you can't quite hold it all in your head at once, providing a steady stream of 'aha, yes, I'm back here again' delights. There's even a few places where, with a little commitment and perfect execution, you can scramble up onto ledges you're not supposed to yet, so you get to feel very smart and a little naughty. That's the good stuff. It's not really a platformer, it's not quite a metroidvania, it's a cool castle game. Put some trousers on and get jumping.

1 - Racing Lagoon

I apologise for typically viewing Square's constantly baffling business decisions with a wry amusement, I didn't understand the seriousness of the crime they committed in 1999 by not releasing this incredible PS1 driving RPG outside of Japan. This could have changed lives. It's an angsty acceleration through Yokohama's street racing scene where the midnight thrills turn deadly and shadowy corporate figures linger amongst rumour and mythology about 「THE FASTEST LEGEND」. Hilltop have delivered the translation again and I cannot enthuse about it enough - a remarkable job. Main character Sho broods melancholic at the water's edge across from an unfinished tower block, abandoned when the market crashed, and delivers perfectly overwrought poetry about the consuming thrill of the race and what lies beyond the boundaries of speed. 

The actual racing is fine, buoyed by the variety of events on offer from a desperate 10-second panic through tiny right-angled alleyways to the smooth drifting heaven of mountain hairpins. You will get very familiar with the courses as the enemy encounters - triggered by running into cars on the cute miniaturised city map - are usually no more than a couple of corners cut out of full tracks. This makes the longer races slightly less terrifying as you recognise the turns individually and, better, these tiny snips of speed let you experience immediately what a difference any change to your car has made. Realising how massive keeping your weight down is a big early eye-opener, and winning your first supercharger is a revelation. 

The stylistic coherence is unmatched, loading screens could be dialogue, menus and brand-studded uniforms match, the soundtrack stitches everything together with a neon thread. Each night you bounce around locations for gimmick side races and melodramatic chats, putting off the main mission which will advance the plot, just as Sho braces against his inexorable slide into the dark roar of devil-tuned oblivion. Instant favourite of all time.

----

That's it. Go home.

[alexalexok]

thoughts on every game I played in 2023

Oh we're back. Coming in way too late sorry boss, but here it is, some words about every video game I played in 2023. I'll give you a break at the top, here's my favourites in short:

Babbdi, Sylvie Lime, Tomb Raider III, Stranger of Paradise, An Outcry, Betryal at Club Low, Elephantasy Flipside, Time Bandit, Mega Man Legends, Crypt Underworld, Roadwarden, Shenmue, My Exercise.

And here's my favourites plus everything else in slightly more depth, thank you:

January 

Bladed Fury

A side-scrolling action-platformer that isn't especially good but is fairly short which I find very admirable. The watercolour Vanillaware-ish art is quite nice and Chinese mythology still feels relatively novel to pull from. You can play it if you want to, I won't stop you. I could, to be clear, but I won't.

Brendan Keogh's Putting Challenge

As we all know the real point of a game is making enough stuff so you can hide secrets in there. This is a pleasant golf game where you have to do all the 'boring stuff' like finding the next tee yourself and collecting your stray ball, but might start to notice as you're wandering around the little open world something that looks a bit like... yes, could it be, a secret golf hole, out here in the open? That's the moment when a video game becomes a video game.

Sephonie

The modern gamer's brain does recoil so pathetically from anything slightly unusual. This is not my homogeneous platformer game feel ah ah I don't like it help me. Oh just run around for fifteen minutes and everything will be fine you big baby, in video games as in real life. This rules, hopping and wall-running and cataloguing creatures inside a weird island, until the island starts cataloguing you.

Babbdi

Okay, you really gotta play this one. It's short and free so go right on. Meet you back here in an hour. Hell yeah. That's the checklist isn't it: small open world, weird little guys, sweet escalating movements options. I love the creepy little city block, the jump-slide tech, climbing walls with a pickaxe. And then when you go 'I wonder if I can get all the way up there' there's a ridiculous reward waiting for you. A template for all games to follow, please. 

Terranigma 

After playing Illusion of Gaia last year I had to go back for some more Quintet. I don't like this one quite as much based purely on vibes, not the game's fault. But I do really love how big brain these all are - in Terranigma you must simply set out from your tiny village inside the hollow earth and resurrect the entirety of creation. Restore the continents, the plants, the wind, the birds. You get to wander around a cute pixel world map of the Actual World (which I always found novel) as it industrialises (which is unfortunate, apparently resurrecting everything includes humans) and a battle between light and darkness ensues (which is only natural.) It's fantastic, and still a breezy pleasure to play a JRPG with action combat - no matter how simple - and not have to keep stopping for random battles. Guess it must be Soul Blazer time soon.

Liblade

Can't believe I have two games on the list this year vying for the Ape Escape Award for Novel Application of the Right Analogue Stick. Keep an eye out for the other contender later, any guesses? In this one the stick is your sword which, yes, may suggest an approach of measured precision but you really want to throw the thing around with all the manic desperation of a man trying to scrape out the last few smears from a pilfered petit filous. A delightful explosion of effects cover the screen, half the challenge in just parsing what you're seeing. It's pacy and fun with a steady flow of upgrades and a nicely ramping difficulty.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes

It's so funny that this was considered a bad game at some point, as far as I understood through gamer osmosis without really looking into it. They ruined the serious cool guy military espionage with silly cutscenes and backflips, did they? It's camp my love, it always has been. An incredible game in any form.

Sylvie Lime

Sometimes you forget that games should ideally be about coming up with fun ideas and putting them to use. Sylvie Lime is great because you not only get to play with a bunch of cool items (my favourite is the checkpoint house which you throw forward when you use it, so you can like do a bank shot off a wall and bounce a checkpoint past some spikes and then die so you respawn past the spikes) but at the end of tricky platforming areas there's little notes going into the design process and collaboration between the game developers, it's very good. Plus there's a song. 

February

Shadow Tower Abyss 

Fairly fresh off the unbelievable high of King's Field IV, I dipped back in for a similar taste. It's nowhere near as yummy, but the absurd thrill of pulling out a gun whenever the fantasy dungeon crawling gets a bit much is worth it. For a while anyway, before effective and surprising creepiness gives way to really repetitive level design lacking any of the From Software sauce. They don't always got it. On the upside I know how to use cheat engine now because of this game, desiring to finish but not actually play it any more, and so sprinting through the last few levels with an infinite ammo machine gun was incredibly good fun.

There Swings A Skull 

One of a few incredibly depressing pixel indie story games the gamer has to experience every year as part of their solemn duties. Gratefully performed, this one's real good. Anatoli himself dutifully heads out through the sweltering town to a vestigial job, skirting piles of ash that used to be people. Routine, love, despair. Something will happen, right? Someone will think of something.

Hylics

I kind of dismissed this for ages because it looked so good I assumed all the work must have gone into making it look good, and there'd be no room for an interesting video game as well. This was a really stupid thing to think. Game rules. It's playful, not ponderous - happy to throw away a beautiful piece of plasticine sculpture as lightly as it does genre conventions. Yes, thank you, goodnight.

Hi-Fi Rush

Dangerously middling for far too long before you're permitted to have any fun. And then, as though it could sense it was about to get binned I was hurriedly gifted a parry and a second support person and suddenly the game is quite good. The main character Chai sucks through the entire thing though in a way that's perplexing more than anything, no idea how we ended up with this. But you know - good boss fights especially the last 3 or 4, and beating up robots, and fairly nice to look at.

Densha De Go! Final

There's a fantastic complete English translation available now for this wonderfully simple game about driving a train in Japan, perfecting your arrival times and stopping location at each station. And again and again, lulled peacefully into oblivion. My favourite bit was trying and failing to find a map for this game so I could do the conductor mode properly and call out the upcoming stops, slightly frustrated. Then I realised I could just look at the real map from real life instead.

Mystic Quest 

More like Mystic Best. More like Mystic Alright. Fairly amusing that something designed as a JRPG for babies is simplified to a state where levels are incredibly important so you're forced to grind at designated grinding spots until you die of boredom. Luckily everything else is fairly good. There's caves and towers and a fun weapon system, four elemental crystals like any good video game, and some incredible enemy sprites that change as you beat them up. Skeletons falling apart and gorgons going bald, I love them.

March

Tomb Raider III

Tomb Raider II is one of my favourite games and so, due to me being correct about everything, one of the best games. I had never played III before though - I think I knew even as a kid that I wouldn't get along with the limited save system. Thankfully not an issue on the PC version today, I had a wonderful time.  A good old globe trotting adventure, from the jungle to the ice, city to facility, all in service of seeing what cool outfit Lara will be wearing next. While I do enjoy the more adventurey levels my heart is with the concentrated, methodical platforming most strongly presented in the first London level, jumping back and forth and up and down a couple of grimy alleyways. They don't make them like this any more, and they never will. 

Tales of Berseria 

We still haven't finished this lol, it's been nearly a full year. Sporadic hours but it's not entirely our fault. So on the upside you've got here probably one of the best JRPG parties ever assembled? Tales games always do very well developing interpersonal dynamics anyway with endless little chats about the consequential or entirely irrelevant, and the Berseria gang of supposed baddies plus a kid everyone loves and a disillusioned goodie-goodie has a perfect dynamic. But the actual game is a complete fucking mess - wonky, systemically incoherent, filled with bizarre design choices and way too long dungeons. Getting anywhere at all is an obtuse ritual, the story meanders like a slow river with a bad memory, and the combat keeps getting mechanical stuff bolted onto it like it was a dare, like you're being pranked with game design. It's quite something to experience - but also, who cares, my computer friends are in there.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty 

I played this and happened to be watching SD Gundam Brave Battle Warriors at the same time (search S/D BBW online today) giving me the scholar's total understanding of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. Ask me anything about Lu Bu. I was having an alright time then I kept dying stupidly on this snowy battlefield level and got into the spiral of trying to change my build but nothing feeling right ever again and I just couldn't be bothered with it any more. Bin.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin 

But I was still in the mood for some fighting after leaving Wo Long behind and fucking hell this rules. If you haven't heard the good word, perhaps just saw people making fun of some cutscenes and thought no more about it, please allow me to enlighten you. This type of action game has been sorely missed since everything just started copying Dark Souls (and this is not like Dark Souls just because you go back to a checkpoint if you die - that is called every video game ever created) - something with systems and style of its own design. Using every Final Fantasy class you could possibly think of, the variety is incredible - pick any two at random and you will have a great time. There's a dozen different weapon types to use, countless skills, and a unique little mechanic or twist to each class, you'll never get bored. And then, a genuinely interesting and decent story unfolds. And then, Jack Garland is just one of the best leads in recent history. I love this silly silly man. Are those cubes?

Boneraiser Minions

Another of the gamer's sacred duties, getting into a run-based arena upgrades thing for a while. This one is mostly impressive because of how many different types of undead thralls they've managed to think of for your various necromancers to drag from the earth. I enjoy also the ability to customise the battle arena with traps and bonuses and stuff as well. There are so many things to unlock and enjoy, the gamer's delight.

An Outcry

A gut-blisteringly bleak story, a burning wave of fascist crows drags you under. Smiling and sneering. Really sharp, really good. Take a deep breath and jump in.

Final Fantasy

The first ever Final Fantasy game can you believe it. I played the pixel remaster on my phone. It does smooth a lot of the interesting edges off - although early on you will still be struggling for money, having to actually think about your resources and plan for a dungeon trip, probably turning back halfway through, the more generous curve puts all that behind you quite quickly. This is good though, if you just wanted to experience the game as I did - not sure I would have enjoyed playing intelligently for the entire duration, I just don't have it in me. 

Tchia

It is wonderful to be reminded that folklore throws dark all over the world. Tchia - created in, inspired by, New Caledonia - is a lovely little open-world game, the story casting a delightful shadow when the bad guy starts literally eating children.

While the main mechanic is the ability to jump into animals and inanimate objects and use the abilities, one of the best little I-hope-everyone-steals-this ideas is the wonderful feeling of catapulting yourself off the top of trees, chaining leaps across the beautiful island forests. Unfortunately the game is rather too full of generic open world events, but what can you do. Even if it rules to turn into a dolphin I don't really ever want to do a checkpoint race thank you.

April

Toem

It's cute to have a little game that moves between a zoomed-out view of its black & white vignettes and the first-person perspective through a camera lens. I just enjoy getting a real close look at everything. It's a bit disappointing when so many of the quests and requests in a photography game don't involve taking pictures - a little more imagination would have been nice.

Final Fantasy II

They made a second final fantasy game as well. You guys hear about this? It's mostly just fine, not as good as the first game - with the exception of the emperor who is instantly one of the best guys of all time. I never even knew about him before I swear. Sometimes a good character is just really evil. No, more evil. Keep adding more evil, there you go, you did it. Maybe a little more. This bitch comes back from hell to reclaim his throne, an incredible scene.

Tomba

I'm so PS1 brained for all time, I can never get enough of these games. So glad people started making them again. Anyway Tomba is great, it's been bouncing around my head ever since I played the first demo {a burst of static erases whatever unpleasant number was written here} years ago. It might look like a fairly straightforward platformer to begin with but it's actually a unique style of questing adventure game. These aren't levels to get past but areas you will visit and revisit, often figuring out what to do just by the names of events that flash up on the screen like riddles. It's definitely too obtuse at times, but I found it incredibly charming and happily did everything there was to do.

Echo Night

A little sidestep while exploring From Software games of yore, this one rules. Instead of dungeon crawling you are walking around a spooky ship, delving into memories, solving puzzles, and hustling a ghost casino. Great atmosphere, check it out. 

Metroid Fusion 

Not really a big metroid guy but this one rules obviously. Just high quality video game making - looks great, sounds great, plays great. A small amount of text does a lot of work, and the moments of Ms You Are Being Hunted are really quite tense. I was expecting it to turn out that you were playing as a parasite duplicate all along and it's real Samus coming after you. That's what I would have done anyway. Never mind.

Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk

Sometimes a game is more like a cool song, or a thunderstorm, or getting stabbed. Something short and whole you should really just experience for yourself. Hey come here a minute.

May

Armored Core For Answer

The 'do I like Armored Core enough to buy 6 when it comes out?' experiment. Well - no, not quite. But I do like it a lot, even if my strategy was largely just holding down all the shoulder buttons and hoping a complete target saturation did the job. And it worked, most of the time, but didn't exactly make me feel very smart or strategic or good at video games. See you in a sale at some point, Armored Core 6.

Library of Ruina 

I was just starting to get my head around this but then somewhere between an inadvised at howlongtobeat.com (one hundred and eighteen hours) and the developers being absolute dipshits about whatever it was I decided I couldn't be bothered actually.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Oh boy. Definitely the most time I spent with anything this year, happily absorbed during my every free hour. I had a good time and I would easily recommend anyone give it a play. But! If you've got a few hours we can chat about all the ways in which it also sucks, almost every aspect slowly collapsing into disappointment. It's a game of, if you will, highs and lows, if you understand my meaning.

It starts so well. The introductory sky islands are beautiful, playful and atmospheric, with a bright, altitude-chilled quiet perfectly cut through by the presence of these stupid birds running about. And then, slowly realising through the game with every revealed chunk of the map that there's no other islands even a tenth of the size is a real taste of the disappointment to come.

But there are moments in the game that are so fucking cool it makes me want to scream. What the hell is every other open world game even doing if they have no interest in playing with scale like this? Every game where you're just a guy walking across some grass looks like shit now. The breathtaking ascent to the wind temple is an early example, climbing higher and higher in stomach-dropping bounds from the sails on ancient ships. Any long drops in the other direction are just as dizzying - diving all the way from the loftiest sky island towards the earth, towards a small dark hole in the earth and through and down down down into an entire world below... it's incredible.

The depths themselves - an inverted, heart-sapping, pitch black underworld - is wonderful, encouraging a completely different style of exploration than the surface or sky. I had a great time for a long time down there, whether it was nervously tip-toeing through the darkness or hurling myself blindly into the void on a wing and a fan and a prayer. Sadly, there's not enough below to sustain interest - the overarching quest especially is a cool premise with no legs and even less connection to the rest of the game. And there's only so many slightly different green tunics to find that you'll never wear anyway before it starts to bore.

The depths do, however, host easily the best dungeon in the game, a robot factory where you must manoeuvre awkwardly shaped components past obstacles using contraptions of your own design. It is baffling to suddenly realise they had it - they had the thing the whole game should be about right here. But it's not. The water temple for example, is simply bad - it's bad, it's tiny and inconsequential, over in ten minutes, featuring these tediously slow water bubbles you just sit in and wait to float across a gap, and a boss of neither scale nor substance. 

The story too, starts well. I especially liked Zelda in the introduction just being herself - an excitable nerd in her element, Link wordlessly taking the torch from her so she can examine some murals better. They're very cute. Dehydrated Gannondorf is cool too in the three seconds he is actually on screen. The set-up is exciting.

In the game proper - there is no story. Nothing happens in this video game, you're just catching up with what happened in the past. Posed as a great upheaval, the world seems to have frozen at the exact moment you observe it, just waiting for you to finish. It's not even a particularly upheaved world - why didn't a whole village get lofted into the sky, the desert drain away into the depths? Something like that, anything like that.

There is one interesting event - what happened to Zelda - which is a surprise, although you'll work it out long before it's revealed to you, and never be able to tell anyone. The rest of the flashbacks are largely uninteresting, the worst one showing when Gannondorf strolls evilly into a throne room to be evil and the goat king says watch out that guy's evil and then he evils all over the place. I know that's fundamentally all he's ever been in these games, but there's literally nothing else to it. A poorly cast Matt Mercer also fails to bring any gravitas or menace to the role. The horny for Gannondorf posts sure did drop off a cliff as soon as the game actually came out. That's how you know you fucked it.

Anyway, the ending sucks as well - it could have been beautiful, as a transformed Zelda and a wounded Link flew off together to new lands and new adventures. Instead we're returned completely to the status quo, Link is magically healed and Zelda doesn't even remember what happened - a conclusion as boring as it is depressing. The new sages gather round and pledge their fealty in what's supposed to be a touching moment of unity but - why? There is no role for royalty in this world, everyone has managed completely fine without it, and Zelda has never seemed particularly interested anyway. She could easily abdicate her throne, let the twice-assaulted vacant ruin of Hyrule Castle crumble, and become a normal person in the world.

Okay, sorry. It's a lot. I know, 'what did you expect from a Zelda game?' - a little too much I guess! Breath of the Wild really did it for me, and Tears of the Kingdom has the sauce in many of the same wonderful ways, but also a lot to complain about and I love to complain.

June

Super Mario RPG

It's funny how little personality the mario guys have developed in the 27 years since this actually came out, such that the fantastic characterisation of Mario and Bowser (especially Bowser) here still feels fresh, fun, and exciting almost. The mystery of why Geno is so popular will never be solved, there's certainly no clues in the actual game. And it's very insulting to all the homies' real favourite best guy Booster.

Betrayal at Club Low

Kind of unfairly good. Really showing everyone's arses here, Betrayal At Club Low. One secret agent scenario - get into the club, get the intel, and make your escape - and a cavalcade of characters, conversations, choices, checks and chances. Weeping with style, oozing jokes, all mediated by an increasingly absurd dice rolling system. Video games are so good sometimes.

Beton Brutal

I have a nice time just throwing myself at difficult things repeatedly. That enjoyable repetition, switching my brain off to let my hands learn what to do. I am highly suited to working in an office. Anyway this is one of those climbing up vertically games that are designed to make your favourite twitch streamer shout really loudly when they fall down, which you find entertaining I believe. My friction point was not the failure but when I wasn't entirely sure if a jump I was attempting was the right way, if I could ever be successful or I was looking in the wrong place entirely, and that's the thing I found frustrating.

Kaze No Notam

One of those odd PS1 games you know about and always wanted to try, and here we are. There I was. I don't think you were there. You pilot a hot air balloon around, as much as one can pilot a hot air balloon - rising and falling to catch air currents and drift, eventually, to specific spots in the landscape. That's it - as light as a summer breeze, soaring on one of the best soundtracks of all time.

July 

Elephantasy Flipside 

This stirred up some very early gaming memories of Solstice on the NES which is a room-based isometric exploration, puzzle and platformer game with the greatest title screen music ever recorded. Elephantasy Flipside is rather more open, and in every direction your find curious oddities, tantalising ledges just out of reach and intriguing locked gates. The Thing is you can only (to start with) hold two useful items at once - speedy shoes, shrinking magnifying glass, magic wand, mysterious herb bag, dictionary, wonders such as these - and in combination slowly expand your reach and your understanding of the world, saving lost souls along the way. The platforming does get a little too tricky towards the end for old dogs such as myself, but there's a couple useful cheats to smooth all that over. A fantastic, engrossing game please check it out.

The Caligula Effect 2

Impossible to write about this without mentioning Persona so yes, it's quite like a Persona, made on a budget of about twenty-five quid by people who actually believe queer kids exist. I recommend it when you're in the mood. The combat is novel too - the twist is you can adjust when exactly your moves will come out on a little timeline to sync up combos between party members. Beating an enemy like 20 levels higher than you just by keeping them completely locked down with perfectly arranged counters, combos, launchers and aerial attacks is immensely satisfying. Just don't do any of the side quests, trust me.

Hypnagogia

A dozen disparate little worlds with their own style, atmosphere and mechanics, tied together with a dream-delving conceit. You've got your standard selection - mushroom village adventure, vapourwave screensaver snake-god zone, door flirting and ruin exploration, frozen apocalypse misery, spooky like a halloween haunted mansion attraction, spooky like a school at night time and something is There, space. All the places you could wish for - and some definitely more successful than others - with a unifying warmth whether sombre or silly. It's just pleasant to feel the touch of a game's creator like this, a showcase of ideas.

Castle on the Coast 

Usually loose and floaty are bad adjectives to describe a platformer, but this wobbly 3D collectathon is somehow so exceptionally loose and floaty that it wraps back around to being good again. You can just hurl yourself around the place without a care and it'll probably end up alright in the end. It's fun like that.

Upaon: A Snake's Journey

A 'snake + sokoban' puzzle game that really hits the moreish sweet spot of speed and complexity to make you burn through too many levels at a time, eyes blurring, bedtime behind you. Just one more level. Each world has its own mechanical twist as is the way of things, offering plenty of opportunities to make the exact same moves for the tenth time in a row as though it might suddenly become the right solution. Fucking idiot.

August

Time Bandit - Part 1: Appendages of the Machine

One of my favourites of the year, no question. Nominally, a block pushing game. Clear em out and collect (or steal - probably steal) crystals in this rather familiar warehouse. Only that moving a block takes half an hour of real time, and you have to buy your own fuel for the moving machine (at variable rates) and if you're an idiot like I was you can also get the machine blocked in and have to save up for another one to get it out. You can also only work when you're on-shift as randomly dictated by your boss without risking getting imprisoned for a bit (again, both shift and jail time running on real hours). And you have to trudge home to your shit little apartment every time you want to quit or you'll get fined for sleeping on the job. Yes, it is a game very explicitly about capitalism and labour. And for something you can play for five minutes at a time - collecting and redeploying your machines, maybe buying some fuel and exploring the moody little town - it grew to occupy so much of my thoughts. Pre-planning my next steps to be as efficient as possible, sneaking in one more round of moves before bed, checking the petrol prices quickly in the morning, and so the work grew to occupy my free time as well. Ah! You got me. 

Mega Man Legends

I may not know anything about Mega Man, but I know an incredible video game when I play one. You've got a lovely city to explore filled with charming characters, a nice little open world and the interconnected treasure-filled ruins beneath, and a bunch of fun upgrades to help you fight and explore. Just do all these things right and you've got a winner, video games are so easy. Legends also has outstanding ship and mech designs as you might expect, plus this facial animation technique which looks incredible to this day. Then it also introduces instant all-timer characters the Bonnes (well Tron Bonne) and the servbots. It is ridiculous how hard they were cooking with this, one of the greats.

The Turgenev Study

Is this difficult or do I just really suck at it? Probably the latter. It's good though, a little avoiding-guys arena thing, an under-the-microscope asteroids, until instead of avoiding guys you need to absorb them and get their powers and different guys appear and you try not to die and then you die.

Murder By Numbers

I love picross of course, I am a human being after all. I can assure you of that. Ultimately I don't really want to play picross on the computer though, and while playing a visual novel between puzzles did sound like a good idea, I think I'd rather just play a better one on its own and save the picross for doing on my phone in the toilet at work as god intended.

Crypt Underworld 

A quite awe-inspiring monument of ideas - rooms and plazas and buildings and dimensions and realities of imagination stacked on top of each other. I did approach it like a gallery at first, methodically enjoying the space and the jokes and the freaks (complimentary), remembering where locked doors were and what I might like to buy from a shop if I ever got the money.

Then in a nightmare cubicle office, stalked by middle managers, I broke a box and started an exponential chain reaction of box breaking, more items than I could ever desire flying everywhere with the partition walls. And, ah, I'm not a sensible tourist here with my backpack on my front, I live here. I am the king of freaks. And so I blasted off in a stream of piss, destroying the world and the framerate in an absurd shower of bombs, ascending to heaven to kiss the face of god. Sublime.

Astebreed

It does seem like a good idea to make a shump for people who don't play those games and don't understand anything and are generally reviled by polite society. In reality, that makes the game inevitably kind of boring. Just hold the buttons down and wiggle around it'll all be okay, let the bullets pass you by and the anime plot wash over you. You have been, playing a video game.

Dragon Quest

I also had not played the first DQ before so there I went. This was the phone version which is surprisingly good and you can also play it in portrait mode if you happen to sit in an office all day and can't make it too too obvious you're playing video games. This is also a version which apparently requires less grinding than the original, which is quite funny because it still requires: quite a lot of grinding. Getting a level is so huge that some fights are legitimately impossible without enough of them. But all the Dragon Quest stuff you like was right here at the start, it's good.

Drill Dozer

I was under the impression that this was a beloved classic type game but I must be mistaken because it's kinda bad. The drill (as in, the thing you use nonstop for the entire game) makes a really annoying noise, the levels are repetitive and unimaginative, the whole thing rather slow. It does look incredible though. The GBA had it like nothing else. 

En Garde!

Yeah, cool. Possibly more in concept than reality, though it looks like a few patches have fixed all the main things I could have complained about. The swashbuckling, acrobatic Zorro-esque adventure genre feels so naturally rich for a video game it's a real wonder it hasn't been mined before. There's minimal exploration through pretty cobbled streets and massive villas, and a lot of fighting guys with a focus on slapstick environmental interaction as you kick them into precarious vases, grease up stairs and toss jugs onto heads while looking very stylish yourself. Hopefully. 

Orbo's Odyssey

I know we've long reached weird little guys saturation point but come on, just one more. He'll fit, he's squishy. This is a very silly platformer where you go very very fast using some very very very fun ground-slam boost tech to, you know, collect things and do objectives in a few levels. Just look at a trailer for a minute - yeah, see, you want to do that, don't you? What is the point in me writing any of this. Ah, too late.

Baroque

You know when you're walking around your local area and end up on a road you haven't been down before so everything is unfamiliar and weird for a while and then - aha, no I know where I am again. Everything in its right place. That's playing Baroque to begin with, then you realise it's a roguelike dungeon crawler, and suddenly the bones you're eating and the parasites you're latching onto stuff all starts to make a bit more sense. A bit - it's still a fantastically odd game, with all the grimy industrial cyber fantasy the late 90s could muster and a bunch of esoteric systems to crawl through. But, you the gamer fundamentally understand how to hit a big fish with a sword, equip a new overcoat, move to the next level, and shoot God in the head with the angelic rifle.

September

Rune Factory 4 Special

Out of interest really. No-one ever seems to talk about Rune Factory as a game they have played, more as a Thing that Exists, over there somewhere, hoo boy. But in reality it's much less intimidating than I was expecting - it's a completely normal video game. You wake up and tend your farm, then talk to everyone in town, then go exploring or gathering or do a dungeon. There's a massive amount of stuff you can do with farming and crafting, though the actual actions involved on your part are very simple. The combat just as simple, but it does feel nice. There was a lot more I could have done, but there's a pretty early credits roll and I decided I'd seen enough so that was a good stopping point. It's quite ugly too. Mystery solved.

Roadwarden

Ah what if the writing in a game mostly filled with writing was really good? I think they might be on to something here. The beautiful, understated art and music certainly shine but the words are brilliant. You were sent from the city to investigate a freaky peninsula filled with creatures, magic and mystery like some kind of fantasy Area X. But it's all very lowkey and human, you're mostly talking to normal people who are just trying to get along despite everything happening beyond whatever walls they've managed to raise. The world is dense and rich in history, delivered in a way that intrigues and doesn't overwhelm, with so many tantalising threads to follow you will immediately abandon whatever plans you had to pull at them. You gotta get it, at least trust me on this.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

Basically impossible not to compare this to Link's Awakening, and very few games are going to come out of that matchup favourably. Sorry lovely. I think the time travel is mostly not that interesting either, and I love time travel. Still, it's a Zelda so it's decent. I like the switch hook and the rings system (Tears of the Kingdom couls have used something like this) and your usual selection of charming weirdos.

Assault Android Cactus

Oh you know, the robot girls shoot their guns in the arena. Was this a big deal, or did a few people I know just tweet about consistently? A mystery for the ages. Anyway it's still fun to shoot guns in an arena and it's great when your character says the names of the power-ups in a cool voice when you run over them, basic excellence in game design.

Shenmue

Never has such a chasm opened up between my idea of what a game is, from the culture, even from watching a playthrough (bless you GBeast) and the experience I had actually playing it myself so many years later. Just incredible, my favourite of the year by far. The first time the little transitionary evening cutscene played with all the street lamps flickeribg on, that was it for me, I was in love. It didn't let up, as wonderful, serious, single-minded idiot Ryu slowly alienates everyone who loves him by trying to track down the man who killed his father. The bustling town, you know this part, somehow with a reputation of being difficult or confusing when literally everyone tells you exactly what to do. Still, I talked to most people in passing anyway just to hear them say hello.

I particularly enjoyed the docks section in the second half of the game which captures the first job experience so well. Taking an odd pride in doing your tasks when you have no particular reason to care - suddenly having way more money than you were used to and no time to do anything with it - hanging out with a random bunch of guys at lunch just because your wildly different lives have intersected at this point - the victorious joy of getting to the bus stop right on time and the furious misery of being seconds late. Can't wait to play the sequel sometime in 2024. 

October

Lies of P

I played a big new game! Please clap. It's good! Pretty good. There's not much to say, I always enjoy the 'very cautiously poking around a place' experience of these games, though Bloodborne is not my favourite place to draw inspiration from, and the level design here is decent at its best, and of course it all goes on too long. The weapon system - slotting together handles and blades as you like - is particularly inventive, even though I pretty much waltzed through just by attaching whatever hit the hardest to whatever swung the fastest. Worth playing through anyway to see the sequel hook at the end, which is amazing.

Saltsea Chronicles

Big Mutazione fan here so I was super excited about this one. I had an amusingly similar arc with both games, strolling along just fine, not super invested, and then suddenly getting really really into it towards the end. Not as much here, though, I'm afraid to say. I'm just not a big game replayer and Saltsea Chronicles is set up for those that are, branching dramatically when you pick not only different destinations in your quest to track down the mysterious ship that stole your captain away, but also which pair of the crew will venture out at each spot, and even who you pick up along the way. Everything I did get to see in my own single journey was (setting aside the infuriatingly slow card game) very good - little societies on little islands, fraught and protective, connected by myth-making waves.

Subpar Pool

I'm a bit of a Holedown hater but I thought they could make a good game at some point. This point? Yeah almost, a fun golf/pool mix with enough weird balls to something something an (looking this up) andrologist's case study. It's good fun though a bit slight, I really wanted a longer mode or more levels to play on.

Mosa Lina 

'Aggressively random' in its own words, a pleasantly spiky reaction to games where everything is perfectly solvable and none of your decisions are wrong. Dropped into a series of levels with a random selection of items - bombs, blocks, ladders, gravity orbs, spear guns, frogs and so on and so forth - and some things to collect, you figure it out. And you can, most of the time, with the pleasantly naughty sensation you might get wriggling up the geometry or out of bounds in other games. Making things work for you is so much more satisfying than just bringing the right key to the right lock. 

Cocoon

About 60% your standard indie game wandering around and solving relatively simple switch and door puzzles, which I'm not against. About 20% fairly bad one-hit-kill boss fights for some reason, which I am against. And about 20% absolutely wonderful orb-shifting world-within-world brain melters, which are a great pleasure to experience and solve.

Venba

Difficult to do any justice to this kind of game with my words, just go and play it probably. A pleasant story about food, family, immigration, and integration - with no great surprises but with great heart.

Solar Ash

It's weird how this should be pretty much the perfect video game but is instead, somehow, just fine. You are skating, leaping, grinding through pretty levels very smoothly trying to stop a black hole ripping the planet apart - even though it feels like it's already been turned inside out, in time as well as space. So much potential, but none if it seemed to excite or interest me even a little bit. Impressive like that, in its own way. Hopefully Hyper Light Drifer 2 will give me the business.

Maquette

A puzzle game of recursive geometry which is pretty good, because I like to do puzzles. I've forgotten the story, some guy is sad about his wife probably, but there's at least two really nice aha I do have a working brain after all perhaps I won't throw myself into the sun for being an idiot or start posting about how the game glitched out on me I think moments in there.

Jusant

A beautiful game with these almost unbelievably cluttered-up homey abandoned settlements to meander through and really fun climbing mechanics. Unfortunately the climbing is almost all set-pieces and puzzles, and nowhere near enough normal climbing. I would have liked the game way more if I just had to climb up a relatively normal wall for a bit. I promise I won't get bored, I promise. And I really would have liked at least 60% fewer notes and diary entries and other scraps of paper all over the place to read. Clunky and dated design, I thought we were a bit better than that by now. Good game though isn't it.

November 

Inertial Drift

Here it is, the second contender for the Ape Escape Award for Novel Application of the Right Analogue Stick - and probably the winner. In this the right stick controls your drifting, separately from the steering on the left stick as god intended. It's fantastic really, so much so that I spent the majority of my time with the game just going around and around the first track until I had a decent record with each car as they all require completely different techniques on the sticks to get good, to get sideways.

Valkyrie Profile

Very nearly amazing you know. A bunch of miserable vignettes that all conclude with someone dying and getting immediately soul-drafted to fight in the war of gods and the end of the world. The downsides are that everything cool is underdeveloped. The combat has a fun timing element but not enough variety to make the vast majority of the characters you pick up worth developing. The exploration makes rare use of your crystal-shooting platforming ability which is both a disappointment (as there's little else to do but run into enemies) and a relief (as it can be incredibly fiddly when you do need to use it.) Meanwhile, something like the item menu is several inexplicable orders more convoluted than it should be. Still, the tone is unmatched, the sprite animation is incredible, and the splashes of early 3D always a treat. We really had it all.

Golden Sun

Still working on this one. Pretty standard form town to dungeon to town JRPG but it's a real good one thanks to both the combat (with the coolest looking battle screen) and the exploration being of actual interest. Turns out I can quite enjoy doing a dungeon when you have to use powers outside of combat to solve puzzles and stuff, not just make your way from one end of a cave to the other. I literally just said this, Valkyrie Profile, please pay attention.

24 Killers 

Kinda funny that I've had Moon on my games to play list for like 5 years but I got to this first. Such is life. Anyway this is basically like Moon which is basically a talking to weirdos game so you can increase your energy and abilities and talk to some other weirdos slightly further away. Yes, so it's excellent of course, with that tight pleasing loop of efficient planning, a wonderful little world and all the aforementioned weirdos you could ever want - about 24 of them.

Engare 

A short and simple - and only occasionally annoying - puzzle game that's like tweaking some spirograph points until your swooping line matches up with an example and everything cascades into pretty Islamic geometric patterns. Very pleasant.

Cellular Harvest 

There really is little better than finding things around a map. Just make a place and put some bugs or whatever in it and I will happily wander around spotting them all, it's much better than shooting robots or listening to a voiceover about being sad or a third thing that can presumably happen in a video game. In this game all the things to find are freaky aliens as well, so that's a bonus. 

OneShot

Uh.. hmm. Can't think of anything to say. You are sat at your computer in real life and playing the video game OneShot, where adorable Niko must travel through a dark world to restore the sun. It has that downplayed, good-humoured depression, with a decent amount of the fourth-wall poking and peeking around in your file system I always enjoy. Just learn about the world, and yourself. It makes a good case for itself. 

My Exercise 

You press the spacebar to make a boy do a sit-up & press his face into a dog's soft soft fur. And you keep doing it and keep doing it and then other stuff starts happening around the screen. It's very pretty, it's basically the perfect video game. 

December 

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

I fancied one of these, and so one of these I did play. It was fine, I don't know. I think the mere presence of enemies in these games annoys me, because I just want to poke around a weird house without a little red crescent sneaking onto the screen to warn me that someone's watching. I find perfecting stealth kills kind of tedious, the stats game of killing vs knocking unconscious / alerts / bodies found uninteresting, and the full-on everyone-is-here combat mess a classic sign of failure. So I'm usually icing guys and disposing of them purely so I can be left alone for one minute please to look in some drawers. Even then, I'm not reading any of your documents. I just like going around a place! Leave me alone! If you've got a weird torture experiment basement under your shop that's cool too, I will gladly check that out just everyone stop trying to kill me or explain lore to me.

King's Field

I guess I'm just playing a King's Field at the end of every year now. It's nice to build traditions. This is not a particularly good video game, but I had a wonderful time. The incredibly simple combat is so engaging - one attack, all positioning, feeling out range and timing to dip forward just as you sword is coming down and sway back again out of reach. Makes you feel rooted, present. It's fun to explore anywhere in the careful creeping fashion demanded here, although the few levels are not exactly inspired - except for one, in a repetitive layout of uniform rooms with eight exits, exactly when you no longer have a map. Even at the very beginning, From Software were at it.

Loplight

More of an excuse to show you some fucking raw ass pixel art than a video game - and, thank you, yes. I think it's sick as hell. An apocalyptic sprint to save the world, trying to catch what's going on as much as your breath, I enjoyed it very much.

Overboard!

Our Christmas game, a wonderful choicy text adventure about getting away with murder that really comes alive aha in repeated attempts, with a sly narrative awareness creeping in and new objectives to lie, cheat, steal, and kill your way towards.

The end, then there were no more video games.

... oh no! 

[alexalexok]

All the Games I Played in 2022

Welcome back. This year let's - hell, let's just run down the list and see what happens. Let's get it all out. I'm sure you recall with a startling clarity that at the end of last year's list I decided that 2022 would be the year of all bangers and no clangers, an unstoppable parade of joy and quality. So of course by September I had not only played some real shit but was actively seeking out games that everyone hated just to feel something. But for a while I was doing okay... for a while back there.

Some little things worth mentioning to start. Obviously no-one gives a shit about Wordle any more, but two games that followed that trend have made it through the year. Worldle is the one where you guess the country by its shape which I continue to enjoy and has definitely improved my geography. They added extra rounds for neighbouring countries, capital city, flag etc now as well, great stuff for people who love getting things wrong. More recently Pedandtle ('guess the Wikipedia article') has been added to the bedtime routine. Not sure how long it will last but it's nice to work your way into situations where you're trying to think of another thing that humans do, generally, or what is something else that involves water because we're definitely on the right track here. We have continued doing the NYT crossword regularly as well, usually just the Friday, Saturday & Sunday puzzles because the nearly week is for babies. By the way if you visit Down for Across you will find them there and can also do any puzzle cooperatively. Just keep that between us okay.

My two games-adjacent shout-outs, firstly to the Abnormal Mapping podcast (and other fine products on the network) whose monthly game club has pushed me to play a bunch of cool stuff I have either always meant to, or wouldn't have touched without the impetus. Secondly to Maraganger's youtube channel which I just found in the last month or so but who does good video essays on the exact kind of weird crap I'm into. Thanks all.

Anyway let's get on with whatever this is.

-

January, February, and March

Started the festive holidays with the King of Dragon Pass. Huddled up around the computer for warmth to have endless problems of our own creation with the lizardfolk and routinely kill half our population trying to force our way cluelessly through a ritual recreation of mythical feats. What better to sustain you in the depths of winter, this is probably what the 50s were like.

Sakuna of Rice and Ruin. I've never got into a farming game properly, but Sakuna hit the spot by focusing not on the usual ever-expansion of acreage and variety, but instead giving you one small square paddy in which to gradually perfect the art of rice. You gotta do it all - preparing your seedlings and soil for sowing, trying to keep everything straight and properly spaced as you plant, then controlling fertilisation, water level, weeds and pests through the year before reaping, drying, threshing and hulling the harvest. Each step simple but important, culminating in a big boost to all your stats at the end of the year based on the quantity and qualities of your rice. This feeds wonderfully into the other half of the game which is an adequate sidescrolling brawler, elevated by the focus on bouncing a dozen enemies around the screen and into each other in a ridiculous dance. Add some excellent found-family development as spoilt harvest goddess Sakuna warms to the mortals she was exiled with and I am very happy, what a good video game.

Adios also has a farm, the kind you wonder around performing daily tasks while having a pleasant, doomed 'I don't want to work for the mafia any more' chat with a mafia guy. You know the type. It's pretty good, not fantastic but the kind of game I'm always happy to see and play. But, you know, it's not exactly like it has an incredible parry mechanic.

Unlike Unsighted, for example, which does. One of the best maybe. No no, let's not get ahead of ourselves. This game rules check it out. You'll probably be as tempted as I was to turn off the 'NPCs run out of time and die' mechanic but please don't, it really adds a lot. You can let them die after you become best friends with them and they give you a present instead, as god intended. Good dungeons, and great movement including a snappy grappling hook and 'what if that cog thing you can ride on from Twilight Princess was actually good.' A banger.

Klonoa is objectively just fine, very simple and very easy with occasional frustrating parts, as was the style at the time. But you play enough and you go 'oh, yeah, I get it' - it's charming, light, playful, I will remember it fondly. I love to get things. I love to understand what the hell any of you are ever talking about.

Vampire Survivors took me a while to get into properly. It is great from the off, the simple joy of narrowly avoiding enemies and managing a crowd and oh my god there's a billion skeletons on the screen suddenly haha what. And for a while, for a bit too long, that's the whole game. I was happy but not too impressed. But then! You cross a line somewhere and get into the nonsense zone where more and more systems, upgrades, options, unlocks get piled on and it's less about that basic gameplay than working towards something else entirely. Turns out there are more ways than you'd ever think to make lots of stuff happening on screen even sillier than before.

The Final Fantasy IV replay revealed that it's maybe not quite as good as I remember, but it's absolutely still in my top 3 with (of course) 10 and 8. I'm far too old to start changing my Final Fantasy opinions anyway, come on. The best thing is that instead of a normal JRPG where you get your party in a few hours and then go on the adventure together, FFIV is like an actual story first with characters coming and going as events dictate. It feels less predictable in this way with a great momentum, and a much appreciated variety to the battles as your team members are constantly changing.

The Shivah is a classic for a reason, a short adventure game which culminates in an absolutely incredible verbal duel trying to out-Rabbi someone on a rooftop.

Olija asks wouldn't it be cool if you had a magical harpoon you could throw and then teleport to. I think you know the answer to that, Olija. Really effectively cloying and foreboding at times, the platforming and fighting is otherwise decent and the story of colonial saviour Faraday killing off the evil tribe and saving the princess is exactly as bad as that if you think about it.

Helen's Mysterious Castle I had never heard of until it was mentioned off-hand in a discord chat. Ten minutes later I had bought it (it's like £1.50) and completely fallen in love. It's a top-down RPG with great puzzley fights that feel like fast duels, managing the chunks of time that your various weapons and shields take to use against an incoming attack. The game just has a certain, I don't know, je ne sais quoi. I love Helen's gormless little face, I love the odd world stacked on top of itself. Go, experience joy.

Grapple Dog is a fun 2D platformer - good, good enough that the ways in which it is not quite great start to prickle. If it was worse it would be better. That makes sense. It is still pretty good though, to be clear. There's a lot of nice platforming ideas, though there should probably be more grappling. Nice secret finding, but bad signposting so you can easily go too far in the right direction and not be able to return. But again, I must reiterate, it's pretty good.

And then Elden Ring happened. It's wonderful, you've probably heard about that. If you didn't, now you have. You can trust me. Dark Souls. Let's get to my main criticism instead which is about the big open world itself, as I guess you might expect from their first proper crack at it. So the vistas are incredible, the views, the spectacle - look at that big castle over there, look at that big fort over there. Look at that big citadel over there. A giant tree, a spiralling storm, a burning mountain. They have always been very good at this. And the small scale moment-to-moment when you're in those places is, of course, immaculate. 

But the landscape itself, as a place you travel through - not as strong. This is before you even get to the two giant snowfields at the end which just feel rather rushed and thrown together, forgiven only for the fantastic dungeons they lead into. I don't know why games are scared to have empty spaces. It's okay. A gently sloping plain to gallop through is nice, I promise I won't be bored. It sets the scene, it flows with you to the points of interest. Much more memorable than having big blocks of fallen stone every ten steps in a rather bitty, disjointed overworld.

There are many good parts of course, I think most successful is the giant flight of steps leading up to the capital city and the walled grounds beyond. A large scale thing you are actually in rather than just moving towards. Anyway, incredibly good video game that consumed me for a month.

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April, May, and June

Freed of the Elden Ring grip I completely lost it and went into a feral gamer hyper state, tearing through like 30 different things just because I could reach them. Don't talk to me when I'm gaming.

To start here's a bunch of stuff I touched but didn't get into that much during this period. Chorus (or Chorvs if you like making silly noises out loud) is a flying-a-spaceship-around-shooting-stuff game, which are fairly rare these days. It seemed decent enough, but then I fell off. These things happen.

Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold is great and I would love to play more but I was playing it at night before bed and then I started feeling bad because I should do some reading or writing instead then. Normal brain. 

Ninja Gaiden and Dead Rising were both 'I never played this so I want to have a proper look' things. Ninja Gaiden is really not my type of thing but I'm glad I tried it, I didn't even know it was set in modern times or there's a second character you control sometimes. It's fun to know things. Took a while to get my head around the combat but when everything starts to click into place it really is very good, more methodical and reactive than I expected, more about precise and devastating moves at the right time than mashing out your favourite big combo. I get it, like a ninja might do. It's a shame that all the other things like level design, aesthetic design, platforming, checkpointing, etc. are all bad, if those kind of things are important to you. And I generally don't appreciate having exploding kunai thrown at me either. 

And Dead Rising I will return to at some point probably... now that I've died a few times and might last a bit longer in the future. It's a good planning game - okay I'll go over here via this route so I can collect this item and then stock up on healing here while I bring a couple people back this way. What's better than making a schedule.

I only got halfway through the first route in Fate Stay Night but I will continue at some point due, it's an important historical document. 

And Cook Serve Delicious 3 I hardly touched but I'm happy it will be there waiting for me the next time I want to clack away furiously upon the keyboard as though I am writing the next great American novel when I am actually placing a single portobello mushroom upon the grill.

Norco! Lovely, horrible Norco. The best writing to read in a game since Disco Elysium's slow shivers zoom-outs. Not a particularly good video game when it's trying to be but don't worry about that. Don't worry at all. Okay, now worry a lot. There is quite a lot to be concerned about in the decaying industrial cancer swamps. I struggled to write this bit because I kept thinking up complete shit sentences that start with 'unlike most video games..' and embarrassing myself. Norco is not unique, but it does have a literary confidence which pulls everything from the bleak to the absurd into coherence beneath a weighty melancholy. 

Tunic is perhaps the opposite, trying very hard to be nice, trying very hard to be a video game. I would call it ill-judged rather than bad, as everything is good but flawed and awkwardly assembled in some ways. I absolutely loved deciphering the language because that just appeals to me, but it is its own reward rather than doing all that much in the game. I would have revealed the 'holy cross' secret much much sooner, which would have made the wildly imbalanced combat more manageable but also slowly opened my eyes to the secrets around the world, instead of basically seeing all the game and then going back through the whole thing again ticking off murals.

Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia) absolutely sucks ass, I hate it. Just kidding, that was a funny prank at exactly one person. Got you. So I like JRPGs obviously, I am human, I have a beating heart. Here instead of turn-based fights you just run around and hit enemies with a stick and when everything in the room is dead you level up. I wouldn't say I prefer it but this does give the game a very nice sense of pace as you visit all the ancient wonders of the world. Your little group of friends tagging along are characterised fairly lightly but I grew very fond of them. The story between the action sections is interesting and varied, you're never just routinely walking straight to the next place to tick it off. You go into dreams, you're lost at sea on a raft for a while, there's a whole thing about slaves and an assassin tracking you, you play poison Russian roulette in a floating village and encounter people forced to cannibalism by famine. Sounds pretty bleak when you lay it all out like that doesn't it. Great game.

Far: Changing Tides I would have completely forgotten about if I hadn't kept this list. Far: Lone Sails was a nice surprise for me a few years back, good little puzzles and a big weird machine to jump around inside to get moving. The big machine in the sequel isn't even as good to control I don't think, and the storytelling does even less. The ending is nice but I wasn't exactly sad I was finished.

Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy. Nothing to say here, it is what it is, slightly better than you may expect, much worse than anything that is actually good. Sometimes I find myself playing through these things when I don't need to.

Metal Gear Acid 2 is an oddity that almost works. If they made another one they'd probably have crushed it. I'm sorry for ever doubting you, the Metal Gear Acid 2 fanbase. It was a helpful game for me to clarify that I don't dislike tactics games, I just dislike how everything always takes forever and there's too many characters and the maps are too big. Going through these small levels with two characters was just right, please make something else like this for me. On a similar note please make a fantasy RPG with a story on Into The Breach scale levels, thank you.

Franken is a great little JRPG, everything you love condensed into a few hours. And it's free, and it's got jokes. The jokes are good jokes, to be clear. What are you waiting for. 

Super Mario 3D Land - I played 3D World on my precious Wii U long before this, so I was expecting basically the same kind of thing. To my pleasant surprise 3D Land is actually quite different and I would say much better. The levels are smaller and more precise, focused on being good rather than giving space for multiplayer chaos as the sequel does. Just everything you want, fun new ideas at every turn. Super fucking Mario.

Citizen Sleeper is the other one besides Norco that got me going yeah hell yeah look at these fucking words, these are fantastic words on my computer screen right now. I had an interesting arc of quickly fleeing the bustle of this creaking space colony's main section to join a small commune and grow mushrooms in peace. Delving deeper into the tangled forests below I found the opportunity to cut every tie completely and dissolve my consciousness into the network, which I was absolutely going to do. That's the dream. But I accidentally picked the wrong option and so ended up staying behind. Bitter about it, disappointed, I had to wander back and pick up the other connections I had left hanging. My regret didn't last long helping so many other great and earnest characters, slowly managing to build a better life for myself and the station as a whole besides. Eventually I met a father and daughter and with them, then, leaving everything else behind felt like a positive step forward from a firm foundation rather than flight. 

Seraph's Last Stand... I think I tweeted something absurd about this saying it might scratch a Vampire Survivors type itch. But it won't, what the hell was I going on about? But you go side to side shooting upwards trying to avoid bullets and then you get some cool upgrades, as is traditional.

It's A Me is basically just a really good joke in video game form. Just download it and see for yourself please, it made me laugh very hard. Thank you.

Leaving Lyndow is a special treat just for Eastshade super sickos like myself. It's a smaller, shorter thing set in the same world, made before they decided everyone should be an animal person so the characters are bizarre humanoid ape(?) things with black voids over their mouths. But the beautiful, gentle atmosphere is all here already, it was like coming home to say goodbye again.

Venus Looking For Jupiter is a shot of joy, running and jumping across rooftops and blasting doors open while you listen to one really good song and then it's finished. Let it clean your head out.

Endling is a bit like if PT was silly rather than scary and set in an Ikea house with an AI asking you questions. So you loop through day by day and things change based on what you said last time, and then inevitably it all starts getting weird. You can throw things around too, it's fine.

10 Minutes Till Dawn - it's a free concept slice of 20 Minutes Till Dawn which is the actual game. I was gonna say now this actually is a Vampire Survivors itch scratcher, but once you add in active shooting and reloading we're back to a good old fashioned top-down arena shooter. The old is new again. Kill waves of guys and get upgrades, it's a good one of these with a nice art style.

No-one Lives Forever, the 60s spy FPS, which you can still just download for free (I mean, you can just download any game for free, please go right ahead) because it's abandonware due to legal rights issues. It's nice to Get Around To playing stuff you always wondered about. I think it's nice anyway, as you may have gathered. Initially this one was a real disappointment due to the awful, drab, repetitive first level, but the game really takes off after that... literally!! There's a level on a plane. There's levels everywhere - shipwreck, nightclubs hotels, snowy mountains, research offices atop secret lairs and, of course, a space station. The variety is quite impressive even today and it does effectively feel like a globetrotting spy adventure.

And then I thought, I thought, what if I just play two incredible games that are incredible in the same kind of way so - Outrun 2 and Afterburner Climax it was. Now Outrun 2 and Afterburner Climax are just sitting on my computer ready for me at any time. What a world we live in, what a time. They are both blistering, buttery spectacles, simple action blissfully perfected. Blue skies forever.

Unexplored 2 is a game I was looking forward to having heard many good things about the first game, especially regarding the generated stories. The sequel certainly looks good, I was keen to jump in - and I don't like it at all. I might even say it's not very good. The repeated experience was taking a lot of time and effort to get somewhere and then discovering that I couldn't do anything when I got there anyway, and then dying in an annoying way and having to start over. I thought, there must be something I'm missing, I'm sure I just got unlucky, but the same thing happened three more times and nothing else interesting came up. I just don't know, good luck to all who sail in her 

Hardspace Shipbreaker is really good right up until it has nothing new to show you. There's a certain void of creativity you drift into after that. There's no innovative or fun upgrades, and once you've seen the biggest ship you're done on that front too. I was very excited to dismantle a 'ghost ship' which was sure to be spooky and fun, right? But it's just a normal ship with annoying little bumps everywhere you have to get rid of. Still, everything is good at the start, slithering down into the guts of a ship, slowly cracking welds in the narrow voids between the walls, and finally emerging again into the open to peel these vast, perfectly dissected lattices of metal away from each other.

Witch Spring 1-4 - I went through all of these over the year, mobile JRPGs that you can play while half paying attention to a middling TV show after you've eaten your tea. Made by a very small team, it's been quite pleasant to see how their skills improved from game to game in terms of environment design and system complexity. And game balance too - slightly unfortunately because in the first two I enjoyed how easily you could get really overpowered with a little smart gathering and training. The third game is basically normal but the fourth is tuned very weirdly, it feels like the maths behind the scenes is broken. Boss fights strategy is to hang on barely doing anything until your special attack is ready and then winning in one shot. Not exactly what I'm after. You tried to make your video game too much like a video game I'm afraid, that's your problem.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake I was fairly impressed with overall. It certainly is bloated beyond belief with every incidental part of the original blown out into a whole ordeal. What if instead of going through a normal door like in Final Fantasy 7 you got teleported to the threshold realm and had to fight the king of knobs and hinges to escape. But through those endless corridors you also get the most lovely incidental dialogue so it's impossible to say whether it's bad or not. The characters as they function in the plot are a bit more up and down - Tifa comes out the worst as she's burdened with the role of indecision so Barret can reiterate the cause, and then even he is set up for a new moment that would be massively cathartic only for it to be taken away. Pretty much every secondary character gets their time to shine though, and there's some good new ones - I love Chadley. And I love Roche even though he, the motorbike guy, didn't come back during the motorbike segment at the end. Hello. The combat in the main game is very nearly good but incredibly frustrating to recover when you're on the backfoot. It's fantastic in the DLC though where they made Yuffie (who rules) an absolute demon who can do anything and is so much fun to use.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the game is really just thinking what's going to happen next, how are they going to handle all the changes from now on and a world that expands massively outside of Midgar. It's very funny also how much character development Cloud gets, he's basically had the entire arc already which is fine but where does it go from here.

Fatum Betula is a wonderful, spooky low-poly adventure game. You gotta walk around and collect different liquids to water a magical tree with and see what happens. How many types of liquid can you think of? Sometimes you just really click with someone's imagination, sometimes those people make video games and you are incredibly lucky to get to play them.

Zone of the Enders 2 is the last game I wrote about in here because I couldn't think of an opinion. It kinda sucks. The story bits are bad anyway. But it also rules. Sometimes wow cool robot is all you can say.

Omori unfortunately I played in a moment of great impatience. I'm being charitable and putting the blame on myself here instead of laying into the game like I really want to, but that's okay sometimes. I can be nice. It's pretty, nicely varied, good characters, the combat is fine I guess. It's very up front that Something Bad Happened, and uh-oh the bad thing is lingering and threatening to break to the surface, here's a scary bit before everything snaps back down again. And I did that for like 12 hours going back and forth between colourful fantasy world with good characters and jokes and fairly tedious real world flashback sections and I thought, this is quite a long time I've been playing now surely I'm nearly finished? And the internet said lmao no not remotely maybe double it and I started thinking when this finally does get to the exact details the Bad Thing am I actually going to care or be surprised or whatever and I decided to stop playing instead. Please, literally every video game, get on with it 

Dragon's Dogma is Dragon's Dogma. It's Dragon's Dogma baby. I had not played it since the original release so all the extra stuff was new and pleasant for me, and painful. There's FOUR more port crystals? You get an INFINITE USE ferry stone?? You kids have no idea. So a nice journey of reminiscence through this odd, brilliant game and into the Bitterblack Isle expansion, which rules. They took the game and made a different kind of game with it. Dragon's Dogma dungeon delving works perfectly, spooky dark corridors leading to who knows what while also serving as useful pinch points for your own attacks. Grab the loot and get out with your lives before a giant undead dragon materialises out of thin air or Death shows up to ruin everything instantly. The main thing anyway is that swinging a sword around has never felt better than this and maybe it never will. I hope they try very hard because Dragon's Dogma 2 is one of the few warm lights in the distance that keep me plodding onwards. 

And The Room is The Room. Click on things and make things do other things, the perfect video game. Whoosh, click click click. Soft chime of success. You are smart, you are capable, you have succeeded.

A Monster's Expedition is probably a bit too big but a very nice puzzle game about pushing trees over and rolling logs around to make a path from island to island. I judge puzzle games on whether or not I get stuck and then go to bed and suddenly solve something while on the edge of sleep. That only happened once, but it did happen. 

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July, August, and September

Riven, you know, The Sequel to Myst? It's hard to say whether 'go through a door and then turn around and close the door again, revealing something that the open door obscured' is better than Myst's 'get in the lift and press the button but then get out of the lift so it goes down without you and you can get on top of it' but they're both exceptional moments in video gaming history. Riven is really weird because there's generously about 3 actual puzzles in the entire game. My fuzzy memory of it from childhood involves just wandering around for ages in the woodland area taking one step forward and then spinning in a circle trying to find anything new. It's nice to know that's the general experience for grown adults too. The funniest bit this time was that we didn't even find the main proper puzzle until right near the end, so we'd been everywhere and written a load of disconnected information down but had no idea what it was all actually in aid of. So then we got to enjoy finally finding The Big Board Where You Input All The Knowledge. Ohhhhh. 

Bitblaster XL is a retro asteroids-style space shooter. Shoot the stuff. Unlock a different ship. Keep it going. It'll be the weekend soon.

Clawfish is a thing where you get off a train and collect fish from various claw machines with sightly different controls on a kind of tiny boardwalk island in the middle of the ocean. Sometimes a game is just something like this and you know what? Thanks very much. I'm wiggling my fingers, don't mind if I do.

Powerwashing Simulator was an interesting experience. I played a bit and then started feeling compelled against my general wishes to keep playing it. I don't think it's all that good, and it makes my hands hurt, it's annoying to completely finish up a job, the upgrades are boring, a lot of the jobs are boring too before stuff starts kicking off. But I just kept going back for more Powerwashing. An addictive sensation I suppose but I don't want to overstate it, I've never really experienced that before. So in the end I played nothing else until, with great relief, I had finally rid myself it. The evil was defeated. I guess I should feel lucky that this is a normal finite video game and not an endless one but let's not do that again.

Little King's Story is great. The little king himself is an awful shit but it sure is fun to get a load of the boys together and take over the world. I'm slowly playing all the games that are a bit like Pikmin I guess, there's not that many of them. What if Nintendo made a fourth Pikmin game for me like they said they would. Anyway what was I saying. This is half a Pikmin where your gang can have loads of different jobs, everyone has their own stats, and you can even give them equipment. It can be very fiddly to manage everyone in the middle of a fight but you'll get over it. The other half is kingdom upgrades and expansion until your lands are quite ridiculously expansive and your army unstoppable. All good, but the quirky imagination in the surroundings kingdoms is what lifts the game as you go through candy pinball, trivia-based egg cracking and giant beard ascent bosses, into a fantastic finale as you fly into the heavens before the world ends.

Raven's Hike is a really good (& cheap, & short) puzzle platformer where you can't run or jump, only grapple in the four most popular directions. Grab all the gems and get to the exit, so it's half route finding and half precision execution. Another good one for your list of games I've told you to get. Go on, write it down there, write it down.

Now a brief pause because in the background of all this gaming I had also been playing Final Fantasy 14 (not that much) and Genshin Impact (quite a lot still) - both of which had big patches / updates in the same week. A good time for content enjoyers. I find that FF14 holds my interest less and less these days, though I do hop on every time something new comes out and I have a good time! It's a good video game, I like seeing the friends, I just no longer have any urge to do much beyond that. I really don't want to level anything else or get way into a card game or cramming materia into my stuff or crafting a billion perfect shoes or whatever all the real freaks are into now, it's okay. 

Genshin Impact I try not to talk about. As a simple creature who just enjoys running around a pretty world solving little puzzles and opening treasure chests I'm happy every time a new area gets added. This year is was a big jungle and a desert area. It keeps me busy. Don't play Genshin Impact probably.

Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day Journey - I was very excited for this, but it's merely alright. As a big Attack Of The Friday Monsters fan now, and seeking any kind of hit of Boku no Natsuyasumi while it continues to be largely withheld, I was hopeful. But with the Shin chan antics very much toned down (as I understand it) and fans of these games lumped with loads of characters they don't know, I don't think anyone will be left especially satisfied here. This is still a good game with a high-imagination summer-holiday dinosaur-summoning nonsense story alongside fish and bug collecting, and the requisite terrible mini-game. It's just, not quite what you want.

Immortality is just incredibly cool, scrubbing through the reels of three doomed films. I kept getting distracted thinking about what this game must have been like to make, the logistics of it. It's all very impressive, and entirely believable. Perhaps it's wrong to say distracted actually - as so much of the footage is rehearsals, casting, clapperboards, discussion either side of the action, closely examining props - the game is keen to show how much work goes into making something, all the set-up and organisation, all the people just out of frame, the drive to get something done.

Anyway it's good, I wanna watch Minsky. It's great to slowly puzzle things out, whether it's just the plot of the films or what happened off set or the story behind the story. And the first time you discover something else lurking amongst the footage is probably an all-time incredible moment. Although I will say, while I was initially deeply intrigued, the more details that came through about this aspect, the less I liked it. An eternal struggle across the course of human history is just fundamentally much less interesting to me than some obsessive weirdos being weird because they're weirdos.

Flerp is a very direct attempt to replicate SNKRX with a slightly different format, and certainly succeeds at that, but the format itself is just not very interesting. Instead of controlling a little snake, avoiding enemies while your segments do their thing, you place some turrets in the middle of the screen and watch what happens. It's alright to watch stuff happen for a while sometimes I suppose, but it's not 'good'.

Wayward Strand is fantastic, I was so enamoured by this, and for a small game to be fully voiced and voiced so well is wonderful. You play as a young girl who spends a few days at a flying retirement home slash hospital. Just help out, your mum says, immediately too busy to say what that could actually mean. If you ever had to hang around your parents' work as a kid, that feeling here is exactly correct. And so left to your own devices, you just wander around and talk to people, and that's the video game. Time ticks by but you never feel rushed or as though you're missing out even as you see people coming and going on the floors above and below, though you might run along afterwards and see if you can overhear anything juicy. You can flit about and land on a whim or keep chatting to your favourite elder or, most likely, go where it feels you might help the most, such as it is. Sometimes that's the thing.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana. Hell yeah. Games fucking rule dude. Video games are incredible, look at this. See my thoughts on Illusion of Time above but even more so, it's never felt so good to be a little guy jumping around laying a hundred attacks on enemies and sprinting on to the next bunch while the sickest music you've ever heard plays. Then a boss puts up a bit of a fight and you need to actually stop and think for a moment. You keep returning to the one little town where things are always progressing and everyone gets their own bit of character development, it's very cute. And the game looks great. And check this out - I think the Duke and the church might be up to no good. Basically the perfect video game.

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October, November, December 

So then I thought, what are some games that suck or everyone hates that I should play to either suffer needlessly or make a very important, insufferably smug stink about. Starting with Recore, a game from 2016 with a protagonist who wears a mask over her mouth but with her nose sticking over the top. So I got towards the end and was pleasantly surprised how little time it took for a semi-open world exploring game of this type. I love a short game. Then I got completely stuck in one of the end sections, dying until I just had to give up. Turns out I guess I should have been grinding out all these side things for health upgrades. Which makes sense, but I would have had a worse time overall if I did that. The extra little challenge dungeons are actually quite decent, the platforming ones especially (the platforming is bad but the level design is good) but they're all especially stingy so you probably won't get more than one reward first time unless you get exceptionally lucky. 

Super Mario 64 - specifically Super Mario 64 Plus, which is a very in-depth kind of mod skin for the game, allowing you to change just about anything you can think of. I made it look slightly cleaner and activated a normal goddamn camera, thank god. Also 'improved flight controls' which tragically didn't seem to improve flying at all. But you can do all kinds of crap including adding moves from other Mario games in, which is fun. Anyway I never really played this properly before because my only experience was with the DS port which can charitably be described as infuriating. I spent more time on the minigames than the actual game I think. ANYWAY, Mario 64 is great. Obviously.

Tinykin is a breezy, easy Pikmin-alike with the added bonus of being a tiny little guy in a normal sized house which will always be cool. Actually I guess that's what Pikmin is too. Okay so this one is inside instead of outside. You get a bar of soap to slide around on and grind along edges with which instantly bumps the game up 2 or 3 points if you were to /10 it. It's definitely missing the better little guy management aspect of Pikmin (and Little King's Story actually) where you are using them to complete 5 different tasks at once in a pleasant arrangement. The focus is more on exploring and collecting, and that's alright. It's alright.

Slice & Dice is a turn-based roguelike that understands the best strength of the genre is getting a load of ridiculous effects working off each other. It even has a mode to skip the first 8 fights so you can get straight into the nonsense. It has like a dozen different modes actually and one hundred heroes all with different attacks and abilities on each face of their dice. Roll the bones and see what you're working with. I do wish everyone had 3 equipment slots rather than 2, but I just love chaos more than balance or whatever.

Moonpong is like, you move a paddle around a circle and try to hit all the stuff in the middle. It has a great style and some fun moments. But the main act you can perform in the video game, bumping the paddle forward to give the ball a bit of a thump, feels really limp and ineffectual.

In Resonance of the Ocean you are on a little island and you hear weird noises wobbling out to you across the ocean, so you collect some junk to make the same noise back through a giant megaphone. That's, you know, the power of connection over vast distances. It takes ten minutes it's nice.

Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia is another game by Bryce Butcher who made Fatum Betula. And what a game. It's a fishing game, you walk around a big lake and catch all the different types of fish, and find lures that are more alluring or can catch fish hanging out deeper in the lake. Deeper, deeper. A strange light shines from the black water at night. And if you're a seasoned game player you'll think hey I wonder what happens if I cast my line into this hollow tree, that would be pretty funny. And the game will go yeah haha nice, you got me, I hid a secret lure in here for you. Because that's what good video games are.

I also played 2 different tower defence games over these months for some reason. Immortal Defence is like you're lying in bed struggling to sleep and suddenly remember a piece of psychedelic shareware flotsam you played on your cousin's computer as a child. It has a nice story mode throwing philosophy in fistfuls as you abandon your mortal form and spend millennia defending the planet against an invading empire.

Meanwhile Rats, Bats and Bones is quite the opposite with its big pixel art and tile based play, laying down traps to stop the various ghosts and ghouls approaching. Initially I thought it was way too hard, but came to think it might be perfect. You just have to go through everything on easy first to wring out gems for upgrades, then you can go back through again on normal once you hit a roadblock. The levels are small and quick, they always keep you busy rather than setting up and just waiting for waves to finish. There's loads of different traps and abilities and my only real complaint is you have a limited amount of resets for your upgrades, when it should be completely free to play with different builds for different challenges. But if you're ever like, hey I could play a tower defence, if that's something anyone ever thinks these days, here's a good one for you.

Frog Detective 3 came out so I finally decided to play Frog Detective 2 instead. It's alright, I wish there was more detecting. But you know, it's a cute vehicle for silly jokes and it does very well. There's few more noble uses of a video game than that.

Butterfly Soup 2 arrived like a beautiful breeze. The baseball gays are having a hard time with culture and relationships again. I can't believe this one is free too honestly, a short visual novel with wonderful writing which is very funny and very heartfelt exactly when you want it. Most impressively it is very online but very good at the same time, a rare combo indeed. Turns out you gotta just write good. Try writing good.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War is the other bad one I decided to play. If you remember, this and Star Wars Battlefront 2 came out within a month of each other and were crammed with enough microtransactions to finally get people properly mad about it and the whole thing fell to pieces. The gamers really said this is exactly how much piss you're allowed to take and not a drop more. And then the damage was already done and everyone had moved on by the time Shadow of War stripped everything out and became a normal video game. It's a normal video game now. The best part is it just shoves grimy fistfuls of skill points at you so you can immediately start teleporting across half a city with ghost arrow powers to chop someone's head off. That's one way to overcome the tedium of working through skill trees, I suppose. It's a funny game - the tone is really sombre and self-serious but all the orcs are giving theatre camp fantasy villain accent workshop camp. They all look incredible too while the humans have bland mush faces. Running around and being a terrifying menace is a lot of fun, but getting stuck in a circle of guys swinging your sword around feels like shit. The big fortress sieges are an enjoyable spectacle but a boring activity, the boss fights at the end are bad as they're just in a room and you can't use all your cool moves so much, and when you take over a zone it never really feels like it. I stopped playing after a few areas because I got the general ideas but I had a nice time.

Moonscars I played very little of but I got to a fast-travel point to discover that activating it also summoned an evil mirror clone that wanted to fight me. Which. That's a bit much probably. It's very pretty and the attacks are nice and it's always fun to hit enemies into spikes. There's plenty of games that are like this these days maybe I'll play Blasphemous instead at some point, people seem to like that one. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. I'm not playing Salt and Sanctuary. I'm probably not playing any of these.

Lunistice. Hell yeah. What an odd little burst of platformers we had this winter. This, and Spark 3, and another one called Kiwi 64, and I saw some people excited about a fake 2D Sonic style one earlier. The weirdos are feasting out here. Lunistice is simple and clean, a pleasantly smooth run through pretty levels with fun mechanics. It's not mind blowing but it's all wonderfully done, you will have a nice time.

The Barnacle Goose Experiment is one of your narrative idle games which I usually enjoy quite a lot. Sadly the main mechanic of this one, combining items, I did not enjoy very much as it quickly spirals into unmanageable recipe juggling. It was too much for me, please just number goes up.

Superhot. (Five years later) Superhot. 

Pentiment I haven't finished yet because for some reason there's a great inertia to starting it up like it's homework I have to do. I don't know why - it's incredibly good when I'm playing, I have a great time talking to my friends as we're all destroyed inevitably by history. That's a good time to me.

Forklift Load kinda sucks but in that way where I did everything in it and enjoyed it all. You gotta play a bad game sometimes, they got good stuff in here you know. You drive a forklift around and do forklift related tasks for other forklifts and cars. You are all also sentient AIs. There's a little city to drive around, you can jump. Try to get a pallet with a wobbly barrel on top over here. Fantastic.

Xenoblade Chronicles DE is still in progress but I'm having a good time. I played X and 2 previously so it's been very pleasant to go back to the beginning of the chronicles. It's funny how restrained and normal 1 is in comparison, as far as JRPGs go. I really thought Shulk was your typical peppy teen protagonist but he's just a guy, he's just a normal guy who goes around and says stuff normally, it's great. I don't like the combat very much so I am trying very hard to just focus on the main fun story quest rather than getting distracted and swimming across a giant lake for 20 minutes to see what's over there. It was nothing.

The Room 2. They made another one. Now there's two rooms. Wait no there's way more than two rooms here let me out.

Untitled Story is an early game by Maddy Thorson of Celeste fame so you know what kind of trouble you're in. You're a little egg doing platforming. It's pretty mean with the checkpoints but otherwise good, with a load of good upgrades to get and a world that branches out nicely so you're constantly thinking ooh actually what if I go back there and then maybe I can go that other way now.

Sonic Adventure 2. I thought, you know, I'm absolutely not a Sonic person, but I've been in a good platforming mood this year so why not this, why not now. The Sonic levels are pretty good, what's better than the homing attack? The Knuckles levels are a lot of fun in my opinion, little free-form exploration zones. Outside of my opinion they're kind of awkward and frustrating. And the third type of level is boring, just firing homing missiles at everything forever, but on the plus side the lock-on tone is one of the most annoying noises put into a video game so that's cool. Maybe a port issue. I had to download a whole separate thing just to get the game running on my computer.

Lil Gator Game. I'm not a fan particularly of this art style you see a lot these days, but whatever. It doesn't matter in this case, a wonderful small open-world exploring and questing game. You've got Breath of the Wild stuff like climbing (not as good) and shield surfing (way better, you can go really fast forever and skip across the water) and a load of other fun crap to play with as you bounce around findings friends. Just put loads of fun crap in your game, what's the problem? A lovely few hours. Most importantly when you're basically finished you get some abilities to help you find the last few collectibles, which is something every game should have. Why is either 'spend hours wandering about hoping to get lucky' or 'just look it up online' the only options in so many cases. You're the video game, how about trying some game design about it.

Quester is a very fast single-screen arcade game that I really suck at. You barrel around the level like fantasy Pac-Man (sort of) using your energy to stab all the enemies, collecting coins to get energy back, jumping over pits to spawn more coins, maybe picking up an item to use in the next level. I got to the second set of levels exactly twice and unlocked one new character who has a bow instead of a sword. These old fingers just ain't what they used to be.

And last of all, probably best of all, it's King's Field 4 (The Ancient City) which I intended to just dip a toe into over the holiday out of curiosity. But I ended up falling completely in love with it instead. A terrible first impression for sure, it must have felt painfully dated even in 2002 - it doesn't even use the analogue sticks and it takes (I timed it) SEVEN AND A HALF SECONDS to turn around exactly once. The fighting is terrible, you have one attack, you die in a few seconds.

All the enemies move extra slowly in the first areas to compensate for this, and you think ah I guess it just has to be this way, so that it's fair. Then four hours later you open a door and a lizard guy straight out of Sen's Fortress sprints directly at you waving a sword about. It is terrifying. The arc from these shaky beginnings to a boss fight against three fast and furious foes, one of which is teleporting around, where I killed them all with skill and precision - incredibly satisfying. 

When you get down into the ancient city proper it is organised around this central tower with lots of shortcuts. So you get those lovely moments of thinking ah I've got this key for that chest now, but it's right back near the beginning of the game, can I actually be bothered.... but no actually if I just go this way and over here then up there I guess I'm basically right next to it anyway wow. The atmosphere is incredible with these great moments like emerging into a lovely, softly lit little forest area after fighting through xenomorphs and spiders in a pitch black tomb. The geography makes sense but with a dreamlike logic that can have you deep underground and then stepping out onto the coast. Perhaps the Dark Souls II sickos are on to something after all. There's obtuse depressed NPCs for you to pester. You slowly collect a handful of vials you can fill with water from magical springs to heal or regain mana. It's all here baby. And the fast travel system is probably better than they've done since.

The main thing anyway is, I just love thoroughly and carefully exploring a place, building up a connection to the world and a mental map. But as I don't like horror games it's very rare that I anything else lets me play like this. It's a really really good video game check it out. Next I am gonna play Shadow Tower Abyss, which is the same kind of thing except there's also guns. Thank you From Software I hope you make it big one day 

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And so that's it. Congratulations to the three of you who made it here. Perhaps the real video games were the video games we read about along the way to the end of a post about video games.

It's 2023 now. I'm gonna try to game a little less and more precisely, but I'm really happy with my groove recently. I know what I like and I know how to find more of it, I enjoy trying things I'm unfamiliar with, old things, odd things. Now watch me get way into Forspoken and finally summon Granblue Relink into existence. Live your good life my darlings, goodbye, farewell.

[alexalexok]

All the games I played in 2021 and my opinions thereon.

I’m back. You remember. It’s Alex, it’s video games. This year I decided to explore the many facets, folds, and nooks of the five star rating system. No crannies though, I am absolutely gone off crannies thank you.

Zero stars because it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

12 Minutes

Hell yeah. Hell yeah! A genuine bona fide ten-tonne clunker, something that everyone can enjoy disintegrating before their eyes at the slightest inspection like so much piss-drenched candyfloss. My favourite bit is probably the terrible central couple - generously, on purpose terrible, in an attempt (a failed attempt) to be like some stage play with two actors and half a set reviewed as ‘raw’, 'human’ and 'intense’ - but also burdened with being badly written in a bad video game and so having to deliver pat one liners about hiding in a cupboard.

Imagine you said to your loved one said my darling, my precious, my perfect angel, I am doing a time loop. If they weren’t immediately on board, giving you an embarrassing childhood secret to use just in case they need convincing at some point, working through what possible sin you have committed or lesson you are supposed to learn to escape - then break up.

12 Minutes asks instead, imagine you were a guy who sucks and your wife hates you but loves you enough to be excited about having a baby with you but also won’t believe anything you tell her about time or danger and you love her enough do timeline preserving brain hypnosis or something so you can stay together even though oh she IS YOUR SISTER but you also interpret ideas like 'give knife to wife so she can protect herself’ as 'stab wife in the stomach’ as though you had no choice in the matter while going “no no no I’m so sorry”. Absolute shit.

1 star because it’s just not especially good.

Heart&Slash

It’s got all the 3D action roguelike elements you might want, apart from it’s not very good to play so probably don’t.

Trash the Planet

I do enjoy a good idle / clicker game, this isn’t one. The writing is fairly annoying and (straining to remember exactly what my problem was nearly a year later) something like, each chapters starts you over with a new hook so it doesn’t even make use of the exponential mechanics of the genre? That sounds right. No-one is checking my work here. Can you prove any of these games even exist.

1 star because I am feeling slightly mean.

Tyranny

The best part of this game is the first 10 minutes when you glide through a pleasant kind of interactive fiction prologue deciding which war crimes to commit to set up the world state in the game proper. It’s quite promising, you play as a bad guy sent to conquer the last remaining enclave of resistance against the Overlord, dealing with the two squabbling factions of the army as you go. Unfortunately, it hardly ever feels like that again - you are just doing quests, like a normal main character in a normal game. The combat is terrible and the whole thing just gets incredibly dull incredibly quickly despite its best efforts.

Zelda II (redux)

I really wanted to be Zelda II guy because, you know, sometimes it’s fun to jump into a conversation and ruin everything with terrible opinions everyone hates. I even used this very nice Redux mod which adds a lot of quality of life changes to the game and I recommend to any weirdos out there, but sadly I cannot join your ranks on this one. It’s just bad, and it’s way too hard even with the changes. I feel like the guy who dies a dozen times to the first skeleton in Dark Souls and writes a widely-derided 1200-word Medium post about it, but I don’t even understand how people do beat a lot of these single enemies consistently. Anyway, more importantly, I don’t think there’s any particular charm or heart to the game outside of the exploration and combat. It did nothing for me.

Genesis Noir

A good first impression, a jazzy noir murder mystery is set out with eye-catching style. Going almost immediately into this terribly-paced gameplay sequence that’s too abstracted to impart any of the feeling it is reaching for. The game unravels a bit, many sections diluting the strength of its initial pitch rather than adding to it. To be fair, the finale is really strong and does do a good job pulling various strands together, but I can’t say it was worth pushing through them in the first place to reach the conclusion.

Holedown

The best part of breakout or whatever is when the ball goes behind the bricks and fucks around up there on its own for a while. That’s the entire point of the game. This hardly ever happens in Holedown because the bricks are too big and quickly too strong, so it’s just boring.

2 stars because even though it’s good, I personally didn’t like it that much alright? Is that okay with you, your majesty?

The Gardens Between

You know, it’s fine. You go forwards and backwards and interact with stuff then go forwards again. It looks nice, it’s a cute story. It’s fine.

Tenderfoot Tactics

I hate myself for this one. Eidolon by the same developer Ice Water Games is one of the greats. It’s wonderful, you must play it. Tenderfoot Tactics carries forward a few cool ideas, especially with its maps. Each map is a local creation, sketching out a limited area with the pathways and landmarks - and the very concept of North - most important to the inhabitants of the village where you found it. These things may or may not be of any interest to you, but slowly you build up a patchwork picture of the world, matching coastlines to drawings of coastlines. Being a landscape understander is very good - as is sliding really fast down big hills, which you do a lot - as is just goblining about with your band of little goblins and giant god creatures kneeling down to speak with you. Unfortunately the meaty meat of the game is doing tactics game combat, taking turns moving around a small grid and doing your attacks, and I simply do not enjoy this genre. I feel like most of the time you are either winning handily or losing terribly and either way it’s happening incredibly slowly. But I think if you might like that, you would really like this. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish I were different.

Calico

It’s very charming, it’s very wonky and fairly repetitive. I will definitely play a little more in the future because the Cat Tech is exemplary. There’s a giant fluffy cat stuck in a hollow log, the ideal creature. You can make your own cats from your own cat cafe big enough to ride on with a magic potion, and they simply look beautiful and move perfectly. There are other animals, but it’s mostly about the cats. Art reflects life.

Chicory

Feeling uncharitable about this probably, but I’ve just had enough of games where you’re a normal little creature and some nebulous dark force which is also mental illness starts ruining the seemingly pleasant magical world. It’s a greater shame here, as in the second half where you travel around with former chosen one Chicory herself the game finally shines in the specific, personal conversations you share. Unfortunately I found myself disappointed with the central 'paint the world’ idea throughout, which seems so full of promise but is simply not developed in enough interesting ways, a wasted opportunity.

Black Book

I don’t know! I should love this, I wanted to love this. I even have a good time when I am playing this, but for some reason it feels very hard to ever start it up. A narrative deck builder set in Russia a few hundred years ago, focussed on the folklore full of fickle, tricksy house and nature spirits. Again, incredibly appealing to me. Probably just a wrong place and wrong time situation, who could say what kind of 'mood’ or 'place’ I was in during 2021 leave me alone.

2 stars because it’s a good game and I enjoyed it, but there’s also quite a lot of bad things in it.

Scarlet Nexus

Strong start, this anime action RPG - super-powered humans fight monsters in the bad future - spends the first few chapters setting up status quos and then immediately undermining them, making everything quite breezy and exciting. The fighting is pretty good, and there’s a few standout characters (I grow particularly fond of my protagonist, aloof but earnest Kasane) - but all the initial energy slowly ebbs away. At the exact moment the game has nothing more to offer, you’re forced through 3 dull, repetitive and over-long dungeons. The suggestion I then play a second time to see the other main character’s route, and the 'real story’ was, at the time, completely laughable.

Captain Tsubasa

Basically my ideal game, sports anime video game, I wish there were more of them. I wish this one was a bit better, too. The football component is fatally flawed with a goalkeeper HP system which strips any sense of rewarding shot set-up and execution, and reduces your forward play to hoofing as many balls at goal as possible until the keeper is worn down and your next strike will score no matter what. There’s a little more nuance to it, but only a little. On the other side of things, the game’s story mode is both slight and overburdened with the Tsubasa history. No real fault of its own, the series has been going for 40 years, but it’s no less of a problem.

The Real Texas

Been meaning to get into this for ages, and I’m glad I did. It’s a very charming, intriguing thing. Some kind of absurd early-Zelda homage where a relaxing holiday to England spirals out of control and through a portal to an idiosyncratic, mixed up land. Good, but very much flawed, and I got utterly, hopelessly stuck no less than three times. My very, very earnest thanks to youtube users 'mag0ca’ and 'Cambrian Era’ - the only two people on the planet who recorded let’s plays of this that I could scrub through and try to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing as there are no walkthroughs.

Inscryption

There was a lot of excited chat around this one, and to begin with at least it feels well earned. The game is threatening and mysterious. You sit down to play a nicely designed card game based around sacrificing weak cards to summon strong ones, then you stand up to solve little puzzles around your creepy log cabin prison and bring the rewards back to assist your time at the table. So it goes in a pleasing loop until the roof blows off the whole thing in an exciting way. There’s a bit of dated, meta video spookiness, then the second act proper lands with a marked shift in style (which is fine) an big expansion of card mechanics (which is really great, but you don’t get enough time to enjoy) and what seems like an important decision (which is actually irrelevant.) The third act is weak, an ugly reskin of the first with a dull game layer on top of the carding and even less to do away from the table. The deck building is possibly the best here though as mechanics begin to stack on top of each other, but immediately makes you wonder why this development doesn’t form one arc across the whole game instead of just in this section. It would also be nice to have some more persistence between acts, items or cards clutched desperately in the shift. It would be fitting, and I would much prefer something like that which further builds the game’s mythos than the played tricks of looking at your computer file system and friend list. There’s one really good joke right near the end, but otherwise Inscryption peaks early and steadily gets worse. A game slightly stranded between its card game and its narrative and ultimately failing to please on either front.

Boyfriend Dungeon

Wasn’t really going to give it even a peek, but then 'the discourse’ made it sound quite interesting. Owned as I am, made it sound way more interesting than it actually is. At first I really liked how breezy all the interactions were, but this inevitably leads to relationships that either feel very sudden and underdeveloped or simply inconsequential. The dungeon combat is also just too basic and lumpy to hold any interest. Still, there is enough latent charm in the idea if not the execution that I finished everything up.

2 stars because I don’t have any particular feelings about it idk leave me alone.

Beacon

Like if Risk of Rain was a top-down shooter. Obviously it’s impossible for anything to reach that standard, but this is actually pretty decent. The main hook is a DNA system with which you can really fuck up the next clone to crawl out of her tube like you were bearing a grudge. It’s a bit unpolished and awkward, but worth a look if for some unfathomable reason you find yourself unfulfilled by other games in the genre.

On Rusty Trails

Perfectly serviceable quick platformer with that mechanic where you can change your colour, and this changes how you interact with the colour-coded world as you go. It’s fun, it’s short, it’s by the same developer that made Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers, and nowhere near as good but I wish them the best. Buy that one instead.

Clickpocalypse 2

Alex tries to find a phone game to keep themselves mildly occupied, first success. You don’t have to do any clicking in this one, I have no idea why it’s called that. Basically you just watch some little guys walk around an isometric dungeon. It’s fun to watch some little guys walk around an isometric dungeon and kill monsters and get chests, look at them go. Turns out that’s about all I want on my phone, to look at some stuff happening and occasionally tap some buttons to upgrade or attack but it doesn’t really matter. Look how quick they killed all those monsters wow.

Heroism

Second success. I only discovered after some time that it’s made by the same guy as Clickpocalypse so that’s, something. Nice? Sure. This is more subtantial, and the main thing is that every single tile in these (not isometric) dungeons has a little orb on it that will zip towards you when you get close. And one of the many things you can upgrade is your orb slurping radius, until orbs find you so attractive an entire dungeon’s worth of circles fly right at you as soon as you step through the door. In my opinion this is the central aim of the game, and many games - to get as much stuff flying around on the screen as possible. With your heroes shooting arrows and spells and sending minions off to attack and enemies returning fire and dying and exploding into loot and gold which is also sucked into your body, eventually so there’s so much stuff happening that you can’t even see the floor any more, which I consider a resounding victory.

3 stars because it’s good, you got me, I admit it. This is a pretty good video game. But it’s not that good really is it.

13 Sentinels

A tangled web of many strands, the main joy here is pulling at something and seeing which sci-fi plot device is tied to the end. There is no cliche left unemployed - mechs and robots, clones and aliens, AI, nanomachines and of course time travel, we’ve got it all. It’s quite absurd, in a fun enough way. The fragmented narrative presentation (switching between each of the 13 main characters’ stories and nudging them along a scene at a time) often feels like it’s trying to hide the weaknesses of the actual story in its own twists and turns, making every pause a cliffhanger and every character meeting a shocking revelation, neither of which would be true if you saw things in linear fashion - but I can’t say it never works. The action part of the game is fine, you just plonk your mechs down to defend a point from incoming bad robots. I really like how loose and analogue everything is instead of the steady grid-based approach I was anticipating. You can also cram as many turrets and drones on the field as possible shooting and exploding until the game slows down to a painful crawl, which is another kind of winning, see previous entry.

Ikenfell

I like all the bits of this - it’s an RPG where you sneak in to magic school to investigate your missing sister, and find it near-deserted and under threat. The game looks fine, the music is fantastic, the story is decent if a little heavy-handed, and the fighting is good too. The long, thin battle arena gives just enough room to make interesting strategy of party member and attack placement, plus it has Paper Mario timing aspects to keep you busy. It hits its stride in the mid section after you have enough options to have fun but before you figure out the most powerful strategies, but that’s probably most RPG system isn’t it. This is a very boring description of a video game sorry - I had a nice time, I promise. Some bits are really good! But I was just mostly playing it to play it. Maybe it’ll be your favourite, don’t let me stop you.

Subsurface Circular

You’re a robot detective just sitting on a train. Other robots come and go around you and in speaking to them you (the player) learn more about the world and you (the player, and the main character) start to get the sense of something big rumbling beneath gossip and rumours. The presentation (nice robots, great fake tube map) elevates the slightly uneven writing which is simultaneously pleasantly brisk and often too cursory to explore it’s own ideas enough. The underlying mystery is enticing, and the final moments rather sudden and not quite earned. But it’s alright.

Deltarune Chapter 2

It’s another chapter of Deltarune, which is good because Deltarune is good, and funny, and touching, with great music and a pretty combat screen. It’s also… the second of many chapters of Deltarune, and so feels very much like another step along a path which will eventually lead somewhere great I’m sure, but that’s a long way off yet. It’s very familiar to Chapter 1, including the obligatory section that goes on way too long - there is progress, development, but little revelation. Luckily your new foe and temporary friend (thanks to the power of trucies) Queen is an instant all-timer.

3 stars because yeah, good job! Video games!

Lifeless Planet

Okay this isn’t 'good’ - but I enjoyed it. You’re a little guy who crashes on a distant planet and then finds out a bunch of Soviets teleported here decades ago and everything went super badly for them. It’s shlocky, very rough, and mostly involves just jumping around between rock formations. But, I don’t know - it’s a lot of fun jumping around between rock formations? You really do feel like a small spaceman jumping around on a very big empty planet, it’s a good sense of scale.

Going Under

Very fun, and funny, roguelike delving into failed startup offices turned dungeons. There’s a decent amount of interesting weapons and abilities, lots of chucking stuff arround and breaking other things in enjoyable wobbly choas. It could do with a few more options to set up your build before you start fighting, and the incredibly loose combat gets finicky and frustrating as the game starts to get harder. Luckily there’s some really good difficulty options to turn on to bring the fun back again. Shout out to your best colleague swomp who says hey beb and probably smells a bit weird and doesn’t care about all this, the perfect man.

Cruel World (Blame Everyone Else)

An experimental platformer that caught on for a while back there - the cruel part is the various terminals and checkpoints around the levels can be hacked and laid claim to, but each claim increases the time of anyone else’s hacks. The platforming feels very strange and unpredictable at first but actually contains a lot of nuance in your bouncy movements and jump timing that I’m not sure I’ve seen before, but it is always hard and those checkpoints very helpful to have. There was a nice little community running, you recognised names on the owner lists, happy to see them again on the other side of a difficult section, tried to leave as many terminals as free as possible for those coming up behind. Originally planned to be on sale for just one day, and to become essentially unplayable in that time - instead, it has persisted and changed, ending up as a beloved treasure sustained by invested players instead of a exercise in hopeless, inevitable failure. Which is nice isn’t it.

In Other Waters

Just great, look at this. Go and look at it, go on. You are the AI in a diving suit, ferrying your lone occupant Ellery across the seafloor of an alien planet. She likes to talk to you (to herself) and you can offer rudimentary positive/negative responses in turn. Otherwise you just have the suit’s functions on screen and an expanding waypoint map to navigate. With these simple tools is delivered a really atmospheric, effective story that moves from tranquil paddle through the shallows to creepy, dangerous expeditions into poisoned darkness as you catalog the plants and creatures of the water, find out what drew Ellery to this planet, and discover secrets in the deep.

My tip is to ignore all the side missions, they involve tedious backtracking which bogs the game down and exposes its weaknesses. You will sadly miss some wonderfully detailed descriptions and sketches of alien life, but you will enjoy the overall experience more I promise. Just use your imagination, picture a freaky little sea mushroom shuddering metal spores into the warm and rushing water, I bet you like that don’t you you little freak.

The Wild at Heart

It’s fake Pikmin baby, what more could you possibly want? Actual Pikmin?? Tough shit. I don’t know why there’s not more fake Pikmins though - the small-scale short-term direction of your helpers is really good, a few over here to carry stuff back to base, a few over here fighitng something, a few breaking down a wall, while you uncover some secrets yourself. Just simple, engaging attention-splitting management, it feels nice to work efficiently even though it’s not neccessary. And then you get an upgrade to control even more little creatures, and so there’s even more little creatures on the screen, and that’s good.

Beast Breaker

Such a good idea for a video game, and it very nearly pulls it off. What if there was a big monster made out of blocks, and you were a little mouse with a sword who could bounce around everywhere to destroy these blocks and then attack the beast’s heart beneath? Not only that, but every time you bounce off something you build up charge to spend on 3 other abilities - and there’s loads of different swords with their own unique abilities and playstyles. Not only that, but you can also swap to bows with their reloading mechanic and ranged attacks or hammers designed around repeating moves to make them stronger. Not only that, you can soon make your own weapons and armour too, take companions into fights, craft potions beforehand. It’s very exciting to begin with, then the flaws start to come through - it’s all slightly rough, there’s too many fights to do, there’s not enough bouncing (see Holedown opinions above) and often the difference between a triumphant victory and miserable loss is just how the enemy decided to randomly move around. Still, nearly there.

Unpacking

It’s the unpacking game. You take all your stuff out of boxes and put it down somewhere in the new place you live, i.e. unpack. Hope you can follow. It’s just very pleasant to do one level every few days as the game and time with it moves from home bedroom to university digs to a house share, relationship move-in.. whoops back home again, and so on. The pleasure of putting things in neat rows, finding their place - the frustration of working around other people’s stuff, awkward spaces. Something like a series of wordless relatable memes, dae need more counter space for their rice cooker, tfw when you give up and just put the yoga map straight under the bed, 7x red flag emojis if he’s got nowhere to hang up your diploma. Sorry for ruining this nice game with these words.

3 stars because yeah. it’s good, it’s a good quality video game. It’s a three star video game check it out. Or don’t.

Morkredd

Pretty fun co-op experience about rolling a big glowing ball around and trying not do die instantly in shadows… and then there is the 'flesh level’.

Ring Fit

Really appreciate this because it got me into a fairly steady exercise routine, and I have since graduated onto other things, which is nice for me. I got like a year and a half out of it, though the more I played the more its problems irritate. I hate how you can’t turn off all the calorie information, which I have absolutely no interest in seeing but still got its claws lightly, unpleasantly into me as I caught myself paying attention to that information on a nice little snack or whatever. The unresolvable tension between the game and exercise elements becomes more apparent - what’s the point in using items to power up and make things easier, when I’m here to work hard and push myself? Why does higher difficulty just mean doing more of the same exercise in a row at once, when a better workout would be doing 'easier’ sets, but for longer? I eventually stopped the adventure mode in favour of custom workouts, though the game feels like it’s missing something between the two options - where you could just say, I want to exercise for about this long, and work mostly on these areas, and have the game spit out something for you to follow.

Refunct

You hop around on these cubes in the water, and they change from grey to a nice green. That’s all. Hoping around on cubes. Great job.

Kittens Game

Third success. I won’t say the best idle game, because I much prefer the ones with actual stories (and which end) like A Dark Room - but this definitely has a certain something about it. I’ve been at it for like 6 months and now I have taken full advantage of metaphysical efficiencies and ready to get my space beacons churning out forbidden relics while I hop carelessly through time to generate antimatter by crushing the timecrystals I get from banishing alicorns back to whence they came. That’s all essentially irrelevant though - as I said, I just want something on my phone I can open now and then and tap on a few buttons to make a number go up instead of doing any work, like Twitter except I am architect of the dark future instead of helpless witness.

Exo One

Only just up here. You’re a ball, manipulating gravity to drag yourself faster down the slopes of craters. You’re a disc, using that momentum to blast a sonic boom up through the clouds. The story is nothing - and worse, at times intrusive. When things don’t quite work and your rolling/gliding combo breaks down, it feels terrible. But when everything aligns, it is indeed very pleasant - to fly, to soar, to skim on stormy water and dive impossible through pink planetary thunderstorms. It should be better, but it’s enough.

4 stars because yeah, shit, this is a really very good game. Although….

Final Fantasy XV

It’s really hard to talk about the meat of the game here instead of the absolute fascinating mess of its development and post-release. They pushed it so hard, backed with a wide-ranging multimedia extravaganza of many forms, none of which really caught on. The game came in smouldering hot and was then changed and updated so much that the answer to questions like 'why is this bit so fucking weird?’ is usually 'oh my god you should have seen what it was like before’ – then there were a load DLC episodes released, including for some reason a multiplayer expansion. Then they had a special 2 year anniversary stream which fans excitedly tuned into, only to be told the director was quitting and the rest of the DLC cancelled. Square Enix truly are unmatched. But - the game, is the game good? Uh you know, yeah! Yeah. Listen, you could use some work too. I wouldn’t say I love the boys that much individually but I do love them all together - somehow, these particular characters being super chatty all the time works. I didn’t realise quite how much I was into it until two specific sections of the game - 1, fantastic, after things have gone really badly for everyone, the upbeat boys time banter is replaced with pissy, frustrated sniping - everyone’s having a fucking miserable time, mad at themselves and each other, an incredibly successful inversion. 2, awful, an entire bad and over-long section when you’re alone and the surrounding silence makes everything so much worse ('oh my god you should have played it when it came out.“) It should not be good, but it is. I really like the ending too.

Vagrant Story

I’ve wanted to play Vagrant Story for ages, like many people I’m sure. 2020 I finally made myself do it - an easy push because I was sure it would be a short-lived experiment before I realised it wasn’t for me and gave up. But - I was completely wrong, I love it. I knew the quality of the writing and visuals were held in high regard, but even these surpassed my expectations and the atmosphere they combine to produce is a thick, fraught melodrama. I was frequency just looking around the pretty little rooms in first-person mode to take in the slant of cold light through high windows.

I made heavy use of a walkthrough because the amount of stats and systems thrown at you is impossible to manage without a nudge in the right direction. It is, eventually, quite simple, and as much about ignoring what’s not important as specialising towards what is - you just need a weapon to cover each type of damage, and some gems to swap between them. And your armour. Oh and all your moves too, and spells maybe. There’s a lot of fussing about in menus, which is easily the worst and most tedious part of the game. It’s very fun once you get going though, with a timing-based combo system that is rewarding to gradually perfect over the course of the game, and there’s nothing better than getting properly set up head to toe and ruining a boss in a single attack chain.

Myst

It’s Myst! You simply 'Myst’ (must) play it. I’m not even sure why it’s so good. I remember this expansive, beautiful thing that took months to complete and notebooks full of scribbled notes. In fact, it’s really small - there’s one pretty simple puzzle in each level, with the notable exception of that endless boring mine cart bit which is only marginally quicker to figure out properly than just complete through trial and error. I have no idea what that’s about. But anyway, it’s still great to work out a puzzle isn’t it, fellow brain users. Elevating the whole experience is the central idea around the ability to write worlds into existence and travel into them, I find it so tantalising and imaginative even today. I would do it good though, not like any of the losers in the game… if only I had another chance. Bring me the yellow pages, friend!

Final Fantasy X-2

A fine game, an incredible game! Please, please never make me play it ever again. The combat system is terrible, trying to be fast but often playing incredibly slow, waiting for long bars to fill up and getting constantly delayed by enemies. Even at its quickest it takes too long to switch outfits - if only you could group a 'pack’ of them together, and so switch between battle 'paradigms’ or something in a second - and there’s too many of them that take too long to level up. When you’re not fighting you’re bombarded with one terrible mini-game after another. The game is barely holding it together - here’s a list of missions, except there’s also missions we’re not listing here so you have to go everywhere anyway, and you might think you’ve done the mission well but you didn’t interact a third time with that one guy so this storyline will just fizzle out with a shrug in two chapters, is that good?

But. I love every single cutscene, I love the set-up and the story, this world trying to pick itself up and work towards a future after everything it was built around disappeared. I love YRP, I love Brother and rival sphere hunter LeBlanc, I love every returning minor character and feel sorry for every returning main character. The light parts are funny and the serious parts heartfelt. Then Yuna gives her speech near the end and it’s simply one of the best things in a video game, I love her.

Genshin Impact

I can’t put in any good words about a gacha game no matter how much I might like it personally so whatever. You can’t just not mention it, then if you do mention it you start going like ooh it’s not sooo bad because you’ve learned to deal with it and blah blah like why the fuck am I doing their dirty work for them fuck off.

4 stars because it’s just a great video game, no notes.

Part Time UFO

You’re a little UFO with a crane game claw - ideally you’re two little UFOs because this is really good to play in co-op. But that’s the game, use your claw to pick things up in tiny levels. Catch fish, stack cheerleaders, tidy up a toy shop. It’s very cute. The control is perfectly balanced between being wobbly and slippery in a fun rather than annoying way, and also allowing you to feel incredibly skilled when you swing your claw and send something spinning through the air to land exactly where you want it. All the levels also have very smart secondary objectives that are usually fun to attempt. They did it.

SNKRX

Another one like Beast Breaker which is just wow, what a great idea. Why didn’t anyone do this before? This one is better though no offence bb. You’re steering your snake around a small arena dodging enemies, and every segment of your snake is a different class like the archer who shoots arrows, engineer who places turrets, psykino who pulls enemies together or infestor who makes critters exploded out of corpses. Then you get items and bonuses and upgrade everything of course, it’s one of these (a game.) I think it’s very pretty for the simple look with block colours. It will burrow into your brain with the potential of different builds. I have not had as much fun going way over the top and looping through levels with a ridiculous creation that fills the screen with deadly nonsense since Risk of Rain, which is about the highest praise I can give.

Tetris Effect

Tetris, you know. I’m pretty bad at Tetris, but I did get better. This one ramps up the tunnel vision zone-out with every level having its own rise and fall in time with the visuals and music to stop you thinking and blinking as much as possible. When it works it really works, but the downside of making every level a unique experience is that some of them suck.

Over the Alps

Really surprised by how good this was. I mean, it’s not that surprising if you look at the game’s lineage. But I was not on board even after playing a decent chunk of the first adventure, a choose your own adventure spy thriller set in the 30s. Everything happens very quickly and I felt there was little to grab hold of as I fought and fled through the mountains. But ten minutes later I was on the edge of my seat - the dashing brush strokes layer to paint a wonderful picture, not just of story but character and characterisation. I couldn’t look away until I was finished, rushing to a final confrontation in the summit snows, exciting on its own terms while absolutely nailing the heightened, arch feel of the genre.

4 stars because it gets the 4 star Alex nod. I don’t have to explain myself. You have no power here. I am going to explain myself a little bit though.

Monolith

Sometimes a roguelike just hits you rogueright you know. This one did, it’s a fast-paced top-down twin-stick shoo-ter. You’re a plane shooting skulls and machines I guess, you do all the roguelike things we know and love, I am describing a video game. It looks cool, it plays great, it’s quick and a bit too hard for me. I guess it’s not a twin stick shooter because you should use the mouse. Well, anyway.

Brave Fencer Musashi

Who is this sassy lost child? Why it’s Musashi, summoned in from another dimension (Japan) to save the fantasy kingdom (Europe) from the evil empire (technology magic.) I hadn’t heard of this until a few years ago, a PS1 action game of bright charm and pleasant variety. It’s not Ape Escape or anything, let’s not get carried away, but it is really good. You go out fighting on your mission, making use of a neat ability-stealing mechanic and then return to town to find out whatever the fuck is happening now. It’s being attacked by zombie vampires, it’s just on fire, it’s being attacked by giant ants. I grew really fond of the town and its people through the game for all this nonsense and I enjoy how obtuse progression can be, so you have to talk to everyone and actually pay attention to what they’re hinting at, as well as playing with the day and night cycle. There’s some really frustrating shit parts but as I said, PS1 game.

Walden, A Game

A game can be a living exhibition of Henry David Thoreau’s time living for a while in the Massachusetts woods in 1845. I think this is wonderful – it’s a light open-world survival game, but the treat is just how much of Thoreau’s words are present, most simply as written in letters and journal, but most effectively narrated as you go about your business. A line for every plant you focus on and every bird flitting across your vision, musings at the water’s edge and as the seasons change. The seasons change beautifully, and when the pond freezes over and you can skate across it with an unexpected burst of speed and joy in the lean depths of winter. It’s not mere pretty words about trees though – Thoreau’s philosophy and actions on abolition and civil disobedience, as well as the lives and losses of his family and friends, entwine the woods as thickly as the blackberry vines.

Atelier Ryza

I’ve wanted to play an Atelier for ages, and now I have. You can do it too if you like. You, too, can play a video game. This is a good one to start with, a gentle JRPG with a focus on crafting, where instead of leaving your small island town to travel acorss the world you keep coming back home again. There is, you know, a little emerging existential threat, but the main point is hanging out with your friends, making a nice hideout in the forest and helping everyone in town with your new alchemy skills. Honestly I did not engage with the crafting too much beyond a normal level until the very end of the game - the last boss just beat me, in a way that I could have won if I tried once more. But instead I spent a few long hours gathering materials to feed into the elaborate creation system, making items to use to make more items, ensuring specific abilities are unlocked and attributes inherited in a long chain. With my new equipment and items, I went back to the boss and won in about 30 seconds - one of the most satisfying epic gamer moments of the year.

Something else I found a lot of fun is how you can feel the concessions to ease this series has made over the years - here, for example, you don’t use your battle items up, you have limited charges instead to spend on 3 things you equip. Obviously to remedy some annoyance players had in previous titles in spending so much time and effort crafting great items only to use them up immediately. Only, this system doesn’t really work either as the scarcity is offloaded onto your charges instead and you don’t want to use those up unless necessary because they’re hard to refresh so you still don’t use your items. Maybe they’ll lean the other way again who knows, I just enjoy this conversation in design.

The Forgotten City

One of the best new things this year no problem. If I say 'secret underground Roman timeloop city where if a sin is committed everyone dies’ and you’re not interested then I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with you. A game where you’re in a little town and you poke your nose into everyone’s business is pretty much the ideal to me. Just walking around getting the lay of the land, talking to people, finding rumours and secrets, telling someone you’re going to kill them just because it’s a fun dialogue option and then fucking legging it through town to escape through a magical portal while everyone dies around you because you didn’t think about a threat being a sin. And you might as well steal a load of money on the way out if it’s already too late. The beauty of timeloop games is you can indulge your gremlin gamer instincts and do whatever you want because it doesn’t matter, just try again next time. And so these experiments and misbehaviours feel more part of the actual experience, not naughty asides you did for fun only to reload to do things 'properly’ afterwards. Anyway this is great, it’s neat and small but with layers to uncover, one really unsettling section, many genre-aware time-saving shortcuts, a very stupid but fun ending, and is just deeply intriguing without being too serious. Wonderful.

Nioh

I’ve been plinking around in Nioh now and then for about six months and will happily do it for another six. Having a great time. It’s nestled in a perfect groove - difficult enough that you need to get into a zone of nice concentration, but not so hard it gets frustrating or bosses take more than a few tries to beat. The levels are compact with plenty of pleasant shortcut-unlocking loops. The fighting is fun with lots of options and I just got the timing down on this ridiculously strong katana counterattack so I am gleeful every time I fight a human enemy because I am about to ruin their entire life. I have no idea what could be happening in the story and I don’t care. Games, games and, indeed, video games.

5 stars because that’s the highest number of stars on the star scale, so these games are some of the best ones. I hope this makes sense but if you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help. Many thanks, kind regards.

Depanneur Nocturne

It’s a rainy night and you dip into a little shop in search of a gift. You pick stuff up and comment on it, you put it back down again or take it up to the till. I think I will refine what I said about The Forgotten City - it’s not just poking around in people’s business that is the best, but just poking around in general. That’s my genre, poking games. I am not taking any feedback on the name. This one is, perfect? Or it hit me perfectly. A whole world created, and all these different objects giving you little sneaky peeks into it. This tiny space, but still crammed with secrets. It’s very confident, coherant, intriguing. And I will just say, although you’ll feel rude and want to stop - do keep pestering for the key to the toilet, because that’s a trip into basement depths to rival the world’s worst Wetherspoons.

The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls

A little proto-Link’s Awakening Gameboy game that never got released outside of Japan. They’re very similar games in many respects, most obviously in the fact that they both fucking rule. This might even be better. There’s really not much to say - it’s great, it’s pacy and funny, the translation patch available is very well written, the princes are in love, you turn into a frog, it’s well-designed and plays around with genre expectations because it’s fun and video games can just be fun you know. I even love the nothing combat which is just a stat comparison and if you’re better then you win - but, that’s what most combat is anyway, at least here it doesn’t waste your time. Plus it means that upgrades are really big upgrades, and suddenly turning around and smashing all the enemies aside instead of even engaging them feels incredible. A game to blast a purifying beam of light straight through your miserable, miserable brain.

Attack Of The Friday Monsters

You can mention this if you want all the cool people to gather round and tell you what great taste you have. You’re a young kid in a ruralish Japanese suburb, it’s a high-summer friendship and innocence jam with a seam of Adult Problems running through, you know the drill. But it’s beautiful, endearing and perfectly judged. This small collection of streets and lanes has a luscious sense of place, and quests give warm insight into the townspeople’s lives. The narrow slices might feel shallow with another framing, but it feels true here, as a kid who knows exactly one weird thing about the guy two doors down. There’s a bad mini-game to play, but there’s also monsters or aliens invaders or maybe it’s just a TV show they record here but also, this kid at school said she heard a rumour…

But this isn’t a game about getting to the bottom of a mystery, you are not playing to find a single answer. Everything is true at the same time, and with that the game embodies the magical potentiality, the contradictory truth of childhood perfectly.

Final Fantasy X

Ah, it’s a nice one. I’ve really enjoyed replaying various Final Fantasies over the last few years, comparing new impressions to old opinions. I was excited to get to X because I remember it fondly but kind of vaguely. I think the colourful aesthetic probably didn’t suit my moody serious teenage idiot period, so I didn’t hold tightly to specific takes as part of my Gamer Identity or whatever the fuck. Anyway we can forget all that now, this is incredible and easily up there for my favourite of the series with IV and VIII.

I love how connected everything is in the world - it’s not an RPG where the threat is an extradimsional darkness that possessed the king, or an invading empire, or a long-forgotten prophecy awakening in the chosen one. That is, a fantasy land set-up pastoral and then something happening to it to spur our heroes on. FFX is the story of itself - the pilgrimage that is the structure, the stops along the way, the enemy you’re facing, absolutely everything is deeply entwined with and present in the culture, traditions, religion, geography, the people of Spira. A world not thrown into chaos but living with it, grown around it for generations.

The best bit is Yuna obviously, the absolute shining star of the game, endlessly charming and complex with I think a perfectly judged voice performance. I love Tidus and Yuna together too, they’re just so cute from the very start, and their relationship believable as awkward flirting shifts into surprising, needed, honest connection. The only acceptable hetero gamer couple.

And the action is also the best bit, perhaps the best turn-based combat has ever been, incredibly smooth and fast-paced, with defined roles but room to strategise, instant and encouraged party switching, and status effects that actually matter for once. You could just do it like this again, video games, please. You had it all. Okay the sphere grid is quite boring for all its potential and blitzball absolutely sucks ass sorry, but what can you do, it’s still one of the best games. And that, as they say, is that. Did you know the VO for Maechen is Dwight Schultz i e. also Barclay from Star Trek.

Katamri Damacy Reroll

Ka, ta. Ma, ri. Da-a-ma-cy. Everybody now. Can’t believe I haven’t played one of these before. I am, as is the normal and natural reaction, very happy that I have now. That’s all, play a Katamari Damacy why don’t you. I wish they’d make a new one, it would be great to have smoother changes to the world as your ball of junk get bigger rather than the wobbly screen effect and all the smaller things disappearing or losing half their polygons. But that doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Sable

Best new game probably, thanks 2021 for this at least. Sable always looked like one I would play, not with a massive amount of excitment, but just that with its pitch and its looks it would inevitably end up on my computer. And it did, and I completely fell in love. I think this is almost my ideal open-world game - the map is a decent size but not too big, there are giant things in the environment to catch your eye and aim towards, and there are lots of small unique things to look at around your feet. Like Shadow of the Colossus which has its giants and ruins, and also a group of cute tortoises in the desert to look at. There’s no rush in Sable, there’s no penalty for exploring where you like, there’s variety in the desert and customisation for its own sake. Enclosed areas with puzzles and expansive landscapes. Crashed spaceships and sand worm mysterious. Big things and little things is the key - so many games get caught up in the middle. The only thing that could elevate this to an all-timer is something like another few powers to get around like your floaty orb, or what if you could stretch the little wings out of your bike when you ramp off a sand dune and actually glide through the air for a while. That would be nice. Also the ending broke and I couldn’t make the choice I wanted, so I decided to become a clown.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

A wonderful treat, I never expected one of the best games to get even more game added to it. I wasn’t even sure how that would be possible, but then this self-contained space colony slash spaceship puzzlebox glides effortlessly into the gravity of Outer Wilds’ solar system like it was always on course. Is this really the only game to be set on a space colony? That can’t be right, right? I don’t think Halo counts that’s just the skybox. This set-up is so good - I was just staring around in awe on my first entry. Who needs a map when you can simply look up, and see the landscape laid out on the other side of the world, water flowing around to meet you. And oh, look there - there’s a third branch to this river current I didn’t see, I bet I could get round if I just make that turn there…

Twice I woke up (correction - was woken up, because of my bastard cat) in the early hours and the solution to a puzzle hit me full on, which is one of the best thing a video game can do to you in my opinion. There’s plenty of the main game’s tricksy just-enough-information delivery, and the story of this doomed cylinder is wonderful as it slowly comes into focus. It’s very pretty too, they’ve done well to make the ship entirely distinct from the design of the rest of the game - all ornate wood and fussy metal fixtures, green firelight and delicate glass projector slides. There are some awful bits - stumbling around in the dark woods, failing to sneak through a ghostly mansion, both scarier and tenser than gliding through Dark Bramble - but, it was hard for me to stay angry at these sections (though I was genuinely miserable at the time) once I realised that I never even had to be there in the first place. You son of a bitch, you’ve done it again.

Space Fuck

Saying 'space’ at the right time in the intro of Star Trek: The Next Generation is my favourite parallelly evolving folk game, and here is the video game of the popular video of that.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

I’d probably give this four stars now I’m all finished, but I wanted to write about it last so whatever. It’s very good anyway, don’t worry about it.

I do really like it when things end - things such as TV shows, or a day at work, or writing ten thousand words about video games for no good reason. FFXIV is not over, obviously, but the story that began more than ten years ago in the original release and has arced over the complete overhaul re-release and 3 expansions comes to a conclusion at the end of this 4th. That’s very nice to me, more games should end please.

I had my obsessed-with-Final-Fantasy-XIV phase quite a long time ago, before the first expansion even came out, so my emotions have since mellowed - in a pleasant way, to be clear. This is my old friend, these are my old friends, and I’m happy to hang out with them again. Endwalker was really working for me though, the old fires of excitement stoked up. They’ve got really good at making this game. First of all I adore how much it just doesn’t care about you fighting anything. I might have killed like 2 enemies before I had levelled up 3 times and was heading into the first dungeon. I think it takes a confident team to push such a high ratio of walking and talking to action, and it totally worked for me, including this new thing where you can run around town with a couple of your NPC pals and talk about things together like you’re in a real RPG.

The pacing does suffer in spots - this is mostly down to the expansion structure they’ve always stuck to. There are six new areas all about the same size, and the story quests, pacing, experience rewards, expand to fill the space first and the needs of the narrative second. I think the last zone in particular rather belabours its point before the climax.

But prior to all that, there’s this mystery running through the game which I found effectively delivered, intriguing, threatening. Even under everything you are currently dealing with there is the sounds of something else cracking foundations far beneath your feet. Things ratchet up and it feels as though the game could go in any number of really interesting, risky directions. It does not. It takes the safest option in one plot thread, and the revelation of the real big bad lost my interest fairly swiftly. Something more personal fades into a kind of stupid 'if the universe is going to end in a trillion years then what’s the point of doing anything, actually I am going to kill you now to save you the bother’ position - not exactly unusual in a JPRG, but a bit of a disapointment, worse off for comparison to the previous expansion.

Most frustratingly, there are threads of characterisation which would work perfectly if they were pulled on a little more, but they are gestured at and left lying. There could have been a desperate plea to be shown light and hope from a small voice in the darkness, in contrast to everything they had been exposed to and absorbed. What we get is mostly a blunt nihilism I have no interest in analysing, it’s boring!

But look, this is far from a failure all together, and as much as I can complain around the edges of the threat, the response to it works. Everyone in the game agrees with me, but they can’t just say oh fuck off and so fight on in earnest with love in their hearts. (Though with a distinct lack of input from the so-called beast tribes for most the story, odd after previous patches have tried to right some wrongs in this area.) It’s just always going to work on me, when countless secondary characters gather to wish you well, when your main gang stand firm beside you, when you find a burst of strength in the power of friendship - when you can finally breathe in the peace of the days after. The final, bittersweet farewells got me so bad.

So yeah, you know. I wish it had been riskier but I am critical not disappointed. That’s it, take it easy everyone. Oh and please do a time skip before the next expansion thanks.

If you made it this far, bless you. Was that any good? Feels kind of pointless and cursory to me, but such is life. 2022 I’m not playing any more shit, 4 stars and up only. All bangers no clangers. If I play even one 3 star game I am going to flip out. Bye love you bye x

[alexalexok]

all the games i played in 2020

Jesus Christ. Fucking hell. Okay, here.

The Best Ones

I felt incredibly blessed in 2019 to get just one beautiful all-time favourite in Outer Wilds, and then in 2020 there was somehow three. So I guess in 2021 there will be five, which is exciting. Big expectations uhh.... Horizon Zero Morning Electric Weeaboo jk jk.

Umurangi Generation 

Making a compromised living, under occupation in desperate times. Each of the small levels reveals a glimpse of something vast, weird and dangerous looming beyond the mundane lives simply hanging out, partying, surviving in the foreground. A candle-lit vigil in the city, a train of exhausted passengers rolling anywhere away from here, a UN outpost burning in the night. Dropped into a location with your friends and your camera, you search the space as much for the countless delicious details as the angles and subjects you need to complete your photography assignment. And while the main game quietly tells itself, giving you the space to understand, the absolutely essential 'Macro' DLC goes completely mask off, bristling with a raw and striking anger. Little hope, but solidarity.

I won't spoil how good those levels are too. The photography system develops to become impressively comprehensive as you unlock lenses, settings and post-processing sliders. The use of level transitions as cinematic cuts is the best I've seen, the soundtrack is incredible. I love even the small things such as the objectives list being split between essential work and entirely optional things like, you know, earning enough money, getting the film you need for your camera, taking a picture of your friends.

All together Umurangi Generation is not only [game of the year] 2020 but also game [of the year 2020]. I would never do anything so horrible as to recommend you play a video game, but just in case, this is the one.

Disco Elysium 

A game that just took over my brain and my life completely for a little while. That was nice. Though a little frontloaded with the worst characters & a little backloaded with unnecessary exposition, that middle like... 93% is so good that, I don’t know. I just got really excited about Disco Elysium okay. A mouldering disaster cop crawls from a blackout to discover there's a murder he's supposed to be solving. Aided by queer icon and character of every year Lt Kim Kitsuragi, and cajoled / threatened / deceived / encouraged / mocked by the clamouring voices of your own body, senses, wardrobe etc. you’ve kinda just got to get on with it. At least eventually, even though no-one seems to care - this is supposed to be your job.

When you finally get to examine the victim, the investigation is so extensive and detailed it carries you away with it, watching experts at their methodical work, sharing a thrill as a secret is discovered. What follows was a game-in-microcosm race to find somewhere cold to store the body before it can be collected, eventually descending into an abandoned commercial area after busting my shoulder on a charm-warded door. With every step absurdity and humour blends with buzzing myth and bleak existence.

But basically every extended section of writing here I found completely magnetic. When the true nature of the world is revealed as something so much cooler and weirder than I had realised. When the game pauses and the camera pulls back and the pulse of the city shivers into your shoes, a little feeling, echo, smell from every direction given attention and time to settle. Every time Kim says or does anything, his nerdy appreciation of the chemical-mechanical devices in his pocket. The whole game wobbles on the edge of unreality and hums with a completely earned, enthralling confidence. Truly very very good indeed.

Eastshade 

This felt so precision targeted at me specifically I am sleeping inside a Faraday cage to protect my dreams. It's all the charming and eccentric parts of something like a Morrowind but you don't have to play it for fifty hours or fight anything. You are a shipwrecked painter and travel around a small island talking to animal people whose problems can mostly be solved painting a picture of it. The island is on a moon which orbits a planet which eclipses the sun at lunchtime every day. That's not "important", but it is just as vital as countless other details - the delicate bridge into town, the windmills turning on the headland, the wooden bicycle I spent all my money on - the rumours of a giant fish in the river, a ghost in the watchtower, a secret sect of hallucinatory tea-drinkers below the city - a balloon ride, a lost treasure on the shore, an expedition to the ice, a tavern murder mystery on a stormy night. All this and more, brimming with a sort of warm woodland witchery that I could sink into forever. A really welcoming game, happy to share its ideas with you. Actually play this one too. Sorry.

Ten Other Really Good Ones

Mutazione 

A lot of things are quite difficult to judge this year because of... you know. I wasn't really into this, just kind of dutifully playing every day for a bit after work, but then I managed to find five minutes to actually relax one weekend and completely feel in love with it. More, I fell in love the small community at the centre of the game. Time passes, you grow gardens around the town, and slowly you get to know everyone's personality, routine and connections. It is far from idyllic or twee, there is trauma of the past joining messy relationships, personality clashes and generation gaps in the present. But in the late hours when everyone gathers there are some of the best quiet, human, loving moments of the year, and I wish the community retained a bit more focus through the ending.

Paradise Killer 

Simply solving the murder of basically everyone in charge as the latest in a line of interdimensional god summoning slash imprisoning synth nightmare decadent ritual sacrifice islands has once again failed to do as indented. The talking-to-suspects and exploring-for-clues aspects are both excellent but I mostly loved just learning about this tonally precise and confidentiality built world in a flurry of grim, beautiful, intriguing details.

A much worse game would try to be 'about' how fucked up the island situation is but aside from a few idle comments from protagonist Lady Loves Dies (who is, despite having been exiled for 3 million days and counting, still very much one of the gang) it is left to you enjoy discovering how fatally and simply flawed the cosmic delineations underpinning this entire endeavour are, and how obscenely, extravagantly awful everyone and everything is. You know, in a fun way, like watching Succession. The gun of justice is in your hand, and all of them unquestionably deserve to die....... the Daybreaks are chill though don’t you think, and Doctor Doom Jazz has those cool arms, and you could get into some fun trouble with Crimson Acid. What if you just pinned everything on someone else and walked away.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna 

As this DLC is completely self-contained and stand-alone, they really just made a little JRPG and I could not be happier. Please make some more little JRPGs, for me, I am grown up with other things I have to do. With a completely set party instead of the wildly spiralling team & assistant configurations in XBC2 proper, I finally got a full and fun understanding of the combat systems and even defeated this game's completely reasonable number of superbosses. It's a nice story too with an almost unheard of 27-year-old woman in the lead, and set before the main game all is infused with that wonderful sense of dramatic irony / complete tragedy as you know where things have to end up. Plus there's a thin but enjoyable system where the people you help out join your community circle and so you end up knowing them slightly more as characters rather than quest dispensing nodes.

Sludge Life 

Unfortunately got it's lunch eaten up a bit by Umurangi as they are shooting in the same direction, but this is basically a perfect video game. I believe it is still free somehow too so please go ahead. You've got your small open world, your secrets, your crushing capitalism. A whole apartment block that exists purely to put a great visual joke in every home. Incredible top to bottom, with upgrades that understand what fun and freedom is.

Hades 

I find it really funny the way that Supergiant's games are good. Like... uh, simply make it look good, and make the action good, and have good characters and writing, and also make the music good as well. Seems pretty obvious, what's everyone else's excuse? But Hades does feel like the game they were finally destined to make really - even from Bastion there was a really obvious love for always having a few different systems that modify the action in their own ways, which is the perfect fit for this genre. The balance here is impeccable as well, during runs every area and boss felt completely insurmountable at first before becoming routine in a way that felt so natural I'm not quite sure how it happened. And between runs there is always a new morsel of story or situation that makes you look forward to dying just as much as living. I was definitely a bit disappointed when the actual goal of the story became clear, compared to the endless possibility of escape that grew in my mind, but that's OK. Everything is okay, except for poison.

Risk of Rain 2 

Risk of Rain is one of my favourite games ever so I don't think the sequel could ever beat that, but it does incredibly well. Really, impressively well, with a move from 2D to 3D that I didn't believe could work. I especially love the Mercenary who I never got along with in the first game but here has become this wonderful flying fighter who with a little skill will zip zap slash between enemies and never even touch the ground. Everything else remains flawless, the rhythm of tense exploration to frantic boss fights, the simple hoarding joy of strapping as many teeth, jars, tools, mushrooms, feathers, hooks, toys and crowns to your person as possible as their effects stack and intermingle, the stages of beautiful desolation, the absolutely screaming soundtrack through it all. Cannot be beat.  

Heaven’s Vault 

If you ever played The Dig, this reminded me of The Dig sometimes, which should probably be all you need to hear to get it. If you haven't played The Dig, well, that's fine I suppose. I suppose that is okay. Half exploring old ruins along the winding spacerivers of a nebula, and half deciphering a forgotten language, I loved both. What really impressed me is the emotional impact some of the locations landed, whether wondrous, incredibly spooky, or full of dark secrets, and there is an exciting unpredictable feeling that you could stumble on absolutely anything next.

Between the big moments, finding any scrap of text to translate is always a joy and developing an intuitive sense of what new words or phrases could possibly be at a glance is incredibly satisfying. The ending unfortunately felt a little abrupt and a step removed from the rest of the game, but everything before that (cumbersome sailing aside) is incredibly good.

Butterfly Soup 

Excellent little VN about girls growing up, being gay, and playing baseball. Please recommended me any other short VN because I love them but I do not have the patience for a million route masterpiece.

Genshin Impact 

I must mention that the feeling amongst people I trust who play a lot of games with these character gacha systems, the one in this is supposedly quite a bad so probably avoid if the claws sink deep. It feels very bad to follow that up with a 'but'. So - however, I just really like this world a lot, and the storytelling and the characters too. That they're going to keep dropping new areas and cities regularly is very exciting for me. If you're a similar kind of person and are very content just running up a hill & going oh! there's a thing! and then you do something with the thing and a treasure chest appears, that’s at least 80% of the experience here. I just like flying around and climbing and being rewarded for my curiosity okay. It's very pretty too. We're going to fake electricity Japan next.

House of the Dying Sun 

It's a spaceships fighting in space game, which I haven't done for a long time so that was nice. It's also not incredible at just that, but as you go along you build up a fleet of ships big & small and start taking on a more commanding role in missions, directing your forces around the combat zone. Everything is elevated by sound and tone and presentation which starts with the name and only gets better from there as you mercilessly hunt down the high-ranking officials your Emperor branded traitors with their dying breath.

Really Short Ones

Frog Detective (link)

You're a detective, who is also a frog. Case closed. 

They Came from A Communist Planet (link)

Simply cathartic, running in the streets, the bright lights above on your side. All that is missing is another stage where things grew, became more communal rather than individual, and picked a bigger target. Should be dragging the rich from their beds. But this is a small thing and good for it. 

Wide Ocean Big Jacket (link)

There's one bit in the early morning when everyone is slowly waking up, emerging from their tents, saying sleepy good morning and sitting around poking the fire or making coffee or whatever. It's just, exactly what that feels like, very quiet and safe and completely free of pressure or expectation. It's a whole game of these nicely translated moments like that as two not-really-kids and two not-really-adults awkwardly get along for a bit.

The Bookshelf Limbo (link)

This is really good. It's about trying to find a book as a present for your dad and your brain slowly melting out of your ear as you think about what each option says about what you think about him and also what you're telling him about you. I ended up getting something fairly bland because I am terrified of being perceived or understood. Thank you, video games. 

Promesa (link)

I think this one caught on a bit more than any other walking game this year as it reduces the genre to an even more fundamental level so you are not even a person trying to get somewhere but a frame capturing pleasing angles of the scenes as you glide slowly through them. I would have liked some more of the narration between sections but it all still hums a warm tone together as you visit a town, a room, a life from different perspectives and different times. 

Can Androids Pray (link)

Well the best bit of any war story is certainly in the quiet aftermath when someone has taken a hit and contemplates their life and their swiftly approaching death so- why not just skip straight to this part? And there's also two of them. Beautiful and beautifully presented. 

Galactic Beacon Brigade (link)

 A vitally important task lies before you, please accept. A perfectly judged snippet of communication and control, cause and effect. 

Far From Noise (link)

A car rocks slowly back and forth on the edge of a cliff, and the driver spends a night thinking about things. As you would, I believe. The sun fades, the stars shine, and the wildlife pays a passing visit. Not a great fan of the tone of the writing moment to moment, but on the whole a very pleasant meditation. 

Rainy Season (link)

Stuck inside on a rainy day. Much like Wide Ocean Big Jacket, the specific feeling of a specific situation is captured perfectly and you just get to sit in it for a while. All the adults go about their business and you as a kid can only really hang around and wait, and use your imagination. 

Perfect Vermin (link)

Hunting mimic aliens in an office with a sledgehammer. That's okay, you can stop reading to go & play it, I don't mind. 

Lieve Oma (link)

Walking in the woods. Walking for a little too long in the woods, but a nice game about visiting the same places over time, pathways and ponds holding your memories for you, connecting you to the person you were and the people you were with before. 

Big Long Ones

Final Fantasy XIII Lightning Returns

It's been very good replaying (watching someone else play) these three games and especially how my opinions have changed. I used to like 2-3-1 the most I think, now it's more like 1-2-3. I definitely loved the idea of Lightning Returns, if only because the shape of it is so unusual for a JRPG and the fighting (when it worked) was really dynamic and fun. Hands off for a second viewing I was mostly struck by how there's just no plot in this game - there's a set-up certainly, and the ending, but then about two things happen between those points. The main story bits I suppose are just meeting old friends from the previous games, but none of them have much facinating going on and are mostly visited in isolation. And Sazh gets treated like dogshit yet again, it is incredible - this game goes so far as to just give away his rightful place in a final cutscene to someone else. Still like it though don't I.

Final Fantasy XIV 

High off the Shadowbringers expansion it's felt a bit of a low key continuation this year, though the final wrap-up of that story was very very good indeed. I was wary of the next step in the story as we're focussed back on the empire again, which I do not really care about. But there will be some nonsense about the moon, the baby joker is here and ready to die, and as we're headed into the final chapter for this current saga there should be some big Events that make me cry. I am ready thank you. Also I enjoy them actually trying to address the bad 'beast tribe' stuff from a long time ago, instead of simply doing better from then on - even if the new approach is also full of problems, they're new problems.

Final Fantasy… XV 

Only about halfway through this one at the moment I think. I do love these boys, the photos are great & a great idea, driving around is nice. Good to play alongside a loved one as this is a game made good almost entirely through tiny moments and single voice lines, and it's fun to react to those with someone (by which I mean, making fun of the boys). I could also complain for several hours about how loose and cumbersome and unintuitive pretty much everything else is - menus, controls, combat, getting anywhere, doing quests, picking anything up because jump is on the same button. And yet, instead of getting frustrated I find it all rather nice.

Tales of Vesperia 

Good gang on this one, main character Yuri is a good one too I think. When he just fucking [redacted] [redacted] that was incredible. The plot however did not especially grab me and I really do not like (/am terrible at) the Tales combat so every boss fight was a living nightmare. You can't react to anything in time! What are you supposed to do what do you want me to do!? I did have fun playing as Patty the tiny pirate though who is very quick and has lots of fun random effect abilities. If I can't be good at something I will at least entertain myself by doing a load of annoying nonsense instead.

Divinity 2 

It says on my list this was this year so I guess that must be correct. What was once new and exciting in Divinity 1 is familiar now, so it was not as exciting. But still, a really fantastic game to play in co-op, you can kind of split up and do your own thing, but always talking to each other about what you find or what seems to be going on in this town. That's nice. It's very fun to hear 'uhhh... can you come over here please because this person sounds like they're really going to try & kill me as soon as I close this dialogue box'. And very fun to respond, I guess so but I won't be much help because I just lost a bet & this guy took all my equipment, but actually hold on let me just pickpocket a couple of daggers off said potential enemy, ok I'm ready to go. That did happen at like hour 2 of the entire thing though, and then nothing better happened for a lot more hours.

Odin Sphere Leifthrasir 

I remember trying very hard two times to like this on the PS2 but found it kind of frustrating and punishing and I couldn't get very far. I took a chance on this remake and whatever they changed really did the trick. In particular, killing a boss in one stunlocked minute with smart use of your various attacks & chucking down the occasional damage potion feels so crisp and satisfying. It's a bit of a bumpy landing going from one powered up character to another at level 1 but I enjoy the different perspectives on the same story conceit. Also sheep trees.

Ring Fit 

I don't know if it's actually good exercise, but getting the old heart racing and discovering which muscles you've never asked anything of before has got to serve some good. I stopped playing the adventure mode a while ago because the small problems I had with game design stuff conflicting with exercise stuff got a bit too annoying. So I just do custom routines now, which is fine, and I want to do more and other types of exercise now too, which is good. I still really hate when working out actually makes you feel good, like how dare you.

Animal Crossing 

I am fairly neutral on this one to be honest, for all the great things they added like landscaping and crucially for me being able to put stuff down outside to actually decorate the island, there's also a sore lack of town buildings and substantial upgrades. Mainly it all feels just very safe and predictable which is definitely fine but there was a tiny seam of weirdness and spooky possibility that used to run beneath these game I miss. Everything is okay now. Hopefully now all the seasonal events have been dropped in there might be some big updates in the future? To be clear I did play for a very very long time & will catch all the things. Ursala is the best villager thank you, she looks so incredibly worried all the time but is trying her best and loves to simply vibe out on the beach, the only time she is content.

Ones Where You Shoot

Also I decided to do a little shooter history lesson to fill in some gaps properly. It probably should have ended with Titanfall 2 but I already played that a few years ago. It's pretty good.

Doom 

The main problem with Doom is that shooting some low-level demons with the shotgun is simply incredible and you get to do that immediately. So then it’s all downhill as using any other weapon against any other enemy never ever feels as good. I do enjoy going fast and finding secrets though.

Max Payne 

Not very good lads. But at least some of the lines still land. It is fun, I would never deny that it is fun to dive forward and shoot people in slow motion, but not as fun as it should be. And it's also really hard sometimes.

Killer 7 

Very difficult to get along with at first because my instinct is to explore thoroughly and go move slowly - but you can't, and there's no point. Once I slipped into arcade mode, just speeding along until hearing the laugh of an enemy nearby, everything fell into place. Just good pulpy nonsense

Halo 

It's okay. Then you get the shotgun and it's really good. Then you walk through the exact same hallway into room into hallway approximately fifteen billion times ? ? until you start thinking it's some kind of Escher maze or you got turned around or is there a trick to this or maybe this has just been your life this entire time, you were born here. What the fuck.

Kane & Lynch 2 

Absolutely grim in a way I don't think has been beaten. Also again the essential inclusion - really good shotguns. This post sponsored by shotgun gang. Categorically not a good game, but nevertheless a great game.

All The Other Ones That Are Good

Soma 

Plenty spooky enough for me even with baby mode turned on where the monsters can't kill you. They can however still appear, be near you, move around, exist. All bad. It is basically impossible to have a surprising story about robots and minds and bodies because we have done this so many times, but I think they took a pretty decent swing at it here. A tip to win me over - make everything as gross as possible. The crusty crushing deep sea location helps as well.

Even the Ocean 

There's a thread through this story of feeling obligated to do something just because you're the one who will do it properly and you have a conscience, even though the whole situation sucks and you should just walk away, but then something bad might happen, and no-one else is going to do it apparently. So, fine. Let's just say, that's some relatable content for me. Plus some side scrolling platforming which can feel really nice with swoopy acceleration curves and pleasing flight arcs as you balance energy to either jump high or far.

A Plague Tale: Innocence

If you're like me and can easily entertain yourself by going 'ah, rats!' every time you see bunch of rats then I have the game for you. The relationship between the main character and her little brother is a very nice thing & this feels like a case where having sections be short and mechanics light probably for budgetary reasons absolutely works in the game's favour. Rats!

Far Lone Sails 

You're just a little guy, come on. You jump around inside a big moving machine to put fuel in, go forward, put the sail up etc. occasionally jumping out to do some puzzles so you can get back in again. That's it, but the landscape tells its story well.

Bleed 2 

Quite a fantastic little action game, flying around the screen, avoiding one colour of bullets and parrying the others. You can finish it in like an hour and be satisfied, or play it again and again with loads of different characters with different abilities and probably also be satisfied. A thing about me is I really like when things are over, so I did the former.

Return of the Obra Dinn 

Just a sublime and unique and at least fairly racist ship death deducer & corpse name assigner. The way the story of a doomed ship and its crew is unfolded to you is brilliant - starting at the end and working backwards, each reverse step eliciting a louder shout of oh my god what the fuck is happening now. Sadly the ending was a real downer, as a mysterious sealed chapter of the story is finally uncovered and... is basically just exactly what I thought happened anyway. Highs and lows I suppose, much like the ocean herself.

10 Beautiful Postcards 

There is not much I can say, but here just explore an incredible nested world and see what you can find, scurry around inside it like a nosy little bug. The kind of intimidating game where you think... okay surely they've run out of ideas now, this must be all the ideas one person can have. Then there are more ideas. Stop it you're showing everyone up. Through all the spaces plenty of implicit & explicit thoughts about, well just life as it is you know, but you know - games and art, work and capitalism, funny little guys and big horrible rats.

Vignettes / Hidden Folks / Kids 

These three came at the time of year called 'I desperately need to do something to distract my brain but I can't summon the energy to do anything but click around on the screen and I need my free hand to rest my giant miserable face on anyway' If you like to look at things and click on things and see things happen these are all fantastic for that.

Friends of Ringo Ishikawa 

At first it just feels like a fairly obtuse school life game - go to lessons, study, be constantly starving because you have no money, talk to friends, get beaten up again, get a job and eat, lose your job because you wanted to read. Which like, yes that is the game here, but these moments of pure aching schooldays melancholy from Ringo and those around him occasionally burst through the routine, and that is what will keep you playing.  

Aer 

It's one of these exploring pretty areas and looking at ancient monuments and murals and opening doors games, except you get to fly which honestly forgives the majority of these sins of familiarity. I just really like flying around what's not to like what's your problem.

Forager 

And this is one of those resource games, get the wood, get the coal, smelt a thing, make a tool. But here at turbospeed, entirely for the sake of the process. It was okay, I liked being overwhelmed by stuff happening and machines making things for other machines, and upgrading something or other every two minutes. Then I got this lightning rod in a desert temple which shoots out three beams and can clear out a whole island of trees and ores in matter seconds, and I just had a lot of fun doing that for a long time. Though these games always leave a bad taste with me because they never end, you just have to decide to stop playing which never feels very good.

Lonely Mountain Downhill 

Throw yourself down a mountain on a bike. That's all you need to know really. Honestly the checkpoints are a bit far apart, and the hazards a bit hard to see coming, so I didn't stick with it too long - but I did enjoy my time. Go down the hill.

I Am Dead 

Ain't that the dream. A hidden object game, but you can also push a cross-section through anything you pick up (being a ghost and all) and find things inside the other things. The main draw here is the game's island setting and the main character's warm-hearted reminiscing of the place he lived and loved right until the end. Not all the sections hit but I suppose I gotta give some congratulations for anything this English to smuggle a positive feeling through my defences. Fuck this wretched country. Execute every Tory.

Disc Room 

Just run around a little room and don't get sliced in half by the sawblades. Except, sometimes do get sliced in half? And sometimes... wait why isn't the timer moving. Oh I see. But why is there just one spinning disc in this golden room and I can't seem to do anything else. How come it says there's four different blades in this room but I've only ever seen three. Why are these teeth so hungry. Yes so, the very simple initial idea is explored, twisted, unfolded to an extent it's just imaginatively pleasing to experience let alone play. That's a video games, to me.

All The Other Ones

Ori 2 

I don't know - I did quite like the first one, because moving around the world felt so nice. It's no less fun here, all swooping bouncing springing, but maybe time has just moved on a little. Perfectly enjoyable, and very pretty though I do not really like the art style. I will add that the ending is kind of an (accidentally??) hilarious and bad swerve away from the kind of resolution you'd expect.

Carrion 

We can all agree that being a big gross flesh monster is great and exploding out of a vent to rip a bunch of humans into their component cylinders is everything you could wish for. And that is indeed all very good, but the game around it is simply okay.

Call of the Sea 

I really do like the Myst type of game which is reading some notes & then prodding at a ridiculous mechanism until it does something. And I haven't played one for ages so this was nice. But there's also about 7 puzzles in total and most of them are just okay. I did kind of like the story in the end for specific reasons I won't spoil, though was indifferent until that point, and while as not as bad as Obra Dinn the whole jolly 30s American off adventuring in the South Pacific carries a lot of baggage before the original secrets of the island take over.

Outward 

Almost something that would be on my favourites list - almost. I like games that are somewhat busted, obtuse, disinterested in your life. Certainly it is intriguing - one time I died out there in the fields and awoke warm in a firelight cave, watched over by a strange creature with limbs or armour of whirling bone. I did want to play a little more but you know, some things you put down and don't pick up again.

Last Day of June 

I would say take a look if you like. It's definitely got something, but the gameplay winds down into a lot of trial and error leading to a lot of repetition either side of cutscenes you cannot skip about things that did not particularly touch me.

Gato Roboto 

A completely fine, cute little metroidvania where you're a cat in a mech. It's not bad or anything.

Like Roots in the Soil 

A nice idea and worth looking at - you can easily just go and do that (link). But too slight to stick. 

Vampyr 

A game with lots of nice ideas and none of them very well executed. It tries to force you into feeding on civilians by making the combat increasingly difficult without it, so you're forced into mechanical rather than moral decisions. But there's little morality at work anyway because feeding on anyone even they are terrible and everyone wants them to die, make the whole area where they hung out more at risk. And they just die there's no fun of turning or just doing a little sippy on people. All the gears are spinning but all their teeth are out of line. I ended up cheating just to finish which I'm not sure was worth it. Also you play as a doctor during the Spanish Flu which like, maybe not right now.

Journey to the Savage Planet 

This was good in that I got to activate my pure hearted gamer mode and skip every scene, ignore every piece of story or text it tried to show me because it was all very bad. It's quite a nice colourful world though & it's good to play a first person game more about exploring and grappling about and finding secrets than shooting. Sure it's a bit like a Metroid Prime then why not.

Space Mining Clicker 

Picked at random because I thought I could go for a clicker game just to, you know, keep my mind off of everything. This isn't a very good one unfortunately but I did click on things and watch other things happen.

Mine Defense 

But then, I decided to explore another clicker and ended up running this big old boy for way too long. I don't know why and I should not be expected to explain my behaviour. It does have the thing I like where one shitty old resource you thought you were done with suddenly gets recycled into vital importance for something else. But I do need a tiny grain of story or something to watch the numbers with.

Glittermitten Grove 

The brevity of individual sections in Frog Fractions really played to its advantages. I did not enjoy the second / main(?) section of this one and ended up wandering around for too long trying to figure out what to do next. Get on with it. Do a joke.

Crosscode 

Actually had an incredible set-up with like 3 different layers to your interaction to the world, which is the real world, but also an MMO in the real world, but you're also just playing the MMO to discover what happened in the real real world. But then the thing is, you just have to play the MMO, which is fine and everything but at least let me hack it or cheat somehow, that would be fun. Never mind.

Creature in the Well 

A lovely idea I thought I was getting really into, a robot plays pinball-baseball in some ruins occasionally mocked by a giant creature beneath the floor. But then the game just asks for some ridiculously precise and difficult play that I was no match for, and I'm not really sure who could be.

Spiritfarer

The kind of game where it takes a while to realise it isn't actually very good. Certainly looks nice, good set up sailing around the place picking up phantoms to help out and eventually send off into the great beyond. It did feel good at first to set a course for the next island and get all the farming and crafting chores done on the boat just in time to drop anchor, but all that stuff develops no depth as you go - there's just new resources to do the same thing with, and again, and too much of it. Fatally, I did not particularly like most of the characters you bring aboard. A few stories do hit, but most I found too slight to really grab hold of. Also having the first few characters know the silent main character feels a very strange choice, they will reminisce about some shared experience but get nothing but a smile and nod in return from her, and a shrug from me. That doesn't mean anything, you just said a few names I don't know.

Ones for 2021

Yeah they're doing another year sorry. You're actually living in it right now. Currently I started playing Ikenfell which is, like, fine, and I got Captain Tsubasa for a present which is good fun but also requires a lot of concentration energy.

For my future gamer plans I would like to play Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin, and also 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. I plan to finally get an Atelier game (Ryza?) and at least see if I get along enough with Vagrant Story to play it through. For new things, I am dying for a single crumb of Silksong so if that comes out I might just survive, and I could be tempted by some new Monster Hunter. 

Also I guess a new FF14 expansion should drop at some point which seems like an absolutely ridiculous thing to say, good luck to them. And good luck to me. And my friend, my friend, good luck to you x

[alexalexok]

i actually kept a list this year

The old black tendril slides around my leg and hauls me to the ground. My chest hums, a scream vibrating the tar that twists, stretches, laughs inside my mouth and lungs and foams against the acid in my stomach. It’s here, it’s writing about video games.

The Signal From Tolva It’s got a soul, a beckoning finger. Maybe this alien planet I smashed into isn’t very interesting or the things to do very varied, but I wanted to explore and I found the occasional bursts of weirdness incredibly intriguing. Maybe the shooting kind of sucks but this odd, stately engagement of taking pot-shots at each other at great distances is rather pleasant. Everything, very pleasant, including stomping around with a little gang of completely useless robot buddies who will go the wrong way, fail to hit anything & then die, but they’re my friends and I love them.

Plus there’s the also very pleasant colouring-in sensation that makes a Dynasty Warriors so engrossing, slowly taking over the map. If you need some peace and quiet for a few hours this winter here you go.

FF14 Giant woman Trash Guts made her triumphant return, lancing through Stormblood in time for Shadowbringers to come out. I love her, and I love this. It’s an unassailable thing, to have time better measured in days than hours spent with characters over multiple massive jrpg arcs and the gaps between.

We’re in some downtime now as the post-Shadowbringers patches start to come out, a new chunk of story every few months. It’s my favourite part, when the evil has been defeated but everything is absolutely not back to normal - so what now? A more intimate focus - on small things, individuals and communities. We’re doing it. I can kill things and nod if that helps. Go get em.

Horizon Zero Dawn A game summoned into being accidentally by a decade of consensus big-budget design. Incredibly dull, incredibly distant, every aspect unfolding so predictably that actually playing it & just imagining playing it are indistinguishable experiences. You get the idea, free yourself and spend 20-30 hours staring at a wall instead, as a gift.

Link’s Awakening The old one not the remake. It’s occasionally obtuse, even more frequently frustrating. But every single line of writing in this game shines with an almost enviable charm, suffusing the whole thing with cheery, dreamy, slightly ominous warmth. What a great job, thank you. I love you Marin, I love you everyone, goodbye, goodbye.

Pikuniku The little red guy. There should be more swinging around but that’s true of everything isn’t it. They put a lot of ideas in here just because it was fun or funny so why not & that’s how you make a good video game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Not a shade on Xenoblade Chronicles X, unfortunately, but still good. Put XCX on Switch cowards. Make XCX2 you villains.

I can’t believe they sold the option to have not every single enemy instantly aggro on you as DLC. My absolute commiserations to anyone who had to play the game like that. Terrible map. Terrible quest tracking. Terrible gacha system that doesn’t even try to fudge things in your favour if it’s going badly - please! There’s literally no reason not to be nice to me! I couldn’t give you any more money even if I wanted to. Be nice to me.

It’s still good though, it’s a jrpg. There’s like 4 distinct groups of villains most of whom end up on your side. There’s a very clear, permanent, concrete and immutable difference drawn between ‘people’ and 'blades’ and then upwards of fifty hours spent discovering that every single character is actually some kind of secret unique combination of the two for various complicated reasons. What more do you want? A plot? It’s the freakin world tree baby.

Bayonetta 2 Sadly the game is about rescuing Jeanne from hell, which means that Jeanne isn’t in the game very much & Bayo/Jeanne scenes are at least 50% of the reason these games are good. Whenever Jeanne’s not on screen, I’m asking ‘where’s Jeanne?’ All the other characters blow ass and I don’t like fighting for its own sake that much in general (as stupid at that probably sounds) so I like the first game better.

Baba Is You I’ve finally made peace with the fact I’m not smart enough to finish it & stopped telling myself I’ll go back to try. Still an incredible idea & an incredible puzzle game up to the point where I couldn’t quite hold all the possibilities of a word in my head so it all leaked out of my ear & onto the carpet never to return. Just staring unfocussed at the screen for twenty minutes, half a dozen colourful words shimmying back & forth without a care in the world & absolutely nothing happening in my brain whatsoever except, maybe, that I could… I could just lean forward slightly and reach into the screen, and gently very gently pluck the baba out, and pop it into my mouth. And no-one would ever know.

Risk of Rain 2 Risk of Rain is one of the best games out of all the probably dozens of video games that have been made. They found another dimension for this one & it works way better than I expected.

I think maybe the point of Risk of Rain is to play it on hard & be smart & good at doing the moves & get to the end & win in like 20 minutes. For me it is a game that you play for 3 hours and slowly amass an obscene amount of items until every particle effect in the game is pulsating around your tiny character, stacked up 4 times, overflowing the UI, looping again through all the levels. The game tries to match you with an obscene amount of enemies, throwing handfuls of bosses at you in desperation, but you’ve transcended the curve, invincible, flying. It’s wonderful, it feels like you’ve cheated, like everything is about to implode. Take me with you.

Sekiro Damn, we’re fighting though. We’re actually fighting thouughh. I thought we were fighting in the previous games, but really the boss was just doing their moves at me, and then it was my turn to do some moves at the boss.

I loved playing an set character for once with existing relationships and opinions. I love the slight smaller scope and scale. I love the slow seep of mythology. I especially loved my final fight - a messy scrap, every step forward cost me and every crutch I had was kicked away. One cut away from death I honestly found a moment of calm in my panic, grit my teeth and decided to win - a string of perfect parries, counters, and the final blow. Exhausting, exhilarating, I’m an anime now.

Watch Dogs 2 A game is only as good as its gang of misfit characters, and we’re doing pretty well here. Done quite a disservice by that open world mission structure so everything is quite bitty and you only get to see everyone 30 seconds at a time in the intro to each mission. So it took a little while to really like everyone but I was very much on board by the end. Surprisingly hasn’t dated as badly as you’d think considering it deals with modern tech & culture. Memes may die but billionaires will always be here trying to ruin our lives in new disruptive ways until we start dragging them from their beds.

Ashen One of the better ones of these ones. Very pretty, a bleak landscape in flat shaded earth tones. And a cool little village gets built up as you bring people back to the base and do some quests for them, it’s everything I want in a game, it’s what Majula in Dark Souls 2 should have been like. Let me come home.

Anyway I had to cheat to get through the last palace dungeon section because it was so fucking long, please do the same & love yourself. Also there’s a very cool traversal method to unlock and a giant woman to meet. Truly we are blessed.

Observation I’m a stupid computer beep blorp. Please repeat the question. Please uh explain what you want me to do a bit more clearly. No? Okay I’ll look it up. Watch out.

Hades Much like RoR2 I haven’t dipped in too much as it’s still being made. But. It’s really good. It’s a wonder they didn’t make a roguelike before because these games live & die on the interesting interplay potential between different abilities, passives, items, modifiers etc & that seems to be something very central to all of Supergiant’s previous games as well. I’m already 70% on board with anything to do with Greek mythology as well & everyone is very good in this. Keep it up good job.

FF13 We are absolutely blessed to have a game that cost a billion pounds to make where it’s just the main cast getting paired up in various configurations to talk about their feelings. Lightning & Hope are the best ones obviously, a traumatised child and a depressed teenager circle one single emotion for ten hours trying to figure out how to defeat it. Really loved Vanille even more in this playthrough too, be nice to her. Be nice to Vanille.

Outer Wilds One of the best. Maybe the best! You just 'gotta have it’. A wonderful solar system full of emotions. You got the small moments - simple discussion present or past, the sun rising through an impossible planet, bursting through cloud cover for the first time, drifting hopelessly in space as death approaches. You’ve got the big moments - astronomically big moments, the life of a star, the sweep of a comet, the secret of the moon. And you’ve got, always, big and small together - a streak of light across the sky when you open your eyes, a warm harmonica humming safety through twisted infinity, a new friend at the end of a quantum unentanglement.

After all that, the final trip - barely breathing I was so tense, so excited to see what would happen. And it felt like everyone was rooting for me.

Cibele It is as good as I was told. A little diamond of a game, swallow it in one gulp & feel it sitting in your guts. Incredible teenager energy - some things kind of just happen, and then they stop happening, and no-one not even you seemed to think or behave like you thought they should have done maybe, probably. Then there’s really nothing you can do but mark it down & see what happens next.

FF13-2 We just kept going. I can’t say this holds up quite as well as I remember but I did play the entire FF13 trilogy for the first time almost back to back in the absolute depths of the deepest depression void, clinging pitifully onto anything I could reach. Do you want to see my platinum trophies.

The 2 main problems are that everyone else from FF13 isn’t in it as much as they should be, and that my boyfriend at the controls wasn’t having a fantastic time of it I don’t think - so you can blame him for this & not me. Time travel though… glam rock villain… extratemporal chocobo merchant… the song 'Crazy Chocobo’… Bigger Hope… none of this means anything to you I guess you’ll have to play the game to find out in stores now.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor A perfect baby. I have no idea if there’s something you’re supposed to be doing in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough for me just to try & internalise this layout of this sprawling spaceport, meet a few spacealiens, play with some strange spaceitems, earn a few space coin to buy some spaceslime to eat. It’s a living. Just about.

Splatoon 2 I got really frustrated at this one sniper level in the single player & haven’t tried it again since. I don’t really like playing the game, I don’t like how the aiming feels & how most of the weapons work & can’t seem to do anything very well. But I really like everything else, especially the single player levels, weird & inventive little shooter/platformer slices. So I’ll try again once I’ve calmed down a bit, in approximately 8 years.

A Short Hike Ah. Ahh! The Game That Has It All. Gamers, you’re in luck. Merry Christmas to the gamers out there. A small, very pretty open world, a load of cute animal people to chat with, a touching story surrounding everything - treasure hunts, races, games, fishing, secrets. Plus plus plus you can fly & at the end of a few hours are soaring, swooping, gliding brilliantly through the skies. I love to fly.

Inside Yep, run to the right & feel very tense & sad & think there’s too many swimming bits. I really like the puzzles where you’re cutting about with a big bunch of the lads, it’s very good. Let me control more than one thing at once more often I’m a fan. The ending is good obviously, a nice inversion of all that’s come before. Together, comrades.

Wilmot’s Warehouse Relationship smugness simulator. We absolutely crushed this one in co-op, thanks. I love the little robot you can get who is absolutely useless. Put a useless little robot in every game if you want my heart if I didn’t make that clear already.

It was fun to be reminded that categorisation consideration (a la 'is a hotdog a sandwich?’) is quite fun to do if it’s a brief intimate discussion instead of an endlessly re-litigated online argument that roils on forever until surely everyone that’s ever thought about it wishes only for death. Wilmot is even better though because these chats are inherently absurd & you find yourself seriously considering... is a needle and thread a type of horseshoe? Is a tent a mountain? Are eyes frogspawn or apples?

Sayonara Wild Hearts Not quite as good as that but still good. Keep it close to hand for when you’ve got some friends around & it’s getting a bit too late & just put the controller in someone’s hand. You can all stare at the screen & not say anything, it’ll be nice.

Goose Game At its worst when it has to be most like a video game, as unfortunately video games often feel they must. There’s not a whole lot you can do to the base, pure, brilliant experience of being a horrible honking beast to make it any better. Plap plap plap plap plap.

A very good ending though - actually it’s the exact same ending as Inside if you think about it. Please enjoy this Gamer Fact.

Battletech I played enough to know what everything happening was, but not quite enough to know whether anything I was doing was a good idea or not. I’m keen to get back, though it felt a bit like once I got settled in actually everything might be a bit simple? The Resonance Of Fate of turn-based strategy mech games, if you will. I look forward to being embarrassingly mistaken.

Anyway shout out to making characters I really started to love & care for just through combat barks. If Glitch dies, we all die.

Death Stranding Someone very wise once said that a game is only as good as its gang of misfit characters. I don’t really like anyone in Death Stranding, maybe least of all the lead. They all have their moments here & there but mostly just… nothing. Apart from lovely Mads. I nothing you all, I’m sorry. And also none of the details being revealed to me are any more interesting than the broad outlines given at the start.

However… the wise man is sometimes a fool. Wise-Foolman. I loved playing this game, I think it is fantastic. I will happily meander around any landscape anyway to be fair, I like going… over there, just to have a look. In this game there’s both the macro route planning, having a destination and thinking ok I’ll cut up this gulley here and then kind of sweep around to crest this hill & we’ll see how steep this rocky section is from there. With the micro management of each step & the weight on my back around rocks and inclines, there’s a very pleasing focus I found. When the destination finally comes into view after a horrible journey, the rain finally stops and the music comes up, there were few better moments this year.

Wattam Not fantastic, but mesmerising. Sit there in a pleasant stupor. What a lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and colour. Buy it for your little niblings without your siblings knowing.

AC7 I just started but it’s Ace Combat you know what you’re getting into. I hate SAM sites. I love the dog. Thanks

And the tendril withdraws, leaving a lovebite rash along my thigh. I lie coughing in the dirt, trying to bring up anything at all. But the tar is in me now, it’s always been in me. Goodbye friends, let’s not do this again.

[alexalexok]

beorn // the old man // the mundane & the impossible // a positive vulnerability

It’s been a very long time since I read the Hobbit. Once and only once, before I had even reached my teens. And while most of its details have fallen away from me now, three things stuck - the book’s beginning, the riddles in the dark, and Beorn the bear man.*

These have all taken on the strange vividity of time-stretched memories, where I’m sure the actual events as written are much smaller than I recollect - simple sentences that spun out into personal touchstones. The last one in particular has become an archetype in my mind for a particular kind of tension where rustic hospitality is undercut with the jarring sense of a secret. The feeling of this scene always comes back to me when new stories tread a similar sort of ground, and I’m always pleased to experience it again.

I think it happens when Bilbo is sleeping in Beorn’s house after a night of feasting and strange festivity, secure in a much-appreciated sanctuary after the ordeals of the journey so far. Then comes the sound of a great beast moving around outside and the peace and warmth of the low-embered dark is split with fear. There it chimes with anyone who has lain awake at night and Heard Something. At the time it held other tensions with me - between what I was told about strangers and what I wanted to believe about people. At the time, I think, it was important to see that a good person was still good, even with a secret no-one mentioned and some were scared of.

Most recently this tension was evoked by the old man in Breath of the Wild. Not immediately - helpful strangers are hardly an uncommon first encounter in a video game. But a little later, after I left him hunting in the woods (a really endearing encounter in itself - here was companionship where I was expecting isolation) I made a beeline towards the next shrine. And I found him again, his back to me, slowly felling trees outside a low log cabin, as though nothing in the world was out of place.

There it was, the mundane and the impossible. Sudden intrigue at the unaddressed mystery and a wariness at what this could mean. A good thing, a small thing - you can’t have got here before me - but it set the tone for the game from then on.

Breath of the Wild uses vulnerability a lot. The traditional vulnerability rooted in mortality - it’s easy to get overwhelmed, easy to die from one mistake. Everything is breaking, storms are terrifying, fights are loose and scrappy panics. But there also a feeling of positive, emotional vulnerability that comes from the game just, doing stuff. That’s what I really carried forward from seeing the old man there - a feeling that really anything might happen here, that this game could surprise me and make my step falter. That absolutely anything could lie over the next ridge or burst with a crackle of lightning from the nearest waterfall. Riding on that nostalgic evocation, here was a real adventure, and I threw myself into it joyfully.

It should be easy, shouldn’t it? I was tempted here to write some sweeping comments about homogenised design that makes other games - open world games in particular - feel instantly and disappointingly familiar. And I do have a lot of problems there, with games that borrow so much that playing them and just pretending you’ve played them are close enough experiences. But I don’t think Breath of the Wild does anything revolutionary, rather it just examined every aspect of itself and asked - what about this? What if we made it good, rather than just making it exist?

Of course, even with such a deft touch in the details and a bounding imagination that sent mine soaring too, Breath of Wild became slowly known to me. Its boundaries were understood, and the surprises dwindled until I was left with a comfortable sense of belonging. I finally had a grasp on it, I knew what it was about.

I do actually have some criticisms about the later parts of the game and I might write them down but, you know, they all kind of faded away once I actually finished the thing. And I know that while many other details will fall from me too, one thing will stick - that first small impossibility, and this game’s endeavour to match with genuine surprises the adventuring intrigue which it inspired.

*A little while ago I searched to see how hot Beorn was in the Hobbit films and it turns out? Not?? Not at all hot? I still don’t... I still - I thought this was like a universal constant, I thought it was Understood - of course Beorn is incredibly unbelievably hot? But APPARENTLY some designer person was like ‘oh yeah. Beorn. I guess I’ll just... I guess he’s just like. A guy. A slightly weird looking guy I guess. Finished.’ and everyone else was like ‘good job!’ GOOD JOB??? no.

[alexalexok]

a new thing for you to read

hello, everyone who forgot they were still following this account. i have something new to share with you & this time it is a whole novel.

it is called narrow lines. it’s about two very sad, very powerful people and the end of the world.

here it is - on itch.io

or, here it is - on amazon - if you’d prefer. 

also here’s the front cover, which turned out pretty nicely i think.

it’s been quite a long time coming, so i’m very pleased to finally be done. this book was actually started during my creative writing master’s in ~2010, where various short projects, assignments & ideas i had been working on all started to feel more like aspects of one big idea rather than separate things.

a year or so after graduating i had a first draft done, for which life & time & failing to find an agent slowly drained away my enthusiasm. at the time the book was non-chronological, structured around one central chapter, with chapters paired in some way to either side of it, forward and back. some of those resonances may still be apparent (two basement scenes, night and day on the beach, two hills climbed, the woods and the city) though now everything is in chronological order & i added in a few more chapters since.

anyway, that’s a little bonus backstory for my tumblr friends. i dragged everything out of retirement earlier this year & have been editing and reworking since. i’m fairly happy with the result, i believe there is some power in these pages. my main problem was just how much i have changed as a person from when i started to now & i was sometimes at odds with past me in the editing process. i believe some of the messages, or attitudes, or conclusions that could be drawn from the work, have become stranded somewhat in the process, in a weak halfway space that does not represent my feelings now or then.

but that’s enough talk for now. i hope i have done okay. i hope some people might read this, take something from it, feel something. i don’t know. but i did it, didn’t i? thank you.

[alexalexok]

well heck

the npcs in dark souls 3 aren’t much good are they? they didn’t do a very good job. there’s not enough of them and they don’t have enough to say. by a long shot they don’t have enough to say for themselves or each other. this is probably my one big problem with the game & i’m actually a bit sad about it?

i know there’s a few good bits & a few good people & stories but. on the whole...

i was gonna write like, ‘ok it’s probably good the series is finishing after this, but as dark souls 2 focussed more on bosses and spectacle, and 3 focussed on legacy and location, i would like one more with a central focus on the people’ along those lines but - actually, what i want is probably just demon’s souls isn’t it.

the nexus is such a wonderful space. not just for the architecture but for everyone you gathered there. a cathedral for lost souls & every type of sinner. everyone clinging on, huddled into their corners. a place to gather yourself & share some understanding, a slow shaking breath, before you ventured back out again.

i was looking forward to making some kind of home at firelink in dark souls 3, but it’s never really come along. it’s just like an area where a scatter of people are hanging out. they have little new to say and very few opinions of each other. all here at the same time, not here together. such a feeling has faded away step by step with each entry in the series.

there is a lot, a lot a lot, that i like in dark souls 3 & what was obviously reprioritised during development. largely a smaller focus on boss fights & greater focus on exploration & environment. but with the other characters in the game, kinda feels as though this was given little priority at all, it was just considered a thing which these games have, so this game has it. for me it’s more vital and precious than most other aspects of the games. 

so there’s that i guess. have a good day please x

[alexalexok]

skin shapes

hi everyone. hope you're doing ok today.

just wanted to do a little summary or talk or whatever about my project skin shapes which i finished & released last week.

so, well, first things first. here it is - skin shapes

i hope you can check it out and enjoy if you haven't already. thank you.

*

mainly with this project i wanted to show off my writing in a different form, separate from static text or the few twine pieces i have written previously (which are also available at alexok.itch.io thank you kiss.) the aim was to make something like a poem to explore and travel through. and to make something that is a little easier - a little more appealing perhaps - for people to approach and experience.

i mean... well it's a little more difficult to get at in the first place being a download (& windows only sadly) rather than browser-based. but it seems like quite a big obstacle to get someone to read something in the first place. reading requires you to reach out towards the thing and make that initial connection. it's difficult to tell from a distance what a piece of writing is, what it will be or could be. there's some investment or trust or work needed. i think it's more difficult to earn that focus from a link on twitter or whatever too. that requires some mental track-switching, from absorbing complete thoughts at a glance to sitting with one single new thing for a while and working out what it is.

so i thought something with sound and with visuals also, something like that can also reach out towards the audience. meet them halfway across that intial step and make the fall in easier. can be understood to a greatest extent from a greater distance.

and i thought, it would be a nice challenge to me. and i thought, there's not many things out there which present writing or poetry in such a way. castles in the sky maybe - exquisite corpses perhaps - but still, it would be nice to make something unusual.

and i thought, there's something to setting the atmosphere and the pace of a piece both. there's something to a moving through. a closer involvement with the thing, an inhabitation to some degree. and i thought, perhaps i can make something worthwhile.

*

skin shapes also serves as a companion piece to my novel narrow lines. a novel which isn't available anywhere yet but has been with me for a while. i started it during my creative writing master's and finished it not too long after. then back and forth between working on it and not, a flurry of complete restructuring, occasionally being hopeful enough to sent it to some agents and eventually be turned down.

the usual story. anyway i thought this could help gather some interest in narrow lines so i could put it out on my own and not have it disappear completely into the abyss. that part hasn't happened and probably won't, but the project has allowed me to understand more about narrow lines than before & understand more clearly what i want it to achieve. skin shapes comes from a different character's perspective than narrow lines so it was in this respect a useful exercise in character exploration for me.

*

but, so. did everything turn out okay? yeah, it turned out ok.

mainly skin shapes took a lot longer to complete than i thought it would. and my usual predictions are very pessimistic, because i know what i'm like and i know how doing anything takes 10x longer than you expect if a computer is involved.

but looking back... considering than the last time i looked at game maker or did any coding was about 10 years ago. considering i've never opened an image, uh, image creating? image editing? program more complicated than paint before, let alone made anything ever that could be called art. considering i've never touched anything to do with editing or making audio or music before. considering that poetry is a rare form for me to begin with. considering that... well, doing anything at all besides sitting very quietly on my own, stirs up an anxiety in me i want to run from.

considering that, i think things turned out ok. most of my ideas were realised in the end and i didn't have to make any massive sacrifices. i think the atmosphere is good and each of the verses are strong or interesting in their own way. i like... the intro & seamless transition into the piece proper. i like the colour in verse 2 and the closing in. i like the effects in verse 3 and how it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, a decent metaphor for insects. i like the secret parts of verse 4. i like the slow revealing flow of verse 5, stretching out behind. i like the rips in verse 6. i like in verse 7 how the leaves start to look like fire. i like the ending a lot.

that's kind of boring sorry but it's important to write these things out sometimes, if only for my own sake. i also wish many things. that there was something else like verse 4, not quite so linear. that certain sounds were better. that 8 scanned ok both backwards and forwards (i did have something but it was far far too long.) that i was better at everything in general, including the writing. i always wish for that.

*

not too many people have played skin shapes. currently it's at 90 views and 19 downloads if you'd like the stats. but i'm still kind of staggered at that. even more that any of those people would send a little money my way for the experience. i'd like to thank you all so much & hope i can keep doing good work.

i do always have a problem... mostly a self-sabotage kind of situation. i weigh everything down with too much hope in my head. maybe it is inevitable, when you feel your life has never really gone anywhere, never even got started. at the bottom it's hard not think oh, maybe this is the thing that will get me somewhere. maybe this will be it. the start, the one.

the story is like, everything you do builds on what you have done before. and life graphs an upwards slope with probably a few stumbles along the way. but it's always felt like a flat line to me, with each success a small bump quickly ridden over & back down to nothing. i'm not sure how to build on things... how to get anywhere. often it is revealing, and painful, to find out how many people are kind of just ambivalent to you. and you try not to hold it against them, for all the other projects you have ignored yourself.

but i'm ok now. and i'm proud of myself. and i'm thankful.

see you at the next bump x

[alexalexok]

another story for you to read

hello everyone. i was ill again last week, so just like last time (with shells) i decided to revise an old piece of work while i couldn’t deal with thinking about new things. and so, shimmer is now up on itch.io for you to enjoy, if you would like to - here

it’s a proper serious one i guess, so a bit less fun than shells, but probably better overall. i think the atmosphere and tone came out pretty well. and it has an actual ending now which is nice. before it would loop indefinitely, but now i added more things that change with each loop, and a final break-away to a full stop (the third time through, if you want to know) 

that actual ending path could probably be better but it does the job. the final sentence is a bit jarring perhaps but i like it a lot and enjoyed trying to read it out loud in one go (impossible) as everything kind of blurs into the next and onwards. 

anyway! thanks for the support & everything everyone so far. new things are coming, still! soon. three things in the works. i’m having some real trouble trying to draw a tree at the moment so that’s fun. bye.

[alexalexok]

oh hey also? there’s 18...

there’s eighteen different party members you can swap between. that’s too many party members you can swap between, video game. but i spotted a big bin labelled ‘suggestion box for any possible kind of character you’d like to fuck please and also this is a legally binding receptacle’ in the background of that documentary so i guess the developers just had to go with what they got. everyone was very horny for the duration of this project.

ah, so, i watched a short behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of xenoblade chronicles x & it was actually very interesting & revealing. basically, the reason there’s so many big, obvious design & ui & usability flaws is because during every important production meeting the art team would keep putting up slideshows of one of their horny alien sci-fi furry characters on the big projector in the conference room. and then everyone else would get super excited about it & start suggesting how they could be put into the game & what some cool cutscenes & camera angles & costume details could be & all the glaring problems about actually playing the game got put to one side to look at again next time. it seemed like a very supportive & enthusiastic studio, probably a great place to work.

[alexalexok]

ah, so, i watched a short behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of xenoblade chronicles x & it was actually very interesting & revealing. basically, the reason there’s so many big, obvious design & ui & usability flaws is because during every important production meeting the art team would keep putting up slideshows of one of their horny alien sci-fi furry characters on the big projector in the conference room. and then everyone else would get super excited about it & start suggesting how they could be put into the game & what some cool cutscenes & camera angles & costume details could be & all the glaring problems about actually playing the game got put to one side to look at again next time. it seemed like a very supportive & enthusiastic studio, probably a great place to work.

[alexalexok]

dragon’s dogma // old words for new friends

the wind is pushing me.

hi there my friends, my pals, my precious babies. i’m excited today! because very soon dragon’s dogma is coming out on pc & that means a whole new bunch of people can play a game i like very much. it’s a slightly unusual feeling & one i think you have to be careful to keep mostly to yourself unless you start pressuring people with it. but, it’s a nice one to just sit with. like when suddenly people were curious about nier last year, wow. or generally any time anyone thinks about saying anything about alpha protocol, oh boy.

so, well, here’s some old & new things i want to say about dragon’s dogma. it’s probably my favourite of those 7/10 games you know. oh, busted for sure. messy, weird. charming, fun, wonderful.

first off i just want to link you to this piece because i still think it’s pretty good okay! still! about anxiety & dragon’s dogma & little ways to deal with things. also an excellent ending i think. i should get paid for this kind of stuff.

and i wanna mention fast travel in this game, because it’s been on my mind lately with this lil piece on xenoblade flight the other day & my own bit about just cause 2 i was thinking about again. i’ll still say fast travel is a bad solution to a problem better solved with allowing progressively quicker, move agile movement options until it’s a pleasure rather than a pain getting anywhere.

dragon’s dogma... doesn’t have any of that! it does have an interesting take on fast-travel though which is basically - okay, do it yourself then. the game’s central city is the only place you can warp directly to in the beginning, but then portcrystals are introduced - items you physically place down anywhere in the world, which then become points you can warp to. 

in the game’s initial release there was only one portcrystal in the entire world (until ng+) which was just about the worst. my pain. but look - the idea to actually build up your own fast travel network is a good one i think. gets you involved & making decisions - not just an abstract system separate from you - rooted firmly in the game’s lore too. planting a portcrystal flag in a far-off corner, choosing if you’d rather avoid a long journey or a dangerous one, linking up settlements, calculating efficiency. it brings this sense of claiming the world, conquering it - or at least, gaining some control over that which beat you back time & again. a physical kind of progression.

if you’re gonna have fast travel, this is a pretty good way to go. all the benefits, but still requires the connection to & understanding of the landscape as it is laid out. i’m sure you made a lovely landscape, it seems a shame to just skip across all that hard work & never come to know it very well.

anyway! last of all - i think the way you move around in dragon’s dogma is actually my ideal, my favourite. the weight of your character, speed & animations, your jump & roll & grab & heft & everything. it is really, really great simply to play this damn video game. mess about in it for a while, scamper across the rooftops, dart back & forth across a field, enjoying the sensation & realisation of your movement. please take note.

and the character creation is so so good as well. and many more things. so many good things! maybe you’ll find out for yourself. as i always say - they’re masterworks all. you can’t go wrong.

please, take care of yourself.

[alexalexok]

xenoblade chronicles x preliminary patch notes

enemy appendage targeting has been improved. using up and down on the dpad while locked on will manually cycle through all appendages for the current enemy.

ground targeting rings have been added (see, ff14) to more easily discern position for directional attack requirements

enemy leash ranges have been dramatically shortened

enemies a significant number of levels below the player’s will no longer be aggressive

enemy density, level & respawn rate has been reduced in some areas, with the intention of making fighting rather than sneaking through to objectives a more viable option

a new console has been added to the barracks allowing free exchange of all available party members & management of their equipment, skills etc.

missions which require (or restrict) certain party members now allow players to reconfigure their party before beginning

all map hexes have been assigned a short grid number for ease of reference.

collectopedia entries & gathering missions will now show a map of the associated item’s general / most frequently found location

more information will be shown given if a map hex with associated mission (/affinity mission) is tapped on (i.e. whether the mission has been started, its level etc.)

suggested levels for missions have been adjusted 

npcs who have new discussion topics available are now marked with a different icon

affinity & story missions can now be abandoned 

improved sound effects & reduced volume while swimming & running on various surfaces

music volume automatically lowers during spoken cutscenes

more audio options have been added

ma-non vocal effects have been entirely reworked

each blade level increase now allows the player to choose an upgrade to run speed, jump height, or crystal collection radius

personal jetpack upgrade now available from blade level 8

[alexalexok]

wish games // tiny bird helper

hey babies... heybies. welcome, to the 2016 zone.

d-don't look around okay. you will scare away all the new exciting 2016 elements of the zone - the elements very much present here, now, within the modern 2016 zone - if you try to discern any obvious difference from this excellent fresh two-thousand and sixteen zone and the old 2015 zone we all loved and enjoyed but have very much utterly abandoned to the mire of its own unsalvageable filth.

i wanted to say a few words about a wish game of mine. you know, just a game that would be a perfect fit for you if by any chance it happened to exist. an idea that flutters up now and then in daydreams, occasionally glimmers in extant works like a scatter of potentiality gems. this one is... the tiny inquisitive bird friend makes everyone happy. hey. okay.

*

by the emotions i'd wish from it, rather than the specifics of its form... but, broadly, first - i imagine the nicest small open world you’ve ever known. one decent sized island complete with a town, a lot of troubled residents & a nice patch of wilderness out the back somewhere. the kind of place you start a jrpg in except nothing bad happens & everything is pretty much fine.

and in this space:

movement. of course. because if it feels good to just move around the place that’s like half the game sorted already. and flying is the best. soaring high & quiet above everything, wing tips fluttering slightly, a glimpse of something golden on a nearby cloud. diving steep & curving smooth back up again. the rush of the wind. cutting close to trees & chimneys. the sharp snap of beating wings. compared to a game with jumps & dashes where the joy comes from the breath of a pause before sudden acceleration, this is the more gentle experience in arcs - great speed curving away rather than cutting off. all in graceful movements to match the pleasant calm of the game as a whole.

scale. i love, first and foremost before any specific humans or animals, chibi robo & chibi robo’s beautiful lovely house. that spacial intimacy growing on two levels - the large scale of each room & the house as a whole, and the small personal level of pathways & routes & limits down low within them. being tiny and cute is very important let’s explore this space some more. become the link between the characters who live on both those levels & the different types of stories they have to tell.

friends. because who wouldn’t sigh & confess the woes of their love life to a pretty, helpful little creature sitting nearby as they work the garden. who wouldn’t recall that shiny trinket they lost in the woods long ago at the twinkle of a bird’s attentive eye. which mouse in their secret mouse house wouldn’t wish someone would help keep a cat away just so they could make a break for cheesy freedom. which great twilight turtle surfacing in the bay wouldn’t share a secret with anyone who could help alleviate the itches of his old green shell.

time. and also unfolding over time. let me sit, let the world move. perhaps just one season cycle, transitions on milestones rather than hard time limits. and so not just solving problems and helping people out but experiencing their lives unfolding and becoming a part of that. i remember windfall island from wind waker very fondly for this (also a good example of very natural feeling quests which weren’t explicitly formalised) how the island shifts as time goes by & everyone’s lives move on a step. it was wonderful - the place felt new again, felt alive.

secrets. because - especially with scale - in a restricted space the secrets can be hidden so deliciously. and that’s what games are for. the small nooks you might have missed amongst the familiar sights. the tree hollows, attic diaries, basement experiments. between walls, under bridges, an abandoned den. in story too... remember chibi robo again, and the old powered down robot in the basement? more of that. great secrets on their own, but not actually sitting in isolation and tied to the stories of the individuals, the families, the town as a whole.

rewards. and what could a bird want in return. i’m not sure it’s super necessary but, what could be better than a little place of your own amongst every else’s lives and everyone else’s homes. a nest, a little cave besides a waterfall to decorate with the lovely tokens you received for helping out your friends when they needed you. like the mementos from neko atsume. ahh!

*

something like that. the tiny amelie bird. my precious friend.

please look forward to it.

[alexalexok]

ten points of light // year's end

hi again. it's me, alex. sorry about that.

so accidentally i managed to play ten new games this year which i guess i enjoyed enough to write about now. don't worry i won't go on too much. i just want pick out one particular thing about each game which has stuck in my mind and my heart since we parted.

ten precious things all in a row, a tiny pointless string of fairy lights you didn't ask for & don't really want to use but here it is anyway.

*

grow home

for placing the paintbrush of its vine next to the canvas of its rock-dotted sky and letting you get on with it. and the plant fighting back a little now and then, not entirely under control (nothing entirely under control, even your own body) to throw in a natural kick to the expression of creation. no mistakes, just happy accidents. we work with what we've got.

it was exploring the limits of the game i loved the most. as something like working within a tight creative writing prompt sends you immediately searching for cracks & edges & possible subversions, ways to play around with the theme and have some fun. i had a similar feeling in grow home's simple premise.

this is how i tend to play games anyway, poking & prodding at them. like, okay... i can do this one thing, grow the vine. buttt. how many vines can i grow. how high can i go, how far away. what happens at all these limits, how will the game handle that. can i grow a separate tower directly up & ignore all the islands & goals i'm being pointed towards. how do things break. how much of my nonsense can you tolerate.

maybe i'll write something else about the answers to those questions, but discovering them was my favourite part. i love to play at the edges of things, where everything starts to get a little weird. that's where i live now.

life is strange

for as much as i sat pure swearing & shouting & hollering at my computer at the end of the fourth episode, it's the early couple that have really stuck with me. i do have... an incredibly mixed, confused, sensitive reaction to the general genre of teens having problems and relationships, but listen. 

we all know the importance of sitting down in games. after the dust has settled in our frantic 62-page message board speculation about whether you can sheath your weapon or not in an upcoming video game, discussion always naturally turns to whether or not you’ll be able to sit down anywhere. life is strange has some excellent sitting opportunities i’m pleased to say.

just a scatter of instances here where you can sit peacefully for a while. share a few of max’s idle thoughts as the camera wanders gently through views of the surroundings. and the quieter, fraught melancholy of the early game comes through. a time, a space to gather your thoughts together, take a breath... and step back into a world you know is beginning to fall apart around you.

undertale

for cooking with undyne. against skeleton pals, a sexy robot, a ghost, numerous dogs & all the rest, that this scene is my favourite probably says enough if you know me at all. i'm not sure if i want undyne to be my best friend or to actually be her, but either way i love her.

i don’t have very much to say here you know, cos there’s nothing much else to say. it’s just a really lovely scene, funny & touching & exciting & nice & silly & everything as undyne takes up the challenge to be your friend in her very aggressive & excited & straightforward way. i like, to make friends, in the video games. and also make spaghetti. i like these things very much.

ori & the blind forest

for the bash move, entirely. it's a pause in mid-air and then a sudden rush towards a target. that's all. in itself, a very nice capsule example of tension and release, an exciting pause and acceleration. combined with the other moves it's the central step in a lovely little dance. i actually enjoyed backtracking in ori because it was possible to go through whole stretches without touching the floor, leaping & bashing & twisting between enemies and their projectiles to stay smoothly, elegantly airborne. 

it's a very special thing that some games invoke - the joy of beautiful movement. a performance for you, by you. simply for its own sake, for no reason but the fun and freedom in graceful motion.

splatoon

for the plaza. it's a really outstanding piece of world building & story telling & tone setting all on its own. i'm not very good at playing multiplayer games because they can make me quite anxious and i don't want to let anyone down or annoy them. it's not just that you can help out and do well in splatoon by actively staying out of everyone's way and painting the floor, but the tone from the plaza carries forward into matches themselves too.

in the plaza everyone is on the same team, just hanging out and having fun and buying cute clothes and sharing the worst memes your wretched eyes have ever seen. a fun place in a fun beautiful game. let’s have fun.

also a special mention for just how slick & goopy & thick the paint looks it’s amazing.

we know the devil

for the morning after every end. it's so close to me. after all tension has grown & finally bursts & the thing happens & then it’s over. but, it’s not over is it. it’s really just begun. 

when the sun comes up we're all still alive, and together. and changed, and different. and it sits inside you, or you sit around it somehow, and look back on the same space as yesterday that seems so distant now. 

and again it’s that moment of barely-held peace, tightly-held hands, before time has to start.

downwell

for the tie that binds us all, a hatred of bats.

metal gear solid v

for my initial disappointment at ocelot being so utterly boring in this game being quickly replaced with a desperate thirst for him & snake to kiss. excitedly shuffling back to mother base as often as possible in the hope of seeing a nice scene where they share a few words or a heavy glance. 

actually no i’m not over my disappointment really. i was very excited to see ocelot again after mgs3 & oh my god he’s so dull now he’s like the most boring nothing man all of a sudden i hate it.

and yet, and yet. oh my god. it’s so horny.

i just want thE BOYS TO KISS 

neko atsume

for being the phone game i actually like to play. in combination with desert golfing my phone game needs are almost entirely fulfilled. i keep downloading these other things with nice art or cute anime girls & then find out there is always such an incredible amount of game in the way of what i actually want to look at. layers and layers of obtuse systems and mechanics and quests and training and teams and items and levelling and feeding to stumble through to see the next story bit.

it's a bit frustrating but i guess they're not for me. i'm coming to terms with this. i just mainly want to look at cute things when the tweets are bad (always) and here is neko atsume with a whole heap of cute cat friends to meet. just check in now & then & shuffle some toys around or buy something new or put some food down & who knows what will happen or who will turn up. 

i think being able to name the cats yourself is a very important option. makes the transient floof parade slightly less passive. now i am always pleased to have a visit from the secret cat prince, or wish granter, or even garbage shithead (i was in a bad mood at the time. i love them really.)

show me the kitties.

final fantasy 14: heavensward

for something so big and broad to have story moments that i cared so much about & found actually very affecting. i enjoyed the expansion's central plot a bunch, its general road trip conceit to see the new sights & more importantly get better acquainted with travelling companions. the game has developed & continues to grow such an excellent large cast of characters who i really like & always want to see more if it’s all quite impressive to be honest. i love to make friends you know. did you know?

but it was the search for old friends (continued on in more recent patches also) which really dragged me forward. the last patch before the expansion was so very dramatic with nearly all of my pals getting left behind in dangerous circumstances. so there’s a great thread of tension running through all the new stuff about whether they are okay, and an eventual emotional (for me) reunion with a couple of them. better than that - everyone starts getting new outfits too! oh my gosh. i would not have thought to find these kind of important things in an mmo but here they are. thank you game.

*

see, that wasn’t so bad. the only other new games i wanted to mention are ones i think i would have something nice to say about if i played them - but i didn’t yet. so tough! her story, read only memories, cibelle, else heart.break(), cradle. probably others i forget.

so then. my babies. i very sincerely wish you all the best for the upcoming year. i think we can make it a good one. i will always believe in you okay.