Alone with my Snark

I had to be the one to do this. As the internet man whose current internet brand is “Playing bad horror games” I’m gonna be the guy that has a take about the Alone in the Dark reboot. Despite being delayed twice to avoid competing with heavier hitters, THQ Nordic successfully managed to release this game right in front of Dragon’s Dogma 2, which has seemingly sucked up all of the discourse in the room not currently devoted to the rest of February and March’s big releases. When an ostensible big PS5 exclusive like Rise of the Ronin is barely getting talked about, a mid-budget horror revival has no chance. Even in a better release climate, I’m not sure this would be talked about much, which is a pity. Credit where credit is due, I think they managed to bring back Alone in the Dark in an interesting way, even for all its shortcomings.

The original 1992 video game Alone in the Dark is staggeringly important, both on a technical level (having like five polygons on screen!) and a mechanical one (adventure game but you’re navigating a 3D space, tank controls, et all.) However important it is, I’d argue it doesn’t really have a consistent identity outside of its grab bag of goofy haunted house trappings. Its sequels make a surprising pivot toward action, unintentionally mirroring the same progression Resident Evil would make, but I’d say they’re all “pretty rough” to go back to. Part of that comes down to the controls, which are clonk even by my standards as a notable Tank Controls pervert, and part of that is simply the punishing trial-and-error design all three games run in. There’s a reason why Resident Evil is the touchstone for most of the gaming sphere while Alone in the Dark is a historical footnote, and a lot of that has to do with RE not randomly killing the player as a goof.

Attempts to bring the series back have gone all over the place, 2001’s The New Nightmare more-or-less ouroboros’d itself into a mediocre Resident Evil imitator, one I managed to finish in a single sitting. It sticks pretty firmly in the middle of my various Dubious Horror Game adventures; not bad enough to be camp, not good enough to be memorable. Infogrames (who by that point had rebranded as Atari S.A.) would try one more time with the infamous Alone in the Dark 2008, which is a game with plenty of fascinating, terrible ideas and basically no foundational connection to the original beyond having a dude named Edward Carnby. It’s easily one of the more spectacular trash fires I’ve played on stream (literal, given the fire tech they have going on) and is worth looking at as a piece of inscrutable ambition.

If you wanna see me play through what accidentally ended up being most of the original AitD, I have great news. The video below will do that for you! I also, for whatever ungodly reason, have a full playthrough of The New Nightmare and a decently long stream of 2008 on my youtube archive channel. Truly I am an accomplished streamsman.

Alone in the Dark (2024)

So that brings us here, and to my question of “how does one even bring back Alone in the Dark?” In the ensuing 16 years the rights were sold off and Embraced, and development duties were handed over to Pieces Interactive, a Swedish studio whose prior accomplishments were Magicka 2 (not 1) and both of the modern expansions to Titan Quest. Did you know they made two more expansions to Titan Quest in 2017 and 2019? Now I do. Thanks, THQ Nordic. This is their first big AAA (or at least AA) project and for what it’s worth I think they did a solid job with this. I think I’m probably on the more positive end of things, especially compared to some of the more damning reviews from larger gaming outlets. Not going to claim this as being a God Hand “they just didn’t get it” situation, but maybe more that my own preferences and tolerances are going to be different than the average freelance video game writesperson.

I will be clear and upfront here, because I’m a sick person and you need to know where I’m coming from: I was fully expecting this game to be a very Eurojank take on Resident Evil 2 remake, and while it’s kind of that it’s not nearly busted or misguided enough to fully earn that descriptor. The combat can be clonk (especially with melee), and some of the facial capture can be stiff, but in my parlance the essence of Eurojank is that of ambitions outpacing design, technical constraints, or budget. Evil West is Eurojank, Gothic is Eurojank. This is more of a lower-case eurojank. There are plenty of aspects where you can see the lower budget, but they're smartly designed around (or at least curtailed) in a way that is easy to overlook.

Surprisingly for something one could label as “Eurojank”, I think Alone in the Dark (2024)’s greatest sin is its own sense of restraint, especially during the first half of its runtime. Of the many ways to bring back a series whose defining characteristics are “Spooky House” and “Guy named Carnby” I was not expecting a slow-burn, dreamlike descent into madness. The lead writer Mikael Hedberg was also responsible for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, and you can see that in the way the story is presented. A lot of it is implicit or pieced together in notes, collectibles, and conversations. Despite my assumptions the celebrity talent would phone it the fuck in, I think David Harbour and Jodie Comer both deliver solid performances, leaning more towards understated than anything. I’m also a sucker for whenever the more obscure ends of cosmic horror are brought up, and there were a few special treats for me, guy who owned a copy of Arkham Horror and played it maybe four times.

The thing is though, this is also a survival horror game where you shoot eldritch monstrosities in the head (or orifice where head should be) with a Thompson SMG and solve puzzles involving sliding tiles, neither of which really benefit from a more meditative pace or constrained scale. Structurally, the game bounces between the mostly safe areas of Derceto manor and various nightmare worlds, which tend to have most of the combat encounters. It’s never really going to be that hard to figure out where to go next, and for the most part the solutions to the various puzzles are going to be in or around the rooms they’re contained in. Some of the puzzles are clever or require a certain amount of outside thinking, but I wouldn’t call any of them especially taxing or involved. They’re mostly on par with the Resident Evil remakes (if perhaps overly-reliant on a handful of different puzzle types) but compared to recent indie games such as Signalis or Tormented Souls, they’re downright tame.

I guess the way I would describe my issues with this game are pretty simple: either the action set pieces need to be louder, dumber, and more memorable, or the puzzles need to be more involved. That’s maybe a complicated way of saying “the game would be better if they made it better” but I also think Alone in the Dark would have benefited from slightly more focus on either of these aspects. Vibes alone cannot carry a $60 survival horror game. The consequence of the (mostly) clear delineation between “puzzle time” and “shooting time” is that there’s not a ton of tension during the former and there’s very much always going to be enough ammo for the latter. The shooting is inoffensive and functional given its infrequency, but the real secret is that your dodge has enough iframes that you can often just run past everything. The last few areas, when things get more… cosmic, are probably my favorite parts of the game, but they’re all over fairly quickly, even on a casual playthrough.

Still, my genre-specific preferences aside, I can’t help but still be on board with what Alone in the Dark manages to accomplish. It’s almost parody at this point for me to advocate for a lower-budget video game that “has moxie” but it’s a probable contender for this year’s “Most 7/10 video game” award. No, you should not pay $60 for it. I didn’t pay $60 for it at launch. It’s going to flop horribly and will likely lead to the studio getting downsized or axed as part of the greater Embracer Sowing/Reaping cycle, but it’s *doing stuff*. A little dry in spots, perhaps, but a much better performance than I was expecting. There. I did it. Feel free to go back to playing Dragon’s Dogma 2. I give you permission.

Hello I'm back, almost a month into 2024 to tell you that, at the very least, like half of this blog was written in early January. We still have our Christmas tree up, no major new releases have come out (for like two days) so this is still relevant and cool, damn it. I'm not going to wallow in it, but my life is in a weird place right now and my writing output has suffered. Listen, there was grad school and then there was health issues and then there was a cat and now that cat is my former roommate's cat, and it was not a great year. For those of you stopping by to have a look, thank you. If you'd like more consistent updates into the exciting world of me, a cishet white man in his 30s with opinions about vidya games no one has thought about since 2003, I would highly recommend you follow me on Twitch or listen to the Deep Listens podcast, which I'm frequently on. We're gonna do an episode about Fear and Hunger! I'm the host of Off the Deep End now?

For now, I plan on continuing to post my written nonsense on Giant Bomb until it no longer makes sense to do so or I finally get over the inertia and start cross-posting to an external blog. I will not stop. You cannot stop me. Since some smartass made a comment about my last list, this one is in descending order. I hope you're happy.

10. TRAG: Mission of Mercy

It’s to my great displeasure that this current run of The Tower of Dubious Horror Games hasn’t yielded more secret gems. While I’ve certainly played my share of weird or fascinating junk, there hasn’t been a real Blue Stinger, Illbleed, or Countdown Vampires-level event. The exception to this is TRAG, an also-ran tank control adventure that is closer to something like anime Die Hard than Resident Evil. TRAG, known as “Hard Edge” in Japan, is a video game with tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds but also combos and a private detective named Burns Byford who punches robots and mutants with his fists. Most importantly, it’s also a delivery mechanism for some of the “best” voice acting of the PSX era. Every line read is a winner.

It’s the kind of forgotten game that was dismissed at the time for being “a Resident Evil clone” and was basically ignored by all but the weirdo youtuber types I follow who care about survival horror. That’s… entirely understandable, given what else was coming out in late 1998, but here and now I’m gonna say this: TRAG is good. Is it great? No. Probably not. But you’ve already played Resident Evil 2. You’ve probably even played a Devil May Cry. Why not slum it and play a game that will never get re-released from a company whose current output appears to be almost entirely mobile and pachislot related? There’s an anime cyborg teen girl who uses a pair of tonfas and goes into the matrix at one point! You can’t do that in Onimusha, can you?

9. Evil West

I’ve come to the realization that if your video game was made in Poland, there’s at least a 75% chance I’ll be interested in checking it out. From NecroVision to The Witcher to Chernobylite to Two Worlds to Outriders, you cannot understate the consistency of this country’s video game developers in making stuff I want to at least look at. I’m not going to claim all, or even most, of those games are stellar, but they’re rarely boring.

Evil West is an Xbox 360 video game from 2007 that was cryogenically frozen and woke up in 2022. It’s to Flying Wild Hog’s credit that a video game where a steampunk cowboy punches vampires is even more brazenly stupid than the premise would imply. It’s not the deepest combat system, but there’s enough game juice and feedback to make it satisfying. Moreover, it has co-op despite clearly not being designed around that feature. Is it repetitive? Yes. Is it a little shallow? Sure. 7/10 would play again.

8. Outward

I played through a good chunk of Outward, weekly on stream with “friend of the show” Relkin. This turned out to be the best and worst way to play a very bespoke, very jank open co-op RPG. Outward definitely has some similarities to the likes of Gothic and Two Worlds, although it’s unfortunately “made in Canada” and not central Europe as I originally assumed. If you’d guess that an open world fantasy RPG with heavy emphasis on survival and crafting elements would have some layer of cruft to it, you’d be right. If you thought I’d be into that, you’d also be right. There’s a level of dumb clownery that can only happen when you’re playing with another person

If I have a serious problem with Outward, it has a lot to do with certain crucial mechanics and abilities very much being hidden behind player experimentation, buying the right crafting recipe, or otherwise dipping heavily into consumable items. Since there’s no leveling, the only true progress you make is via equipment and purchased skills. If we’d looked at a wiki sooner, rather than intentionally going in blind, we’d probably have had a better time. That said, I don’t regret my time with it, and in fact enjoyed myself enough that it’s on this here list.

7. Gothic

I’ve finally lived up to my German ancestry by playing a Piranha Bytes game to its conclusion, and it turns out that Gothic is good, actually. With this out of the way, there are only a handful of stamps left on my “Late 90s/Early 00s CRPG” bingo card. My credibility? Still in hand. My brand? Intact. Just don’t ask me to finish Arcanum, I tried that this year and still couldn’t do it.

As one of the foundational texts for both Piranha Bytes as a studio and the modern Eurojank RPG, it’s impressive to see how much Gothic gets right the first time around. The prison colony the game takes place in feels like a real place. It’s small and contained enough that you get a pretty good grasp of its geography, its characters, and its power structures, then throws your nameless chump in to disrupt it all. It’s so good that I can see why they proceeded to do some variation on that idea for the next seven games.

Now, to be fair, Gothic is not an easy game to love, and it took a few hours before I fully decided to approach the game on its own terms. Between the bizarre keyboard-only control scheme, the aggressive difficulty curve, and the complete lack of guard rails even for a game from this era, you can see why it’s a “cult classic” (probably among people who aren’t native english speakers) and not a mainstream genre touchstone. Certain skills are of questionable use, certain aspects of the economy can be cheesed with a little enterprise and you can absolutely make a compromised character if you spread your points too thinly. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, you can tell the exact moment they ran out of time and money, and it’s the last dungeon.

Gothic II is apparently a better realization of all of these ideas, and I look forward to seeing it. Then probably not playing any more Piranha Bytes games after that. Listen, I’ve played Elex for a few hours. I’ve seen that Billy Idol concert in Elex 2. You’re not tricking me. The weird corollary to Gothic being good is the knowledge that PB got worse at making the same game over the course of 20 years.

6. Northern Journey

Northern Journey is a bizarre indie FPS(?) adventure(?) made by one very strange guy from Norway. For a quirky indie game that could very well go off of vibes alone, it’s also shockingly varied and smartly paced; a hiking journey through a weird, extremely Nordic wilderness. If you’ve ever wanted the experience of what it’s like to live in a place where the sun doesn’t shine for more than two hours for half the year, this feels like a pretty solid encapsulation. It’s also the kind of thing where a lot of the joy of the game is seeing what comes next, so I’ll refrain from spoiling more than that. Give it a look.

5. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2

In order to justify myself I feel like I need to express I was not “a skating child” in the late 90s and early 2000s. Skateboarding was something cool kids did, kids with more pain tolerance, or maybe kids with better coordination than me. I was also a Nintendo child, as previously established, which was not the place to play games about skateboarding. I mostly bring these up to excuse myself for never really playing a Tony Hawk game seriously until this year.

It turns out, regardless of how cool one was in the early 2000s, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is actually kind of amazing. I know I’m roughly 25 years late to the party on this one, but now I know the lyrics to Superman by Goldfinger and also how to do a benihana. I apologize for my lateness on this one. So here I am, growing older all the time. Looking older all the time. Feeling younger in my mind?

4. Panzer Dragoon Saga

2023 was the brief moment in which I realized the Saturn weirdos might actually have some valid ground to stand on. If the Dreamcast is a machine full of nothing but arcade ports and weird, commercially unviable niche Japanese games that are someone’s favorite, then the Saturn is that but also all of those games either never came out over here or had a very limited number of copies made. Also unlike the Dreamcast, which was broken wide open while it was still alive, Saturn emulation was in a pretty bad spot until a few years ago. It’s the kind of console that feels like undiscovered territory; the kind of thing that hasn’t really been covered to the same cultish degree as its successor. It’s ripe territory for future streaming and writing, and you can expect more from me now that I’ve gone through the trouble of getting Mednafen to work. Also? Burning Rangers is dope.

If you listened to our podcast on the game, you’ll hear me say this and I’ll say it again here: shockingly, Panzer Dragoon Saga manages to mostly live up to the hype bequeathed upon it by the five individuals who actually played it over here. While not without problems, I genuinely think this is the kind of game that would’ve been heralded as one of the great JRPGs of the 1990s… had it not come out on a dying platform with a criminally miniscule number of copies. As Sega’s response to Final Fantasy VII, it manages to go toe-to-toe with Square’s equivalent offerings, with an amazing soundtrack, fully voiced, lip-synched cutscenes three years before FF X, and some of the goddamn prettiest fully-polygonal environments on a 32 bit console this side of Vagrant Story. The combat manages to take the principles of a linear shmup and apply them to an active-time JRPG battle system in a smart and innovative way, blending menu based shit with the kind of reaction and pattern memorization that defines Panzer Dragoon.

While this would’ve been a minus at the time, the part where PDS is only like 15~ hours long is actually a plus these days. It keeps the combat from outstaying its welcome, and makes the weird chaff sequences where you aren’t on the dragon more tolerable. While the story isn’t the deepest thing either, it has its share of pathos and a few fun meta moments that are cute and neat. If there’s one game on this list I’d actually recommend people check out, it’s this one.

3. The Legacy of Kain series (Except Blood Omen 2)

Picking my Soul Reaver save from last year back up was actually an inspired decision on my part, because it led to me finishing that and eventually the entire Legacy of Kain series. 20+ years on, these games are still a remarkable achievement in video games, not necessarily for how they play, but in terms of tone, storytelling, vocal performances, and homoerotic vampire time travel fuckery. It’s the perfect combination of self-serious melodramatic soliloquy and late 90s video game-ass video game pulp that really makes it work. I cannot overstate how good Michael Bell and Simon Templeman are as Raziel and Kain respectively, giving the perfect level of gravitas and heft to soliloquies about the nature of free will or the nature of the block puzzle in front of your character. In an era where video game voice acting was still usually terrible, the quality of the Legacy of Kain series stands out even today.

The weird thing about LoK as a series is that it doesn’t really have a consistent identity structurally. Each game is accidentally part of a different genre. Blood Omen is a top-down action/adventure in the vein of 2D Zelda, Soul Reaver is basically an attempt at 3D Zelda, Soul Reaver 2 is more of a linear action/adventure, and Defiance is closer to a cut-rate Devil May Cry. Blood Omen 2 exists. I wouldn’t call any of them best-in-class, and they all feel like they had plenty of corners cut in order to ship. Eidos wasn’t exactly a great publisher, even before Square-Enix took over. That’s fine. Blood Omen 2 excluded, they’re all moderately playable titles of that era. Not bad, considering they were also all built on the same tech responsible for Gex.

That cobbled-together nature is also present in the series’ story, but the way it manages to thread the needle of its myriad different timelines, plot threads, and recurring characters is good, actually. It’s worth remembering, there was something of a legal kerfuffle between Crystal Dynamics and Silicon Knights over the series, which is part of why Soul Reaver is such a different game than its predecessor. The way Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance try to tie those two games back together through retcons, timeline fuckery, and characters who see the wholeness of history is great. It’s the kind of thing that would probably attract the lamest kind of youtube “plot holes” breakdowns today, but I have to give Amy Hennig and co credit for managing it as they went along. If you have a character monologue gravely enough, I am willing to excuse time travel as an explanation for anything.

Unfortunately, the way Defiance ends is *absolutely* something of an unresolved cliffhanger, setting up for one last game which never got made. (Crystal Dynamics got put in charge of Tomb Raider around that time, which was a far more lucrative and popular series.) People love to champion a tragic cause, and Kain’s ultimate fate is one of them. It’s probably for the best we didn’t end up getting the 360-era soft reboot from the Her Story guy, or the asymmetric multiplayer game that was salvaged from *that* game’s ashes. If The Embracer Group stops shutting down half of the studios it bought within the last 3 years and actually tries to reboot Kain, I dunno if I’d want that either. More than many other games, part of the appeal of this series for me is its very specific place as an artifact of the late 90s and early 2000s. I don’t know if you could make something like that again and have it work for a mainstream video game audience. Maybe you could! I don’t envy anyone who tries.

2. The Armored Core Series (but especially the 3rd and 4th gen)

Listen, I’ve already written a whole thing about my experiences with Armored Core in 2023. You can read that if you didn’t. Listen, I liked the first four or five generations of AC so much I thought 6 was slightly disappointing because it’s slightly different from those games! I’ve become that person for a *different* video game series than the ones I’m already that way for! I haven’t even played Armored Core Verdict Day for more than a few hours, so I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other on how the 5th gen mixed things up. If I had to rate a top 3, it’d probably be 3/Silent Line, Nexus, and For Answer. The only one I’d absolutely recommend against is Nine Breaker.

The thing I guess I will say (if it wasn’t already obvious) is if you liked AC6, it might be worth your time to mess around with some of the older games in the series. Old Armored Core doesn’t get dual analog control until Nexus, but most of those games are less difficult than their reputation would suggest. At least, they were for me. Maybe I’m just really good at video games, who’s to say? I did beat Last Raven, and people say that’s the hardest game FromSoft has ever made!

1. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Sure, I didn’t play the “relevant” Zelda game for more than a few hours in 2023, but that’s because I instead decided to play Skyward Sword as a goof, a jape. Now it’s one of my favorite games in the series. Whoops. Outside of maybe Spirit Tracks, which is derided because no one in the United States cares about trains, it’s the one mainline Zelda game whose reputation feels mostly muted. I was fully expecting to go into this thing ready to tear it apart, but it’s been so long since I’ve played “one of these” it actually looped back around into genuine surprise.

As the last traditional 3D Zelda game, probably ever, Skyward Sword feels like the application of everything Aonuma’s team learned over the course of making four other 3D Zelda games. What also surprised me was seeing some of the foundations for ideas that would show up in Breath of the Wild. Sure, those ideas aren’t implemented as well but you can see where the important building blocks came from. What it all comes down to for me is dungeon design. You use items to solve puzzles outside of the dungeon you get them! How novel! How exciting? But seriously, there’s an understanding of how a 3D Zelda dungeon should flow, how they should introduce concepts and ideas for puzzles and then ask the player to execute on them, that I think is some of the best the series has to offer.

For all the complaints I remember this game having, about the slow introduction, the relatively small real estate of the different areas, the backtracking, I don’t think any of them are particularly egregious? What I do think the game deserves some shit for is the absolutely perfunctory nature of the side stuff. I’m not the kind of person who gets all the heart pieces in any given Zelda game. The side ventures in Skyward Sword feel even more pointless than they usually do in these games. There are upgrades and collectibles and extra bottles and none of that really matters because: A. you still get more rupees than you know what to do with and B. the game is, for the most part, quite easy.

One of the things that helps with Skyward Sword is that, a decade-plus removed from its existence, I’m not tired of or angry at the concept of waggle. I think a large chunk of that has to do with the higher precision of the joycons compared to the Wii Motion Plus, but it also helps that motion controls are weird and novel again. Skyward Sword is a game whose entire identity feels predicated on the very Nintendo-like problem of “We need to justify the features of this console.” But they work! They’re cool! It was a genuine surprise! Video games!

Poor Choice of the Year: You and Me and Her

This year in Visual Novels was the year I finally had enough self-destructive inclination to do the unthinkable and install an 18+ patch because people on the internet said “it’s important for the story.” That was a mistake. Don’t listen to those people. You and Me and Her: A Love Story is best known in the West as the primary inspiration for Doki Doki Literature Club, which should already give you an idea of what it’s trying to go for. Just… with a lot more NTR. Like, a lot more. I’m not going to tell you, the reader at home, what is or is not acceptable as far as kink, but it’s not my thing. And to be clear, that’s A LOT of what this game’s story is ultimately about. It positions itself as a lampshade hanging meta-commentary on dating sims, gal games, and VNs in general, but is also more than willing to exploit those tropes for the sake of being horny.

The line between “VN with 18+ scenes” and “Eroge with a censored version” can be a very blurry one, given the medium’s history and the incentives that were built around it during the PC-98 era. The thing is, I do think You and Me and Her’s all-age version probably loses something if the story is just about kissing and holding hands. I also don’t think it’s a particularly great story either way. “It’d be really messed up if characters from dating sims remembered things from other routes” is a novel idea, but You and Me and Her doesn’t really have anything to say about love, relationships, or the dating sim genre *beyond* that. The meta-trickery aspect is something that feels like it would’ve hit harder when the game was new, before every modern indie title tried something similar.

I’ll give it this though: when the game goes for upsetting, it’s certainly upsetting. It’s nice to know I haven’t been fully desensitized by my time on the internet. I just dunno if the payoff for fucking with the player (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) is nearly as smart or profound as it thinks it is. It sure is good that I didn’t make that mistake again in the same year! Oh. O-oh. I also played some of YU-NO. Uh. Yeah. Maybe I’ll end up writing something about that.

Visual Novel of the Year: Chaos;Child

Thankfully, there are plenty of options in the world of VNs that don’t involve having a rhetorical debate over the merits of pornographic scenes. Take MAGES Science Adventure series, for example. Best known for spawning Steins;Gate, there are actually eight games in the series as of this writing. I’ve said before that I think Steins;Gate is fantastic, fun time loop anime fringe science storytelling in both its VN and anime forms. But did you know it wasn’t the first game in the series? I mean, probably. If you’re the kind of person who remotely gives a shit about “What if Anime Was Books And Those Books Took 30+ Hours To Read” you are likely aware.

Only officially released in the west last year, Chaos;Head Noah is the updated version of the first SciAdv novel first released in 2008. I’ll be as generous as I can be here when I say maybe there’s a reason why Steins;Gate was the big breakout hit and not this one. Focusing on psychic teens, group hallucinations, and gnarly fucked up serial killings, it’s also a pretty on-brand snapshot of Japanese otaku culture circa the late 00s. It also has, by design, one of the more pathetic and irritating protagonists I’ve seen in a story like this. Takumi Nishijo is a deeply paranoid, deeply neurotic shut-in who is scared of girls, life, and humanity in general. While this is the point, it also makes him an incredibly passive protagonist. There’s a lot of good dread and paranoia to be had from that perspective, but it’s also a 30+ hour VN where the ostensible hero of the story spends a good chunk of it metaphorically or literally in the fetal position cursing his fate.

Chaos;Child isn’t really a direct sequel to Chaos;Head, outside of being set in Shibuya and having psychic teens, Japanese internet culture, and serial killers. There are references and callbacks, but nothing crucial. This one benefits greatly from having “a cast of characters” who “do things,” and a protagonist whose personal arc isn’t resolved in the last hour of the story. There are still some weird last-minute ass pulls, a particularly goofy and unnecessary twist near the end, but the emotional core holds. It’s definitely one of the best VNs from this series.

Adventure Game of the Year: Unavowed

As part of a continuing goof at the expense of my friend/co-host/antagonist Chris "ZombiePie" REDACTED, I played a couple of adventure games in 2023. If you watched his streams, you might have the impression that the adventure genre died because it's full of terrible Euro-trash myst clones written by people who actively (instead of passively) hate women and minorities as much as they love the worst bullshit puzzles fathomable by humans. Adventure games are not normally a genre I get along with particularly well, but goofing around with Wadjet Eye stuff was a good reminder that, yes, the genre in fact has merit. The Secret of Monkey Island? Totally okay! Not nearly as funny as it thinks it is (or people thought it was 30+ years ago), not to mention the enhanced graphics of the XBLA remaster have aged like milk, but it's charming enough. Unavowed though, that's the good shit.

Other than being Urban Fantasy, a genre that always feels a bit under-represented in video games, the thing that makes Unavowed work is the part where it secretly just applies the concepts of a BioWare game to a point and clicky. You have companions to bring along, who have their own unique skills and perspectives to help solve puzzles in different ways, tackling cases in vignettes rather than a contiguous series of adventure game nightmares. It's good! I will play more adventure games! They will be better than the ones ZP plays!

Also special shout outs to "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" which is also excellent and successfully conveys that England is a place no human being should live.

Baffling Thing of the Year: The Callisto Protocol

In a year where I played multiple Sonic games, including BOTH versions of Sonic Unleashed, the actual most ??? video game for me this year was the fucking off-brand Dead Space. The parallels between The Callisto Protocol and The Evil Within are abundant and easy to make. Both are games acting as spiritual successors to beloved franchises, spearheaded by industry veterans and backed with not-insubstantial resources by a newish publisher. They’re both awkward cross-gen experiences with notably terrible PC ports and decidedly compromised last-gen versions. They’re also both crushingly disappointing and not worth your time. I’ve made my thoughts on The Evil Within and its sequel fairly clear over the years, but I think The Callisto Protocol might have them both beat in terms of truly inexplicable AAA experiences.

There is a world where The Callisto Protocol is good. You can see bits of good ideas and design expertise peek through the cracks, but for whatever reason those ideas are subverted by bad ones, or questionable design, or some of the weirdest, most frustrating encounters I’ve seen in a video game. This is the kind of game that should get a tell-all article about its development, assuming anyone even remembers it exists in a few years. Is it a hardcore survival horror game? Is it a weird clown game? Is it a fucking mess? Yes to all three.

A more melee focused Dead Space set on a prison colony should be an easy sell! And indeed, for the first half of The Callisto Protocol I was very much of the stance that “hey this isn’t nearly as bad as people say it is.” Sure, the plot and characters are non-entities that feel like they had half their scenes cut, but playing punch out with not-Necromorphs and bonking them with a stun baton is a fun time! And then it turned out that was all the game had up its sleeve. Outside of some truly wretched stealth sequences and an emphasis on environmental hazards, it’s kind of the same thing for its entire 12ish hour run time, but it gets worse as it goes along. You never get enough ammunition to make ranged weapons a primary option, though the kinesis equivalent is solid given the number of grinders and spikes placed everywhere.

Should you play The Callisto Protocol? Given it’s never getting a sequel and frequently goes on sale for like $15, my answer is “maybe???” I know I just said above you shouldn’t play it, but if you’re sick and have a morbid sense of curiosity it might be worth your time. Of course, you could also just use that time to play through the RE4 remake again.

Replay of the Year: Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Sigma 2. Not 3. 3 is still terrible.

No other character action game captures the level of high speed ultraviolence like Ninja Gaiden. If Devil May Cry is concerned with being stylish and God of War is concerned with being gratuitous, then Ninja Gaiden is the power fantasy of being a cuisinart. Even playing the Sigma version of 1 and 2, where the violence is inexplicably toned down, it’s still incredibly fun to play as Ryu Hayabusa and just leave a pile of limbs and arterial spray from whatever fucked up demons, mercenaries, and evil ninjas cross your path.

What stuck out to me this time? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ninja Gaiden Black is still the superior version of the first game. While there’s more wiggle room and debate about Sigma 2, the changes made in Ninja Gaiden Sigma in general make it a slightly lesser experience. I’m not the hardest corest Master Ninja or anything but even I can see the way certain quirks and differences, plus some jank-ass PS3 visuals, make for a worse product. THAT SAID, the way people talk about it you’d think a crime had been committed instead of just certain difficulty and enemy behavior changes alongside some truly spurious Rachel levels. If you don’t feel like dragging out an Xbox console to play Black, you’ll be *just fine* with Sigma.

It probably doesn’t bear repeating, but I’m just going to emphasize: Ninja Gaiden 3, even in its Razor’s Edge form, is a bad time of a video game. Whatever improvements made to the combat over the original version can’t really salvage the fact that it shares a spot with Resident Evil 6 in the pantheon of “Japanese Developers attempting to appeal to the west and failing miserably” games that line the libraries of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The core combat is fine, if even messier than 2, but any izuna dropping ultraviolence to be had can’t really compensate for the fucking awful scripted sequences and boss fights that are scattered through its runtime.

Vtuber(s) of the Year: FuwaMoco

BAU BAU

Hello and welcome to video games. 2023 was a bad year for me but a good year for video games. Here is a list of the ones I liked this year.

1. Alan Wake II

Having played it this year, I think the original Alan Wake is mostly quaint. Coming to it 13 years later, you can see all the ways it was salvaged from an open world game they couldn’t make work. What’s left is a string of repetitive combat arenas bookended by some of that good Remedy schlock. I don’t think it’s a particularly great game, but it’s the kind of thing that was on the acceptable side in 2010. American Nightmare feels like a better approximation of the combat loop from the original, but it’s also a $15 XBLA game and three hours long. It’s also of questionable canon? Maybe?

Alan Wake II dares ask: “What if Remedy made a video game for me, ArbitraryWaterman” instead of a thematically enjoyable but mechanically intolerable third person shooter. Which is to say it’s sort of a survival horror game. While it certainly plays more closely to the kind of stuff I like, the real draw of Alan Wake II is the realization of Remedy’s house style. Their entire history has been one filled with goofy FMV nonsense, musical interludes, and a general stylistic inclination towards making weird television. This feels like the best melding of that with an actual competent video game, complete with an extended rock opera sequence, a bunch of weird love letters to Remedy’s Finnish homeland, and an inexplicable spiral of metatextual nonsense best seen for oneself.

If I have any serious complaints, they’re mostly superficial. Saga’s actress’ inability to hold onto her American accent for more than one sentence at a time is distracting. Sometimes navigation can be a challenge, and sometimes the enemies feel a bit too agile for the kind of tools you have at your disposal. It also ends in such a way that doesn’t resolve a whole lot, but honestly at this point I’m fully on board with whatever they do next. Control 2? Alan Wake 3? Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I’ll check it out.

2. Age of Wonders IV

You know me. You know how I like them hexes. I like them 4Xs with hexes. Age of Wonders IV is one of said games that has both 4X and hex (combat) and does both very well. The biggest improvement in this one is the focus on customization and modularity, letting you goof around with different tomes, spells, units, cultures, and ancestry in a way that allows you to RP or mechanics together whatever fantasy faction you feel so inclined to make. The tactical combat, on the other hand, is as good as ever.

One of Triumph’s greatest strengths as a developer is their skill and agility at making their games better over the lifetime of support. Age of Wonders 3 and Planetfall greatly benefitted from patches and expansions and the same is true here. Even in just six or so months, many of the smaller, more annoying issues I had with the game at launch have been addressed (victory conditions, AI quirks, some performance issues) and by the time they’re done Age of Wonders IV will already be better than it is now.

3. Resident Evil 4:

I’ve said this before many a time: they did not need to remake Resident Evil 4. Unlike 2 and 3, with their “tank controls” and “old graphic,” the original version of RE4 is still mostly in line with modern video game sensibilities despite being old enough to vote. However, what I did not count on was that current-era Capcom is an exceptional video game developer, especially when it comes to making video games specifically for me. While I still think the inevitable RE5 remake is a terrible idea and they should instead try and fix Code Veronica, those cowards, there’s no doubt in my mind that the RE4 remake nails it.

A lot of this is built on the success of the modern games, Village especially, but you can tell the designers thought a lot about what people liked about RE4 and focused on that. Unlike 2, and especially 3 remake, it’s still the same beats as the original, but shuffled around and tweaked in ways that help pacing or play with the expectations of people like me who’ve played the original too many times on too many different consoles. It’s familiar, yet different! Finally, something I can support! What narrowly edges it onto this list over the Dead Space remake (which is also fantastic) is probably that creativity in execution.

I should also mention I was genuinely impressed by the Separate Ways DLC. While the original Separate Ways in RE4 is a bit of a boondoggle, the one they did for the remake actually manages to stand on its own. Once again, they should stop while they’re ahead and not actually do RE5.

4. Baldur’s Gate 3:

Honestly if not for a handful of things, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be #1 on this list, easily. It’s understandable why this hit as hard as it did for the video game mainstream. Am I still baffled and shocked that goddamn normal people are into a 60+ hour CRPG-ass CRPG? Yes. But it’s also proof of Larian’s ascendancy from “weird Belgian dev who made a handful of moderately received Eurojank RPGs” to “Industry Standard-Bearer.” This is an arc I’ve witnessed firsthand over the last 10ish years, and BG3 feels like a well-deserved payoff. Sure, I wish I’d waited a few months for patches to come out and Act 3 to not be constantly on fire, but even with a compromised experience it was a good time.

It’s the combination of the expertise gained from both Divinity Original Sin games, plus a blank check from Wizards of the Coast which really make this possible. I mean it in a positive way when I say that you can see where the budget and dev time went, and where three years of early access paid off. D&D 5e is a ruleset I find increasingly staid as time has gone on, but the changes they make for the sake of making the video game better are all smart ones. It’s a monumental accomplishment, and also very much an exception in the increasingly precarious, unsustainable world of AAA video game dev. We should treasure it.

Unfortunately, I replayed both Pillars of Eternity games this year and I’m still going to be that asshole in the corner. BG3 has some charming characters, excellent performances, and cool environments. But ultimately, it doesn’t go as far into sicko territory when it comes to games like these. It’s too good, too normal, too approachable by mortal ken. I might roll my eyes a bit when “the youths” are still making memes about Astarion like four months later, but it’s undeniable that BG3 has worked for and resonated with a much larger group of people than I would’ve ever expected. Let me be salty about this.

5. Lies of P

If you had told me the goddamn Korean Pinocchio Bloodborne was going to be on my list I would’ve said “yeah sure, that makes sense.” This is where we’re at. Here’s the thing though: Lies of P is very, very, very good. I’ve played a lot of Souls, a lot of games that are sort of like Souls, and even a couple games that are only vaguely like Dark Souls but people continually compare to Dark Souls because our shared vocabulary is limited and cursed. I’d like to think I have a strong enough grasp of what does and does not work for the genre.

Lies of P is up there for me with Nioh and its sequel in terms of non-From soulsy games. Instead of subsystem hell, Lies of P chooses the path of focused precision; somewhere between Bloodborne’s focus on aggression and Sekiro’s emphasis on parrying and stance breaking. More importantly, it understands the importance of level and encounter design in a way a lot of soulslikes don’t. It’s hard and demanding in ways that can be a motherfucker at times, but once the systems “click” you can see the level of thought and craft that went into the way Lies of P moves and the way that works towards it as a coherent product.

Furthermore, it’s much better at stylistic and emotional trappings than you’d expect from, once again, a game where you are a public domain hot boy puppet doing bloodborne things to evil robots and eldritch monstrosities. The unblinking sincerity with which it treats its premise is actually a positive.

6. Remnant 2

Remnant 2 is a sequel that fundamentally understands what made the first game work and then expands upon it in so many smart ways. It’s still a game best experienced with friends, possibly with a guide to find hidden stuff, but even alone you can see where a higher budget and more dev time paid dividends. It’s difficult, but rarely overbearing (at least until some of the later boss encounters, which are decidedly *hard*) and offers a lot of good and interesting character build possibilities between classes, items, and weapons. Don't really have much to say about this one. It's Remnant, but moreso.

7. Turbo Overkill

As the “Retro Throwback Shooter” space becomes oversaturated with stuff that may or may not be any good, it’s important to single out and celebrate stuff that is doing more than just “what if Doom or maybe Quake???” Namely, Turbo Overkill, a game whose ultra-violent pixelated neon aesthetic and claims of “you have a chainsaw leg” suggest a level of embarrassing 90s ‘tude it thankfully avoids. I’ve said before, but if there’s one way to make me wish for death, it’s attempting to recapture the spirit of Duke Nukem 3D like that isn’t the saddest fucking thing imaginable.

Instead, it’s a fast-as-shit hyperkinetic take closer to something like Doom 2016, which is to say that most big fights take place in bespoke arenas rather than untethered levels. The weapon roster feels nice and powerful, with plenty of meaningful and interesting alt-fires, but the real star is just how mobile your acts of violence can be. In addition to the aforementioned chainsaw slide, you can dash, grapple, and wall run, which all allow you to zip around like a particularly angry cyborg cuisinart. It’s a very satisfying endeavor, made more satisfying by some solid, varied level design and fairly consistent pacing.

8. Street Fighter VI

This is once again an admission to the world that I, quite frankly, don’t have the temperament to play fighting games on a regular basis despite loving them. I get just a little too intense and a little too involved and I fucking cramped my leg multiple times because I wanna grab a guy and spinning piledriver him into the ground. I don’t get this way about any other competitive game, but throw me into the meat grinder online and I will destroy myself. It’s probably why, after getting myself to Gold rank with Zangief, I decided to take a break. That break will probably end at some point, after which I will once again prove myself slightly too sweaty a gamer for this specific genre.

Oh, and to be clear, Street Fighter VI is a much better game from the onset than V was on every level. I’m at the point where robust single player offerings in fighting games not made by Netherrealm mean very little to me, but the World Tour mode is at least more comprehensive and less embarrassing than SF V’s story. But it’s actually mostly down to one thing: the netcode is very good. I’ve played against people halfway across the world in like, the fucking Netherlands, with 200ms ping and had an entirely playable, mostly smooth experience. Being able to approximate something resembling a community is fun and enjoyable, and it even led to me seriously “learning to play the video game” instead of the usual half-assed grasp of systems and characters I usually embark on with this genre.

9. Fire Emblem Engage

For as much as I appreciated Fire Emblem Three Houses, replaying that game to see all four of its routes is an exercise in tedium. Half the game is the same regardless of which house you pick, and the school management aspects are even more tedious the second, third, and fourth time around (I only managed one and a half playthroughs. Me! Man who likes Fire Emblem!) It’s also just… really easy sometimes. Maybe one day I’ll give the DLC mini-campaign a shot, take a look at the new classes they added post-release, but I’ve become increasingly tired of Persona-lite structures as time has gone on.

Engage, by contrast, is a Fire Emblem game with the lightest, breeziest, and most E for Everyone anime nonsense storyline underpinning a far more involved tactical experience than 3H. It’s the first Fire Emblem game in more than a decade that feels built around perma-death instead of treating it like a legacy feature (i.e. you get a ton of units and most of them are pretty good) but more importantly the maps are distinct, bespoke, and crafted in a way that a lot of 3H’s open fields weren’t. Also you summon old Fire Emblem heroes as stands and that’s fun.

10. Jagged Alliance 3

God be praised, the mid-budget Eurojank game is still trucking along despite the Embracer Group’s recent troubles of “not getting two billion dollars in Saudi oil money after buying every mid-sized developer known to man and also the Lord of the Rings license” Jagged Alliance 3 is a triumph for one reason and one reason alone: Unlike the other four attempts at rebooting SirTech’s beloved “XCOM with mercs,” they made a new Jagged Alliance game in the 21st century and it was good, actually. They did it. Not since Crash 4… three years ago has a late-numbered sequel actually lived up to that ambition

Now to be clear, Jagged Alliance 3’s characters and general sense of humor are irritating at best and cringe-worthy at worst. It’s the kind of writing that would be a deal-breaker for a lesser tactics game, but thankfully JA3 is not a lesser tactics game. The focus on modern, conventional firearms and the removal of any specific to-hit chance gives more of a sim-y bent than most other XCOM-adjacent tactics stuff. That last bit is a bit controversial (you can turn it back on, if you’re boring) but I found that the tension of not having that number in front of me actually forced more interesting play. Having to get a “feel” for what is and is not a viable shot is fun! It’s not like XCOM wasn’t brazenly lying to you anyway.

Other Games of Note:

HROT, Dead Space remake, Armored Core 6, Against the Storm, Lords of the Fallen 2023, Aliens: Dark Descent, My Friendly Neighborhood, Super Mario Bros Wonder, Darkest Dungeon II, Lunacid, The Last Spell, Barotrauma, Lethal Company (early access), Tales and Tactics (early access), Wartales, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Battlebit Remastered (early access), and probably even more stuff I’ve spaced on.

Listen man, 2023 had a lot of good shit. I could easily write an entirely different top 10 list with the stuff I’ve listed here. Games listed in bold were on a previous draft of this list.

Best DLC Thing: Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs in Total War: Warhammer III

Total War is in a weird space these days, thanks in part to Creative Assembly’s commitment to trying to kill their own golden goose for most of this year. There’s been a lot of scuttlebutt around that company in the wake of Hyenas’ cancellation, the backlash surrounding some brazenly overpriced DLC, and the general wet thud that was Total War Pharoah. There is a level of entitlement and self-loathing in the TW fanbase I find particularly cringe-worthy most of the time, but for once they were actually in the right. This has culminated in an apology and mea culpa that is actually sort of shocking, and hopefully will be the start of more improvements to come.

Of course, now this is where I admit I’m still a goddamn sucker, because Total War Warhammer III is still fuckin great and the Chaos Dwarfs are a perfect example of what that studio (and especially the DLC team) are capable of when they’re not engaging in self-sabotage. They took a third-rate, decidedly obscure faction from the tabletop game and gave them the works, with a bunch of unique subsystems, a specialized economy, and a three-tiered roster that fits mechanics and lore. But most importantly, just an overwhelmingly stupid amount of firepower. Just shove a demon in a train and have that train drive through the enemy frontline as it fires a flak cannon. You know, good shit.

Best Game that isn’t a commercial product: Thief: The Black Parade

I make no exaggeration when I say that The Black Parade, a 10 mission mod for Thief Gold, is better than several games I paid full price for and put on the above top 10 list. As both a love letter to Thief and a celebration of the original game’s 25th anniversary, it offers some best-in-class level design from noted members of the mod community. These levels are great at both, and absolutely stand toe-to-toe with the best material from the original trilogy. See for as good as those games are, there’s definitely some filler, some cruft, and some just bad levels scattered among them. I wouldn’t say that about any of these, even if I definitely enjoyed some missions more than others.

If I have to issue a caveat, it’s that these are levels made for people with some decent level of experience with Thief 1 and 2. They’re big and intricate in a way that only stuff made by hardcore fans over like seven years can be. This is the kind of thing I’d recommend if you’re already a fan of those games, not necessarily if you’re coming into this fresh. But if you are a fan of Thief and haven’t seen these already, highly recommend.

Shame Games: Tears of the Kingdom and Hi-Fi Rush

No really I’ll get around to them I know I’ll like them both please don’t yell at me.

Most Disappointing: Wo Long

Wo Long felt like the unfortunate middle ground between a Nioh and a Sekiro, lacking the depth of the former and the precise focus of the latter. It grieves me to say this, because I was extremely on board with what they were going for, but I didn’t like it very much at all. Doesn’t help that the PC port was busted at launch, and still doesn’t run great.

Most 7/10 video game: Starfield

Starfield has become something of an inflection point amongst terminally online video game folk. Discourse around Bethesda Softworks’ increasingly tenuous and shaky philosophy of game development has been going strong for years, finally reaching something of a culmination here. The company whose games are known for scale and scope accidentally let you see the wires with this one. What could’ve been a massive galaxy is instead a series of hyper-segmented instances, a realization that perhaps a No Man’s Sky approach does not necessarily gel with “A Skyrim.” People are upset. They are writing negative steam reviews. The developers are responding in a way that is funny to look at. The cycle continues.

Free of that discourse, I’m instead here to tell you Starfield is extremely okay. Unmoored from my already low expectations, I mostly found myself enjoying Starfield and am also deeply glad I didn’t pay $60 for it. Nothing it does is exemplary; every subsystem feels like something that will eventually be made more in-depth and interesting with mods, but on the other hand it’s a dumb open world skyrim where I can do space piracy and also putt putt around with a jetpack. Would Game Pass again. Thanks Todd.

Now unfortunately, as is tradition, I have two lists. That second list will come at some point in the next week or two. Expect takes about Armored Core and probably some other bullshit. If you got this far, thanks for reading.

Hello and welcome back to dubious horror I swear I'm gonna try and put these out at a regular clip. If you'd like to follow along with the dumb internet streams these write-ups are based around, I'm on the Twitch under this dumb internet moniker. Or you can find the VODs on Youtube.

Deep Fear

Category: Residon’t Evil (also: Sega Graveyard and BANNED IN THE NTSC)

Developer: Sega AM7 R&D Division (Also known as “Team Shinobi” and “Overworks”)

Release Date: July 16, 1998

Time Played: like six hours?

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Would I go back and finish it? If you paid me

The Sega Saturn is a weird, fucked-up console with a weird, fucked-up trajectory whose fucked-up history is the kind of thing you can find multiple youtube essays about. For years it was something of an enigma to me. I never knew a human being in the real world who owned one, and until this year I’d mostly seen it from a distance as “the Dreamcast for even stranger Sega fans.” Thanks to the recent advances in Saturn emulation, this has changed. Much to my misfortune and distaste, I’m into what I’ve played on the console so far. Those Sega fans lurking in the dark corners of the internet who kept hyping up Panzer Dragoon Saga were mostly right! That game is cool! Burning Rangers? What a neat thing! The game I played for this feature? Ehhhhhhhhhhh… not so much.

By 1998 the Saturn was already half-dead in the US, helped in no short part by Sega of America’s refusal to put anything out. One of the casualties of this was Deep Fear, Sega’s first-party answer to Resident Evil. It’s one of those aberrant titles released in Europe and Japan but not the US, and after some time with it I guess I can see why it was passed up. This thing came out multiple months after Resident Evil 2, and to be frank the comparison is not a flattering one. There’s certainly some dubious merit to Deep Fear, especially in regards to its cutscenes (which have some untapped memetic material for the internet) but as a whole it feels like they missed the target. As a survival horror game, Deep Fear is weird, clumsy, and maybe one of the worst paced Resident Evil clones I’ve experienced in my surprisingly extensive run with them.

So, to back up a bit, Deep Fear is “A Resident Evil” taking place in an undersea research base. As John Actionman, a real American hero, it’s your job to fight horrible undersea mutant things, deal with dwindling oxygen supplies, and otherwise tank control down pre-rendered backgrounds. The oxygen part is the important bit, actually. While Deep Fear’s cinematic aspirations certainly seem like an attempt to differentiate the game narratively, the biggest concern mechanically is that rooms often have a set oxygen level ticking down. If there isn’t any oxygen, you have to put on your rebreather. Outside of a few intentionally stressful set-pieces, air management is never all that much of a concern... much like health management, ammo management, inventory management, or really any of the other managerial aspects of these sorts of games I want.

It’s unfortunate that the rest of the game seemingly took the wrong lessons from Resident Evil, especially in terms of environment design. This is something I hammer on a lot with “these sorts of games” but Deep Fear features a lot of running back and forth through linear corridors that don’t neatly loop back on each other. This is what I refer to as "The Code Veronica problem," but there's significantly less back and forth to grab key items in that game compared to Deep Fear. In fact, given that you can fully restock your ammo at any supply room, it feels like Sega fundamentally misunderstood the point of “survival horror.” Why avoid enemies when you can blast them? But of course, blasting comes with the unfortunate side-effect of having to deal with the game's sometimes bad targeting and hitbox bits. What ultimately results is tedium, as you’ll see in my increasing frustration during the stream VODs of this game. It’s a shame, because the storytelling and cutscenes are goofy and camp enough to be worth talking about.

…Iru!

Category: Cthulhu and Friends (also BANNED IN THE NTSC, High Quality Horror on my Sony Playstation)

Developer: Soft Machine

Release Date: March 26, 1998

Time Played: A little under four hours.

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Would I play again? No real need tbh

Ohoho, what’s this? Another game not released in North America? As if to really tank my personal relevance during this; the spookiest of months, here’s an even more obscure game. Iru (which roughly translates as "They're Here!") is essentially a pretty short, pretty straightforward narrative adventure game with some light dusting of Lovecraft for funsies. It’s the kind of game that would only have been made for the PSX, the kind of low-budget, fairly low-stakes release clearly made by a handful of people. In modern times I guess you’d compare it to smaller narrative indie games, but those things weren’t put on a disk and sold on shelves at like… a Super Potato. There’s not really much to say about it, other than it’s “neat” and “probably not dubious” and I’m glad I got to experience it. With a guide. Need to really hammer that second part home. If I didn’t use a guide this game probably would take another two hours to play and would’ve been far more frustrating.

The thing I will say about Iru is that, if nothing else, it has vibes. As a video game it mostly consists of walking back and forth between different rooms in an increasingly eldritch school talking to different characters and occasionally using an item on a thing. But as a vibes machine? It uses the limited draw distance and primitive polygonal capabilities of the PSX to great effect to tell a story whereupon kids get murdered in front of you and eldritch hijinks ensue. There are certainly more sophisticated horror stories set inside Japanese high schools and more sophisticated examples of Lovecraftian madness (followed by modern progressive disclaimers of “yo this dude was a turbo-racist even by 1920s standards”) but Iru has moxie. I don’t think it’s a “must-see” experience or any sort of amazing revelatory thing, but it’s much better than most of the stuff I’ve played for this feature by virtue of not trying to do all that much mechanically.

Oh right, so. Originally this was gonna be The Innsmouth Case, but after roughly 30 minutes of getting bored and annoyed by that game's writing, tone, and frequent typos, we switched to Iru. So skip ahead in the VOD if you don't want to hear me get increasingly gravelly doing bad dumb voices and reminding the audience at home that I "took some technical editing classes."

anyway the next blog is already half-written so you can expect more "good" video games of the terrifying variety before October ends. I'm not sorry.

The Tower of Dubious Horror Games 2023

Welcome back to the realm of Dubious Horror. I’ll be honest: I have a shortlist for The Wheel of Dubious RPGs III: The Absolute Dregs with more than 40 games, as well as a smaller list of dubious character action stuff I'd really like to show off. Both of these will likely come to fruition next year, but I think it’s time to return to Dubious Video Games with a seasonally appropriate slate of prime quality dubious horror. I’ve been berated by my “friends” for playing too much good stuff in the last few months, so it’s important that I stress: there’s gonna be some real garbage in this one. I’m very excited to showcase some of the stuff on my list and I hope you come along either during my streams or with these write-ups.

What makes a game “Dubious” you may ask? This is a question people have posed to me multiple times and I figure it’s worth laying out here. My extremely serious and not-at-all loose criteria for such is threefold: Weird, Questionable, and Obscure. Chances are, if a game fits one or more of these extremely specific and not at all subjective adjectives it qualifies for this feature. For example: only the most asinine of contrarians will stake Resident Evil 4 as being “dubious,” but there are numerous main-series and side games in that franchise that I think would undoubtedly qualify. I played two out of the four Gun Survivor games, and I can say with some assurance that Resident Evil Dead Aim is a weird fucked up thing and Resident Evil Survivor is hot trash. Similarly, a game might not have a bad reputation, but if it’s weird enough or no one has heard of it, that’s worthy of my notice as well. Finally, I want to stress that “dubiosity” is an indicator entirely separate from quality or how much I enjoyed any given game. Blue Stinger might not play especially well, but hot damn is it one of the most memorable things I played last year.

Daymare 1994: Sandcastle

Category: Indie Dubious Horror Around the World (Europe)

Developer: Invader Studios

Release Date: August 29, 2023

Time Played: a little over 7 hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Would I play again? No.

As the inaugural game of Dubious Horror 2023, the hottest release of this year, and the prequel to “one of the worst games I’ve played on stream” I had high hopes for Daymare 1994. Unfortunately for all my Going There/Being There enthusiasts, I have terrible news: Daymare 1994 is a far more competent game than its predecessor. The small Italian development team at Invader Studios got the memo, took a look at Daymare 1998, and then proceeded to “make a better video game.” Oh, it’s still terrible, mind you, but instead of being terrible in a way that was a highlight of last year’s feature, this one is just kind of a boring linear action shooty shoot thing.

I had plenty of words to say about the previous game, but it’s the kind of thing that makes sense when you think about its roots as a fan remake of RE2. It’s a game with more enthusiasm than sense or budget or really anything resembling cohesion. Between the bits of Resident Evil fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off there were numerous attempts at making a weird busted pastiche of other, better survival horror games. To reiterate, it’s one of the worst things I played last year (a year where I also tricked three other adult men into playing Aliens Colonial Marines with me for the children) but it feels like a bad Resident Evil fan project that wished upon a star and became a $30 published video game. If you'd like a reminder of how that went, my write up from last year is here.

Perhaps wisely, Daymare 1994 understands its limitations better, and instead tries to focus on action above all else. You’re only controlling one character, from one perspective, and a set inventory of tools and abilities. There aren’t even that many puzzles or anything resembling inventory management this time around. It’s just your not-Umbrella agent lady with a MP5k, a shotgun, and a cryo gauntlet. In this video game, you mostly just do a light jog through well-rendered but overly large environments, occasionally interrupted with fights against exactly three regular enemy types, all of whom are weak to “getting shot in the head” or “getting sprayed with cryo gas.” There is barely anything resembling variance to these encounters, it just eventually ends. You can upgrade said cryo gauntlet with more abilities, but otherwise you get no new weapons or tools or really anything that helps differentiate hour one from hour seven.

The storytelling is still bizarre and incoherent, to the point where it’s genuinely impossible to understand the main drive of the plot and I'm not going to even try. That’s fine. It’s honestly a plus, given that every cutscene has an essential “what the fuck is going on” quality to it. It also, weirdly enough, doesn’t actually tie into Daymare 1998 all that much outside of a limp post-credits stinger. If there were more cutscenes with that sort of deranged, incoherent quality instead of endless hallways, I’d probably have more positive words to say about this one. Instead I’m left adrift. I do think if Invader refocuses themselves a bit, they can probably find a happy medium between "One of the worst things I've played on stream" and "God this is just a really slight third person shooter with a lot of running" I know in my heart they'll find a way. Should you play it? No, oh god no. Please don't. There are plenty of genuinely good smaller indie games trying to do the resident evil throwback thing which are far more worth your time. Have you played Signalis yet? you should play Signalis!

Song of Horror

Category: Indie Dubious Horror Around the World (Europe)

Developer: Protocol Games

Release Date: October 31, 2019

Time Played: 7 hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Would I play again? The perma-death mechanic really took the wind out of my sails here, so I’m leaning towards no even if I think the game itself is mostly decent.

Previous company excluded, one of the more exciting things I’ve wanted to delve into with this incarnation of Dubious Horror is the indie scene. Not full-on steam trash or streamer bait, but well-intentioned horror games of varying kinds on modest budgets with modestly-sized teams. Sometimes you get a Daymare 1998, but other times you get a Tormented Souls. It’s a surprisingly vibrant scene, all things told, and even if not all of it is great there’s at least a chance it’ll be interesting. The games on my shortlist for these categories are ambitious enough or at the very least noteworthy enough that I feel like I can talk about them and their dubious qualities without feeling like I’m punching down on “like five dudes.”

With all that said, Song of Horror might be closer to the “not actually dubious” end of the scale, inasmuch as I could see a human being who isn’t weird and irony poisoned having a good time. An episodic, smaller-scale survival horror game with multiple playable characters, a weirdly punishing perma-death mechanic (more on that later) and some really impressive environments is frankly better than what I want or expect from the same feature that led me to play Countdown Vampires. I can respect a smaller game that knows its limitations and scope just as much as I can enjoy one that wildly overreaches, but the latter is usually better for #content.

To be clear, the basic game part of Song of Horror involves you selecting one of a handful of characters with slightly different properties, wandering around mundane spooky environments with fixed camera angles solving various Adventure Game and/or Resident Evil puzzles. The first episode takes place in a spooky house, the second a spooky antique store (and its adjoining apartment complex) and the third a university archive. There’s some sort of overarching story about a cursed music box, an unkillable eldritch presence, and a guy who really could use a nap, but since I didn’t finish the game I can’t really say if it managed to nail whatever landing it was going for. I’ll just say that by the levels of competence I expect from this genre, for this feature, it seemed a resounding fine/10

While I wouldn’t call the game all that scary (insomuch as I am resistant to a lot of that stuff these days) there’s a good level of detail and spooky atmosphere I think they manage to nail. The actual puzzle design for a lot of the puzzles I would put on the obtuse side of acceptable. A lot of these games tend to have puzzles that are a little more involved than the survival horror games which inspired them, and this one is no different. I, at one point, had to take notes. Gross. What is this, some sort of myst clone? Disgusting.

Instead of combat, however, there’s an AI-driven presence who will show up to ruin your day. This feels as much like an intentional experiment as it does a self-imposed limitation to not have to design combat mechanics. Avoiding the smoky, tentacle shadow thing entails listening to doors, not poking your head in obvious deathtraps, and…participating in QTE minigames. So here’s the thing. Shooting a zombie in the head or running past it is the kind of small, tense interaction that adds friction to what would otherwise be walking between points of interest. Trying to recreate that tension via “occasionally finding a hiding place and doing a breathing minigame with the triggers” is a bit less engaging once you’ve done it the third or fourth time, especially since the consequences of failing are instant death.

I’ve been dancing around it, but I think the instant death stuff is actually what killed my desire to see this one to the finish line. You have, in essence, a fixed number of “lives” (random people who live in suburban UK) to do an entire episode with or restart it from the beginning. When and where “the presence” will attack is governed by an AI director, so what I think the game is trying to do is encourage cautious play. What it actually does tends to be a bit less fair, I think. There are usually clues hinting at various actions which will lead to death, but some of them are obtuse or punish curiosity. Basically, what I’m saying is that Song of Horror intentionally or unintentionally evokes a Sierra adventure game more than a Resident Evil. I feel like being friends with ZombiePie for over a decade has ruined me and this haunting is the result of that.

I don’t think the component parts necessarily add up to something amazing, but I do think if this mechanic was a bit less punishing (or if I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed poking at things that would obviously kill me) it probably would’ve been the difference between finishing the game and deciding to move on. While it certainly displays signs of indie-budget jank, my overall feeling is that it’s probably a bit too competent to fully earn the dubious pedestal. Thankfully, the next couple games I’m covering have no such problem.

Help, Armored Core has consumed my life

Oh hi, it’s been a bit, hasn’t it? What if I got back into the habit of playing video games and writing about them, hm? Too much has happened to me in the last few months but I’m back and ready to throw down thousands of words for a scant few readers in my lonely little corner. It’s fine. With the slow erosion of the games press from every conceivable angle, and especially the devaluation of written content thanks to SEO guide hell and AI bullshit, I’d just like to say that I was ahead of the pack by never ever actually making a cent off of this shit despite doing it on and off for the last fourteen years. This is just therapy at this point. I don’t even *care* if you nerds read it. Okay I do. A little. If you’d like to support me in my stupid bullshit either give my twitchy twitch a look and watch me stream, or you can support Deep Listens’ patreon. I’m on their podcast sometimes! We talked about Dragon Age II! You should listen to it!

2023 has already been a banger year for video games. Like, shockingly so, in both the “garbage made specifically for me”, and “Popular things which are good” categories. You’d better believe I have strong opinions about Baldur’s Gate 3 and other, far more obscure or weird bits and bobs. I also played through pretty much all of The Legacy of Kain series and might eventually have some things to say about that! Heck man, I might even get back into the garbage streams again. There’s a non-zero chance more horror write-ups are coming later this year, because I’ve found some stuff I need you to see. I have a lot I want to talk about, basically, and I might as well start with the thing that’s devoured my attention this summer.

To summarize, Armored Core is a franchise where you kitbash various parts of robots together in order to do bite-sized ill deeds (and the occasional war-crime) for megacorporations, often using controls not meant for human hands, with a level of accessibility and difficulty one would expect out of 2000s From Software. It’s my jam. I’ll admit this was not entirely my own idea. You can blame VaatiVidya’s coverage of the Armored Core series for being the catalyst to this. In retrospect, it’s frankly absurd I wasn’t an Armored Core person *before* this. I’ve already expressed a willingness to delve into From Software’s pre-Souls back catalog, I love stupid granular video game mechanics, and I think giant robots are mostly cool and rad. OF COURSE I would be into this.

It’s also no surprise that none of these games reviewed especially well. It’s hard to imagine now, in a post-Elden Ring world, but this series was pretty consistently poo-poo’d by various western games press outlets. This was the case for a lot of overly-esoteric or overly-Japanese series in the 2000s, but pre-2009 From Software was uniquely qualified for the ire of mainstream outlets. To quote G4’s review of Last Raven: “The presentation is weak, the gameplay flawed, and the reliance on insanely in-depth customization will likely end up annoying most gamers.” I will never not take an opportunity to swipe at “Old Games Media” and this is another case, like the early Yakuza games, where motherfuckers just didn’t get it. That’s their loss and my gain, as I’m here to recount (almost) every Armored Core game and its status in the overall energy of the cosmos. This is my service to you, and also my way of forcing myself to write things again.

Armored Core, Project Phantasma, Master of Arena (1997-99)

There are many series that don’t find their footing until the second or third installment, but to Armored Core’s credit, they kinda figured it out from the get go. If you like customizing robots, ice cold corporate wetwork, and the kind of UI design only a company who started out making bizdev software could do, they did it in one. Oh, to be clear, you also have to live in a world where using R1 and L1 to strafe and R2 and L2 to look up and down becomes a reasonable way to live your life, but it’s fiiiiine. I did it! Me, the person who regularly plays weird old games with nonstandard control schemes, says the old video game with a nonstandard control scheme plays just fine. Which means you can believe me. Part of why this is tolerable has to do with the very generous soft targeting system AC has going on. As long as you can keep the enemy inside the targeting box, you’re locked on. The size and shape of the box is determined by the weapon you’re using and the FCS you have installed. The real problem is dealing with vertical enemies, of which there are… some.

I will not pretend that a From Software game released before the year 2015 has any real desire to be played by human beings. I will say, however, that the general mission structure of these games is bite sized in a way that makes them less daunting than otherwise apparent. The average mission in most of these Armored Core games is less than five minutes. If they’re particularly spicy, they might be closer to ten. This is even more apparent in this first PSX generation, where draw distance is at a premium and corridor crawls are frequent. Most missions involve you needing to blow something up, prevent something from being blown up, or going from point A to B. The exceptions to this structure tend to be big late game set pieces. The last mission of Armored Core the First is notoriously one of them, featuring a platforming sequence I might generously call “pretty awful.” It’s the most egregious bit of the game and I have no regrets about abusing the hell out of save states to get through it. Later games definitely have their share of bad mission design, but none of them will ever be as bad as “destroy floating mines.”

I don’t have a ton to say about the other first gen expansions. Project Phantasma adds the arena, which is a key component of the series going forward, and Master of Arena (unsurprisingly) focuses on arena fights and integrates them with the main story. I didn’t play too much of the latter, likely because I was already getting a little tired of the technical limitations and notable jank of the PSX generation, but if you get anything out of this know that these games are all shockingly playable in spite of their age.

Armored Core 2 and Another Age (2000-2001)

Armored Core 2 is one of THREE Fromsoft games to make the PS2’s North America launch , which is probably as good an indication of any as to how much they used to just throw stuff out into the ether. It’s easily a better game than both Evergrace and Eternal Ring (both of which have a… dubious quality to them, one might say) and I dunno I might go as far as calling it the best PS2 launch game. What’s gonna compete, hm? Fantavision? Madden? Tekken Tag? Those aren’t real games. Those are the games your normie cousin bought alongside a DVD copy of The Matrix.

To be frank, Armored Core 2 does not fuck around. None of these games do, but the second generation of Armored Core sticks out as having some of the more consistent examples of “From Software difficulty” in regards to mission design. They’re not more complex than the first game, at least most of the time, but they are often more demanding. Heat is now a concern, and I would recommend getting a better radiator as one of your first purchases so that errant enemy rifle fire doesn’t lead to considerable damage over time. I’d also say this is really where I actively needed to change up my AC on a regular basis to meet the needs of the mission, rather than relying on a single build to do most of the heavy lifting. While a lot of problems can and will be solved by building the biggest tank with the heaviest weapons, there are cases where that should not be the immediate go-to. For one, sometimes you need to be able to stay in the air for more than like ten seconds. Or go up a large vertical shaft.

AC2 Another Age is noteworthy mostly because of how much it’s just an unapologetic “mission pack” of an expansion. It has 100 missions, and to see credits you have to do all 100. I ended up skipping it for that reason, but now that I’m coming back around to write all of this, there’s a good chance I’ll revisit it. I mean, if VaatiVidya can play all of them, that clearly means I should as well. (I don’t think I will play all of them) (I might play all of them)

Armored Core 3 and Silent Line (2002-03)

The third generation of Armored Core was the first to dare asking “what if you could hold something other than an energy sword or shield in that left hand?” This opens up a lot of very stupid build variety options, as my various hijinks involving “What if Two Machine Guns” is any indication. It’s also the first game in the series to let you just dump a weapon to lower your weight and energy drain. Is it the first that lets you move the camera and aim with the analog sticks? No, of course not. Why would you think that? These games came out on the PSP for god’s sake. To be fair, AC3’s controls are absolutely smoother and more responsive than the prior generations, but you’re still strafing with the shoulder buttons. These ended up being some of my favorites of the bunch, and I think if you’re gonna check out one of “the older games” these might be the two I’d recommend.

My self-imposed challenge for Armored Core 3 was to avoid going as heavy as possible from the outset, which helped me improve . In both AC 1 and 2 I’d very quickly opted for a heavy quadruped build, whose combination of ground mobility, armor, and the ability to fire heavy weapons while moving was key to my early success in these games before I really “got gud” at using the series mobility tools. Legs determine your weight capacity, your mobility on the ground and in the air, and even the size of your AC’s hitbox. They’re easily the most important part of your robot, in the same way that they’re the most important part of Atelier Ryza’s character design. Besides bipedal legs, which come in all weight classes and varieties, there are reverse joint chicken legs (which tend to have excellent jumping ability), the aforementioned quad legs, full on tank treads (which unsurprisingly can support a lot of weight, have a lot of armor, and basically can’t move very quickly at all) and the awkward stepchildren of the bunch: hover legs (good for water missions and staying in the air, if nothing else)

Silent Line is probably the high point for me, as it’s where I finally “figured out” a lot of Armored Core mechanics and had more fun just goofing around and experimenting with builds. You may ask “Arby’s Waterman, how come you didn’t get sick of these games even tho you play so many???” and I think a lot of that has to do with both the bite-sized nature of missions *and* the stupid granular nature of customization. Once you understand the rules, the various bits and bobs, it’s easy to make something that works, even if that something is very stupid. What if you had ALL MISSILES? What if you had missiles for your missiles? What if you relied on the good grace of god and just shot a bunch of dumbfire rockets everywhere? What if *two* energy swords? You can make it work. You can, if you believe in yourself and think very long and hard about weight limits. And energy limits. You want both of those things.

Armored Core Nexus, Nine Breaker, Last Raven (2004-2006)

Often referred to as “Generation 3.5” by fans, the last trio of PS2 Armored Core games finally introduce modern controls that control like normal video games. Imagine, being able to aim with the right analog stick! It’s unironically the biggest deal. All three of these games are also quite different from one another, at least as different as three games running on the same engine tech with the same core gameplay can be. One gets the sense that it’s where a lot of experimentation was happening, given that at this point they’d managed to churn out like ten Armored Core games in nine years. Truly the Madden of robot customization games, or something. Except instead of a truck stick or QB vision cones or whatever they made it so now your booster generates heat and also overheating drains your energy bar super quickly instead of being a simple damage over time effect. Needless to say, cooling moves from being “nice to have” to “a fairly crucial part of one’s build” in case you didn’t need more plates to spin when designing a robot. I like that. You can also now store backup weapons when your primaries run out, in case you were to say, have two pistols and replace those pistols with two more pistols. Highly recommend that.

Armored Core Nexus is more-or-less an indirect follow-up to Silent Line, featuring the same corporations, many of the same basic parts, and seemingly a lot of the same game assets. However, between the aforementioned control changes, gameplay tweaks, and a bonus disk containing remade versions of classic Armored Core, Project Phantasma, and Master of Arena missions, it’s definitely worthy of being more than just “an expansion.” Nexus is probably my second favorite in the series behind the 3 games, and a lot of that has to do with the game being far, far more generous with money than any of the prior titles. This makes things a bit easier, but it also adds more opportunities for customization and different situational mechs depending on the situation at hand. This is where I made a build with floating legs and machine gun arms and managed to make it work.

Nine Breaker is an Armored Core game with no story missions and no shop, instead tying advancement to arena fights and bespoke training missions. If you import your save from Nexus, you also don’t get access to the parts the game would otherwise give you for free on a new game, which is a problem given the variety of tasks laid out in front of you. So, fair to say, I skipped Nine Breaker. This one feels like it’s the most “people should throw money at me if they want to see me suffer through it” of the bunch, and while I cannot explicitly link you to places to give me money on here, just know you can do that and you *can* let me know if you’d like me to play Nine Breaker.

Last Raven, on the other hand, might as well be called “Armored Core for Super Players.” I would like to consider myself pretty good at video games. I have completed most of FromSoft’s post-Demon’s Souls output. Armored Core: Last Raven might be the single hardest video game to come from this developer. I do not mean that as hyperbole, I don’t mean this as a “wow Elden Ring EZ” sort of brag. It’s just pure sicko mode shit made specifically for a hyper-niche audience of lunatics in mind, as you’d expect from a late model PS2 game from a long running niche series. Many of the builds which made easy headway in Nexus were powerless against the enemy AC pilots of Last Raven, all of whom are more maneuverable and aggressive than anything prior. If you like the AI flying over you and stunlocking you to death with perfect precision, I have great news. I don’t even know if this game is hard in a “fair” way so much as it’s just oppressive. A real fucker, you might say.

It’s maybe the hardest “git gud” wall I’ve encountered in some time, but to my credit I managed to get it done. Sure, I might’ve picked one of the easier routes (Last Raven only requires you to play roughly a dozen missions before seeing credits, as opposed to most other games hovering around 30) but I’m just proud I saw credits at all. A few days (and a few more AC games) removed, I'm almost dumb enough to want to see the game’s other routes, now that I’ve managed to get my expert bunnyhopping technique down. I don’t know if this is stockholm syndrome or a reflection on how much easier future AC games ended up being, but yeah I’d consider doing that mission where you fight another AC in an open field that is continually being bombarded by suicide drones again. I’d do that. For money.

Conclusion:

Armored Core is good and these older titles are still worth going back to. Unfortunately, none of them are digitally available on modern consoles, which just leaves a scant handful of PSP and PS3 offerings if you're willing to go through the hassle of ancient desiccated storefronts. I did that, and as a result, I have access to a for real digital copy of Verdict Day. Given the current state of retro game inflation, further exacerbated by the announcement of AC 6, physical secondhand copies of these games have never been more expensive. I'm not going to explicitly endorse piracy on this here video game webzone, but I will say "get it where you can."

So, for both word count reasons and logistical ones (namely, the Armored Core V games don’t emulate well at all and I currently don’t have access to my PS3 to play Verdict Day at the moment) I’m gonna take a hard stop at the end of the PS2 generation. However, depending on how people respond to this as well as my own play habits, you can likely expect a follow-up covering the fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth(???) generations of Armored Core, as well as the ones I skipped (in case you really want my hot takes on Formula Front.) Spoilers: Armored Core 4 is lukewarm and mediocre, Armored Core For Answer is fucking rad. That's it. I'm done. Maybe I'll do my big Baldur's Gate 3 spoiler writeman. Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

It’s time to finish my plate. I figured before I started my next dubious streaming project*, I might as well clean up The Tower of Dubious Horror Games. So here it is, a testament to my 14 years of writing dumb things on this silly webzone. Should only need one more part after this. If you'd like to find stream VODs of all of my playthroughs of these games, consider checking out my youtubes

Countdown Vampires

Category: Actual Garbage

Developer: Bandai

Release Date: August 21, 2000

Time Played: Around six hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Would I play again? I won’t pretend I wouldn’t.

Countdown Vampires has occupied an outsized place in my brain for the last few months, even among the weird shit I’ve played for this feature. To call it a “bad Resident Evil clone” is like calling the Louvre a “building with some art in it.” It transcends mere badness and becomes high art, worthy of being put in the Louvre. Or at least the MOMA. Few other games aspire to this level of exalted ineptitude, perfectly balanced between being “sort of playable” and “deeply incompetent.” It’s cargo cult game design at its finest and easily sits in the Dubious Hall of Fame. No I’m serious. It’s been like six months since I streamed this game and I still think about it.

To explain *why* Countdown Vampires is The Birdemic of Video Games, it’s worth considering what games like Resident Evil do correctly. Take the Spencer Mansion of the first game, or the RPD of the second as examples of tight puzzle box environment design. Those games start with an environment that you slowly unwind and learn over the course of a handful of hours, with enemies acting as the obstacles. Even in games with a more linear structure, the idea of resource expenditure and exploration plays a key part in Survival Horror as a “genre.” If you remove that, it’s basically an adventure game. If you give the player too many resources, it becomes something closer to an action game. It’s a tricky needle to thread, but the actual nuances of that design aren’t the topic for today.

My point is more that Countdown Vampires doesn’t understand any of this. It doesn’t understand how to create an interesting environment, or the basic fundamentals of video game puzzle design, or why you’d want to run past an enemy instead of unloading on them. It’s performing a bizarre pantomime of a Resident Evil game where it understands the controls, the UI, the way a pre-rendered background is supposed to look, but exhibits no meaning behind them. It’s a game whose one unique idea is to give you a tranquilizer gun to knock out vampires (you can then sprinkle them with holy water to “cure” them) but said tranquilizer lasts like 10 seconds at most. Oh by the way you need to save at least 30 people this way to get the good ending. No, this isn’t indicated anywhere. There’s no real “flow” state to environments, nor is the game shy about just spawning new enemies by the time you return to those areas. MULTIPLE puzzles will have the item needed to solve them in the adjacent room. It’s deeply incompetent on such a fundamental level that it doesn’t surprise me to learn this was this team’s first game, or that none of the lead developers had much experience with the genre beforehand.

None of this would be possible if the overall presentation wasn’t also deeply nonsensical and silly. Keep in mind this thing came out four years after the original Resident Evil and somehow matches it in terms of hilariously bad line reads. How did they get away with the audio popping and crackling the way it does? Why does it take a full second to open up the inventory menu? Why is the protagonist a shirtless goober? Why do I have to gamble at a casino to afford health items? Wait, I have to play the entire game again to see the true ending? What?

Without exaggeration, Countdown Vampires is the perfect example of why I do this nonsense in the first place. It’s a laser-targeted piece of garbage aimed directly at me and my stupid preferences. I have no idea if you, the reader at home, will get anything out of it, but as someone who loves him some classical survival horror-ing, inventory managing, tank controlled nonsense it’s that premium quality junk.

Now time for a lightning round, because "I don't want to write a minimum of 2-3 paragraphs for some of these games and also it's been long enough that I don't remember everything"

The Evil Within 2:

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

A revisit probably best left in the past; I think The Evil Within 2 is fundamentally a more coherent game than the first one, but it’s also less interesting as a result. As these replays have cemented for me, both Evil Within games aren’t great. They have interesting ideas. They might even have good sequences. But for the most part, they’re games I define by their failures more than their successes. Especially in a post-RE7, post-RE2 Remake world, I just straight up think they’re not worth my time. Probably aren’t worth your time either.

Dementium: The Ward and Dementium 2

Dubiosity: N/A

Technically ambitious, pushing the DS hardware in a really fascinating way. Are they remotely fun and/or scary? No. No they aren’t. Had my fill after about an hour.

Resident Evil Gaiden

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Resident Evil Gaiden continues the longstanding Resident Evil spinoff trend of being kinda shit, which should surprise absolutely no one. As the unlikely, non-canonical duo of Barry Burton and Leon S. Kennedy, you get to investigate a boat, awkwardly navigate environments, and engage in a combat system I’d describe as “being pretty bad.” It’s definitely pushing the limits of what the hardware is capable of, but there isn’t a whole lot to it beyond “they kind of tried to cram a Resident Evil game onto a game boy”

No, seriously, it was probably a mistake to have a dedicated portable category. By their very nature, a lot of portable games from this era were simple and straightforward and there's not a whole lot I can say about this that wouldn't be made readily obvious watching 10 minutes of gameplay.

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (GBC)

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

You know how Capcom started making and then canceled a version of Resident Evil for the Game Boy Color? Leaked prototypes are out there, you can see what they were going for. It’s an impressive little thing, but you can also see why it was canceled. The GBC is an interesting platform for a lot of reasons, but Resident Evil Gaiden was probably a better fit for the platform than trying to cram the original in there.

So anyway, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, recently released onto Nintendo Switch Online, is the actualization of what that RE 1 port was trying to do. It’s a game attempting to cram an abridged version of its console counterpart onto a 4MB cartridge, complete with pre-rendered backgrounds compressed to the point of abstraction. Is it good? No. Is it interesting? Absolutely.

Fobia: St. Difnia Hotel

Dubiosity: honestly too good for this feature.

Made by a small Brazilian team, Fobia is a reminder that, in fact, there are indie developers out there who are genuinely capable of making a decent survival horror in this day and age. Fobia is a notch or two below Tormented Souls in my “how good of a fake Resident Evil is this Fake Resident Evil” ranking list, but as a neat $20 take on RE7? Not bad!

Corpse Party

Category: Visual Novels can be Scary As Well

Developer: Team GrisGris

Release Date: April 22, 1996 (original release)

Time Played: Around 12 hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Would I play again? No please no oh god no

If you are of a certain age, or perhaps of a certain weebish disposition you’re likely familiar with the likes of Corpse Party. The original 1996 version of the game, a doujin PC-98 game made with the original version of RPGmaker, influenced an entire swath of Japanese horror stuff in video games and beyond. You wouldn’t get the likes of Yume Nikki, Ib, or Ao Oni without it, or even the likes of Undertale. I’m not even fucking joking when I say that Corpse Party is the most influential game I’ve played for this feature. So much J-horror stuff, RPGmaker stuff, and indie doujin stuff in general can directly or indirectly trace its roots back to this one thing. Unfortunately, it’s also terrible.

When I say Corpse Party is Triumph of the Will or maybe Birth of a Nation, but for doujin horror games, I’m not joking. I’ve played some pretty unfortunate visual novels in recent months, but Corpse Party has the distinction of being one of the worst things I’ve played on stream for any of these features, up there with Duke Nukem Forever and Daymare 1998 in 2022’s Hall of Infamy. It’s genuinely miserable edgelord trash, and I wish I had never played it. But I did so I’m going to justify myself by doing this write-up. I spent $15 american dollars on this video game, I hated pretty much all of it

Worth mentioning, the version of Corpse Party I played is actually the 2011 remake (which itself was a remake of a 2008 mobile/PC version, and then was subsequently re-re-remade for PC with higher resolution art in 2021), which came out over here on PSP courtesy of XSEED. That release in and of itself is actually pretty important, as it’s around the time visual novels started to gain real traction in the west, both officially and via fan translations. And in that sense, this game makes sense. If the year is 2011, you're like... I dunno, 16, and you've never seen an edgy anime before, I can see how it might resonate with you. Am I saying that Corpse Party is responsible for the endless garbage torrent of RPGmaker hentai games clogging up Steam’s new release calendar? I’m not *not* saying that.

To experience Corpse Party now is to have a rosetta stone for the previous two decades of edgelord J-horror tropes. If there's a shitty horror anime from the past 20 years, it probably owes something to Corpse Party. If you enjoy a nigh-endless amount of shock horror, where bad things happen to anime kids and they poop and piss and wander around getting scared, do I have a VN for you! If you enjoy wandering around the same handful of environments for 10 hours looking for the next story trigger, only to get a bad ending because you missed a thing an hour ago. There aren’t themes, the characters are mostly tropes, and the entire thing is genuinely just mean-spirited to the point of absurdity. The worst part is I can see where other, better things took Corpse Party's ideas and made them their own. Higurashi and Umineko probably owe some amount of debt to this game, but those games have likeable characters, themes, genuine dread, good writing, etc etc.

So yeah please don't play this one. You have so much to live for.

anyway there's one more of these on the way, in case you want my months-late thoughts on video games I streamed last year. Also should have another tactics thing out before the end of the month. The best way to start 2023 is to finish my stuff from 2022, apparently.

PLAYER PHASE

Much to my chagrin, I am not a being with infinite time and infinite patience. Playing enough of a tactics game to feel comfortable writing 3-5 paragraphs about it is a surprisingly time-consuming process, especially since I’ve already written about the games I liked enough to play to completion or near-completion. Writing things in general can be hard, especially when the site you’re putting them on feels precarious. This is a personal outlet; having an audience is just a favorable side-effect. I’m not expecting a huge audience to mourn should my 14 years of internet blog just vanish into the ether one day. HOWEVER, just know that I have plans to continue writing things regardless of the state of *this webzone* and if you’d like to follow along (should the inevitable happen) it might not be a terrible idea to keep your eyes on the Deep Listens podcast feed or maybe my Twitch. That’s all I’ma say about that.

With the release of Fire Emblem Engage last week, I thought it pertinent to finish this installment of “Here are all the video games I played with tiles in them which came out in 2022.” Once again, if you’d told me in the year of our lord 2013 they’d be making numerous games like Fire Emblem Awakening, I would’ve been stoked beyond my capacity. Now, to some extent, it turns out I *can* have enough Fire Emblem. I don’t know if playing through all three of Fates’ campaigns back-to-back-to-back broke me, but I’ve found my general threshold for anime tile-em-ups to be less than it used to be. With that said, I present a handful of games clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’ flagship series. That means tile-based, turn-based, games with bespoke units, often with fixed or suggested classes, and probably some level of character bonding.

Also, in case you’re wondering, I think Engage is a fucking banger if you have any interest in the tactical side of Fire Emblem and aren’t just there for mediocre anime ships. Just thought I’d throw that out there immediately.

Lost Eidolons

Lost Eidolons is the freshman effort from Ocean Drive Studios, a Seoul and Los Angeles-based joint made up of MMO and mobile game veterans. I say this as nicely as possible, because it feels like a passion project, a game that has a lot of moxie, but Lost Eidolons is on the endearing side of “mid.” It’s maybe not something I’d recommend at full price, but in my roughly eight hours with the game thus far it’s grown on me to the point where I think I’m gonna finish it, which I wasn’t initially going to do. Sure, the man who just spent the last week replaying Ninja Gaiden 3 is maybe not the greatest barometer for how you should spend your time, but just know that for the most part this game carries my tentative endorsement.

Its baseline mechanics are different enough to be more than Fire Emblem with the serial numbers filed off, but there’s no denying what it’s trying to imitate. The presence of an optional perma-death toggle should be indicative enough, and like the absolute predictable buffoon I am, I picked the hardest difficulty with that feature enabled. Thus far, I haven’t been incredibly taxed by Lost Eidolon’s map design, but credit where credit is due, I’ve also had to take advantage of the rewind feature numerous times. There are some interesting ideas, especially when it comes to the game’s magic system (i.e. cast a water spell to drench an enemy, then follow up with lightning to do extra damage or ice to stun them for a turn.) and I wouldn’t be surprised if later chapters have even more unique ideas.

To keep the Fire Emblem comparisons going, it’s incredibly evident the devs were inspired by Three Houses when it comes to structure. Which is to say that between maps you can wander around camp, talk to your followers, and engage in obnoxious busywork to earn doodads and beebobs and so on to min-max your squad in various different classes. Moreso than even Three Houses’ monastery, the camp area has a lot of chaff, definitely where you feel that Korean MMO and mobile game DNA seep in a little bit. A lot of it feels like it could be relegated to a menu, or otherwise cut down, but maybe some people are into spending 30 minutes fiddling with gear, wandering around, and engaging in awkward conversation with your friend “Robert.” I, alas, am not one of them.

If there’s a trend you should take away from “ArbitraryWaterman Spending Too Much Time Telling You About Turn-Based Bullshit You Have or Haven’t Heard Of 2022”, it’s that all of these fucking video games need to stop pretending their vanilla-ass fantasy story is worth an hour of introductory exposition. I can’t believe I’ve gotten to this point. ME! The CRPG man! The doofus who read like eight Shannara books in middle school! This was a problem with Midnight Suns, it’s a problem here, and it’s going to be a problem when I get to Triangle Strategy. The tale of a band of small-time mercenaries rising to lead a rebellion isn’t even egregiously bad or anything, and in my time with the game I’ve seen enough to think they’re at least nailing the (trope-y) beats they’re going for. It’s just in need of an editor. And maybe a different art style, if I’m gonna be honest. Something about these very realistic character models stiffly emoting like PS3 JRPG characters feels a bit off-putting.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

Symphony of War is a surprising combination of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle, made even more surprising by the fact that developer Dancing Dragon Games has managed to cram it all in the confines of RPGmaker. This is a game clearly straining against the limitations of what that software is capable of, and for that reason alone I think it’s noteworthy. For a $20 indie tactical RPG I picked up on a whim? Also noteworthy! It’s a neat little thing! Have I finished it? No. Shit’s long my dudes, and there are at least four more games from 2022 I’d like to cover before it stops being okay to talk about games from 2022. Wait fuck, it’s almost February?

So, as mentioned, Symphony of War has you moving bespoke units of troops around the map instead of individual characters in a very Ogre Battle (not Tactics Ogre) sort of way. Thankfully for all involved (me), it’s not doing the faux-RTS thing but is instead about that tile bullshit. There’s no weapon triangle or anything, but there sure are obvious rock-paper-scissors interactions between different types of units (hey guess what, spearmen are good against cavalry) complicated and made more fun by the way you set your troops up. Unlike an Ogre Battle, you can very much get away with something like a unit of nothing but archers or mages, assuming you ensure they don’t get attacked directly or anything. There’s even artillery n’ shit if you really want to hammer enemies from range.

If there’s a problem I have with it, it’s that the game sometimes falls into the weeds of its own UI a bit. Part of this, I imagine, is due to the limitations of RPGmaker, but like my time with Ogre Battle 64 last year you can just get overwhelmed with the amount of information at your disposal and the ways to access any of it. It can also be difficult to gauge how any given combat encounter might go at a glance, which is something other games of this type have gotten better at. I’ve also heard from people who’ve played more than me that the gameplay never really meaningfully evolves past the first few hours, but I’d have to look for myself to know for sure. And to do that, I’d have to stop playing Fire Emblem Engage, which I’m sorely against doing.

If you haven’t noticed I haven’t talked about the story and that’s because it’s some vanilla-ass JRPG “we played a Fire Emblem and an Ogre Battle and sort of tried to do both of those” storytelling. It’s not really all that remarkable and should probably be shuffled alongside the likes of… Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, or something in terms of indie JRPG generica. Still, the game as a whole is cool and novel enough that I will not hesitate to recommend it.

Bonus: Dark Deity

Technically a 2021 release, but with Dark Deity being included as a freebie for the EGS, ported to Switch, and in at least one humble bundle this last year, I figured it worth my time to also talk about it. Mostly to warn you away from it. See, while I’d give the two previous games a tentative thumbs up despite some weird gameplay limitations and oatmeal storytelling, Dark Deity doesn’t get more than a “well, you tried” award. Like the prior two games, it’s a Fire Emblem-esque indie title, but unlike the prior two games it does not have nearly enough “moxie” to overcome some really truly baffling design decisions. I’m always hesitant to dunk on small indie games like this, especially from what appears to be a relatively inexperienced team, but this one might just be too rough to escape judgment.

You know the weapon triangle? A pretty simple rock paper scissors deal? Cool stuff, yeah? What if there were FOUR different armor types with varying levels of resistance to NINE different damage types? What if, instead of equipping your characters with different weapons, you just kinda had four different classes of weapon you upgraded individually? See, if there’s one thing I appreciate about “A Fire Emblem” it’s that the math is relatively straightforward. Muddying it with percentile damage variations and fiddly damage/accuracy calculations makes things harder. As always, map design is another concern, though I’ve only played through chapter 8 and don’t feel especially pressed to see if it improves.

It’s a shame, because there’s absolutely some production work done here. The character art is nice and colorful, and the sprite work intentionally evokes the GBA Fire Emblems. Sure the story is, once again, the tale of a group of plucky young upstarts evil empire cult blah blah blah blah but it’s at least not taking itself especially seriously. The best I can say about Dark Deity is that it feels like a particularly ambitious Fire Emblem ROM hack. It doesn’t really nail what it’s going for, but it has the enthusiasm and ambition to try and tinker around with fundamental bits to see what does and doesn’t work. With a bit of refinement, I think my feelings would probably shift. For now? I’d pass.

Bonus ++: Project Ember

Oh, so anyway, Project Ember is a particularly ambitious Fire Emblem ROM hack for Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (AKA the one with Roy, AKA The First GBA one, AKA The one people in the early-mid 2000s were asking Nintendo to localize). The most recent version came out last year and does seem to nail what it’s going for, with the enthusiasm and ambition to try and tinker with fundamentals to see what does and doesn’t work. I’m of the opinion that FE6 is one of the lesser games in the series. It’s definitely harder than the other two GBA entries, but rarely for reasons that feel fair, and rarely for reasons that I find fun. Hit rates are low, enemies are tanky, and maps tend to be overly-large, all of which contribute to the whole thing feeling like a slog. Combine that with some surprisingly stingy promotion item distribution and it’s not one I really want to replay all that much. Until… now?

While I’ve only gotten through the first six or so chapters, Project Ember feels like it addresses pretty much all of my issues with the game. As the person who recommended it to me said “It’s FE6 for people who don’t like FE6.” Admittedly going down a laundry list of *why* this fan made ROM hack for a 21-year-old GBA game that never came out in the United States and 95% of my audience hasn’t played is probably a losing battle, but to sum it up: everyone hits harder, characters are more viable, and you aren’t stuck using the same handful of units every single playthrough. It’s closer to something like New Mystery of the Emblem (wait, fuck, that’s *another* Fire Emblem game that never came out over here) in terms of being more about the player phase. Your characters tend to hit very hard, and so do the enemies, leading to less “Park one overpowered unit in the range of all the enemies to kill them during enemy phase.” It's also, um, harder, if the video below is any indication. I'd call myself pretty good at Fire Emblem, but this one definitely has pushed me harder than some more recent titles.

Uh, but yeah. For the five of you who know what this means and have feelings on Blades-a-Binding, maybe give this one a look? The new and reworked sprite animations in this thing are fantastic, and probably worth the price of admission alone. I’ve already accepted that trying to get people to play the Japan-only Fire Emblem games for more than five minutes is a little like herding toddlers or convincing someone to watch all of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It’s not impossible, but at some point they’re going to want to do it themselves without any prodding from you.

And that’s it for Tactics Emblems! Well, sort of. There’s one more game in this list that I’d consider Fire Emblem-adjacent, but it’s interesting enough on its own merits to not be lumped in here. That, and I’ve already written about four things here.

ENEMY PHASE

Oh Hi, it's me again. Did you miss me? No? Well, too bad. When I'm not playing terrible fucking Sonic games on stream or entertaining a particularly anxious 4-year-old Goldendoodle while his owners are visiting the in-laws, I like to tactics. Here are two more high quality (this isn't me doing a sarcastic bit, I think both of these games are fantastic) video games worth your time if you like hexes and/or squares and enjoy doing murders in a turn-based fashion.

PLAYER PHASE

Expeditions Rome

Expeditions Rome is the third game in Logic Artists’ Expeditions series of historical tourism tile-em-ups; one of those series you’re vaguely aware of but probably aren’t thinking of very often. You may recall the Denmark-based studio was working on the canceled Divinity tactics spin-off, or that they announced they were pivoting to NFT games right after Rome’s release. I’m here to tell you that it's not only unfortunate timing, but also an absolute shame. Expeditions Rome is one of my favorite games of the year, and in a lot of ways checks the boxes I want from both a CRPG and a tacticstravaganza.

To give an indication of exactly when this game grabbed me, it was one or two hours in. At the start of the game, your character (a noble son or daughter of Rome on the run from troubles at home) becomes acquainted with a young Gaius Julius Caesar. He’s friendly, if a bit shady and perhaps a little too ambitious for his own good, but you think “oh, I see, I’m going to watch Ceasar’s rise to power from the sidelines.” An hour later, he gets merc’d right in front of you and you take control of a Roman legion. This happens at the beginning of the game. My friends, Expeditions Rome is a tactical RPG about your created character doing a Julius Caesar. Or not. This is not a game concerned with minuscule historical accuracy about legionary tactics, it’s not coming in with a weird nationalist agenda about “accurate historical depictions of Medieval Bohemia.” This is the funhouse TV show version of Roman history, hovering somewhere between a classic sword and sandals film and a premium cable series like HBO’s Rome or Showtime’s Spartacus, with just a sprinkling of classic BioWare in there for good measure.

Like prior Expeditions titles, this is a hybrid between a couple different kinds of game. The tactical battles, featuring hexes, bespoke objectives, and different classes, are the main appeal. Most of the encounters in the game have a bespoke, hand-crafted affinity to them, which makes each fight feel more meaningful than some of the other tactics games of 2022. For the most part, you’re going to be doing *something* else besides just taking your Roman guys and gals, slashing and bashing every enemy you run into. You can tell they learned some stuff from that canned Divinity game, because the amount of environmental interaction is noteworthy. Highly recommend throwing oil pots when you aren’t just throwing a shield guy to shield your guys while your shield guy does shielding.

There’s also the army management angle, which… to be perfectly, completely, totally honest I don’t think is all that exciting or good? There's cards? And numbers? And it's never really well explained if what you're doing is meaningful. It feels a little too limited to be a truly great strategic layer, and for the most part I found it to be on the forgettable side of pointless. Thankfully, it's not a huge part of the game. Still probably better than the naval combat in Pillars of Eternity 2 though.

The actual thing which surprised me was the quality of the CRPG-ish walk-and-talk sequences. The writing and voice acting in Expeditions Rome is… good? As mentioned, it’s a game that aims for being fun and having verisimilitude over being hampered by real historical minutiae. This extends to your supporting cast, who are probably more fun and diverse than actual Roman legionaries would’ve been. Since there are only 5, and you’re more-or-less rolling with the full crew as soon as you get all of them, that also means they’re more than willing to react to your decisions and give you shit or question your choices. It’s all fully voiced, and for the most part I will continue to say putting full voice acting in your dense RPG (and having said voice acting be good) adds a lot to the experience for me.

This is one I need to get back to, if only to see the inevitable part where you can choose to cross the literal Rubicon or not with your legions. Still, unless the game collapses in its last third I think it's fair to say I recommend it unambiguously.

King Arthur: Knight’s Tale

We’ve finally reached the first honest-to-goodness Eurojank contender for this year. Neocore Games, based in Budapest, is one of those developers who’ve been silently cranking out decently successful video games for the last decade. You know, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing? Warhammer 40K Inquisitor Martyr? More importantly, like a decade ago they made an RTS/RPG hybrid called “King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame.” While I’ve never played it myself (despite owning it on steam for something like a decade?), it was apparently successful enough to warrant a sequel, and here we have what appears to be a successor to that. Kinda? Maybe? Apparently King Arthur II: The Roleplaying Wargame is “not very good” if steam reviews are to be believed. Anyway, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the one which came out this year. It’s an Arthurian tactical RPG with a copious amount of edge. It’s very good!

Arthurian myth has been reinterpreted and re-framed by different authors with different ideas for literally more than a thousand years. It’s a malleable story, so Knight’s Tale featuring a revived Mordred recreating his own Camelot and Round Table to fight against an undead Arthur doesn’t feel particularly out of the realm of possibility. There’s a respectable amount of intent in trying to create a vaguely grimdark, decidedly grungy take on those stories; they clearly did their homework. What seems less intentional is how sometimes the game’s dark fantasy aesthetics and writing lean into accidental camp. Lines that would otherwise seem grim, weighty, or potentially badass are instead enhanced by “high quality” voice acting to become something a little sillier. I don’t think it’s quite “Full 40K” as far as being in on the joke, but in some ways that also makes it more pure with the stupid metal album energy going on. I mean, heck, Knight’s Tale even has its own moral compass based on the decisions you make along the way. Forget Lawful Evil, my boy Mordred is Tyrant/Old Faith.

As far as tactical turn-based combat goes, it’s not doing anything especially unique, but what it is doing is executed well. I’ve been playing on Hard, and the name of the game there is “damage mitigation.” Sure, you might say that’s the name of the game for ALL of these, but no, let me be clear. Your characters have two layers of health. The first layer (HP) can be replenished during missions and acts as a buffer for your vitality (which, once it hits 0, your character gets perma-death’d.) Furthermore, taking damage into vitality has a chance of giving your character debuffs in the form of injuries. Both injuries and vitality need to be restored at Camelot between levels, which requires time and/or money. While that might seem overly punitive, it highly encourages the player to think about each encounter from a very defensive perspective. Enemies will almost always outnumber you and some of them are quite tanky, so you can’t crowd control or out-damage your way through everything. Everyone can overwatch for a reason. This is maybe the first tactics video game, perhaps in the history of me playing tactics video games, where I’ve found traps to be astoundingly useful instead of a pointless boondoggle.

The other thing this injury system encourages is having a deep bench of knights to go upon knightly quests (i.e. murdering a bunch of undead, picts, bandits, human soldiers, or fae.) There are about thirty recruitable characters in all, but your round table can only hold a dozen once fully upgraded, including Mordred. That can lead to some fun, tough choices in regards to who you bring along through the game and who you kick to the curb, especially once loyalty bonuses and penalties from alignment start factoring more heavily. There are six classes, and each character tends to have a few unique abilities or passives to make them stand out. There’s a lot of wiggle room to build characters in specific ways, and thankfully this is one of those games where each spent skill point actually feels meaningful instead of incremental.

Honestly, the fact that I’m as impressed as I am with the character building aspects of this Grimdark-ass eurojank King Arthur RPG should be proof of my enthusiasm towards it. It can be a tad slow and isn’t as flashy as some of the other stuff on this Tactical Travelogue, but it’s got moxie and sheer “meat and potatoes” competence. Honestly, if not for the fact I’ve already declared like five other games to be the sleeper hit of 2022, this would probably be the sleeper hit of 2022. The developers have been pretty consistent about adding new updates, and there’s even some sort of competitive multiplayer skirmish thing? Sure? Looking forward to seeing what else comes out of Neocore in the future.

ENEMY PHASE

If you had told me around a decade ago that XCOM Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem Awakening would help usher in a new wave of turn-based tactics games, I would’ve been irrationally stoked. Too much, honestly. After spending multiple years of my life griping that they weren’t making the video games like the video games I liked, there is suddenly an abundance. A surplus of games what with square and/or hexagonal grids, probably turn-based, and undoubtedly full of numbers. And to be clear, this list is just games I’d explicitly consider “tactics” first and foremost. They might have other elements, but the primary form of interaction is moving goofuses around in a turn-based fashion. If we wanted to expand the definition to strategy games, or RPGs with tactical elements, there’d be even more.

Point is, there are a lot of these things. And if you’re not sick like me, you might want some actual recommendations instead of just playing all of them. That’s fair. That’s what I’m here for. So assemble your troops on a square or hexagonal grid, stare blankly at your slate of abilities, and figure out how many action points you want to spend because… I dunno where this metaphor is going. Turn-Based. We’re talking about turn-based video games. That’s the joke. I'm going to write more of these.

Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters

When trying to explain the torrential flood of games with the Warhammer license in its fantasy, sci-fi, and higher fantasy permutations to a normal person, I often have to take a step back. How is a layman supposed to distinguish a Dakka Squadron from a Darktide? A Dawn of War from a Battlesector? A Chaosbane from an Inquisitor Martyr? What about that one Age of Sigmar tactics game that came out last year and nobody played? I guess I can see how that might be confusing to someone who can’t tell one division of the techno-fascist Imperium of Man from another, but that’s why I’m here to help. Just remember this handy dandy device to determine which games with the Warhammer license are good, and which are bad: The ones I say are good are the ones you should play. Okay cool. You’re welcome. I guess you could also try asking Henry Cavill, given he seems to have some free time right now.

Chaos Gate Daemonhunters is the ostensible revival (sequel?) to 1998’s Chaos Gate, a game I’d call a “pretty good X-COM style tactics game.” It’s something I might eventually dig into more, but for now I want to talk about this new one, which is a “very good XCOM style tactics game.” In fact, I think it’s one of the best games of this year, if my top 10 wasn’t indicative enough. You’re Space Marines, you’re the super duper secret psychic daemonhunting chapter, you’re a squad of four heavily armored trucks wrecking shit and eradicating heretical snot cultists wherever you find them. Along the way you’ll get to be yelled at by your disappointed father of a Chapter Master, condescended to by the sassy lady Inquisitor who does your research, and probably face the most dreadful minions of the plague lord. You know, regular 40K stuff.

For as much as I kind of despise the way “XCOM” has turned into mainstream parlance for any game with turn based combat, a grid, and half-cover shield icons, this game is undoubtedly “An XCOM.” Most of the baseline design decisions in Chaos Gate feel like they came from people who played a lot of Firaxis’ take on XCOM and took notes on what did and didn’t work. Damage is fixed and based on range and cover. There are no percentile to-hit rolls. Armor acts as a buffer to HP. Your squad of four Spayce Muhreens recovers all of their AP the first time you encounter an enemy pod, letting you take position even if caught by surprise. Instead of XCOM 2’s hard turn limits (which are good) there’s a soft timer in the form of the warp surge meter, which constantly debuffs your squad, buffs your enemies, and even occasionally sends in reinforcements. It also goes up incrementally whenever your characters use psychic abilities, creating tension without forcing you to rush.

It’s some good shit, and even with occasional bits of jank, though I admit some parts can be frustrating. There are some boss fights which definitely lean a little too hard on gimmick mechanics, you can get screwed over on post-mission loot drops, and the (thankfully) light strategic layer can be annoying to deal with early on. It’s also kind of a fucker? The recently released Duty Eternal DLC, which adds some extra mission types, Techmarines, and even the occasional Dreadnought, also made the game notably harder (though like half of that was certain overpowered abilities and exploits getting balanced.) I’m saying my attempt at an Ironman run has gone very poorly multiple times and I should stop trying to beat the game that way.

But yeah, if there’s one game from this list I would recommend to anyone who needs their fix five years since War of the Chosen, it’s this one. In a lot of ways, it feels like the game Gears Tactics should’ve been; similarly focused on getting close up and aggressive but with a stronger sense of identity. It even has the same execution mechanic, granting your entire squad extra AP if you manage to kill a stunned enemy. That’s always fun! Anyway there's a near-full playthrough of the game I did on stream with @relkin so maybe you could check that out if you want an example of video games.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Speaking of Actual Firaxis, let’s talk about the actual game from the Actual XCOM people. I know people break out in hives when the topic of Marvel comes up, or when the topic of “there are cards” comes up, or when the concept of “doing a S.Link” comes up. I know this because, at various points and to varying degrees of severity, I find myself some level of done with all three. BUT EVEN SO, I think Midnight Suns is a pretty fuckin’ good tactics game. I was a doubter, I was a naysayer, and look at me here now. Writing a thing. On the internet. Please tell Jake Solomon I'm sorry.

To get it out of the way immediately, I think the writing and socializing elements of this game are *fine.* They’re not great, and they feel like someone in the dev team played Fire Emblem Three Houses and tried to put that game’s bad hub area in there verbatim. Your mileage with these things will likely be based entirely around how much you’re willing to buy into Marvel Bullshit at this point in the Year of Our Lord 2022, a year which brought us like five Disney Plus TV series and like three or four theatrical films. I refuse to look up how many there actually are because fuck man, there are too many. They don’t repeat the same mistake as Crystal Dynamics’ Avengers game – the more notable characters aren’t just carbon copies of their MCU counterparts – but your actual mileage may vary on how much you want your dweebus OC to become platonic besties with Blade.

For my part I’ll just say that I liked some characters a decent amount, liked some of the club interactions a lot (book club good) but didn’t hang out with Iron Man at all (he sucks.) I basically did none of the exploration puzzle shit on the abbey grounds after a while either, and straight up think the game would be better if all of that stuff was consigned to a menu. Perhaps more damning, I definitely started buttoning through dialogue instead of letting the voice acting play out. There’s a lot of talking, especially early on, and by the end I had my fill of it. Call me when the Morbius DLC comes out. I want to hang out with Michael Morbius. (Morbius is one of the DLC characters in the season pass I am not doing a goof)

The chaff between missions was probably my biggest point of contention during my playthrough. Once you get into the actual missions though, it’s that primo quality shit. That tactical cocaine. You’ve got three card plays, two redraws, and one move. It’s your job to maximize that as much as possible, alongside a pool of Heroism and a bunch of environmental interactions. It’s puzzle-esque without feeling as stifling as something like Into the Breach, and there’s a lot of customization and expression in the way you can load out your characters and synergize as a squad. The difficulty also is granular in a way that lets you play exactly up to your comfort zone. It’s really inspired in that way, which is why the parts of the game which are less confident and less polished really stick out.

If I was going to get super specific and dig through every character’s deck, there are probably some things I’d harp on, but for the most part I think they do a great job of making each character feel unique and capture the stupid dumb power fantasy one wants from a video game what with super heroes. Spider-Man sticks out as being a tad weaker than the rest of the cast, especially before you get some of his better cards. Otherwise, very few notes. I maybe wouldn’t recommend this at full price if you aren’t enthused about doing a Diet Fire Emblem with Wolverine, but that’s about it. Now please make XCOM 3.

YOU THINK IT'S OVER? THIS IS JUST THE FIRST TURN. also there are a lot of games on this list. Like, a lot. Like, at least two more write ups worth.

ENEMY PHASE