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Discussion / Re: 2021 games in review
« on: January 03, 2022, 11:04:50 AM »
Last Year's This Year
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Hades
Everyone already knows Hades is good, it topped basically every list last year. So I am not going to measure it in this year's personal top 10, despite it surely deserving one of the top all-time spots. It gets this special category instead.
Hades is close to being a "perfect game," everything in its place, doing exactly what it sets out to do, no more and no less. I only got around to playing it this year, and could not stand playing it as much as I wanted to due to arm injuries, but could not stop once I started. Gameplay? Great. Story? Also great. UI, gameplay loops, music, everything I can think of, great. Especially notable is how the game eschews previous Supergiant tendencies towards minimalism and cryptic protagonists: Zagreus knows exactly who he is, and is not afraid to spout thousands of voiced lines at every situation. There are still mysteries to uncover, of course, but the profound moments now marry a true sense of accomplishment to the major story beats.
Walking out into Greece for the first time immediately became another one of those gaming moments that makes me tear up.
In terms of gameplay, I had fun crunching it out, and finally realized I had achieved a sense of system mastery: at last I understood what I was doing, when to dash, what attacks were what. The entire game crystallized from "vaguely mashing buttons" to "I know exactly what I am doing and can see into the matrix." Haven't gotten that strong of a sense of mastery since the old days of learning Touhou bullet hell shooters.
Ongoing Multiplayers
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I Want This Genre To Be Good - Asymmetrical Horror-ish (Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th, VHS, Propnight etc)
This genre continues to evolve... very slowly, shackled as it is by DBD and the untimely death of F13. Behavior's forays into NFTs and mishandling of Pinhead, along with the slowly worsening gameplay and matchmaking, seem to have finally turned the corner on DBD's market dominance. Slowly, people are leaving. Slowly, new games are coming in. One of them will have legs, eventually. It probably won't be Propnight (too buggy and inaccessible). It might be VHS, but too soon to say how people will take to a much more directly skill based, combat based game. But someday it will come.
MOBA Gameplay That Doesn't Suck - Eternal Return: Black Survival
This game... probably has legs, but it is a long term project and hasn't quite found them yet. A hybrid crafting/itemization/survival/battle royale/MOBA, I discovered it around last December and enjoyed watching while unable to play anything. It brought in many of the good parts of traditional MOBAs while getting rid of things I didn't like. Unfortunately capitalism is a killer and development seems to have stalled into endless loops of making new characters and skins and minor tweaks. Major gameplay improvements are quite slow; overall the game is in much the same place today as it was a year ago and a lot of the people trying it out slowly dropped it. Including me, for now. It remains in the back of my mind for future years.
:funeral_classy: - First Class Trouble
The success of Among Us energized a new generation of social deduction games. Project Winter, Dread Hunger, etc etc. They're all.. fine, none of them have really broken out yet. FCT seems like the best of them currently, hewing close to "Among Us but in 3d and Roaring Twenties retro-spaceship-cruise aesthetics." It has its share of glaring flaws as development continues, but nonetheless is playable and creates tons of memorable experiences with a good group.
Twitch dot TV slash dumbdog, skadj, karacorvus, chilledchaos, pastaroniravioli, and more - Modded Among Us
Definitely more of a "watch streamers play" than "play myself" here. As time rolls on, people got good enough at Among Us that the vanilla "serious" game was pushed to the limit of what it could be and still be fun to play. Solution: mods that add more flavorful roles. The serious deduction aspects take a backseat to a big box of variance and hopefully-fun roles that do a ton of crazy things, some with new win conditions, others more classic but with new options. Role madness mafia setups, in other words. I wouldn't want to play these without a group that was very experienced... but for groups of streamers/youtubers/vtubers who do have that experience, it's fantastic entertainment, especially when you're able to watch multiple perspectives on the same game.
This Should Actually Be On My Top List But It's Here Instead - Storybook Brawl
Just recently easing into this one as a comfort game/timesink brain pleaser. An autobattler based heavily on Hearthstone Battlegrounds, but with cleaner aesthetics, tighter gameplay, and made by a group of ex-MTG pros whom I (mostly) respect and don't mind supporting. Like most autobattlers it is a drafting game at its core, and therein lies the way to my heart: make better decisions, get rewarded. Or sometimes not, variance is a thing.
The game is highly skill based, much more so than what I've heard of others. Climbing the ladder recently has really driven that home, lobbies in legend+ are MUCH more difficult than the lower casual ranks, you see very different strategies and boards and start to really feel your opponents as people. I got into a lobby with Matt Nass once and his board absolutely obliterated me. A fantastic experience.
Anyway it's both engaging and cute and fun socially so - quite a good one.
The Hall of Disappointment
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Free Taiwan/Hong Kong/the Uyghur - The Yawning Abyss of Riot Games Taking Over Every Genre And Everything I Love
I will never play a Riot game. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all people make their own choices, this particular one is mine.
-12/12: 12 Minutes
This game started out with a promise of greatness, big budget narrative experience, surely my type of thing? And then turned ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL. Wow this game sucks. I almost don't want to talk about exactly how. Let's say that the people calling it Murder Your Wife Simulator are not far off *and it gets worse from there* in both gameplay and "story". Don't play this.
More like Meh-troid: Metroid Dread
Well, Metroid Dread is a lot better than 12 Minutes, don't get me wrong here. It's not Other M bad, either. But Dread still clocked in as a disappointment to me, which... highlights a lot of the ways I feel weird and out of place compared to "normal" people, most of whom have this in their top 5 or so for the year. The good points about it are good, but they are not the things I like or want to be good. Controls, sure. Boss fights, sure. Some of the plot, sure, continuing from Fusion worked out pretty well.
Music? Meh. Unmemorable. Visuals? Areas are pretty cookie cutter themes and literally "named" A through H or so in order. Ew. Of all the things they appropriated from Hollow Knight, the matte black walls everywhere is one I wish they hadn't. All of the game's environmental elements look tiny and unimportant. I kept waiting, thinking "well the music and area visuals are pretty meh so far but I'm sure they get better in later areas"... and then they never did and the game was over. Yes, the whole game really does look that way. Yes, the game manages to have absurd load times even though there are no backgrounds or complex features that would require it. Yes, boss arenas are mostly empty rooms. Yes, the EMMI is better than the SA-X but it's also just the SA-X again.
The world design... you never get lost. You never CAN get lost. The teleporters take you exactly where you need to go. Again it's not as bad as Fusion's hyperlinearity, at least they don't lock you into rooms where the AI tells you where to go in a 60 second unskippable cutscene, but... I want to get lost in a Metroid game, I want to explore. This is a standard tension in metroidvania-style games, there are plenty of videos and articles out there about it, go look up "Why you never got lost in Metroid Dread" on Youtube if you want an in depth analysis.
The story... was mostly okay until the end. The end has a patriarchal figure grab and overpower Samus, while specifically stating that her gender is the reason for her weakness, until plot contrivances save her.
Heck right off with that. This isn't the Samus I want, this isn't the Metroid I want. Give me back Super Metroid's silent, lush world and a hulking bounty hunter who takes no nonsense and doesn't run around looking like a supermodel in blue skintight spandex.
FINALLY IT'S HERE ok I don't like it - Tsukihime Remake/Melty Blood Type Lumina
So the Tsukihime remake finally arrived.
Sort of, anyhow. 1/3 of it, just the Arc and Ciel routes, with the rest to come in another package... sometime in the far future... maybe.
In tandem with the previous entry, these are perhaps fine games for people who aren't me, but for me lost a lot of what makes the originals tick. I'll let the creators speak for themselves, from translations of interviews:
"Nasu: I understand the feelings of the people who just want to see the original, not new things. For that reason, Arcueid's route is mostly unchanged. Arcueid's route is formatted as the same Tsukihime everyone knows and loves.
Takeuchi: But we have to admit the Tsukihime remake changed one major point, and the fans who are really attached to the old Tsukihime might be disappointed by it. Still, I want you to understand that every change has a meaning behind it."
I mean. I guess! Arcueid's route is bland though. Another interview gives their take on removing the character of Chaos and replacing him with a new vampire; loosely translated "Chaos was a weird vampire and the new one is a more normal Dracula type vampire, in line with what people expect." But that character being so weird and unexpected is exactly what I liked.
Wow I'm a super hipster this year. It is what it is, the new content leaves me cold. Melty is the same way, it's, a game that exists I guess, it's fine, but most of the cast is gone and I don't prefer the new gameplay (shield clash RPS stuff, managing two super meters, no damage numbers).
The Actual Top Seven
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7. The Binding of Isaac: Repentence
Every so often, in gaming or other media, a title comes along that Changes Everything. Nothing is the same in its wake, EVERYTHING in the genre is influenced by it forever after, even if the title itself was fashioned from pieces of previous works. Street Fighter 2. Super Metroid. Mario 64. Ocarina of Time. Final Fantasy 7. Grand Theft Auto 3. Dark Souls. Harry Potter, in a non-gaming example.
And The Binding of Isaac.
It's been a bit over ten years since the original Isaac released on Steam, in its poopy irreverent naked child glory, and almost every other game on this list owes an incredible amount to it. The concept seems simple enough, a mashup of twin stick bullet hell shooter and Zelda 1 dungeon rooms, with randomly generated floor maps, item pickups that provide permanent upgrades to change the course of your run, and gradual unlocks of more items and upgrades to expand the game over multiple runs. But no one had really made a game like that before this. No one had ever really succeeded as an indie game on Steam before this. (The more cynical may say it's still nearly impossible, but nearly is not the same thing as totally.) Today? "Indie Roguelite" is its own entire flourishing genre now.
I spent a lot of time with the original Isaac, and a lot more on its successive remakes and expansions. 300 hours according to Steam, but much more than that across multiple computers, multiplayer with brothers and IRL friends, and watching streams and racing leagues and all sorts of other things. (BOILER, the original Binding of Isaac League Racing, was one of the earliest major speedrun-style competition organizations, parts and people from it flowed out to the future in the form of SRL, Speedgaming, randomizer racing leagues, GDQ marathon segments and setups...)
All that having been said, the canonical game tended to become worse over time, like the developers didn't understand their game. Major bugs went unfixed for years, interactions were broken, gameplay was degenerate. Mods solved some of these issues, but navigating tons of mod installs and patches was a challenge all on its own (even with Steam Workshop).
There was one particular very ambitious mod, Antibirth, that released as nearly a direct competitor to the poorly received but "canon" Afterbirth+ expansion. Antibirth was closer to a total conversion than a simple mod, adding not just new characters and items but entire new zones, complex game-spanning mechanics and secrets and an entire new original soundtrack. Virtually everyone who played it said the same thing: "Wow, they should buy these people's work and make THIS the new official expansion!"
Then there was radio silence for years, both from the Antibirth team and the official team.
Until suddenly: Repentence. And so it was done. Repentence includes not only the great majority of Antibirth content (though not the soundtrack, sadly!), but far more than anyone ever imagined would come to the game again. ANOTHER separate endgame route. Not just the few new characters from Antibirth, but an ENTIRE NEW ROSTER of 17 "tainted" characters, all with their own unlocks for all the various routes. And, blessedly, a full overhaul and rebalance to just about every item and gameplay system.
Finally, Isaac is good again. And all of this on the Switch version as well. What an amazing definitive edition - and one most people thought we'd never, ever get.
Obligatory mention: Nicalis is a terrible company, Tyrone Rodriguez is a terrible person, Edmund McMillen is at least complicit by association, these things can and do darken the game for many people and that's fair. Likewise with the themes of toilet humor, religion and child abuse - and gosh there is some very uncomfortable child abuse stuff in the leadup to the final ending, though the ending itself goes out on a much more positive note. It's not a game for everyone in and of itself. But if you can deal with it, game's great, and its broader effects on the industry will keep going for decades to come.
6. The Dark Pictures Project: House of Ashes
Now this I didn't expect to be making my list. This is another entry in the anthology-style collection of co-op cinematic "QTE and occasional choices" horror games from the makers of Until Dawn. Until Dawn itself was pretty great, but their subsequent entries, well... Man of Medan was a rough experiment that showed glimpses of potential, and Little Hope was just terrible and gross on several levels. The trailers for House of Ashes looked to be loaded with cringe potential, so I almost skipped over checking it out. Glad I did, though, as the final product here is FAR better than the last two and back to Until Dawn levels of quality.
The game follows a group of US Marines in the midst of 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom, as they break into an ancient temple excavation suspected to be one of Saddam's hidden chemical weapon stockpiles, and clashing with Iraqi Republican Guard there as they -
Hey! Come back! No, no, seriously, it's not that bad, I swear. It's... it's still PRETTY CRINGE at points. But not. That. Bad. The Iraqi soldiers are treated with actual respect, easily the most interesting characters, and the obligatory drama is played up for great effect specifically to serve the purposes of the "who will live or die in your playthrough" gameplay.
As you can guess from this being a horror game, what's sealed in the temple turns out to be a lot more than just some chemical weapons. The game's tone shifts into an homage to various classic 90s action horror movies, starting with The Descent and moving on through Predator, The Mummy, various Lovecraft pastiches and finally all-out James Cameron Aliens. Rather than shy away from its inspirations, it leans hard into them and revels in homage and melodrama, and this is exactly the right call. It's cheesy, it's cringe, it's ripping off dozens of things in any given scene, and it's incredibly fun.
Especially with a friend using the coop system, which deserves special mention. There's a decent array of accessibility options, you can take turns for local couch coop with a single controller, or split control of various characters, you can turn QTEs on or off, or on for specific players or characters but not others, or set the whole game to cinematic mode and just watch if participating in the horror elements is too much for someone's taste. Finally, the promises made in Man of Medan are paying off. Overall a great time and I'm back to looking forward to what Supermassive will do from here.
5. Inscryption
This year's Halloween hit, Inscryption probably appears on a lot of folks top lists this year, with good reason. A high polished blend of Slay the Spire-like deckbuilder-roguelike and 3d escape room, Inscryption offers up a flavorful and well produced challenge...
... and then things get weird and the surprises start coming, as expected from the developer of infamous metanarrative games.
I... don't have a ton to say about Inscryption, it deserves to be played for itself and not spoiled. You know there'll be twists. They're good.
One thing I can say is that the entire game, in addition to all the things it is on the surface, is a love letter to card games and specifically to trying to design card games. Anyone who's ever dipped their toes into the design end of things and tried to create their own Magic cards, much less a full game, will recognize a ton of details and inside jokes and shared sympathies, from the difficulty of balancing resource systems to how much a game can or should cheat against or in favor of the player. There's a (https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/4_mana_7/7). There are duel discs. Magnificus is literally a magnificent ficus. Long Elk is long, and Longer Elk is longer.
It brings the smiles and sparks the joy. Well played.
4. Jupiter Hell
Lawyers shut down the Doom Roguelike, but they couldn't seal it away. It's back, with a vengeance, the serial numbers knocked off, optional fake CRT scanlines and an ASCII mode coming soon.
This is exactly what it says on the tin, a Doom inspired turn based classic roguelike, built to appeal to classic roguelike fans and pull no punches while still being accessible to modern sensibilities. There's a spectrum of 6+ different options to customize the exact level of profanity you like in the voice acting (and none of them use slurs or gendered insults). The gameplay is swift and responsive. Mouse control is optional but now fully functional. 1.0 release was November, and the long tail of development promises new features and bosses to come.
Classic roguelikes are very fun and rewarding, if they can overcome the initial hurdle of aesthetics, and notquite!Doom is certainly good enough for me. Music's great, gameplay's great, I can sink into a run and pick a build or play to what I find, and every run learn something new and improve my understanding and decision making. Compared to Hades, the story is not as good but the gameplay is better and deeper.
I tuned in to watch one of the current best players tackle Nightmare on stream. He asked how old the viewers were. The average age was over 30. That's how you really know roguelikes are where it's @.
3. Deltarune Ch.2
Another entry that everyone already knows is good and most people will have already discussed to death, I'll try to be brief again.
Undertale was great. Deltarune is shaping up to be even better. A mental game I play with myself sometimes is "what if this game you like had been made earlier and been a hit in the 16 bit era (or whenever), how would things be different?" Undertale is fun to imagine in that space. Deltarune ch. 1 was about the same.
Chapter 2 is different, though. This time, Toby Fox's world is not timeless, but exquisitely, painfully, emotionally dated to the current moment. I cannot imagine this installment having been made even 5 years ago, let alone ten or more. The cyber's world, Queen, Spamton and Berdly are all touching on ideas that exist in the now, in the age where we can recognize Facebook and Twitter as having turned into anxiety nightmarescapes, Elon Musk as both Person of the Year and Worst Person of the Year, Kris can use they/them pronouns and that carries a meaning beyond being a player avatar, and we can feel simultaneous sympathy and antipathy for a huckster puppet.
Undertale touched on some themes, like the separation of player and character avatar, but never did much with them beyond hints and bits in obscure endings. Deltarune is gearing up to take all of this and run with it. It's no longer subtext that the player is an alien entity possessing Kris's body, that the Knight is probably right in our faces as simply K-ris at NIGHT, that both Ralsei and Kris are in on a plot trying to manage the player, or that all the characters are incredibly traumatized and the story's real title is "What Happened to December Holiday?" We still don't have all the details, just the ghosts of outlines, but things are a lot clearer than they were at this point in Undertale... and a lot murkier.
When the light is running low
And the shadows start to grow
And the places that you know
Seem like fantasy
There's a light inside your soul
That’s still shining in the cold
With the truth
The promise in our hearts
Don't forget:
I'm with you in the dark.
... the lyrics were with us in chapter 1. We didn't realize, even with that, how sinister they could or should be read. Well, Toby Fox is a master.
2. Blankspace (https://nobreadstudio.itch.io/blankspace)
Hey, you know what genre's doing very well, flourishing with the exact amount of support modest Kickstarters are able to provide and actually work out? Small to moderate scope indie visual novels. Love em. Here's Blankspace, one such that features Zero Escape series style escape room puzzles. I wouldn't expect anyone to have heard of this game except via my recommendation, it's not popular like Your Turn To Die... but if I were to put YTTD into this year's ranking it'd be below this, because the quality of the writing stood out and the story stuck with me all year.
There's a heart that shines through the writing and makes me crave more of it, something different from most "game writing." For all that it seems modest (or immodest, if you're talking about the fanservice), it's... different. The sort of different that I churn through these sorts of small projects to find. The diamond in the rough, to go all Aladdin.
Definitely more of a "me" entry, and I can't say it's "objectively better" than Deltarune or whatever else, and I can't write a bunch more paragraphs without delving into hard spoilers... but it stuck with me. Check it out if you like.
1. Escape From Tarkov
... the shooter thing? What? Really? Seriously? Ran, are you okay?
Yes. (except maybe that last one, but watchin some tarky makes it better.)
Tarkov is a russian-developed (and very russian mindset) looter/shooter/FPS/survival game, in which you alternate playing an ex-private military contractor trying to gather resources and complete quests, with RPG-ish stats and progression (but if you're killed you drop everything you're carrying except for a small valuables pouch), and runs as one-time generated "scav" characters, who spawn into maps at random times with random (generally bad) gear but are encouraged to work with one another to scavenge what they can and avoid or ambush any cheeky PMCs.
It is very complex and very in depth, with heavy attention to detail and realism in gunplay.
This game should not exist. It breaks every rule of design. Nothing is proceduralized. Nothing is safe. Time to kill is zero. You can and will spend 30 minutes crawling through a raid and get one-tapped by someone you never could have seen and lose it all. It's fantastic.
Realism is explicitly prioritized over gameifying elements in the shooting. No auto aim. Intense physics simulations with diagrams for things like minute improvements in bullet dropoff and how they impact various materials and helmets and armors. It shouldn't work, these things are gameified for reasons. And yet - every realism update they've done makes the shooting MORE fun. It's winning awards for best FPS combat of all time.
The latest patch adds in world VOIP chat. This should be a disaster that everyone will immediately want to turn off, right? Full of trolls and spammers?
No. Almost universally positive experiences. Players going out of their way to turn VOIP on because of the moments of cooperation it creates. Some bemoan that the game is slowly becoming less of a deathmatch free for all, but then, in the Grand Plan, it was never supposed to be. There are a million things that are barely or not implemented yet, coming in slowly over the course of years, and they all sound like awful ideas that will ruin the game, and every single one has been a fantastic improvement. Even as it is, the design and attention to detail is spectacular. The Terragroup and EMERCOM logos bring movie horror stylings to mind. You could drop a Predator in here, if they got the license, and it'd be a better Predator game than anything has ever been. But so far they have resolutely stuck to mundanity. Can't wait for when the radiation and toxin counters are actually used for something though.
Learning about Tarkov's existence and experiencing even a little bit of it almost immediately ruined multiple genres for me. Every other shooter on the market compares unfavorably. PUBG, Apex, Super People, ain't got nothing on Tarkov gunplay. The looting is better than most dedicated looter games. Farewell Borderlands, farewell Diablo 2 remaster, the flea market and digging through jackets for keys has all of you beat. Inventory tetris, heck yes I am here for inventory tetris. The questing is more to the point and thoughtful than most MMO questing - take this one with a grain of salt, I'm not an MMO person.
But it may not be a poor comparison. As Tarkov slowly evolves over time, the community aspects of it resemble an MMO more than anything else - in some respects. The admiration that my FF14 friends have in their voices when they talk about Yoshi-P, I hear the same in Tarkov players when they talk about Papa Nikita and his grand vision.
Oh, the grand vision? It is to do away with all of the menus and connect all of the maps (most of which are already the size of PUBG or Warzone's battle royale layouts) into a single gargantuan fromsoft/metroidvania simulation, to put everything in world and have the ultimate challenge be to complete all the quests and escape from all of Tarkov without dying.
This might take another twenty years. I think they might actually do it.
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Hades
Everyone already knows Hades is good, it topped basically every list last year. So I am not going to measure it in this year's personal top 10, despite it surely deserving one of the top all-time spots. It gets this special category instead.
Hades is close to being a "perfect game," everything in its place, doing exactly what it sets out to do, no more and no less. I only got around to playing it this year, and could not stand playing it as much as I wanted to due to arm injuries, but could not stop once I started. Gameplay? Great. Story? Also great. UI, gameplay loops, music, everything I can think of, great. Especially notable is how the game eschews previous Supergiant tendencies towards minimalism and cryptic protagonists: Zagreus knows exactly who he is, and is not afraid to spout thousands of voiced lines at every situation. There are still mysteries to uncover, of course, but the profound moments now marry a true sense of accomplishment to the major story beats.
Walking out into Greece for the first time immediately became another one of those gaming moments that makes me tear up.
In terms of gameplay, I had fun crunching it out, and finally realized I had achieved a sense of system mastery: at last I understood what I was doing, when to dash, what attacks were what. The entire game crystallized from "vaguely mashing buttons" to "I know exactly what I am doing and can see into the matrix." Haven't gotten that strong of a sense of mastery since the old days of learning Touhou bullet hell shooters.
Ongoing Multiplayers
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I Want This Genre To Be Good - Asymmetrical Horror-ish (Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th, VHS, Propnight etc)
This genre continues to evolve... very slowly, shackled as it is by DBD and the untimely death of F13. Behavior's forays into NFTs and mishandling of Pinhead, along with the slowly worsening gameplay and matchmaking, seem to have finally turned the corner on DBD's market dominance. Slowly, people are leaving. Slowly, new games are coming in. One of them will have legs, eventually. It probably won't be Propnight (too buggy and inaccessible). It might be VHS, but too soon to say how people will take to a much more directly skill based, combat based game. But someday it will come.
MOBA Gameplay That Doesn't Suck - Eternal Return: Black Survival
This game... probably has legs, but it is a long term project and hasn't quite found them yet. A hybrid crafting/itemization/survival/battle royale/MOBA, I discovered it around last December and enjoyed watching while unable to play anything. It brought in many of the good parts of traditional MOBAs while getting rid of things I didn't like. Unfortunately capitalism is a killer and development seems to have stalled into endless loops of making new characters and skins and minor tweaks. Major gameplay improvements are quite slow; overall the game is in much the same place today as it was a year ago and a lot of the people trying it out slowly dropped it. Including me, for now. It remains in the back of my mind for future years.
:funeral_classy: - First Class Trouble
The success of Among Us energized a new generation of social deduction games. Project Winter, Dread Hunger, etc etc. They're all.. fine, none of them have really broken out yet. FCT seems like the best of them currently, hewing close to "Among Us but in 3d and Roaring Twenties retro-spaceship-cruise aesthetics." It has its share of glaring flaws as development continues, but nonetheless is playable and creates tons of memorable experiences with a good group.
Twitch dot TV slash dumbdog, skadj, karacorvus, chilledchaos, pastaroniravioli, and more - Modded Among Us
Definitely more of a "watch streamers play" than "play myself" here. As time rolls on, people got good enough at Among Us that the vanilla "serious" game was pushed to the limit of what it could be and still be fun to play. Solution: mods that add more flavorful roles. The serious deduction aspects take a backseat to a big box of variance and hopefully-fun roles that do a ton of crazy things, some with new win conditions, others more classic but with new options. Role madness mafia setups, in other words. I wouldn't want to play these without a group that was very experienced... but for groups of streamers/youtubers/vtubers who do have that experience, it's fantastic entertainment, especially when you're able to watch multiple perspectives on the same game.
This Should Actually Be On My Top List But It's Here Instead - Storybook Brawl
Just recently easing into this one as a comfort game/timesink brain pleaser. An autobattler based heavily on Hearthstone Battlegrounds, but with cleaner aesthetics, tighter gameplay, and made by a group of ex-MTG pros whom I (mostly) respect and don't mind supporting. Like most autobattlers it is a drafting game at its core, and therein lies the way to my heart: make better decisions, get rewarded. Or sometimes not, variance is a thing.
The game is highly skill based, much more so than what I've heard of others. Climbing the ladder recently has really driven that home, lobbies in legend+ are MUCH more difficult than the lower casual ranks, you see very different strategies and boards and start to really feel your opponents as people. I got into a lobby with Matt Nass once and his board absolutely obliterated me. A fantastic experience.
Anyway it's both engaging and cute and fun socially so - quite a good one.
The Hall of Disappointment
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Free Taiwan/Hong Kong/the Uyghur - The Yawning Abyss of Riot Games Taking Over Every Genre And Everything I Love
I will never play a Riot game. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all people make their own choices, this particular one is mine.
-12/12: 12 Minutes
This game started out with a promise of greatness, big budget narrative experience, surely my type of thing? And then turned ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL. Wow this game sucks. I almost don't want to talk about exactly how. Let's say that the people calling it Murder Your Wife Simulator are not far off *and it gets worse from there* in both gameplay and "story". Don't play this.
More like Meh-troid: Metroid Dread
Well, Metroid Dread is a lot better than 12 Minutes, don't get me wrong here. It's not Other M bad, either. But Dread still clocked in as a disappointment to me, which... highlights a lot of the ways I feel weird and out of place compared to "normal" people, most of whom have this in their top 5 or so for the year. The good points about it are good, but they are not the things I like or want to be good. Controls, sure. Boss fights, sure. Some of the plot, sure, continuing from Fusion worked out pretty well.
Music? Meh. Unmemorable. Visuals? Areas are pretty cookie cutter themes and literally "named" A through H or so in order. Ew. Of all the things they appropriated from Hollow Knight, the matte black walls everywhere is one I wish they hadn't. All of the game's environmental elements look tiny and unimportant. I kept waiting, thinking "well the music and area visuals are pretty meh so far but I'm sure they get better in later areas"... and then they never did and the game was over. Yes, the whole game really does look that way. Yes, the game manages to have absurd load times even though there are no backgrounds or complex features that would require it. Yes, boss arenas are mostly empty rooms. Yes, the EMMI is better than the SA-X but it's also just the SA-X again.
The world design... you never get lost. You never CAN get lost. The teleporters take you exactly where you need to go. Again it's not as bad as Fusion's hyperlinearity, at least they don't lock you into rooms where the AI tells you where to go in a 60 second unskippable cutscene, but... I want to get lost in a Metroid game, I want to explore. This is a standard tension in metroidvania-style games, there are plenty of videos and articles out there about it, go look up "Why you never got lost in Metroid Dread" on Youtube if you want an in depth analysis.
The story... was mostly okay until the end. The end has a patriarchal figure grab and overpower Samus, while specifically stating that her gender is the reason for her weakness, until plot contrivances save her.
Heck right off with that. This isn't the Samus I want, this isn't the Metroid I want. Give me back Super Metroid's silent, lush world and a hulking bounty hunter who takes no nonsense and doesn't run around looking like a supermodel in blue skintight spandex.
FINALLY IT'S HERE ok I don't like it - Tsukihime Remake/Melty Blood Type Lumina
So the Tsukihime remake finally arrived.
Sort of, anyhow. 1/3 of it, just the Arc and Ciel routes, with the rest to come in another package... sometime in the far future... maybe.
In tandem with the previous entry, these are perhaps fine games for people who aren't me, but for me lost a lot of what makes the originals tick. I'll let the creators speak for themselves, from translations of interviews:
"Nasu: I understand the feelings of the people who just want to see the original, not new things. For that reason, Arcueid's route is mostly unchanged. Arcueid's route is formatted as the same Tsukihime everyone knows and loves.
Takeuchi: But we have to admit the Tsukihime remake changed one major point, and the fans who are really attached to the old Tsukihime might be disappointed by it. Still, I want you to understand that every change has a meaning behind it."
I mean. I guess! Arcueid's route is bland though. Another interview gives their take on removing the character of Chaos and replacing him with a new vampire; loosely translated "Chaos was a weird vampire and the new one is a more normal Dracula type vampire, in line with what people expect." But that character being so weird and unexpected is exactly what I liked.
Wow I'm a super hipster this year. It is what it is, the new content leaves me cold. Melty is the same way, it's, a game that exists I guess, it's fine, but most of the cast is gone and I don't prefer the new gameplay (shield clash RPS stuff, managing two super meters, no damage numbers).
The Actual Top Seven
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7. The Binding of Isaac: Repentence
Every so often, in gaming or other media, a title comes along that Changes Everything. Nothing is the same in its wake, EVERYTHING in the genre is influenced by it forever after, even if the title itself was fashioned from pieces of previous works. Street Fighter 2. Super Metroid. Mario 64. Ocarina of Time. Final Fantasy 7. Grand Theft Auto 3. Dark Souls. Harry Potter, in a non-gaming example.
And The Binding of Isaac.
It's been a bit over ten years since the original Isaac released on Steam, in its poopy irreverent naked child glory, and almost every other game on this list owes an incredible amount to it. The concept seems simple enough, a mashup of twin stick bullet hell shooter and Zelda 1 dungeon rooms, with randomly generated floor maps, item pickups that provide permanent upgrades to change the course of your run, and gradual unlocks of more items and upgrades to expand the game over multiple runs. But no one had really made a game like that before this. No one had ever really succeeded as an indie game on Steam before this. (The more cynical may say it's still nearly impossible, but nearly is not the same thing as totally.) Today? "Indie Roguelite" is its own entire flourishing genre now.
I spent a lot of time with the original Isaac, and a lot more on its successive remakes and expansions. 300 hours according to Steam, but much more than that across multiple computers, multiplayer with brothers and IRL friends, and watching streams and racing leagues and all sorts of other things. (BOILER, the original Binding of Isaac League Racing, was one of the earliest major speedrun-style competition organizations, parts and people from it flowed out to the future in the form of SRL, Speedgaming, randomizer racing leagues, GDQ marathon segments and setups...)
All that having been said, the canonical game tended to become worse over time, like the developers didn't understand their game. Major bugs went unfixed for years, interactions were broken, gameplay was degenerate. Mods solved some of these issues, but navigating tons of mod installs and patches was a challenge all on its own (even with Steam Workshop).
There was one particular very ambitious mod, Antibirth, that released as nearly a direct competitor to the poorly received but "canon" Afterbirth+ expansion. Antibirth was closer to a total conversion than a simple mod, adding not just new characters and items but entire new zones, complex game-spanning mechanics and secrets and an entire new original soundtrack. Virtually everyone who played it said the same thing: "Wow, they should buy these people's work and make THIS the new official expansion!"
Then there was radio silence for years, both from the Antibirth team and the official team.
Until suddenly: Repentence. And so it was done. Repentence includes not only the great majority of Antibirth content (though not the soundtrack, sadly!), but far more than anyone ever imagined would come to the game again. ANOTHER separate endgame route. Not just the few new characters from Antibirth, but an ENTIRE NEW ROSTER of 17 "tainted" characters, all with their own unlocks for all the various routes. And, blessedly, a full overhaul and rebalance to just about every item and gameplay system.
Finally, Isaac is good again. And all of this on the Switch version as well. What an amazing definitive edition - and one most people thought we'd never, ever get.
Obligatory mention: Nicalis is a terrible company, Tyrone Rodriguez is a terrible person, Edmund McMillen is at least complicit by association, these things can and do darken the game for many people and that's fair. Likewise with the themes of toilet humor, religion and child abuse - and gosh there is some very uncomfortable child abuse stuff in the leadup to the final ending, though the ending itself goes out on a much more positive note. It's not a game for everyone in and of itself. But if you can deal with it, game's great, and its broader effects on the industry will keep going for decades to come.
6. The Dark Pictures Project: House of Ashes
Now this I didn't expect to be making my list. This is another entry in the anthology-style collection of co-op cinematic "QTE and occasional choices" horror games from the makers of Until Dawn. Until Dawn itself was pretty great, but their subsequent entries, well... Man of Medan was a rough experiment that showed glimpses of potential, and Little Hope was just terrible and gross on several levels. The trailers for House of Ashes looked to be loaded with cringe potential, so I almost skipped over checking it out. Glad I did, though, as the final product here is FAR better than the last two and back to Until Dawn levels of quality.
The game follows a group of US Marines in the midst of 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom, as they break into an ancient temple excavation suspected to be one of Saddam's hidden chemical weapon stockpiles, and clashing with Iraqi Republican Guard there as they -
Hey! Come back! No, no, seriously, it's not that bad, I swear. It's... it's still PRETTY CRINGE at points. But not. That. Bad. The Iraqi soldiers are treated with actual respect, easily the most interesting characters, and the obligatory drama is played up for great effect specifically to serve the purposes of the "who will live or die in your playthrough" gameplay.
As you can guess from this being a horror game, what's sealed in the temple turns out to be a lot more than just some chemical weapons. The game's tone shifts into an homage to various classic 90s action horror movies, starting with The Descent and moving on through Predator, The Mummy, various Lovecraft pastiches and finally all-out James Cameron Aliens. Rather than shy away from its inspirations, it leans hard into them and revels in homage and melodrama, and this is exactly the right call. It's cheesy, it's cringe, it's ripping off dozens of things in any given scene, and it's incredibly fun.
Especially with a friend using the coop system, which deserves special mention. There's a decent array of accessibility options, you can take turns for local couch coop with a single controller, or split control of various characters, you can turn QTEs on or off, or on for specific players or characters but not others, or set the whole game to cinematic mode and just watch if participating in the horror elements is too much for someone's taste. Finally, the promises made in Man of Medan are paying off. Overall a great time and I'm back to looking forward to what Supermassive will do from here.
5. Inscryption
This year's Halloween hit, Inscryption probably appears on a lot of folks top lists this year, with good reason. A high polished blend of Slay the Spire-like deckbuilder-roguelike and 3d escape room, Inscryption offers up a flavorful and well produced challenge...
... and then things get weird and the surprises start coming, as expected from the developer of infamous metanarrative games.
I... don't have a ton to say about Inscryption, it deserves to be played for itself and not spoiled. You know there'll be twists. They're good.
One thing I can say is that the entire game, in addition to all the things it is on the surface, is a love letter to card games and specifically to trying to design card games. Anyone who's ever dipped their toes into the design end of things and tried to create their own Magic cards, much less a full game, will recognize a ton of details and inside jokes and shared sympathies, from the difficulty of balancing resource systems to how much a game can or should cheat against or in favor of the player. There's a (https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/4_mana_7/7). There are duel discs. Magnificus is literally a magnificent ficus. Long Elk is long, and Longer Elk is longer.
It brings the smiles and sparks the joy. Well played.
4. Jupiter Hell
Lawyers shut down the Doom Roguelike, but they couldn't seal it away. It's back, with a vengeance, the serial numbers knocked off, optional fake CRT scanlines and an ASCII mode coming soon.
This is exactly what it says on the tin, a Doom inspired turn based classic roguelike, built to appeal to classic roguelike fans and pull no punches while still being accessible to modern sensibilities. There's a spectrum of 6+ different options to customize the exact level of profanity you like in the voice acting (and none of them use slurs or gendered insults). The gameplay is swift and responsive. Mouse control is optional but now fully functional. 1.0 release was November, and the long tail of development promises new features and bosses to come.
Classic roguelikes are very fun and rewarding, if they can overcome the initial hurdle of aesthetics, and notquite!Doom is certainly good enough for me. Music's great, gameplay's great, I can sink into a run and pick a build or play to what I find, and every run learn something new and improve my understanding and decision making. Compared to Hades, the story is not as good but the gameplay is better and deeper.
I tuned in to watch one of the current best players tackle Nightmare on stream. He asked how old the viewers were. The average age was over 30. That's how you really know roguelikes are where it's @.
3. Deltarune Ch.2
Another entry that everyone already knows is good and most people will have already discussed to death, I'll try to be brief again.
Undertale was great. Deltarune is shaping up to be even better. A mental game I play with myself sometimes is "what if this game you like had been made earlier and been a hit in the 16 bit era (or whenever), how would things be different?" Undertale is fun to imagine in that space. Deltarune ch. 1 was about the same.
Chapter 2 is different, though. This time, Toby Fox's world is not timeless, but exquisitely, painfully, emotionally dated to the current moment. I cannot imagine this installment having been made even 5 years ago, let alone ten or more. The cyber's world, Queen, Spamton and Berdly are all touching on ideas that exist in the now, in the age where we can recognize Facebook and Twitter as having turned into anxiety nightmarescapes, Elon Musk as both Person of the Year and Worst Person of the Year, Kris can use they/them pronouns and that carries a meaning beyond being a player avatar, and we can feel simultaneous sympathy and antipathy for a huckster puppet.
Undertale touched on some themes, like the separation of player and character avatar, but never did much with them beyond hints and bits in obscure endings. Deltarune is gearing up to take all of this and run with it. It's no longer subtext that the player is an alien entity possessing Kris's body, that the Knight is probably right in our faces as simply K-ris at NIGHT, that both Ralsei and Kris are in on a plot trying to manage the player, or that all the characters are incredibly traumatized and the story's real title is "What Happened to December Holiday?" We still don't have all the details, just the ghosts of outlines, but things are a lot clearer than they were at this point in Undertale... and a lot murkier.
When the light is running low
And the shadows start to grow
And the places that you know
Seem like fantasy
There's a light inside your soul
That’s still shining in the cold
With the truth
The promise in our hearts
Don't forget:
I'm with you in the dark.
... the lyrics were with us in chapter 1. We didn't realize, even with that, how sinister they could or should be read. Well, Toby Fox is a master.
2. Blankspace (https://nobreadstudio.itch.io/blankspace)
Hey, you know what genre's doing very well, flourishing with the exact amount of support modest Kickstarters are able to provide and actually work out? Small to moderate scope indie visual novels. Love em. Here's Blankspace, one such that features Zero Escape series style escape room puzzles. I wouldn't expect anyone to have heard of this game except via my recommendation, it's not popular like Your Turn To Die... but if I were to put YTTD into this year's ranking it'd be below this, because the quality of the writing stood out and the story stuck with me all year.
There's a heart that shines through the writing and makes me crave more of it, something different from most "game writing." For all that it seems modest (or immodest, if you're talking about the fanservice), it's... different. The sort of different that I churn through these sorts of small projects to find. The diamond in the rough, to go all Aladdin.
Definitely more of a "me" entry, and I can't say it's "objectively better" than Deltarune or whatever else, and I can't write a bunch more paragraphs without delving into hard spoilers... but it stuck with me. Check it out if you like.
1. Escape From Tarkov
... the shooter thing? What? Really? Seriously? Ran, are you okay?
Yes. (except maybe that last one, but watchin some tarky makes it better.)
Tarkov is a russian-developed (and very russian mindset) looter/shooter/FPS/survival game, in which you alternate playing an ex-private military contractor trying to gather resources and complete quests, with RPG-ish stats and progression (but if you're killed you drop everything you're carrying except for a small valuables pouch), and runs as one-time generated "scav" characters, who spawn into maps at random times with random (generally bad) gear but are encouraged to work with one another to scavenge what they can and avoid or ambush any cheeky PMCs.
It is very complex and very in depth, with heavy attention to detail and realism in gunplay.
This game should not exist. It breaks every rule of design. Nothing is proceduralized. Nothing is safe. Time to kill is zero. You can and will spend 30 minutes crawling through a raid and get one-tapped by someone you never could have seen and lose it all. It's fantastic.
Realism is explicitly prioritized over gameifying elements in the shooting. No auto aim. Intense physics simulations with diagrams for things like minute improvements in bullet dropoff and how they impact various materials and helmets and armors. It shouldn't work, these things are gameified for reasons. And yet - every realism update they've done makes the shooting MORE fun. It's winning awards for best FPS combat of all time.
The latest patch adds in world VOIP chat. This should be a disaster that everyone will immediately want to turn off, right? Full of trolls and spammers?
No. Almost universally positive experiences. Players going out of their way to turn VOIP on because of the moments of cooperation it creates. Some bemoan that the game is slowly becoming less of a deathmatch free for all, but then, in the Grand Plan, it was never supposed to be. There are a million things that are barely or not implemented yet, coming in slowly over the course of years, and they all sound like awful ideas that will ruin the game, and every single one has been a fantastic improvement. Even as it is, the design and attention to detail is spectacular. The Terragroup and EMERCOM logos bring movie horror stylings to mind. You could drop a Predator in here, if they got the license, and it'd be a better Predator game than anything has ever been. But so far they have resolutely stuck to mundanity. Can't wait for when the radiation and toxin counters are actually used for something though.
Learning about Tarkov's existence and experiencing even a little bit of it almost immediately ruined multiple genres for me. Every other shooter on the market compares unfavorably. PUBG, Apex, Super People, ain't got nothing on Tarkov gunplay. The looting is better than most dedicated looter games. Farewell Borderlands, farewell Diablo 2 remaster, the flea market and digging through jackets for keys has all of you beat. Inventory tetris, heck yes I am here for inventory tetris. The questing is more to the point and thoughtful than most MMO questing - take this one with a grain of salt, I'm not an MMO person.
But it may not be a poor comparison. As Tarkov slowly evolves over time, the community aspects of it resemble an MMO more than anything else - in some respects. The admiration that my FF14 friends have in their voices when they talk about Yoshi-P, I hear the same in Tarkov players when they talk about Papa Nikita and his grand vision.
Oh, the grand vision? It is to do away with all of the menus and connect all of the maps (most of which are already the size of PUBG or Warzone's battle royale layouts) into a single gargantuan fromsoft/metroidvania simulation, to put everything in world and have the ultimate challenge be to complete all the quests and escape from all of Tarkov without dying.
This might take another twenty years. I think they might actually do it.
