Picked up Bio-Prototype (Steam Early Access) this weekend and it’s pretty fascinating -- sort of a hybrid of Vampire Survivors with the wand-building system from Noita.
Gameplay takes place in waves of 1-3 minutes, and at the end of each wave, you’re rewarded with cells (gold), nerves, and organs:
* Organs perform some kind of attack (melee swings, shooting bullets, spawning helper creatures, applying buffs/debuffs) whenever they’re activated by a nerve they’re connected to.
* Nerves activate their attached organs. Some simply fire periodically, but others have a trigger condition: taking damage, hits/crits/kills by a parent organ, inflicting debuffs, etc. Nerves have an “efficiency” which modifies the strength of the organs downstream of them; generally, fast-firing nerves have lower efficiencies.
So, between waves, you connect nerves and organs together to create crazy chains of attacks. e.g. “I shoot a bullet every 2 seconds; every time it hits a target, it spawns a sword there that melees anything in range, and also generates an explosion, and if that explosion kills something, it spawns X...”
You can rearrange and replace your organ/nerve tree freely between rounds, and most characters will let you have multiple trees running at once. Different characters put different bonuses and limits on how you’re allowed to combine attacks and how powerful attacks are.
The early stages of each run can be challenging, but once you get going on a run, it’s fun to see what crazy things you can cobble together from the flesh you’ve got.
(Expand “keep reading” for spoilers re: Wolfstride’s ending)
Reusing the mech combat UX for “Dominic overcoming his guilt by having a symbolic swordfight with the ghost of his dead master” was almost a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the finale of Wolfstride.
(It almost makes up for the corny monologuing and deus ex machina ending. And I feel vaguely dirty about cheesing the Engelbrecht fight by just spamming Unwarranted Self-Esteem to drain her Nano Gauge so that she couldn’t repair.)
There’s a ton of genres that just don’t hook me — gacha, horror, most VNs. But I can look at Genshin Impact or Honkai Impact (or Outlast, or Eliza) and see an absolutely beautiful, well made, widely loved game that just isn’t my thing.
So I'm wondering about the actual practicality of this sort of engine. Holy water is the easy one: by Vatican rules, you can replicate it endlessly so long as you can add relatively pure (in the clean sense, not the religious sense) water to it.
But blood is harder to get. Yes, it is renewable, needing only water and iron and some other materials, but it's still relatively rare and expensive in the real world and we've got 8 billion people and good sanitary practices.
How do you mass produce blood for this sort of thing? Do you have, like, a civic duty for people in your city to donate blood once a week or something? How do you store all this blood and keep it fresh? Do you even need to keep it fresh?
Does having this much blood on hand make your city a target for more vampires? Like, what if a powerful family of vampires decides to do a heist on your blood bank?
And does the blood need to be human for this to work? Or could, like, you have a huge flock of sheep or cows or something that you use as your blood supply. That'd definitely help, especially if you don't have the kind of sanitation we have these days to make donating blood not such a risky business.
Also if you have a city that makes all the citizens "donate" blood... Well first of all it's not much of a donation, is it? It's no longer voluntary. But more importantly, if you're powering your city using the blood of the citizens, in what way is your city different from a vampire? Cities are immortal unless killed, after all.
"Vampire City" might be a fun name for an RPG setting or fantasy novel. You go there expecting lots of vampires, but find none. In fact, there are fewer vampires than you'd find in most cities, almost like something is happening to the vampires... And then you discover the dark secret at the heart of the city, the hidden blood banks, the double-blasphemy of the vampire engines, and realize the name is not a synecdoche: it's not a city WITH vampires or a city OF vampires: it's a city that IS a vampire.
And you can of course go one step further and put on your philosophy hat:
Don't all cities live off the blood, sweat, and tears of their citizens? Aren't all cities vampires? And if not, how are they different?
Explain, before your body is sacrificed to the hungry God Profit and your blood is used to grease the wheels of exploitation and industry.
The moral of the story: if you visit somewhere known as "FOOBAR City" and there doesn't seen to be any FOOBAR there? Run. Run as fast as you can. Best case is that this is a Star Trek planet-of-hats. Worst case, you're in the Twilight Zone.
Either way, if you stay you're probably dead, the only question is if your death will be a warning to Kirk or if you'll have an ironic death and possible eternal torment.
At least for the red shirt getting vaporized, it's over quickly. Twilight Zone protagonists do not always have the luxury of a quick death.
Slice and Dice: Fantastic casual strategy game. You get five heroes, each of which has six possible moves per turn, represented by a D6. Different classes of heroes have different sides. Each turn of combat has you roll the dice up to three times, locking in moves and their targets, and everything plays out once moves are locked in. It's got some depth and some tactics to it, but super easy to pick up and explain, and a session usually finishes pretty quickly. (itch.io)
Backpack Hero: Imagine a deck-building game like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, but instead of a deck of cards, it's a bunch of items that you have to fit Tetris-style into a backpack. The items in your backpack -- all of them -- make up your verbs in combat, literally clicking items in your pack to make attacks or build up defense points. Some items care about where they are (e.g. a helmet gives extra defense if it's on top of armor, gloves want to be on the left or right sides), some weapons damage items next to them when swung, etc. It's still in active development, but it's got promise. (itch.io)
DRAINUS: Terrible name aside, it's great that people still make shmups like this in 2022. (Steam)
Wolfstride: At its core, it's just a visual novel with some minigames, about a group of retired bank-robbers coming together to honor the dead by becoming... a professional mecha combat team. The writing is merely okay, but it gets carried by having a fully voiced cast (a rarity for indie VNs, especially with some of the high-profile VAs present), and the mech combat parts are actually pretty fun. (Steam)
Nuclear Blaze: Little short pixel platformer with physical simulation aspects for fire and water -- explore an underground bunker and put out fires. (Steam)
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator: Changing the path of the galaxy by buying low and selling high. It'll capture your heart -- and sell it to a cult trying to resurrect their lost flesh deity. (Steam)
Also, I should mention Destiny 2, which is by far my most played game of the year despite not being on my top ten. It’s just the game I do with my friends and chat, really. Ignore the 2700+ hours sunk into it. (Although holy crap I love what they’ve done with Season of the Seraph, enough that I might put it on the top ten list for 2023 if they keep doing bangers like this.)
Time for the self-indulgent personal top ten list! This is just my favorites from what I played this year, not necessarily 2022 releases. Game names and specific what/why for each game are past the fold!
I’ll probably do a follow-up post with some honorable mentions as well. (And yes, Elden Ring is on my radar, I just haven’t given it a proper try yet.)
WHAT: It's QWOP in space, with goals: Left/right thumbsticks waggle your arms around, LT/RT close or open left/right hands, and bumpers kick your legs. It's broken up into levels, each of which has a list of tasks to accomplish: wrenching on things, managing airlocks, unpacking things from crates, piloting a shuttle, etc.
WHY: Part of it is the usual physical comedy of zero-G and shitty controls, bouncing off walls and flailing and looking for handholds and leverage points. I usually bounce off games that have difficult controls for the sake of difficulty alone (e.g. Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, or Jump King), but it’s made better by adding short achievable goals to accomplish with those controls -- it feels like fun in small doses, instead of just feeling hard. The sound design is great, and it has a really lovely streamlined art style that uses detail sparingly to call out important parts of the environment.
WHAT: A first-person shooter with rhythm and score attack elements. Firing your guns or doing melee attacks in sync with the beat deals more damage, and earns you more points. Some actions (finishers, etc.) can only be done on-beat.
WHY: The soundtrack sells the game -- If you like metal, here, listen to Mikael Stanne, Tatiana Shmailyuk, and Serj Tankian growl at you while you blow things up. If metal isn't your thing, you might still like it; it's a lot like Bullets Per Minute, but with fixed levels and leaderboards instead of procedurally generated levels. That said, while it’s fantastic, it’s VERY short -- finishing all levels (both main and optional "Torment" side challenges) on the second highest difficulty took five hours.
WHAT: High-difficulty 2D Metroidvania, with a fixed melee attack and an assortment of spells. Souls-esque “recover your corpse to regain lost XP” on death. Lots of backtracking to get to inaccessible parts of levels once movement tech is unlocked. Extremely awesome but creepy pixel-art style summed up as "Spanish Roman Catholic Guilt: The Game."
WHY: It's beautiful, and challenging but satisfying. The controls are polished, the bosses are hard but telegraphed and fair, and there's a ton of collectibles and other bits to do. ~25 hours for 100% completion.
FYI, if you picked this up after launch and haven't touched it since, consider trying it again with the new DLC, which adds new bosses, NG+ and an alternate True Ending. Also, a sequel is now in development for 2023.
7: Deathloop
(Sep 2021; Steam, Playstation, Xbox)
WHAT: “What if Dishonored had replayable levels and a meta-puzzle?”
Deathloop is first-person "Groundhog Day," but in the 1960s and with more murder. Each day is split into morning/noon/afternoon/evening, and for each time period, you pick one of four locations to go to, each of which has varying content based on time of day and how far you've progressed in the meta-plot. Your goal is to kill eight different people in a single day, and the bulk of the game is planning that out: through trial and error, figure out who is where during the day, and how you can encourage people to be in the same spot at the same time so you can kill several of them in one shot.
WHY: Sure, it reuses the same four areas four times each. But each of them feels fresh, and it’s really fun to figure out the differences in each area over the day -- what doors are open when, who is where, etc. The investigation UX always has a good hint about what to check out next, or where you left off, without spoiling it for you. Like Dishonored, the levels are structured to give good options for both stealth play and going in guns-blazing. Voice acting and audio in general is fantastic.
It had a Souls-esque multiplayer component where other players invade your game as a competing time-looped character, trying to kill you (or at least prevent you from carrying out your murdered), but it didn't really work well. The single player content holds up though.
(FYI, a recent patch ended an epilogue cutscene for the Golden Ending. Catch it on YouTube if you beat the game prior to it being added.)
6: Cult of the Lamb
(Jun 2022; Steam, Switch, Playstation, Xbox)
WHAT: I’m pretty sure everyone on Tumblr is familiar with this one, even if you haven’t played it. It's a cartoony world inhabited by cute animals and insectoid eldritch gods who slaughter them. As the last living Lamb, you're given immortality by an Ancient Imprisoned God and tasked with creating a cult to gather power, defeat the lesser gods that wiped out your kind, and release your god from its prison. The game alternates between a small community sim (give your worshippers tasks to accomplish, keep them fed and happy, etc.) and a Binding-of-Isaac-like dungeon crawler.
WHY: The dungeon crawling is solidly implemented. The sim part is okay; I wish you weren’t permanently locked into Cult Doctrine choices, especially when they have such large effects on gameplay (e.g. the sim part gets significantly harder/more annoying in the late game if you don’t take Fasting Ritual early on in the game, or Brainwashing late in the game). But, hell, you can brainwash people into eating poop, and that has to count for something.
I spent a lot of time playing this, which is why it’s on the list -- and I’m a sucker for games that attempt to merge or straddle between different genres. However, it’s probably the game I’m most conflicted about on here. There's about 20 hours of decent game in here, a bit more if you're interested in grinding out all the "get everything unlocked" achievements. It's fun at first but wears out its welcome fast.
5: Ghostwire: Tokyo
(Mar 2022; Steam, Playstation)
WHAT: First-person action-adventure with parkour elements. A mysterious fog rolls into Shibuya, turning everyone it touches into spirits and leaving behind only piles of clothes. You play one of the few survivors, now sharing a body with a paranormal investigator, and try to find out what happened and deal with the hostile spirits now running wild around town.
WHY: On one hand, this is your bog-standard Bethesda action-adventure collect-a-thon: run around a gigantic map, do a ton of sidequests, fight baddies, get bored about 40 hours in and make a beeline for the end of the story. The magic-based combat is novel but not that good; once you unlock a bow, you'll probably do 90% of your combat with that afterwards, and just use fire magic to clean up what’s left once you’re out of arrows.
That said, it mixes in bits of horror, weirdness, and just generally nails a sense of alienation that's rare in this genre of game. The story and mood are outstanding, and manages to carry what is mechanically a somewhat clunky game. (It feels like they made the bulk of the game in 2020, and then spent two years polishing the graphics, which are admittedly outstanding.)
Also, more personally: I love Shibuya, and it was lovely to see so many places recreated fairly faithfully.
4: Horizon: Forbidden West
(Feb 2022, Playstation exclusive)
WHAT: Picks up where Horizon: Zero Dawn left off, with Aloy heading west in search of a backup for the GAIA artificial intelligence in the hopes that it might stave off a collapse of Earth's ecosystem. Third-person action-adventure, go hunt gigantic robots with bows and small arms and explore ruins.
WHY: Overall, it's a significant improvement on the first game; in particular, the story is considerably more competently portrayed this time around, even if it's partly spent establishing that Aloy is a gigantic dork that tries to do everything on her own. The combat has some highs and lows. There’s more variety in robots, and you've got a lot more strategic options to use; the formula of "shoot armor plates / weapons off, plink at soft squishy weak spots" still works and is still fun. The lows all come from Guerilla handling the power creep problem by adding a lot more enemy attacks that temporarily stun you -- and there are no I-frames on stuns. Fighting multiple combatants can mean being juggled for 5-6 seconds at a time, which can be profoundly frustrating and heavily encourages drawing off single combatants at a time from a pack to handle in isolation.
There was a lot of blurf in the press about the length of the game; I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to do, but there is a lot. If you're the type of player who likes to wander around finding random shit to do, looting everything, and getting around to the plot when you're good and ready? Then, it's got about 100 hours of content, and you'll be dramatically overpowered by the time you finally do the story missions. If you follow the missions more tightly, there's probably about 60 hours of game here, but some of the late-game fights might be frustratingly hard without top-tier gear.
(I usually don’t like to talk about the length of games, but H:FW is one of the main excuses atm for buying a PS5, so there is some bang-for-buck to think about.)
WHAT: Zelda homage with a low-poly isometric visual style, and some beats from Souls games. Cute fox with sword tries to save the world.
WHY: The game’s all about discovery and feeling adrift in a world you don’t fully understand. The main gimmick is that as you play, you unlock pieces of the game manual (which looks like an NES game manual from the 80s, complete with some previous owner’s hints/notes in ballpoint pen). However, all the game content and all of the manual is written in a constructed language, so you have to intuit directions and solve puzzles based on context. Often, you've got no idea what to do, and just wander around seeing what you can get access to and where you might find the next item.
Some of the optional puzzles can be extremely obtuse, especially if you're going for the Golden Ending. The final boss on the non-Golden route is impressively hard. Some of the combat in general needs good reflexes. But this was still one of the best games of the year just from the sense of confusion and discovery and just playing with items and areas to find out how they work.
(Also, the descent into the Quarry is probably the creepiest gaming experience I had all year. Absolute props to the sound designers.)
WHAT: It’s a Pokemon game, ffs. You run around and collect them all. Maybe you do some side quests.
WHY: I've been playing this series since you shoved it into the back of a grubby gray Game Boy, and I honestly thought I was done with Pokemon games in general after Sword/Shield. But Arceus honestly managed to breathe a ton of life into what felt like a stale property, enough for me to go full Living Pokedex on it.
The graphics aren't great, but they get the job done, and the gameplay is surprisingly polished. The need to actually observe Pokemon doing things to fill out the Pokedex was a great idea, even more so than the “capture a Pokemon without fighting it” changes. About my only complaint was the sheer amount of running around needed, up until you get the ability to fly.
The story is a bit predictable but is enough of a fig leaf to keep playing.
1: Vampire Survivors
(Dec 2021 EA / Oct 2022 for 1.0; Steam, Xbox, and mobiles)
WHAT: Horde defense. You control a character using only a thumbstick, and they constantly autofire all weapons they have. Dodge and damage waves of enemies, collect XP gems, adding more weapons and upgrades with each level-up. After thirty minutes, death inevitably comes. There are no vampires, and no survival.
WHY: For starting out as a $3 kusoge with reused Castlevania sprites, this has probably been my most revisited and frequently played game this year. Sure, I've probably sunk more hours into H:FW or Destiny 2 -- but VS has been the "put on Youtube and brainfart, throw bibles at enemies, watch numbers go up" game that's delivered the most bang for buck of any game on this list. It's not demanding, it's simple, it's fun, it has ton of little hidden secrets and unlockable bits.
One of the recurring high points of this year has been seeing a new VS patch come out, and know my previous 100% achievements is now 90% or whatever, and that I’m going to put down whatever I’m playing and spend the next three days finding and unlocking all the new things they’ve added.
While it wasn’t the first single-stick shooter, its’s success has basically kickstarted a genre. There's a ton of VS successors now -- Rogue:Genesia, Brotato, Spellbook Demonslayers, etc. -- that suggest that they've actually exposed a still-novel space in gaming to be explored, rather than being just a one-off great game.
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