Discover Top Posts Tagged with #pyre

Oh look, an excuse to talk about games I like.

Each game will get its own paragraph explaining its placement, bolded titles at the start so if any of these are games that have you go "oh what's that?" or "why is that in that category? you're an idiot" you can quickly jump to those bits.

Before I go into that, Dispatch and Invisible, Inc both are in my "strong recommend" category even though I couldn't find a category to neatly fit them into here. Dispatch is a good narrative game, Invisible, Inc is a good procedural "raid the base" game with a high skill ceiling as you get used to the way the game flows.

Favourite of All Time: Dragon Age Origins

So this, Valkyria Chronicles 4, and Pyre are all kinda in contention for this spot. I put this one here because of the three it least qualifies for the alternative categories. An epic fantasy RPG from around 2009, the game gives you The Darkspawn as a generic faceless overwhelming horde of monsters that will destroy Fereldan, and you as the last Grey Warden (a sacred order dedicated to fighting them) has to handle all the interpersonal political bullshit to convince the continent that yes, the Darkspawn are real, and no, they cannot be reasoned with. A very complex world where your methods of trying to unite the world can result in party members choosing to leave the party (or actively trying to kill you). Your choices matter in this game more than in games that tell you how much they matter. It's possible to be a lone wolf going up against the Archdemon as just yourself as the stress of trying to save the world has you push everyone away. Or you can go up against the Archdemon with a full party from all walks of life coming together for a fight they don't think they'll walk away from. It doesn't handle romance very well, I accidentally ended up in a relationship with the evil witch party member because I was nice to her, but the size and depth of the game world has me prepared to overlook that and she took it well when I dumped her after realising I was apparently dating her.

Best Story: Valkyria Chronicles 4

I could also give this to Pyre, but this was really the best spot to slot VC4. Valkyria Chronicles 1 was a tonally confused game where the narrative was telling us all about how awful war was and how it's wrong to kill people with magical weapons, but it's totally okay to kill people with tanks. The impossible-to-kill super magical powerful antagonist also sacrifices herself for zero reason because they couldn't figure out a way to justify defeating her in battle. The gameplay was great, though the scout unit was overpowered and trivialised everything. VC4 pretends that the even bigger messes that are 2 and 3 didn't exist, and is set at the same time as the first game but in a different part of the continent as you now play as the Heroes of the Federation instead of the Gallian Militia. As Heroes of the Federation, you get a narrative about how "yeah killing sucks but if we don't kill to defend our families then they'll die", which is much less confused and much more poignant. Especially as the Empire only have about two actually morally evil characters. The main antagonist you face on the battlefield explicitly is only fighting you because "yeah killing sucks but if I don't kill to defend my family they'll die". Because whatever the bigger reasons for war, typically the people actually on the front lines aren't actually a part of that. They're fighting for their own reasons. This leads to battles where the antagonist actively discourages his troops from unnecessary bloodshed, and there are several moments where you as the commander have to make decisions where there are no right answers and the main cast remain divided on what you should have done. It's basically the best kind of sequel that took the good parts of the original game but then took them to the next level, even rebalancing the entire game around the overpowered Scout class by buffing every other class so now the narrative scenes about needing cooperation stand strong. Because you genuinely need most classes represented in each mission to stand a chance.

Favourite Art Style: Return of the Obra Dinn

This is a One-Bit Wonder. It's in One-Bit. Only two colours are used for the entire game, which is a three-dimensional seafaring vessel (The Obra Dinn). The art style adds to the atmosphere, as you board the Obra Dinn and try to figure out what happened to the entire crew by using your magic pocket watch that will display a tableaux of the exact moment of death of any corpse you find. A good detective game made by the same guy who made Papers, Please as you piece together who everybody is and how they're connected to the broader mystery. Not as much to write about this one because it's basically a mystery. The gameplay is solving the mystery by learning the story in a nonlinear sequence. You need to play it with as little knowledge as possible for maximum enjoyment.

"I'll Finish It Someday": Undertale

Yeah this one always upsets people. I remember playing The Stanley Parable and being completely obsessed with it, and then Doki Doki Literature Club came out (I wrote a university essay on that one), and all of my friends were like "Oh, you like meta games? You'll love Undertale!" So I booted up the game, thinking about tackling the game like you would tackle those other two. Try to break everything (climbing out the window in Stanley Parable, pre-emptively deleting Monika in Doki Doki). So Tauriel told me to wait in the room. So... I waited in the room for ten minutes. Then nothing happened. And everyone was like "well of course not!" as if they hadn't got me into it by comparing it to games that would reward you for doing that. So I just struggled to get into it, but I did end up having fun with it. I reached the town with all the dogs (no I don't remember what it was called or anything more than that, I'm always asked this as well), and then I quit, planning to get back to it another day and then it's several years later and I just didn't. It wasn't bad. I know enough about it because of how often it comes up in game discourse. Basically I was just introduced it in a very unhelpful way that made me not get on the hype train. But I'll play it someday. Maybe.

Big Personal Impact: Hype The Time Quest

I am now old enough that this and my "Back in the Day" game are very interchangeable. Stuff I played as a kid would go on to have huge impact on me, but I decided to put this here instead of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. If you're looking at the box art thinking "hold up, is that a Playmobil and Ubisoft colab?" then the answer is yes. Yes it was. This was when Ubisoft was known for making Rayman and Playmobil was perceived as off-brand Lego. Okay so that second bit is still the same. We bought it in one of those Scholastic Magazine things you could order from school because it had a knight and a dragon on the front cover. The game is a fantasy epic about a knight (Hype) who is sent back in time four generations by a mysterious black knight who raids the King's celebration while riding on a dragon. Hype works with a local trainee mage (Gogoud) to try and send himself back to his own time and save the king. Except he has to go the long way round, as the magic crystals that allow for time travel can only jump you forward in thirty-ish year increments. So you get to see people grow up, the city change, but then as you keep reappearing at key historical events you become a figure of legend that the Black Knight now knows is coming. As a kid it was my first real exposure to that level of world building and it definitely sits with me as where a lot of my joy of interactive narratives (like tabletop RPGs) come from. Nobody is too sure how Playmobil made such a great game after that horror fest that was The Playmobil Movie, but they did. Yes, they made a movie to try and rival Lego's and they no joke go from an upbeat musical number into smash cut of the police arriving at a kid's door to tell her that her parents are dead. It's really weird. This was also really weird, but turned out a lot better.

Best Combat: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds

A TV show tie-in game being actually good? Woah. But yeah. My biggest annoyance in action games is when you're one 1HP, and then you like... trip over a bug or something and then your character is thrown into the air like it was a lethal hit, despite being unphased by a bazooka to the face two minutes earlier. Chaos Bleeds has a good mechanic where characters (you and enemies) have an HP Bar, but you don't die unless you're hit with a finishing move after you hit 0HP. So you can never die from being kicked in the shins. If you're dying it's because you got beaten up and then let yourself get grabbed and bitten by a vampire. In the same way, if you hit a vampire to 0HP with punches, they don't just die. But now you can hit them with a wooden stake and it's an autokill. If you set them on fire though, that will just burn them up because vampires are weak to fire. It's just good and fluid gameplay where things only die when it makes logical sense for them to die. Also they give you a super soaker filled with Holy Water in one level and if that's not the most satisfying way to set vampires on fire I don't know what is.

You Like but Everyone Hates: DC Superhero Girls: Teen Power

So this came out in 2021 in a Nintendo Direct where a bunch of men made fun of it for not being targeted at men. Uh... I don't know how else to describe it. The YouTube trailers got bombed with dislikes and it was a really bad time and some game stores then decided to not stock it at launch because of the pre-emptive negative reception. So like... definitionally it belongs here. Not sure if "everyone" hates it, but it released into a culture that had already decided it sucked. It's a pretty generic beat 'em up game where you play as the kidified versions of DC Superheroes and Supervillains. I think that the game (and TV show) do my favourite version of "aged down characters" universe, with Supergirl's super hearing being nerfed because she doesn't understand the words the adults are using while she's eavesdropping, Hal's power ring doesn't work because he's too afraid to tell Carol he wants to break up with her, and Harley and Babs are best friends at school and have no idea that they're actually fighting each other late at night. The game isn't 10/10 amazing, but it's enjoyable and has an old-school game design mentality around collectibles. I did my usual "try to break the game" approach, finding polygons narrowly sticking out of the edges of building to try and climb on places I'm not meant to go, only to find collectibles hidden there. Don't go into it expecting the greatest game ever, but you can tell that the game designers actually played games in the 90s/2000s with how they hid collectibles and leave you very little clues so you actually have to push the limits of the game for yourself to find them all.

You Hate but Everyone Likes: The Walking Dead (Season Four)

Full disclosure: I could put seasons one or two in this spot too. As a fan of the decision-making-as-gameplay genre, I truly cannot stand the Walking Dead series and I do not understand why it is the series that popularised the genre. Zombie media ends one of two ways: everybody dies, or everybody gets on a boat. If you build a settlement, it will fall. That's just the rule. Seasons One and Two are just a string of bad things happening to people and the best "ending" is just... where any episode could have left off. Because it's just people walking through the wilderness hoping to find somewhere to stay. I can't connect to a world where there is no world, and no character can survive for more than ten hours of screentime. Season Four is able to avoid this problem by being set long enough into the apocalypse that societies do survive. And then realised that they had nowhere left to take the story. "Oh, let's cover ourselves in zombie guts again". "What if... zombies are intelligent creatures?" despite the barn scene of getting them to look at the loud noise being done in season one by Molly as her way of tricking them into going one way so she can freely move another. No, they're not intelligent. James is an idiot. You know the story has run out of places to go when they try to portray James's point of view sympathetically. But the biggest nail in the coffin for me is that it just became a pandering fest. I know that Skybound took over development because of the love of fans after Telltale went under. But... adding the option to spit on Marlon's grave when up until that point Marlon was portrayed as a traumatised and scared kid who was in over his head feels ridiculously out of place. Until you remember that the fandom at the time were 13 year olds who all knew a Marlon-like person at their school who they hated and so decided he was an irredeemable piece of shit. So now the game had to include that. Everyone likes romance stories? You HAVE to romance Violet of Lewis. You don't have to, but the game judges you pretty hard for rejecting either of them. I chose "check on the barricades with Violet" because that felt way more useful than tuning the piano. Then she tries to flirt with me and I'm like "what?" and then I get the whole "Violet is upset" thing in the credits or whatever. And then you have to choose which of them isn't kidnapped. Dispatch handled the romance far better by making it completely optional and made you feel like you weren't missing out by not dating anyone. Walking Dead 4 makes you feel like you made a mistake by not dating anyone. And we won't talk about Clementine's fake out amputation. I just realised how many words that was. But yeah. Not a good series. If you enjoy them, that's fine. People enjoy what they enjoy and get value out of what they find value in. I just am not one of those people.

Underrated: Age of Mythology

Being the spin-off/sort of sequel to Age of Empires II put this game in an impossible situation. The fact that AOEII is still getting expansions over twenty years after its release shows that nothing else in the franchise will be able to compare. Growing up, this was largely considered to be Age of Empires III until they went and actually released AOEIII. Thus making it even more forgettable until it is now referred to as "that weird fantasy spin-off of the popular franchise". Age of Mythology is what happens if you combine Starcraft's "different factions get different mechanics" with AOEII's vibe and desire to capture elements from the cultures they're based on. So you get the Greeks playing like your standard Age of Empires game, the Norse designed for aggressive playstyles where they generate resources by attacking and their military units are the ones that can build buildings, and the Egyptians who are kinda doing their own thing but don't actually need to use all the resources until the endgame. And the age-up system is tweaked to instead be about choosing a minor god to gain the buffs of, so you can adapt your strategy on the fly rather than having all your bonuses pre-set upon starting a game. As a kid I just picked whichever one I thought looked the coolest. Now I pick the one I think looks the coolest and pivot my strategy to justify that choice based on their buffs. I enjoy it because AOEII feels too big-brainy for me and the units are all generic medieval dudes. AOM lets me get a little army of cyclopses to throw around my opponent's infantry like ragdolls and so feels more fun even though I'm sure mechanically I'm doing exactly the same thing as AOEII.

Overrated: Fire Emblem Three Houses

Yeah I had all my friends get mad at me for this one when it came out. I played Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones back in primary school and I was immediately caught up in it. A simple fantasy narrative about a band of adventurers saving the world, with the enjoyability coming from the cast. Your band of misfits would slowly grow, and you'd unite the people you had. Cutscenes deliberately contained few characters from the ensemble, so that the main source of "main characters" was determined by who was actually on the front line doing the fighting and getting screentime. Your party needed the right combination of characters to have proper class coverage. Class choices mattered because they'd lock you out of certain gear. It was a good ensemble cast who felt important, and an RPG where your tactical decisions mattered. Three Houses did neither of those things and added in creepy teacher behaviour. A political narrative where cutscenes are dictated by your starting party creates huge dissonance between gameplay and story. "It sucks we had to kill our friends", Sylvain says, despite having sat on the bench the entire game and never having fought everyone and also all of his friends are a part of the house but just vanish for cutscenes. You can either be a political narrative, or be an epic "recruit everyone". Doing both just makes both feel weak and cheap. Same with class selection. Put everyone on a dragon and they can still use any weapon (except gauntlets). But the point is bows have gone from "a risky decision" to "everyone can just hold one regardless of their class". Three Houses is a dumbed down streamlined Fire Emblem that is enjoyable, but is just a hollow shell of what the series was. Also... the teacher (who is 21 - you can calculate Byleth's age based on when Jeralt ran away from the monastery) spending time with a 14 year old until she likes him enough to join his class is low key messed up. As I began working in schools this game became harder and harder to enjoy as more and more red flags popped up. I do play the game but I just skip all the cutscenes as the lore is inconsistent with the gameplay (and then I don't have to witness the weird teacher/student behaviour).

Game You Have the Most Hours In: Super Smash Bros Ultimate

By pure hour count according to my Switch, it's this game. However most of those hours are because we use my Switch for the school tournaments. Definitely played a bunch. Definitely not good at it. But it's fun. Not a lot to say here.

Game You Always Come Back To: Obscure

I thought about putting this in Favourite of All Time or Best Combat? But I think it's more a case of "Best Adaptation". Because this is one of the few horror games I've played that actually feels like a Horror Movie because if a character dies, the story goes on without them. Not in the way that a "choices matter" game does. In the way that it's a survival horror game where you're trying to find your friend who's been kidnapped by someone, and as you move through the abandoned school if your character is killed then the game just cuts to one of the other students who is still alive. Anyone can die because if you mess up, that character will now be absent from the story. The cutscenes have been made to include any combination of characters to ensure it'll always work. Also to prevent savescumming, it gives you limited save items. Usually I hate that, but given that you have five "lives" in the form of students, you get enough save items to clear each area (saving when you find the discs basically gives you a checkpoint system), and the gameplay is more about "did I like that character more than I like the last ten minutes of progress I made?" My first playthrough was a bloodbath. Now I zip through and still have fun with it and whenever I just want to mindlessly run a game I run this one. It's just a shame about the sequels...

That Atmosphere... : The Painscreek Killings

They made a ghost town, gave you a newspaper article saying that someone was murdered in the mansion at the top of a hill a few years ago, and then said "go figure out who really did it". There is zero handholding. You can begin by exploring about four different locations that all will give you the beginnings of a different plot thread that could help you find the truth. I managed to solve the mystery and skipped an entire segment of lore. I think this game is probably the peak of emergent storytelling? It perfectly captures the vibe of being a journalist walking through an abandoned town. Complete with managing to give you that eerie feeling that somebody is watching you. Despite not having another character model watching you. The ending is very divisive, but this was a game that was unsettling enough just from how it portrayed its environment that I did end up having dreams set in the abandoned town after playing it too late at night. I like the ending and think it's the only way to end it. Other people do not. But the atmosphere is universally praised by the ten of us that have played this game and it should be.

Bad Day Cure: Poco

This one is free to play, for all you people who are interested in gaming but don't have money you can download this one! The game has moments of sadness, but brings it all together wholesomely. It's a thirty minute puzzle game where you're a clown who gets kicked out of a circus for not being good enough, and then you have to use those clown skills for the people on this little island to get the supplies to build a rocket. A cute little game about friendship and you can honk a giant clown nose. Not a lot to say about it because it is so short, except if you ever played Putt Putt or Freddie Fish it's like if one of those games came out in the modern era. And if you're a clown.

Favourite Protagonist: Pyre

As mentioned in the Dragon Age Origins section, this is in contention for my favourite game. You are a Reader in a fantasy world where literacy is illegal. You get exiled to The Downside, where all criminals are sent. You end up in the wagon with a mismatched crew called the Nightwings who tell you that they need a Reader so they can compete in the Rites. What are the Rites? Three-on-three basketball games but everyone's using their fantasy species' powers, where the best performing Triumvirate get rewarded with liberation to return to the Commonwealth. Yeah the Fantasy RPG NBA Jam kinda comes out of nowhere, but the premise is simple: you are unable to compete, but can read the stars and act as the coach. They can compete and potentially earn freedom for the Nightwings. From there you get a slow introduction to the lore of both the Commonwealth and the Downside as you compete in the Rites and assemble a Triumvirate of people from all the different fantasy species. The first reason the game is so good, and this is a minor spoiler but I think it's an important part of the hook, is that the winning team does not ALL get liberated. ONE of them gets liberated. So to free all nine eventual party members, you have to compete in nine liberation rites. If you lose a liberation rite, the other team liberate someone instead and the narrative will continue with that antagonist absent from the story. This means that the narrative is written in a way where any of the nine party members COULD be competing in the final rite. So everyone has main character potential, and character arcs are determined by who's still in the Downside, and who you've granted freedom. It also forces you to actually use everyone as the characters you use the most are the ones you like the most and so you want to liberate them. But the reason that this is under "best protagonist" is that the Reader is hugely open as a character. The reason that you can't compete in the Rites depends on you. You get asked why you're limping by the Nightwings upon meeting them, and you get a few answers. "I'm injured" and "I'm old" are the two I remember, and if you are old it changes how the characters interact with you. If you're injured, you'll be asked about the injury. Your explanation becomes canon when you give it. But also, unlike other Visual Novel games (yeah it's a visual novel when you're not playing basketball), when you get a dialogue option, you can hover your mouse over it and it has a little thing pop up showing a longer explanation for your answer. So it avoids the "no" but then you start cussing someone out. You can hover over the "no" and it describes the motive for why you're saying no/the intensity behind it. So you have more informed decisions. They're a blank slate character done right. Because all versions of The Reader (whether you're selfish or selfless) have a valid reason to remain with the Nightwings. I've gone on way too long for this bit, but at least you know I can ramble about things I like as well as things I don't like.

After Work Relaxation: Party Hard

When I do the kids holiday program I run, when I'm on break I am playing this on my work laptop. You're a guy trying to sleep, your neighbours are having a loud party, you go over there and have to kill everyone. Stealth-based puzzle game as you gotta figure out how to kill everyone in the house without getting caught. Fun little game. Story is garbage as they take the premise and try to make it something deep. Gameplay is fun.

Biggest Letdown: Mass Effect 3

Oh boy. The Mass Effect franchise is basically "What if Dragon Age was a shooter and sci-fi?" The answer is "good but not as good." Mass Effect 1 is peak. Mass Effect 2 has an amazing ensemble cast, the gameplay I think took a step backwards, but the worldbuilding and cast and atmosphere had be keen and I get why it became as popular as it did. The final mission is iconic for a very good reason. So to go into Mass Effect 3 and only finishing it out of obligation... really sucked. I wanted to like it. But they already less good/more streamlined gameplay of ME2 got even more streamlined and diminished. The DLC stories are actual stories which is good. But when the comic relief fandom-pandering DLC is legitimately better than the actual game (and you know how much I hate pandering content) says a lot about the quality of ME3. People most often talk about the ending of ME3 as the worst part (at least that was the discourse when I was a kid when it came out to the point that I knew what the possible endings were despite never playing the game). Honestly I think the ending is totally fine and understandable. There are only two ways the story can end with the Reapers attacking. Them giving you two endings just makes sense. Insert the usual "it's about the story you told to get there not the ending" argument that every interactive narrative gamer makes. This game is only worth playing because the first two games are that good that it's worth putting up with this slog fest to wrap it up.

"Back in the Day" Game: Marvel Ultimate Alliance

I played this on the Original XBox so often as a kid. My sister and I would walk up the road to the local DVD rental store (yeah, I'm that old), and we would pick a random game that looked cool and hire it for the week. One day we stumbled across this. We spent so much money on this game it's not even funny. Then when they started selling their ex-rental games we ran up there to buy it immediately. Worth noting: this game came out BEFORE the MCU was a thing. This is the game that popularised Deadpool. The premise of the game was "bring together the A-List Marvel characters (Spider-Man, Wolverine, Thor, Captain America, the Fantastic Four), a few teams, and then they brought in some of the "who the heck are you?" picks as a way of seeing which C-Listers could be pushed into the limelight. Here comes Deadpool, the kinda odd X-Men rep who probably only made it in because this was an indirect sequel to X-Men Legends 2. His fourth-wall breaking shenanigans and several secret dialogue options had him get added into basically everything, creating "Deadpool Fatigue" as comic fans got fed up seeing him everywhere. The Deadpool movie was because of his launch into fame. But also this game was a hugely detailed RPG disguised as a fandom beat 'em up. If you're on the hard difficulty and you're not optimising your teams powers and suit upgrades for maximum synergy, you will be killed in the first boss fight. So many memories of this. I would play as the Human Torch and shoot fire everywhere and annoy my friends because nobody could see anything underneath my fire covering the screen. 10/10 do recommend.

"Not the best, but having fun...": New Tales from the Borderlands

Okay so the original Tales from the Borderlands is the greatest Telltale Game ever made. This is important context going into this game. Telltale got the Borderlands license from Gearbox, were told "you can use Zer0 as a cameo in the first episode, but just tell a low key story set in the same world as our big series". Then the fandom absolutely loved it despite the gameplay being all narrative. Then Telltale aquired the rights to Game of Thrones. They made the assumption that the Game of Thrones game would make more money (like The Walking Dead did), so they funneled staff and resources away from Tales to put them on GoT. The dev team reached out to Gearbox for help. Gearbox said "everyone loves this, what do you need?" They got permission to then pivot the story to end with a huge lore-changing event that Borderlands 3 would have to include in its canon. GoT would go on to be forgotten about. Everyone was desperate for a sequel that never came. I played Tales from the Borderlands without playing any other Borderlands game and absolutely loved it. This is around 2014. Around 2020/2021, it got leaked that Gearbox were now making their own in-house sequel to Tales from the Borderlands. The hype was real. Unfortunately there was no world where this game could live up to a passion project that got granted permissions to grow in scope over the episodic release schedule. So I went in with low expectations because literally any expectations would be disappointing. To make it worse, it got released in 2022. Developed through the COVID pandemic with very little budget. The game has the charm of the original game, but... they just didn't have the resources to make it work. They get creative with how they worked around the budget, the greatest example being a fight scene they couldn't animate so instead Octavio grabs a mic and commentates on the fist fight like a WWE announcer, with the camera tracking him and his reactions to the off-screen fight. A choice that makes absolute sense given the circumstances of its release. It's also a choice that makes it fail to have the impact of the original. It's not a letdown because we came into it knowing it couldn't succeed. It's absolutely worth playing and I really love it, but I know that I am playing a holding pattern thinking about what could have been.

Criminally Underrated: Crookz: The Big Heist

This game is exactly how you do a heist game. You get the planning sequence of the characters discussing the security measures in the place you're about to rob. Then you can pause the game to cue up the team's actions as you scatter throughout the venue, deactivating cameras and alarms at the exact time to help your other crooks get through. Spend an hour with the game paused setting the waypoints, then press play and finish the mission in two minutes. Or if something goes wrong, you pause again and quickly remake a plan on the fly. You get the feel of a well oiled machine as well as the panic of "oh no the guards have seen one of us" and improvising. The story is also very 60s heist movie. Top tier game. Also a strong recommend.

Depressing Game: This War of Mine

This game was partially developed to show people the realities of growing up in a war zone. It's a survival game. It uses very realistic depictions of war. It is very difficult to play because it just is very depressing because the effect of war on innocent bystanders is very real and very horrific. The game is doing exactly what it is trying to do. I must commend it on that. I also do not really enjoy playing it for the same reasons that it is good at doing what it is trying to do.

Favourite Active Franchise: Danganronpa

If 2x2 wasn't coming out I would not have had an answer for this one. I don't tend to enjoy new release games because I don't have the disposable income for them. But I wrote my Honours Thesis on this franchise and how it functions as an interactive narrative. There's a lot to this series. I've picked UDG as the icon for it in the image because it's my favourite one in the series, Komaru is the best protagonist, Toko getting actual character growth after her weird portrayal in THH, and Monaca is a villain who actually knows how to do evil things instead of bragging about how evil she's going to be. The way the games demonstrate and acknowledges the reality and power of pain and suffering, while also naming that this reality doesn't have to be the end is good story theming and the Killing Game backdrop is perfect to tell that narrative. Just remember that the Killing Game is the framing device, not the point.

Indie Pick: The Path

So like... a lot of the games on here are indie. I put this game here because of the games I like, this is the most Indie in terms of gameplay. You wonder around a forest blindly trying to find things to interact with. Six sisters take it in turns to journey to grandmother's house. Each of them face a different "wolf", representing a different struggle of growing up. The vibes are great, but unlike The Painscreek Killings, this game doesn't have the same obvious objective/gameplay, which is why this is here for its indieness instead of over there for its atmosphere. It's filled with little extra optional details and encounters in the way that only running around in the woods without a map can be.

Not Usually My Thing, But...: Halo 3 ODST

This is the only FPS on here. I tend to not play FPS games that much. Partially because I'm not good at them. Partially because generally they get very action-oriented narratives if they have one at all. I played Halo: Combat Evolved growing up and loved it because each gun had a distinct gameplay purpose. Halo 2 was like... very "eh" and felt like it was trying too hard. 3 and Reach were forgettable. ODST made me actually care because it's not about big epic space battles where nothing uses its proper name. You're a regular soldier whose ship crashed as the alien invasion of earth starts. You wake up ten hours AFTER the aliens have established a foothold. The game flicks between you walking around the deserted city streets while evading alien patrols, and flashbacks of your squad fighting back the best they can without you. Eventually the two paths connect and I don't really remember a lot of the story but I just remember being invested in the squad which I cannot say the same thing about for any other Halo game.

Postlude

Feel free to agree/disagree/ask other questions about gaming preferences. There's a lot here but these posts are best if you then actually use it as a launching point for deeper conversation. Feel free to share your own game lists! The blank template is here, I don't actually remember where it came from I saved it to my laptop like seven years ago after scrolling around on Deviantart.

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