The first highlight of any brand new year is the annual Awesome Games Done Quick event: a week-long speedrunning charity drive where over a hundred of the world's best, worst, weirdest, rarest, and most broken games are played through as quickly and efficiently as possible by talented and dedicated speedrunners the world over to raise money for Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's always a humbling and exciting time watching these events every six months, either live or via the quickly uploaded archives, and each event always introduces a mix of the familiar and some fresh new faces - both in terms of the runners featured and the games they run.

That also means that, because Twitch uses our wiki as a basis, there's the occasional game that isn't as well represented by our wiki as much as I would like. I take it upon myself (mostly because it's January and there's not much else happening) to ensure we have pages for all the games featured in the event besides those prohibited by the wiki (fan games mostly) and for existing pages to be in a semi-informative and legible state for anyone who clicks through to our wiki to get the 411 on the obscurity currently being played. These wiki projects rarely take more than a few hours total, so I'm really just blowing a whole lot of smoke up my own ass with these rundowns.

Still! I like to think I can do more than just complain about self-inflicted workloads, so I've bifurcated this blog into two lists of twenty, it being 2020 and all: the first list has the top twenty scheduled speedruns I'm most looking forward to watching over the next week, while the second list has the top twenty pages that took the most elbow grease to fix up. Peruse one or both or neither at your leisure, and I hope you all have a great time watching AGDQ again this year (and remember to donate!).

The Twenty Most Anticipated Runs

The theme of this GDQ? Races and randomizers! For real, I love watching runners adjust their strategies on the fly due to some unfortunate RNG or because their opponent has pulled ahead and they need to try a risky strat to catch up. I've never seen a run that wasn't enhanced by having multiple people competing with each other for the brass ring. Likewise, the randomizers are exciting to watch because a lot of runners have such keenly honed minds from so much practice that they've seemingly prepared for every possible permutation a randomizer might throw at them. The solo runs can be fun too, especially for games I've never seen run before and/or those with runners who can provide some great commentary, but the races are what I'll tune in to see live.

The following are in chronological order, with an attached start time/date (in GMT) and approximate length:

Super Mario Bros. 3 (race) - Sun 5th / 11:50pm / 1h15

A nice, straightforward three-way race for a beloved NES classic. However, it feels like a game as widely deconstructed and analyzed as SMB3 has a hundred single-frame and risky strategies and techniques available, giving each race participant all the dilemmata they could handle if they happen to be a little behind or ahead. I imagine it'll either be a super close thing, or one of those situations where the guy(s) in last place makes the gap worse by fumbling a Hail Mary or two. Always a lot of drama, and that's what makes them so compelling.

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (co-op) - Mon 6th / 9:50am / 2h50

I wasn't even aware this game had a co-op mode, but it was something available to those who had the GBA/GameCube cable adaptors that came with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. It's still an RPG with turn-based combat so I can't imagine it'll be a whole lot faster with two unless they can split up on the overworld for separate objectives, but co-op is a great opportunity to watch two runners appear to play with a single brain.

ActRaiser ("Professional" race) - Mon 6th / 2:25pm / 30m

I love me some ActRaiser, so I'll be tuning in for this race that plays on the highest (and secret) difficulty that eliminates magic and makes all the bosses twice as sturdy. This game's platformer sections were honestly hard enough already, though I suppose speedrunners have trained enough that they can glide through these games without even getting hit.

Terraria - Wed 8th / 12:05am / 1h

Intensely curious about this run for what might be my favorite Indie games of the past decade. It involves fighting all the way up to the Moon Lord, a boss added in one of the later updates, and so will also involve fighting through most of the other bosses as well as a few major world events. I'd love to see how quickly they can dig down to hell and get the high-level gear necessary to survive while also on the clock.

The Legend of Zelda (series relay) - Wed 8th / 1:30am / 3h30)

I don't know how many Zeldas are in this relay, but given there are nine participants I imagine it'll be the first three games. Relays are extremely tense because you're relying on your partners to perform well, so if you're first you have the stress of setting a good pace and if you're last you're either responsible for pulling your team's ass out of the fire or making sure you don't squander their hard-fought lead. I realize these tense races aren't everyone's cup of tea - with all that happened this week, we could use some relaxation - but it's what I live for in speedrunning, especially in a live format.

Final Fantasy VIII (co-op relay) - Wed 8th / 5:05am / 8h55(!)

Fellow mods @thatpinguino (Gino) and @zombiepie (Chris) had something of a FF8 speedrun contest last year for Extra Life, so I'm curious to see the professionals take a crack at it. Not so curious that I'll likely watch this nine hour marathon in one go (and certainly not live, if you noticed that GMT start time) but it might be something to leave on in the background throughout Wednesday morning.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts (race) - Wed 8th / 4:10pm / 25m

One of the hardest classic platformers and another challenging race. I'm less familiar with the Mega Drive Ghouls 'n Ghosts, which is pretty much a direct arcade port, but I imagine this will be the best education into its nuances I'm likely to find. Who'd volunteer for this?

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (European Extreme Foxhound) - Wed 8th / 9:22pm / 1h20

Speaking of high difficulty, this MGS3 run is going for the hardest setting and the hardest post-game rank to earn. A lot of that rank involves never slowing down and never getting caught, two things paramount to a good speedrun regardless, so maybe it's not quite the nightmare I'm picturing. Then again, it's not like I'd ever put myself through this. I just hope the Foxhound rank doesn't involve shooting all those frog toys.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (100% NSR) - Wed 8th / 10:50pm / 3h05

Ocarina of Time is definitely no stranger to GDQ events, but I'd not seen this category before. It's 100% items but with "No Source Required" (NSR) rules, which means that some or most of the necessary items for a 100% run can be glitched into Link's inventory by any means at the runner's disposal: you don't need to go to their source to obtain them, which would take way too long with, say, the wallet upgrades from the Gold Skulltulas quest or all those heart pieces. Three hours is about right for a good Zelda run, so I'm looking forward to seeing all the many ways the runner can magically summon the items they need.

Mega Man 4-6 (relay race) - Thurs 9th / 3:15am / 2h05

Another relay race, going through the three lesser NES Mega Man titles. The boss orders are probably set in stone at this point, but I wonder if some alternative paths might provide shortcuts at greater risks, and whether any of the runners will be desperate enough to take them.

Wild Animal Sports Day (relay) - Thurs 9th / 9:30am / 10m

Wild Animal Sports Day is here to represent the entire Awful Games Done Quick block, something I probably won't be awake to watch in whole. This relay race is somehow less than ten minutes long, so I assume it'll be chaotic.

Fatal Frame - Thurs 9th / 2:40pm / 1h20

There's a horror game block midway through the fifth day of the event, and although you could argue that the two games this run is sandwiched between - Resident Evil 4 and NightCry - are possibly more interesting to watch, I've always loved the Fatal Frame series, its dread-filled suspense, and its carefully-timed shutter release combat. I imagine the runner can't afford to wait around for the most effective ghost-killing pictures and I'm itching to see what the alternative strategy is.

Jak II (race) - Thurs 9th / 6:20pm / 1h05

More races. I haven't seen Jak 2 for decades and barely remember much beyond all its GTA hoverbike nonsense. An hour seems extremely quick for that game, given how much there was to do, so I'm anticipating the two runners to duke it out with all the glitches in their repertoires.

Earth Defense Force 5 (one-handed) - Thurs 9th / 8:40pm / 55m

Halfcoordinated is one of the more compelling speedrunners to watch due to his limitations: he can only use one hand to speedrun these games, and even though EDF isn't the most sophisticated game franchise you still need fast reflexes and accuracy to beat those missions quickly, especially on the hard difficulty that this run uses.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - Fri 10th / 11:00am / 45m

Forty-five minutes is ridiculous for an RPG like Bloodlines even for as notoriously broken as the vanilla version was, so there's going to be a lot of using arcane vampire powers (both intended and otherwise) to fast-track a path through the game's many "action" zones and dialogue trees. Actually, given the runner is using a Nosferatu build, lengthy dialogue scenes might not be an issue (though moving around the surface world will be).

Mega Man X (race) - Fri 10th / 11:20pm / 40m

Heck yeah, another race, a four-way one this time. Forty minutes is incredibly tight so this will definitely be more of a sprint than a marathon. If I had to guess (and I do) it'll come down to pure skill in the end, and less strategizing.

Super Mario 64 Randomizer (race) - Sat 11th / 3:35am / 1h10

Time for the randomizers! The Super Mario 64 randomizer is a trip. I initially thought it might be just that paintings go to different levels and maybe the red coins/stars have switched places, but it turns out they shuffle around almost everything and put them in random new locations: every enemy, every loose coin and star, every ? box, every secret, even where Mario spawns into the level - it's just utter chaos. The doors to different areas of the castle also have randomized star milestones, which might for example force you to go to the second floor before the basement. They're fun watches, and even more fun when you have three people racing each other and having to roll with the changes.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer (race) - Sat 11th / 7:10pm / 3h30

The gold standard for randomizers is A Link to the Past, however, and in this year's race there are two variables in play: Open Mode, which eliminates the Castle Hyrule prologue and lets you begin the dungeons in any order; and Crowd Control, which from what I understand involves the Twitch chat gifting the players items through bits and subs. AGDQ is going to have a lot of Twitch chatters to wring cash out of, so this two-person race might prove to be a big charity earner.

Super Mario Maker 2 (4x4 relay) - Sat 11th / 11:35pm / 1h15

A semi-traditional sight now, the GDQ gets close to the end with a big four-person team relay race where several of the world's best Mario players take on some of the most diabolical user-created levels sight-unseen. As fun to watch for the sheer malevolent level design as it is for the race itself, I always try to find the time to catch it live.

Super Metroid Impossible - Sun 12th / 2:45am / 2h30

Super Metroid and its ubiquitous incentive goal of "save or kill the animals" is usually the ultimate or penultimate run of any GDQ event. This time, though, the solo runner is playing through a ROM hack which greatly increases the difficulty. I've seen plenty of SM runs but none involving this particular hack, so it'll be intriguing to see what's changed. I'm sure also that the runner will be taking some big risks going into those enhanced boss fights understocked.

The Twenty Pages That Were Most in Need of Work

I've rounded up the following twenty wiki pages into five groups that best represent the challenges I most often face with this thankless (and possibly fruitless) process year after year. Then again, it's thanks to the following that I had something to do while listening to leftover GOTY podcasts.

"Where'd They Go?"

Culprits:

• Sword of the Black Stone
• Wild Animal Sports Day
• Super Cat Bros.

Simply put, these wiki pages didn't exist until I came along. My chief goal with this wiki push is to ensure that every GDQ submission exists for the sake of Twitch's "now playing" doohickey so the event organizers aren't hit with some missing data when they're already stressed about a dozen other technical issues. No surprises that the three missing pages this year are all fairly recent and two are godawful joke games someone found on Steam and figured it'd be funny to speedrun (the last, Super Cat Bros., is an Android/iOS game lost in a huge marketplace).

"It's All 'You, You, You'"

Culprits:

• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
• Dino Crisis 2

The bane of any GB wiki power user is scrubbing all the prohibited second-person usage - "you," "your," "you're" - from a page and it's an especially enormous problem with pages of a certain vintage and mainstream popularity. The staff and wiki mods here appreciate anyone who takes time out of their day to fill in some several thousand lines of info on their favorite games, and in their defense we didn't have a style guide or anything close to same until fairly recently to give them necessary direction. Still, when you have pages like Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (100+ 2nd-person uses), Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (130+ 2nd-person uses) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (230+ 2nd-person uses) to clean up it can slow things down a smidge.

"The Indie-Anonymous 5000"

Culprits:

• Super Fancy Pants Adventure
• Touhou Luna Nights
• Gato Roboto
• Squidlit

Indie games don't have as many champions as the big-budget games, so even semi-popular ones like the above can have empty or next-to-empty pages. That was the case with the four above, and although I've not done too much there's a little more meat on their bones now. I mean, this neglect is partly on me too: I played Gato Roboto last year and didn't think to update the page then, and I'd be happy trying any of those others for a future "Indie Game of the Week" entry.

"Cobwebs and Tumbleweeds"

Culprits:

• Jurassic Park III: Dino Defender
• Cybergenic Ranger: Secret of the Seventh Planet
• Normy's Beach Babe-O-Rama
• Castle of Dragon
• Vectorman 2

Some older/retro games deserve to be placed on a pedestal and admired for eternity for their innovations to the game industry or for the joy they inspired in their time. Others tend to be lost to history; little more than footnotes, if they're remembered at all. A game wiki can abate a game's slow consignment to oblivion, at least to some degree, but I can't really blame anyone for not caring enough about the five games above to fill out their bare pages. We have: a thematically disjointed sci-fi dinosaur licensed PC platformer; another PC action game considered one of the worst of all time; an objectifying bargain basement Genesis side-scroller; a NES port that butchered an already mediocre arcade hack-and-slasher; and a Genesis sequel that showed up in late 1996 long after the system's decline. A motley crew, but one that seems to have found a new lease of life from the speedrunning community.

"A Waning Wiki"

Culprits:

• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• Super Mario Maker 2
• Marvel's Spider-Man
• Manifold Garden

Sometimes it's evident that the Giant Bomb Wiki isn't the priority for site users that it once was. This could be due to a number of factors, but whatever the reason the four games above - all front-runners for GOTY in 2018 and 2019 - had no body text on their pages, though the rest of the data (images, releases, a header) was present. Descriptors and overviews are always a bit intimidating to write - where do you start with a game with the mechanics or history of Manifold Garden or Marvel's Spider-Man? - but it's always dispiriting to see that default "no description" placeholder, especially given how many visitors those pages must see.

It's a new year, and a new spate of Indie Game of the Week blogs on some not-so-new Indie games. Smoke and Sacrifice is a middling introduction to the year, as I didn't anticipate how much survival mechanics played a factor in its action-RPG gameplay framework. The game's set in some kind of post-apocalyptic landscape where one of the few surface areas not affected by an endless winter is kept lit and arable by various ancient machines that provide sunlight to the vicinity and allows for crops to grow and a humble agrarian community to flourish. However, this boon comes with a price: every citizen must sacrifice their firstborn to the "Sun Tree" to keep the lights on, and the latest chosen is protagonist Sachi's infant son Lio. This religious ritual is not quite as it seems, however, and seven years after her heartbreaking loss Sachi is finally in a position to figure out the dark secrets literally lying beneath her feet and uncover the conspiracy behind all these "sacrificial" children. It starts with a teleporter that takes her deep underground, filled with toxic smoke and hostile creatures...

The game is loosely a Diablo-like action-RPG with real-time combat in that sort of slanted overhead perspective. Sachi acquires weapons and armor as she explores, and must make judgments about whether or not a nearby opponent is something she is capable of taking on, depending on her gear and current condition. What sets the game apart from most action-RPGs is a very heavy emphasis on crafting and maintenance, making it more akin to a Don't Starve in practice: almost everything needs to be constructed from parts found from all over and several of those items, including all the weapons and the essential lanterns, have endurance that ticks down with their constant use. Many consumable items have limited shelf lives also, especially parts dropped by dead enemies. Items can be mended on the fly and many can be crafted then and there, but the more sophisticated items - meals, equipment, certain key items - can only be made at special crafting stations dotted infrequently around the landscape. The world is separated into "biomes" which have their own assortment of naturally occurring resources, enemies, traps, and hazards - a polar region, for example, needs special shoes to stop Sachi from slipping and is the only place to find ice fungus and bone piles. Though the game has a somewhat open structure, there's always a main questline and several side-quests that the game tracks on your behalf, and will always provide you with some rough idea of a destination to head towards next with its handy map system.

For as survival-heavy as some aspects of the game might be, it's not actually quite as much of a headache as I usually find with others of this genre. For instance, there's no hunger or thirst gauges: every consumable item instead regenerates health and possibly provides a temporary boost to speed, offense, or defense. Many items, like shoes, keys, meals, and inorganic resources, won't decay at all and will safely sit in your inventory in reasonably large stacks until you need them. Others that can go off can be stored in chests to preserve them, and the game is filled with "travel tubes" that allow for instantaneous travel to places you've visited (and, when the story necessitates it, sometimes a place you've yet been), many of which are also strategically next to one or more of the aforementioned storage containers. The quest structure eliminates the usual meandering common to survival games, where it's not clear what you should be doing besides building ever better equipment and shelters, and although the combat is rough going initially by taking the time to explore and finding recipes and ingredients in remote locations you start building up a decent arsenal of tools and weaponry. A useful early find is the formula for smoke grenades, which can be used to slow and weaken groups of smaller enemies that might otherwise swarm you. One persistent annoyance is the game's equivalent of a day/night cycle: being underground, you don't so much worry about darkness than the onset of a thick, venomous fog that rolls in from the toxic sludge that surrounds the subterranean landmass and acts as a hard barrier. When this smoke is active, the player must use some manner of lighting device to keep it away or suffer a steady health loss - there are the lanterns, one of the earliest recipes you find, and eventually you become capable of producing your own light at a mana cost - and stronger enemies start roaming around when the smoke is at its densest. This cycle can change enemy drops and environmental details as well, so even though you could theoretically wait out the smog in a safe haven there are times when you'll need to brave it for specific resources.

I'm finding the game fascinating, even if my progress is only coming in fits and starts. There's a lot of ways you can be killed quickly, either because you wandered into the domain of a foe far too difficult for you right now or because you aren't able to effectively manage your health/light or because of some new trap that you weren't prepared to deal with, but these challenges all provide reasons to press on so you might one day surpass them and see what lies beyond. Wandering off the beaten path can be a death sentence or a shortcut to riches, frequently both depending on how cautiously you approach it, and the vaguely steampunk environments of the underworld are always wonderfully curious places to explore and beautifully rendered by the game's painterly and detailed 2D graphics (they remind me a lot of Broken Age, especially with how "paper doll" the character movements are). It is a game that asks a lot of the player, ultimately, and I don't know for sure if my intrigue about the game and where it's going will necessarily win out over my increasing apathy with each progress-scrubbing game over or tedious cycle of maintenance work. Still, I can appreciate any survival game that uses those mechanics sparingly in the service of more compelling story- and RPG-based goals, rather than the be-all and end-all of the entire game's progression.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine opportunity to finally tick off a few items I've had on my various backlog lists/spreadsheets for longer than I'd care to admit.

December

• Game: Atlus's Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE.
• System: Wii U.
• Original Release: 2015-12-26.
• Time from Release to Completion: Four years, seventeen days.

Well, we made it to the end of the year and I'm happy (?) to say that I've yet to kick the proverbial bucket after which this feature is named, so we might see more long-awaited (by me at least) playthroughs in the years to come. The last entry for 2019 is also where I finally say goodbye to a much-maligned console - the Nintendo Wii U - as this was the last system exclusive I was interested in. I still some affection for its Fisher Price tablet and teal game boxes, but it did have a relatively weak showing in terms of a library, which is really the worst quality a console can have. It doesn't help that almost all its best games have since emigrated to the Switch (a superior platform in more than just technological metrics) with this month's entry, Atlus's odd hybrid between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem set in the entirely-separate-from-both universe of the Japanese entertainment industry, soon joining them with its Encore remaster. Still, that remaster's not out yet (as of writing), and that gives me an opportunity to take the original out of mothballs and give it a spin just a little bit of ahead of its rediscovery by the gaming world zeitgeist.

Talking of ghosts with Germanic names, Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE is about a successful a merging of Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei as you're likely to find. Well, if you don't include games like Devil Survivor with its SRPG grids; TMS is wholly a turn-based RPG closer to the classic SMT games (and Persona in particular) that largely only uses Fire Emblem iconography and characters as supernatural flourishes. It helps that, despite their different genre structures, the two games already share a lot in common, most particularly a heavy emphasis on elemental types: a Fire Emblem campaign lives and dies (literally, with permadeath) on the player's understanding of type dominance (keep Pegasus Knights away from Archers, for instance), while every SMT game has you exploiting the elemental weaknesses of enemies while covering your own. Most of TMS's best mechanics, however, are entirely unique to the game: they weren't so much inspired by SMT/Persona or Fire Emblem at all, but part of its own identity. Most overt of which is the story: set in various famous parts of Tokyo, Shibuya most prominently, the entire cast are rising stars of the entertainment industry - singers, models, actors, TV show presenters, and idols which are a combination thereof - brought together by their Persona-like ability to see another world full of hostile "Mirages": creatures from another universe capable of draining a human's creative energy for their sustenance. It's a familiar framework to Persona fans; you're often having to save someone with the potential to become a Mirage Master, as they're called, who then subsequently joins the team and becomes your next playable character. However, this particular setting and the value of "Performa" - the name of this aforementioned creative energy, and a cute little localization joke - means there's a few more avenues that have opened up for the game's mechanics to explore.

All right, so here I go gushing over smart JRPG mechanics. I honestly live for this shit though, so this is where my creative energies are going. First, Performa can crystallize into various forms based on a person's determination, and can be found after the death of an enemy Mirage or borne from the protagonists directly. These two Performa types, respectively, are then used to create new weapons and "Radiant" skills: the latter of these are passive boosts that might be as quotidian as a fixed percentage HP boost or as game-changing as the ability to use "sessions" from outside the active party. Sessions, perhaps the game's best invention, are how the game exploits weaknesses; instead of having an enemy knocked down and the active PC gain another turn like in regular SMT, a weakness will cause every other PC to get a free attack on the same enemy, provided they have a compatible session skill. So for example if Itsuki's best bud Touma has a "sword-to-spear" session skill, that means if Itsuki's sword skill hits an enemy weak to swords it will prompt Touma to follow it up with a spear attack, which then might trigger others following that. My characters are at the point now where a six-person session is possible, and I have the skill that allows a session chain to bounce from enemy to enemy if they should die in the process, so they're very powerful. Better yet, as session chains increase, so too do the rewards: you get way more Performa and consumable drops by using this feature to its fullest. Third, and this isn't unique to this game but is a progression mechanic I always like to see, is the Skill Inheritance system: by wielding weapons with attached skills often enough, you eventually acquire those skills permanently even after you've changed equipment - this is combined with SMT/Persona's stringent limits on acquired skills, meaning you have to carefully consider which skills to keep and which to discard based on your party's composition - making Itsuki a back-up healer is wise, but you'd also be forgiven for making him a pure damage-dealer. (Also, if you acquire the same skill twice, it powers it up which is rad.) Finally, one of the few Fire Emblem mechanics to carry over is a class change system: every class has two superior classes they can progress up to, though you need a rare and valuable resource to enact the switch. These new classes have access to unique weapons and skills, as well as higher stats in general, so they're instrumental for the late-game.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions can be alternatively too easy and too difficult with all these character building mechanics. Too easy because most encounters can be defeated with one or two sessions-heavy skills, but too tough because of the Savage Enemies. The bane of Etrian Odyssey players, Savage Enemy encounters can occur randomly and invariably drop you into a fight with enemies several levels ahead of you. This applies to going back to early dungeons full of weak enemies: a Savage Enemy will always kick your ass unless you go all out offensive early enough to clear some of their number, or turtle up with Rakukaja/Tarunda type skills. If your party is iced by one of these encounters, that's it; you're back to whenever you last remembered to save. Fortunately, the game isn't picky about save points: you can save whenever you want, besides battles and cutscenes. You can also bounce from dungeons whenever you want - there's no calendar system that causes time to move forward after leaving a dungeon like there is in Persona - and restoring the party and getting some crafting business done with the synthesis vendor (who is also a vocaloid, because Japan) before hopping back in is a cinch. Warp points in dungeons make it easy to continue where you left off, though I usually try to tough it out until I've activated a new one to minimize backtracking. It's a very accommodating game, all told, and that's something I always appreciate in JRPGs that are already asking for a major time investment; a fifty-hour long campaign is fine if it doesn't also involve an additional ten hours repeating large swathes of a dungeon because of a tactical miscalculation or two.

Another point in the game's favor is how much it commits to its pop star aesthetic. Dungeons have specific themes that determine not only their look but the puzzle "gimmick" of that dungeon: an early case involves chasing after a possessed photographer that uses his camera to literally capture models, and the dungeon's walls are plastered with glamor shots of those he has taken. (On revisits, after you've saved the models, these photos have all been replaced with landscapes, which is a nice touch.) Likewise, the dungeon is littered with cameras that you send you back to the last checkpoint if you cross their line of sight: the goal is to weave between them, or pick alternative routes if the way forward passes directly beneath their watchful eyes. The dungeons are designed like those in Persona 5 (or maybe it'd be more accurate to say Persona 5's dungeons are based on TMS's, given the order the games came out) in that the geography is fixed and so are the enemy encounters for the most part; if you're coming back to look for a certain enemy's drops, it's not hard to zero in on where they're most commonly found.

I'm not kidding when I say TMS is probably the MegaTen-adjacent game I've enjoyed the most in terms of pure mechanics. However, the plot and characters are a little more rote and beholden to standard anime conventions than the more nuanced story beats and personalities of the Persona games, though the localization does its best to rise the clichéd material up, and the less said about the dry, milquetoast protagonist and the harem of beautiful starlets who inevitably find themselves in his orbit the better. The game lacks any social links and romance options, though you still have three "side-stories" with each major character through which to get to know them better. The story might still appeal to those way into the "A Star is Born" narrative with all its concomitant tropes, maybe via the likes of Idolm@ster or Love Live!, but despite a few highlights I didn't really find myself as attached to this group as I was with, say, the Inaba Investigation Team or the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. It does mean we get a few animated musical numbers though, and they're generally well done - and even factor into the combat in some clever ways (i.e. an "ad-lib" performance, which infrequently replaces a normal skill with a much more powerful variant, is accompanied by a small sample of the active character's singing/acting ability).

On the whole I think Tokyo Mirage Sessions is spectacular, and it's not so much the showbiz flashiness which draws my attention than it is all the intelligent features and systems under the hood. An SMT game isn't shy when it comes to elaborate character building and tough combat that draws on all the player's resourcefulness, and while the Fire Emblem contribution is somewhat muted by comparison - the player's allied Mirages are modeled on famous Fire Emblem characters, and the aforementioned class change system - there's enough small references and allusions to Intelligent Systems's massive SRPG franchise to appease its fanbase. I'm presently partway through Chapter 4, which I think is just past the midway point of the game, and it's still introducing new characters and systems. I've only just accessed the class change system, for instance, and now I can strengthen older weapons by essentially recrafting them if I wanted to spend the time farming the resources to do so. It'll keep me busy for a week or two more at least, I suspect.

That's going to do it for the 2019 Bucketlog, and for this year's blogging content from yours truly. My thanks as always for anyone who spent moments of precious gaming and/or Giant Bomb video watching time perusing my stream of consciousness ramblings, and I hope to produce many more insights in 2020. (You know, "2020," "in-sight," perfect vision, etc.? Yeah, get to used to seeing that wordplay for a while.)

While we're still just about in the festive season, I figured I'd pick something Christmassy and what's more Christmas than (EG)GNOG? This diorama style point-and-click belongs to a certain subgenre evolved from the Windows 3.1/95 salad says of interactive screensavers and experimentation-based clickery. There are a number of Indie games doing this, and I think the intended age is probably several decades lower than my own, but I can't help but to be impressed with the level of intricacy involved with their design and the childlike glee of sliding levers across and pressing buttons to see what happens. It's the type of toy meant to keep a toddler amused for hours, sure, but there's also something universally appealing about feeling your way around a small puzzle box containing an unknown number of surprises.

So, with GNOG the idea is that you have a series of these interactive boxes all based around specific themes (space, frogs, deep sea diving, candy stores, apartment buildings), with a robotic face on one side and a backplate that - when removed - has a little scene inside including people and furniture. The goal of each box - there's nine total - is to figure out how to "activate" it, which usually involves solving all its puzzles and hitting a nose-like button on the front, at which point the box sings to you and does a little dance and you're brought back to the hub area with more boxes unlocked to check out. Each box won't take you more than ten to fifteen minutes total, in part because the puzzles are simple and in part because there's never a whole lot to interact with thus making it hard to get too lost, so it's not a lengthy game by any stretch. The controls boil down to simply the two main mouse buttons: left to activate whatever the cursor's pointing at (with maybe some dragging motions, which - like The Room series - works better with a touch control equivalent for Switch or iOS), and the right button to flip the box over from front to back (there's no elaborate camera controls to look at the box from every angle like there would be in, say, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes).

As a kid of the early '90s who grew up with Mighty Max - the adventuresome "tough kids for boys" equivalent to the domestic Polly Pocket - this type of set-up already punches me square in the nostalgia plexus, but of course this being a video game there's a lot more the developers can do to on the periphery to make this little diorama feel even more alive: the NPCs move and emote, there's stuff moving around in the background, there's solid feedback for buttons and sliders with how things light up or make noises, many stages have mild musical components and the game has a "reactive" soundtrack of the sort that adds instrument tracks based on which elements of the level are presently "active," and several other sensory connections between the player and these boxes. The whole game's also couched in this cute, colorful, but simple aesthetic I lack the visual design savvy to accurately describe. Maybe like an animated Sesame Street skit if it was commissioned by IKEA? It definitely feels like something you'd use to introduce your kid to adventure games, and to mouse or touch controls specifically.

It's an appealing package and I liked some of the puzzles, but writing this review does feel like being in 7th grade and doing a book report on Clifford the Big Red Dog. It feels like a game that wasn't intended for me, and so writing subjectively about it as a gaming experience with the same amount of scrutiny as something way more complex like Subnautica or Return of the Obra Dinn (both released on Steam around the same time as GNOG) feels both incongruous and unnecessary. If you're a kid or an adult who likes toys, GNOG is some simple charming fun to wile away a couple of hours but not a whole lot more than that.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

It's that time of the year again (the end part of it, specifically) where the pageantry of Game of the Year is in full swing and I'm left picking over a depressingly small list of games upon which to bestow accolades.

2019 was a buffer year in many respects; the entire industry and those that cover it have been holding their breath for next year's two new console debuts and any number of currently-secret big-budget projects pertaining to same. That said, I think 2019 will also go down in the history books as a year where the dearth of any major universally adored tentpole releases and a higher than average number of black horse GOTY candidates had players cautiously leaving their comfort zones more than ever before. Sure, a few of the better regarded games this year were remakes (RE2, Modern Warfare) but it also feels like a year where something as niche and thematically strange as Control or Outer Wilds or Death Stranding or Disco Elysium (all new IPs) can get some well-deserved kudos without being overshadowed by the usual franchise suspects hogging the limelight. I think everyone's top ten lists this year will feel a little more varied and personal as a result, and I can't wait to see how the overall community rankings shape up - and the staff's own top tens as well, of course.

So with all that said, here on the eve of Giant Bomb's opening salvo of GOTY content, it's time to deliver my own approbations:

Best 2018 Game of 2019

Candidates:

• 428: Shibuya Scramble
• Chuchel
• Dandara
• Into the Breach
• Marvel's Spider-Man
• Return of the Obra Dinn
• The Room Three
• Spyro Reignited Trilogy
• Subnautica
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

It becomes more of a truism every passing year, but most of the fun I had over the past twelve months came from games released the previous twelve months that had dipped in price to something affordable. 428 continues my education with the best the visual novel genre has to offer, coinciding with a playthrough of Steins;Gate and my return to Ace Attorney (which is more of a VN edge case). The Spyro Reignited Trilogy filled a gap that sorely needed filling for a self-proclaimed 3D platformer collectathon nut. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate rocked me for a month, subsuming me once again into its enormous world of Nintendo nostalgia obscurity. Marvel's Spider-Man is about as solid a superhero open-world game as you're likely to find outside of Rocksteady's Arkham series, and while I had issues with Subnautica, The Room Three, Dandara, Into the Breach, and Chuchel, they were all rewarding demonstrations of the ingenuity and diversity found in the Indie circuit. However, none more so than Return of the Obra Dinn - the Best 2018 Game of 2019 - which offered a truly unique combination of investigative deduction, logic grid ratiocination, and a starkly presented grisly historical drama.

2018 also had the unenviable position of trying to follow 2017, and while the above list of ten can attest to the overall quality of that year the fact that I can make an equally compelling top ten list of 2017 games I caught up with - even though we're two years removed now - is a testament to its lasting legacy. In fact, what the hell, here's my top ten 2017 games played in 2019 in no particular order:

• Nioh
• Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
• Divinity: Original Sin II
• Yakuza 0
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Gorogoa
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm
• Battle Chasers: Nightwar
• Tacoma
• West of Loathing

Best 2019 Game of 2020?

Candidates:

• AI: The Somnium Files
• Disco Elysium
• Luigi's Mansion 3
• The Outer Worlds
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Just me testing the waters a little bit before all the acclaim comes pouring down next week. I suspect these five games released this year will be highlights for next year, or perhaps a year or so after that. AI: The Somnium Files is the new game from the Zero Escape guy, and from what I've heard I've got nothing to worry about as he transitions to a new property. Disco Elysium's text-heavy RPG seems to have captured the imagination in ways the similarly structured Tides of Numenera did not, and that a game so singular and off-beat is able to net awards from a show as mainstream as Keighley's The Game Awards says an awful lot. Luigi's Mansion 3 sounds like the Luigi's Mansion we've all been waiting for, and Sekiro's FromSoftware pedigree makes it something I intend to get into eventually. Ultimately, I think seeing Obsidian revisit Fallout: New Vegas with a new IP strongly mirrors the way they homaged Baldur's Gate with Pillars of Eternity, and I have the utmost faith that they can pull off the same trick a second time - hence why it's my pick for Best 2019 Game of 2020.

Bucket List Tick-Off

Candidates:

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
• Banjo-Tooie
• Mother 3
• Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

This category, which determines the best game released over ten years ago that I only finally got around to recently, is more stacked than ever specifically due to a monthly blog feature dedicated to "Bucket List" games. I also got into some retro hijinks back in May with an entirely separate '00s CRPG feature, so I had plenty of options to choose from in 2019.

While Shigesato Itoi's Mother 3 (a.k.a. EarthBound 2) was easily my favorite of the shortlist above, since it's the only one where I don't have a single negative thing to say about it, they're all fantastic games I should've played a lot sooner: even if the Sith Lords wasn't fully complete, its vitally irreverent tone was the breath of fresh air and the deflating of Jedi/Sith pomposity that Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was close to achieving; Banjo-Tooie was a little too convoluted for its own good, but perhaps rewarding in its own way because of all the extra hoops you had to jump through; Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru sees Nintendo at their most inventive, even if its innovations missed as often as they hit; and the underappreciated Zelda II was one of those games that everyone should feel the urge to play at least once, if only to better understand the roots of one of the most beloved and successful video game franchises of all time.

Best New Character

Candidates:

• Dr. Casper Darling (Control)
• Carabosse the fairy familiar (Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night)
• Horace (Horace)
• Ajna (Indivisible)
• Kiki the Cat (Gato Roboto)

This felt like a strong year for characters, with more narrative-heavy games in the running for Best Game than usual. Control has the edge here for its live performances, which can add so much more to a character than just voice acting and facial animations alone, and none shined brighter than Matthew Porreta's avuncular Head of Research at the Bureau of Control. The game made sure early on to present both sides of this beleaguered scientist: the jovial and enthusiastic talking head that provides a lot of the game's exposition via pre-recorded company PSAs, and the nervous wreck that he becomes in video diary entries once the inter-dimensional antagonists have their foothold. Both are equally compelling performances.

Of the rest, Ajna reminds me a lot of Trails in the Sky's impulsive heroine Estelle, where their tendency to act first and think later can be both beneficial and detrimental to their fortunes. Kiki the Cat is a lovably realistic feline protagonist who can't speak, despite being intelligent enough to drive a mech, but isn't lacking in ways to express herself. Horace and the way his journey shapes him is one of the most compelling bildungsroman characters I've seen in a while, though his inherent goodness and compassion are the few traits that remain with him throughout the many tragedies he suffers.

Finally, I gotta pour one out for the best of Bloodstained's familiars, Carabosse, who not only heals you in times of woe and points out secret walls to appease my OCD brain, but has a number of delightful quirks like the way she sits on Miriam's shoulders whenever the latter takes a break or when she accompanies Miriam's piano with her singing. I never found much use for the more aggressive familiars like the Silver Knight or the Bloodbringer, who all did chip damage at best unless I wanted to spend hours levelling them up, and the extra design work put into Carabosse's personality confirms the notion in my mind that she's canon.

Weirdest F'n Game

Candidates:

• Disco Elysium
• Death Stranding
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
• Horace
• Control

This was a good year for weird games, and I'm only sorry I didn't have the time and cash to explore all of them. It feels like if you were going to play Death Stranding at all, it'd be to see Kojima play in a brand new world of bizarre ideas, oddly-named characters, and game mechanics that seemed designed to be as counter to user-friendliness as possible. A compelling slog, is the kindest way I've heard it put. Disco Elysium uses character interiority to explore depths never before seen, and if the decaying post-communist world wasn't weird enough for you living inside the protagonist's fractured psyche should suffice. Bloodstained is a little goofier than any previous Igavania, partly due to Kickstarter additions like people in bad vampire costumes rendered as paintings in Old Master styles or the demonic sentient living heads of beloved pets brought terrifyingly to life. The way the game can be broken six ways from Sunday is a little unusual also, if maybe not for Igarashi's works then at least for RPGs in general. Horace's story goes places I don't think anyone could reasonably predict, and that made it a delight throughout. Control is the least accessible and explicable of Remedy's many thematic genre explorations, from crime noir to horror to time travel, but that also makes it the most compelling world they've ever created.

It feels like a cheat to give it to Death Stranding, because I've yet to play it and probably never will, but learning more about this deeply strange game was a recurring theme throughout 2019 as more and more details emerged closer to its release date. If you aren't awarding "weirdest game" to one built entirely around courier deliveries filled with characters called "Fragile" and "Die-Hardman" where success was contingent on keeping your balance while carrying a 20ft stack of boxes while ensuring the happiness of an expressive fetus floating around in a jar of amniotic fluid you keep on your person at all times to avoid sludge ghosts, then why even have the category?

Best Indie Game of the Week

Candidates:

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019)
• Gorogoa (2017)
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)
• Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)
• What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)

Indie Game of the Week is probably the only remaining "regular" feature I have, and it's about to finish its third successive year with next week's 150th entry. That means I had another fifty games to pare down to the five candidates above, and from there down to my absolute favorite Indie game I've covered for this feature in 2019. Return of the Obra Dinn cinches it for me purely on the basis of it being something I've never seen before, but the overall list is compelling evidence (if I needed it) that there's so much more out there in the Indie market that I've yet to tap into.

Here's a few close runners-up to give you an idea of how tough it was to narrow this list down: Indivisible (2019), Tacoma (2017), Strikey Sisters (2017), West of Loathing (2017), Dex (2015), Dandara (2018), Environmental Station Alpha (2015), Victor Vran (2015), Glass Masquerade II (2019), and Gato Roboto (2019).

Best Soundtrack

Candidates:

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
• Control
• Electronic Super Joy II
• Trails of Cold Steel III
• Cadence of Hyrule

In my heart of hearts, I know that Ys IX: Monstrum Nox had the best soundtrack this year, but I can't give it the credit because the localization is still months (or possibly years) away. I'll give it a spot on my subsequent category for individual tracks, but picking from games that actually released in the west in 2019 I'll have to give it to Control for the way that soundtrack was used in-game, especially the Finnish heavy metal track "Take Control" and how well it scored the chaotic Ashtray Maze sequence. Outside of that, it has this wonderfully eerie soundtrack occasionally interrupted by something incongruously cheerful (like the Threshold Kids theme playing in an adjacent room) that works perfectly with the disjointed tone and spooky aesthetic of the game.

Trails of Cold Steel III is (as far as I'm aware) the only Falcom Sound Team JDK soundtrack released this year, excepting the above Ys IX, and so it automatically gets a spot on my list (I mean, I did listen to it and it deserves to be there, but sometimes you can take these things on faith). Electronic Super Joy II is pure EDM nirvana with a licensed soundtrack that combines three or four of the most talented mixers out there. Bloodstained sought to recreate every one of Symphony of the Night's strengths, including its alternately gothic and jazzy soundtrack (always a highlight of any Castlevania), and I'd argue it pulled it off as well as anything it was looking to homage. Cadence of Hyrule is, well, Zelda music done in the NecroDancer style and just about tops the remixed Link's Awakening soundtrack.

Best Original Tracks

Candidates:

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Gears of Fortune
• Control - Take Control
• Cadence of Hyrule - Garudo Valley (Combat)
• Death Stranding - Death Stranding (Chvrches)
• Judgment - Rake Your Inside
• Kingdom Hearts III - Anti-Aqua
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Tal Tal Heights
• Sayonara Wild Hearts - Wild Hearts Never Die
• Trails of Cold Steel III - Erosion of Madness
• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - Monstrum Spectrum

Great tracks here, though I'm sure I've missed plenty. Check out MajorMitch's Best Music blog for even more Spotify playlist inspiration.

Giant Bomb's Best Feature of 2019

Candidates:

• GB Crime Crew
• Jeff Gerstmann's Pro Skater
• Mass Alex: Mass Effect 2
• VinnyVania: Bloodstained (Vinnystainia)
• The Worst Songs of the '80s

I dunno, I didn't find myself resonating with a lot of what Giant Bomb put out in 2019. While no specific person's fault, there just didn't seem to be a lot of the elaborate set-up through which Giant Bomb features thrive. 80% of this year's premium content involved someone just bringing a game in and playing it while everyone else talked around it about whatever. Dan Ryckert, usually the site's secret weapon for high-concept ideas, hit a rough patch with the tumultuous Burgle My Bananas which was only saved by the unintentional way it imploded with the rampant misuse of its "wheel of fortune" component. That was a huge bummer for me, as someone who loved the thematically similar Steal My Sunshine and the way it brought everyone together through its (only occasionally busted) challenges.

There were still plenty of standouts though, certainly more than enough to justify an annual premium subscription were I to ever stop being a cheapskate moderator and pay for one: Mass Alex 2 was as great as the first, with Mass Effect 2 and its better writing, less micromanagement, and character-focal arcs giving Alex more to react to and affectionately critique. Jeff's love and mastery of the THPS franchise shone through with his Pro Skater series, which kickflipped along at a steady pace as he quickly conquered each level's list of challenges while discussing nu metal, bail videos, and other skating-related ephemera of the early '00s. Vinny had a bit more difficulty with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but he reached that point (as all of us who played it did) where the near-limitless potential for breaking the game became apparent. After that, it was fun to watch him stomp every battle with his turbo-speed Rhava Velar and steady supply of magic chisels. The Worst Songs of the '80s, both as a standalone feature and as a recurring bit in a number of Bombcasts, was an intriguing look into the musical tastes of Giant Bomb West and the community, and the quest to find the worst song of the 1980s will forever be an elusive one.

The standout video feature for me this year, though, was the unexpected camaraderie formed by Giant Bomb East's Giant Bomb Crime Crew: not in the sense of the team working together seamlessly to pull off a series of daring heists, but in the united front they put up against the rigours of the hopelessly broken GTA Online. Expertly edited together from four separate perspectives by Vinny and Abby, each episode was a gruelling endurance test of groaning through terrible dialogue, surviving a disastrous cornucopia of game bugs and server issues, bouncing back after the derailing antisocial antics of certain users on the service (resident trickster spirit Dan most of all), and the oft-alluded to challenges involved in editing down hours of unusuable technical turmoil and online griefer fuckery into a neatly packaged 90-or-so-minute episode of workable video content. I give it the award of Most Entertaining Giant Bomb Feature of 2019 partly because it was evident how much work was put into salvaging all that footage. They suffered through GTA Online so we never have to.

Best Game of 2019

1. Control
2. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
3. Kingdom Hearts III
4. Baba is You
5. Horace
6. Indivisible
7. Shovel Knight: King of Cards
8. Electronic Super Joy II
9. Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions
10. Gato Roboto

I played... a sufficient number of 2019 games to put together a top ten list without any clunkers, but that was about all I managed. I'm sure my top ten for 2019 will look very different this time next year once I've done some catch-up gaming, and more so in 2021 and beyond, but I can't say you should be too disappointed in any of the above if you decide to pick them up in the January sales (or just download ESJ2 now, since it's free). I created a separate and much more verbose list of this top ten over here somewhere, so please feel free to read it for any further elaborations or justifications.

That's going to do this for this year's awards, and my thanks as always to this site's staff and its amazing community for making me feel welcome for another year despite all my terrible puns, chickenscratch comics, and old man kvetching. Truly, you have the patience of saints. Good Holiday Times to you all and here's hoping 2020 doesn't suck balls.

I figured winter was as good a time as any to review a game called Seasons After Fall. It's another explormer, though I might refer to it more as a "lite explormer", in that there's a significant reduction in the usual components that make up this ubiquitous sub-genre. For one, Seasons After Fall lacks combat and its large areas are connected in such a simple and straightforward way that an in-game map isn't strictly necessary (nor is one provided, more to the point). Instead, the game's more about quiet exploration and some mild seasonal puzzles of the kind you're probably familiar with if you've played The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons or that one tree level in Banjo-Kazooie. The plot is loosely about a spirit that is tricked by a minor forest god and must make amends by helping the forest's guardians fix the natural imbalance you caused as an unknowing accomplice. As such, the game is split into three "acts" where you visit the game's four regions - each based on a specific season - for a different objective each time.

The first time through a region is where you acquire the power to change to that region's season, and this first third of the game operates as a tutorial for each of the seasons and the changes they bring. A common example is to switch to winter to freeze waterfalls and pools, allowing you to walk and jump across them to reach new areas. A more complex puzzle might involve switching from winter to spring to cause water spouts to thaw out and grow higher, and then switching back to winter to refreeze them into taller platforms. The player also has a "bark" (they spend the game in the guise of a fox) that they can use to influence other creatures or activate button-like protuberances. The crux of the game is figuring out how these seasons affect your surroundings and using that understanding to make progress, and each story-critical objective becomes that much trickier to reach. Along the way, you're getting voiceovers from both the god (called a "Seed," though you don't find out what this seed's role is until late in the game) and the forest's Guardians, which are invariably large animals - the most talkative being the ursine Guardian of Winter seen above.

The story's beats about the insecurity and fear of growing up and the importance of environmental equilibrium, as well as the simple puzzles, suggests that the game is perhaps more suited for a younger audience, or those who appreciate gentler types of video game that the Indie circuit is more inclined to provide. The beautiful graphics with its heavy brushstrokes in addition to all these forest spirits definitely puts to mind something like My Neighbor Totoro or Princess Mononoke - Studio Ghibli often features environmental themes in their films - or the similarly picturesque and arboreal Ori and the Blind Forest from Moon Studios. If you're looking for something more demanding in terms of challenging platforming or tough boss encounters like Ori, though, Seasons After Fall isn't all that interested in delivering either. It is not, by any stretch, a demanding video game.

In summery(!), I think I appreciated Seasons After Fall more than I strictly enjoyed playing it. I found the puzzles a bit too easy and the platforming has a bit of stickiness to it that means you always have to build up a little momentum for longer jumps. All the same, this time of year is always miserable and stressful, and I unwittingly picked a supremely chill game to cover as we lead up to the rigors of GOTY and the holiday fallout. While it's rudimentary as games of this genre go, focusing exclusively on environmental puzzles and the smallest amount of hopping across branches and leaves, the unhurried pace of the exploration, the story, and the voiceovers lends it a wholesome fairytale aesthetic that is the epitome of wistful and serene. If you're in the right mood for its humble charms and aren't looking for anything too deep in terms of difficulty or mechanical complexity, Seasons After Fall might have what you want.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

• Game: Two and Thirty Software's Electronic Super Joy II
• Release Month: August
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 13/12.
• Completed: 15/12.

Remember Electronic Super Joy? It's the one with the orgasmic checkpoints and that Quick Look where Jeff pretended to be the Franco-Hispanic-Russian game developer (the developers are Canadian, so that's like one-half out of three right). It was also a masocore platformer with some jamming EDM music and sleazy nightclub visual effects. Well, its sequel came out earlier this year - FOR FREE - and barely anyone noticed. It's a shame too, because this sequel is one of my low-key (well, "low-key" isn't really in the game's vocabulary) favorites of 2019.

The story is stupid and inconsequential, by design. You're trying to emancipate Mega-Satan of his shiny golden butt so you can wish for a motorbike, taking down Santa and adjusting to your new Lovecraftian stepdad along the way, and the game only sometimes remembers it has a story to tell. Instead, the game's highlight is and always has been the level design, concise controls, and sheer sensory overload of the visuals and music. It's hard enough to bounce between the minuscule platforms and avoid homing missiles and other projectiles at the best of times without all the hot musical slaps and WinAmp visualizers going on in the background, but it's also what makes the game such a blast to play. (An ample supply of checkpointing doesn't hurt either.)

As for what makes this different from the first, Electronic Super Joy II has a bit more fun with power-ups. In the original ESJ you only had a stomp attack: this was useful for clearing enemies, but it also allowed you to kill your forward momentum dead and plummet to whatever was beneath you (hopefully a platform). You no longer have the stomp as default, but depending on the level you can acquire a double-, triple- or quintuple-jump, the stomp, an explosive jump that gives you an extra mid-air jump for every enemy you kill with it, or a sword attack that is pretty much the stomp but horizontal. You are offered no real benefit by these skills: the level design is invariably built around you having these abilities, and it's a little disorienting to be reacquainted with a power-up you haven't used for a while but must master fairly quickly to avoid instant death. The sword is perhaps the most tricky: you'll eventually have levels where you must quickly charge to the side and back in quick succession as you rapidly fall down a pit of spiky enemies, and the timing's (literally) a killer. With all the variety offered by these new power-ups, the sky's the limit for the level design.

Other new innovations include occasional side-areas and bonus levels, which you can access through the game's twisty world map equivalent, and the occasional flights of fancy into even more discombobulating skies. This game straight up has Doom levels in it, as well as levels where the camera spins around a 3D model of the level while you're trying to complete it on a 2D plane. The developers evidently went all out to make this game's personality even more idiosyncratic than the original, and in retrospect it's a little strange that I've played two 2D platformers this year with FPS sections (along with Horace).

ESJ2 doesn't have the warmth of last year's Celeste, though it certainly matches it in mechanical diversity, and it still retains that treasured Super Meat Boy feature of allowing you to immediately restart from the last checkpoint without interrupting the music and losing your momentum. And, oh man, that music. The Electronic Super Joy series always brings in some dubstep and drum n' base ringers - in ESJ2's case that's EnV, GetSix, and Reptiore - and the resulting soundtrack is on a Hotline Miami tier of excellence; the kind of tunes you don't mind jamming out to on your first, tenth, or even one hundredth consecutive death. There's no getting past that this is a masocore platformer through and through, and that cycle of endless pain and slow and steady progress via muscle memory is only going to appeal to so many people. The homing missiles, forced auto-scrolling, extremely precise hops, awkward wall-climbing, triangle jumps, and other advanced platforming techniques you'll need to progress through the game can be on the demanding side to say the least, though I feel like if I was able to beat the game then anyone has a chance. Doing so with all the collectibles and achievements, or really going the distance and trying to beat the time trials and zero death challenges, is where the game goes from manageable to a superhuman endeavor if that's where your masochistic tendencies want to take you. No kink-shaming here. I mean, I've no leg to stand on after the amount of orgasm noises this playthrough produced (in-game, I should quickly clarify).

Electronic Super Joy 2 won't win any prizes for subtlety or narrative depth (playing catch with a giant tentacled monstrosity to earn your new daddy's love was oddly endearing though), but it is a tremendous amount of fun and one of the more smartly crafted masocore platformer series out there. That it is being given away for free on Steam right now, which I feel I should put in all-caps again, is some bizarre marketing oversight that everyone should take advantage of immediately.

< Back to the Go! Go! GOTY! contents page

• Game: Yacht Club Games's Shovel Knight: King of Cards
• Release Month: December
• Quick Look: Coming Soon?
• Started: 10/12.
• Completed: 12/12.

I have to marvel at Yacht Club Games's business model. Three DLC campaigns, two of which are equally the length of the original game if not longer, and all of them free to anyone who bought the original game when it was still ostensibly in need of sales. The cynic in me always has to look past the magnanimity of a freebie like this and ponder the financial benefit of such a move, but I'll be darned if I have the business sense to work it out. Still, I suppose it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth, or one of Shovel Knight's bipedal horsepeople at least.

King of Cards is the fourth and final Shovel Knight campaign, following the original (retroactively dubbed "Shovel of Hope"), the Plague Knight campaign "Plague of Shadows," and the Specter Knight campaign "Specter of Torment." King of Cards in particular follows King Knight, the most buffoonish of the original Knights of the Order of No Quarter boss troupe - the first boss Shovel Knight defeats, in fact - and puts him in his own prequel game, presenting the auspicious circumstances that made him King of Pridemoor and a delusional servant of the Enchantress. This tale, for whatever reason, involves playing a lot of card games, a mini-game about which I'll get into in just a moment.

Like the other campaigns, King of Cards is predominantly a 2D platformer that takes elements from several decades-old classics of the genre as a deliberate homage, though in King of Cards's case a new inspiration has entered the fray: Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 for the Game Boy, and its sequels. As a platformer hero King Knight is a little slower than the other campaign leads, but uses his extra weight for shoulder charges which are capable of damaging foes and destroying blocks alike. More to the point, a successful shoulder charge (it is ineffectual against certain enemies and types of wall) will result in a mid-air corkscrew jump. This jump is the key to forward progress, as it allows King to spring off enemies and objects in the environment (including those that would normally hurt him) to reach higher places, much like Shovel Knight's shovel hop and Specter Knight's cloudwalking did in their campaigns. The starting areas quickly get you acclimated to this new control scheme, and it shouldn't feel too alien after Specter of Torment regardless. (King of Cards unfortunately lacks the the little procedurally generated obstacle course of Specter of Torment that allows you to practice the new moves to your heart's content.) A typical platforming instance, then, might involve shoulder-charging a mid-air platform and using the subsequent corkscrew jump to get on top of it, or using the corkscrew jump to hop along a series of otherwise damage-causing hazards like cannonballs (not unlike those Super Mario Maker levels where you have to spin-jump on a thwomp or piranha plant, for example). King Knight can also acquire "Heirlooms" that work the same as the other special sub-weapons and equipment that Shovel Knight can acquire; my favorite was one that put you temporarily inside a bubble you can then charge out of, as it frequently saved my bacon after a botched leap. In order to address the higher combat difficulty, every third or fourth hit on the same enemy produces a recovery heart: this means that aggression is often the key to survival, as a good charge/corkscrew combo against a tough boss can net you the hearts you need to stay in the fight.

Then there is the card game. Sigh. I wanted to like this thing, as the superficial similarities to Triple Triad - the Final Fantasy VIII card game - were immediately apparent. However, while the higher numbers on the Triple Triad cards merely flipped the neighboring cards over, in the King of Cards variant - named Joustus - cards are physically pushed to the side by new placements dependent on their arrow configurations and this can lead to all manner of unpredictable chain reactions. Cards are also not necessarily placed in an empty space on the three by three grid (and the game experiments with more than just a nine-tile square) but can be placed slightly adjacent of an already placed card in order to push it. There's rules and layers of complexity to learn even early on, and it continues to get more complex as the game progresses when it introduces cards with conveyor arrows, bomb arrows, flip arrows, polarity switching, and more. It's a headache if you were looking for something casual and collectible like Triple Triad, though probably still too basic for CCG diehards. Worse still is that Joustus opponents aren't at all balanced at any juncture. When you first reach a new "Joustus House," and the game has several, every player inside will have better cards than you. What few special cards you've managed to accrue will quickly be lost against the CPU players' stronger decks and uncanny AI, unless you strike it lucky, and that means either having to win those valuable cards back from them or - more often the case, since the gap between you and the CPU has inevitably been widened by you losing a good card and them gaining it - buying any lost cards off the shady vendor Chester. You'll regularly wander into these dens of card sharks and be taken for a ride by all the unfamiliar new rules and superior decks. It doesn't help that nearly every CPU opponent is a tactical genius, especially the "champions" of each house and the duel-happy NPCs who start filling your hub (it's an airship this time), and you'll be paying through the nose for any unique cards you end up giving away. Fortunately, besides a tournament early on, it doesn't seem like these card games are strictly necessary for progression: you can dismiss them and focus on the game's core platforming content if you'd prefer. Still, for a feature that evidently saw a lot of development time and resources and is the big new innovative selling point for this specific Shovel Knight campaign to hang its crown upon, it's a bummer that it's too irksome, too unbalanced, and too convoluted for its own good. And it cold sucks to keep sheepishly returning to the vendor to buy all your best cards back; it's the worst fucking feeling.

On the platforming side, it takes after many of the best lessons of Specter of Torment although it doesn't quite flow as well as that campaign did. Specter of Torment had you flying through levels once you'd got its cloudwalking down - if you somehow skipped it but played The Messenger instead, it has a similar zip to it - and the speed at which you'd hop from one obstacle to the next made the original Shovel Knight campaign feel clunky in comparison. King of Cards falls somewhere between the two in terms of clunkiness, so in that regard it's a bit of a step back, but at the same time we're talking about being nestled between two of the best, most concisely-controlled 2D platformers of recent memory so that's still nothing to sneeze at. It's enough to carry the game through to its conclusion, especially with the way the game has broken up areas into a large number of more digestible smaller stages (most of which take about five to ten minutes) where each can have a theme or gimmick that it can explore to its natural limit in that single instance; say, bouncing across the tentacles in Treasure Knight's aquatic area or those platforms that sink into the swamp when you put too much weight on them in Specter Knight's graveyard. King of Cards is also the first campaign, I believe, to add secret exits: something that Super Mario World fans have been hoping to see in this series for a while. The routes to these secret exits are better hidden than almost anything else in the game, and frequently lead to little bonus side areas on the overworld map where you can get some extra funds or a rare Joustus card or two. My advice? Regularly check the tops of walls.

I generally liked the story and characters, even if I've seen most of them before, though there's no getting past King Knight's obnoxious braggart personality. It's only mildly amusing when he cuts off NPCs mid-soliloquy and roundly belittles everyone he meets, this rudeness being the sole cause of most of the game's duels and boss fights, and there are times when you get hints at the spoiled child he truly is, never more so than when his elderly mother is doting on him with freshly baked pastries (and getting flirty with the charming former King of Pridemoor; a slowly developing romantic entanglement that disturbs King Knight to no end). The story itself is predictable enough, especially given that this is a prequel, but I did appreciate one component of the ending: the destruction of every Joustus card in the kingdom. It should also go without saying that the soundtrack is still amazing: the game uses a combination of returning tracks and those developed specifically for this campaign, and both the new and old merge together seamlessly. There's a handful of older tracks that have been remixed with a more regal air to suit the new protagonist, but most of the new tracks concern new bosses and new locations so they're wholly original compositions.

It's a little tough to know where to stick King of Cards in my ranking of the four campaigns, because I played the first one almost five years ago now. King of Cards is certainly weaker than Specter of Torment, but the vast amount of quality original content (maybe excepting the card game) puts it well above Plague of Shadows. If you're someone who bought Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove or the original game when it was still standalone, you have a fairly good idea whether you want to play this content or not and it's free for you regardless. If you've yet to try Shovel Knight, you'll want to pick up the Treasure Trove compilation chiefly for the core campaign and the Specter Knight campaign - two fantastic games that would be worth the asking price individually - and King of Cards will be there waiting for you to slake any remaining thirst for some solid retro platforming. Maybe the card game will click for you in a way it didn't for me. In any case, you can't really argue with that price. As for me, it's probably going to be somewhere fairly low on my GOTY list this year, but unless I ever figure out what kind of The Producers style fiscal ploy Yacht Club Games is running with all these free campaigns they have my eternal affection and support for all this wonderful gratis content.

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• Game: Pavel Kostin's Odysseus Kosmos and His Robot Quest
• Release Month: April (Episode 5).
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 07/12.
• Completed: 08/12.

For the sake of this series I was checking up on the status of Kentucky Route Zero - still no news about that fifth act, alas, despite a tentative and apparently way too optimistic 2019 release date - and instead discovered that another episodic adventure game I'd forgotten about had finally completed its five-episode arc earlier this year. Odysseus Kosmos and His Robot Quest, a sci-fi game with mysteries like Outer Wilds but unlike Outer Wilds did not crash and delete all my saves, is a classic 2D pixel-based graphic adventure game with some tricky puzzles and quality writing with a story that riffs just a little bit on the movies Solaris and Interstellar. (Here is my original rundown of its first two episodes, and this review will look at the series as a whole.)

The titular Odysseus Kosmos is a crewmember of the USS San Francisco and the ship's engineer, which is why he was left behind when the rest of the crew took a shuttle to a nearby exoplanet orbiting a supermassive black hole. If you've seen Interstellar, or just know anything about black holes, the time dilation of this planet compared to the one currently experienced by those on the ship - orbiting a slightly more distant planet for reasons not elaborated - means that far more time is passing for Odysseus than for the intrepid away team. It's been seven years since the shuttle left by the time the game starts, and Odysseus would be beside himself with concern for his fellow crew if he wasn't so bored - as the sole human on board, he's taken to playing mind games with his robotic companion Barton Quest and overeating - and when the game begins he's patching up the ship with whatever tools are handy, in true resourceful adventure game hero style. Then the maybe-not-all-in-his-head hallucinations of a young woman begin...

I've played a number of adventure games where you're the sole survivor of a space voyage (for all you know, at least) and must first spend time contending with the Apollo 13-esque life-or-death mechanical issues that abound in space travel before settling down with the deeper and less urgent mysteries that arise when trapped in a bucket halfway across the galaxy and are slowly going stir crazy. That was the case with Subnautica - a game that spent far more time forcing the player to attend to their basic survival needs than allowing you to go off and explore the fascinating xenoarcheology and alien pathogen plot points - as well as the likes of Mission Critical, going even further back. I'm regretful that I originally had to bounce from Odysseus Kosmos just as the aforementioned Solaris business started to kick off, as the first two chapters were all that were available at the time. Since it's been a spell, I started over, so here's a recap of the first episode:

Episode 1 of any serial adventure game is required to do a lot of the expositional heavy lifting, though there's thankfully little you need to understand going in and there's enough optional lore in the ubiquitous computer terminals to answer any questions about the set-up. The bulk of Episode 1's tasks resume after Odysseus realizes the extent of the ship's disrepair, due to a malfunction in the computer that detects malfunctions. Through this process we learn more about the two main characters, about the layout of the ship and the purpose of its chambers, and about Odysseus's strengths as a character and his sanity-stretching predicament. It's also made evident that, although it's usually binary-choice-dependent story-heavy adventure games that become five-part series such was the case for The Walking Dead or Life is Strange, Odysseus Kosmos's aspirations are closer to that of Wadjet Eye's: to revisit a period of classic 2D point-and-click adventures where inventory puzzles and experimentation are the order of the day. Not to say there won't be more story beats later, but when your protagonist is a sardonic space engineer with a MacGyver knack for improvisation, your game should ideally play to that virtue.

Later episodes start taking some interesting narrative detours. For instance, the second episode begins with a protracted flashback to Odysseus's childhood, where he plays pirates and hide and seek with his younger brother Sam, but something's off: a model of the San Francisco is in the boys' hideout, despite the fact it won't be built until Odysseus is in his adult years; there are trees and greenery in the flashback, even though global warming - which has become so severe it's simply referred to as "The Warming" - has driven the less heat-resistant flora and fauna to extinction; and finally, the same odd woman who appeared to Odysseus at the end of episode 1 appears here also. This is where the game starts flexing the aforementioned Solaris muscles, and it becomes a recurring pattern throughout the later episodes, in addition to goals involving fixing whatever is causing the engineering crisis of the moment. The third episode switches control to Barton throughout, who doesn't necessarily play differently than Odysseus (besides being able to go outside) but offers a fresh perspective and also starts a second story thread about certain truths about the mission that he is privy to and Odysseus is somehow not. Episode 3 also introduces the other crew members, sorta, by allowing Barton to access their rooms for plot-vital items. Each has a diary too, though they're fairly cryptic given what we think we know about the ship, the crew, and the mission. Beyond that, we're in the Shyamalan Twist Zone and I daren't say more.

A curious but decidedly beneficial facet of this serial format is that each episode is required to use the same setting - there's no getting off the San Francisco, except in flashbacks - but the game prioritizes different areas for each episode, eliminating those that have no purpose for the immediate scenario and occasionally introducing new rooms on the ship we've had no reason to visit before. That might mean losing access to the laboratory area for the third and fifth episodes, or never visiting the crew quarters and the hallway that contains them before the third, since Odysseus only has access to his own - instead, the door that leads off to the crew quarters had always taken the player directly to Odysseus's cabin, since there's no point adding anywhere else. Thus, after the full run you can mentally map the full layout of the ship, but you only ever see a truncated version in any single episode. Recurring items, likewise, will randomly appear across the ship as they get misplaced by Odysseus or Barton, and finding them again is like a little boost of familiarity even if their role ends up being different. It's a smart way to be economical with the game's limited art assets as well as being convenient to the player by removing surplus elements like inconsequential rooms that will only prove to be red herrings or dead air if left in, dragging out the puzzles longer than they need to be.

The game also has a hint system for the truly lost in space, where Odysseus might suddenly remember that there's a useful item for the task at hand in a different area of the ship, but it'll always fixate on one specific goal even when you might have multiple objectives to deal with. Taking the above crewmember cabins as an example: in each room there's a cardkey to find, and a separate set of puzzles for each, but the hint system will only give you the same hint for one of them until you've completed it rather than cycle through hints for the other unsolved cabin puzzles. It's not necessarily a bad thing - best to stay focused on one task at a time - though it did feel a little limited.

Though I liked the backgrounds, the game can be rough around the edges visually - some movement animations tend to have characters float around when trying to move any direction besides horizontally, and there's copious artifacting especially around text - and the puzzles aren't always the most intuitive, even when there are hints available. For example, a puzzle that included a hint about using a certain person's lab coat wasn't easy to figure out, given that said lab coat actually belonged to someone else. The script is generally fine but for a few typos and instances where it feels like a sentence fragment was clipped off the end, and the game's moody synth theme fits the atmosphere but its lyrics aren't all that easy to understand - both results of a game originally written in a foreign language (Russian), I suspect (at least there's no voiced dialogue for the devs to worry about; just Banjo-Kazooie/Simlish noises).

I also had some considerable difficulty progressing through the final two chapters: it felt like the puzzles were written to be far more obtuse than they were before, and ditto to understanding the characters' motivations which made it challenging to intuitively know what I should even be doing next, and I can't shake the feeling that it might've been a deliberate ramping up of difficulty that didn't quite pan out the way the developer hoped. Increasing difficulty in an adventure game always seems to boil down to making the game less enjoyable to play, either because the inventory puzzles now require larger leaps of logic to solve or because the Layton-style instance puzzles - the game has a variant of that water jug puzzle from Die Hard With a Vengeance, which always makes me smile - become trickier to execute (and thus more of an unnecessary roadblock). Odysseus Kosmos - whether it intended to make the game more challenging or not as it moved towards its finale - falls into this trap. Many video game genres benefit from a steady difficulty curve, but a purely narrative-driven genre like this that relies on intuitive solutions to puzzles is not one of those. It'd be like a visual novel choosing to be "more difficult" by turning the lights off so you can't read.

All in all, though, I enjoyed my time with Odysseus Kosmos. Retro adventure games like this, when treated with the right amount of modern quality-of-life features to assuage the usual moon logic frustration, can be a lot of fun and are still a solid method through which to deliver a compelling story in the video game medium with the possibility of sardonic asides and other incidental silliness thrown in for color. I have a soft spot for any fiction that deals with the dichotomy of tedium and wonder that space travel inspires, and I liked this game's characters and the way it slowly builds up its mysteries throughout its five episode arc. A satisfying enough throwback, if not perhaps one special enough to stay on my 2019 GOTY list for long (if it even counts, that is; the first episode released back in December 2017).

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• Game: Mobius Games's Outer Wilds (PS4)
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 06/12.
• Completed: N/A.

I was trying to keep this list of last-minute GOTY potentials somewhat low-key and under-the-radar, if only because I happened upon most of this feature's hit list while they were heavily discounted in the autumn sales (or free, in some cases), but Outer Wilds was the exception that proved the rule. I knew a game that was this dense with mysteries to solve would be impossible to appreciate post-GOTY talks from the site, given how much the staff in general seemed to enjoy it and how often it'll no doubt come up in all the most spoilerish categories - Best Story, Best Moment, and the top ten Best Games in general - so it felt like the one game this year you either had to see for yourself first or be prepared to start tactically skipping around the GOTY podcasts whenever it came up.

Outer Wilds puts you in the boots of a newly trained space pilot, ready to fly a rickety spacecraft into the local cluster of planets to slake your own curiosity about what's out there. On the way to grab your launch codes from the nearby observatory, an alien artifact comes to life and triggers a sudden influx of past memories, from the moment you awoke to your time spent wandering around the village talking to NPCs and exploring tutorial areas that teach you how zero-G movement works, how to fly the ship, how to parse the ancient alien text dotted around the system with a newly invented translation device, and how to use the "Signalscope" to pick up distant frequencies. After that, you take your first few steps on a planet of your choice when you see the sun suddenly go supernova. Kinda hard to miss that huge ball of light imploding and then exploding with tremendous force; enough to wipe out everything in the system, including you and your ship. That's when you awake back at the starting campfire and realize you're in a temporal loop, no doubt precipitated by the artifact, and may be the only one capable of preventing the end of everything you've ever known. Oddly enough, and this might be an element of the game's easygoing sense of humor, but neither you nor the people you talk to about the stellar apocalypse and strange temporal loop seem all that nonplussed about it.

The game is presented in a first-person format both in and out of the ship, and the effect of climbing into the ship, sitting in the cockpit, and launching off towards the infinite horizon is seamless. While the celestial bodies have gravity and you and your ship are heavily affected by same - trying to land on a station orbiting the sun becomes a little tricky given the gravity well the star presents - reaching escape velocity on any planet is effortless, and it's a cinch to patch up your ship if your landing was a little rough. Though superficially similar, the game isn't interested in throwing too many Kerbal Space Program astronautical rules and mechanics at you; the crux of the game revolves more around the cosmic enigmata it has built up and wants you to unravel. If flying the ship required all the requisite checks and careful maneuvering of real space travel, after all, you'd probably still be calculating fuel consumption ratios as the star explodes.

Story wise, the game gives you little direction save for a few threads and rumors. As you explore more of your planet and the many others out there, you find more threads and more questions, and might even start discovering connections between them. You'll also intuit that every planet is undergoing some dramatic process as time moves forward, possibly but not obviously related to the imminent destruction of the star. Being on the right planet at the right time becomes a greater factor to uncovering its mysteries, and a Ship's Log - oddly, one of the few things unaffected by the time loops - records every little piece of information you've found, from observable phenomena to NPC dialogue hints to revelations gleaned from ancient alien messages. Towards the end of my session I had over a dozen possible threads to follow up on, some of which required quick timing as their trails would soon become inaccessible due to one reason or another - an example being twin planets locked in a mutual orbit where the sand from one is getting sucked up by the other, the former becoming more accessible as the sand clears away from the alien ruins while the latter becomes less accessible as the sand buries everything. If anything, I was spoiled for choice as to where to go next, and I hadn't even touched down on a couple of the further out planetoids to see what seeds of a mystery I could collect from a cursory glance.

And then the game crashed.

And then the game corrupted the save.

And so I'm presently filling out an online form to get a refund. I'm not sure what Sony's policy is for those, whether they do something like Steam where a certain hourly usage amount negates the warranty so to speak, but this is entirely unacceptable for a released product and has completely eliminated any desire to keep playing. To build up that network of information nodes drawn from every corner of the system only to have it all wiped out in a second, and knowing that if it happened once it could easily happen again... Nah. Nope. Nuh-uh, not in my lifetime. It wouldn't have been my GOTY at any rate; just an intriguing curio placed halfway down the top ten and eventually dropping off entirely after more catch-up gaming over the subsequent decade, and at this point I'm not even all that bothered if the GOTY talks do end up spoiling every last twist. I got enough of the gist in my brief time with the game, and I've seen what it does done better in other games (Majora's Mask, Gregory Horror Show, and The Sexy Brutale for the time loop puzzles and No Man's Sky for the rapid on/off-planet space travel). Kind of a sour note upon which to end my peregrinations of the Hearthian skies, but apparently that's how it goes when you put out a barely functional port. Won't be buying another game (relatively) new for a very long time, that much is certain.

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