In the weeks following Dawntrail’s launch, there were hundreds of thousands of voices talking about it on social media, on YouTube, in Discord servers, and on in-game chat channels. People shared their impressions and opinions about its story, pacing, characters; everything you’d expect. I cannot give a comprehensive portrayal of these myriad voices, at least not without conducting innumerable surveys and interviews, but broadly speaking, what intrigued me the most was how there was no consistency on which part or parts of Dawntrail were “good” or “bad.” There were players who liked the first half, but found the second half bizarre and jarring, and there were players who found the first half boring but thoroughly enjoyed the latter half. There were players who strongly felt that it did not have enough voice acting, while others enjoyed the performances and were highly enthusiastic about characters old and new. Dawntrail has certainly been a divisive installment, to say the least, something that I haven’t seen since the Stormblood days.

With the whole of Dawntrail’s story completed, and the narrative now shifting gears as it leads us into the next expansion, I feel ready to talk. I will only be touching upon the story of this expansion, as an all-encompasing review of its new gameplay additions, features, quality-of-life updates, and such would widen the scope of this piece to the point of losing focus. Furthermore, many such additions can and already have been altered from their initial state at launch, whereas the writing of the Main Scenario Questline is very rarely altered outside of typos or errors. I also won’t cover the story in its entirety so as to remain as spoiler-free as possible; this will make sense in a bit when I get to one of my criticisms.

[There are minor spoilers for Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Dawntrail in this article.]

Dawntrail is an expansion that excels in the details. Sure, it has a grandiose plot with mystery, drama, and epic set pieces the likes of which we’ve seen all across FFXIV before, but that’s par for the course, that’s what players expect. It starts with the uncovering of a mysterious letter from her grandfather, mentioning a “golden city,” and quickly leads into a Rite of Succession for Tuliyollal, a nation spread across two continents. In any of the other expansions, the whole story would revolve around the trials involved in that Rite, but Dawntrail concludes that arc halfway through its runtime, and for the first time in any expansion in FFXIV, the road is left open without any signposting about where the story will go. The northern continent is made accessible, and players go on a whimsical non-sequitur questline about troubles in a wild west frontier town. There’s a saloon, there’s a catboy sheriff, there are tumbleweed crabs, there are dinosaurs; it’s a whole thing and it’s incredible.

The first time I played it, I briefly forgot I was playing Final Fantasy XIV, the MMORPG. That’s how well the story drew me in. It felt like a breath of fresh air, like I was experiencing what this game would be like if it were taken off the rails and allowed to descend into the Beast Road; that is, allowed to break free of its constraints as a railroaded storyline and be a truly open-world experience. It still was a railroaded storyline at that point (hell, it even becomes a story about a literal railroad later on) but one could see, however faintly, an alternate version of this game where exploration and discovery were the driving force behind its story, and not the other way around.

Right at the conclusion of this leg of the journey, there’s an explosive earthquake that’s foreshadowed so lightly, you’d miss it if you weren’t paying enough attention. A giant purple dome suffused with lightning appears on the horizon, and flying futuristic airships start pouring out of it, heading for the capital city of Tuliyollal. This leads into the second half of Dawntrail, which goes into the mysterious dome, its denizens, and the conflict between them and Tuliyollal which seems all but inevitable.

One of my criticisms of Dawntrail is that what’s in the dome was spoiled in some respects through pre-release material. There’s a city in there that is unlike anything in FFXIV, and feels wildly out of place even among the more science-fiction locales of the game. It’s stunning and impressive and extremely cool… and it was shown off well before Dawntrail launched, denying tuned-in players a chance to experience it fresh and in its proper context. It’s the sort of thing that should’ve been kept secret, and FFXIV has often withheld certain locations in upcoming expansions from pre-release material to keep them as surprises. This city should have been one such surprise.

Be that as it may, this dual-nature of Dawntrail serves to reinforce many of its narrative throughlines and messages. Stormblood has been the only other expansion so far to be split in some capacity, but that story was still unified in its overall themes about the impact of war on people and land, why liberation is a cause worth fighting for, and how even the mightiest of foes, be they constructs of faith or machines of empire can be toppled and dismantled when pushed with many hands. The split was geographical, but not textual. 

This is not to say Dawntrail has two different messages, but rather that the first half tackles and searches for what it means to be a good leader for one’s community, and how communities can be strengthened within themselves and made even stronger by building bridges to other communities, and the second half begins by taking one possible answer to those questions and accelerating it to its logical extreme, with all of the horrifying consequences made manifest. After all, your communities, your people, need land and resources to survive and thrive; running out of either would mean that you did not take proper care of your people and thus are a bad leader, so it is only righteous and just for you to find new lands and new resources and claim them for the sake of you & yours. Even if they belong to someone else, the needs of your people must come first.

It is this duality which makes Dawntrail fascinating to me, as players have mentioned disliking one half or the other. The story works best when intertwined as it is, and yet some are quick to bring up complaints I haven’t heard since Stormblood. Stormblood itself was split between the region of Gyr Abania and the eastern continent of Othard, and several voices following its launch in 2017 expressed preference for something more monoptic. They wanted either an expansion solely within Gyr Abania, or one solely within Othard, and didn’t like that the story was separated across these areas. These old complaints always struck me as odd, because they seemed to dislike the presentation and not the actual story, as Heavensward did not receive any such criticisms despite being split across the regions of Coerthas, Dravania, and the Sea of Clouds (i.e. it wasn’t solely about Ishgard, from the Ishgard perspective). Echoes of these sentiments have resurfaced for Dawntrail, and while they do address the narrative more than just the setting this time, they still come across as being arguments on the principle rather than the material. All of the expansions and thus all of FFXIV’s story has been told through the connection to a wide variety of different cultures and peoples across all kinds of places, and this is why one of the prime questions that pop up in conversations about upcoming expansions is “where are we going next?”

This drew me to an understanding of Dawntrail which may explain why there are so many differing perspectives on it. I believe that Dawntrail is an amalgam; a combination of every previous part of FFXIV combined and condensed into one single expansion. It has the slower pace and worldbuilding emphasis of A Realm Reborn and the earlier parts of Shadowbringers; it has the trek into enemy territory and reconciliation between opposing nations present in Heavensward; its dual nature I’ve already likened to Stormblood, but it also has a bit of the “war story” and leadership soul-searching present there. To cap it off, it takes the triumphant, defiant answer given to The Question posed at the end of Endwalker and immediately perverts it, twisting it into a nightmare scenario that has far-reaching implications for the universe of FFXIV. It’s got a bit of everything from everywhere.

This admixture is necessarily diluted as a result. One of the antagonists of Dawntrail has a backstory that is all but absent, which makes his motivations flat and uninspired (especially in a game with impressive villains.) While this narrative lacuna was addressed in a post-launch patch, it would’ve had a more lasting impact if shown before his demise and not after, as it makes his final moments comical to the point of absurdity. There’s a historical faction introduced toward the end of Dawntrail, who are only brought up as a matter of trivia in the base expansion. This faction ends up being very important later on, so their mention serves as foreshadowing, but given the extent to which they impact the narrative, it again comes across as something that should’ve been addressed in the base storyline, but was held back in favor of ending the initial story on a high note. 

There’s also a case to be made that Dawntrail tips its balancing act too heavily toward the latter half, leaving the nation of Tuliyollal and many of its denizens (like the ever-charming Wuk Evu), who are the focus of the first half, out to dry in favor of the thunder dome and the many loose threads trailing out of it. Many of the threads left open regarding its first half are addressed in side stories and activities, but to put things into perspective for the main story: the thunder dome and the history behind it are responsible for five of the currently six major boss fights, with two of them taking place within the dome, two of them in a place previously attached to the dome, and the latest one in the region the dome came from.

It’s not that Dawntrail has a bad story, however, or that its foibles are particularly unique in FFXIV. Heavensward kills off two major characters through self-sacrifice, and while one of them is afforded intimacy in a tender final moment, who is remembered by fans over a decade after their death because of said moment, the other is blasted out of the sky to die a lonesome disintegrating death, and who isn’t afforded the same ceremony or reverence by fans all these years later, and you get three guesses as to which character is a woman. Stormblood arguably has the worst writing in the whole Main Scenario so far, with the baffling decision to bring in a comic relief gillionaire-type character to ask him, in earnest, how to help an ailing nation recently recovering from imperial occupation, to which his reply is “well you can’t just give them money because then they won’t develop the working mindset needed to make it in this economy!” Even the beloved Shadowbringers has some pacing issues leading up to the end of its second act, and while I can appreciate that crafting a mountain-sized golem takes time and many hands, that questionable pacing is why Dawntrail turns its homage to this exact sequence into a quick and cute montage.

One could argue that Dawntrail’s story tries to do too much in too short a time; it has to introduce several new characters, locales, and story hooks; it has to follow up on the impressive finale of Endwalker; and it has to set the stage for the next major story saga. All things considered, I find it was more than merely satisfactory, but impressive in its own right. From my viewpoint that Dawntrail is a combination of every other part of the story blended together, the result is something familiar yet refreshingly new. It’s still Final Fantasy XIV as I’ve known it. It’s still keeping in form and function with both its connection to the rest of the MMO as well as its place within the Final Fantasy lineage. It’s just told in a new light through a new perspective.

Previously, the story of FFXIV has built up the player character as The Warrior of Light; champion of the wronged and the weak, seeker of truth and justice, and ender of apocalypses. Every major story beat has been punctuated by a formidable foe who bars the path or threatens the innocent, who must be laid low by the player character. Often, the Warrior of Light is the only one powerful enough to contend with these adversaries for one reason or another, and while the powers of friendship, sheer determination, and hope do much to bolster efforts in vanquishing villains, much of the narrative is built around small acts of kindness, favors, and chores.

Much and more has been said and bemoaned about “the MMO fetch quest” wherein a player is tasked with collecting some amount of items and delivering them to someone, but even in the earliest days of A Realm Reborn, FFXIV has always used simple quests like these to provide context, build out the world, flesh out characters, and inform the player of details. Skip through the dialogue and you’ll miss that the bucket of water a bar’s owner asked you to fill up and dump on a rowdy patron, was done so because he was being incredibly racist to someone else, behavior which the bar’s owner tells you is unfortunately common in these parts but which he forbids in his establishment.

There are hundreds of examples like that one in the multiple quests throughout the game, and they serve to build up the player character as a true hero. The Warrior of Light isn’t someone who only appears when a battle needs winning, who is only known for violence. They’re renowned for their incredible acts of selflessness, kindness, and communal love, too. It is this focus on building up someone to be a champion of the people, who is driven by action and a burning desire to do right by their neighbors, which sells the concept of the Warrior of Light. This resonant fiber is stitched throughout every chapter of the Main Scenario Quest, and this extends into Dawntrail as well, only this time there’s a twist and it comes in the form of Wuk Lamat, the deuteragonist of Dawntrail. Even calling her “deuteragonist” doesn’t do her character justice, as Wuk Lamat’s journey is a core aspect of Dawntrail, and why she is one of the game’s most interesting characters.

Introduced at the tail of Endwalker, Wuk Lamat approaches the player character with a proposition: be her ally in the upcoming Rite of Succession for Tuliyollal’s head of government. She is the underdog (undercat?) of the contest, and the exploits of the Warrior of Light compel her to seek them out and request their assistance. She is earnest and eager, but out of her depth, and aware of that fact. While she has no selfish ambition to take the Dawn Throne for herself, she is driven to counteract the frontrunner contestant who plans to plunge Tural into a war with nations across Eorzea and beyond. She’s not strictly in it to win, but he must lose at the very least.

The Rite of Succession requires contestants to connect with several communities across the southern continent of Yok Tural, completing their requests as decided by community leaders in whichever manner they see fit. Some leaders use the Rite as a means of educating the participants in their local culture, while others have pressing concerns and see the Rite as an opportunity to have an urgent need met. This Rite is analogous to A Realm Reborn, wherein the player traveled around Eorzea meeting leaders of various communities, towns, and organizations, doing favors and services for them in exchange for information, cooperation, supplies, and support. The context is different but the motions are the same. There’s even an undercurrent of mystery; A Realm Reborn had the looming threat of the Garlean Empire and the shadowy machinations of the Ascians, while Dawntrail’s primary mystery surrounds the “golden city of Tural” and how to locate it, which is actually the final objective of the Rite of Succession.

It is through this Rite, and all the trials and challenges that come with it, that Wuk Lamat is sharpened and shaped into the leader she wants to be for her people. Much like how the Warrior of Light was forged from a simple adventurer into a true hero over the course of A Realm Reborn, Wuk Lamat is built up in the same manner. One of the earliest complaints about Dawntrail was that its story defocused the player character in order to put Wuk Lamat centerstage. While it makes sense that some players would have that takeaway, especially after how intensely Shadowbringers and Endwalker made the player character the central focus of their stories, such a perspective fails to realize the role the player character is given and how it complements the narrative of Dawntrail.

The Warrior of Light’s role in Dawntrail is that of the mentor. The example I’ve been using for over a year now is Auron from Final Fantasy X; an older, more experienced party member who can be relied upon both for their combat prowess as well as their wisdom and worldly insights. Dawntrail’s story is refreshing and exciting because it makes another character the focal point, allowing the player character to run support for them, and then maintains that shift throughout most of its runtime. Riding shotgun for another character’s story is done plenty of times in and out of the main story of FFXIV, but Dawntrail capitalizes on the concept by focusing on Wuk Lamat, Krile, Erenville, Sphene, Gulool Ja, and a few others all throughout. This paradigm shift enhances Dawntrail’s messages on communities and families and coming together to build a better tomorrow, by allowing the characters who can best convey those messages the proper attention and narrative respect.

But I want to focus on Wuk Lamat in particular, because this mentorship role the player character has with her left a lasting impression I still think about to this day. I said Dawntrail was a combination of every other part of FFXIV, and I see that in Wuk Lamat too. From her introduction and all throughout Dawntrail’s story, I see myself in her. I see a fledgling me, nervous about playing with random players but eager to learn how to tank so I could be ready when I got to Heavensward and could unlock Dark Knight. In Wuk Lamat, I see every new player; the ones to whom I’ve given advice, or assistance, or just some words of encouragement. As she grows throughout the story, I see the growth of every player, myself included. You see her confidence grow, her doubts subside, and her resolve crystallize, until she’s a warrior in her own light: A Warrior of Dawn.

There’s a part in Dawntrail where the crew has to board a hot air balloon to fly deep into the jungle, and Wuk Lamat is embarrassed but finally admits to the player character that she is nervous about the flight, and asks if they can hold her hand. Now, I’ve made several alternate characters in FFXIV, and when I come to dialogue options in the story, I’ll pick the ones that seem appropriate for the character I’m playing, or I’ll pick the options I’d never pick for my main character just to see the alternate dialogue. I have never denied Wuk Lamat a steady hand to hold. I cannot speak to the performances in other languages, but Sena Bryer does such a phenomenal job portraying Wuk Lamat as a character brimming with kindheartedness, strength, and sincerity, that my calcified skeleton heart is immediately incinerated with warmth when she asks for help.

That is what makes Dawntrail special to me. It is a story about what makes family and community important to us, and how to strengthen our ties to them. It’s about how to forge new bonds and reinforce old ones which are wavering or even broken. It’s about how to weather change, and to possess both the reason and the resolve to identify and act when the only sensible option forward is to sever the ties that bind us; be they to the past or to people who have wronged us. It builds up these ideas bit by bit in the first half, and then uses the second to test them, twist them, and ultimately make them more resilient. It’s not content to simply state “Wuk Lamat is a good leader because she cares about her people and that’s why she wins the Rite of Succession!” It demonstrates the strength of her character by building her up in the same manner as the Warrior of Light, turning the perceived weakness of her reliance on others into one of her greatest powers—a staple message of FFXIV at this point, but the perspective shift given to the player character makes it shine because she learns it from us—and then playing her off of another character who shares her virtues but who has taken them too far.

I believe Dawntrail to be an expansion story with flaws like any other chapter in Final Fantasy XIV. But for all of the divisiveness it’s seemingly instilled, I also believe it’ll be looked back on fondly. When we’re further on into this saga’s storyline, and the Dawntrail callbacks start hitting like waves of nostalgia; when Wuk Lamat, my third-favorite Dawntrail character, shows up with Mr. Baby President and Shale from IT to help us out of a jam, that’s when people will realize what I’ve known all along. Dawntrail was an excellent tale, and a solid foundation for the future of Final Fantasy XIV.

The post Dawntrail’s Duality and What Makes It Shine appeared first on Gamesline.

With Game of the Year coverage out of the way, the gang sits down to finish it all off for a topical discussion of the year in games. Scott is joined by Spencer, Crystal, Elvie, and Lorelai to go over as many topics as they could in 12 20-40 minute segments.

Part 1: Friend-Type Games – Crystal
Part 2: Dynasty Warriors – Lorelai
Part 3: Silksong – Spencer
Part 4: Blue Prince – Scott
Part 5: The New Age of Handhelds – Crystal
Part 6: The Remastering of the Classics – Lorelai
Part 7: Final Fantasy Tactics asks us What is a remake? – Scott and Lorelai
Part 8: We have to talk about Rematch – Scott
Part 9: Unique Artstyles and Designs of 2025 – Elvie
Part 10: Nightreign – Scott
Part 11: Questions – Everyone
Finale: What do we want out of 2026? – Lorelai

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Scott, Lorelai, Crystal, Spencer, and Elvie.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai and Produced by Lorelai, Crystal, Elvie, and Scott

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 81: Game of the Year Special Edition appeared first on Gamesline.

Honorable Mentions

Monaco 2

While I played a fair amount of this one, and I’m a huge fan of the original game, I played Monaco 2 in an evil way where a good chunk of the game mechanics don’t get a chance to shine (that is, I played a multiplayer game by myself). I enjoyed my time with it, but it’s really the sort of game you want to play with others. Keep it in mind if you’re fiending for more co-op games. I will say I think Pocketwatch Games did a great job translating the blocky art style of the original into 3D.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

I’m likely going to enjoy this one enough to put it on this list retroactively, but I’m waiting for the PC release to really sink my teeth into it. We’ll say Death Stranding 2 is my secret Game of the Year for the time being, and move on.

The Real Picks

Dispatch

Playable television show Dispatch impressed with high-quality animation, sublime voice acting, and a witty, charming script. While its gameplay is just north of serviceable, that works to its credit as it walks the line between being slowed down by complex management systems without forgoing the crucial aspect of its core conceit. You want to be a good dispatcher, as that ties in directly with the script and story the game wants to tell, but the skill floor is very low so you aren’t heavily punished for a few bad rolls. It doesn’t take more than a few runs to figure out the systems on offer, and while they are simplistic, there is a natural progression as you go through each chapter.

As for the story itself, it works really well in an episodic style, but there’s clear room for improvement. I believe Dispatch splits the difference between wanting to be an office romance drama and an office sitcom drama. The romance scenes are front and center in nearly every chapter, yet there are only two potential partners in a game with enough material for at least three or four more. At the same time, the romance is so front-and-center that trying to play the game while avoiding it or denying it feels like you’re half-fighting the game beat-by-beat, and while you can get a no-romance ending, it is not satisfying getting there.

If there’s to be a season 2 of this show, it can’t be more of the same. What’s here is good, but it could be so much better. The story’s focused scope precludes drastically divergent paths through the narrative, and I think that’s a smart decision, but there could be perspective shifts to other characters that would underline the impact of the player’s dialogue choices. The dispatching gameplay is satisfying, and the curveballs it throws in the final sequence tease a whole slew of potential avenues AdHoc Studio could take with expanding its systems. I liked Dispatch enough to want a sequel for it, and I only hope they can build on the solid foundation it provides.

Blue Prince

As I have not completed Blue Prince (regardless of how you define that), there is little I can say on it. I have played enough to know that it’s incredible, to the point that I’ve put off playing more of it. You only get one first playthrough of a game, and even with my measly five and a half hours of playtime, I know there’s an ocean of depth to be found in this one. This would probably be my top pick of the year if not for the fact that I have hardly played much of it. 

But gods, the atmosphere is phenomenal. Sitting here writing these scant few sentences and thinking about how much I have left to uncover in Blue Prince is making me antsy to dive back in. I still never made it to that final room. I do wonder what’s in there from time to time. Maybe I’ll boot it up tonight and find out. If there’s a skeleton in this game somewhere, I’m gonna flip. I hope there is. I hope a skeleton comes running down the corridors of my labyrinthine abode and pelts me with a janitor’s ring full of keys. I hope I find a mirror room and see that the skeleton is me.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

On the one hand, I think every game should be made in the same fashion as Silksong; built up over the course of several years with a crew free to hone it to a razorsharp point. On the other hand, I feel like one of few people who can weather such long periods of radio silence, with no Silksong news or announcements. I was never a huge Hollow Knight guy; it’s a game I like, love even, and replaying it recently in preparation for Silksong, I still think it’s a highly polished, exceptional game with very few flaws. But I’ve been content with that game, and never lamented the absence of Silksong’s release year after year. Not so for many people, unfortunately.

Thus, the question surrounding Silksong is, “Was it worth the wait?”

The answer: “There is no question.”

Silksong is undeniable in its execution. It builds on the foundation of Hollow Knight, and comes with so many refinements and additions to its predecessor that it boggles the mind. There was never a single moment in my time with Silksong where I thought “they had how many years and this is it?” It was always “holy shit, there’s more?” The crest system is a marked improvement from the charm system, offering more robust combat and navigation options. The tools acting as Castlevania style subweapons makes them fit in perfectly with Hornet’s character and game. Even Pharloom itself feels more alive and lived-in than Hallownest, and while that haunted ghost-city vibe of the first game still finds its way in Silksong, there’s a tangible difference in the presentation. It’s way more Catholic this time around, is what I’m saying.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is like Hollow Knight +1, except that every additional year Team Cherry spent making it, it got another +1. Fantastic game.

The post Spencer’s Choice Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

I tend to be a bit skeptical when I hear that any game is adding romance, especially when it wasn’t the primary focus or a planned feature of the game. We’ve all seen the half-baked, bad-taste dating sim mini-games companies have put out on April Fools in the past, which all have the same tired punchline of “aren’t dating sims weird?!” When I heard this announcement about a romance system in Warframe, I thought to myself that it probably wouldn’t be bad in that same way, but I still had doubts about its implementation and efficacy. It seemed like a case where they spent a lot of time bringing these characters to life and wanted to add a little something to make them more prominent; you know, justify all that effort? So how did that system turn out?

Let’s step back and look at the broader picture first, starting with what even is Warframe: 1999? It’s the title of Warframe’s Update 38 which launched in December 2024, and is the colloquial term for all of the gameplay additions made available to players by said update. It sees players travel back in time to the Earth year of 1999, in a main quest called “The Hex,” where they team up with a faction of the same name in order to track down one Dr. Albrecht Entrati in the loosely Eastern European-inspired city-state of Höllvania; a city that is currently under martial law by the private military contractor Scaldra, who were dispatched to exterminate the encroaching Technocyte Virus infestation (or “Techrot”) which plagues the city both above and below ground. It’s one of the latest major story beats in the ongoing narrative of Warframe, and while it is just one chapter, it ties together various lore threads from years ago into an extension of Warframe’s narrative tapestry. As an example, in Update 29, The Heart of Deimos, released back in August 2020, Albrecht Entrati was first introduced as an unseen character, gestured at here and there by members of the then-new Entrati Family. Recordings of his life were unlocked as players gained reputation with the Family, and in one recording, Albrecht briefly mentions the “radiation wars” as a past event. Warframe: 1999 features Albrecht Entrati as a major character (though he was formally introduced into the game prior to this update) and it provides some context about why those radiation wars occurred (the aforementioned Techrot).

Speaking of the Techrot itself, it too is intrinsically linked to the game’s sci-fi setting, serving as an ancestor strain of the Infested, one of the older enemy factions in Warframe. Imagine if the Y2K Problem was less about simple computer errors and more about all technology running amok from being coalesced into a fleshy amalgam of old TV screens, boomboxes, speakers, computer terminals, and many other devices. So there’s more connective tissue between the main game and this retro romp than meets the eye. That sets the stage so now we can address the stars of the show.

The Hex are a group of six characters who act as the main cast of Warframe: 1999 and who are designated as “Protoframes.” The in-game playable Warframes are futuristic technology, made possible due to the Infested and by extension the Techrot, and when Dr. Entrati went back in time, he brought his technical knowledge and expertise with him. While he’s not the creator of the Warframes, he knew enough about them to experiment on and partially convert a handful of individuals into frames using the Techrot as raw materials, keeping their individuality intact while affording them powers and resilience beyond their normal human bodies. This was done with their consent, as the Hex found themselves against overwhelming odds combating both the Scaldra and the Techrot in the “Plague Year” of 1999, but the transformation was excruciating and irreversible. They are the subjects of the romance system, effectively giving a human face to the Warframes they embody.

Led by Arthur Nightingale, who takes up the mantle of Warframe’s poster boy Excalibur, the Hex are a vigilante group consisting of Aoi Morohoshi, Quincy Isaacs, and Leticia “Lettie” Garcia, four rogue members of the ICR (International Crisis Response) who have gone against direct orders to terminate infected Höllvanian civilians, as well as Arthur’s journalist sister Eleanor Nightingale and the tech intern Amir Beckett. Aoi and Amir embody the Warframes Mag and Volt respectively, and together with Arthur serve as human sides of the three starter Warframes players pick at the beginning of the game. Lettie, being a field medic, takes up the original healer frame Trinity, while Eleanor’s advanced Techrot infection makes her subsumption of the psychic frame Nyx quite potent. Quincy is the only protoframe of the Hex who portrays a newer frame, that of the sharpshooter spec-ops Cyte-09 (sight-o-nine), a Warframe that was released alongside the update. All together, they act as a cadre of ‘90s action heroes ripped straight out of a grungy, grime-slicken comic book or cartoon show. You spend five minutes around this gang and you can easily imagine them existing in the same pop-cultural spheres as Gargoyles, Æon Flux, and Spawn.

But hold up. You’re probably thinking how it’s even possible to romance these characters when Warframe players themselves play as, well, Warframes; biomechanical… not-robots, which typically lack mouths and more importantly, dialogue or personalities unto themselves (for the most part anyway.) Four years ago, when Update 31’s The New War quest was added to the game, Digital Extremes introduced into Warframe one of my favorite video game design techniques of all time: the ability to play as other characters in games where previously you only played as a single character. There are plenty of games built around the premise of playing as several characters, from fighting games to MOBAs to racing games and so on, but the concept is flat-out more impactful in games where you don’t have a selectable roster. The sequence in Majora’s Mask where you temporarily control Kafei, the first time anything like that had been done in a Legend of Zelda game, a series dogmatically committed to only ever letting you play as Link, serves as a classic example. It was just as buckwild when Final Fantasy XIV, an MMORPG, flipped the script and had players controlling NPCs for select quests for the first time toward the tail end of its Stormblood expansion. This is how Warframe is able to add a romance system to the game; one of the characters introduced in The New War Update was the Drifter, a character with their own history and personality, who has become a prominent figure in the Warframe storyline. It is the Drifter who is sent back to 1999, and it is through them that the story of the Hex and Höllvania is experienced by the player.

Enough beating around the bush though, let’s talk about the romance system. After completing The Hex quest,  building up one’s relationships with the six characters becomes available. This is entirely done through the “Kinemantik Instant Messenger” or KIM, a play on America Online’s “AOL Instant Messenger” or AIM, which is accessed through Pom-2 computer terminals in the player’s Base of Operations. Every real-world day, players have the ability to chat with each member of the Hex, with certain dialogue choices granting “Chemistry,” which raises their relationship with that character. If the character responds with text that shimmers gold, that signifies a boost in Chemistry.

Players can also mail-order each character various gifts from an online catalogue, including powerful items like a binder, coffee cups, gas cans both large and small, an office phone, and a toaster. Gifting items costs in-game currency (one of my favorite stylistic flourishes in the update is whenever you’re in the 1999 areas, the in-game futuristic Credits you’ve accrued are converted 1:1 to Höllars) and it’s up to the player to figure out which items will be favored by each character.

Chemistry can also be gained by completing Hex Bounties which involve normal Warframe missions, which randomly have one of the six members assigned to each of the six bounties who accompany the player on the mission as NPC support, though players can only gain this boost in Chemistry every ~16 hours, effectively making it a daily boost. When reaching a sufficient level of Chemistry with a given character, the player will have the option to ask about dating them, though whether they accept will depend on choices made during the KIM chats, and each level of Chemistry is locked behind ranking up with the Hex faction as a whole. If the character accepts the offer, it unlocks new KIM conversations with them, and they appear in the Backroom, the player’s Base of Operations in Höllvania, where they’ll have additional dialogue. Additionally, there’s a romantic cutscene that plays at the end of 1999 which changes based on which character the player romanced, and if they chose not to pursue any character, they still get a special cutscene so anyone who opts out of dating altogether still gets a sweet moment.

The actual romance system itself isn’t particularly novel or interesting, at least not when laid out as I’ve done thus far. But like with all good stories, it’s the writing that makes the difference. See, each KIM conversation with a character ranges from funny little asides or questions about life (either their’s or the Drifter’s), but in a lot of cases they delve into particularly serious topics such as Lettie’s history as a medic. These little KIM conversations are written in such a way that perfectly captures the interiority of each character and makes them feel more real than they are. Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent a long time connecting with people over the Internet, but these conversations read like they were written by people who have been there; in chat rooms and IRCs, used services like AIM and Skype. Each character has their own username and little profile picture and way of typing that brings a level of authenticity to the whole deal.

The system isn’t without its flaws. The major pitfall of the chat system is simply that these individual conversations have some degree of randomness to them. Amir is the quintessential nerd of the group, and at one point wants to put together a game of Fables & Frontiers. The player is tasked with trying to rope as many members of the Hex into the game as possible, with some only joining if you manage to convince others. I had successfully convinced Aoi, Lettie, and Arthur to join, and then I told Amir that’s probably all I could convince. After the game started (an entirely off-screen affair, tragically), days later I got a message from Quincy asking about the Fables & Frontiers game, and while I successfully convinced him to join, it was one point where the artifice was laid bare. While most of the chats are at least funny or engaging, there are at least a handful that end rather abruptly, which also underlines their perfunctory nature.

As far as the romance writing goes, I’m personally glad everyone is very grown-up about things. There aren’t any sex scenes or fades to black, but characters will outright say “let’s have sex tonight” and that’s a breath of fresh air compared to other games which settle for implications or omissions. It’s down-to-earth and feels more natural as a result, and it benefits from not being the sole focus either as the chosen lover will not simply devolve into weak-knees and doe-eyes upon dating them. That said, there’s one point that’s a little disappointing to me. It’s understandable why Digital Extremes opted for a monogamous approach to the dating aspect, purely from a design standpoint: That special cutscene would have to have way more combinations if players could date even just two Hex members at the same time. However, the problem I ran into was wanting to date four of the six Hex members and only being able to pick one. It’s a minor problem overall, and considering that Digital Extremes continues to be pretty good about inclusivity, missing out on a big Hex polycule is something I’m just going to chalk up to “it would be more powerful than all of the Incarnon weapons combined.”

The part that really brings everything together is how necessary this relationship system is to the story of Warframe: 1999. I thought before playing it that this whole “romancing the Protoframes” thing was just an additional feature they created on a whim or for fun, but that’s not the case at all. Building your relationships with these characters and investing time into them is critical to the story. I’ve kept this piece largely spoiler-free, so I won’t go into why the silly little KIM conversations have cosmic consequences for the Warframe universe, but just know that “The Hex” quest’s finale is made stronger by their inclusion, and the story would be weaker without them. That’s what I loved the most about this simple relationship system in Warframe: 1999: It’s earnest. It commits to both the veneer and the viscera underneath, and it does so without reservation.

Warframe‘s newest update, The Old Peace, launches tomorrow, December 10th, and with it comes the arrival of three new potential romance partners: a crop top priest, a French ghost nun, and Blue Emet-Selch. Time will tell if their characterizations maintain the level of quality that 1999 demonstrated, but I’d wager they’ll be spectacular additions to Warframe‘s bizarre cast of characters. It’s Blue Emet-Selch! There’s simply no way René Zagger doesn’t eat up every scene voicing him.

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Playing as Arabella Greene, an elderly English botanist, your overall task is to finish up researching a handful of plants for her debut herbarium, “Forgotten Flora,” at the behest of her publisher-to-be. Starting in the greenhouse, you solve a basic puzzle that introduces the game’s controls and overall puzzle presentation, before you’re allowed to wander the premises and start the game in earnest. Botany Manor is split into distinct chapters, with Arabella needing to complete research on two or more plants per chapter, upon which more of the manor is unlocked to the player, leading into the next chapter. Puzzle solving is the core strength of the game; every puzzle is solved by successfully triggering a given plant’s ideal growth conditions, but finding out what those are and how to achieve them makes up the bulk of each chapter. This brisk explanation truncates what is consistently a healthy admixture of exploration, investigation, and experimentation. Leveraging its own art style and whimsical premise, Botany Manor features fantastical plants which react to all kinds of external stimuli, ranging from weather to sound to animal activity (often through roundabout means as befitting a puzzle game), and it’s up to the player to study the clues strewn about the rooms and use them in conjunction with the manor’s various contraptions to bring each sapling to bloom and complete her research.

One of my favorite aspects of puzzle-solving in Botany Manor are the various documents which serve the double duty of fleshing out the setting and characters while also keying players in on which devices and techniques should be employed for which plants. Being as vague as possible for this example, there’s a folklore book with a peculiar story involving a plant, and the story ends up being critical to understanding how to bloom it. The book provides necessary context to understanding certain aspects of the environment, which link over to another element of the puzzle. Every document is like that book; perfectly couched in its respective context, giving a weighty realness to them that breathes life into the game. Newspaper articles follow the same cadence you’d expect of reporters investigating an odd river phenomenon. Letters from official sources have a cold formality, while ones from Arabella’s sister are warm and playful. It’s through these texts that the game’s setting is fully realized—another reason I adore it so much. There is an efficiency in the writing that is unbelievably potent for a game of this scope and scale. And they’re necessary too! These aren’t just lore snippets or optional collectables: Most of them are pieces of the puzzles themselves, offering vital information about each plant. Acquiring this information is one step of the puzzle-solving process, and the game allows the player to assign documents like books, newspaper articles, and letters to each plant’s entry in Arabella’s herbarium.

This is a delightfully ingenious way to corroborate disparate information and sets players up for success. Getting stuck on any puzzle, even when you have all the information, is really frustrating, and assigning these clues to each specific plant helps organize the information and refocuses attention on the puzzle as a whole, as the player will know which clues correspond to which plant. It’s not necessary to assign information in this fashion, so players with no need or interest can skip this step without any penalties, but when working on four or five plants at a time, it becomes more useful and adds a degree of satisfaction on its own, as a plant’s page isn’t fully complete without its clue assignments. This clue assignment feature’s effectiveness cannot be understated, as it turns what might otherwise be a bother or struggle point for some players into part of the puzzle-solving process, reinforcing the core strength of the game and smoothing out the experience overall.

The only downside to this system is that the actual text in the clues themselves are not collected. If you find a temperature chart, and you know the chart corresponds to one plant, but you forgot which entry on the chart relates to the plant in question, you’ll have to manually walk back to the chart to review it, rather than selecting the entry in your clue catalog. This is a minor downside, as a little inconvenience is often necessary to keep players engaged in a game with no stakes. Botany Manor affords the player many concessions as a more relaxed puzzle-solving experience, and being forced to backtrack through the gorgeously decorated and realized rooms and lawns of the manor is hardly a punishment at all (especially since Ms. Greene is a spry old woman who can sprint with the best of FPS characters, though I am a bit crestfallen that she cannot bunny hop.) This is the only point of the game’s design where I could see someone reasonably arguing “I wish this element worked differently,” which speaks to the game’s sheer quality.

After reading a fair number of decades-old letters, newspaper articles, correspondences, and books, the story of the titular Botany Manor and Ms. Greene herself winds its way out into the light. The manor is old and contains its share of surprising secrets, but I will set them aside to focus on Arabella Greene’s narrative, as her history is a spectacular example of how such few words can invoke such a strong connection and emotional bond with fictional characters, even silent protagonists like Ms. Greene. I mentioned before that Arabella is an elderly Englishwoman; what I have not mentioned is this game takes place in 1890. Our understanding of Arabella’s history is made manifest through private letters and official documentations; she grows up and becomes fascinated with the botanical sciences, seeking to further the collective understanding of the myriad plants in her neck of the woods.

As you might expect, she is disenfranchised constantly by men who believe academia and fields of science are exclusive realms which are forbidden to women. A fellow woman in her family desperately seeks to set Arabella up with one of her neighbors, citing that it’s for “Arabella’s own good” as she’s getting on in years and won’t be able to bear children if she keeps up with her silly little flower obsession. There’s one absolutely infuriating story about Arabella going on a brief nature excursion with a notable botanist and his wife, and another young man roughly her age. Arabella makes an actual botanical discovery about a peculiarly-shaped mushroom and brings it to the botanist’s attention, and he dismisses it as her confusing the mushroom for a different species; you find a published book about this newly discovered mushroom by the botanist later, and the unremarkable young man is accredited on the cover, with no mention of Arabella.

These are heart-wrenching, incensing revelations that burn in your mind as you solve silly little flower puzzles in your silly idyllic manor. The whole veneer of the game gets covered in a dusty sheen of would-be triumphs and denied opportunities. They’re the kinds of anecdotes that stick with you because of how real they are, juxtaposing with the warm atmosphere and stylized art direction of the game. There’s no blood or gore in Botany Manor, but its portrayal of the institutional and systemic desecration of this poor old woman’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge and harmony with her environment over the course of decades is just as gruesome.

Botany Manor surprised me, to say the least. While its plant-based puzzles, detailed corridors, and well-kept gardens were what drew me in, I did not expect to be drawn into the life of Ms. Arabella Greene so vividly. Her story is told not through bombastic cutscenes or epic expositions of her storied lineage. It is quiet, and quaint, and gradual, blooming in the light of a lazy midday sun, but it is no less stunning for it.

The post Botany Manor Isn’t Afraid to Have Thorns – Botany Manor (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

10: Botany Manor

Botany Manor is without a doubt the easiest game I can recommend on this list. It’s short, taking roughly 2 to 4 hours or so, it’s incredibly sweet, and it’s a delight to play through and through. It’s the sort of picturesque game I would use to bridge the gap between people who have almost no experience with games or people who think every video game is a shooter for teenage boys. It’s a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to grow fantastical plants and you do so through exploration; sometimes the clue is in a note you find, but oftentimes it’s found by being a keen observer and spying something in the environment. The level design is straightforward and not too complex, but it’s still enough to really sink your teeth into for a few hours as you figure out its myriad puzzles. Everything matches up seamlessly as well; from the stylistic art direction, to the writing style that sincerely captures the tone and setting, to the beautiful compositions that inspire curiosity and warmth and bitterness. Yes, that’s the thing that really surprised me about Botany Manor. Despite its “cozy” atmosphere, the game has a clear message to convey, which I won’t spoil here, and the path of protagonist Arabella Greene is one carved through the underbrush by millions like her. It’s a well-worn path, and in playing Botany Manor, one feels compelled to help Arabella pave a new journey through her world of flora.

9: The Operator

The Operator is one of those works that demonstrates so clearly why some stories simply have to be told through the medium of games. You play as a new employee for the fictional Federal Department of Intelligence, and your role is to assist agents in the field by using the FDI’s various electronic systems and internal databases to solve various cases. It’s essentially a visual novel with a fancy GUI that’s used for puzzle solving, with a few twists thrown in here and there. Make no mistake though, The Operator really pulls its weight with full voice acting, exceptional casting and direction, and a tightly-paced script. There is not a single actor who isn’t giving it their all in their performances and while I’m not the best judge of acting skill, the dialogue adds an immense amount of gravity to what would otherwise be a purely textual experience. It’s not that you couldn’t make a game like this without voice acting, but the performances sell the whole concept, which proves highly effective for The Operator’s story. It’s an absolutely bone-chilling experience I highly recommend.

8: Fallen Aces (Chapter One)

Look, if your setting is gonna be called “Switchblade City” sign me the fuck up. Fallen Aces is a game I’ve had tabs on for a long time, and last year saw the release of its first chapter. Six levels of old-school shooter action painted with the veneer of mid-20th century comic book flair, Fallen Aces Chapter 1 was a highlight of 2024. It’s one part DOOM, one part Thief, and two parts hard-knuckle wise-guy attitude. The presentation is off the charts with this one, folks, and it’s dressed to the nines from levels to the soundtrack to the cutscenes. Perfectly suited for immersive, slow-and-steady skulkin’ about, and cruisin’ bruisin’ speedster playstyles alike, Fallen Aces hits all the high marks you’d hope for in a game with such an ambitious pitch. I’m not sure anyone in the last 30 years asked “what if DOOM had mobsters with tommy guns and lead pipes” but the answer is “it would be fucking incredible.” The only downside is that we just have Chapter 1 to sink our jaws into, but that just makes the anticipation for the next chapters all the sweeter. Pick this one up if you’re a real goon-clobberer.

7: Helldivers 2

There was a significant point in time last year where Helldivers 2 was the talk of the town. Everyone was playing it or talking about it or streaming it. It rekindled cyclical debates about works like Starship Troopers and it produced some of the most obnoxious forum posting I’ve seen in years. But that’s to be expected with a game as good as Helldivers 2. Something I particularly enjoyed about it was the plethora of immersive sim elements they put into the game to enhance both the gameplay and the vibe of being a Super Earth Helldiver. It’s not the kind of game that usually comes to mind when one says “immersive sim” but little details like how reloading prematurely wastes unspent rounds in a magazine, or how supplies are limited, or the hilarious ways in which the physics engine can turn an expertly tossed stratagem orb into Impending Imminent Death for you and your squadmates truly does add necessary flavor and fun to the chaos of intergalactic warfare. While the kayfabe of Helldivers 2 is something I believe is best saved for in-game experiences (some people are a little too happy about roleplaying as shock troopers of a fascist super empire in, say, the Youtube comments section), when it comes to getting people together to do dumb shit for false glory, Helldivers 2 is a staple choice.

6: Shadows of Doubt

I wrote about Shadows of Doubt a while ago and talked about how much I was looking forward to the full release, and it’s incredible how much the game has improved in what feels like such a short time. It’s a true pearl of a game, and you really can’t find anything like it anywhere else. Most of the improvements implemented since my previous writing are found in bug fixes, usability enhancements, significant changes to level generation, smaller tasks you can complete in the game, and new investigation approaches such as having to find a rogue sniper’s vantage point. Shadows of Doubt is still the fantastic sandbox detective game with charming voxel models and sprawling cityscapes it was in 2023. It’s still a great game for spending an hour combing through an apartment complex trying to find your primary suspect, only to hear that they’ve murdered someone in the diner down the street. It’s still the only game where I can eat a yakisoba pan while sprinting down a street in the rain, running away from an angry citizen who is mad that I took a collector’s baseball from their apartment which they had stolen from their so-called friend days prior. I highly recommend it.

5: Balatro

Yeah, yeah, Balatro in a list of top games from 2024, big surprise I know. There’s barely anything I could say about Balatro that thousands of others haven’t already said about arguably the best game of 2024, but the fact of the matter is it simply is that good. The only critique I have for Balatro is that going past Ante 12 is strictly a build check to see if you got a good set of “the right jokers” which usually boil down to the same staple combos. There’s a sticker for beating Gold Stake with every joker but if there was a sticker for beating Ante 16 with every joker, completionists would themselves become the Joker. It’s not that the game would be better if such a feat were possible, but it’s just a bit sad that some jokers don’t get to shine in the spotlight as much as DNA or Blueprint, and it would be fun to see more decks or game modes that cater to the little fellas. You don’t have to be a card shark to understand why Balatro is one of the best games of last year; you need only gaze into the eyes of Jimbo and know why everyone wants to be his friend.

4: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

Coming down from the emotional highs and climactic saga-ending finale of Endwalker, I was curious how Dawntrail would fare narratively as the “Part 1” in a new era for FFXIV. A small but extremely charming aspect of the story was the shifting of the player character from the typical status of Main Character to essentially a mentor role. A lot of people did not like this shift in focus, but when I realized they had made my guy an “Auron” or “Uncle Iroh” to Dawntrail‘s heroine Wuk Lamat, I was ecstatic. It’s a really good shift in roles after Endwalker ramped up the Main Character vibe of the player character; rather than trying to one-up that climax, better to shift the paradigm completely. What really surprised me, however, was Dawntrail taking the conclusion of Endwalker and flip it on its head and send it screaming right back at us. The final boss of Endwalker concludes that life and existence itself is full of pain and suffering, and so seeks to end everyone and everything, because surely whatever comes after will be better than clawing and bleeding and scraping for survival. The retort that’s presented is that life is still worth living, hope is still worth having, and being that hope for others in times of dire need creates unbreakable bonds that can lead us to brighter futures, even if death is our inevitable end. Dawntrail’s villain, in that most timeless of narrative twists, takes that reply to its logical extreme, arguing that life is indeed worth living, and that we should actually live forever, amplifying the horror of that maladaptive conclusion in ways I don’t even have time to cover. Terrifying conceit for a Final Fantasy villain aside, Dawntrail cements itself as a solid foundation upon which this next saga for FFXIV can be built.

3: Void Stranger

Void Stranger. I’ve had to pause and sit here while thinking of what to say about Void Stranger. There is so much power and emotional resonance to be found in this sokoban game. On the surface it looks like a charming little homage to GameBoy titles like Link’s Awakening, but this is a trick. Do not be fooled by the incredible sprites and sublime soundtrack. Void Stranger is the game to play when you want your heart to hit the fucking floor and shatter into a million pieces which then vaporize into void ash. It’s soul-rendingly good and really deserves to be experienced yourself. The story is like a simple recipe; few ingredients and a straightforward approach, but it’s the quality of its components and the deftness of technique that really bring the whole dish together. Oh, fair warning; while the story is a real gut-puncher, don’t expect the puzzles to be easy by contrast; some of the solutions are downright diabolical. I had to learn how nonograms work in order to finish this game, and even if you’re someone who is already in the know about nonograms, that won’t save you. Few are the virtues that will save you in the depths of Void Stranger, but I promise you it will be worth it by the end.

2: Dread Delusion

Dread Delusion is brimming with vibrant weirdness and ethereal atmosphere. From its surreal soundscape to its bizarre locales, it’s a game that instills within oneself that eye-widening desire to explore and uncover the myriad secrets of its absurd landscape. It’s a perfect example for how to design an open world that’s strictly as big as it needs to be. Dungeons are relatively short compared to the likes of The Elder Scrolls series, but this is to the benefit of Dread Delusion’s overall pacing. The level and world design is big enough for the explorers and strollers to get their fill, but small enough that the action-focused, goal-oriented players won’t agonize over needlessly vast swathes of land. While its combat and quest systems are standard fare all things considered, they’re time-tested approaches that don’t bog down the experience with niche complexities, and any game that can get players to stop hoarding consumable items gets a gold star in my book. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Dread Delusion; it does its own thing in the space of open world RPGs, commits to its goals and vision right down to the flavor text, and isn’t afraid to give players levels of freedom and progression seldom seen in recent years.

1: Pacific Drive

Pacific Drive is absolutely phenomenal. It is my favorite game of 2024 bar none. Set in a forsaken, reality-fractured swathe of the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Drive masterfully blends vehicular gameplay with scavenging, resource management, and car maintenance, all while trying to avoid getting your car and your body mangled and warped by dozens of hazardous anomalies. These anomalies range from the cute and cantankerous road bunnies to the unsettling Tourists, to giant clouds of acid; each one an engaging obstacle on your journey through the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Pacific Drive’s art direction excels at creating immaculate landscapes while also providing visual clarity for its vehicle-based gameplay. I’m personally a huge fan of the pixelated UI that both pulls you back to the late 90s of the game’s setting and provides clear and concise information at a glance, allowing you to identify multiple types of items simply by their color. The procedural generation of the levels means no trek into the Zone is quite the same, and once you get the hang of how to source various supplies and resources for upgrades, each trip feels like measurable progress as a single trek can have multiple different personal objectives. The tumultuous nature of the Zone, its strange weather effects, its mysterious history, and its menagerie of anomalies make for a fascinating world to explore, and everything being experienced behind the wheel of a haunted station wagon only adds to the game’s unique appeal. Pacific Drive is a stellar game, from its unimpeachable art style to its wonderfully fitting soundtrack, and my singular pick for Best Game of 2024.

The post Spencer’s Top Ten Games of 2024 appeared first on Gamesline.

What I kept coming back to time and time again last year was this notion that approaching games on their own terms makes enjoying them for what they are easier, as well as helping to zero in on why they work in some areas and why they don’t in others. This isn’t some grand revelation or anything; it’s more of a litany against falling into the spiral of expecting games to conform to our own perceptions about how they ought to be, or how they should have played out. It’s all too easy to conflate critique and wishful thinking; to confuse projections we impose on games with our analysis of its components. I think a lot of people get hung up on this ethereal concept of a “platonic ideal” version of a game, and they build their entire perspective around how a game fails to achieve that zenith. It’s an exhausting way to play and talk about games, and while I understand that it’s fun to think up ways a game could be enhanced or improved, it’s important to acknowledge the version of the game that actually exists, and see it for what it is, not what we might want it to be.

 Without further ado, here are my top games of 2023.

Honorable Mention: Starfield

I do not know what people expected with this one. I’ve managed to get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of Bethesda’s older games (Morrowind was on my Game of the Year list for last year!) but anybody shocked that this game was not a meteoric game changer for the industry probably needs to be reminded that Fallout 4 was not actually that good of a game, even if you found it fun like me, or like Bethesda games in general. Perhaps it’s because I had no expectations, no hype, and barely saw any preview material for Starfield that I was able to enjoy over 300 hours with it. I went in expecting nothing, and got Something. What that Something was wasn’t what many people wanted, but just like with Bethesda’s previous games post-Morrowind, Starfield is serviceable at what it does. Is it the best? Of course not: Destiny 2 and Titanfall 2 are better sci-fi FPS games. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are better RPGs. Elite Dangerous is simultaneously a better space exploration game, and a better spaceship-flying simulator. Its individual components are C-grade at best, and together they average out to a passable, serviceable game in my eyes. 

Like many games of its kind, there are kernels of greatness that can be found here and there, but Starfield is ultimately held back by the same design and scriptwriting framework we’ve seen from Bethesda time and time again (maybe someday they’ll figure out how to make unarmed builds fun and rewarding.) I cannot deny the reputation it has garnered in the wake of its release, but I will say I still enjoyed my time with Starfield. It’s better than Fallout 4 by a country mile, and at the very least, that’s something.

8. Lethal Company

I am not a horror game person. I hate jumpscares, and being chased by foul creatures without some recourse for their assaults fills my skeleton heart with dread. But I can play Lethal Company, a game that’s sometimes about the first thing, and definitely about the second thing, without any issue. Something about the whimsical art style, the hyper-corporate hellcapitalism of its future dystopian setting, and the silly little creatures what snap your neck and crumple your character into boneless ragdolls on contact is very funny and refreshing. I still get scared while playing it, and there can be very tense and dreadful moments throughout a run, but the beauty of proximity voice chat, the bonds between good friends, and the thrill of making it back to the ship alive with a puzzle cube, scrap metal, and a clown horn cuts through the intensity of the horrors and makes the experience all the more delightful. Any game that can not only force me out of my comfort zone, but also show me that I can thrive outside of it is a good game in my book. It’s still in early access, but it’s already a runaway success, and Lethal Company deserves every bit of praise it gets.

7. Shadows of Doubt

While Shadows of Doubt was slated to be fully released toward the end of 2023 after a period of early access, it was ultimately pushed back to 2024. I’m still including it here because it’s an exceptionally good game with a very focused conceit, and I also put Lethal Company in so it’s only fair. Solving procedural murder mysteries in the future-past world of 1979 proved to be so engaging that I spent an entire week doing almost nothing else but playing this game. The voxel aesthetic has never been something I’ve been very keen on, but Shadows of Doubt is the game that sold me on their potential. I initially found myself suspecting this art direction would hold the game back, but every still taken of this game evokes its sheer tone and atmosphere that makes it shine. It’s like playing a video game version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. There are tons of little details in the game’s world that made learning more about its setting extremely fascinating. I’m a particular fan of how each of the procedurally generated cities are built on what appear to be large offshore platforms due to the global warming crisis: You are a film noir detective solving murders on one platform of Big Boss’ Brother’s Mother Base, and sometimes you are paid by strangers to retrieve their bric-à-brac from their covetous, thieving friends. That is an absurd sentence to type, and yet it’s a pretty accurate description of what Shadows of Doubt is like, in part. I cannot wait for the full game to release with all the refinements and updates that will entail, but for now, I am content being the voxelated 1979’s version of Columbo.

6. Final Fantasy XVI

The core element of Final Fantasy XVI is its exceptional combat system. They built the whole game around it and when you do that for a game, in any genre, it’s imperative that the combat system is robust, enjoyable, and possesses enough depth to stave off stagnation. FFXVI is a phenomenal entry into the character action genre, and it also serves as one of its most approachable titles. As to be expected from a mainline Final Fantasy title, playing other games in the series is not required, and while the story of FFXVI has some elements that could be improved (do not put the Heavensward writer in lead writing positions for any games involving women with connections to Shiva, thanks in advance,) the combat shines through as its crowning achievement. Every fight feels flashy and every attack is powerful and potent, from the smaller mob fights to the big climactic Eikon Clashes. If any game proves that set pieces and cinematic fights are good, FFXVI is that game, and it does such a wonderful job of merging cinematic sequences, combat sections, musical choreography, and sheer unadulterated exuberance for what it’s dishing out. Its lows are low, but its highs are exospheric. There is also something to be said for the game being a shorter affair than its monolithic siblings. The game is paced tight enough to feel brisk, while slow enough to not feel like you’re blitzing through everything. 

Final Fantasy XVI proves three things beyond a shadow of a doubt: Final Fantasy games can still be short in both story length and development time; mainline Final Fantasy games can completely change up the format and genre and have it still feel like a Final Fantasy game; and you should always put Rider Kicks in your video games.

5. Honkai: Star Rail

After being disillusioned by Pokémon games in the wake of Sword & Shield, to the point where I haven’t even touched the new games, I was beginning to think that perhaps my love for turn-based RPGs had faded away. Not that there’s anything wrong with the genre, or that Pokémon games are the only ones worth playing, but I had realized that I hadn’t played a single turn-based RPG since Sword & Shield, and I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to dive into a new one. Honkai: Star Rail showed me that I was wrong; I do still love turn-based RPGs, I just needed to take the plunge and play one that hadn’t become stale to me. I’m a bit trepidatious about recommending Honkai: Star Rail to anyone given its status as a gacha game, but I will bring up why I find it such a fascinating game to play. Right off the rip, if you’ve played Genshin Impact, it’s abundantly clear that Honkai: Star Rail is built off the bones of its older sibling. The interface and menus are nearly identical, and it’s exceedingly obvious how much of HSR is straight-up reusing systems from Genshin Impact. That said, I am always in favor of developers recycling and reusing assets, systems, engines, models, animations, sound effects, and anything else, as game development is already a difficult and challenging process. 

With its turn-based combat system, HSR combines two things that often sell me on games; a class system, and an elemental system. Each character has a class, called a Path, and element, with the Path determining their role in a party, and their element determining their effectiveness against enemies. These can combine in fun ways, and even when characters match in both Path and element, they can still have radically different playstyles. The combat system is fairly simple, but it has a snappy ebb and flow to it that makes it engaging from start to finish. Its storyline is intriguing enough, with cosmic forces clashing in a galactic war that’s sometimes hot and sometimes cold, each side fielding factions big and small to further their own ends, but like with Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail’s story is ongoing and as of now, unfinished. Time will tell how well the story winds up being, but for now, I’m content to blow up hordes of enemies with the funny SMG woman.

4. System Shock (2023)

System Shock 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and when I went to investigate the original System Shock from 1994, I was immediately put off by the clunkiness of its gameplay. I don’t really care if a game looks dated or is graphically lackluster, since graphics should serve the game’s art direction and gameplay, and while System Shock (1994) has a very distinct art style that perfectly fits its tone, the gameplay was too of the era. When Nightdive Studios announced a full remake of System Shock, I was excited to play a more modernized spin on the precursor to System Shock 2, and let me tell you; System Shock (2023) does not disappoint. As far as an FPS game goes, it’s fairly rudimentary and simple, but that simplicity is deceptive. The shooting feels as good as it needs to feel, and the animations on the weapons are far more intricate than they’d need to be. It’s very distinct watching your character reload what looks like a plastic toy gun with the rote efficiency and mechanical nature one would use to reload a real firearm, and that toy gun comment is not a criticism. 

System Shock (2023) has such a unique art direction that’s really quite something to behold. Instead of making the whole game look fully modernized, with “realistic” interpretations of locations and more grounded models and textures, as one might see from games like DOOM (2016), Nightdive went for an upscaling of the original game’s art direction. The areas look almost identical to their 29-year-old counterparts, albeit with more polygons, better lighting, better textures, and a modern rendering engine. The same is true for the enemies and many of the items found throughout Citadel Station. If you walk up close to some of the textures, you can see where they’ve artificially blown up the pixel size to give them a crunchiness that contrasts with the smoothness of some other components of the environment. The visuals in System Shock (2023) are so fascinating to me because they’re such a perfect answer to the question of how best to recreate an older game and retain the spirit of its original art direction, and the markings of the cultural era it was created in. System Shock (2023) looks, feels, and plays like a ‘90s comic book interpretation of a dystopian cyberpunk future, and I truly enjoyed every second of it.

3. Lies of P

I love Lies of P. When this game was first announced, I and many others thought it would be the same Action RPG slop we’d come to expect from many, many games who have died on the blade of trying to be “The Next Souls Game” in a perverse modern version of the 2000’s onslaught of would-be “Halo Killer” shooter games. But it must be said: Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio pulled it off. They’ve proven that you do not have to be From Software to make a game with this caliber of punchy, weighty combat infused within a surreal, forlorn world beset by a larger-than-life tragedy, with all the atmosphere and attention to detail both required to excel. Lies of P is going to be one of my gold standards going forward; this is what a game can be when it has a cohesive, focused vision, and the teams and talents required to realize it. This is what a game can be when its premise is leaned into wholeheartedly, and not shunned or mocked or ashamed of what it’s all about. This is what a game can be when it seems at first blush to be a pale imitation of something great, but it turns out to have been great in its own right, with its own soul, all along.

2. Pathologic 2

What an incredible game Pathologic 2 turned out to be. Going into it I had a lot of preconceived notions and expectations about how it was going to go, given the game’s reputation. As I said with Lethal Company, I’m not really a horror game person, and while Pathologic 2 isn’t quite as intense as some other titles, it’s certainly filled with tension and stress, and there were at least three in-game days where I was scared out of my wits. The art direction of Pathologic 2 is quite unique, as is its setting and general premise, and I’m surprised how well Ice-Pick Lodge were able to both capture the particular time period and cultural influences they blended together in the first Pathologic, and refine them visually into a style that expertly conveys the myriad emotions and moods the game evokes throughout a playthrough. This merges beautifully with the gameplay, putting you in the body of Artemy Burakh as he desperately tries to find a way to save his hometown from a catastrophe and live up to his father’s legacy.

There is so much I could say about Pathologic 2, and while I do believe it’s an incredible experience and a wonderful game everyone should play, I will say this: Pathologic 2 is a game filled with juxtapositions. They permeate every aspect of it, from the clean, minimalist user interface that’s strikingly full of character and detail, to Artemy being branded as a murderer yet tasked with protecting children and treating patients, to the machinations of the various townsfolk torn between the ancient old and the mysterious new, and to the game’s ability to portray warm moments of small, quiet coziness, and desolate nightmares of sheer, stark despair. Pathologic 2 is a game for the ages, and I’m glad I finally got around to playing it.

1. Pathologic Classic HD

That’s right, baby; did you think I was done talking about Pathologic? Not on your life, my friend, for after finishing Pathologic 2 I almost immediately went into Pathologic Classic HD, the 2015 rerelease of the first Pathologic  from 2004 (2005 outside of Russia). Pathologic 2 was a spectacular experience, but I had to go higher, dig deeper, and really sink my teeth into the roots of this story, its characters, and the game that started it all. Pathologic  is even more notorious than its sequel, and I wrote a whole piece back in September about how much I thoroughly enjoyed the game and found it to be quite fun despite its reputation. The funny thing is that Shadows of Doubt was actually the catalyst for getting me to try both Pathologic games. All three of them are first-person games with unorthodox melee combat, survival mechanics such as sleeping, eating, and managing status effects, and trying not to die while walking down streets and investigating leads. Shadows of Doubt is obviously a less brutal, less story-focused game than either Pathologics, but getting a handle on its mechanics opened up my willingness to try something that would bite back. I started with Pathologic 2 because I had actually played up to the end of Day 5 back in late 2022, but after finishing it, I felt compelled to play its much rougher predecessor. Seeing the through lines of plots and character arcs as they originally played out in Pathologic, with the knowledge of how they were reinterpreted in Pathologic 2 had this surreal effect where both versions wound up elevating each other; the old providing the blueprint and framework for the new, and the new serving to accentuate how little they ultimately had to change, because they got so much right the first time. The two of them are two of the greatest games of all time, and I say that with zero hyperbole or exaggeration.

The post Spencer’s Top 8 Games of 2023 appeared first on Gamesline.

A new week, a new episode of the Gamesline Podcast. This week, John and Spencer sit down to talk about everything around the games industry. John’s been digging into Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth while Skull has gotten up to a lot in Infinifactory, Library of Ruina, Lethal Company, and of course Arknights.

In the news, Fate/Stay Night Remaster is coming to the West, a Persona 3 Reload data mine gave us The Answer, and The State of Play gave us a look at Death Stranding 2 On the Beach. We got more news about some Yu-Gi-Oh stuff and found out Microsoft games are going multiplatform all while Love Live School Idol Festival 2 was announced and cancelled all in the same tweet.

If you want to skip potential Like a Dragon Spoilers there are minor spoilers from 1:14:15 to 1:17:10

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, and @SolaireHazard.

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 30: Like A Podcast: Infinite Wealth appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s time! Spencer is back on the pod to join John in talking about the week in games. John’s been playing more Fate/Samurai Remnant and Spider-Man 2 while Spencer has been living in the Pathologic games and Starfield. In the news, Microsoft is bricking third party peripherals and Nintendo patents are showing what the next Switch might be. Bungie was hit with a bunch of layoffs and then they talk about all the announcements coming out of Blizzcon.

We also celebrated the entire weekend with a marathon stream for Extra Life. Please help us reach our goal of $300 by hitting up our donation page.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, @MaverickDrifter, and @fkasocks.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at gamesline.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or directly to our RSS feed.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 23: Goated With the Sauce appeared first on Gamesline.

There are three main statements that people have said about Pathologic:

• It’s not a fun game to play, and having fun while playing it is difficult, if not inconceivable.
• Its primary gameplay activity is mind-numbingly boring, and there is too much of it.
• It’s designed around inflicting pain and misery upon the player by impish developers gleefully twisting their little game developer knives into your sides as they make you play their horrible twisted game for sickos.

All three of these statements are what I like to call: bullshit. They’re all bullshit. But before we dig deep into those cans of Worms, let us first address the one aspect upon which most people agree.

You’ll notice that none of those three statements reference Pathologic’s story elements, and that’s because the writing is something everyone tends to appreciate and enjoy. The game features a truly inspired setting that’s novel for video games to this day, nearly twenty years after its initial release. The particular themes it explores encompass a wide array of topics from relationships between rural towns and the governments whose jurisdiction they fall under, and how those power dynamics clash in dire emergencies, to the nature of death on the individual, social, political, ideological, geographical, and cultural scales, and how death impacts the humblest of orphans, the most powerful of rulers, the economically disenfranchised, the oldest of traditions, and those close in blood or bond. 

The narrative and character writing of Pathologic is, mildly speaking, pretty damn good. It has that enrapturing quality about it where you’re given a mixture of cold facts, gestures at rules and rites that must be adhered to but never explicitly outlined, lots of ambiguity, metaphors, symbolistic language, and in some cases, deceptions, to such a degree that the text lends itself to personal interpretation, meditation, and reflection.

The example themes I gave are barely scratching the surface of what can be gleaned from this work, and arguably the best part about it is that you don’t even have to be all that keen on literary analysis or have a degree in creative writing to pick out enough details to support a nigh bottomless well of themes and ideas. In other words, Pathologic is largely allegorical in nature, and this is aided by its more surreal elements. There are literal plot points that can be extrapolated for those with less interest in thematic interpretation (or those who require more concrete plots to follow), but like with all allegorical works, you get out what you put in. The blood squeezed from the stone is the same blood that’s your own.

I’m not fulminating about the narrative elements. Those are great, and I won’t be talking at length about them anymore, in the off-chance that you play this wonderful game yourself, and experience that narrative unmarred by my interpretations. No, we’re here to wade through the aforementioned bullshit, and hopefully cross to the other side with a clearer understanding of what Pathologic is, and what it is not.

Pathologic is a fun video game. Read that again. This is not a bit, this is not a joke, this is a true statement… for me at least. I can’t rightly claim that Pathologic will be fun for everyone, but it is not an unfun game. It is not devoid of fun or enjoyment, because its various systems build on top of one another, interlinking in such a way that mastery over one section helps you overcome other sections. This results in a positive feedback loop of ever-increasing mastery until eventually, you are “good at Pathologic,” and it does this without having any abstract properties of player progression.

There is no gaining experience points to level up in Pathologic, nor is there anything that boils the concept of progression down to something that is handed off to the computer. “I got to level 15, so now I can enter Barley’s Warehouse and take out the seven muggers because they’re all level 10 and I will have more than enough HP to weather their stabs.” Pathologic isn’t like that. Instead, it focuses on more actionable methods of progression which rely squarely on player skill, planning, and decision-making. “I have acquired enough healing supplies and bullets to see me through Barley’s Warehouse. I’ve fully repaired my revolver, and I’ve purchased some clothing for protection from the muggers’ knives, so now I feel ready. I’ll still have to play skillfully and carefully, but I am much better off than if I didn’t have a revolver or any healing items at all.” It’s not a game where you improve by putting points into stats; it’s a game where your skill improves as you gain familiarity with the environment, mastery over its controls, and acquire knowledge of how its other systems work and how you can use all of these in conjunction with one another to plan, prepare, and enact short-term and long-term strategies over the course of a playthrough.

In order to know that clothing provides defensive boosts, you have to equip it and notice its effect on certain parameters in the Character Menu (or read its item description). In order to repair your revolver, you have to observe that weapons have durability which degrades with use, and you have to learn that certain NPCs can repair them for a fee. In order to acquire healing supplies and bullets, you have to learn where to source those supplies, and also acquire a means to buy or trade for them. Knowledge of these systems and how they play off of each other is a crucial aspect of Pathologic’s gameplay, and it’s the core of what makes the game fun.

A lot of games have money that you can use to buy and sell items, but very few games have multiple uses for items without simply implementing a dime-a-dozen crafting system. Bartering in Pathologic is such a cool mechanic because you start to see all the connections various items have with each other. You develop familiarity with the game’s items and use cases and with that knowledge, you’re able to turn junk items into the supplies you need, whether that’s medicine, munitions, rations, or even gear like clothing and weaponry. Part of what makes the barter system rewarding and fun is its relative novelty. Plenty of games have trading, but most items across most games tend to be restricted to one purpose. You either use the item for its singular context, or you liquidate it for cash. In Pathologic, you still have those options, but most items can also be traded to specific NPCs for other items. The muggers that spawn in the town at night drop blades when you kill them, which have no practical use for the player, except that they can be traded to boys for medicine, lockpicks, and bullets; to patrolmen for food and bullets; or sold to shops for cash.

Mastery over the game’s item economy affects how you’ll plan your routes and tasks for each of the game’s twelve days. You’ll regularly take stock of what you have, what you need, what’s due for repair, and as you go through the day’s main quest and side quests, you’ll adjust your routes and schedule accordingly in order to satisfy any material needs you have while fulfilling the objectives of quests along the way. Early on in my playthrough as Bachelor of Medicine Daniil Dankovsky, I was still getting used to the layout of the town. I noticed my rations were getting low, and that I’d need to resupply soon, as letting the Hunger meter max out causes health damage over time. Daniil starts in the westernmost quarter of the Town, the Stone Yard, and a lot of his quests take him there. The Stone Yard has two shops across its two districts; a pharmacy in the Atrium, and a tailor shop in Bridge Square. Neither of these are grocers, and when I learned of this, it impacted the entirety of my route-planning across the rest of my playthroughs, even long after I’d finished Daniil’s route. I knew that if I wanted to buy food from shops, I should stay out of the Stone Yard. It sounds like a minor thing, but in a game where time management is crucial, where traversing the town is a primary aspect of the moment-to-moment gameplay, saving time by taking note of details like that is extremely valuable as it adds up considerably over a full playthrough.

This leads me to the second point people bring against the game: the boredom. Much has been said about the sheer amount of walking Pathologic asks of the player, and the amount of walking leads some players to find the game boring or uninteresting. The game takes place in a small rural town in the Russian steppe, connected to other metropolitan areas solely via a railway. The town has to be traversed in real time, with no options for expediting this process. There are no vehicles, no fast travel points, and there isn’t even a sprint button. This game hails from a time before even mega-hit franchise games like Halo had sprinting as a regular feature (and we all know how much Halo fans despise sprinting). While walking in Pathologic is what you do for a majority of a playthrough, I would argue that it’s anything but boring or excessive.

In isolation, walking in Pathologic appears to be a routine, monotonous task with no engaging elements and no depth; it’s too slow, and you have to do so much of it all the time. Of course, as someone who loves to “RP Walk” in all kinds of games when the mood strikes me, “just walking” is often an opportunity to engage with the atmosphere of a game’s world; to really breathe it in and enjoy the scenery and mood. But look, I’ll level with the less-patient, more extrinsically-motivated crowd: During my first playthrough as Dankovsky, I started to notice that walking around the Town was far more involved than it would seem to someone watching me play over my shoulder. See, Pathologic has three layers of gameplay that interact and play off of one another:

• The Quest Layer
• The Item Layer
• The Survival Layer

The Quest Layer is tied to the 25 major characters who make up the main cast of the Town. They are later joined by two more characters who appear in the second half of a playthrough, as well as the other two playable characters you didn’t select at the start of the game, who act as NPCs who go through their storylines while you take your selected player character through their own storyline. As part of your character’s storyline, you are given a main quest every day, as well as one to four side quests by these major characters. Any quests you receive during a day must be completed before the end of that day; they do not carry over into the following day. Failure to complete the main quest by midnight results in one of the major characters becoming infected by the plague (and it can outright give you a Game Over if the main quest is important enough). This makes that character inaccessible unless you provide antibiotic medication or a plague curative for them. A key thing to note is that each player character has a set of seven or more of the major characters who are “Bound” to them, and they are referred to as your Bound. If you fail to complete the main quest on a day, it is specifically one of your Bound who succumb to infection, and the only way to avoid the game’s bad ending is if none of your Bound are sick by the end of the twelfth day. The side quests are less crucial than the main quest in terms of story priority, but they often reward you with items, money, reputation boosts (or losses), and in some cases they unlock opportunities such as providing alternative conclusions to the main quest for that day, or unlocking the ability to purchase maps which reveal the location of plagued districts for that day.

The Item Layer is something I’ve mostly addressed already; it refers to the item economy of the game and how each item interacts with the barter, combat, and quest systems. Weapons help you deal with threats, trinkets and curios can be traded or sold for goods and coin, and some quests require the acquisition and delivery of certain items. You get the idea.

It’s the Survival Layer where everything comes together. Each player character has a list of meters that have to be monitored and taken care of, as neglecting them will eventually result in death. The Health meter is self-explanatory; you’re smart, you’ve played video games before, you know what health is. The Exhaustion and Hunger meters go up over time, cause periodic health damage if they’re allowed to max out, and are satisfied by sleeping and eating food respectively, as you might expect. The Infection meter only comes into play if you get infected by the plague, but unlike exhaustion and hunger, infection causes damage over time even if the meter is barely filled, and as the meter builds, each tick of damage increases in turn. Infection has to be managed with antibiotic medication, but these items cause health & exhaustion damage when you take them, acting both as an abstraction of medicinal side effects, and as a complication to the Survival Layer. Infection damage can be reduced by increasing the Immunity meter via immunity boosters and vaccines, and higher immunity also acts as a resisting shield against infection. While Immunity takes a hit each time you’re hit by a plague source, it’s very easy to replenish on the fly with boosters. During my Changeling playthrough I got hit with plague clouds more than a dozen different times and I only suffered an infection once. Last and certainly not least is the Reputation meter. This abstractly represents your overall standing in the Town. Reputation is gained by doing good deeds such as killing muggers or donating money or items to poor or sick NPCs, and it is lost by killing innocent townsfolk, killing patrolmen, and stealing from houses. As mentioned before, quests can also alter reputation, positively or negatively, depending on the actions you take during the quest. As your reputation lowers, shops eventually stop accepting your patronage, and if it gets even lower, townsfolk attack you in the streets, and killing them will lower reputation even further, making it that much harder to climb out of infamy.

So how does all this link back to the walking being boring, I can hear you ask. Well, every day you have a set of quests to do, and these quests are given by NPCs scattered around the Town. But at the start of each day, you don’t necessarily know which quest is going to be the main quest. These NPCs will send you letters at certain times of the day letting you know they have something for you to do, but until you talk with them, you won’t know whether they have the main quest or a side quest. Additionally, some quest objectives are only available at certain times of the day, meaning that even if you know where to go through deductive reasoning, you might be too early to do anything once you get there. You’re never required to do any of the side quests, but they often provide resources which make surviving the Town easier, and while you’re traveling around completing these tasks, your meters are rising. You’re getting hungrier, and more exhausted. If you’ve been having to fight enemies or you’ve been infected, you’ll have to mend your health and lower your infection. You’ll have to find items to mitigate the effects of these meters, and you’ll be taking stock of what you need and where to get it.

The result is that you start making plans throughout the day, and adjusting them according to quest objectives, the state of your supplies, and the status of your meters. You received a letter from Lara Ravel, so you’re walking to her house to learn more about her quest, and you know that there’s a grocery store nearby; your rations are running low, so it’ll be worth checking the shop while you’re visiting Lara. There are a couple trash bins next to the grocery store, so you check them for items you can trade with townsfolk. Lara’s quest takes you to the eastern part of town, and there’s another NPC over there to whom you need to speak as part of another quest, so you’re able to knock out two tasks in one trip. And while you’re over in the Earth quarter, you might as well stop by Andrey’s pub and pick up some coffee, as your exhaustion meter is getting close to full, but you don’t want to waste time sleeping because it’s already late in the afternoon.

The walking in Pathologic is different to walking in most other games, because it’s directly tied to the most important resource in the game; time. The game is constantly testing your abilities of time management, and all three characters have at least one main quest which requires them to travel through the entire town, from one side to the other and back again, often under some sort of time constraint. Walking makes you intimately familiar with the Town’s layout, and you find shortcuts & more efficient routes to complete your objectives each day, while managing both the items in your inventory and the survival status of your character. Sometimes it’s worth cutting through a plagued district in order to save time, and other times it’s better to take the long way around as that’ll take you to shops or other NPCs or a place to rest and reduce your exhaustion. On the surface, it’s just walking, but when you’re actually playing the game yourself, it’s equal parts an immersive activity that puts you directly in the shoes of your character, and a “zen” activity which leaves you with enough brain bandwidth to calculate faster routes through the town so you can deal with all three layers of gameplay at the same time.

Walking is also balanced perfectly with the size of the Town. The Town is big enough to feel expansive and appropriately scaled for the type of settlement it’s supposed to be in the story, while small enough that traversing it doesn’t ever feel like the game needs to have a fast travel option, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of open world games we’ve seen as of late. Try playing any five open world games released in the last six years, but restrict yourself from using their fast travel systems, and see how boring and monotonous the walking becomes in most of them, which stretch out their maps to such massive degrees that they can’t reasonably expect players to manually walk from one end to the other. Fast travel systems are a bandage solution to bloated map design, and it’s something many games would avoid if they scaled down their worlds to a more reasonable level; something best learned from games like Pathologic, which has a world that’s as big as it needs to be, and no bigger. Ice-Pick Lodge would eventually add a fast travel system in Pathologic 2, but unlike many games, it’s diegetic, costs a special resource to access, in-game time still passes in transit, and it accounts for the physical topography of the Town. It’s very possible in that game to fast travel from one part of town to another and have the travel waste more in-game time than if you simply walked there instead. As far as fast travel systems go, it’s leagues ahead of the kind of “waypoint” network we’ve seen in dozens of open world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Genshin Impact, and Elden Ring.

Pathologic is built and designed entirely around the speed at which the player characters walk, the distances the quests ask them to walk, and the total amount of time in a day that they have to complete those quests via walking. To me, saying the walking in Pathologic is boring is like saying the shooting in Halo is boring. Sure, walking is less visceral of an activity than shooting an alien might be, but they’re both the main thing that their games were designed around. If you isolate either of those mechanics, the walking or the shooting, then they’re going to look pretty bare-bones and monotonous, but there are other components and layers to both walking in Pathologic and shooting in Halo that embellish the overall moment-to-moment gameplay. I know that this is an absurd comparison to make, but to me, both of them are equally engaging even though they offer very different experiences. It’s all about approaching a game on its own level, and leaning into what it’s trying to do, rather than expecting it to be something it is not.

This brings us to the final point of this fulminating rant about the lies that have been leveraged against Pathologic for years now. I’ve spoken at length about how the game is fun and engaging, and how it’s neither boring nor tedious, but now I seek to tackle a far more prevalent claim; one that sneaks its way into even the more level-headed and open-minded reviews, critiques, and showcases. A claim seemingly so universal that it’s taken for granted as being true, and it’s even seeped into perceptions of the sequel, affecting the impressions that game has garnered. That claim being thus: Pathologic is an exercise in sadistic game design, where the developers have meticulously and carefully crafted the whole experience to excruciatingly squeeze as much suffering and torment out of the player as possible. Of course, I’m being a bit dramatic here, but that’s part and parcel for the language often used to deliver this claim.

See, Pathologic is particular because of those narrative qualities I mentioned earlier. The story, setting, and characters have a lot of intrigue and complexity to them that cannot be denied, even if one finds the gameplay unsatisfying, basic, or outright bad. If it was simply a boring, plain game from the mid ‘00s, then it could be comfortably and quietly consigned to the mediocre shelves of obscurity; to be pondered and perused only by the most perspicacious of video game enthusiasts. But no, Pathologic is an artful game. Those narrative elements are too craftly woven into the work to ignore the game in its entirety. And thus are people left to consolidate their appreciation of the game’s story, with the reality that they didn’t find the game to be enjoyable for one reason or another. This ultimately leads many to conclude that the game must be unfun on purpose, as an intentional design philosophy, and this conclusion leads to all kinds of misconceptions about Pathologic.

The walking is boring on purpose: to frustrate you as various tasks and meters waste your precious time each day. The combat is awkward on purpose: to discourage fighting whenever possible, as partaking in combat risks losing health or dying or sacrificing weapon durability. The item economy is obtuse on purpose: to confuse your understanding of the value of items and how they might help you. There’s no clear-cut way to heal yourself. The game pits you against several enemies at once in order to fuck with you. The side quests waste your time when they don’t tell you that they don’t have a reward. The game doesn’t tutorialize its mechanics or tell you anything about what to do or how things work, which makes playing the game even more frustrating and insufferable and holy shit I can’t deal with these three muggers and ten thousand rats and constantly juggling all of these meters and items and I don’t have enough time to do anything and the walking is so slow and—

When Dark Souls was gaining popularity, one of the core features people often touted about its gameplay was that it was challenging and difficult. This was a carry-over from Demon’s Souls, which pioneered many gameplay concepts and design strategies that are still in use today by many games, especially ones not developed by From Software. One of those concepts was the ability to write messages on the ground for other players to see, to provide guidance, levity, or chicanery in varying measures. Players were unable to type out customized messages, and had to use a library of specific phrases and terms to prevent the use of unscrupulous language (though players would inevitably discover creative ways to twist the library of terms into obliquely suggestive or vulgar statements.) One of the pre-made messages players could leave for others was this one:

“The true Demon’s Souls starts here.”

This phrase has persisted in the subculture of video games, with “true” frequently being morphed into “real” and “Demon’s Souls” commonly converted into whichever game is the subject of the conversation. It’s often an indicator meant to say “this is where the hard part of the game begins” or, more broadly “this is where the player truly starts to experience what the game is all about.” It’s so ubiquitous a phrase that it’s escaped out of games culture entirely and it’s not uncommon to see it brought up in conversations about all kinds of media from television shows to webcomics.

The atmosphere which surrounds Pathologic reminds me so much of the same stifling air that engulfed games culture during the rising popularity of Dark Souls. Not that Demon’s Souls wasn’t widely enjoyed or just as good, but it’s with its spiritual successor that the suite of From Software action RPGs really started their upward spiral into the mainstream success and acclaim that they enjoy to this day. For many people, myself included, those games were a wake-up call. It became evident that players appreciated challenge in their games, and that many games released during the first decade of the 21st century were too easy or too quick to give concessions to the player. MMORPGs stopped reducing players’ accumulated experience points, and the tales of players dying and de-leveling were novel stories of the past. FPS games eschewed health bars and medkits in favor of bloody vignettes covering the screen to indicate damage, and giving players regenerating health (or shields) once they found cover and avoided damage for a short time. I was in high school in 2007 and people were still referencing Contra for the NES as one of the hardest games ever, a game that was twenty years old at the time. Nowadays, we’ve got a veritable buffet of games with varying degrees of difficulty and ways to modulate that difficulty, and even though difficulty for the sake of being difficult was never the point of Dark Souls, people realized that mechanically pushing back against the player drew them in, because it forced the player to take the game’s mechanics and goals seriously.

Dark Souls didn’t take away your souls on death because the designers wanted to be cruel and punish you for being bad at the game. They took your souls away so that death would have a consequence; so you wouldn’t just mindlessly throw yourself into the fray with no care about what you were doing or where you were going. It was quite ingenious of them to pick souls as the thing you lost upon death in Dark Souls (another carry-over from Demon’s Souls). Souls were both a currency to buy items and upgrade weapons, and they were the equivalent of experience points. Normally currency and experience points are separate resources in games, but they combined them for the Souls games, and then made you lose all unspent souls that you had accumulated whenever you died, with a singular chance to reclaim them which asked the player to retrace their steps back to where they perished. Imagine playing Final Fantasy XIV where every death zeroed out your held gil, and if you died again before returning to your point of death to reclaim your lost gil, then it was all gone forever. I’d wager more people would keep their gil stored with their retainers most of the time, only making a withdrawal when needing to make a purchase. But that’s just speculation, because they wouldn’t put that kind of resource loss function in Final Fantasy XIV as it wouldn’t serve the goals of that game like it serves the goals of Dark Souls.

I thoroughly reject the idea that Pathologic is a sadistic game that revels in the suffering of the player. It is not a game about inflicting pain and misery when it’s played; those aren’t really what its goals are as a video game about immersing yourself in a plague-stricken town as a healer trying their best in a worst-case scenario. While it certainly pushes back against the player with its survival mechanics and focusing all actions the player can take within the constant pressure of a time limit, it also seeks to help them out considerably if they pay attention and approach the game on its own terms. It’s not a “one-way street” game that forces you to come to it in order to have fun and experience all it has to offer. Pathologic asks you to meet it halfway, and it’s frankly abysmal to think that anyone would drag their feet forward to that halfway mark, and make the process of playing the game out to be this painful endeavor from which the developers take fiendish delight. 

Let me give you an example. When I started my playthrough as the Haruspex, Artemy Burakh, I was a bit more familiar with how his storyline was going to go since I’d played Pathologic 2 prior to the first game, and Artemy’s route is the only playable route in the sequel as of this writing. While Bachelor Daniil starts in a house with decent funds, items, and a maxed out reputation meter, Artemy starts at the train station outside of town with 30% health, half-full hunger and exhaustion meters, barely any money or items to his name, and a reputation meter lower than his health. He’s often touted as the “hard-mode” character of Pathologic because of his objectively worse starting scenario compared to Daniil. Artemy, like all three playable characters, meets a couple of tutorial NPCs at the start of the game, who explain his situation to him. These NPCs also act as guides of sorts, in the event the player is playing Artemy as their first character. One of them puts a marker on Artemy’s map, telling him that he should go to Big Vlad Olgimsky’s house in the center of town.

Beelining for that quest marker causes the player to activate a scripted cutscene where townsfolk chase Artemy into the Warehouse district, where he takes refuge in one of the sheds occupied by a gang of children led by a boy named Notkin. Notkin offers Artemy a gun & ammo if he agrees to do a side quest that involves killing a defecting gang member. When I was playing as Artemy, after this quest, I decided to head up to Vlad’s place. The problem was that Artemy’s low reputation meant that townsfolk were constantly trying to kill me, so I was having to kill them first or run away. When I got to Vlad’s house, I found a courier outside who mentioned that Vlad wouldn’t be available until 11 am. The game starts at 6 am, and even with the distraction of Notkin’s quest, I got to Vlad’s house at 7 am. So now I was stuck in the middle of town, where any moment someone could spot me and try to kill me, with four in-game hours I needed to burn. By the time I managed to speak with Vlad and his daughter, Victoria, my exhaustion and hunger meters were nearly maxed out, shops wouldn’t sell me food because I’d killed a lot of townsfolk and cratered my reputation, and I didn’t have much health from all of the fighting. I thought it was hilarious when both Vlad and Victoria told me not to make my situation worse by killing people (oh hey, it’s helpful guidance from the game disguised as character dialogue!) because at that point, even if I managed to build up my reputation, I wouldn’t be able to recover it in time to deal with the hunger damage I’d be taking in an hour or two. Thus, I wrote this playthrough off as a failure, and opted to start over.

On my second attempt, I thought about what I had learned when playing Daniil’s route. There’s another character in the Warehouse district who represents the Town’s underworld element. I figured he wouldn’t mind my bad reputation, and it turns out I was correct. Not only does he give you an extra reward for dealing with Notkin’s side quest, but he tips you off to some muggers you can kill back at the train station for some reputation bonuses and some items, and he leads you to another side quest. This one takes you to the easternmost side of the Town, where you’re asked to go all the way over to the west side of town, and then go back east again. It’s a long trek, and if you go through the town it can be a bit tense as townsfolk chase you in the streets. But if you manage to complete this quest, you get a huge boost to reputation at the cost of some health.

By the time I wrapped up this long side quest, it was around 11 am; the perfect time to visit Vlad. It was then that I noticed what the game had done. Because I had spent the morning wisely by completing side quests and avoiding killing townsfolk, the amount of time it took me to complete those quests almost perfectly lined up with the time that the main quest could be started at Vlad’s place. Not only that, but my reputation was high enough that the townsfolk would no longer attack me, making the trek to Vlad’s house effortless compared to my first attempt. It’s almost like the designers expected the player to beeline right for Vlad, since it’s the only direction the player is given at the start, so they forced them into a cutscene which takes them to an NPC with a side quest, and if they pay attention to the dialogue from Notkin and the defecting gang member, they can find a couple more objectives to do before Vlad’s house is open later in the day. Additionally, they lock Vlad’s house up so that even if the player stubbornly goes back to beelining to the map marker, they get shut out and told to go somewhere else for a few hours (such as doing that side quest they were directed toward earlier).

What’s interesting to me about Artemy’s starting position is that, while he starts in a worse place compared to Daniil, if you take the opportunities the game gives you, you end Day 1 in an arguably better place than Daniil does. Daniil gets to virtually ignore the reputation mechanic for basically his entire storyline, and he gets showered in coin in all of his side quests. But Artemy gets more powerful guns much sooner, lots of bullets for them, and a means to acquire unique resources that can lead to more ammo, money, and special medicinal brews which are stronger and safer than the typical medicine items Daniil has to rely on. It’s not like the game doesn’t help you at all; the designers simply use the game’s mechanics to instill a certain mood or tone for each in-game day, which coalesce with that day’s quests, events, and rewards. This tone is elevated by the game’s survival mechanics, the atmosphere, and yes, the walking.

Even when Pathologic is pulling the real horseshit moves, such as when the game wants you to be on one side of town for one quest, but then will ask you to be on the other side of town for another quest, and you only have a small window of time to get both done because they’re only available toward the end of the day, I’ve never felt like the game was brutally painful or displeasing to play. As I’ve said before, I find the game to be full of mechanical depth, at least for what the game is trying to do, being an older title with a more focused experience. There are certainly mechanics which I find to be more refined and considered in Pathologic 2, such as making those medicinal brews and how their usage is expanded upon both mechanically and narratively. But Pathologic stands on its own as a real accomplishment of how games can interweave their gameplay and narrative into one singular, cohesive work.

Pathologic is not a game about reveling in pain and player suffering. Nor is it a game absent of fun or enjoyment. It’s a game that asks you to place yourself in the shoes of its protagonists, who are all dealt awful hands at the start of a nightmare scenario, and it wants you to play it through to the end. It wants their stress to be your stress. It wants their actions to be your actions. It wants their victory to be your victory. And it believes that you can do it. I believe you can do it, too. I don’t think my ability to enjoy the game or find it fun or lean into its stressful moments to be a novel aspect unique to me alone. I just believe that when a game challenges our preconceived notions about how games should be designed or what feelings they should inspire in players, that we should endeavor to lean into those departures from the familiar and the safe, and meet the game halfway.

Pathologic deserves to be recognized for its well-considered gameplay elements as much as it’s adored for its awe-inspiring narrative ones. I can’t guarantee you’ll find playing it as fun as I do, and if you have played it and found it boring or tedious, then I don’t think your experience is wrong just because mine was different. But if I didn’t offer my own perspective on my time with the game, which seems to clash quite explosively with what I was led to believe based on videos and articles about the game, then I’d surely fulminate into oblivion.

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