11. Star Wars Outlaws

I have a Star Wars OC. Well, two, technically. One is from when I was much younger. He was a Jedi in the style of Luke, as I’m sure many OCs were. An earnest go-gooder who sometimes struggled with the Dark Side but always took the high road in the end. He wielded two lightsabers, one blue and one green. I don’t think about him anymore.

The other is Dia V’rei. She’s a Twi’lek with dark green skin and quite a few tattoos, who in her youth eked out a living by participating in races, legal or otherwise. She got caught up in some bullshit with the Empire and now the ghost of a disgraced Sith Inquisitor is living in her head. They’re both trying to make the most of the situation. She has one lightsaber that used to be blood-orange, but now it’s teal. The focusing crystal makes a sound eerily similar to a wail of despair when she switches it on.

Star Wars Outlaws does not let you create a character. It has a very specific story to tell about a very specific protagonist. That part of it is fine. It’s a solid, enjoyable romp of which I only remember the vaguest details. What the game does best, though, is satisfy the core reason why I still sometimes think about Dia V’rei and add a little bit to the story I have for her in my head: it’s fun to imagine existing in Star Wars. The first time I touched down on Akiva–a humid, jungle world where it’s almost constantly raining–I just wandered the city streets for half an hour. I slowly weaved through the markets, admiring the lush plantlife, letting the ambient noise wash over me and imagining how the rain would feel on my skin. I wished, so badly, that I could be there.

More than anything, it’s those moments that truly sell why Kay Vess endures all the stress and life-threatening jobs. An hour from now, she’s probably going to get shot at by a rival gang again. But in this moment? Life is perfect. Let’s enjoy the rain.

10. No Man’s Sky

This year, I played No Man’s Sky for the first time since its release. It’s simultaneously a very different game and also fundamentally the same thing. I understand the growing frustrations of the purists every time a massive new update was released. There was an appeal to the simplicity and loneliness of the original game that is now forever lost to time. The game now has base-building, ship-building, a fleet mechanic, and even a dedicated multiplayer hub you can summon with a button-press. For my part, though, I enjoyed that I could pretty much ignore any of these extra systems if I didn’t care about them; and the changes I did care about ultimately made it much easier to appreciate the core of what made NMS fun in the first place: finding absurd worlds and getting yourself into situations.

NMS swept my friend group like an infection, and at one point there were at least 4 of us playing the game at the same time. We never did missions with each other, but we would chat on Discord and stream our own games to each other. On one such occasion, I was having some pretty rough luck with the planets in a new system I had just warped to. Every celestial body I landed on provided a new, unique hell to experience: constant freezing blizzards, acid rain, hostile wildlife, or an atmosphere entirely composed of toxic gas. Meanwhile, my roommate was exploring what the game itself described as a “paradise” planet. It was beautiful, had no extreme weather, peaceful wildlife, and abundant resources and water. She was still miserable, though, because the air was filled with bubbles, and they were really getting on her nerves. She hated those goddamn bubbles.

I, of course, teased her about it.

“I’m over here on literal hell worlds and you’re complaining about bubbles?”

I didn’t understand, she told me. The bubble filter was really annoying.

After calling it a day on my current planet, I got into my spaceship and sped over to the final planet in the system.

“One more chance for something nice. Maybe I’ll get bubbles this time,” I remarked.

I landed on the planet. It had a bit of a red tint and looked like a desert. Still, the ambient temperature wasn’t too bad, the alien life wasn’t hostile, and even the Sentinel activity was relaxed. It was certainly not a paradise, but I just might have a pleasant time here.

Less than a minute later, I got caught in an extreme storm. My survival suit flashed a warning message: “COMBUSTIBLE DUST.”

I burst out laughing. That’s the game, baby!

9. taking my Dark Knight girlfriend to the corner store

This was the year I started to more actively seek out sapphic stories to read. As much as I like to consider myself thoughtful and well-read, I have a very bad habit of just reading or playing whatever happens to come my way through friends’ recommendations or critical praise. This does mean I very rarely encounter anything truly terrible, but the second edge of that blade causes me to get stuck in artistic ruts. When I try to find new books, I’ll see something with a premise that’s up my alley that has a lot of very good reviews, and then get scared off after reading one 2-star review that says, “The characters never really developed beyond their starting archetypes.” Is that true? I’ll never know, because I will simply avoid trying it out of fear of “wasting” my time with something mediocre. And then I will play another Assassin’s Creed game for, like, 50 hours. It’s embarrassing.

This was the year I shoved my decision paralysis in a locker and did my best to keep it there. Dark Knight girlfriend was an important part of that process, partly because it’s very easy to just read something and see what happens if it only takes 20 minutes. I’ve read short stories in sci-fi anthologies that take longer than that. And you know what? It was a pretty nice time. It has fun with the obvious fish-out-of-water premise, and I connected strongly with the main character’s constant background-anxiety. What I loved the most, though, was that the scenes it cared most about were very mundane and domestic. It is, after all, a game where you take your girlfriend to the corner store. Then you get back home and cook for her and talk about your plans for tomorrow. There are a couple moments you could very loosely describe as action scenes, but they are over quickly and primarily exist as gags. They aren’t the point. The point is the everyday routine, and the comfort in sharing that routine with someone you love.

It did not blow my mind. It was exactly what I was hoping it would be, but in a way that helped illuminate to me what my hopes even were.

8. Life is Strange: Double Exposure

I was not expecting to play a Life is Strange game this year. I played the first game as it was coming out in 2015 and enjoyed it quite a bit. After that, I would be aware of other games in the franchise releasing and getting generally positive reviews, but I felt like I had moved on by then. A similar thing nearly happened for Double Exposure. When the first episode released, I became vaguely aware of the discourse surrounding Chloe breaking up with Max in the “saved her” timeline, and then I just didn’t think about it for an entire year. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers who worked on Double Exposure would become scapegoats for a subset of fans who wanted a target for their frustrations. Some took the layoffs that would happen just three months later as a kind of vindication. It felt weird and unsettling to see all this play out for a game that had once meant a great deal to me. When a couple of my friends later recommended the Double Exposure to me, I finally decided late into 2025 to give it a shot. I wanted to know what the game actually was, not what people were trying to turn it into. What I found was far more interesting and introspective than the early kneejerk reactions had given it credit for. My biggest problem with the first game was the infamous final decision, which made it seem like Max was being arbitrarily punished for trying to use her powers for good. Double Exposure instead makes the case that Max is perfectly capable of being her own disaster.

Double Exposure wants to talk about adventure games and the type of person who’d be a protagonist of one. Like a lot of heroes in this genre, Max is an insatiably curious snoop, and the game continually presented very standard adventure-game mechanics in a context that made me feel absolutely awful for doing them. If she senses there’s a problem or mystery she doesn’t know about, she will do whatever she can to figure out what’s going on and try to “solve” it. She will cause a distraction to snoop through someone’s briefcase for confidential legal documents. She will shift timelines to break into private offices and read emails. She will use an emotional confession told to her by someone in a state of desperation and sadness to cajole more information out of an alternate universe version of that same person. You, the player, get very little choice in the matter. You have to do it, because it’s what Max would do–what she so often justifies as something she must do–and then you will probably watch it blow up in her face later.

This is never directly stated to be the specific or even only reason Chloe broke up with her. There is no one reason. However, Chloe does express anxiety about how Max uses her powers, and whether Max would ever try to win an argument with them. Max insists she wouldn’t; but if that’s the same Max who also doesn’t think twice about rummaging through the personal lives of people she knows to fix a problem all on her own, well, I get why that might not be reassuring. There is a need in Max to control the chaos of life, to make the universe and the flow of time bend in a direction that she believes is best. It’s a desire I deeply connected with, one my teenage self also had when it seemed like so many things around me were changing in unpleasant ways. Was there something I could have said or done to make it all work out? Was I just not smart or clever enough? The difficult reality was that many things were just out of my hands. I never had a say in the first place.

7. Unnamed Space Idle

I don’t usually play idle games. When I venture into the genre, I’ll poke around at a game for two or three days and then eventually forget about it, never to return. I “played” USI for 719 hours. Maybe part of it was just that the aesthetic clicked for me. I love spaceships, and it did, at times, feel like I was pushing buttons on a control panel to eke a bit more power out of the reactor. Maybe the gameplay loop just appealed to me more than others I’ve tried. USI places a huge emphasis on doing focused progression. You very soon reach a point in the game where trying to improve all your ship’s systems at the same time becomes impossible. You have to learn to be okay with letting some stuff sit on the backburner while you catch other systems back up.

It took a while for me to acclimate to this style, but the moment I depowered my warp core, shifted all my stats into material synthing, and then saw recipes with an estimated build time of 1 year suddenly finish in 3 minutes was an incredible high. There’s not really much else to it. I still like booting it up for a few minutes a day to check on my progress and poke around for a little. I’m splicing my crew members with alien DNA now. Things are going well, I think.

6. Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery

It’s funny to me that I first learned about and played this game the same year that Uma Musume was released. Uma Musume is a very monkey’s-paw style of game to me. On the one hand, I’m happy to finally have horse-girl representation sweep through the spaces I inhabit. Cat girls and dog girls have hogged the spotlight for so long. The various Umas have fun designs and personalities, and I appreciate when artists draw them kissing each other. I, too, run because I love feeling the burn in my thighs and the wind catching my hair like a banner flying behind me.

On the other hand, I personally despise the real-life sport of horse racing. There are many inside the industry who claim to love horses. I’m sure that must be true for some portion of them. As much as I love horses, I will almost certainly never own one myself, because they are extraordinarily expensive in comparison to almost any other pet you can legally keep. I imagine that horse racing represents an opportunity for some to actually make a living interacting with the animal they adore. This does not change the fact that horse racing is an ugly sport that blatantly commodifies and exploits horses purely to engage in an entirely different type of exploitation of humans.

Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery is not explicitly about racing, but it is about sports. The stat-raising gameplay is cold, calculated, and sterile, like a simplified spreadsheet of any sports management sim you can imagine. The actual impact on your horse, though, is gross and upsetting. The abstraction of the stats represents the more tactile reality of your protagonist transforming a living creature into a horrifying flesh-mass through careful regulation of diet and injections. Your ultimate victory requires the slaughter of your only companion in the world. Congratulations! You’re officially a Horse Master, for all that matters.

I guess I appreciate the bluntness.

5. VRChat

If I end up buying a VR headset next year, it will be entirely because of VRChat. One of my favorite things to do in this world is go to a place I’ve never been before with someone. We then walk around and talk about anything that comes to mind. It is one of the greatest joys of living in a physical, material space, and it’s frustratingly hard to do when most of your friends live hundreds or thousands of miles away. VRChat’s social hangout spaces acted like a life raft to me. The life raft is never as nice as the boat it was stored on, but it’s there for you when you need it most.

The whiplash of tones you can get when visiting different environments is a big part of what made it so fun for me. After spending some time on a rooftop break room in the twilight of the early evening (where I watched my friends excitedly discover that they could use an already-lit cigarette to start another cigarette), we hopped over to a dead-mall-esque structure that appeared to be entirely dedicated to tourism vTubers. Or perhaps vTubers who were simply doing a collaboration with Japan’s various tourism organizations. We didn’t recognize any of them and had a very limited grasp of the language, so it was impossible to fully understand the context. Still, we had fun wandering around, assigning one of the vTubers to each other, and talking about the places we’d like to visit if we were on vacation. It was an experience I desperately needed.

4. The Rise of the Golden Idol

I’m still a little star-struck by the Golden Idol games. Conceptually, it’s so simple: study what’s happening on the handful of screens that show a frozen moment in time, then use a bucket of a couple dozen words to explain what’s going on. It’s remarkable how the game uses those two basic structures to find so many different ways to tell a story. One chapter will show you a zoomed out view of an entire city and ask you to piece together how the schemes of a group of scientists slowly unravel as the day progresses. Another chapter will zoom into a single apartment complex, each room showing the ripple effects of those same scientists’ callous disregard for the people they used in their experiments. It shifts effortlessly between being hilarious and bleak. It feels so damn good when, after spending half an hour staring at a scene wondering what you’re missing, you realize you completely misunderstood one detail, and now everything else clicks into place.

3. This Bed We Made

I played through This Bed We Made in two days at the very end of 2025. I only heard about it because a friend mentioned it offhand, and I’m so, so glad she did. This game is a narrative-heavy adventure where you play as a 50’s hotel maid snooping around guests’ rooms.  She soon gets wrapped up in a story of forbidden love and can eventually discover and explore her own lesbian desires. It hit me like a heat-seeking missile, and it provided a fascinating contrast to Double Exposure. Where LiS gestured toward but never quite successfully grappled with the ethical nuance of Max’s vigilante-detective routine, TBWM presents a more straightforward argument: you have a moral imperative to resist the police. Laws can be unjust, cops are lazy and incompetent, and they will absolutely use their power to persecute so-called “degenerates.” A key part of the game is using the small amount of control Sophie’s job provides her to decide what items to preserve and what to throw away, and getting a good ending depends on you, the player, exercising that power. All while that’s happening, you get frequent check-ins with your preferred supporting character, which for me played out as Sophie slowly realizing, “I think my coworker likes women. Wait, do I also like women?” The whole thing was very charming.

2. Mysterium

I’ve lived in Minneapolis since 2022, and halfway through 2025 I realized I was still just as much of a social shut-in as I was in the Arizona suburbs. I really like being around people, but I’m also very anxious about meeting new ones. There’s a part of me that always fears each new social experience will be the one I fuck up so bad that I never live it down and also reveals that no one ever liked me to begin with. This is why it took me two whole years to go to a local queer board game night that was perpetually on the “I should do this next week” agenda.

My fears, of course, were completely unfounded, and I had a delightful time. One week, I decided to bring along my copy of Mysterium. It’s a game I adore, but I’ve almost never had enough people around to play properly. The short pitch: one player is a ghost, and the (up to six) others are psychics trying to solve the ghost’s murder. The ghost hands out cards from a huge deck of abstract, surrealist art that is evocative but never too specific. The psychics must then use the cards they’re given to deduce which suspects, locations, and makeshift weapons the ghost is trying to direct them toward. The ghost cannot speak or provide any clues other than the cards. Sometimes a psychic locks in, interprets the ghost’s clue perfectly, and gets it right on the first try. When that happens, they both feel like geniuses. More often, though, the psychic gets it wrong, and they both get to laugh at how badly they messed up.

That’s the beauty of Mysterium, to me. There is technically a fail state, but “failure” is its own reward, because it’s really funny. I loved every second I spent playing Mysterium with people. I brought it three weeks in a row, and it had the whole table cackling every time. Damn me and my stupid anxieties. I could have experienced this kind of joy so much sooner.

1. Warframe

Over the last decade, I have attempted to play Warframe three times. The first couple times, I managed to stick with it for a few hours before feeling overwhelmed and putting it down to focus on something else. This year, for some reason, I decided I wanted to give it one more, fair shot. I’d watch a couple tutorials, focus on doing the questlines, and actually figure out how the thing works.

I have now played Warframe for 290 hours. It certainly helped that several friends also got hooked on it soon after, and it’s a lot of fun to regularly hang out in voice chat helping each other with one of many varieties of grind in the game. What truly shocked me, though, is how much I enjoyed the writing and story. As you play through the main questline, you can see Digital Extremes gradually understand both what type of story they want to tell and how best to tell it within the framework of the game. It starts out with simple expository voice-overs that are a little hard to pay attention to while you’re in the middle of a mission, and ends with elaborate cutscenes and a visual novel with complex branching dialogue and dating elements.

Gameplay elements that you’ve long-since taken for granted are recontextualized dozens of hours later in genuinely heartfelt plot revelations. You will meet a whole parade of fun and interesting characters and make jokes with your friends about how you imagine them interacting with each other in their off time. You will discover that a family can be an adoptive Exposition Mom, a traumatized space ninja, their girlfriend with magnetic powers who’s trapped in a timeloop, and their computer son who probably has an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. Also that war veteran who defected from his corrupt government to form a resistance movement dedicated to freeing people from mind-control slavery is basically my uncle. I am currently flirting with a nun and will eventually need to talk to my magnetic girlfriend about forming a polycule.

That all of this even exists in Warframe is remarkable. That it somehow comes together into a genuinely touching story about bodily autonomy, the daily struggle of living with trauma, and the power of communal support networks feels like a minor miracle.

Iris (she/her) loves to ramble about games, comics, and movies, especially if any swords and/or knights are involved. You can hear more of her critical work on her podcast: The Iris Archives.

The post Iris’ Top 11 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Love and Warframe in 1999 appeared first on Gamesline.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

For years I have tried to play Morrowind. Time and time again I would get through the introduction, only to drop off sharply soon after. The furthest I had ever progressed previously was making it to Balmora, speaking with Caius Cosades, and then strolling around looking for work. Having completed a full playthrough of the main story, I can confidently say Morrowind is one of my favorite games, and I understand why many have sung its praises in the decades following its release.

There is a true sense of accomplishment to be found in completing quests and making progress in Morrowind, since gold can be directly funneled into character skills and equipment. One thing I greatly appreciated was the lack of quest markers indicating where to go, which have dulled the exploration experience of many games. What is the point of building a huge open world for the player to explore, if you are just going to pinpoint exactly where they need to go, depriving them of the need for exploration, and provide for them convenient fast-travel points, so they can easily skip over large swathes of land? In Morrowind, you ask for directions and characters will give you realistic descriptions that actual people living in its world would give you, which your character jots down in their journal, and the game trusts you to be cognizant and observant as you make your way to your destination. It’s simply a more engaging way to go about building a huge world to explore, and I wish more games would rely less on markers and waypoints.

Morrowind is truly a masterpiece of a game, and I’m glad that there is still so much of it I have yet to uncover. On my playthrough, I essentially made Casca from Berserk, except having her favor all kinds of melee weapons instead of just swords; she joined the Fighters Guild, but left the other factions to their own devices. I had heard many tales about how broken the magic system in Morrowind can be, but I opted to barely use any magic outside of enchanted items, since I wanted a more straightforward experience. I’m pleased to report that even if you don’t interact with magic or potions or enchanting your own items, Morrowind is still a fantastic game to play, and I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Warframe

Warframe has changed a lot since I started playing it back in 2019. While the core gameplay is largely the same fast-paced action I came to love, there’s a lot more to do and it’s a game I always enjoy coming back to when I’ve got that itch. Much of last quarter of 2022 left me preparing for my experience with its New War story, which completely blew me away with how fucking amazing it was.

I’m not normally a fan of set-piece segments in games (e.g. your driving sections, your forced stealth sections) since they tend to fall short when compared to the game’s core design (and especially when compared to games dedicated to those concepts, driving games, stealth games, etc.), but the New War has set-pieces that are built within its own core gameplay structures. It felt like playing a whole new game built inside of an existing one, to the point where I forgot that I was playing Warframe despite each set-piece literally using the same design conceits as the main game. This wasn’t like playing a unique game-mode inside of a game; it was like playing a sequel that doesn’t exist. I’ve heard of out-of-body experiences, but out-of-game experiences are a whole new ballpark of ludonarrative what-the-fuckery.

Of course, none of what the New War entailed would’ve impacted me as much if I was not fully invested in the story and setting that Digital Extremes has been building upon for nigh on a decade now. It’s truly remarkable what they’ve managed to build upon in just the years I’ve been playing; I can only imagine what the game must feel like for those who have played it since the beginning. My time playing Warframe in 2022 left quite the impression on me, and I’m looking forward to what the future of this silly space ninja game has in store.

Signalis

I am not a horror enthusiast. In fact, it’s probably my least-favorite genre of fiction, especially when it comes to video games. But I couldn’t help but pick up Signalis and give it a shot, and what I found was an absolute master-class of aesthetic design. If Signalis wasn’t a horror game, it very well could’ve been my #1 pick this year (I also would’ve been able to actually finish it, too.) While its gameplay isn’t something for me, everything else about it is.

I thrive on slick UI design, and Signalis has that in spades. Not only does every button press, selection shift, and menu screen brim with detail and deliberate flair, it functions perfectly as a replica of the older survival-horror games it draws upon for inspiration. I love when games have GUIs that perfectly mesh with both the setting and gameplay, and even though that gameplay holds me back from fully enjoying Signalis, the sheer magnitude of how fucking cool it looks might be enough to push me through the scary bits and finish it. Maybe.

If you’ve played Signalis, you already know how good it is. For everyone else, know this: I’m putting it on my top games of 2022 list, and I haven’t even beaten the first boss yet. You might say “well how can it be in your top games if you’ve barely played it!” I’ll tell you how: because it’s cool as hell, and even though it’s in a genre that literally causes me physical discomfort to play, the art direction was impressive enough to make even those moments enjoyable. Go play Signalis, unless you’re like me and can’t deal with horror that well. In which case, get a friend to play it for you.

Elden Ring

It’s funny how I went from not caring about Elden Ring for a long time, to playing it on release day and having it consume my entire life for a month or so. I wasn’t really on board the hype train for it, despite enjoying past works by From Software. While Elden Ring provided more of that solid action RPG gameplay we’ve come to expect from The Studio That Had A Guy Kick You Down A Pit Five Times, what really captured me was the setting of the Lands Between. One of the things I drew a lot as a kid were trees, and while I know the Dark Souls trilogy had a fair amount of tree symbolism, Elden Ring took the extra step of centering its entire world around one really big tree, and then running with it.

While I cannot say that Elden Ring has surpassed Bloodborne in my eyes, it’s certainly triumphed over the Dark Souls trilogy, even if I still have love for Dark Souls III. In games like this one, where there are multiple options for building out various characters, if I like the game enough I’ll make multiple characters and play through the whole game with them, going so far as to create a spreadsheet to plan everything out. Bloodborne was the only From Software game to get me to do this, but now I’ve made one for Elden Ring. I’ve already got two playthroughs under my belt, and I’ll be eager to revisit the Lands Between in the future to try all of the dumb builds my friends clamored about last year.

The House in Fata Morgana

You’d be forgiven for thinking my Game of the Year would be Elden Ring, especially after I did an Items Only playthrough of it, and it’s certainly a good one, but the experiences I had playing The House in Fata Morgana are on a completely different level. I’m not well-versed in visual novels, but The House in Fata Morgana is one I can easily, whole-heartedly recommend to anyone and everyone. There aren’t too many games out there that can put me in stitches and move me to tears repeatedly.

There is so much that can be said about The House in Fata Morgana. How it paints conversations and trains of thought with a believable, human quality to the writing that brings disparate characters to life, and how it acknowledges that aspect as a crucial cornerstone of its premise. How it fully utilizes the medium of a visual novel, playing with the script backlog at times to offer additional layers of mystique, and how it takes advantage of the multi-ending structure commonly found in visual novels to subtly prime the player for one of its most touching moments, so they can fully coalesce with the desires and emotions of one of the characters. How it can tell a story so gruesome and tragic and heart wrenching, and yet provide such a satisfying and overwhelming finale.

The House in Fata Morgana has many doors and many rooms. It took me several months to actually finish the game for various reasons, but each time I found myself within its walls, the beautiful backdrops, outstanding soundtrack, and truly moving script dissolved the world around me, leaving me to soak in the atmosphere of its world. If you are a big visual novel fan, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. And if you are like me; one who normally passes this genre by, in favor of games with fewer words and more buttons, I implore you: play The House in Fata Morgana. It is absolutely worth your time.

The post Spencer’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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As for TennoCon itself, Holy Shit There’s A New Skeletal Warframe That Shoots Void Beams And Runs Around As A Skeleton After Blowing Up Their Armor. Xaku, the new warframe in question, is a collaborative effort between the playerbase and the development team; the community proposed ability ideas and the general theme of the warframe, while the devs actualized those elements. Xaku is a weird “broken robot” with a skeletal wireframe dressed up in piecemeal armor which falls away from the main body in a unique dodging animation. They employ void tentacles to trap foes and steal their weapons, and their ultimate ability is to literally blow up and have their bits of armor act as shrapnel, after which you can run around as the goofy skeletal frame within. As something of a Big Skeleton Fan myself, I am of course enamored by Xaku’s design, and as a person who enjoys thievery in video games, stealing weapons from enemies and then using their own arsenal against them is right up my alley.

The big new update for Warframe is called “The Heart of Deimos,” and its demonstration at TennoCon showed it to be a clever and efficient combination of old and new content. In Warframe, there are many factions vying for resources and survival in a future version of our solar system. One of these factions, which has been in the game for years, is the Infested. They’re a biological weapon gone horribly awry which infect and infest mechanical apparati and biological life alike. The other antagonistic factions in the game, such the Grineer and the Corpus, have had their own biomes and levels for a while now, but the Infested have always had to piggyback off of pre-existing assets. They were always implemented as a variant faction, so you’d have a Grineer level, with all the Grineer enemies replaced with Infested versions, and then you’d slap some Infested accoutrements throughout the levels’ rooms to visually connect the enemies to the environment. It wasn’t awful, but as other factions became more robust with each update, the Infested quickly began to wither by comparison. “The Heart of Deimos” is the answer to this withering; an update entirely focused around the Infested faction.

To go along with this Infested update, the Helminth is getting a complete renovation. A weird biological mass of Infested flesh tucked away in a room on your ship only accessible under certain conditions, the Helminth as it stands now is limited in its usage. Currently, the Helminth is the only way to acquire an Infested companion, and it’s mainly used by Nidus, an Infested warframe. Beyond that, it’s just a funky room in your ship that has a cool aquarium under the floor, but with the Heart of Deimos update, you can actually feed the Helminth various resources and even warframes in a style clearly reminiscent of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. Doing this allows you to unlock Helminth abilities which you can graft onto your warframes to replace their existing ones. This adds a new level of customization, as there are many warframes who have at least one ability that is lackluster for any given build. The Helminth, like the Infested, has long been a neglected facet of Warframe and it would have been so easy to focus on the new without paying attention to the old; to showcase the big while ignoring the small, and I think that attention to this single weird room you could feasibly ignore for hundreds of hours, makes this update feel more complete.

As the update’s name suggests, Heart of Deimos adds a second moon to Mars for players to access on the star chart: Deimos. Previously, only Phobos was visible, so now both of Mars’ moons will be playable locations in Warframe. But they didn’t just create a new zone for Deimos – they actually pulled an older zone into Deimos’ construction. This zone, the Orokin Derelict, is unique because it isn’t directly connected to the rest of the star chart, and you need to construct special keys to even visit the Derelict levels. This zone has been one of two which are solely inhabited by the Infested faction, and due to its weird position in the star chart and unease of access making it difficult to reliably find other players for matchmaking, DE has decided to combine it into the Deimos content. It’s unclear right now how exactly this will shake out, but if it means you can now get the Nekros warframe on Deimos (accessible much sooner than the Derelict), this will make player progression much better for newer players, as Nekros is primarily used as a looting frame since he can double enemy drops. Also he’s a necromancer skeleton frame, so obviously he rules.

I’m always a fan of when dev teams of online games reuse old content that maybe didn’t work out so well, and repurpose it to be engaging and useful to players without scrapping all of the work that’s already been done. It’s a great way to efficiently recycle assets and areas, which saves time and effort, while also integrating it more cleanly into the current version of the game. There’s a melancholy associated with abandoned corners of an online game, and it’s pleasing to see those corners dusted and renovated. It just makes the rest of the game feel more complete and considered: an impressive feature for games that are constantly being iterated upon.

Deimos itself contains the third open-world area in Warframe. This means that all three of the major antagonist factions in the game have an open-world area devoted to them: the Plains of Eidolon on Earth for the Grineer, the Orb Vallis on Venus for the Corpus, and the new Cambion Drift on Deimos for the Infested. Due to TennoCon being entirely streamed this year, DE added special stations in Warframe for players to visit. If you were in one of these relays while the stream was live, you and everyone else were transported to exhibition platforms which showed off various new assets from the Cambion Drift.

It was a surreal experience, as the models and animations were fully rendered and demonstrated in-game, in real time. Being there myself, I got to see some of the new enemy types up close, as well as a couple new characters important to Deimos’ storyline. It wasn’t visually astounding, but the context alone gave me a greater depth of appreciation. This wasn’t necessary by any means, but it was done as a concession for there being no in-person TennoCon due to the global pandemic. In lieu of human bodies, we showed up in our warframes, which is a weirdly immersive situation in the context of Warframe’s narrative. The whole affair isn’t a novel concept – many online games like Fortnite have done virtual events already. But why it was done is what made it something more.

All in all, I have to say this is probably one of the best presentations we’ve had out of games since the novel coronavirus threw a wrench into big gatherings and venues, but that’s mostly attributable to Digital Extreme’s experience with streaming events live on a biweekly basis. Maybe it’s that familiarity I mentioned before that left me feeling more pleased by this year’s TennoCon. Or maybe it’s the sick as fuck robot skeleton. Hard to say.

The Heart of Deimos launches on August 25th on all platforms.

The post TennoCon 2020 appeared first on Gamesline.

5. Warframe

I was watching my brother play Warframe back when it first launched, and the only memory I had of it was “Wow, this PvP game looks neat; it’s a shame I’m not interested in PvP games.” For years I had assumed Warframe was a PvP-only game, based on the 2-odd minutes I watched my brother go at it.

Well, the joke’s on me because it turned out to be one of my favorite games of 2019. I’m years late to the party, but that hasn’t stopped me from thoroughly enjoying my time with Warframe. Being a free-to-play game, it has a lot of grinding and timer mechanisms in place. In a year filled to the brim with new games, having to wait for weapons or Warframes to finish building meant that I could take breaks from the game to play other titles. Obviously, those timers are in place to encourage you to spend money, but I’m a patient sort, and using them to my advantage rather than getting frustrated with waiting felt much easier on my brain.

Warframe has an art direction and visual design that speaks to me in ways other “spacey, shooty” games never did. I’m not going to claim that it’s “better” than any Halo, but I certainly enjoyed Warframe’s PvE elements more. It’s a game I look forward to playing more of, as the narrative is much more impressive than I would’ve expected.

4. Dicey Dungeons

I’ve always had a fondness for dice. One of the items I ordered at my elementary school’s Scholastic Book Fair was a booklet accompanied with dice whose pips were bordered with bones, and whose six side was replaced with a debossed skull (yeah, I was all in on my brand before I even knew what I was doing). When I traveled overseas, I would purchase dice whenever I could find them. My brief college experience was stressful to say the least, and throughout it I took to bringing along six d6’s in my pocket, to hold and fiddle with to ease my nerves. Dice have always given me a sense of control, despite their entire purpose being to remove control from those who cast them.

Which is kind of funny when you think about how Dicey Dungeons starts with Lady Luck herself turning her contestants into dice creatures for her dungeon-themed game show. Featuring a phenomenal chiptune soundtrack by THE Chipzel, Dicey Dungeons fully explores its mechanics of rolling dice and using items to outplay adorable opponents. Each character has their own gimmicks and playstyles, and the finale is worth sticking to the end for. Also, it has a skeleton with a big sword in it; an absolute masterpiece as far as I’m concerned.

3. Dragon Quest Builders 2

I started this decade playing Minecraft, and I never would’ve guessed in a million years that I’d end it by playing a delightful block-building game that wasn’t Minecraft, much less one spawning from Dragon Quest of all franchises. Akira Toriyama’s art style is not one of my favorites, but Dragon Quest Builders 2 warmed me up to it immensely. It was helped by my fondness for Dragon Warrior Monsters for the GameBoy Color; seeing old and familiar monsters, fully modeled and rendered, posing just like they did in that game, with all the same sound effects, was like stepping into an idealized variant of that game.

The two games don’t have many comparisons beyond that, but DQB2 is a fine game by its own merits. Many folks struggle with open-ended building games like Minecraft because a lack of direction or narrative motivation gridlocks their brain, preventing them from enjoying the act of building for its own sake, and DQB2 sidesteps this completely by having clearly defined goals and blueprints for the player to build at their leisure. Most of the game is one extended tutorial on showcasing the numerous systems at play with its building mechanics, but it’s all packaged in an easy-to-follow narrative with charming writing and down-to-earth characters. You’re encouraged to take things at your own pace; build what you want when you want; get creative or stick to the script, and in a game like Dragon Quest Builders 2, that’s the best of both worlds.

2. Baba is You

Baba Is You is a game that broke me down countless times, and it’s one of the most clever puzzle games I’ve ever had the pleasure to play. When I say it “broke me down,” what I mean is that all too often I would play a level and be unable to complete it; I’d get frustrated and quit out of the game, only to stop myself two minutes later. “Wait a minute, I never tried X, let me go back in.” Then, my third eye would open and I would see all the parts I glanced over before. It was astounding how often Baba Is You forced me to reevaluate how I approached its puzzles. Sometimes it’s not the pieces themselves, nor the connections they make, but their pure physicality that gives you the final click needed to solve the level.

Its visual design is absolutely adorable, its puzzles are relentless and considered and crafty, and some of the later moments and mechanics carry a lot of emotion for a game with no direct narrative. I think about the time I first broke the “Baba Is You” rule, and the eerie wind sound that plays as the puzzle lays before you; desolate and destroyed, with no way for you to interact with it anymore. I think about the ways new pieces get used, often to comedic or absurd effect. I think about the mini-narratives each level provided, and how often you have to rely on automatons or bugs to help you reach “Win.” I think about the first time I was able to make “Skull Is You.” I think this might be one of my favorite puzzle games of all time.

Baba Is You And Good.

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

What else can I say? You could read my review of Shadowbringers on the site; you could listen to the six goddamned hours Rose and I recorded combing over everything the expansion contains. But if I had to sum up in one sentence as to why it’s my Game of 2019, it’d be this: Shadowbringers has one of the best personal stories I’ve ever experienced in a video game.

Throughout Shadowbringers, you learn the forlorn history of a parallel world on the brink of utter annihilation. You learn of civilizations long dead, of local traditions cut short, of ways of life long forgotten. You experience the impact of a global catastrophe, and despite being a hero who has won battles and killed gods and stood up against injustices, you can only hope to save what remains. You cannot save everything, and you cannot save what has already been lost.

For most of Final Fantasy XIV’s story, you are a champion of the people; you stand up when they are pushed down by oppressors; you shield them when they are threatened by hungry gods and the evil empire alike. With Shadowbringers, however, the fate of two worlds rests on your shoulders, and you are no Atlas. The game balks at the notion that one person, no matter how powerful or experienced, can bear the weight of the world by themselves. It is only through the combined strength of collaborators and cooperators, of families and friends, that the impossible becomes possible.

We live in a time when the powers that be fail to safeguard our own planet’s health. A time when the rich commodify and curate cultures and communities. A time when it’s all too easy to feel powerless as an individual. The message that working together is the best (and often only) way to save the things you care about is a resonant one.

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While we didn’t get any new information about the “Railjack” feature, we did get the official name, and the full reveal date. As expected, Warframe Empyrean will be shown off live during Tennocon on July 6th. For those who don’t know, Railjack will allow players to control their own spaceship and take to low-orbit to do space combat with enemy factions. It will integrate seamlessly with the already-existing Archwing system, which will allow players to fly from their ship to board enemy vessels and clear decks while blowing up core systems.

I’ll certainly be jumping into Warframe Empyrean whenever it releases to the public, but if you do watch the Tennocon stream, you can get a free Nekros Prime frame, which I’ve wanted since I started.

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