Stoked to see some Desperadoes 3 love! Mike is totally right about how expertly crafted it is. Please let Mimimi keep making these fantastic top down stealth games.
I also ended up getting a bit of the koi koi bug from Sakura Wars. I had dabbled with koi koi a tiny bit in the Yakuza games, but I think it being the only minigame in Sakura Wars made me pay a little more attention to it this time around. It took me a while to understand more of the strategy of playing it; it felt very deterministic initially.
Ten and Till sounds good, I think I'll check that out. I went down a bit of a shmup hole in 2020, I think I might have the same super zen bullet dodging power you described, unbeknownst to me. A lot of me just going "wow how did i dodge that" over and over. Ketsui Deathtiny came out in English on PSN a couple months back and I have been playing a lot of that, I love it.
I really need to get back to playing Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, I played a few hours of it and really enjoyed it. Paradise Killer and 13 Sentinels were also both on my list this year. I was also very impressed with how deftly the narrative of 13 Sentinels is constructed in a way that people can approach it in a different order and still have an equally satisfying time. I was trying to figure out how they managed it, but I think you really hit the nail on the head here:
The gist of what has actually happened isn't some complicated Kingdom Hearts style fabrication, and that's what makes it work. Like a good mystery, it exhausts every possible option until only the real truth remains.
There's someone at my job who has remarked a few times that "Ghosts of Tsushima" (sp) was one of their favorite games ever, and I resisted snarkily telling them it was surprising they did not know the correct name of one of their favorite games. As the deck on this video posits, perhaps they were just talking about the newer multiplayer portion of this game ;)
CrossCode is quite good, glad to hear Ben played more of it. The dungeon/puzzle design in that game reminded me a lot of Alundra for the PS1 (even the aspect of how difficult the puzzles start getting), which I think I would recommend to folks who liked CrossCode (or 2D Zelda in general, really).
City of Brass has good first person whipping, BTW. Pretty fun game to boot as well.
And best wishes to Ben, I have definitely enjoyed your contributions to the site. I appreciate your positivity, humor, and enthusiasm, and your willingness to give a wide range of games a fair shake and try stuff out. Go live your truth though!
Especially relevant since Vinny played Follin's new game.
Synergy!
Oh wow, did my research after reading your comment - I totally did not realize Contradiction and At Dead of Night were Tim Follin joints. In general, I didn't realize he had branched out from just composing game soundtracks.
Glad to see a decent amount of Murder by Numbers love in the comments, this brings me joy. I just started the new Ori game, really liking it so far, I see a lot of others also enjoyed it.
My biggest surprise of the year was the fact that I played a jillion hours of Spelunky 1 and bounced off of Spelunky 2 like a super-powered trampoline. It is FAR too dense with threats and seems to be hyper-obtuse just for the heck of it, I couldn't even bring myself to finish the game once.
Damn, no love for Desperados 3 in this thread? I haven't been as pleasantly surprised by a game in a long time, it's so fun and clever, I was constantly excited by it.
Glad y'all touched on the Capital Hill stuff, was nice to know it wasn't just me who was furious. Seeing all the images and video from that really fucked me up mentally. As Alex said, it was shocking but not surprising - of course if you feed people lies and whip them into a frenzy for years, those chickens will eventually come home to roost.
On the games front, I was super stoked to hear @vinny played There is no Game! I finished it a couple days ago, and weirdly enough, one of my first thoughts was "this totally seems like it would be up Vinny's alley". I already made my GOTY list on the site, but I actually might sneak that game on there, I adored it. It pumps more clever ideas into 5 hours than most 50 hour games do, and it is legitimately VERY funny. One of my coworkers also played it with their kids, and their family enjoyed it a lot too! I hadn't thought about the analogy of kid's books that strike a similar tone, but you're totally right.
Also...yes, strangely enough, there is a narrative justification for the state of undress of the pilots in 13 Sentinels. Honestly, most of the stuff in that game happens for a reason, but that's all I'll say.
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