Honorable Mention: Discord Poker

Without hesitation, I can say I owe a lot of my life to Discord. It’s not a perfect app, but its range of functionality is so strong and it regularly reminds me how hard it was when all we had was Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or Skype. I’ve been able to stay so thankfully far from Twitter for about six years now. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is in place as they added a regular poker game where my near-nightly voice chats with friends can have a little more fun and flair. And it’s a little more than that, because other poker clients can range from being shady online joints or unwieldy apps like Tabletop Simulator, having poker in-app is so handy that it adds a ton to the ways we all hang out together again. It helps that the app has a lot of dramatic and explosive flair that makes drawing hands fun and breezy; I love giving friends the toilet paper emoji when they get a flush and customizing the table or card backs when it’s my turn to be dealer. That all said, the best part is how I always get straights or better pretty much every hand because I’m really good at poker and not because Discord Poker is loaded in some way. Anyways, web apps are not games SO LET’S MOVE ON TO REAL GAMES!

Dishonorable Mention: Neon White

If I were credited as a writer of Neon White, I’d be so incredibly embarrassed for ruining an otherwise perfect game. Inside of a game with high level art, incredible voice acting, a cool edgy style, a soundtrack that blows you a new asshole and most impressively, a revolutionary high-action game that reinvents the puzzle-FPS in a way we haven’t seen since Portal…

They YIIK’d it.

But like if YIIK was voiced by Spike Spiegel. It has such a cringey, banal, pedestrian quality to the dialogue and plot that it is completely un-recommendable to anyone, especially the hardcore anime fans it is selling to in every other way. Swagless prose. Maidenless world-building. Who let them cook? Normally, it’d be very easy to HOLD F to SKIP all the dialogue and look past it, but since every part of the gameplay loop points back to earning more cutscenes (collectibles earn you dialogue, level completion earns you scenes with characters, etc.) and the high production quality and cloying cast of characters tease that something must exist beneath this veneer, you’re burdened with hope that it’ll get better. That the plot will lead somewhere -anywhere- interesting or novel. It doesn’t. The protagonist White and everyone associated with him is a loser where they are desperately trying to out-cool each other, out-flirt each other, and out-mystery each other. It’s not clever, it’s just stupid. Unlocking the amnesiatic protagonist’s memories does not reveal a complex past; it simply shows insecurity and stubborn unwillingness to actually dig into the forces that drive friendships apart. While it cooly bares sharp fangs, it’s plain to see from the opening crawl onwards that the story’s fangs are delusional plastic vampire teeth. I so desperately wish that I could recommend Neon White that I’m adding it to the top of this list, 10/10 in almost every aspect, yet one glaring inescapable flaw. Ben Esposito, one of the most creative game makers of all time, with an all-star team of designers and artists, scores a huge and unbelievable MISS with Neon White. The silver lining here is that they’ll all be back, though.  I’m sure they’ll get it next time – I firmly believe this was an inexplicable fluke.

AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative

Let’s start this list right! The first AI: The Somnium Files was a weird cult classic that slowly over the last three years has re-introduced western gaming at large to the mind of Kotaro Uchikoshi through an intense mystery with more twists and turns than a Bavarian pretzel factory. This Sophomore release takes on a different tact by removing the branching narrative paths that all of Uchikoshi’s works are known for, instead going on a direct, linear railroad of a story that you chug-chug-chug right through. The uncharacteristic linearity leads to some shortcomings around the pacing, but in spite of that, I still loved the tragedy and joy inside of this game. New protagonists, Ryuki and Tama, are desperately sad- fighting through mental and physical trauma as the game’s body count rises. Their struggle and failure in trying to solve the Half-Body Murders is so palpable by the time it becomes Mizuki and Aiba’s turn to take over the mystery in the second half of the game. The string of suspects throughout the game are all fascinating to learn about, especially the minecraft-headed, last-place father and comedian Komeji, the hyper-technologist milf Tokiko who would kill to reach nirvana, and even the original victim who is clearly much too wealthy to have been simply murdered…right?

It’s not all an easy victory though; Nirvana Initiative does have some rough spots that keep it from being much higher on the list. A few new key characters are obnoxiously useless to the plot and feel forced in, and since the game isn’t worried about the mystery until all the serial killings are done it makes investigating each individual murder along the way feel benign. And then there’s the huge twist™, which, while I’m still constantly thinking about the utter gall of it, is brazen, bizarre, and can be pretty alienating  20 hours into a story that you’re invested in. That all said, I still love it. This is a sophomore entry into a plucky underdog series that I can’t wait to see continue. It’s full of whimsy and heart and at least one Somnium where you capture Monokuma and Shiren the Wanderer in Poké Balls to fight a bunch of gangsters. Even if the mystery doesn’t quite land like the first, the ride was incredibly thought provoking and exciting for me. I’ll definitely be looking forward to the inevitable sequel to continue to dive into increasingly byzantine mind palaces for no more than 6-minutes at a time.

Live A Live

This was the year of discovering remakes of JRPGs that you’ve probably never gotten to play but absolutely should: Crisis Core, Chrono Cross, Romancing SaGa. At the top of that list should absolutely be Live A Live, which in the last decade has rocketed from a relatively unknown RPG, completely drowned on the genre-rich SNES, to one of the most historically significant productions of the genre. You deserve to understand what inspired Undertale so thoroughly. You deserve to understand what put Yoko Shimomura on the map as a composer. And with this remaster being in the Octopath Traveler engine, you deserve to see what that engine is capable of. The Live A Live remake is a masterpiece that shows how the original classic still stands today stronger than ever. Its core design of seven different two to three hour long RPG-styled set pieces is so modern in the way it breaks down and explores the genre that there is still nothing else like it. One vignette tells a love story without any spoken dialogue, another story has no battle sequences and uses the dialogue system (and loading screens) to terrify the player, an even stranger story lets you nearly skip the entire main bossfight by arming an entire village to sabotage the fight in your favor. The diversity of styles and flavors are all balanced by how thoroughly they deconstruct every part of the genre. Undertale’s core mechanics are based on one story in the game, and every other scenario could be the impetus of another modern indie classic. There is even a strong claim to make that Demon King Odio, in his many incarnations and names throughout the game, stands as a villain alongside the genre’s greats like Lavos and Sephiroth. Live A Live has surprised me with its persistence and poise- it’s a story that deserves to be retold just as much than its contemporaries currently getting their remakes, if not more so.

Mushroom Musume

THIS GAME IS FREE. It costs absolutely NOTHING to make a cute mushroom daughter grow big and strong. If you are familiar with the Princess Maker subgenre of raising sims then you know what’s going on in Mushroom Musume, but it has so much gorgeous style and a delightful swagger just for the mycophiles (whom’st are also girls). It’s only just begun development, but like a growing pile of oyster mushrooms it’s shown a ton of growth over itself this year in a way that will no doubt continue to blossom over this next year. 

What’s so fascinating to me is how perfectly the writing brings fantasy and nature together to create an atmosphere of care that works equally for taking care of a plant as well as roleplaying as a child. Chanterelles are much cooler than children, though. In a few of the rougher endings, my little daughter was ripped and shredded by wolves which would obviously be fatal for flesh and blood, but not her! She pulled herself together and moved on to the next day (at the sacrifice of her Robustness stat, of course). Mushroom Musume has a surprising amount of power underneath the hood and I started to realize it’s been a while since I’ve played much with Ren’Py – DDLC sure did a number on that engine and my relationship to it – but with all the ways Mushroom Musume is exploring the engine currently it’s exciting seeing that come through within this game. I got to go down a route where I taught my cute mushroom daughter what wrestling kayfabe was and she decided to become the wrestling champion of the town! Her trainer was a skeleton! Anyways, this game is free, so go play it! Mushroom Musume is such a chill afternoon.

We Are OFK

Now this is something special… For four weeks through 2022 I got a new episode of the interactive TV Show/Visual Novel/Actual Music Band hybrid We Are OFK. Each Thursday, I got around 60 minutes of interactive joy. I got to savor the drama that is a band of queer musicians and artists in LA trying to survive while they make their dreams come true. All the while, the dreams of the real-life creators of We Are OFK are completely tangible through their Gorillaz-like transmedia extension. As the in-game singer/songwriter Luca collapses or flourishes, so too does his creator Teddy Dief, and it is such a palpable connection that you can’t help but cheer for it from both sides. At PAX West this year, I got to see Playstation’s Shuhei Yoshida speak about all the indie creators he is currently working with and the way he lit up when We Are OFK came to be the topic of focus, it felt like the exact same way I lit up while playing through it. I wasn’t expecting that for such an explicitly queer game? But that’s just the kind of project We Are OFK is; even the corporate folks at Sony get how large a swing this game is taking, and they respect it! The voice acting performances are raw, the dialogue is fresh and relatable, the characters grow through varied dramatic arcs, and the music is not just good – it’s also sometimes kinda bad; it’s imperfect in a way that is so frustratingly appropriate for the kind of band that We Are OFK currently is (btw the non-diegetic soundtrack for OFK is incredible. Support Omniboi, cuz holy shit those tracks make this game such a pleasure and delight) The band OFK is made up of four individually talented artists who, in their freshman outing, do not have their act fully together. But the bones are there! The music and lyrics to each song are full of heart that carry players through each interactive music video. And then on top of all that I can follow them on Twitch, and listen to their tracks on Bandcamp, and follow them around like an actual band which is just such a fun cherry on top. We Are OFK is an incredibly fun project that is trying to push at the boundaries of media, but specifically through the lens of games, and that’s what makes me scream O, FK!

HYPER DEMON

Nothing I could possibly write here will do justice explaining how important HYPER DEMON is to the FPS genre. I can’t link to a video that walks you through what is going on. I can’t stream it and create a performance that lets you vicariously understand how the game works. I can’t send you a two-hour explainer video about the game’s lore. There is absolutely no substitute to playing HYPER DEMON with your own hands, because it is such a distinctly kinesthetic joy that comes from a lifetime of knowledge of the genre. Sublime mastercraft within a 20 second package. The game’s only level isn’t longer than 3 minutes, but even after hours of play I still haven’t gotten past the first minute and a half. I have only seen other high-scoring runs get to the dragon. Maybe someday I will get there… I talked earlier about Neon White reinventing a new type of puzzle-FPS, well, HYPER DEMON changes arena shooters into just a single, perfect, uncut gem. And most importantly of all, HYPER DEMON finally solves the FPS problem of monsters showing up behind you by giving perfect information of all monsters 360deg around you in a 3-ft radius. The red-flashing outline of monsters behind you is a mechanic that needs to be explored more throughout the genre. It’s pure cocaine… I need to play it until I go dizzy again. It hurts so bad.

Tunic

I built a language just to play this game. And I’m not talking about the cute glyph script that is in the game, I can’t read that stuff at all– never needed to. I’m talking about the language of play. When my parents’ generation talk about how important adventure games like the original Zelda were to them, it’s because they had the opportunity to build their language of play from the rudimentary tools the game offered. With the modern era of games literacy and abundance of online knowledge, you’d think that kind of spark would be impossible to reignite, yet Tunic comes out with a cute little fox and demands that you unlearn your ways while inviting you along a journey to rebuild a lot of that very specific adventure game language. Tunic is masterful work. From top to bottom, there are so many parts of this that shouldn’t work, and yet the love and care put into this game is palpable. The systems of play are thoroughly explored and every new little secret you uncover seems to endlessly unravel to tons of other secrets throughout the game, until you ultimately get to a door where you have to input 100 secrets in a row. There are other puzzle-adventure games like Fez or The Witness, games that revel in keeping secrets from you, Tunic manages to walk the line the other way and continually invites you to find out everything you possibly can. Its ways of rewarding you are by helping you learn more of that language of play with which to keep playing the game. 

I adored opening up the in-game manual where each page holds layers of mysteries while also on the surface teaching you the core mechanics of the game and the nuances there within. Then you’d take that knowledge into play, find through play another way of looking at the manual, and then return again with new ways to play the game! It’s a beautiful loop that had me screaming the designer, Andrew Shouldice’s, name in joy and frustration at how easy he made molding the plastic synapses in my head. The only tragic part about Tunic is that I can’t play it for the first time ever again, because I 100%d the game, I’m going to know this game deeply forever.

Sonic Frontiers

They did it… Every time I think about Sonic Frontiers, I think about getting high with my best friend and being like: “bro you gotta check out this game it’s so stupid.” Smash-cut to us an hour later watching a video of the first boss fight and scream-laughing along with the Super Saiyan hedgehog blasting at the Shadow of the Colossus boss while post-hardcore music rings through the house at maximum volume. I’ve shared that moment with so many people at this point, but the game is so much more than that. They found the compromise between open-world gaming in the modern era and the quixotic dragon that is Sonic Adventure 3. Not only does Sonic Frontiers achieve in that hokey ‘What If Sonic Unreal Engine??’ way but it also builds Sonic and his world in fun new ways. We play as Sonic, trapped in a computer simulation. All his friends (and Eggman) are there too, along with an unknown eldritch force who is using the simulation to trap an entire ancient civilization (who look a lot like Chaos in its myriad forms??) There are contextless rails floating through the skies like computer detritus that you can lose hours to while you explore what is otherwise a frighteningly sparse world (which, itself, is accidental commentary on open world games). It’s bleak yet playful in the way these open world games always are, but there’s an intention here to it that is unmistakably Sonic-like. It embraces those video game aesthetics that have always been present in the franchise. This is especially present in the on-rails levels scattered throughout the open world (Sonic Generations style). Each of these levels are incredible because they are so organically nostalgic: the signifiers and aesthetics of old sonic levels are largely absent or if they are there they are perverted in some alien way; but when you play through them and hear the incredible music offering small hints, you can /Feel/ exactly what level it is. It’s so hard to explain that a level that doesn’t look anything like SA2’s Metal Harbor is making me do all the exact same Metal Harbor moves, and that I know where the shortcut is because it’s the same shortcut in the original level.

They did it… They pulled it off… They made the Sonic Boom characters, the Sonic Forces tone, these distorted creatures that folks were originally repulsed by because they weren’t like what they knew– they made them likable and fun! Sonic is a big goofy hero, Tails and Knuckles both explore their weaknesses being second to Sonic all the time, Amy helps introduce the world they are trapped in, and Eggman gets to create a daughter who plays foil to Sonic better than any of his creations ever have. Sage is probably the most important part of this game (next to the bossfight presentations and fishing ofc). You don’t need to see Sage’s cutscenes for any kind of completion of the game, but I went out to find every one that I could because the way Sage and Sonic’s relationship grows throughout the game is fascinating. Sage as a computer simulation knows escape is impossible and illogical, but every time she explains this to Sonic and Sonic doubles-down, she re-evaluates all of her simulations and finds new hope from previously unrecognizable places. To watch Sage grow from someone who refused to interact with Sonic because he was a speck inside the mainframe to finding a new strength within herself from working with him is this wonderful and beautiful transformation. And it even builds into a perfect ending when the final scene shows her returning back to Eggman with renewed vigor for taking down Sonic with her dad. It’s so good, and I can’t wait for more of this bizarre post-apocalyptic hopepunk-ass style to continue in future games.

Signalis

Girls Rock.

MAN. 100/10 Game #SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/RHWgSY6DkT

— Caro, PHD in Dantes (@xviicprc1) March 6, 2023

#SIGNALIS Knock, Knock! pic.twitter.com/YUevUKcc2J

— LunarStarAngel (@LunarShadeStar) March 12, 2023

THIS GOD WON’T FORGIVE YOU #SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/EJUYeLb7qM

— name (@namedr_) March 12, 2023

Finished my fanart of Beo the Mynah from Signalis, she really needed a hug.#ericlvargas #Beo #SIGNALIS #replicants #Elster #fanart pic.twitter.com/r862shbzm4

— Eric L Vargas COMMISSION’S open! (@Ericlvargas7) March 13, 2023

My friend showed me a meme from reddit and I had ended up drawing it. #SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/jsjKLsusY4

— loafie Comms Open! ☆ (@loafiebasket) March 13, 2023

couple’s t-shirts for elster and ariane #SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/rEynp7MBGS

— Maarika ✨ (@theMaarika) March 5, 2023

#SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/F6SlvIdPOL

— FANGGGG (@squarelost) March 16, 2023

True #PS5Share, #SIGNALIS pic.twitter.com/l8snMtrxug

— zerogouki @ Sakuracon? Maybe? (@zerogouki_) March 12, 2023

Super Lesbian Animal RPG

I NEED TO REITERATE (from our Live A Live discussion): This was the year of discovering JRPGs that you’ve probably never gotten to play but absolutely should: The Crystal Project, Chained Echoes, Purgatory Dungeoneer – all of which are absolutely important for anybody who wants to see what modern western JRPG design is like. Modern western-made JRPGs have been unbelievably on fire this year, and this sub-genre represents the dream of almost every game developer. For many, making the JRPG is the magnum opus, as it blends storytelling and mechanical expression in a timeless package that extends forward through time. As we saw with Live A Live, a good JRPG is timeless, it lives forever. It’s so spiritually important that developers like Bobby Schroeder will spend eight years working on a single title in the hopes that it touches someone’s heart. They are all fantastic games, but this one that stands out just above the others is Super Lesbian Animal RPG – yeah it’s a helluva name – but I demand trans liberation and trans futures and this game delivers that in a way that challenges and inspires hope. 

Super Lesbian Animal RPG, or SLARPG for short, is a silly name for a silly game where you kiss your girlfriends for a four-turn 15% stat boost and every time you do a counter goes up that shows up on the save screen. It’s also a serious game about reinventing yourself, navigating trauma with your partners, and still having faith in each other after best-laid plans blow up in your face. Sisterhood standing strong. This is a conventional RPG in mostly every sense (it’s an RPG Maker game for gay heaven’s sake) and the ways it works within those conventions are comfortable and at the highest levels possible. And because of SLARPG working so firmly within the conventions, it is able to set the bar for this kind of design. And oh girl does it set the bar high. The story is engaging and the world leaves plenty of open-endedness for future expansion. Every character and NPC has varied personality-driven dialogue that compels you towards talking with everyone all the time, the battle mechanics are simple but give you ample opportunities to explore different sub-strategies and they fill the space comfortably over the 30 levels you gain, and while monster encounters are often pretty optional in the field and dungeon maps, the monsters are fun and full of hilarious surprises, completing the game’s bestiary is a rewarding task just to hear the party bicker about adventuring with the overworked librarian mouse trying to record their adventure in pained awe. The moment you fight a wild Nothing is so important. I mean, it had a health bar! If I had more space here I could obsess about how much I love Melody, Allison, Claire, and Jodie together or how this stands alongside its RPG inspirations like the Mother series. Ultimately, it’s a big beautiful fish in a reasonably contained pond and within that conventional structure it is Perfect. 8 years of development and every second worth it to get to this point, SLARPG can be immortalized with the greats, it will be just as fun today as it will be in 30 years. Super Lesbian Animal RPG is exactly why I love RPGs so much.

Norco

Sometimes something is funny and I have a feeling to laugh about it. Sometimes something is painful and I have a feeling to laugh about it. Sometimes something is so abysmally bleak with no possible way out and I have that feeling. I laugh. It hurts so much, it’s just cosmically funny. I just have to put my hands up in the air and scream, “GOD. HOW?” People sometimes have asked me how I can be so warm and chipper and happy all the time? It’s nihilism. It’s not that nothing matters, it’s just that everything matters so much and the world is so beautiful that the machinations that try to interfere with or control the world are infinitesimal on a cosmic scale: A religious zealot screams at a woman with cancer about salvation while standing knee-deep in a swamp. Will God save her from cancer? Well, she’s in remission, maybe God already has, but to pay for the cancer treatments she does gig-work over her cellphone with a god-deity named Uberduck who wants her to find a techno-religious artifact in Lake Pontchartrain. She does. She’s paid in cryptocurrency. It will never be enough to pay for the medical debts that are more than enough to destroy her, but she’s a fighter and so she accepts to upload her consciousness to test an experimental device for a corporation’s search for eternal life. She gets paid enough crypto to get out of medical debt. What she finds in the lake overloads Uberduck, her cryptocurrency is destroyed, the uploaded sentience screams in horror without being attached to a body, however the experimental gig-app is found to leak radiation resulting in the final nail in the coffin for the woman who now, once again, has cancer. Ain’t that a kick in the head? The zealot in the swampwater will later meet her daughter who has arrived in Norco to pick up the pieces of a world she never wanted. None of this matters. Nothing has ever been more important. The zealot in the swamp will scream about righteousness at the daughter of a woman who died of late-capitalism. Life’s just funny like that.

The power of Norco comes from subverting expectations. You expect simplicity from a small town but you are immediately met with a Virgin Mary statue hiding an advanced bioscanner behind its face. You expect a simple point & click game but there are plenty of mini games and setpieces. You expect a dry folksy theme but there are equal parts sci-fi, mystery, comedy, and drama throughout. For me personally, I expected something high quality but familiar, and the thing I didn’t expect was a completely new mechanic I’ve never seen before. Within Norco, your phone can add a recording feature where you can use lines of dialogue out of context to mess with other characters. It sounds simple yet it’s incredibly novel! You could make a whole game out of just that! I could probably talk forever about each little part of this game that blew my mind (they trapped a Garrett in a decorative vase! What the hell?) but I’ll instead wrap this up talking about how this leads to the future. Norco won the first ever Tribeca Games Award from an institution known for its film festival, and it also took home Playstation’s Indie Fund. This proves the power of widening the window for awards and accolades within video games. Without E3 and other in-person events strangling how games are represented while in development the door is opened to so many diverse and inspired experiences to be explored in games. Every part of Norco inside and outside of the game has me so excited about the future of interactive media and is why it’s so important to uphold the games that were similarly produced like Glitchhikers and Untitled Goose Game. Good labor, well cared for and strongly funded by its community, has a strong chance of making good art. Bad labor rarely makes good art. Norco is some really fuckin’ good art, and we can make more of it from its blueprint.

The post Solon’s Ultimate Top 10 Games Of The Year 2022 appeared first on Gamesline.

I love indie games. I love the diversity of art styles and presentation, the creative boldness taken either by influence, constraints, or novelty, and the different voices we get to hear. 2022 feels like a year with a lot of games that almost flew under my radar (and almost certainly a bunch that did) but are so full of life and great storytelling and wonderful moments of empathy that I need to shout them from the rooftops. 

5. South of the Circle

I played this on a whim because it looked beautiful and promised a “deep narrative experience.” It delivered! Within an overarching story set during the Cold War about university politics and ethics, scary communism, empathy, and nuclear disarmament, you play a man unraveling his past, reconciling promises made with a present reality that grows starker by the moment. These scenes of past and present are blended together, often to great emotional effect, as you play out the consequences of the choices you make almost like a memory.

Your dialogue choices drive the story, and those choices are based on emotion, tone, mood, etc. in a more nuanced way than maybe the classic “mean, nice, or zany” type of dialogue options. A slight shift in tone could alter a conversation and change the way someone else speaks to you, and that made me feel closer to the story, made me consider how I wanted to project myself, all culminating in a final choice that really felt like a punch to the heart. This choice changes the final scene in a subtle way and if you find yourself trying this game out, I encourage you to see both endings.

Overall, South of the Circle is a great story with well-written beats, really good voice acting, and its minimalist and vibrant cell-shaded art style creates this surreal, immersive experience that I haven’t seen talked about nearly enough!

4. Beacon Pines 

I saw Beacon Pines at the PAX West indie show last year and loved the art style, so once it came out I jumped right on it, and I’m so glad I did! From the visual and audio design, to the story itself, it was a deeply relatable and comforting experience with a feeling of surrealism I don’t often see pulled off this well with cute-looking games.

It’s a storybook game about a small town in a subtle crisis with a big secret, and you investigate all the weirdness from the perspective of both the storyteller/narrator and the protagonist: a melancholy yet inquisitive kid. All of the characters in this game are uniquely designed and deeply considered, fleshed out and well-written. They also have that Banjo-Kazooie style of speaking that I always love to hear.

The themes in this game mostly have to do with science and environmentalism mixed with corporate creepiness, but there’s also a lot it has to say about friendship, family, fear, and change, especially when all the main drivers of the story are kids. All of it is written with a lot of empathy and dialogue that feels very natural.

I also really loved the gameplay system they used: you run around and discover “badges” with words on them, and you use those words to drive the story forward. Every narrative crossroad has a different outcome based on what word you choose, and some of those outcomes lead to certain failure. The whole story branches out into different paths, and you can revisit those paths to try new words, find new badges, etc. It’s a fun little choose-your-own-adventure type of thing, and it was done well here.

Also, the music was so good it made me cry! Twice!

3. Stray

Alright, I already talked about Stray, so I won’t go on too much here. At the risk of repeating myself, it’s an aesthetically wonderful and sweet game with some scary bits here and there. Honestly, I was expecting more of a cat simulator (and you do get that a little) rather than a cat-in-robot-dystopia action adventure game, but I definitely like this better.

Pretty much all of the robots have TV heads which is my favorite kind of robot, and you can interact with them in cute little cat ways like rubbing up against their legs and curling up on their chests. Those smaller moments, along with all of the surrealism and sci-fi suspense, round the whole game out and really make it a unique experience.

The story is interesting, mysterious, and bittersweet. The world design is vibrant and maximalist down to the trinkets and art that decorate homes and shops, and the way the characters look and dress. It’s an incredible amount of personality and effort put into a game that I finished in just over six hours. I loved this game a lot!

2. Norco

Norco is a point-and-click adventure game and that is genuinely the most normal thing about it.

It’s got everything from corporate destruction of communities and the environment to a religious cult of weird dudes to a giant fucked up god-bird who sends you on errands via text message to a good, classic story of family, legacy, and the complicated nature of faith. The story is mostly made up of smaller, incredibly developed side-stories and fleshing out characters in it via a “mind-map” weaving over and under the main objective of Finding Your Brother. The world of Norco is beautiful, richly elaborated upon, and charming even with the gloom.

Norco is also distinctly of the southern gothic genre, which is hard to attempt and even harder to nail. It’s transgressive and sometimes irrational, but other times soothing and comfortingly weird, and deeply, darkly funny. The writing is equal parts absurd and compassionate. The music is all over the place, but in a good way.

This game hit a lot of soft spots on basically everyone I know who has played it, and it was cathartic to me in a lot of ways too. I’ve never been to Louisiana, but I do know the feeling of coming home to ghosts. 

1. Pentiment

Everyone should play Pentiment. It’s an astoundingly well-researched and well-executed point-and-click work of art, with a dense narrative that’s relatable, provocative, thoughtful, and oftentimes very funny. The art style connects you to the time and place in which it’s set, with medieval manuscripts and woodcut art, religious texts and murals, even stage play and labyrinthine representations of character. It’s gorgeous and interesting and truly something new.

You play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist in 16th century Bavaria who takes up an apprenticeship in the abbey of Tassing, working on a manuscript that’s been commissioned by the monks who reside there. What follows is a story about murder, religious conspiracy, paganism, grief and sacrifice, love and community, history, tradition, art, and the growing dissemination of culture and the written word to a more common folk. Centralized in this story is the tension and political power struggle between a towering monastery and the town that sits beneath it, and as the artist who travels freely between the two, you take the lead in the investigation of (more than one!) murder. Perhaps the most compelling part of the story is that it’s less about unraveling mysteries and more about making the choices that you have to live with and confronting the people who have to bear the brunt of those choices.

Everything about this game comes together to create a narrative experience that you can tell was developed with an incredible amount of attention and empathy, not only to the player but to a kind of people that Pentiment has, in some small way, resurrected to tell this story. It’s so much more than it seems and what I can put into words. It truly blew me away. Pentiment not only pushes the boundaries of what video games can be, but the kind of work that goes into making them.  

The post Franny’s Top 5 Games of 2022 appeared first on Gamesline.

Who’s going to win? Who’s going to lose? That’s what you get to find out now! We had a blast putting together nominees for this past year’s Game of the Year Awards, and if you missed our livestream award extravaganza, or prefer to read things instead of watching them, we have all of our awards right here… for you…

Best Music: Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Runners-Up: Beacon Pines, Sonic Frontiers

Yasunori Mitsuda and the rest of his team at Monolith spared no effort when composing Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s gargantuan 12-hour soundtrack. With so many pieces having variations and arrangements to match specific scenes, the sheer scale of this body of work is commendable in its own right.

What’s even more impressive is the meticulousness and raw energy invested into every minute of the experience. The soundtrack ranges  from luscious solo piano pieces to monumental symphonic metal epics featuring traditional Japanese woodwinds and large choir ensembles.When trying to discuss–I repeat-  12 HOURS of music it’s hard to choose specific highlights that would accurately portray so many other songs, and yet it’s incredible that not a single track chooses to take the easy way out. There aren’t 4 chord loops or extended ambient cuts anywhere to be seen. Even down tempo numbers like the lovely off-seer melody features multiple variations on its main motif with slight changes in progression, phrasing, and harmony every time a passage repeats that show just how much love and effort was poured even into the music that wouldn’t call attention to itself.

But, it’s of course in the high energy numbers that this team’s dedication has an opportunity to really shine, such as the theme for special enemy encounters, “A Formidable Enemy.” Not content with being an extremely catchy and danceable piece of symphonic rock, it’s awash with so many riffs, and small flourishes for each part of the ensemble, packing into a single piece the amount of ideas that other musicians would have spread over 4. And let us not forget the incredible instrumental heroics from the guitars dive bombing and chugging away even as the beautiful strings drown it out, to the preposterously flashy piano solos. This entire score is performed with all the fire of a shounen hero, and what could be better fitting for a JRPG?

With its amazing composition, passionate performances, and sheer size, this is truly a score worthy of accompanying an adventure larger than life.

-Walker

Best Audio: Signalis

Runners-Up: Faith, HYPER DEMON

As early as the first time you read the title of the game, Signalis evokes the feeling of distant radio signals, so far and so removed from you that you can only sit and speculate their meaning. One of Signalis’ biggest inspirations are real world numbers stations; cryptic shortwave radio signals that would broadcast seemingly arbitrary sets of numbers (as well as the occasional national anthem or piece of classical music) that have been the subject of mountains of speculation and conspiracy theories surrounding their origins and their purpose. The world of Signalis is similarly distant and alien. It draws from the familiar, like a set of numbers you recognize, but like the feeling of hearing a sudden crackle after listening to the same set of numbers being read back to back, it distorts itself in cryptic and horrifying ways.

While the game sports its own unique in-game numbers stations alongside other stations with other vague and mysterious purposes, its use of audio goes far above and beyond a simple numbers-stations-as-metaphor gimmick. Signalis sports a soundtrack by artists Cicada Sirens and 1000 Eyes full of dark distorted synths, haunting, often offkey and deeply compressed piano strings, and classical swells that are employed so so effectively at all the most heart wrenching moments of Signalis’ ambiguous yet deeply emotional story.

Signalis’ soundwork in all aspects is truly amazing. From the gun sounds that feel all too familiar to Resident Evil, to the deeply distorted and jarring cacophony the KOLIBRI enemies overwhelm you with when you walk into a room full of them, to the low screech that plays while your screen fills with the deepest shade of red you’ve ever seen every time you save your game (an all time Best Save Screen contender if that ever becomes one of our GOTY categories), it truly should come as no surprise that we loved how horrifying Signalis sounds.

-Scott

Best Visuals: Signalis

Runners-Up: Scorn, Elden Ring

“PS1 Graphics” used to be a scathing remark upon the graphical quality of games from the 00s and into the early 2010s. These days, thankfully, more and more people are recognizing both the latent charm and aesthetical advantages of low-fidelity textures and polygonally-limited environments and models. rose-engine’s Signalis, a survival horror game taking large inspiration from PS1-era games like Resident Evil, brandishes this antiquated style with bombastic effect to accentuate its levels, atmosphere, and characters.

Every frame in Signalis brims with a retro-futuristic flair, matching perfectly with the excellent array of worldbuilding art scattered across the game’s eerie rooms and corridors. The UI itself is replete with details, taking the form of a CRT screen to highlight both the technological and utilitarian aspects of the world Signalis invites one to explore. The uncomfortably unhinged androids skulking about are made all the more horrifying as their lack of detailing and polygons leaves the mind to fill in the blanks as they screech and succumb to visual distortions, heightening their terror.

With Signalis, every visual aspect has been considered and refined to a razor-sharp point, and the full effect is immaculate. The low-fidelity style of the moment-to-moment game is so crisp, it even manages to match unbelievably well with the high-quality sprite artwork showcased in the game’s cutscenes. The game is just that stunning to behold. In the past, game developers had to work within the limitations of older hardware to create vibrant and stunning worlds, but in the present day, rose-engine proves such limitations can be used to brilliant effect in enhancing a game’s experience.

-Spencer

Best Presentation: Pentiment

Runners-Up: Signalis, Faith

Pentiment is a rare video game that actually looks like the era it represents; the way that people would have depicted themselves and their life in 16th century Bavaria. The art style focuses primarily on Reformation woodcuts, with some scenes played out on medieval and religious manuscripts and art. Character text is presented as though being written by hand, with fading ink and misspellings corrected in real time, and different script-styles for different status and social classes that can change when uncovering new information about a person. The audio of Pentiment is all soft footfalls, the scratching of a pen, the solid thump of a press, minimal vocalizations, and an early music instrumental score. This is all very appropriate for a narrative that’s mostly a murder mystery, but is just as much focused on history, commentary on the dissemination of the printing press and the written word from the church to the common people, and the way that art can change or erase the story of a community. From the color palette and art style to the writing to the sound design, everything in Pentiment builds off of each other to form a game that’s interesting, visually stunning, and expertly composed.

-Franny

Best Mechanic: Soul Hacking (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

Runners-Up: Throwing a Pokeball (Pokemon Legends Arceus), Throwing Your Guns/Alt. Fire (Neon White)

Blue Mages are cool!!! I will always stand by this one true fact about gaming: it’s super cool to learn the moves of your enemies, and use them against them in an incredibly modular and broken format. In recent years, more and more games are realizing this, from Final Fantasy XIV finally adding Blue Mage, to games like Nioh 2 taking the concept and making it fit into their pre-existing gameplay systems. It’s an idea that’s understandably limited by the scope of a lot of games, especially those that are focused on maintaining some sort of “balance”, but when it’s there, let me tell you, I am popping off. So imagine my joy when the notorious developer who doesn’t give a damn about scope or balance Monolith Soft decided to put Blue Mage into Xenoblade Chronicles 3!

Soulhacker is one of the many classes your characters gain access to over the course of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and it just might well be the best in nearly every way. Firstly, from an aesthetic standpoint, it’s taught to you by a member of the main antagonist organization who doesn’t seem to really care about anything because he’s a crazy old pirate, so the class’ outfit has you wearing their weird techno uniform while wielding two flaming anchors as fist weapons. Second, it integrates itself perfectly into the world by having you learn your various abilities via defeating the Xenoblade Chronicles’ series recurring unique named monsters, providing them with new purpose outside of just being a mini-boss in the open world. Finally, it provides a new dynamic to strategize your party around, which helps make the game’s occasional reliance on the holy trinity of RPG design (Tank, Damage, and Healing) a lot more fluid.

You can make any of your characters into a Soulhacker, and even further, you can make any of those Soulhackers more specialized into doing anything from more healing, more debuffs, being able to draw more aggro from enemies, the list goes on! While it’s really fun to play as a Soulhacker, the real joy comes from its hearkening back to an entirely different era of RPG design. An era where a certain class was allowed to be ridiculously strong, where there were so many different systems going on at any given time with a game, that it made things feel like almost anything could be possible. More games could stand to learn from letting players fool around and getting lost in their systems, and in other Role Playing Games’ case, it helps make their worlds all the more richer.

-Rose

Worst Mechanic: 2 Minute Job Design – Final Fantasy XIV Online: Endwalker

Runners-Up: Viola Block Parry for Witch Time (Bayonetta 3), Weapon Crafting (Destiny 2: The Witch Queen)

Final Fantasy XIV job design has had a history of being rebuilt to be more accessible with every new update. Back in the day, we had resources like TP, a form of MP for melee jobs that would fully drain when you sprinted to worry about, and cross-class abilities that required leveling multiple jobs. We had healers with swappable stances for healing and dealing damage, and  tanks who, if they had their aggro generation abilities running, could barely do any damage. At first, the design focus was on getting rid of redundant systems, removing abilities and cross classing to solve issues like button bloat, then on  taking away stances and TP to make jobs a little bit easier to manage.

With Shadowbringers, the jobs in the game had some of the best balance and depth they’d ever had. Most were easy to pick up and beginner friendly,with tanking and healing as more accessible roles, and every job getting simplified for the new and casual player, but full of depth and strategy for the high end players. Jobs having buff windows going out at one minute, 90 seconds, and 2 minutes made figuring out the best ways to do damage a lot of fun. Do I hold my 90 second buff so it lines up at 2 minutes? Or do we have a smaller burst at 3 minutes and a massive one at 6 when everything lines up? Raiding in Shadowbringers was some of the most fun the high end of the game had ever been.

And then Endwalker came around and suddenly nearly every job buff was set at 2 minutes. Which, shock of shocks, when every single damage buff in the game outside of a few hit at 2 minutes, suddenly you go from miles away the highest damage dealing classes in the game, to ones that aren’t really worth the tradeoff you get of not having any group buffs, which led to them shifting all of the abilities that weren’t on the 2 minute timer to that time frame. Jobs like paladin that always did sustained damage but not during burst windows suddenly became locked out of high end parties because everything was so reliant on that window. Every raid tier there have been multiple jobs locked out from being able to participate unless they could put together a team with friends. The first tier was Paladin, Dancer, and Machinist, the next it was Paladin, Warrior, Machinist, and Reaper.

Of all of the mechanical decisions in gaming, the 2 minute window has done the most harm to long-time players of the game. It might make things easier for new players who started in Endwalker, but it has led to a homogeneity that even casual players are feeling; leading to a lot of people taking long breaks, or even unsubscribing from the game altogether.

-Lorelai

Best Character: Eunie (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

Runners-Up: Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring), Sage (Sonic Frontiers)

I would’ve been happy to see any of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s main cast in this spot, but Eunie was the obvious winner for me. She’s a brash, sharp-tongued woman who still finds a way to show she cares about her friends. She’s a healer, but takes no shit and can fight just as well as her more aggressive counterparts. She’s also absolutely hilarious, shooting down insincerity from anyone. Grey, a mysterious cowboy hero, often hides his emotions around the party. Eunie is quick to tell him to drop the façade and just be honest about how much he likes the crew. The main thrust of her character arc is struggling with her collective pasts, the continuous war that every person in their society is trapped within for all time. Eunie breaks free from this cycle with confidence, leading her friends and society as a whole in healing from the trauma of the endless now.

-John

Worst Character: Lien (AI The Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative)

Runners-Up: Kenny (High on Life), Ghost (Destiny 2: The Witch Queen)

AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative has been a pretty divisive game around my circles, but if there’s one thing that nearly everyone agrees on, it’s that Lien really sucks.

You’re introduced to Lien within the first hour of the game, where his literal first action is to profess his undying love to Mizuki’s high schooler friend Kizuna, while he cries about being laid off. In another game, there could be something to this! There could be some sort of analysis about the way that women quickly become tools of comfort in the eyes of men without any sort of thought or consideration. Instead, nirvanA Initiative does absolutely nothing with this concept, and in general, does nothing with Lien at all!

Lien stalks Kizuna relentlessly for the next six years, while other characters grow and change in all sorts of ways, Lien remains exactly the same, still stalking the same girl since she was in high school. When it comes to engagement with the overarching narrative of the game, the most Lien does is pop up in situations where incredibly contrived reasons are devised to utilize his singular talent of lockpicking. In the last couple hours of the game, where everything is popping off and things are really starting to happen, the game actually forces you to go do a whole sequence with Lien out of nowhere just so you can open a lock somewhere, and it grinds the pacing to a ridiculous halt.

All of these issues on their own make Lien unlikeable in his own right, but what truly puts him beyond the pale is that nirvanA Initiative actually rewards his stalking, and puts him together with Kizuna at the end. Thoughtlessness doesn’t even begin to convey how bad this sort of writing is; the idea that if you stay true to the grind and harass a woman nonstop, she’ll eventually realize just how charming you are. Maybe if there was any sort of chemistry between Lien and Kizuna; maybe if there was a sense of meaningful growth as they each changed over the course of the game, a story like this wouldn’t feel so bad. There’s even a universe where Lien’s terminal lack of coolness, despite his slightly edgy appearance, is charming! Instead, the lack of care and awareness that went into the writing of his character does nothing but bring down what should have been an amazing sequel to an amazing game.

-Rose

Best Surprise: Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher

Runners-Up: Sonic Frontiers, Weird RPG

If I had to think about the most unlikely series to get a new installment in 2022, I’d probably think it would be Monster Rancher. The monster raising sim franchise hasn’t had a new installment since the phone app My Monster Rancher in 2011, and prior to this year we only just got an updated port of Monster Rancher 1 and 2 for the Nintendo Switch, which simplified the physical feature of scrounging up CDs to a new keyword format in order to unlock and train new monsters. So color me surprised when not only do we get a new game in the series, but it’s a crossover with the much beloved Ultraman franchise. Now with that kind of a mix of two not-incredibly-popular series stateside, it would make sense that any English translation would be relegated to a South-East Asian release only for import. Yet, Bandai Namco truly cooked this year by letting Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher release stateside digitally for many curious and eager fans alike to enjoy.

Nothing ostensibly big has changed in the formula here: you get to choose between buying a stock monster from the local town or insert keywords (song titles in Japan and Southeast Asia versions) to potentially unlock a completely new kaiju from the hearty tokusatsu franchise to then raise its various stats and make compete against other monsters in a fighting sequence that’s all about positioning and luck. Admittedly, the accuracy component that was notoriously difficult in previous games feels more even-handed here; you’re just as likely to get hit with a devastating blow that retires a Kaiju as you are to sweep an entire cup thanks to dedicated min/max strategies beforehand. Training increases your Kaiju’s Anger meter, and once it’s full they’ll go on a Rampage which could end up in a surprisingly good outcome or a smackdown from the titular hero himself. I knew I’d have a good time training various Kaiju up to their retirement, but I definitely didn’t expect it to become my gateway to Ultraman after having spent over 50 hours in the loop. Thank you, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, for opening my heart to the likes of Alien Baltan and Gomora through my time raising them to victory and acclaim.

-Maverick

Best Moment: The Eclipse (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

Runners-Up: Project Protection Protocol (Pokemon Scarlet/Violet), Final Level Sequence (Spark the Electric Jester 3)

About 50 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3, The Eclipse occurs, which sees our party at their lowest. They have been captured by their enemy, locked in a prison for months, and now Mio, the catgirl of the team, is set to be executed. I don’t want to fully spoil what goes down, but there’s plenty more game after this, so you can figure some of it out. Going from the lowest to the highest point in Noah and Mio’s character arcs in a masterful, transcendent way is a big reason why The Eclipse stands out as the highlight in the incredible story of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but I’d be remiss to skip mentioning that this is a moment that weaponizes cucking someone. Someone gets broken up with so hard it ruins an entire evil plan. The greatest victory the Ouroborus crew gets over their enemies, Mobius, is thanks to realizing that the future is important to accept instead of living in the present, even if things are at their lowest. Also you gotta be nice to your catgirl or you’re done for. Xenoblade rules.

-John

2022 What the Fuck Award

Ah 2022, a pretty lively year for games but even livelier with games news. Specifically, a whole lotta bad news with the way this hobby we share gets tossed around and stomped on. For starters, Disco Elysium creators and creative co-op ZA/UM saw the removal of key members Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere, prompting a subsequent lawsuit from the trio over accusations of fraud. Truly ironic that the developers of a game reckoning with the forces of capitalism and poor politics ultimately got upended by capitalism and poor politics.

If this were the only sort of company wide fuck-up that’d be one thing, but 2022 sure gave us a look into just how little companies care about games media. Tencent effectively sundowned Fanbyte and its related sites, a shame given how personable the site made itself to its audience (RIP to the two articles Maverick made for its wrestling vertical). While something like the collapse of G4 seemed inevitable, and doubly so once finding out that its demise came from the joint mishandling of funds between CEO expenditures and payouts for streamers, one of the biggest shocks of the year came in the form of Jeff Gerstmann getting fired by Giant Bomb, the company then being one of several bought by Fandom, and Fandom then laying off several staff members across GiantBomb and GameSpot including recent GB hire Jess O’Brien and long running member Jason Oestreicher. Jeff’s been able to set up a Patreon and weekly streaming/podcast setup, but this entire year’s been a grim reminder that people making most of the money in these media verticals really couldn’t care less about the people who hustle day in and day out to make these sites interesting.

Of course, the true nature of the What the Fuck Award wouldn’t be complete without an out of left-field moment, and among the several squares on people’s proverbial 2022 Bingo Cards, Yuji Naka getting arrested on two separate accounts of insider trading probably wasn’t on any of them. The man responsible for Balan Wonderworld, a bogus game that insulted the audience it was meant to placate, had gone on to become somewhat of a hero for the common man after blaming the game’s rough development on the greed of publisher Square Enix. Then, Yuji Naka actively removes a member of his staff when sharing a snapshot of the development team for Balan, offhandedly confirms connections between Michael Jackson (his collaborator, actually) and Sonic 3, and then finally invests in upcoming mobile projects for the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series before their public announcements. Truly, Yuji Naka had a case of Going Through It and we could all feel that on the day he got double arrested. As we look onward to the new year, I guess between the genuine dread of being in games media and greater desire to leave a mark in life be it good or bad, it becomes easier to recognize you truly aren’t off the deep end when it comes to how video games play a role in your life. Solidarity forever, and fuck Balan’s Dad.

-Maverick

2022 For the Win Award

2022, for as many turns it gave us, also had plenty to celebrate!

For starters, the Zelda Wiki has completely defected from Fandom, after its  announcement of its mass acquisition campaign . The Wiki had been running through Gamespedia since 2017 and after surviving Fandom’s buyout of their original host, the decision to leave is admirable. Being able to hit the bricks instead of trying to appease the wants of a force like Fandom who’ve all but ransacked the honored tradition of forum posting and GameFAQ updating felt like something that couldn’t happen anymore. Godspeed Zelda Wiki, may Tears of the Kingdom get you a motherload of hits once people start searching for lore.

In the wake of Activision Blizzard shitting the bed with everything regarding its game development, treatment of employees, and credibility as an employer, it’s always reassuring to know when workers are able to get demands met (since the headassery of one CEO or Project Manager shouldn’t cost the paychecks of those below him). Blizzard East, formerly Vicarious Visions, along with Raven Software, managed to get union voting on the table and ultimately have their unions recognized, or at least vocalized amidst the general conversation regarding whether or not Microsoft might make a bid for the company. Times are hectic, and in the wake of seeing multiple people lose their jobs for no good reason, it’s a helpful reminder that the workers do have power when in collaboration.

Finally, more games are being able to implement features that allow for more inclusivity in who gets to play. This trend has been ongoing for quite some time, but it’s a great reminder when AAA studios are able to truly dedicate budget and resources towards including features that games made with much less had still taken the time to incorporate. Big shout-outs to God of War: Ragnarok in particular for how much it allows the player to work with while still maintaining its core features. From being able to change the text color and presentation of subtitles to incorporating a screen reader to even changing gameplay so that someone doesn’t have to wreck their wrist button mashing, these inclusions do show what happens when studios recognize just how much money they have on hand and that making games available for everyone isn’t going to harm the vision that’s there.

-Maverick

Best Writing: Norco

Runners-Up: Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Pentiment

There are something around fifty-or-so different government registered townships surrounding Lake Pontchartrain, one of America’s largest, briniest, and shallowest lakes. It’s haunted as shit. One of these lakeside towns is Norco, LA, which stands as the centerpiece of an entire universe where nothing ever changes (the mini-mart is now fully automated and the last cashier they had is now the bodyguard outside the mart) yet everything is happening (boat and floaty party, you’re invited, at the rocket launch in the center of the lake! Not evil!) Norco celebrates the joys and pains of humanity to its fullest through combining folktale, sci-fi, and a noir-ish Americana to depict a bayou town’s struggle with belonging and identity in an increasingly disconnected late-capitalist world.

Sometimes you’re feeding people week-old hot dogs, taking in a puppet show, fueling a stalemate between coked up Proud Boys, trawling for gators, hanging with a juggalo detective, or just having a staring contest with a stuffed monkey…but most importantly you are making connections with people. During a time when folks in America are so isolated from each other, where you can be constantly surrounded by people and still feel utterly alone – Norco is a game that takes suburban depression and nihilism together and embraces them as understandable characteristics of human life. It criticizes institutions of labor and faith and gives space to let the people who get wrapped up within them (often absurdly so, in our case) speak for themselves. Sometimes people, gods, or crocodiles do evil things to gain power, but as much as they fight against it, even the wicked aren’t disconnected from the tethers that weave us all together. By the end, Norco is a staggering story where you continually ask simple questions to a local community member or a god and receive an incredible, complex tapestry of an answer. It makes you think that if this is what Norco is like, then what about those 49 other tiny towns that surround Lake Pontchartrain (again: haunted as shit!!!)

-Solon

The 100% Orange Juicin’ Award For When You’re Juicin’ Your Game Hard And It Feels Good to Play a Game Award Not Presented By Balan This Year (His Dad’s Going Through Some Stuff 🙁) Award: Evil West

Runners-Up: Rumbleverse, Neon White

When I first started playing Evil West on stream, one of my girlfriends immediately came in to ask what year it had come out in, only to be flabbergasted when I said that it had come out just months ago in 2022. Evil West is pure concentrated Xbox 360-era B game THQ-ass gold in every way, and it fucking rules. They do not make games like this anymore, but Evil West proves they should.

Evil West is basically just your average third person action game, but the sheer breadth of tools and breakneck pace at which they are given to the player is admirable in a world where most games take hours to even unlock new traversal features. You start Evil West with a huge metal gauntlet and a pistol, and not two chapters later you’ve got teleporting, electrocution, a rifle, a shotgun, and all sorts of new kinds of punching to do. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to the light of God Hand in almost twenty years, and WE NEED MORE OF THIS!

It would have been so easy for Evil West to just be a half-baked B game with mediocre combat that never strays too far from its opening level, but instead Flying Wild Hog Games decided to follow the Vampire Survivors creation ethos and recreate the sensation of one of those fancy insane slot machines without any of the nasty gambling. Every move you have is tied to a different button; left trigger to aim down sights with your rifle, right trigger to fan the trigger of your revolver, square to fire a shotgun, the list goes on. When you electrocute an enemy with your grapple or any of the other various ways to do so, you immediately go into a rapid ridiculously over the top punch combo that literally makes slot machine noises. Couple all this with the fact that every enemy that you fight explodes into comical bursts of viscera and it just all feels so damn good.

-Rose

Most Disappointing: Bayonetta 3

Runners-Up: Neon White, AI The Somnium Files 2: Nirvana Initiative

I truly don’t know what else to say about this game. In the final quarter of 2022, I was more or less thrown on an emotional rollercoaster with the release of Bayonetta 3. First there was excitement that it was happening, then concern over Helena Taylor being replaced for the role, some embarrassment over how a lot of the ensuing discourse got handled, and ultimately I sit here in dejection and resignation over what the  game is. I’ve got a review out for the bigger points, Rose and I spent three whole hours stomping on what makes this game insane to us, so it’s only natural that this whole campaign ends with a declaration: Bayonetta 3 is the most disappointing game of 2022.

Mechanically, it’s not a bad game; the part where you play as Bayonetta is the tightest the series has felt, and the implementation of multiple demon and weapon loadouts leaves plenty of space for replayability. That said, the story commits its most grievous sin of taking “The Lore” of Bayonetta way too seriously, and brings the entire project down to Inferno with it. Jeanne is an afterthought at best and a wet fart of a minigame segment at worst, Viola, while fun as a dorky Nero equivalent, is irritating to actually control since no one bothered to make a game all about dodging work inherently with parries. Luka is the most disposable he’s ever been, which is mind boggling considering how much they want to make him a plot point to the extent of writing in a new rich backstory, and it’s especially head-turning when, in any and all conversation about this game, I can bet 5 bucks against anyone that they won’t know who the main villain for the game is. Bayonetta famously said that “As long as there’s music, [she’ll] keep on dancing” at the end of her outrageous introduction to gamers back in 2009. Well, three games in I can confidently say the music’s over; get your shoes, honey, and get off the dance floor.

-Maverick

Best Ongoing: Warframe

Runners-Up: Monster Hunter Rise, Harvestella

While too many AAA games are chasing the phantom clout of trying to be too much like films and prestige television, Digital Extreme’s funny little free-to-play space ninja game has been steadily refining itself over the years since its launch in 2013. In 2022, Warframe launched cross-play, allowing players to connect with each other regardless of their platform; a big step for any online game to be sure. But the real clencher for Warframe’s position as the Best Ongoing Game of 2022 lies in the execution and follow-through of one of its greatest story arcs – The New War.

The New War is an incredible demonstration of what an actual film-like experience in a game can be. Warframe had been building up to the New War for years, and the payoff was well worth the wait. It opens with the second invasion of the Sentients, a robotic faction from ages past, who have returned to take over the Origin System. Instead of throwing the player into a series of samey missions as is standard practice for shooters these days, the player first takes control of a Grineer soldier; a grunt-type enemy the player has killed countless times before. The mission makes it imminently clear how overpowered Warframes are, and how deadly and dangerous this world is to the average person. From there, the player takes control of other characters as well, including Teshin, Warframe’s PvP vendor. Imagine a Mario game that opens up with you playing as a Goomba; imagine a Splatoon game that has you play a level as one of the Splatfest idols. That’s the kind of experience that the New War offers, and it’s all for the purpose of contextualizing just how all-encompassing this invasion is, as well as what the world is like for the factions the player has come to know, and that’s just in the first few missions.

I won’t spoil what happens in the New War, but it certainly has some of the coolest moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game (if you really liked the Azem reveal in FFXIV, you’ll like what the New War does). And once you complete it, the world of Warframe permanently changes. Locations, environments, and even the world map change to reflect the damage the New War has wrought. Some of the newest content in the game expands on aspects brought up during the New War, from the Veilbreaker update offering missions where you once again play as that Grineer soldier, to the Angels of the Zariman, which adds a unique fusion of Warframe’s open-world and mission-based gameplay offerings.

It’s always been easy for me to recommend Warframe since the movement mechanics are fun to learn, the nature of its design allows for cooperative play and interesting buildcrafting, and its one of the few free-to-play games that actually embraces that structure of game content delivery, as it doesn’t lock players out of content or cosmetics with an additional price tag with each update. Nobody is doing what Warframe is doing, and more games should follow their example.

-Spencer

Worst Game: Babylon’s Fall

Runners-Up: High on Life, Fashion Police Squad

It’s insane to think that there was in fact a point in my life where I believed Platinum Games could do no wrong. A time where I even went out of my way to buy a Wii U just to play The Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2. Unfortunately that age is long behind us, and while Platinum has been putting out some questionable work over the last few years, Babylon’s Fall is easily the worst.

Babylon’s Fall was supposed to be a follow-up of sorts to Platinum Games’ developmental relationship with Square Enix that was forged by NieR: Automata. It was shown at an E3 presentation to a middling reaction, with the reception becoming only more dour with the reveal that it would be a Live Service title. In a perfect world divorced from the way this model has been utilized across the past few years (and to be safe maybe a world without capitalism), the idea of a Platinum Games’ title that got continual updates almost seems like a boon in their favor. Players of Character Action games already love replaying the same levels over and over, so giving some sort of tertiary hook in the form of cosmetics, or pacing things out through a time-locked format has a lot of potential! Sadly, the only potential Babylon’s Fall made good on was the potential to further accelerate the erosion of Platinum Games.

Immediately, the gameplay of Babylon’s Fall is somehow on the level of a bad licensed hack-and-slash game from the PS2 era, with limited weapon options and even fewer combos. The core loop of the game involves queuing into missions Monster Hunter style, and doing some mediocre platforming as you make your way to a slightly stronger enemy (or sometimes even a boss!), defeating them, leaving, and starting all over again. Again, if the gameplay was even close to parity with any of Platinum’s flagship titles, there could have been something to all this, instead of creating an experience so dire that a server shutdown notice was put out only months after release, and PC player numbers peaked at just 1106 players.

Even outside of the gameplay, there isn’t much else to love about Babylon’s Fall. Several player animations and gear sets were directly imported from Final Fantasy XIV, which in a vacuum would be just fine, but without any sort of aesthetic base to work off of, end up making the game feel like a thrift store of ideas. Despite being a full-priced game, Babylon’s Fall also wanted to operate on a battle pass model, asking for additional money right from the get-go (though they would quickly make that first battle pass free). With other games that use this system, like Destiny 2 and Warframe, and even shooters like Apex Legends or Fortnite all available for free, it’s mind boggling that this model was seen as even remotely viable for any game, let alone one as rough and bare bones as Babylon’s Fall.

While all sorts of discourse around Platinum Games later in the year would quickly overshadow Babylon’s Fall, it still remains as a perfect exemplification of all the recent problems surrounding the company. It was a project with no real ideas behind it, and the lack of direction and complete misuse of developers and their talents resulted in what can only be described as the worst.

-Rose

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It’s a new year which means it’s time for the crew to sit back down and talk about games. John’s been playing AI: The Somnium Files Nirvana Initiative while Solon’s been big into Lunistice, Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7: Reunion, and Super Lesbian Animal RPG. Maverick’s been going on a roundup of his game of the year contenders with God of War Ragnarok, NORCO, Pentiment, Spark the Electric Jester 3, and The House in Fata Morgana.

In the news, Sony’s got a new accessibility controller, Sakurai is semi-retired, Square Enix still has a thing for NFT’s and Zenimax QA has been unionized. Dungeons and Dragons is also trying to change their gaming license in a messy situation for everyone.

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In the news, Roblox is now oofless, Meta is jacking up it’s prices, you can’t see John Cena in Fortnite, and Rockstar Games seems to be cleaning up it’s act in regards to it’s workplace culture. I guess Grand Theft Auto 6 is a thing now too. In other workplace news, Vox media sucks and is laying off employees. Scott then goes deep into the week of weird Nier church videos and everything around that.

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In the news, Activision’s got another Blizzard of news with just, so much happening that they had to show off a new Overwatch character to distract people. Bugsnax is getting more content and coming to all the consoles, No Man’s Sky is getting even more free updates, and Cook Serve Forever is coming. Kingdom Hearts 4 is also on the way, along with fun furry Half-Life 2 mods. Hasbro also bought back D&D Beyond.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @arealgoldmouth, and @lvmaeparian 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 videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask.

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As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @mavsplaniamania, and @ChorbySP

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In 2011, the annual New York City event controversially included Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire in that year’s official selection — for reasons that were rather divisive, to be honest! Long since then, and although Tribeca has been playing around with distinct VR categories, this is the first year Tribeca has officially decided to include video games in a brand new category in hopes of bringing a new perspective to the medium and industry — perhaps since leaving behind the perception that video games should adhere to strict definitions.

Although few, the titles showcased here are certainly not far between, with many of them having already been teased in other shows and events the past year as they near the end of their respective development cycles. They are all offering something very unique to the table.

Signalis
Rose-engine

Signalis pits you in a rough dystopian world where you have to face nightmarish monsters and to uncover the truth. About what? I don’t know yet! But its low-bit artstyle clearly drawing from anime aesthetics looks rad, featuring both side-scrolling action and some first person puzzle-solving in a freaky, claustrophobic world.

NORCO
Geography of Robots

Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Ember Lab

Kena: Bridge of Spirits has already been previewed in other events in the past year, and I still can’t get over the army of cute blobs you have to maneuver and command at your whims a la Pikmin, all while juggling all the mechanics you can find in any solid action-adventure platformer. It certainly looks like it offers something both fun and vast with a new, original concept we have not seen in this particular genre, but with that optimism also comes some caution in hoping to see the Southeast Asian influences be appropriately handled as they should be in the final game.

Harold Halibut
Slow Bros.

It’s wild to me that it was not that long ago that people have constantly been on edge over whether not stop motion is a “dead” artform with the advent of high resolution 3D CGI dominating filmmaking, but we’ve been seeing one of the hardest techniques you can possibly do in animation popping up in all sorts of places — and here’s another game that uses it! I could not shake the feeling that the energy of this game felt like a Wes Anderson flick with some sci-fi undertones, and I think that perfectly encapsulates what Harold Halibut is from what we’ve seen so far.

Sable
Shedworks

Sable also has been teased for some time now, and every new snippet of footage of it heightens my anticipation for it! With a purposefully flattened style harkening to the illustrations and comic works of Moebius (Jean Giraud), the game has you trek across vast, desert landscapes in what looks like to be a world in ruin. And with Japanese Breakfast on the soundtrack to boot, it’s sure to be a tranquil, meditative experience in the same vein of something like Journey.

Lost in Random
Zoink

12 Minutes
Luis Antonio

Uh oh! 12 Minutes is another Wife-in-Peril game where Daisy Ridley is your wife and Willem Dafoe might be evil in pursuit of ruining your not-so-happy married life together. You find yourself stuck in this horrible event that unfolds within 12 minutes of your time (hence the title, get it?), and it’s up to you to make different choices to prevent it from happening and finally free yourself from this loop. For me, this was the weakest highlight in all of this showcase. I  was not that impressed with this game’s premise, given that it did not stand out to me any more differently than numerous titles already in the text-based and visual novel genre. That said, the game’s presentation of remaining in a fixed, top-down perspective was interesting, but there’s not much more to say on what new things this can bring to Saving the Wife games.

The Big Con
Mighty Yell

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