#goty 2021

[yjochin]

poorly drawn zel, link, and sid bcos I'm devastated no news abt botw2

[wercia-menelcia]

How watching Game Awards nominees felt like:

[razberryaquato]

me watching the Game Awards, hoping that Psychonauts 2 would win something, only for it to win nothing:

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

“It Takes Two” deserved to win Game of the Year, I’m not taking any criticisms on this.

[alexalexok]

All the games I played in 2021 and my opinions thereon.

I’m back. You remember. It’s Alex, it’s video games. This year I decided to explore the many facets, folds, and nooks of the five star rating system. No crannies though, I am absolutely gone off crannies thank you.

Zero stars because it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

12 Minutes

Hell yeah. Hell yeah! A genuine bona fide ten-tonne clunker, something that everyone can enjoy disintegrating before their eyes at the slightest inspection like so much piss-drenched candyfloss. My favourite bit is probably the terrible central couple - generously, on purpose terrible, in an attempt (a failed attempt) to be like some stage play with two actors and half a set reviewed as ‘raw’, 'human’ and 'intense’ - but also burdened with being badly written in a bad video game and so having to deliver pat one liners about hiding in a cupboard.

Imagine you said to your loved one said my darling, my precious, my perfect angel, I am doing a time loop. If they weren’t immediately on board, giving you an embarrassing childhood secret to use just in case they need convincing at some point, working through what possible sin you have committed or lesson you are supposed to learn to escape - then break up.

12 Minutes asks instead, imagine you were a guy who sucks and your wife hates you but loves you enough to be excited about having a baby with you but also won’t believe anything you tell her about time or danger and you love her enough do timeline preserving brain hypnosis or something so you can stay together even though oh she IS YOUR SISTER but you also interpret ideas like 'give knife to wife so she can protect herself’ as 'stab wife in the stomach’ as though you had no choice in the matter while going “no no no I’m so sorry”. Absolute shit.

1 star because it’s just not especially good.

Heart&Slash

It’s got all the 3D action roguelike elements you might want, apart from it’s not very good to play so probably don’t.

Trash the Planet

I do enjoy a good idle / clicker game, this isn’t one. The writing is fairly annoying and (straining to remember exactly what my problem was nearly a year later) something like, each chapters starts you over with a new hook so it doesn’t even make use of the exponential mechanics of the genre? That sounds right. No-one is checking my work here. Can you prove any of these games even exist.

1 star because I am feeling slightly mean.

Tyranny

The best part of this game is the first 10 minutes when you glide through a pleasant kind of interactive fiction prologue deciding which war crimes to commit to set up the world state in the game proper. It’s quite promising, you play as a bad guy sent to conquer the last remaining enclave of resistance against the Overlord, dealing with the two squabbling factions of the army as you go. Unfortunately, it hardly ever feels like that again - you are just doing quests, like a normal main character in a normal game. The combat is terrible and the whole thing just gets incredibly dull incredibly quickly despite its best efforts.

Zelda II (redux)

I really wanted to be Zelda II guy because, you know, sometimes it’s fun to jump into a conversation and ruin everything with terrible opinions everyone hates. I even used this very nice Redux mod which adds a lot of quality of life changes to the game and I recommend to any weirdos out there, but sadly I cannot join your ranks on this one. It’s just bad, and it’s way too hard even with the changes. I feel like the guy who dies a dozen times to the first skeleton in Dark Souls and writes a widely-derided 1200-word Medium post about it, but I don’t even understand how people do beat a lot of these single enemies consistently. Anyway, more importantly, I don’t think there’s any particular charm or heart to the game outside of the exploration and combat. It did nothing for me.

Genesis Noir

A good first impression, a jazzy noir murder mystery is set out with eye-catching style. Going almost immediately into this terribly-paced gameplay sequence that’s too abstracted to impart any of the feeling it is reaching for. The game unravels a bit, many sections diluting the strength of its initial pitch rather than adding to it. To be fair, the finale is really strong and does do a good job pulling various strands together, but I can’t say it was worth pushing through them in the first place to reach the conclusion.

Holedown

The best part of breakout or whatever is when the ball goes behind the bricks and fucks around up there on its own for a while. That’s the entire point of the game. This hardly ever happens in Holedown because the bricks are too big and quickly too strong, so it’s just boring.

2 stars because even though it’s good, I personally didn’t like it that much alright? Is that okay with you, your majesty?

The Gardens Between

You know, it’s fine. You go forwards and backwards and interact with stuff then go forwards again. It looks nice, it’s a cute story. It’s fine.

Tenderfoot Tactics

I hate myself for this one. Eidolon by the same developer Ice Water Games is one of the greats. It’s wonderful, you must play it. Tenderfoot Tactics carries forward a few cool ideas, especially with its maps. Each map is a local creation, sketching out a limited area with the pathways and landmarks - and the very concept of North - most important to the inhabitants of the village where you found it. These things may or may not be of any interest to you, but slowly you build up a patchwork picture of the world, matching coastlines to drawings of coastlines. Being a landscape understander is very good - as is sliding really fast down big hills, which you do a lot - as is just goblining about with your band of little goblins and giant god creatures kneeling down to speak with you. Unfortunately the meaty meat of the game is doing tactics game combat, taking turns moving around a small grid and doing your attacks, and I simply do not enjoy this genre. I feel like most of the time you are either winning handily or losing terribly and either way it’s happening incredibly slowly. But I think if you might like that, you would really like this. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish I were different.

Calico

It’s very charming, it’s very wonky and fairly repetitive. I will definitely play a little more in the future because the Cat Tech is exemplary. There’s a giant fluffy cat stuck in a hollow log, the ideal creature. You can make your own cats from your own cat cafe big enough to ride on with a magic potion, and they simply look beautiful and move perfectly. There are other animals, but it’s mostly about the cats. Art reflects life.

Chicory

Feeling uncharitable about this probably, but I’ve just had enough of games where you’re a normal little creature and some nebulous dark force which is also mental illness starts ruining the seemingly pleasant magical world. It’s a greater shame here, as in the second half where you travel around with former chosen one Chicory herself the game finally shines in the specific, personal conversations you share. Unfortunately I found myself disappointed with the central 'paint the world’ idea throughout, which seems so full of promise but is simply not developed in enough interesting ways, a wasted opportunity.

Black Book

I don’t know! I should love this, I wanted to love this. I even have a good time when I am playing this, but for some reason it feels very hard to ever start it up. A narrative deck builder set in Russia a few hundred years ago, focussed on the folklore full of fickle, tricksy house and nature spirits. Again, incredibly appealing to me. Probably just a wrong place and wrong time situation, who could say what kind of 'mood’ or 'place’ I was in during 2021 leave me alone.

2 stars because it’s a good game and I enjoyed it, but there’s also quite a lot of bad things in it.

Scarlet Nexus

Strong start, this anime action RPG - super-powered humans fight monsters in the bad future - spends the first few chapters setting up status quos and then immediately undermining them, making everything quite breezy and exciting. The fighting is pretty good, and there’s a few standout characters (I grow particularly fond of my protagonist, aloof but earnest Kasane) - but all the initial energy slowly ebbs away. At the exact moment the game has nothing more to offer, you’re forced through 3 dull, repetitive and over-long dungeons. The suggestion I then play a second time to see the other main character’s route, and the 'real story’ was, at the time, completely laughable.

Captain Tsubasa

Basically my ideal game, sports anime video game, I wish there were more of them. I wish this one was a bit better, too. The football component is fatally flawed with a goalkeeper HP system which strips any sense of rewarding shot set-up and execution, and reduces your forward play to hoofing as many balls at goal as possible until the keeper is worn down and your next strike will score no matter what. There’s a little more nuance to it, but only a little. On the other side of things, the game’s story mode is both slight and overburdened with the Tsubasa history. No real fault of its own, the series has been going for 40 years, but it’s no less of a problem.

The Real Texas

Been meaning to get into this for ages, and I’m glad I did. It’s a very charming, intriguing thing. Some kind of absurd early-Zelda homage where a relaxing holiday to England spirals out of control and through a portal to an idiosyncratic, mixed up land. Good, but very much flawed, and I got utterly, hopelessly stuck no less than three times. My very, very earnest thanks to youtube users 'mag0ca’ and 'Cambrian Era’ - the only two people on the planet who recorded let’s plays of this that I could scrub through and try to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing as there are no walkthroughs.

Inscryption

There was a lot of excited chat around this one, and to begin with at least it feels well earned. The game is threatening and mysterious. You sit down to play a nicely designed card game based around sacrificing weak cards to summon strong ones, then you stand up to solve little puzzles around your creepy log cabin prison and bring the rewards back to assist your time at the table. So it goes in a pleasing loop until the roof blows off the whole thing in an exciting way. There’s a bit of dated, meta video spookiness, then the second act proper lands with a marked shift in style (which is fine) an big expansion of card mechanics (which is really great, but you don’t get enough time to enjoy) and what seems like an important decision (which is actually irrelevant.) The third act is weak, an ugly reskin of the first with a dull game layer on top of the carding and even less to do away from the table. The deck building is possibly the best here though as mechanics begin to stack on top of each other, but immediately makes you wonder why this development doesn’t form one arc across the whole game instead of just in this section. It would also be nice to have some more persistence between acts, items or cards clutched desperately in the shift. It would be fitting, and I would much prefer something like that which further builds the game’s mythos than the played tricks of looking at your computer file system and friend list. There’s one really good joke right near the end, but otherwise Inscryption peaks early and steadily gets worse. A game slightly stranded between its card game and its narrative and ultimately failing to please on either front.

Boyfriend Dungeon

Wasn’t really going to give it even a peek, but then 'the discourse’ made it sound quite interesting. Owned as I am, made it sound way more interesting than it actually is. At first I really liked how breezy all the interactions were, but this inevitably leads to relationships that either feel very sudden and underdeveloped or simply inconsequential. The dungeon combat is also just too basic and lumpy to hold any interest. Still, there is enough latent charm in the idea if not the execution that I finished everything up.

2 stars because I don’t have any particular feelings about it idk leave me alone.

Beacon

Like if Risk of Rain was a top-down shooter. Obviously it’s impossible for anything to reach that standard, but this is actually pretty decent. The main hook is a DNA system with which you can really fuck up the next clone to crawl out of her tube like you were bearing a grudge. It’s a bit unpolished and awkward, but worth a look if for some unfathomable reason you find yourself unfulfilled by other games in the genre.

On Rusty Trails

Perfectly serviceable quick platformer with that mechanic where you can change your colour, and this changes how you interact with the colour-coded world as you go. It’s fun, it’s short, it’s by the same developer that made Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers, and nowhere near as good but I wish them the best. Buy that one instead.

Clickpocalypse 2

Alex tries to find a phone game to keep themselves mildly occupied, first success. You don’t have to do any clicking in this one, I have no idea why it’s called that. Basically you just watch some little guys walk around an isometric dungeon. It’s fun to watch some little guys walk around an isometric dungeon and kill monsters and get chests, look at them go. Turns out that’s about all I want on my phone, to look at some stuff happening and occasionally tap some buttons to upgrade or attack but it doesn’t really matter. Look how quick they killed all those monsters wow.

Heroism

Second success. I only discovered after some time that it’s made by the same guy as Clickpocalypse so that’s, something. Nice? Sure. This is more subtantial, and the main thing is that every single tile in these (not isometric) dungeons has a little orb on it that will zip towards you when you get close. And one of the many things you can upgrade is your orb slurping radius, until orbs find you so attractive an entire dungeon’s worth of circles fly right at you as soon as you step through the door. In my opinion this is the central aim of the game, and many games - to get as much stuff flying around on the screen as possible. With your heroes shooting arrows and spells and sending minions off to attack and enemies returning fire and dying and exploding into loot and gold which is also sucked into your body, eventually so there’s so much stuff happening that you can’t even see the floor any more, which I consider a resounding victory.

3 stars because it’s good, you got me, I admit it. This is a pretty good video game. But it’s not that good really is it.

13 Sentinels

A tangled web of many strands, the main joy here is pulling at something and seeing which sci-fi plot device is tied to the end. There is no cliche left unemployed - mechs and robots, clones and aliens, AI, nanomachines and of course time travel, we’ve got it all. It’s quite absurd, in a fun enough way. The fragmented narrative presentation (switching between each of the 13 main characters’ stories and nudging them along a scene at a time) often feels like it’s trying to hide the weaknesses of the actual story in its own twists and turns, making every pause a cliffhanger and every character meeting a shocking revelation, neither of which would be true if you saw things in linear fashion - but I can’t say it never works. The action part of the game is fine, you just plonk your mechs down to defend a point from incoming bad robots. I really like how loose and analogue everything is instead of the steady grid-based approach I was anticipating. You can also cram as many turrets and drones on the field as possible shooting and exploding until the game slows down to a painful crawl, which is another kind of winning, see previous entry.

Ikenfell

I like all the bits of this - it’s an RPG where you sneak in to magic school to investigate your missing sister, and find it near-deserted and under threat. The game looks fine, the music is fantastic, the story is decent if a little heavy-handed, and the fighting is good too. The long, thin battle arena gives just enough room to make interesting strategy of party member and attack placement, plus it has Paper Mario timing aspects to keep you busy. It hits its stride in the mid section after you have enough options to have fun but before you figure out the most powerful strategies, but that’s probably most RPG system isn’t it. This is a very boring description of a video game sorry - I had a nice time, I promise. Some bits are really good! But I was just mostly playing it to play it. Maybe it’ll be your favourite, don’t let me stop you.

Subsurface Circular

You’re a robot detective just sitting on a train. Other robots come and go around you and in speaking to them you (the player) learn more about the world and you (the player, and the main character) start to get the sense of something big rumbling beneath gossip and rumours. The presentation (nice robots, great fake tube map) elevates the slightly uneven writing which is simultaneously pleasantly brisk and often too cursory to explore it’s own ideas enough. The underlying mystery is enticing, and the final moments rather sudden and not quite earned. But it’s alright.

Deltarune Chapter 2

It’s another chapter of Deltarune, which is good because Deltarune is good, and funny, and touching, with great music and a pretty combat screen. It’s also… the second of many chapters of Deltarune, and so feels very much like another step along a path which will eventually lead somewhere great I’m sure, but that’s a long way off yet. It’s very familiar to Chapter 1, including the obligatory section that goes on way too long - there is progress, development, but little revelation. Luckily your new foe and temporary friend (thanks to the power of trucies) Queen is an instant all-timer.

3 stars because yeah, good job! Video games!

Lifeless Planet

Okay this isn’t 'good’ - but I enjoyed it. You’re a little guy who crashes on a distant planet and then finds out a bunch of Soviets teleported here decades ago and everything went super badly for them. It’s shlocky, very rough, and mostly involves just jumping around between rock formations. But, I don’t know - it’s a lot of fun jumping around between rock formations? You really do feel like a small spaceman jumping around on a very big empty planet, it’s a good sense of scale.

Going Under

Very fun, and funny, roguelike delving into failed startup offices turned dungeons. There’s a decent amount of interesting weapons and abilities, lots of chucking stuff arround and breaking other things in enjoyable wobbly choas. It could do with a few more options to set up your build before you start fighting, and the incredibly loose combat gets finicky and frustrating as the game starts to get harder. Luckily there’s some really good difficulty options to turn on to bring the fun back again. Shout out to your best colleague swomp who says hey beb and probably smells a bit weird and doesn’t care about all this, the perfect man.

Cruel World (Blame Everyone Else)

An experimental platformer that caught on for a while back there - the cruel part is the various terminals and checkpoints around the levels can be hacked and laid claim to, but each claim increases the time of anyone else’s hacks. The platforming feels very strange and unpredictable at first but actually contains a lot of nuance in your bouncy movements and jump timing that I’m not sure I’ve seen before, but it is always hard and those checkpoints very helpful to have. There was a nice little community running, you recognised names on the owner lists, happy to see them again on the other side of a difficult section, tried to leave as many terminals as free as possible for those coming up behind. Originally planned to be on sale for just one day, and to become essentially unplayable in that time - instead, it has persisted and changed, ending up as a beloved treasure sustained by invested players instead of a exercise in hopeless, inevitable failure. Which is nice isn’t it.

In Other Waters

Just great, look at this. Go and look at it, go on. You are the AI in a diving suit, ferrying your lone occupant Ellery across the seafloor of an alien planet. She likes to talk to you (to herself) and you can offer rudimentary positive/negative responses in turn. Otherwise you just have the suit’s functions on screen and an expanding waypoint map to navigate. With these simple tools is delivered a really atmospheric, effective story that moves from tranquil paddle through the shallows to creepy, dangerous expeditions into poisoned darkness as you catalog the plants and creatures of the water, find out what drew Ellery to this planet, and discover secrets in the deep.

My tip is to ignore all the side missions, they involve tedious backtracking which bogs the game down and exposes its weaknesses. You will sadly miss some wonderfully detailed descriptions and sketches of alien life, but you will enjoy the overall experience more I promise. Just use your imagination, picture a freaky little sea mushroom shuddering metal spores into the warm and rushing water, I bet you like that don’t you you little freak.

The Wild at Heart

It’s fake Pikmin baby, what more could you possibly want? Actual Pikmin?? Tough shit. I don’t know why there’s not more fake Pikmins though - the small-scale short-term direction of your helpers is really good, a few over here to carry stuff back to base, a few over here fighitng something, a few breaking down a wall, while you uncover some secrets yourself. Just simple, engaging attention-splitting management, it feels nice to work efficiently even though it’s not neccessary. And then you get an upgrade to control even more little creatures, and so there’s even more little creatures on the screen, and that’s good.

Beast Breaker

Such a good idea for a video game, and it very nearly pulls it off. What if there was a big monster made out of blocks, and you were a little mouse with a sword who could bounce around everywhere to destroy these blocks and then attack the beast’s heart beneath? Not only that, but every time you bounce off something you build up charge to spend on 3 other abilities - and there’s loads of different swords with their own unique abilities and playstyles. Not only that, but you can also swap to bows with their reloading mechanic and ranged attacks or hammers designed around repeating moves to make them stronger. Not only that, you can soon make your own weapons and armour too, take companions into fights, craft potions beforehand. It’s very exciting to begin with, then the flaws start to come through - it’s all slightly rough, there’s too many fights to do, there’s not enough bouncing (see Holedown opinions above) and often the difference between a triumphant victory and miserable loss is just how the enemy decided to randomly move around. Still, nearly there.

Unpacking

It’s the unpacking game. You take all your stuff out of boxes and put it down somewhere in the new place you live, i.e. unpack. Hope you can follow. It’s just very pleasant to do one level every few days as the game and time with it moves from home bedroom to university digs to a house share, relationship move-in.. whoops back home again, and so on. The pleasure of putting things in neat rows, finding their place - the frustration of working around other people’s stuff, awkward spaces. Something like a series of wordless relatable memes, dae need more counter space for their rice cooker, tfw when you give up and just put the yoga map straight under the bed, 7x red flag emojis if he’s got nowhere to hang up your diploma. Sorry for ruining this nice game with these words.

3 stars because yeah. it’s good, it’s a good quality video game. It’s a three star video game check it out. Or don’t.

Morkredd

Pretty fun co-op experience about rolling a big glowing ball around and trying not do die instantly in shadows… and then there is the 'flesh level’.

Ring Fit

Really appreciate this because it got me into a fairly steady exercise routine, and I have since graduated onto other things, which is nice for me. I got like a year and a half out of it, though the more I played the more its problems irritate. I hate how you can’t turn off all the calorie information, which I have absolutely no interest in seeing but still got its claws lightly, unpleasantly into me as I caught myself paying attention to that information on a nice little snack or whatever. The unresolvable tension between the game and exercise elements becomes more apparent - what’s the point in using items to power up and make things easier, when I’m here to work hard and push myself? Why does higher difficulty just mean doing more of the same exercise in a row at once, when a better workout would be doing 'easier’ sets, but for longer? I eventually stopped the adventure mode in favour of custom workouts, though the game feels like it’s missing something between the two options - where you could just say, I want to exercise for about this long, and work mostly on these areas, and have the game spit out something for you to follow.

Refunct

You hop around on these cubes in the water, and they change from grey to a nice green. That’s all. Hoping around on cubes. Great job.

Kittens Game

Third success. I won’t say the best idle game, because I much prefer the ones with actual stories (and which end) like A Dark Room - but this definitely has a certain something about it. I’ve been at it for like 6 months and now I have taken full advantage of metaphysical efficiencies and ready to get my space beacons churning out forbidden relics while I hop carelessly through time to generate antimatter by crushing the timecrystals I get from banishing alicorns back to whence they came. That’s all essentially irrelevant though - as I said, I just want something on my phone I can open now and then and tap on a few buttons to make a number go up instead of doing any work, like Twitter except I am architect of the dark future instead of helpless witness.

Exo One

Only just up here. You’re a ball, manipulating gravity to drag yourself faster down the slopes of craters. You’re a disc, using that momentum to blast a sonic boom up through the clouds. The story is nothing - and worse, at times intrusive. When things don’t quite work and your rolling/gliding combo breaks down, it feels terrible. But when everything aligns, it is indeed very pleasant - to fly, to soar, to skim on stormy water and dive impossible through pink planetary thunderstorms. It should be better, but it’s enough.

4 stars because yeah, shit, this is a really very good game. Although….

Final Fantasy XV

It’s really hard to talk about the meat of the game here instead of the absolute fascinating mess of its development and post-release. They pushed it so hard, backed with a wide-ranging multimedia extravaganza of many forms, none of which really caught on. The game came in smouldering hot and was then changed and updated so much that the answer to questions like 'why is this bit so fucking weird?’ is usually 'oh my god you should have seen what it was like before’ – then there were a load DLC episodes released, including for some reason a multiplayer expansion. Then they had a special 2 year anniversary stream which fans excitedly tuned into, only to be told the director was quitting and the rest of the DLC cancelled. Square Enix truly are unmatched. But - the game, is the game good? Uh you know, yeah! Yeah. Listen, you could use some work too. I wouldn’t say I love the boys that much individually but I do love them all together - somehow, these particular characters being super chatty all the time works. I didn’t realise quite how much I was into it until two specific sections of the game - 1, fantastic, after things have gone really badly for everyone, the upbeat boys time banter is replaced with pissy, frustrated sniping - everyone’s having a fucking miserable time, mad at themselves and each other, an incredibly successful inversion. 2, awful, an entire bad and over-long section when you’re alone and the surrounding silence makes everything so much worse ('oh my god you should have played it when it came out.“) It should not be good, but it is. I really like the ending too.

Vagrant Story

I’ve wanted to play Vagrant Story for ages, like many people I’m sure. 2020 I finally made myself do it - an easy push because I was sure it would be a short-lived experiment before I realised it wasn’t for me and gave up. But - I was completely wrong, I love it. I knew the quality of the writing and visuals were held in high regard, but even these surpassed my expectations and the atmosphere they combine to produce is a thick, fraught melodrama. I was frequency just looking around the pretty little rooms in first-person mode to take in the slant of cold light through high windows.

I made heavy use of a walkthrough because the amount of stats and systems thrown at you is impossible to manage without a nudge in the right direction. It is, eventually, quite simple, and as much about ignoring what’s not important as specialising towards what is - you just need a weapon to cover each type of damage, and some gems to swap between them. And your armour. Oh and all your moves too, and spells maybe. There’s a lot of fussing about in menus, which is easily the worst and most tedious part of the game. It’s very fun once you get going though, with a timing-based combo system that is rewarding to gradually perfect over the course of the game, and there’s nothing better than getting properly set up head to toe and ruining a boss in a single attack chain.

Myst

It’s Myst! You simply 'Myst’ (must) play it. I’m not even sure why it’s so good. I remember this expansive, beautiful thing that took months to complete and notebooks full of scribbled notes. In fact, it’s really small - there’s one pretty simple puzzle in each level, with the notable exception of that endless boring mine cart bit which is only marginally quicker to figure out properly than just complete through trial and error. I have no idea what that’s about. But anyway, it’s still great to work out a puzzle isn’t it, fellow brain users. Elevating the whole experience is the central idea around the ability to write worlds into existence and travel into them, I find it so tantalising and imaginative even today. I would do it good though, not like any of the losers in the game… if only I had another chance. Bring me the yellow pages, friend!

Final Fantasy X-2

A fine game, an incredible game! Please, please never make me play it ever again. The combat system is terrible, trying to be fast but often playing incredibly slow, waiting for long bars to fill up and getting constantly delayed by enemies. Even at its quickest it takes too long to switch outfits - if only you could group a 'pack’ of them together, and so switch between battle 'paradigms’ or something in a second - and there’s too many of them that take too long to level up. When you’re not fighting you’re bombarded with one terrible mini-game after another. The game is barely holding it together - here’s a list of missions, except there’s also missions we’re not listing here so you have to go everywhere anyway, and you might think you’ve done the mission well but you didn’t interact a third time with that one guy so this storyline will just fizzle out with a shrug in two chapters, is that good?

But. I love every single cutscene, I love the set-up and the story, this world trying to pick itself up and work towards a future after everything it was built around disappeared. I love YRP, I love Brother and rival sphere hunter LeBlanc, I love every returning minor character and feel sorry for every returning main character. The light parts are funny and the serious parts heartfelt. Then Yuna gives her speech near the end and it’s simply one of the best things in a video game, I love her.

Genshin Impact

I can’t put in any good words about a gacha game no matter how much I might like it personally so whatever. You can’t just not mention it, then if you do mention it you start going like ooh it’s not sooo bad because you’ve learned to deal with it and blah blah like why the fuck am I doing their dirty work for them fuck off.

4 stars because it’s just a great video game, no notes.

Part Time UFO

You’re a little UFO with a crane game claw - ideally you’re two little UFOs because this is really good to play in co-op. But that’s the game, use your claw to pick things up in tiny levels. Catch fish, stack cheerleaders, tidy up a toy shop. It’s very cute. The control is perfectly balanced between being wobbly and slippery in a fun rather than annoying way, and also allowing you to feel incredibly skilled when you swing your claw and send something spinning through the air to land exactly where you want it. All the levels also have very smart secondary objectives that are usually fun to attempt. They did it.

SNKRX

Another one like Beast Breaker which is just wow, what a great idea. Why didn’t anyone do this before? This one is better though no offence bb. You’re steering your snake around a small arena dodging enemies, and every segment of your snake is a different class like the archer who shoots arrows, engineer who places turrets, psykino who pulls enemies together or infestor who makes critters exploded out of corpses. Then you get items and bonuses and upgrade everything of course, it’s one of these (a game.) I think it’s very pretty for the simple look with block colours. It will burrow into your brain with the potential of different builds. I have not had as much fun going way over the top and looping through levels with a ridiculous creation that fills the screen with deadly nonsense since Risk of Rain, which is about the highest praise I can give.

Tetris Effect

Tetris, you know. I’m pretty bad at Tetris, but I did get better. This one ramps up the tunnel vision zone-out with every level having its own rise and fall in time with the visuals and music to stop you thinking and blinking as much as possible. When it works it really works, but the downside of making every level a unique experience is that some of them suck.

Over the Alps

Really surprised by how good this was. I mean, it’s not that surprising if you look at the game’s lineage. But I was not on board even after playing a decent chunk of the first adventure, a choose your own adventure spy thriller set in the 30s. Everything happens very quickly and I felt there was little to grab hold of as I fought and fled through the mountains. But ten minutes later I was on the edge of my seat - the dashing brush strokes layer to paint a wonderful picture, not just of story but character and characterisation. I couldn’t look away until I was finished, rushing to a final confrontation in the summit snows, exciting on its own terms while absolutely nailing the heightened, arch feel of the genre.

4 stars because it gets the 4 star Alex nod. I don’t have to explain myself. You have no power here. I am going to explain myself a little bit though.

Monolith

Sometimes a roguelike just hits you rogueright you know. This one did, it’s a fast-paced top-down twin-stick shoo-ter. You’re a plane shooting skulls and machines I guess, you do all the roguelike things we know and love, I am describing a video game. It looks cool, it plays great, it’s quick and a bit too hard for me. I guess it’s not a twin stick shooter because you should use the mouse. Well, anyway.

Brave Fencer Musashi

Who is this sassy lost child? Why it’s Musashi, summoned in from another dimension (Japan) to save the fantasy kingdom (Europe) from the evil empire (technology magic.) I hadn’t heard of this until a few years ago, a PS1 action game of bright charm and pleasant variety. It’s not Ape Escape or anything, let’s not get carried away, but it is really good. You go out fighting on your mission, making use of a neat ability-stealing mechanic and then return to town to find out whatever the fuck is happening now. It’s being attacked by zombie vampires, it’s just on fire, it’s being attacked by giant ants. I grew really fond of the town and its people through the game for all this nonsense and I enjoy how obtuse progression can be, so you have to talk to everyone and actually pay attention to what they’re hinting at, as well as playing with the day and night cycle. There’s some really frustrating shit parts but as I said, PS1 game.

Walden, A Game

A game can be a living exhibition of Henry David Thoreau’s time living for a while in the Massachusetts woods in 1845. I think this is wonderful – it’s a light open-world survival game, but the treat is just how much of Thoreau’s words are present, most simply as written in letters and journal, but most effectively narrated as you go about your business. A line for every plant you focus on and every bird flitting across your vision, musings at the water’s edge and as the seasons change. The seasons change beautifully, and when the pond freezes over and you can skate across it with an unexpected burst of speed and joy in the lean depths of winter. It’s not mere pretty words about trees though – Thoreau’s philosophy and actions on abolition and civil disobedience, as well as the lives and losses of his family and friends, entwine the woods as thickly as the blackberry vines.

Atelier Ryza

I’ve wanted to play an Atelier for ages, and now I have. You can do it too if you like. You, too, can play a video game. This is a good one to start with, a gentle JRPG with a focus on crafting, where instead of leaving your small island town to travel acorss the world you keep coming back home again. There is, you know, a little emerging existential threat, but the main point is hanging out with your friends, making a nice hideout in the forest and helping everyone in town with your new alchemy skills. Honestly I did not engage with the crafting too much beyond a normal level until the very end of the game - the last boss just beat me, in a way that I could have won if I tried once more. But instead I spent a few long hours gathering materials to feed into the elaborate creation system, making items to use to make more items, ensuring specific abilities are unlocked and attributes inherited in a long chain. With my new equipment and items, I went back to the boss and won in about 30 seconds - one of the most satisfying epic gamer moments of the year.

Something else I found a lot of fun is how you can feel the concessions to ease this series has made over the years - here, for example, you don’t use your battle items up, you have limited charges instead to spend on 3 things you equip. Obviously to remedy some annoyance players had in previous titles in spending so much time and effort crafting great items only to use them up immediately. Only, this system doesn’t really work either as the scarcity is offloaded onto your charges instead and you don’t want to use those up unless necessary because they’re hard to refresh so you still don’t use your items. Maybe they’ll lean the other way again who knows, I just enjoy this conversation in design.

The Forgotten City

One of the best new things this year no problem. If I say 'secret underground Roman timeloop city where if a sin is committed everyone dies’ and you’re not interested then I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with you. A game where you’re in a little town and you poke your nose into everyone’s business is pretty much the ideal to me. Just walking around getting the lay of the land, talking to people, finding rumours and secrets, telling someone you’re going to kill them just because it’s a fun dialogue option and then fucking legging it through town to escape through a magical portal while everyone dies around you because you didn’t think about a threat being a sin. And you might as well steal a load of money on the way out if it’s already too late. The beauty of timeloop games is you can indulge your gremlin gamer instincts and do whatever you want because it doesn’t matter, just try again next time. And so these experiments and misbehaviours feel more part of the actual experience, not naughty asides you did for fun only to reload to do things 'properly’ afterwards. Anyway this is great, it’s neat and small but with layers to uncover, one really unsettling section, many genre-aware time-saving shortcuts, a very stupid but fun ending, and is just deeply intriguing without being too serious. Wonderful.

Nioh

I’ve been plinking around in Nioh now and then for about six months and will happily do it for another six. Having a great time. It’s nestled in a perfect groove - difficult enough that you need to get into a zone of nice concentration, but not so hard it gets frustrating or bosses take more than a few tries to beat. The levels are compact with plenty of pleasant shortcut-unlocking loops. The fighting is fun with lots of options and I just got the timing down on this ridiculously strong katana counterattack so I am gleeful every time I fight a human enemy because I am about to ruin their entire life. I have no idea what could be happening in the story and I don’t care. Games, games and, indeed, video games.

5 stars because that’s the highest number of stars on the star scale, so these games are some of the best ones. I hope this makes sense but if you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help. Many thanks, kind regards.

Depanneur Nocturne

It’s a rainy night and you dip into a little shop in search of a gift. You pick stuff up and comment on it, you put it back down again or take it up to the till. I think I will refine what I said about The Forgotten City - it’s not just poking around in people’s business that is the best, but just poking around in general. That’s my genre, poking games. I am not taking any feedback on the name. This one is, perfect? Or it hit me perfectly. A whole world created, and all these different objects giving you little sneaky peeks into it. This tiny space, but still crammed with secrets. It’s very confident, coherant, intriguing. And I will just say, although you’ll feel rude and want to stop - do keep pestering for the key to the toilet, because that’s a trip into basement depths to rival the world’s worst Wetherspoons.

The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls

A little proto-Link’s Awakening Gameboy game that never got released outside of Japan. They’re very similar games in many respects, most obviously in the fact that they both fucking rule. This might even be better. There’s really not much to say - it’s great, it’s pacy and funny, the translation patch available is very well written, the princes are in love, you turn into a frog, it’s well-designed and plays around with genre expectations because it’s fun and video games can just be fun you know. I even love the nothing combat which is just a stat comparison and if you’re better then you win - but, that’s what most combat is anyway, at least here it doesn’t waste your time. Plus it means that upgrades are really big upgrades, and suddenly turning around and smashing all the enemies aside instead of even engaging them feels incredible. A game to blast a purifying beam of light straight through your miserable, miserable brain.

Attack Of The Friday Monsters

You can mention this if you want all the cool people to gather round and tell you what great taste you have. You’re a young kid in a ruralish Japanese suburb, it’s a high-summer friendship and innocence jam with a seam of Adult Problems running through, you know the drill. But it’s beautiful, endearing and perfectly judged. This small collection of streets and lanes has a luscious sense of place, and quests give warm insight into the townspeople’s lives. The narrow slices might feel shallow with another framing, but it feels true here, as a kid who knows exactly one weird thing about the guy two doors down. There’s a bad mini-game to play, but there’s also monsters or aliens invaders or maybe it’s just a TV show they record here but also, this kid at school said she heard a rumour…

But this isn’t a game about getting to the bottom of a mystery, you are not playing to find a single answer. Everything is true at the same time, and with that the game embodies the magical potentiality, the contradictory truth of childhood perfectly.

Final Fantasy X

Ah, it’s a nice one. I’ve really enjoyed replaying various Final Fantasies over the last few years, comparing new impressions to old opinions. I was excited to get to X because I remember it fondly but kind of vaguely. I think the colourful aesthetic probably didn’t suit my moody serious teenage idiot period, so I didn’t hold tightly to specific takes as part of my Gamer Identity or whatever the fuck. Anyway we can forget all that now, this is incredible and easily up there for my favourite of the series with IV and VIII.

I love how connected everything is in the world - it’s not an RPG where the threat is an extradimsional darkness that possessed the king, or an invading empire, or a long-forgotten prophecy awakening in the chosen one. That is, a fantasy land set-up pastoral and then something happening to it to spur our heroes on. FFX is the story of itself - the pilgrimage that is the structure, the stops along the way, the enemy you’re facing, absolutely everything is deeply entwined with and present in the culture, traditions, religion, geography, the people of Spira. A world not thrown into chaos but living with it, grown around it for generations.

The best bit is Yuna obviously, the absolute shining star of the game, endlessly charming and complex with I think a perfectly judged voice performance. I love Tidus and Yuna together too, they’re just so cute from the very start, and their relationship believable as awkward flirting shifts into surprising, needed, honest connection. The only acceptable hetero gamer couple.

And the action is also the best bit, perhaps the best turn-based combat has ever been, incredibly smooth and fast-paced, with defined roles but room to strategise, instant and encouraged party switching, and status effects that actually matter for once. You could just do it like this again, video games, please. You had it all. Okay the sphere grid is quite boring for all its potential and blitzball absolutely sucks ass sorry, but what can you do, it’s still one of the best games. And that, as they say, is that. Did you know the VO for Maechen is Dwight Schultz i e. also Barclay from Star Trek.

Katamri Damacy Reroll

Ka, ta. Ma, ri. Da-a-ma-cy. Everybody now. Can’t believe I haven’t played one of these before. I am, as is the normal and natural reaction, very happy that I have now. That’s all, play a Katamari Damacy why don’t you. I wish they’d make a new one, it would be great to have smoother changes to the world as your ball of junk get bigger rather than the wobbly screen effect and all the smaller things disappearing or losing half their polygons. But that doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Sable

Best new game probably, thanks 2021 for this at least. Sable always looked like one I would play, not with a massive amount of excitment, but just that with its pitch and its looks it would inevitably end up on my computer. And it did, and I completely fell in love. I think this is almost my ideal open-world game - the map is a decent size but not too big, there are giant things in the environment to catch your eye and aim towards, and there are lots of small unique things to look at around your feet. Like Shadow of the Colossus which has its giants and ruins, and also a group of cute tortoises in the desert to look at. There’s no rush in Sable, there’s no penalty for exploring where you like, there’s variety in the desert and customisation for its own sake. Enclosed areas with puzzles and expansive landscapes. Crashed spaceships and sand worm mysterious. Big things and little things is the key - so many games get caught up in the middle. The only thing that could elevate this to an all-timer is something like another few powers to get around like your floaty orb, or what if you could stretch the little wings out of your bike when you ramp off a sand dune and actually glide through the air for a while. That would be nice. Also the ending broke and I couldn’t make the choice I wanted, so I decided to become a clown.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

A wonderful treat, I never expected one of the best games to get even more game added to it. I wasn’t even sure how that would be possible, but then this self-contained space colony slash spaceship puzzlebox glides effortlessly into the gravity of Outer Wilds’ solar system like it was always on course. Is this really the only game to be set on a space colony? That can’t be right, right? I don’t think Halo counts that’s just the skybox. This set-up is so good - I was just staring around in awe on my first entry. Who needs a map when you can simply look up, and see the landscape laid out on the other side of the world, water flowing around to meet you. And oh, look there - there’s a third branch to this river current I didn’t see, I bet I could get round if I just make that turn there…

Twice I woke up (correction - was woken up, because of my bastard cat) in the early hours and the solution to a puzzle hit me full on, which is one of the best thing a video game can do to you in my opinion. There’s plenty of the main game’s tricksy just-enough-information delivery, and the story of this doomed cylinder is wonderful as it slowly comes into focus. It’s very pretty too, they’ve done well to make the ship entirely distinct from the design of the rest of the game - all ornate wood and fussy metal fixtures, green firelight and delicate glass projector slides. There are some awful bits - stumbling around in the dark woods, failing to sneak through a ghostly mansion, both scarier and tenser than gliding through Dark Bramble - but, it was hard for me to stay angry at these sections (though I was genuinely miserable at the time) once I realised that I never even had to be there in the first place. You son of a bitch, you’ve done it again.

Space Fuck

Saying 'space’ at the right time in the intro of Star Trek: The Next Generation is my favourite parallelly evolving folk game, and here is the video game of the popular video of that.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

I’d probably give this four stars now I’m all finished, but I wanted to write about it last so whatever. It’s very good anyway, don’t worry about it.

I do really like it when things end - things such as TV shows, or a day at work, or writing ten thousand words about video games for no good reason. FFXIV is not over, obviously, but the story that began more than ten years ago in the original release and has arced over the complete overhaul re-release and 3 expansions comes to a conclusion at the end of this 4th. That’s very nice to me, more games should end please.

I had my obsessed-with-Final-Fantasy-XIV phase quite a long time ago, before the first expansion even came out, so my emotions have since mellowed - in a pleasant way, to be clear. This is my old friend, these are my old friends, and I’m happy to hang out with them again. Endwalker was really working for me though, the old fires of excitement stoked up. They’ve got really good at making this game. First of all I adore how much it just doesn’t care about you fighting anything. I might have killed like 2 enemies before I had levelled up 3 times and was heading into the first dungeon. I think it takes a confident team to push such a high ratio of walking and talking to action, and it totally worked for me, including this new thing where you can run around town with a couple of your NPC pals and talk about things together like you’re in a real RPG.

The pacing does suffer in spots - this is mostly down to the expansion structure they’ve always stuck to. There are six new areas all about the same size, and the story quests, pacing, experience rewards, expand to fill the space first and the needs of the narrative second. I think the last zone in particular rather belabours its point before the climax.

But prior to all that, there’s this mystery running through the game which I found effectively delivered, intriguing, threatening. Even under everything you are currently dealing with there is the sounds of something else cracking foundations far beneath your feet. Things ratchet up and it feels as though the game could go in any number of really interesting, risky directions. It does not. It takes the safest option in one plot thread, and the revelation of the real big bad lost my interest fairly swiftly. Something more personal fades into a kind of stupid 'if the universe is going to end in a trillion years then what’s the point of doing anything, actually I am going to kill you now to save you the bother’ position - not exactly unusual in a JPRG, but a bit of a disapointment, worse off for comparison to the previous expansion.

Most frustratingly, there are threads of characterisation which would work perfectly if they were pulled on a little more, but they are gestured at and left lying. There could have been a desperate plea to be shown light and hope from a small voice in the darkness, in contrast to everything they had been exposed to and absorbed. What we get is mostly a blunt nihilism I have no interest in analysing, it’s boring!

But look, this is far from a failure all together, and as much as I can complain around the edges of the threat, the response to it works. Everyone in the game agrees with me, but they can’t just say oh fuck off and so fight on in earnest with love in their hearts. (Though with a distinct lack of input from the so-called beast tribes for most the story, odd after previous patches have tried to right some wrongs in this area.) It’s just always going to work on me, when countless secondary characters gather to wish you well, when your main gang stand firm beside you, when you find a burst of strength in the power of friendship - when you can finally breathe in the peace of the days after. The final, bittersweet farewells got me so bad.

So yeah, you know. I wish it had been riskier but I am critical not disappointed. That’s it, take it easy everyone. Oh and please do a time skip before the next expansion thanks.

If you made it this far, bless you. Was that any good? Feels kind of pointless and cursory to me, but such is life. 2022 I’m not playing any more shit, 4 stars and up only. All bangers no clangers. If I play even one 3 star game I am going to flip out. Bye love you bye x

[yostarside]

Hey, so like, who can I talk to about Before Your Eyes?

I got finished playing this game on stream about an hour or two ago (the VOD will be on YouTube soon) and when I tell you I felt so many emotions in about two hours, my eyes were waterfalls by the time I reached the credits. The game has a very cool mechanic where you control it by blinking (yeah you set up a webcam and you progress through the story by blinking which is one of the COOLEST GAME MECHANICS I'VE EVER EXPERIENCED). Aside from the mechanic, the story fucked me up emotionally so bad.

If you haven't seen any gameplay or seen anything at all, it's absolutely one hundred percent worth a try, like THIS GAME WAS ROBBED AT THE GAME AWARDS LAST YEAR

[kirabaileyapologist]

PSA: I’m not trying to brag. I am incredibly grateful and I’m just excited to show everyone.

For my first post, these are the NINE dolls I got this Christmas! I asked my mom for Kira, and the WBU dolls if possible, but she said she ended up going overboard and bought me Marisol, Grace, Kanani, Josefina and Marie-Grace as well! Fun fact: My mom actually confused Grace with Marie-Grace, so she accidentally bought me a second Marie-Grace (I got one secondhand in 2018) however this one is in absolutely perfect condition. I think I’ll probably sell my first one and maybe buy Corinne.

Here’s some descriptions of their personalities. I’m keeping their interests canon, but I chose their birthdays/zodiacs, MBTI types, etc.

Marisol Luna (GOTY ‘05)

she/her

16 years old

Libra

ISFJ

Josefina Montoya (35th Anniversary)

she/her

15 years old

Virgo

INFP

Marie-Grace Gardner (Historical)

she/they

14 years old

Pisces

ISFP

Kanani Akina (GOTY ‘11)

she/her

15 years old

Cancer

ESTP

Grace Thomas (GOTY ‘15)

she/her

16 years old

Aquarius

ESFJ

Kira Bailey (GOTY ‘21)

she/her

14 years old

Sagittarius

ISFJ

Evette Peeters (WBU)

she/they

15 years old

Taurus

INFJ

Maritza Ochoa (WBU)

she/they

16 years old

Aries

ENFP

Makena Williams (WBU)

she/her

16 years old

Gemini

ENFJ

I’m so happy to welcome all of them to my doll family! <33

[matildathewolf]

Alright Psychonauts fans; if Psychonauts 2 doesn’t get nominated for at least one category tomorrow, we riot.