What I got is a game that largely feels good, but it tastes pretty sour.

Haven is a metroidvania-esque open world exploration RPG with high speed rocket boots. You play as a couple, Kay and Yu, as they make a new life stranded on an abandoned planet called Source. Haven’s narrative is told through a familiar visual novel style format, and it’s gameplay is separated into neat little chunks. Much of the visual novel aspects of the game can be experienced in it’s home life simulator, while the more active parts of gameplay are separated into open-world exploration and timing-based RPG combat.

In the visual novel sections of the game, Kay and Yu spend their days in their home, a destroyed spaceship called The Nest, having what feels like an almost endless amount of scenes of them hanging out in different ways. The pair use all the resources they’ve collected out exploring the world to cook and prep a bunch of meals for the future, as well as synthesize important medicine that they need to survive on this planet. The writing in these sections ranges from genuinely cute to “ok this is a little too twee, even for me” to outright cringy. There’s also plenty of scenes that, while never sexually explicit, are definitely sexually charged in a way that most games don’t feel comfortable enough to explore with their characters. If you’re sick of games that have overly dark tones and too many scenes full of worry and anxiety, then a lot of this will be really refreshing. Even though there are extreme stakes to Kay and Yu’s story, the two are more often than not just happy to be around each other and are finding newer, sometimes hornier, but generally more fun ways to spend time together.

One thing I really appreciate about this game’s writing is how deftly it uses callbacks to previous optional scenes that feel very natural. Sometimes it’s a clever line of dialogue that’s referenced, other times it’s an item the couple found in their exploration. One part that was especially touching was an extremely cool culmination of a bunch of different scenes. It started with a scene where the couple was camping out under the night sky, and Yu mentioned that she missed her guitar. She was never good with the guitar and it was a passing offhand comment, considering she only remembered it since it felt like it would really fit the mood camping under the stars. Yu promptly forgot about it, but Kay didn’t, like a partner would do. Later, during an extended sequence where we were alone on a beach islet, just swimming and having fun, Kay got his foot stuck in an extremely large shell. It’s a really long, not very funny scene, but they did decide to keep the shell as a keepsake. Finally, later, Kay gives Yu a present for their anniversary. She unwraps it, and it’s a brand new guitar made from the giant oversized shell. It was an extremely cute and touching moment, and it was brought together through a completely unexpected dynamism between scenes. Moreover, if I missed either of those scenes for whatever reason (the one where you get the shell felt particularly missable), it probably would have never happened. I appreciate any game with the boldness to let you miss an entire subplot and never even notice.

However, this sort of dynamism isn’t present in the majority of the scenes you’ll encounter. Haven is a game completely littered with rough writing and dialogue choices to the point where it felt like the script seriously needed a second pass. This is a critical misstep for any visual novel, but especially a game focused on dialogue between only two characters. Moreover, many of the scenes in this game are meant to be comedic, and the sense of humor in this game is probably the furthest from funny you could get. The biggest offender here is that there’s only one swear in the game, and it’s the kind of sci-fi fake swear that’s really grating to hear every time it happens. Both Kay and Yu use the word, “bloot” (a combination of both “fuck” and “shit” somehow), so often that you would expect it become background noise, but instead it stands out every single time it’s said. It’s especially noticeable in really dramatic scenes where Kay and Yu are trying to express real, genuine feelings, and then “bloot” pops up and it takes you out of the scene entirely. It’s aggravating how often “bloot” is said in this game, in all the different contexts it’s said, and how in a game that is not afraid to show the 3D models of these characters completely naked that they couldn’t just say “fuck” instead. They say “bloot” in places where a swear wouldn’t even be appropriate. This game wants you to constantly be aware of the specter of “bloot” hanging over your head at all times, ready to come at you when you least expect it.

To give more examples of the poor sense of humor in this game’s writing, there’s a recurring bit where Kay finds a couple of dolls from one of his favorite childhood shows called Muffin & Cupcake. There’s one prominent scene where you have to sit through him reenacting an episode with the dolls and it’s utterly intolerable. In two distinct high pitched voices, he explains the plot of the episode laden with baking puns every single chance he can get. It’s so brazenly unfunny that at the end of the sequence, you get a dialogue option from Yu where you can either say that was awful, or ask if you can play. In the context of being stranded on a deserted world and literally going through every option they can to entertain themselves, it makes sense why Kay would do this. It doesn’t make watching this scene any less funny. I hesitate to even bring it up because I fear that, in explaining this sequence, it may accidentally sound funny or appealing to somebody. If that is you, dearest reader, I’m genuinely sorry. After this, Kay will occasionally make references to the sequence like it was hilarious and everyone loved it. The dolls appear on the ship as an item you can interact with for extra pieces of incidental dialogue. I avoided those dolls like the plague.

The main story is largely pretty enjoyable, except for a pretty scattered and unfocused ending sequence. The premise of lovers trapped on a distant world is solid and unraveling the mysteries of a once colonized but then abandoned planet with the looming anxiety that the government will arrive at any second to bring these two young adults back to their dystopia is satisfying. There are pretty meaty twists and turns that kept me going, even while I was suffering through the bits of narrative presented in the homelife simulation section that were extremely grating. Even if I didn’t enjoy the dialogue very much, it did also really make these two characters feel like a real, genuine couple. They’re both twee, but they’re twee together, and their tweeness unfolds very naturally.

Outside of the visual novel sequences, you travel around the planet of Source in open-world exploration. They both have rocket boots, and you’re encouraged to constantly be flying at all times. Both characters can walk, but any time you stop to walk, even for a second, even on accident, Yu will speak up going “AUGH walking is SO BORING why don’t we ride our cool rocket boots more?” Then Kay will pipe up and go “yeah but walking is pretty nice sometimes, if you think about it.” This exchange happens an amount of times that I can only assume is in the double digits on a normal playthrough. To mix it up, sometimes Yu will go “you know what walking is kind of nice sometimes.”

Anyways, I struggle to call what you do in this game platforming. It’s more like a freeform driving game like Forza, except instead of really nice cars, you drive around in an extremely horny young adult couple. The high-speed gliding, especially when you’re flying on flowlines (the ingame tracks you have to follow to charge up your power), is mindlessly fun. It feels less fun when they require you to think about it. You’ll be forced to ride on flowlines high above the ground where you have to drift a ton of times. If you fail, you fall back to the ground and you have to navigate all the way back to the awkwardly placed starting position to try again. The drifting in this doesn’t feel very rewarding to pull off, and it’s not helped by having two separate tutorials dedicated to drifting, and tons of early game incidental dialogue where Yu implores the player to drift more. Any kind of action that requires precision or stopping just a second to get a better view of the map feels janky and breaks the flow of the movement. There are tons of times when you’ll be trying to clear out an area, only to have to stop on a dime to wonder “Why haven’t I picked everything up? Is there something I missed? Where is it? Is it nearby or is it hiding somewhere?”

While exploring the open world, sometimes you’ll run into less than friendly creatures and critters, and you’ll need to do some timing-based RPG combat. While this kind of RPG gameplay is nothing new, Haven’s take on it is pretty refreshing, and is challenging without feeling overly demanding. I’ve avoided bringing it up throughout this review but I think it’s finally time to invoke this game’s obvious comparisons to Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, which is an utterly fantastic game I find myself recommending to people constantly. Despite Brothers being excluded from Haven’s inspiration map, there’s plenty of common ground between Haven and Brothers, and it’s most apparent in Haven’s combat, which is pretty ironic considering Brothers has little to no combat to speak of. Both Kay and Yu occupy one half of your controller, and whenever one of them isn’t actively doing something, the other is available for actions. It can be pretty jarring entering combat for the first time since when most games start RPG combat, you expect a menu to pop up to tell you what you can do. Instead, you can act as soon as the transition finishes. Every single move you make has a charge time associated with it, which makes timing them correctly crucial. Each ability also has animations that you need to get into the rhythm of popping off whenever is appropriate. Kay and Yu have completely identical movesets and HP, which is thematically relevant with them being two halves of the same whole relationship and neither outweighs the other. While I personally love RPGs with varied character roles and large casts, having a game with a party of two that play identically works for what this game is trying to achieve.

Kay and Yu both have 4 core moves: Impact, Blast, Pacify and Shield. Impact and Blast are your two primary attack moves, with some enemies being vulnerable to physical attacks while others are weak to energy blasts. Pacify is the move you use when you want to calm a KO’d enemy. What’s interesting about this system is that pacify is a move that requires charging as much as any other move. Since most of the enemies in this game are indigenous wildlife that have gone hog wild on Rust, you aren’t attempting to kill any of them. When you do knock one out, you want to send the critter off on it’s way not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but also so it’s effectively out of the battle. If an enemy is KO’d for too long, they’ll get back up with some health. This results in having to put together the mental math of “should I pacify this enemy while this other one is about to attack” in ways that feel really satisfying to solve.

The final ability is Shield which should be straightforward, but it comes with some added caveats that I really enjoy. You would expect there to be points in this game where both characters need to shield to avoid a large attack. Instead, what happens is that only one character needs to shield while the other acts. This is important because whichever character is shielded will block the next oncoming attack for both characters. I love this. It recontextualizes defending as a selfless act, putting one of your characters in harm’s way in order for the other to act as necessary to continue battling. It keeps battles from becoming conservative defensive messes while you’re trying to plan and figure out how to topple enemies. Even when defending, it always feels like you’re moving forward in combat. Each character’s shield gets weaker on repeat uses, meaning you have to switch out which character is defending each turn to minimize damage taken. This is also great for reinforcing the relationship these two characters have. Kay isn’t a toxic male chivalrous defender because he’s the one defending all the time. Instead they both defend each other because they’re a couple and supporting your partner when they’re vulnerable is what people in healthy relationships do. The way this game uses game mechanics as metaphors for parts of a relationship is what Haven does best.

The pair also have Duo Blast and Duo impact moves which are super charged up versions of Blast and Impact respectively. They require deliberate timing to charge and are really satisfying to pull off at the right time, but I felt like most incidental battles relied on them too much. While later battles reinforce the necessity of not relying on them, a lot of fights get finished just by spamming Duo moves. Other times, you’re just simply waiting until you can pull the right one off at the right time. The battles often felt less like satisfying RPG combat and more like a puzzle that needed to be solved in the right order, which can feel mindless when repeated too much. Also, your characters automatically target the enemy that will be most vulnerable to the move you’re using in order to cut down on any needless confusion. While this system works pretty well, it also compounds the mindless feeling in a lot of stray encounters. At worst, in a handful of later, really difficult battles, I found myself shooting my shots at enemies that were vulnerable a second ago but not anymore, meaning my shot will just whiff completely when it would have been better if the system targeted another enemy with that attack instead. For all the really unique and interesting, and sometimes flat out intimidating enemy combinations that this game throws at you, once you get down what works against what, the battles feel monotonous as the game goes on.

Haven is well paced with little repetition in battles, but when you do run into the same combination of dudes you were banging your head against a wall to solve and then eventually downloaded, rebattling them feels tedious. It’s a good combat system, but it’s weighed down by enemies that are not only not very engaging to fight against once you’ve got them solved, but the visual design of every single enemy is deliberately Brown and Red, which makes every battle feel the same, even if it’s not. The animals in the overworld are all richly colored and nice looking, but when they’re infected by Rust, they all look exactly the same, which instills this “here we go again” feeling when you get into battles, even against enemies you’ve never fought before. I wish there was more visual variation in the enemy designs. Maybe keep the red and brown general motif but allow more colors to seep in on the enemy designs.

I feel like it’s really necessary to bring up the music in this game, considering it’s the follow-up to Furi, a game that is almost overshadowed by its incredible soundtrack. Comparatively, Haven is underwhelming. Sure, it’s not going for the heavy EDM beats that Furi implemented flawlessly into it’s combat, but it is going for a similar 80s synth aesthetic. Instead of a star studded soundtrack, Haven is composed entirely by french electronic artist Danger, who is a fantastic musician in his own right. The use of his music in game, however, feels very bland. When you’re exploring a lot of the same areas trying to clear every single bit of rust, you’ll get hit with the same looping synth beats over and over again to the point where it feels repetitive and like it’s not adding to the experience. Good music will amplify your experience, something that Furi does excellently. Haven’s soundtrack isn’t necessarily bad, but it feels disappointing by comparison. There’s some great standouts. 4:42 Still Free, the song that plays over Haven’s immaculately beautiful intro cinematic is fantastic. The intro is so good, in fact, that it makes the rest of the game feel disappointing by comparison, without even comparing it to Furi.

The standard battle music, a track called 14.52 Ready When You Are!, is so light and comes in so softly that it adds zero tension to battles. That may have been the intention, to make the process of entering combat feel as chill and relaxing as flying around a floating piece of land on a desert planet, but it sort of compounded the tedium of entering battle against enemies that looked the same as the last enemies I encountered. Individually, the tracks in Haven aren’t bad and some are really good, really chill beats to listen and do homework to. They’re just not employed very well in the game itself.

Even if the music doesn’t hit all the time, Haven is still it’s best when you’re flying around through large, weirdly colored spaces while chill lo-fi heavy synth beats play in the background and your deuteragonists are holding hands. It’s banging on all cylinders when you feel Kay and Yu’s relationship deepening simply through playing the game. It evokes a mood that you might find in some high concept anime fanart by people who want to see their ships come to life. As far as I can tell, no other game delivers the kind of technicolor chill vibes that you get from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and that’s something that I think is definitely an accomplishment. I just wish the story and dialogue at all met the level of quality of the synergy between the themes of this game and it’s mechanics.

SPOILER WARNING
This final paragraph spoils the ending for Haven. If you still want to play it, I recommend not reading further!

I harbor a lot of misgivings about the ending of Haven that I’m finding difficult to just let slide from how I feel about the game as a whole. The ending has Kay and Yu cutting off the flowbrige of Source from the other planets in the galaxy, meaning that they will be stranded on it forever. I have no issues with this, it’s an extreme decision made by a couple of brash young adults, but also it makes sense considering the stakes the game is trying to set up. If the Apiary catches them, their life together ends. There’s no way around it. In the process of cutting off the flow bridge, Yu becomes horribly disfigured and has tons of red crystals sticking out of her through the remainder of the game. It seems like Yu is on death’s door, but the two manage to cut off the flowbridge and isolate themselves, and the world of Source, from the rest of the galaxy. Some light credits roll, and then an epilogue sequence starts where Kay and Yu are back at The Nest.

Yu is still covered in bloody wounds and crystals sticking out of her skin, but the two are acting as if nothing happened. Instead of treating her incredibly dire wounds, Yu amplifies Kay’s rocket boots in a way that makes it so flowers can burst out of the ground. It’s an inverted callback to the end of Furi where everything is dying under The Stranger’s feet, where instead new life springs from their love. It would be really sweet but the sequence goes on a little too long and it wears out its welcome quickly. Then, Kay and Yu have dinner, the two go to bed, and then they have a conversation about Yu’s horrible disfigurement. Apparently she’s completely fine and the crystals don’t even hurt anymore and she’s totally normal. I think the point the game is trying to make is that Kay will love Yu no matter how she looks. Conceptually, it should be a sweet moment, but the way it’s portrayed makes it seem like they didn’t even bother trying to treat her, which goes against the survivalist elements of this game. They’re supposed to be stranded on a deserted world and they’re supposed to take care of each other, but they don’t even try to remove some of the crystals, bandage up her wounds, maybe even redo her art a bit so the crystals are still sticking out but they’re not in horrible bleeding fleshwounds.

The non-chalantness of the way this is handled makes me think I missed something and could have completed the game without her getting hurt, but if that is the case, then I feel like it horribly undercuts its own point about how much these two love each other. It’s a strange ending, one that also was so baffling that, much like most of Haven, I didn’t feel like I got much out of it.

The post Haven (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

And thus, game of the year for 2016 begins! John, Scott, Michael, and Rose all sit down to hash out the first categories for day one. If you want to keep our winners and losers a surprise, then listen to the podcast linked above. We deliberated, discussed, and debated each category until a winner, and two runners-up were decided.

For today’s GOTY we gave awards for Best Soundtrack, Best Audio Design, Best Visuals, and the What The Fuck Award.

Best Soundtrack: VA-11 HALL-A

Runners-up: DOOM, Furi

There were a lot of solid soundtracks this year, but few were as accomplished as VA-11 HALL-A’s two-part, 62-track OST: Sounds From The Future and Second Round. With a style that’s both wildly varied and totally unified, VA-11 HALL-A delivers no end of instantly iconic bangers. There’s the head-bobbing pulse of “Good For Health, Bad For Education,” the driving power-rock of “A. Rene,” and a plethora of great songs for any mood. It’s a soundtrack that epitomizes every piece of cyberpunk media which came before it, while also being its own unique work- and for that, the VA-11 HALL-A OST is the perfect music for mixing drinks and changing lives.

Best Audio Design: Oxenfree

Runners-up: Overwatch, Devil Daggers

There’s something incredibly impressive about how different games can use their audio design in wildly disparate but powerful ways. Oxenfree on its own is a narrative experience much akin to games like Life is Strange or a Telltale series, but its core conceit really sets it apart from the pack. As you wander through the mysterious Edwards Island, a handheld radio can be used to tune into the supernatural elements of the island, letting you hear things that feel eerie and wrong. From cut World War II sound clips, to haunting orchestral music, everything you can hear on the radio creates an incredible atmosphere of unease for an already anxious situation. When you actually tune into specific objects, the distorted hum that accompanies the equally disturbing visuals makes every second feel powerful, dark, and dangerous. 

Even aside from the general sound work, all of the voice acting you’ll hear in the game sounds crisp and real, like you’re really listening to a couple of friends talking. This becomes even more effective when things like possession come into play, making the distorted voices of familiar friends feel all the more corrupt. Oxenfree lives and dies by its audio design, and when you still call to mind exactly how a game sounds, long after it’s done, you know it was good.

Best Visuals: Hyper Light Drifter

Runners-up: VA-11 HALL-A, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst 

Very few games nowadays manage to have an entirely unique aesthetic identity, especially when it comes to pixel art. Hyper Light Drifter’s visuals, while definitely steeped in inspiration from its forebears, are still uniquely its own. An off-pastel color palette set to a drab and dying world. Areas that are not only visually interesting and have great environmental storytelling. Hidden areas always have subtle clues leading you in their direction. So many amazing touches, and it’s hard not to mention the game’s intro. It’s seriously an achievement, you’ve gotta check it out.

What The Fuck Award: The Coleco Chameleon

Runners-up: Palmer Luckey and his meme investments, CS:GO Gambling

It’s somewhat trite at this point to jump on-board the “2016” train, but it seems like even the games industry couldn’t avoid being an absolute wreck this year. We’ve seen multiple bizarre occurrences this year, but one stands glorious atop this festering pile of feces – and that’s the Coleco Chameleon. Having started life as the Retro VGS in 2015 (and failing spectacularly), 2016 saw RETRO Magazine’s Mike Kennedy reboot his pie-in-the-sky console into the Chameleon. However, a disastrous Toy Fair showing, which alleged the console to be little more than a Super Nintendo inside an Atari Jaguar shell, and the ensuing fiascoes saw the Chameleon devolve from a pipe-dream into spectacular farce.

A second faked prototype – revealed to be a DVR capture card – followed by Kennedy’s attempts to portray himself as a hapless schmuck who got taken for a ride by a skeevy hardware guy saw Coleco Holdings pull out, and the venture die officially. Allegations from people close to the project at one time or another that Kennedy had funneled money out of RETRO Magazine and Game Gavel (themselves largely unsuccessful ventures) into a separate LLC in order to cut his business partners out of Chameleon profits didn’t help Kennedy’s image; and even saw RETRO Magazine hemorrhage some of its few remaining staff members. Kennedy has since continued to occasionally surface in the retro scene for all the wrong reasons, but it’s unlikely he’ll ever bungle something as hard as he did the Chameleon.

The post Game of the Year Awards 2016: Day One appeared first on Gamesline.

I feel like a real normcore cockhole because it’s been a strange strange year for your bud Scott. I moved out of my house into a new apartment and started making way more money than I usually do, so my focus was more on big AAA releases than usual. I’ve also had way less time to play games and, for the most part, spent most my time playing known quantity games that are good for when you need to unwind and listen to some pods (short for podcast). On top of that, one of my roommates is a big fan of spending money, so I wound up with more big budget games than I typically would have played.

I wanna make some honorable mentions of Life is Strange and Tales from the Borderlands, which I both played this year and absolutely loved. However, since they didn’t come out this year or have any major updates or DLC, they didn’t feel appropriate on this list. I also started games like VA-11 HALL-A, Final Fantasy XV, Pokemon Sun, and Let It Die that I just haven’t had time to sink my teeth in and make a definitive judgment on them despite being so very my shit. And I, uh, also spent a lot of time playing WWE 2K17 and I feel really bad about that but that you can’t change me baby. Sorry John.

10. Watch Dogs 2

The second half of this game, especially the ending, is just plain lame. Not lame in the way that the over the top hacker aesthetic the game covers itself in is so lame that it’s endearing. It kinda just ends on a wet fart, but the first half of Watch Dogs 2. It’s so rich with silly situations, great character moments, and bold commentary on gentrification in San Francisco. Marcus’ facial animations and comic timing make him feel so likeable, especially given that outside cutscenes he’s basically a walking gun with neat toys to play with. They do such a good job of getting you attached to a crew of wisecracking, follower obsessed millennials that it’s hard for me to let this game go unrecognized.

9. Fallout 4

I spent a lot of time this year building settlements. Like, A LOT of time. I’m probably considered an expert and am qualified to teach classes on the subject. With mods on PS4 finally being a thing, albeit a limited thing compared to competitors, I’m able now to remove even more trash from my settlements and make even cooler looking towns. I don’t know why I’ve dumped so many hours into it. They aren’t the best set of tools for building and they’re not in the best game for it, but it’s hard to find something more satisfying than laying down, puttin’ on a pod or two, and building a nice little town on Abernathy Farm. I think the idea of making something stable for all the people who live in a fucked up world is positive for me.

8. DOOM

Typing this now, I’m finding it hard to find what exactly to write about DOOM other than “It’s a fun game! It’s a fun game to play. I love to play games.” To me it was a satisfying, mindless experience where I ripped a lot of demons in half. It does an incredible job of evoking the heavy metal aesthetic and the sheer hatred that the Doom Guy feels towards demons. It’s a really endearing, well made game. It would probably be higher up on the list if there was something more than just gameplay though. The story didn’t do much for me, the final boss battle is a flop, and the ending didn’t get me excited for a DOOM 2 or DOOM FOREVER or whatever.

7. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

While I’ve really fallen off this game lately to make way for more Pokemon in my life, Brave Exvius is a real gem anyone with a phone should try. It’s a Final Fantasy twist on Brave Frontier, and the ways it’s referential to old Final Fantasy games is really refreshing, especially if you’re already in deep with Final Fantasy Record Keeper. They include characters from more medieval themed games like 3, 6, 9, Tactics and 12 while excluding characters from more modern, popular Final Fantasy games like 7, 8 and 10. The battles get really tough after a while and require you to think outside the box for team composition. Anyone that can apply status effects or buffs is just as valuable as a really good black mage. It also does a good job of not making the paid currency stuff crucial to the game in major ways and rewarding it frequently. They’re constantly giving out gifts to players just because and running interesting events. You should really try it for yourself if you’re into JRPGs.

6. Titanfall 2

This game not getting recognized is such a tragedy. EA mishandled it’s release by putting it right between two juggernauts. While it’s a relatively short eight hour campaign, they manage to pack in so many totally rad set piece moments and fun dialogue between you and your robot pal. It manages to make platforming feel totally natural, even without prior experience with the first game. Climbing inside a giant tank that’s also your friend has so much style and gravitas to it. Taking out enemy mechs, even little, shitty ones, always feels fun to me. There’s so many good sequences in this game that’s hard to pick out a favorite moment, but I think anyone who’s played the game can guess. While it suffers from the same sequel syndrome that a lot of other games are facing with their endings lately, this one still manages to end its campaign with real finality and a massive bang. I still haven’t had a chance to touch the multiplayer, but this is absolutely one of my favorite experiences this year. It’d be a real shame if we didn’t see more Titanfall.

5. Overwatch

Overwatch gets it. Blizzard figured out how to take the class based competitive framework of Team Fortress 2 and condense it into bite sized, action packed chunks. It takes the language and design of TF2 and some familiar concepts (like Torbjorn’s turret, or Pharah’s flight and rockets) and rolls them up into a unique package. The gameplay loop of playing until you get a higher rank and some more cosmetic items seems hollow at first, but ultimately rewarding considering how cool the designs of the characters are. Everything just works exactly how it feels like it should which is an impressive feat.

4. Hyper Light Drifter

This game is beautiful. The incredible landscapes set to a somber, electronic score made for some of the most memorable moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game. It’s tough and it forces you to learn how to play better to overcome it’s obstacles (my shit my shit my shit my shit). All the sword swings have the right amount of crunch to them and the guns feel really satisfying once you learn how to use them properly. It feels a lot like the much harder and darker sequel to Link to the Past I never knew I wanted.

3. Dark Souls 3

These games have been on a yearly cycle since Dark Souls 2 hit, and while they’ve absolutely lost their luster a bit, I don’t enjoy playing them any less. Dark Souls is back, baby! It’s good again. Yes, I would love to see more experiences like Bloodborne that expand the Souls format and apply them in really unique ways, but also I just enjoy playing these games. We’re getting to the point where Souls clones or Souls-likes are popping up now, but very few of them feel just right. It’s totally possible that we will never see another proper Souls game again, but I’d still be very down to play more games in this same format.

2. Furi

What a good god damn game. What a good god damn game that dropped totally for free on PS Plus when it was released. While you may be hard pressed to find it for the very reasonable price of zero bucks now, this game is still worth checking out. It’s a tight experience with fantastic visuals, an amazing soundtrack that feels super 80s, and boss battles that are tough to master but so so so satisfying to finish. The gameplay is such a clever mix of the dodge, parry and attack style of character action games alongside heavy shoot-em-up sections. I’ve never felt anywhere near as anime as I have playing this game, and you should get to feel anime too.

1. Firewatch

I don’t know what it says about me now that this was my favorite game this year. I typically tend to judge things based on how I react to them emotionally. Most games don’t do it for me. Firewatch extremely did it for me. It’s a story about getting away from your problems and living a fantasy, and all of the central characters are just as guilty of it as Henry. The only difference is we get to see what Henry is running from. The pairing of Rich Sommer and Cissy Jones as Henry and Delilah is absolutely magnificent. Their dialogue tends to feel a little flat and poorly placed early in the game, but it’s in the exact same way that talking into a walkie talkie sounds. Their rapport as the game progresses not only gets better, but you can feel the emotional weight between them bearing down on your shoulders as you’re forced to make tough decisions that may completely and drastically change the lives of the characters. I’ve heard a lot of complaints towards the Firewatch’s ending. That it’s too dry, it ends on a flat note, and you’re left with a feeling that nothing much has really changed. But to me, that’s the point. Nothing has changed. Plot threads that begin end very abruptly, in the same way they would end in real life. Life goes on and you need to confront with the problems in your life that you’ve put off for so long. You can’t live in your fantasy forever, you have to put the game down and take responsibility for your life. I feel like I made a lot of progress this year as a person. Playing Firewatch, even so early in the year in February, probably didn’t inform any of that directly, realistically. But in the fantasy world where we’re all inspired directly by the fantastical adventures that we embark on, I’d like to think that it absolutely did.

The post Scott’s Top 10 Games Of 2016 appeared first on Gamesline.

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Furi is one part character action, one part shoot ‘em up, one part walking simulator, and all parts boss rush. The boss battles are laid out clearly in phases, moving between dodge-and-parry swordplay and bullet hell shooting sequences pretty frequently, and occasionally both at the same time. Everything feels tight and responsive, and while there is the slightest delay between pressing the dodge button and actually dodging an oncoming attack, it never felt like it was the game’s fault that I didn’t quite get the timing right. Doing a perfect parry at the very last second and landing a special attack is satisfying and makes you feel like a cool anime dude.

Right out of the gate, Furi’s presentation is fantastic. It’s full of vibrant neon colors and boasts unique scenery and character designs. The sections between fights feel lovingly crafted with creative dream-like cyberpunk takes on typical fantasy landscapes, and are set to synth-pop and techno that’s reminiscent of the 80’s. Seriously, the soundtrack is great and totally worth a listen even if you don’t plan on playing this game. In boss battles, there are several instances where you’ll find yourself in canned animations with cinematic camera angles, and they feel just as fast and frenetic as the gameplay. Each battle has unique animations too, so it almost felt worth it dying all those times to see some of the ridiculous ways the protagonist got back on his feet.

There are, however, some technical hiccups on the PS4 version. Some hitching definitely pops up when transitioning between gameplay and loading screens. There are also just a few framerate issues outside of combat. Not to mention a certain pair of lips that just look like something out of a nightmare (hopefully unintentionally). These are minor gripes though, and they didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the game. If Furi had just a little more polish, like seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics, or having character’s lips move when they’re talking outside of cutscenes, the presentation would be near perfect.

As early as the second boss, Furi gets pretty punishing very quickly. The game is all about pattern recognition, and you always have all the information you need to succeed in front of you. It’s all left up to your execution. The first boss fight teaches you each tell for every kind of attack there is in the game, as well as how to counter it. There’s also a How to Play menu option for each in case you forget exactly what you need to do, which I highly recommend reading through, as it provides a couple extremely useful techniques that the game doesn’t tell you about at the beginning. The UI also tells you the amount of phases you’ll need to get through to beat each boss upfront, and also provides you a stock of continues for the whole fight. This is really useful, as it gives you a little leeway to learn the attack patterns of each boss without just dying and restarting at the beginning. Finishing a phase gives you full health regeneration and an extra continue in case you used one too many in the last phase. Parrying also restores health, so mastering that mechanic becomes essential for completing the game.

This game could use a little more variety in enemy attacks, however. While they definitely rachet up in difficulty as the game goes on, they’re still the same effects, just changed to different colors. It is intentional, though, since the game gets very frantic and there are tons of projectiles on screen, it helps for them to be easily recognizable. I just wish they weren’t displayed like a weird wave of color on the ground, or a circle with other circles in it. They all convey an easily recognizable visual language, but they all look bland. The ice boss uses waves of energy on the ground that are just white because… well… she’s an ice boss and things should be white. It could be much cooler if she used sheets of ice that move similarly to the energy wave attack. It’s another minor gripe, but I just wish the attacks looked even half as neat as the rest of the designs in the game.

Non-combat sections of the game consist of one thing. Walking. Very slow walking through some really pretty and well put together set pieces. Aside from that, there isn’t anything to do except for some light exploration, and exploring doesn’t really lead to anything worthwhile. The walk speed is so plodding that it becomes a chore to move anywhere that isn’t the main path. The camera angles don’t necessarily line up with the direction you’re pointing in, too, so it can take you out of the moment seeing your character scramble for a second to get back on the main path. The developers accounted for this by putting in an auto-walk button that just takes you straight to the next boss fight. Simple! Except then you’re not actually playing the game during these sections. You’re basically just watching another cutscene. I just wish there was more to do along the path, or at least provide me the option to move through it quicker.

Nonetheless, I had a good time with Furi. It’s a really tough game but it felt great when I finally mastered it. There were definitely some soul-sucking instances where I was on my last stock of health and I just had to land that one very last hit to finally put a boss fight behind me, and I got hit with one stray attack and had to replay the whole fight over again. These aren’t short fights either; each is about a good fifteen to twenty minutes to beat. But getting back into the saddle and breezing through early phases with no problems, getting to the ending stretch, learning from your mistakes and landing that last final hit is truly a great feeling. This is what Furi does so so well. I enjoyed this game a ton and it makes me happy knowing gamers can grab this now that it’s out for free on PS Plus all throughout July.

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