Do you guys think they’re ever going to chill on the video games? Like, I think we’re on like year 8 of there being too many video games every year.
The ease of distribution and access to game dev tools has no doubt been a boon to the creative world; look at bold independent projects experimenting inside of under-explored genres like Voices of the Void, or even less innovative, yet still impressively engaging independent forays like Megabonk. While we used to be in the chokehold of either weird PC games you had to go to a special site to find as an alternative to the typical high budget fare, we are now gluttons for choice. Won’t they think of poor innocent women like me who are interested in learning about everything before we experience cultural paradigm shifts like this?
I joke but really, I think I am playing more and more games every single year as time goes on. It never ends. I think this year I’ve counted over 65 games that I’ve tried at any given point, and don’t even get me started on the freaking gacha games. It feels like every week I join my Final Fantasy Raid Call and I have to commiserate with my friend Eric over how there’s a brand new puzzle game that we now have to accelerate up the list.
It never ends.
Anyways. Gaming. For as good as a lot of things were this year, I wouldn’t say there were that many stand-out moments of absolute shock and awe. I definitely found a lot to admire within the bevy of releases I fooled around with, but it felt like I had pretty big caveats with everything to a certain degree. I’ll get into all that, down further, but honestly you know me, I’m kind of gushy.
There is no order to these games. I used to fruitlessly order games like oh yeah I definitely love Number 6 15% more than I love Number 7, but I don’t think I can live like that anymore. Everything has its own contexts, its own meaning. While we can draw comparisons easily, it’s a lot harder to create a meaningful bar of quality to evaluate with when all these works are so fundamentally different. You can’t really compare Silent Hill f to the aforementioned Megabonk in a way that doesn’t make you seem completely unhinged? Well, maybe you can, go off if so, but for me, I’m just going to start rambling.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
The game is good! The music is really fun and the breadth of variety is truly astounding. I think most areas had like, 4 unique songs in them used at different points. It felt great, this is what JRPG gaming is all about.
I don’t think I had the revelatory experience many had with this title because uh, I actually play JRPGs. Expedition 33 isn’t shy about its inspirations, you can see every major team member’s favorite games on the Sandfall Interactive website, and if you’ve played those inspirations, I mean, you kind of already got the bits. I too like Lost Odyssey and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and yes, I think it was really fun to parry in Sekiro.
That said, the unevenness of the finished work and desire to actually represent the things the developers liked about the games they like, means that Expedition 33 perfectly encapsulates the feeling of playing something like Final Fantasy 8 for the first time in a way that most RPG juggernauts have struggled to. Does the draw system in Final Fantasy 8 work great? Not really. Is it cool? Hell yeah it is! That’s the type of thought process I went through in my time with the game; is it annoying that you can sort of mitigate all damage by learning parry windows, and sort of accidentally stumble into broken builds? Definitely. Did I care at all? No, I was having fun playing as a god damn Blue Mage in a brand new video game for the first time in years.
RPGs used to mean something…
Its story is rushed, its character writing incredibly fascinating but woefully underbaked due to what almost feels like an inherent fear of the player becoming bored and leaving, but the heart is all there, and it shined through all the way to the end. Games can be funny without being comedies! I hope that whatever Sandfall Interactive works on next adds something like Skits from the Tales series, because even just that would have transformed their work from an RPG great to an RPG all-timer.
(You can tell I live for critique because this game has a red hair girl turn into a white hair girl in a fucked up house and I just said it was alright)
Umineko
It’s fine.
Silent Hill f
We finally got an actual Silent Hill game after 20 years. AND it’s about women? Holy…
Silent Hill f suffers in a lot of really weird ways that only really make sense when you realize it was written by someone who can usually get away with making 8 different Visual Novels to slowly drag out his story because he likes the idea of slow dissemination; and that developer Neobards’ experience making games has been mostly old Capcom remasters and whatever the hell Resident Evil Resistance was.
That said, I don’t really care because ohhhh my god hitting enemies with a pipe is what every girl wants to do forever.
The story of Silent Hill f may be lacking in deeper subtexts, and you can pretty much get what’s going on after your first playthrough, but it’s an absolute delight to hear any of its characters start to talk about Space Wars like it’s the most serious thing in the world. I probably would be even more forgiving if I hadn’t finished my fourth playthrough of the game (required to get the true ending), a week before they let you skip over half of your repeated playthroughs. We gotta do something about games taking 3 extra months to actually be done.
It’s odd to me that the game doesn’t have more variety in what it’s dishing out when it wants you to go through it again and again. It’s cool to see different variations on the last few cutscenes, but why am I going through the whole town in the same order every time? There could have at least been some sort of alternate routing or unique combat encounters to make things feel a little less monotonous.
Bonus points for being one of the only games that can get away with Unreal Engine 5’s sludge world shit because Silent Hill is supposed to look terrible.
Silent Hill Ascension
It’s sooooooo bad but please you gotta check this out.
I watched all of the archived episodes for the failed interactive story game Silent Hill Ascension and I love it. It’s not good at all. The acting is terrible. The story is barely sensical. The two minute chunks of presentation are completely insane.
I think about it far more than I should.
The First Berserker Khazan
Didn’t even play this one before they added the ability to turn Khazan into a girl and I already thought it was peak.
I think the Souls space is getting to the stage where a lot of people roll their eyes at new entries, but really, there’s always the potential of a new Lies of P…for those with eyes to see.
I don’t think Khazan quite hits the high highs that Pinocchio did, but damn if it didn’t feel good in a way I still think about. Three kinds of situational parries that aren’t just reactive to a fancy glow the enemy does. Moves you can do after filling up a meter instead of moves you can’t do because you ran out of a meter. Defined weapons that all feel different and fun because they didn’t just make 80 variants of a sword because they felt like they had to and 70 of them feel bad. It’s so good.
CloverPit
Pretty poorly balanced but also…it’s gambling. That’s how gambling works. It’s no Balatro but I had a lot of fun figuring out the best ways to win.
Elden Ring Nightreign
Nightreign suffers in a lot of the similar ways that Elden Ring did, but it has an “Arcadey” modifier that makes the whole thing so much more bearable.
If there was a problem I had with Elden Ring, it was that unlike other Souls games that I could replay endlessly, I never wanted to play it ever again. The copy-paste dungeons and weirdly strict traversal options with very little meaningfully changed from its predecessors were just too tough a pill for me to swallow.
Yet here it all works. Maybe it’s being forced into different weapon builds by the whim of RNG. Maybe it’s the fact I can play as a spellcaster and literally never run out of mana if I’m playing well. Maybe it’s because I can be a doll girl and then immediately switch to being a nun. Maybe it’s because bows and arrows feel good for the first time EVER! The list can go on.
Nightreign might be miserable to play on your own, but in a world where me and my girlfriend have spent hours over the years trying to hide our summon signs in the right place to hopefully get connected for co-op in Dark Souls over and over again, it was the ultimate panacea.
Silksong
I’m only halfway through Act II oh god.
Listen it’s not Silksong’s fault that everytime a game shadowdrops I get thrown off because I perfectly plan out every game I’m going to play in random chunks, and it happened to line up with a Trails game I had to review. I promise I’ll get back to it. I promise it’s not cheating that I played two other Metroidvanias since it came out. I’m so sorry. Hornet please you have to forgive m-
Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores
I really liked the first Lone Fungus, even if it wasn’t a game about super cute mushrooms. I think that its fixation on tough platforming with traversal is one that more Metroidvanias could learn from, but it did become a little much at times.
Melody of Spores basically solves all the issues I had with Lone Fungus, and also takes things in a decidedly GBA-style direction. As someone who recently played through every single GBA Castlevania game, this was amazing to see.
I think something was lost, when we pivoted entirely to handheld consoles with comparatively immense power that don’t even try to have a unique control scheme. When you play a GBA game, there’s a level of deliberate design at almost every stage that makes it clear they know you could be doing this shit on a bus for 20 minutes and then have to go. Nowadays, some of that sensibility can be found on Steam, especially with the advent of the Steam Deck, but things feel almost entirely lopsided towards something like a Balatro or Vampire Survivors.
Melody of Spores gives you a whip, and it changes everything. Where combat in Lone Fungus was a pretty simplistic affair, and it arguably still is, there is such an absurd breadth of build-crafting that you can do with the new equipment system that feels straight out of Aria of Sorrow. Do you have to engage with it? Not really, the game isn’t that hard. Is it fun to realize you can just chuck a vase at a boss over and over again? Absolutely.
Making the more absurd platforming challenges completely optional and detached from the world helps a lot too, and things never get as hard as the endgame gauntlets of Lone Fungus. I remember being incredibly sad when this game originally failed to meet its crowdfunding goals, and I’m really glad they somehow managed to get it out the door regardless, because it reminds you that sometimes a developer just needs to keep getting chances to hone their craft, and watching them improve can be the most beautiful thing in the world.
Infinity Nikki
I love dress up games. I hate gacha games*. Alas, they made a Dress Up Gacha game that has an actually fun to explore open world, so here I am.
I think at launch Infinity Nikki was very charming, but clearly unfinished. Core systems were missing, the absurdity of the Nikki series was present, but noticeably muted. They actually on-god had pulls that would expire!
A year out however, basically everything has been ironed out into an incredibly easy to engage with format. Do I still hate the gacha? Yes of course forever. Can I mostly ignore the gacha because every 5 star is just a ball gown in different colors? Yep.
I think it’s impressive that several members of the Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild development team worked on this, because it solves a lot of the issues I had with those experiences. While there’s still entirely too much space, it’s almost entirely solved by being able to dress my Nikki up exactly how I want, and at a base level, aren’t video games all about looking super cool and aura farming in various locations with an incredible fit?
The 2.0 update specifically was incredibly good for the game. Where a lot of open worlds can suffer from being wide expanses of nothing, Nikki went extremely dense, and at times, vertical. The rainforest-like setting of the mushroomy Itzaland actually feels like a place where you have to constantly climb through layers of canopy, and pay attention to your surroundings in all directions, rather than immediately in front of you. I love turning huge in an instant and just trivializing a platforming challenge. I love talking to a baby mushroom and randomly getting pulled into an incredibly dire life-or-death sidequest about the saddest thing you ever heard.
I hope someday the stuff that makes games like Nikki can find their place in a more traditional video game.
* a lie.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II
One of the weaker Trails games and I still loved basically every minute of it. Just play these for the love of god if you like RPGs at all. Please.
Metro Gravity
We do not get enough 3D Metroidvanias, and this delivers in not only that, but also Gravity Rush! Wow!
Cannot recommend Metro Gravity enough mainly because I struggle to think about a game that is actually meaningfully analogous to it. Yes, you do Gravity Rush stuff, but like, it has more substance than that (no offense to Gravity Rush).
The boss battles specifically really got my ass. They’re kind of rhythmic-based parry fests, but they’re so immaculately designed and tied to a song playing that it encouraged me to learn how to optimize everything I possibly could to feel good. I rarely get into time-attack style stuff, but it was just so much fun learning how to best slingshot myself around planets in one boss fight, or just how many hits I could get in between deflective parries in another. The soundtrack is incredibly distinctive and fun, the art style’s mishmash of pixel art and low-poly is the shit I love. Man. What a good video game. The type of game that makes you happy from seeing someone just give their all.
Labyrinth of the Demon King
Combining King’s Field with Silent Hill is genius, why hasn’t anyone done this before?
I specifically really liked the weird obtuse ways you could upgrade your broken-ass starting katana into a whole host of different weapons depending on what you gave to reforge it. What a cute idea. I picked the evil blood one in case you were wondering.
It’s also really neat that the enemies will just start beating the shit out of each other. One of my favorite parts of certain Dark Souls games is when you find two guys just fucking going at it. Like those guys outside the Abyss Watchers in Dark Souls 3. Hype Moments. If you’re going to put me in hell, it should feel like other people are trapped in hell too! Why the heck should they get along where I can’t?
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
Insanely good Metroidvania. I’ve talked in the past about Ender Lilies, and this does everything that it did but better.
I love the way the map slowly fills in with color if you’ve done things, genuinely telling you if you’ve done everything you can in a room without forcing you to rely on guide websites for just the basic question of “did I do everything I can here”.
There’s an actual story here outside of the Dark Souls apocalyptic item descriptions of the original. I loved whenever I sat down at a checkpoint and one of my ghostly oomfs wanted to just talk about some shit that happened in the evil rich people house. Awesome.
Mushroom Musume
Third game of the year with Mushrooms!
This is a really cute raising simulator about raising a bunch of fucked up awesome mushroom daughters. You can give them knives. You can teach them magic. You can get them lost in a Resident Evil Mansion. You can send them on quests. It’s awesome.
I was really impressed by how many unique events there were in this game, which befits the sheer amount of mushroom daughters you can make. In raising sims, you’re always going to see repeat events, it’s kind of intrinsic to the nature of the thing, but the sheer originality on display here was inspiring. When your poor mushroom daughter goes out into the real world away from your sheltered wooded home, and has to learn what the Tooth Fairy is? That’s real shit. When people try to get high off of her body parts because that’s kind of what mushrooms do? Messed up.
I still have so much more to do, but I was in love with every second of this game, especially with its menagerie of unlockables that ranged from a weird gardening mini-game that lets you min-max your daughter, to palettes that just changed all the cutesy colors of its incredibly charming UI presentation. It even has Pokémon-ass mystery gift codes! Cute!
Death Stranding 2
Kojima learned women have rights for once. He didn’t do it perfectly, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t think he was capable of this. It’s been like 20 years since MGS3 and every game he’s released since then has at least 4 insanely offensive displays of women. Here we have women who actually do things! Rainy is cracked!
I think this is Kojima at some of, if not completely, his best. The storytelling is insane, the concepts are outrageous, the direction is sublime. Italian Solid Snake is hot.
The game part though, I don’t know what the hell happened man. I get that he loves Mad Max, so a car-driven game in Australia makes complete sense (even ignoring the Tarman shaped George Miller in the room), but it completely ruins the balance that made Death Stranding’s first outing so iconic. Death Stranding was never a hard game, and the Director’s Cut made it even easier, but Death Stranding 2 is almost mindless at times with how little friction there is.
I remember struggling and optimizing my ziplines in the snowy mountains of Death Stranding so that I could deliver all I could as best I could, and being incredibly satisfied when I managed to make the routing work with floating cargo carriers in-tow. In Death Stranding 2, I just get in my car that holds 30 packages with no downsides and drive up the whole mountain over and over until it tells me I don’t have to anymore. It was sad. You can in fact make a game too easy. The Dark Souls easy mode deniers were secretly right all along…
of the Devil
🙂
Lies of P: Overture
Holy Fucking Shit.
Fromsoftware’s DLC efforts have always been better than the base game they spawn from, but Round8 has taken it to another level. I am in awe of Pinocchio’s exploits in this game, and its surprisingly more in-depth narrative. Gepetto is the biggest bastard of all time, there’s genuinely something severely wrong with that guy.
Dreams of D is going to be the greatest game ever made.
The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-
This was just a normal visual novel with the bad Utawarerumono combat, I really don’t get why it was such a big deal (Half Joking).
Danganronpa games are fun, but they always have an issue where writer Kazutaka Kodaka loves to just be insanely embarrassing and offensive out of nowhere and it sours the whole thing. Shockingly, possibly because he brought on the incredibly bad Boruto writer to make him look immaculate by comparison, he doesn’t have many of those problems in Hundred Line.
I wish that it actually delivered on the concept of 100 unique endings, but that would be insane, just as many were suggesting in the hype cycle lead-up to the release where Kodaka insisted each next day may be his last. As is though, it’s still a pretty fun visual novel, especially now that some of the more cloying gameplay mechanics have been streamlined or improved. I still think this is a game that’s incredibly poorly designed from an engagement perspective (It really was JUST like trudging through the Utawarerumono weightless combat after a while), but it’s fine because the story is still generally pretty fun. Kodaka has an incredibly vibrant way of writing characters that always impresses, and I’m going to be thinking about Eito Aotsuki forever now. I think I finally understand Komaeda people.
Lethal Company Modded So That Pikmin Follow You Around and Your Friends Spend Way Too Long Gambling in a Casino
Beautiful, perfect, no notes. The true king of Friendslop.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure
Awesome cozy-core game that lets you be friends with Cinnamoroll. It took way too long to get to the point where Cinnamoroll can follow me around all the time but we got there folks.
I think it’s a weird game where it was definitely made as a phone game you log into everyday, but it really just feels like Animal Crossing at its core. It’s lacking in the level of polish something like a Nintendo can do, but at the same time that means they’re way more free-form and experimental. They put Wish Me Mell in a weird pocket dimension! Big Challenges is here and makes you do Big Challenges! They confirmed that Tuxedo Sam is gay!
I think it’s a little bad at actually making you want to decorate houses, between the weird crafting system, and the lack of diversity in the actual furnishings you can put down, but that’s fine. If you treat it as a nice little place where you can run around with Kuromi while you do tasks and she’s kind of rude about it, it’s perfect.
Blue Prince
Dude Blue Prince.
I love roguelites and puzzle games so it’s no surprise I love this game sooooo much. I think that ultimately it made me realize that while I might not lack the imagination of the average gamer, I think I might have too much anxiety to actually engage with a lot of methods of play unless I’m actively forced to. Like I said with Nightreign earlier, there’s something about having a game just direct where we’re going today that brings peace to my soul.
There’s plenty I could say about Blue Prince’s design, the layers upon layers, but the real reason I loved this game? It’s because I played it with my friend Trevor.
Playing with Trevor meant that I had a second set of eyes to look at everything I was doing, and his skillset from playing a million games about optimizing numbers meant that he could cover me in spaces I would’ve otherwise stumbled in. Do you think I could have managed my step counter on my own? No chance. Would I have picked a good room to place in the corner on the run that I was finally close to winning? No I would’ve died right then and there.
It was really neat figuring out things like how the Garage worked, how to get more resources for future runs, and actually getting the damn boiler room working. I get why some people might have struggled with some of the RNG mechanics, but the subtle ways you can manipulate the RNG to guarantee most things before getting to the more obtuse and multi-run puzzles meant I was never really frustrated by it. Is it as tightly designed as something like Return of the Obra Dinn? No, but that’s fine, it wasn’t trying to be. It’s trying something new; it’s trying to be itself.
I love puzzle games, but I think they shine the most when you have someone else with you to see angles you can’t. There were just as many times where Trevor had no idea what was going on, but I, with my own skillset and knowledge base, was able to immediately discern what I had to do. It was so much fun, easily the most fun I had with a game this year. Thank You Trevor.
