• 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.

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• 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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• Game: Sectordub's Pikuniku
• Release Month: January.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 05/12.
• Completed: 06/12.

Pikuniku is a chill game perfect for those of a young age or who don't play a lot of games; however, even though I'm neither of those things, I found it to be a very personable piece of fluff. The game's designers seemed to draw from Keita Takahashi's or Tsutomu Kouno's works, especially with the character designs and pastel palettes but in general with the friendly tone and easygoing level of difficulty, as well as something like Amanita's Chuchel in which it rewards mechanical experimentation - like seeing what you can kick - with some silliness and sardonic humor. Like Portal 2, the game's content is split into two equally lengthy modes: a single-player adventure that has a story to follow and NPCs to talk to, and a co-op mode which is strictly a series of two-person platforming challenges using the mechanics you'd theoretically already learned from the single-player. Even with my dabbling in the co-op, though, I don't think you'll be too lost if you decide to head there first with a companion in tow.

For its single-player adventure mode, Pikuniku divides its time between platforming challenges and adventure game puzzles; neither are particularly difficult, and the tougher platforming is usually relegated to optional side-areas. Platforming might involve pushing boxes around so you can jump on them or activate switches, looking for semi-hidden passages (there's a telltale zig-zag pattern that you start to intuitively look out for), swinging on hooks, kicking down fragile walls, and so forth. The titular protagonist (well, one of them) can also tuck in its legs to assume a ball form that is quicker on the ground and also smaller, allowing them to squeeze through gaps. A little tutorial area at the start imparts about 80% of everything you need to know going forward.

The adventure game stuff, meanwhile, generally boils down to using the right hat for the immediate task - you have one that lets you draw on things, for example, and another that produces water to grow plants - and you rarely have to move too far or use much brainpower to figure out what you need to do next. There's a handful of minor mini-games also, like a "baskickball" game where you try to defeat a useless CPU opponent by scoring baskets with your feet, or a dancing rhythm game. Though there are a few explormer characteristics - the world's open enough after the first few chapters and there's places you can go if you come back with the right item or ability - there's no big interconnected map and little reason to go off the story's critical path except for a few inconsequential bonus items like little 3D trophies of the game's characters or new costumes to wear.

Honestly, after the surprisingly involved Horace and the brain-scrambling Baba is You, the brisk and simple Pikuniku was something of a palate cleanser. It's not a game that will demand a great deal from anyone, but is more inclined to deliver a delightful time with charming dialogue, visuals, music, and a cute, round-edged world of low-key frivolity. It plays like one of those gateway games you'd use to finally get a partner or offspring into your hobby, and the world can't have enough of those. Ultimately it wasn't really for me and that's OK. I've got a lot more 2019 games to get through yet for this feature, after all.

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• Game: Paul Helman & Sean Scaplehorn's Horace.
• Release Month: July.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 02/12.
• Completed: 04/12.

My goodness, this game. It's hard to know where to start. What I can tell you is that this game is extremely British and extremely 30-something-year-old British at that. Rare that I feel so seen by a game; the last one steeped in this much '80s British gaming paraphernalia was probably Lumo back in 2016. Horace is, nominally, about a little yellow robot who learns how to become a real boy, albeit with a few hurdles and mishaps along the way. The story begins small enough as Horace ingratiates himself with his adoptive family and learns what it means to walk, talk, and appreciate video games, before the tale soon segues into a massive global war that has left the United Kingdom (the game's setting (mostly)) devastated, and then continues to escalate and make many wild detours from there. With so many plot turns and surprises, I'd be loath to say any more about where it goes.

Horace is chiefly a 2D platformer, with the unnamed robot protagonist - you'd assume his name was Horace given it's the name of the game and the name stamped on his delivery box, but he's only ever referred to as "The Robot" - modified in such a way to have "infinite lives" by his benevolent creator and father figure, whom is only ever called the Old Man. For the majority of its length the game is strictly linear: you move from one area to the next, dying dozens of times to the game's many single-screen platforming challenges, until eventually story cutscenes take over for a while and you end up somewhere different with a new objective. The game is very story-dense considering its genre; I'd liken it to last year's Iconoclasts with the way it combines a very arcade-y style of action game with a narratively complex plot with a huge cast of characters, each with their own arcs, and many dramatic twists and tragedies. Often you might find yourself pushing through an overbearing challenge just to see where the story might head next. For a long spell around the two-thirds mark the game becomes a honest-to-Robot-Jesus (who is in this game, incidentally) explormer complete with regular post-boss traversal upgrades and an auto-map filling in rooms of an enormous interconnected mansion.

One meaningful aspect of the game is the Robot's impulsive decision to "collect a million things" as his life's work, after he asks what his purpose is and is told it must be an answer he finds himself, with most areas of the game filled with a certain number of "junk" items to pick up (some of which aren't junk at all and can be sold for a lot of cash). The pause menu will tell you how much junk is left in the immediate area, assuaging the slightly more obsessive collectors among us, and even the broken and useless items can be sold for a little bit of money which can then be put towards upgrades. Having all these collectibles, and a means to always know how many you have left, added a lot of extra little risk vs. reward targets to chase after, making the tough platforming even more so as I invariably made my way over to all the flashing piles of detritus before moving on. I'm a sucker for collectibles, so you better believe I earned that requisite million before the game was over. (I realize that sounds like a lot of items to collect, but there are a few rare trash objects that are worth several hundreds and thousands apiece.)

Graphically, it's a great deal of pixel art, but it's very good pixel art. The artist has a knack for drawing faces which leads to a lot of recognizable cameos throughout, and there's a huge number of enemy sprites, detailed backgrounds, and other art assets that evidently took some time to create. The music is mostly chiptune renditions of famous classical music, though there's a few original tracks in there too. It sounds fine and is worked into the scenes germanely, but it's not like I haven't heard Danse Macabre or Für Elise a hundred times before. The voice acting is exclusive to one character - The Robot, who is narrating his life from some time in the future - and it all sounds like one of those monotone text-to-speech machines with a slight southern English accent, though its deadpan delivery lends itself well to a few of the fish-out-of-water jokes early on.

I realize this is a trite thing to say about a game starring a literal tin man, but Horace has a lot of heart. So much heart, in fact, that I'm willing to overlook a great deal. The core platforming gameplay is competent with some neat features you don't normally see in Indie games of this genre - the ability to walk on walls and ceilings, defying gravity, as well as the usual bevy of explormer upgrades - but Horace isn't exactly well-optimized for weaker machines and the framerate can be just tragic in some densely populated areas. Other sections, like the dream sequences where you fly through rings, was for me a glitchy mess that was impossible to visually parse. The platforming can also be slippery and there's a lot of weird hitbox problems - I'd regularly die crashing through brick walls because the game detected I was standing where it thought a wall was and gave me the "stuck in geometry" insta-kill - and the many, many times it tries to stretch its creative muscles with something a little different (shoot 'em ups, 3D runners, driving sequences, FPSes, and many other arcade parodies) it was a little more "miss" than "hit." Yet for as frustrated as I could get with Horace between its very harsh challenge level and no shortage of bugs both visual and gameplay-related, and the aforementioned slowdown issues, I found it impossible to stay mad at a game this ambitious and personal. I think it could be 2019's Deadly Premonition or Undertale, purely in the sense that while it certainly won't be for everyone it took a very determined individual (or two, in Horace's case) a very long time to make a very specific type of game that epitomized everything that was important to them, with the hope that it would find others and resonate with them just as strongly. It did for me.

While I leave you with that unsteady recommendation to check the game out for yourselves, and that you probably won't see half the bugs I did if you have a half-decent rig that doesn't shriek in terror and hide behind the sofa whenever it's required to run anything polygonal, I also wanted to peel back the curtain and demonstrate the many times I felt the game was either speaking directly to me, was doing something lovably overambitious, or was so wildly, blissfully out of its gourd. I'd consider the following screenshot gallery packed with minor spoilers, if only in the sense that I'm potentially ruining surprises for anyone curious enough to check out the game themselves, so I've placed them all inside a spoiler-block. If you need a little more convincing, though, be sure give them a look.

(And hey, on the off chance Dan Ryckert's skimming through this wondering if he should've played a little more after the Quick Look, I should mention that Horace had a very inspirational Ric Flair quote to impart.)

Screenshots aweigh:

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• Game: Arvi Teikari and Hempuli Oy's Baba is You
• Release Month: March.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 28/11.
• Completed: 01/12 (sorta - there are more stages but I've seen an ending).

Review is Start. Baba is You is one of those deceptively complex puzzle games that beguiles you with its cutesy, child-like whimsy before locking the door, filling the room with a mysterious gas, and letting you know in no uncertain terms that you're in for a world of brain-hurt. I was initially going to give Baba is You a miss because it combines two of my least favorite puzzle game genres: Sokoban, the ancient art of pushing boxes into corners and trapping them forever and rueing that you even bothered to wake up that day, and those intricate programming/assembly puzzles where success is contingent on memorizing a bunch of rules and figuring out how and when to bend or break them. The former's been around for literal decades, while the latter's only come into its own in the past few years with the works of Zachtronics and Tomorrow Corp's Human Resource Machine. Certain large-scale factory games like Factorio and Satisfactory also have an element of this, where a complex array of zig-zagging assembly lines can only work if the coding behind it is solid.

Baba is You isn't quite as demanding as all that though, for as tough as its puzzles can be. For one, you're only ever dealing with a handful of clauses and booleans to futz around with, limiting the number of possible combinations to the extent that you could always potentially luck upon the right solution, or at least that first challenging step from which you can intuit the rest. The rules are also simple Noun is Noun or Noun is Adjective for the most part, though the game eventually starts throwing in operators like "and," "has," "on," and others. However, it only introduces one operator/noun at a time across its many worlds and stages, usually starting with a simple tutorial to teach you all (well, some) of what you'll need to know about this new aspect going forward. The game wisely has something of an open-world approach, with multiple worlds and multiple levels in those worlds becoming accessible concurrently: it's best to go in order, as you'll find new worlds incorporate most or all of those introduced in the previous, but the level of freedom means you can bail on one stage causing your brain to overheat and cool down with others for a while. There are also tricks to learn and shortcuts to take that you'll glean upon over time, and coming back to tricky levels armed with that knowledge can make them far more approachable. It's not unlike Thekla's The Witness in that regard.

Presently I'm powering (if by "powering" I mean "staring dumbfounded and occasionally sobbing quietly") my way through the final handful of worlds, having already seen the "normal ending" of the game. I've experimented with the absolute dumbest ideas I can conceive more times than I can count, and on at least half of those occasion it's proven to be the correct solution. The operators and nouns available are so carefully chosen that none of them are ever there by accident, which in turn gives you an inkling of what you might be missing. Keep running past that one "and" function you don't know what to do with? Well, it's gotta be there for a reason. However, some puzzles are straight up evil with the amount of necessary steps involved, and others make you feel like you've somehow broken the game before you realize it's exactly what the developers intended. I've heard that you could hypothetically beat any Baba is You stage within a minute if you know exactly where to go and what to do, but I swear there are times where I've been steadily working my way through a single stage for half an hour before finally getting that sweet "Congratulations!" screen wipe. Baba is You is at least smart enough to give the players an unlimited undo button for these longer instances, but then I couldn't imagine wanting to play the game without it.

On the whole, I think Baba is You is delightful. I sometimes get wary with puzzle games that start easy and then suddenly catapult you into low orbit, like - say - the original Snakebird or Stephen's Sausage Roll, but Baba is You has proven to be just on my wavelength. Not insurmountably difficult, but certainly tricky enough to BSOD my bean for hours at a time. I'm sure it's working its way up to the point where I'll feel completely lost, but I've at least seen a substantial amount of the game's content and I appreciate how new wrinkles and mechanics are appearing all the time. A puzzle game can only ultimately be judged on two factors, assuming everything else (graphics, music, UI, accessibility, etc.) meets an acceptable level of competency: the gradient of that difficulty curve, and the variety of its content. Baba is You nails it by both criteria. Review is End.

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Season's greetings! What season is it? Why, it's the season of freezin' (my ass off) squeezin' in last-minute Games of the Year! On this auspicious page of the calendar, we've all collectively chosen to praise and distinguish the excellent games released over the past eleven months, as well as collectively chosen to toss the ol' double deuce at those poor suckers launching their games in December. Better luck next year, dummies!

Sadly, due to my frugal nature I so rarely buy games new when I can just buy a dozen slightly dated ones and be set for an entire year. All the same, there comes a time and perhaps a brief impulse purchase spree or two where I find myself at the dawn of December with a handful of as-yet-untouched potential GOTY candidates. That's where Go! Go! GOTY! comes in: a sometimes-annual feature wherein I give some recent well-regarded games the treatment they deserve - feverishly powering through them, savoring nothing, and hurriedly summarizing them here without any deeper consideration or critique. Or copy-editing even. Surely a win-win scenario for both myself and my readers.

"The rules! Where are the rules?" you ask? Here you go, weirdo, whatever floatys your GOTYs:

• We're recycling the format from 2017, which is to say that a new Go! Go! GOTY! blog will only appear once I've completed the game it pertains to (or at least played a sufficient amount to pass judgement).
• The cut-off for this year will be the 20th of December. We'll undoubtedly be done long before that deadline unless the Cyber Monday sales work their dark magics on my already ailing wallet.

Finally, here's the fancy-prancy, hoity-toity box where I put all the blog entries:

November's been a relatively quiet month of releases, which is perhaps for the best because everyone seems to be in catch-up mode right now. Myself included, of course, as three of the four Indie Games of the Week+ (see below) were 2019 explormers I was curious about. My list is coming together nicely, though I'm still short of the ten I need (plus maybe a few extras) to put together a top ten list for the year that I'd be happy with. Next month will correct for that deficiency, as I've been spending the credit left over from birthday vouchers on some fodder for this year's returning Go! Go! GOTY! feature: a marathon sprint of contemporary GOTY candidates for the last leg of the year.

Beyond that, the past thirty days were as uneventful for me as it was for the game industry - give or take a Stadia launch - with most of my gaming time put towards both the very old (Bucketlog entries) and very new (IGotW). The calm before the storm, perhaps.

Indie Games of the Month

November comprised the 145-148 entries of Indie Game of the Week, outlined below:

Gato Roboto (IGotW 145) is the first and probably least consequential of the three 2019 explormers I played this month. To that effect, it reminded me of XeoDrifter: a game that was far too brief and surface-level to really justify its own existence, especially when the genre is already so well-represented and being constantly evolved by Indie developers. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but if I were to put together a book on the top 50 games of this very specific genre format drawing from just the last ten years of Indies alone I'm not sure Gato Roboto would make the cut. However, it plays well enough, the minimalist black & white is a strong look that we're seeing put to effective use more regularly, and all the kitty stuff is cute if you have whole YouTube playlists about feline antics, so it's not like it was a struggle to get through. Right level of challenge also; the bosses were a bit bullet sponge-y but not a one felt like a breeze or a sudden brick wall.

Bloodstained: Ritual of Night (IGotW 146) is the glorious return to the "IGAvania" blueprint that I think we were all hoping to see, warts and all. Koji Igarashi was careful not only to replicate the highlights of his gothic RPG explormers but to do so in a way that wouldn't alienate the many who dropped cash on Kickstarter to make this spiritual successor happen. We're in this odd and possibly detrimental era of game development - especially for this mid-tier where so much of the necessary capital is raised through crowdsourcing - where developers are cautious to play to the home crowd rather than a hypothetical wider audience. It's more important to dance with the ones what brought you, or bought you in this game's case, than it is to try to rock the boat with too many changes and innovations to entice those that left these games behind back in the PS1/GBA eras. All that said, I'm heartened that Igarashi hasn't missed a beat after his absence from game directing and there's fingerprints from so many other creators that are in lockstep with the man who helped define the explormer genre. The extraordinary level of customization with the game's hundreds of ability "shards" and weapons, though frequently broken as hell, is a lot of fun to tinker around with and I suspect the change to slightly iffy 3D graphics will be something the series eventually grows into.

Indivisible (IGotW 147) meanwhile, is taking after a few PS1 games of its own, albeit ones with a considerably smaller profile than Symphony of the Night. Valkyrie Profile is a highly idiosyncratic 2D RPG more revered for its graphics and sound than perhaps its convoluted game mechanics, which includes a revolving door of a party that the player has to disassemble and rebuild after each of the game's chapters, sending their best ringers off to fight for Valhalla. Indivisible is a little more fighter-heavy with its approach to VP's combat system of four characters that can be controlled simultaneously via individually binded face buttons, taking advantage of MvC-style lengthy combo chains and air juggles and perfect guards to keep enemies from retaliating with their otherwise lethal blows. The game is also seeped in the cultures of a dozen nations analogous to south/southwestern Asia, with the game's distinct art style benefiting from both that geographical background and from Lab Zero's typically excellent character designs and animations. Personally, I think I preferred the platforming - which is naturally supplemented by a dozen acquired skills that include the usual air dashes and double-jumps - that had the same acrobatic flow of something like the equally picturesque Ori and the Blind Forest. The combat and the very minor RPG aspects were a little undercooked in comparison, and while I certainly appreciate having almost twenty fighters to choose from I'm the type that tends to stick to what works unless I'm occasionally forced (or encouraged, by way of game-ified boons) to use characters I'm less familiar with. At the end of Indivisible, I'm not sure I ever tried half those characters, because I was more invested in exploring those maps than I was taking new souls into combat to see what they could do. Also, I really didn't care for the game's final stretch: the moment when it becomes apparent that the game had to hurry up its development to make its deadline is never a great one.

Gorogoa (IGotW 148) was selected because I've opted to move the remainder of my 2019 homework to a separate feature, leaving the IGotW to continue drawing from the wide catalog of excellent Indie games of yesteryear. A very late 2017 release that unfortunately meant it missed out on many GOTY accolades of its own, Gorogoa is a very attractive puzzle game that takes windows of various scenes and allows the player to pick them apart and find new routes and solutions from these new perspectives and filters. Each of its chapters revolve around the search for a special colored fruit, though the routes to get there are locked behind several layers of scene manipulation and viewpoint changes. It's nothing short of masterful the way the game plays around with these angles and scenes, and I missed noting it in the review but it plays like someone expanded the brilliantly imaginative opening montage of Satoshi Kon's Paprika into a full video game. That reason alone is enough to fall in love with its playful nature, for as serious as its themes of war and loss might otherwise be.

Hey Everybody, It's the Tuesday Slot

Bucketlog October: Arc the Lad

I lied earlier about November being quiet; I and many others spent the first week of this month either running or moderating the annual Extra Life streams that stretch out over many concurrent hours and days. Because of that, last month's Bucketlog entry extended almost halfway into November, and while G-Craft's first game in its contiguous SRPG series was relatively short as PS1-era RPGs go, it wasn't exactly something that I could complete overnight. Arc the Lad is one of many games from the PS1/PS2 era that feels "forgotten" to someone like me: not just in the sense that it's been around two decades since they all came out and the memories have faded, but because the cost-to-revenue ratio involved in translating RPGs to Europe where FIGS meant four times as much work as a North American localization and so were left out of the European marketplace. As such, there's a lot of PS1/PS2 RPGs that I never saw and have been curious about ever since.

Arc the Lad - which eventually did make its way to Europe, debuting here with its fourth entry Twilight of the Spirits - is fairly rudimentary as SRPGs go, and could easily be mistaken for a SNES game were it not for its 32-bit sprite scaling tech and interstitial FMV cutscenes. I liked it, as it followed my preferred Vandal Hearts style of SRPG where you have a consistent party of clearly defined characters that all have plot armor, but it had a surprising amount of table-setting for future entries that left players with a number of loose threads as well as an oddly lop-sided ratio of optional content over story-critical maps to pad out its runtime. A bit on the rough side, but I appreciated how these odd design decisions helped define its unusual status as a game specifically built to be the first part of a grander story arc. I'll hopefully play its sequel before too long.

Bucketlog November: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Figuring I didn't want to be caught flat-footed again like I was with Arc the Lad, I got this month's Bucketlog entry out of the way earlier than usual, going even further back in time to a game that not too long ago celebrated its thirty-second birthday. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a known quantity to so many that I was afraid that I'd find nothing to cover in a review that wasn't already common knowledge. Notorious for being the black sheep of the Zelda franchise, back while it was still finding its way with its first sequel, Zelda II is distinct for being the only wholly side-scrolling Zelda game (besides when Link's running around on the overworld map) and for being the only Zelda game to strictly qualify as an RPG, if only barely. It's my view that RPGs probably need more than just occasional stat increases from earning XP, maybe more in the way of an armor or weapon upgrade system (Zelda II lacks both, unlike its sequels), but grinding and building up those numbers plays a much larger role here than it would in any future Zelda game.

While many of the game's criticisms don't stand up - I value the game more for its big changes than others might, perhaps because I've played every other Zelda and sometimes have trouble telling them apart - the matter of its insane difficulty level is still a sore point. While I somehow missed the fact that you respawn outside the final Palace if you game over, rather than all the way back at Zelda's temple at the start of the game, the final gauntlet to get there and then to get all the way through that final palace to the Contra bullet hell Thunderbird boss are still both cheap with their falling deaths and relentless high-challenge enemy encounters. Not for those who have grown soft on the conveniences and compensations of modern game design, myself sadly included.

Kingdom Hearts in the Right Place: The Ranking of All Cosmos

Kingdom Hearts III has the unenviable task of incorporating a number of Disney and Pixar properties into its narrative, and with each property the game designers have to figure out how best to generate conflict within this world between the heroes and the game's nebulous "Heartless" foes, how best for that world's characters to befriend and interact with Sora and his friends, and how best to create compelling level design with the settings and scenes available. It's a process that ends up being a little hit and miss, depending on the reverence to the source and the suitability of the property in question. As with my Bosswatch series for Soulslikes, which narrowed its focus towards what I consider to be the most critical aspect of those games, Kingdom Hearts in the Right Place seeks to rank each world that appeared in Kingdom Hearts III by how effectively they were turned into Kingdom Hearts levels. That might mean critiquing the decision to hew close to their movie's events or opting to create a specific story more germane for Kingdom Hearts, how the environments and the characters of the movie(s) were "Hearts-ified" to suit their new medium, and whether or not it all worked from a pure gameplay perspective.

Hardcore fans and detractors alike tend to focus a lot on Kingdom Hearts' completely nonsense overarching story about Nobodies and keyblades and people with Xes in their names and the power of friendship, which has grown to unmanageable proportions after so many side-games and interquels, but the true heart (as it were) of the franchise has always been visiting and spending time immersed in those movie worlds. Even if you're not a huge Disney fan, the sheer diversity of visual styles and themes presented by that wide a range of movies can make for a game with an incredible degree of artistic and mechanical freedom. At least, ideally. The actual result is usually a little more hit and miss, as the above ranked list can attest.

The Games of November

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

As with any Super Smash Bros., I skip right past the multiplayer and dig into the single-player content. There are fewer multi-focused games that still take the time to recognize its single-player quotient, and I'm grateful Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continues the SSB trend of giving solo players a huge adventure mode and a massive number of collectibles to find or earn. Ultimate's masterstroke is in how it creates these bespoke fight challenges for each of its "spirits": a replacement for trophies that are closer to Brawl's stickers, in how they can be equipped for passive boosts. For example, a challenge for the Poppy Bros. Jr. spirit - that bomb-tossing rascal from the Kirby series - might involve fighting a CPU Young Link who spams a strengthened down+special move (the bomb, naturally).

It's incredible how the resourceful designers behind the spirit battles managed to find so many apposite scenarios for the game's 1000+ spirits, drawing from the game's admittedly huge amount of characters (74 not including DLC, which might be a non-MUGEN record), items, stages, special rules and conditions, and support trophies. Unlike Super Mario Maker 2, which they appear to have already bailed on, Nintendo is constantly giving the Ultimate audience additional little boosts of content. As of writing, for instance, there are four Resident Evil characters up for grabs. I'm not the biggest fan of "games as a service" because I'm someone who tries to get in a wide range of gaming experiences every year, bouncing between dozens of complete games rather than sticking to one or two regularly updated ones, but I have to admit the way Nintendo continues to support their game with new content while not-so-subtly advertising upcoming Switch ports and new releases works a treat for both them and us. There are the overpriced DLC characters too, of course, but I'm fine ignoring those. (Well, until they decide to add Ys's Adol the Red to Smash, at which point all bets are off.)

Smash is still Smash at the end of the day; it's not a franchise that sees a lot of growth, and that was made evident by how they named the last two releases. Smash "For Wii U and 3DS" is about as non-committal a title as you're likely to see, analogous to calling Ultimate "that one you can play on the Switch". From what I can tell about Ultimate and its post-launch longevity, the goal maybe wasn't to say that this is all the Smash we're ever getting because Masahiro Sakurai has been running on fumes for years and might collapse into a cloud of sparkly dust at any moment, but to create an "ever-game" that Nintendo can keep incrementing upon until they determine that the series is no longer profitable. That they deliberately planned for five DLC characters for its season pass, only to announce later that they're going to keep them coming long after the mysterious fifth DLC person (or thing, maybe) is announced and released, suggests that they're only going to be done with Smash Ultimate once everyone else is. Smash is popular enough in fighting competitions like EVO that I'm not sure that day will ever arrive, at least not until Nintendo remembers they're a hardware company and decides to come out with a "New Switch" and will eventually need a Smash Bros. game to go with it, along with a new Zelda and a new Mario Kart and a new everything else.

Anyway, Smash is fun and I keep popping back in for those new spirit events - I already collected all the ones that came with the game - so here's to who knows how many more years of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, may it live forever. Just let Sakurai sleep in his own house occasionally, all right Ninty?

Looking Ahead

It's wild to think December was once the busiest time of the year for new releases with everyone rushing to get their games out before the holidays, because these days it feels like the big publishers see the end of the year looming and decide to punt their upcoming blockbusters to the following Spring instead. Some part of me knows that the GOTY season is all BS - if a publisher digs hard enough they can find at least one site willing to drop a GOTY accolade for their game thus giving them all the justification they need to bring out a DLC-festooned "GOTY Edition" the following year, and the rest of us just uses GOTY as an excuse to loudly argue because we didn't get enough of that around the Thanksgiving table already - and yet it feels like the entire industry has shifted its release windows around to accommodate the award season.

For one reason or another, December's become a frigid wasteland of releases to befit the snowy season, though there's a handful of notable releases still left in 2019:

• December 3rd is perhaps the last "big" release day of the year, with the long-awaited XCOM successor Phoenix Point, the localization of the SaGa reboot SaGa: Scarlet Grace - Ambitions, and the apparently not terrible but still not great Terminator: Resistance. For ports we have Halo: Reach on PC, Neverwinter Nights EE for Switch (to join all the Infinity Engine remasters out this year), and Blair Witch for PS4. Life is Strange also completes its second season, making it eligible for a bunch of weepy "Best Game Story of 2019" approbations. Out of all those, I'm only all that interested in Phoenix Point and Life is Strange 2, though as always I'm deeply curious about any new SaGa game - a curiosity that cost me dearly with the last reboot, 2003's Unlimited SaGa, which was also unlimited garbage.
• December 5th sees the release of two potentially exciting RPGs: Darksiders Genesis and Star Ocean: First Departure R. The former is a top-down RPG based in the Darksiders heavy metal multiverse starring the fourth and last to be seen Horseman, "Strife," who appears to shoot people rather than hit them with a giant rectangular sword. It's being made by Airship Syndicate, behind the excellent if repetitive Battle Chasers: Nightwar, and looks to drop the action-adventure pretensions for full Diablo style crowd control and loot management. Could be a better direction for the series than Darksiders III was, though they're treating it as a side-game for now. Star Ocean: First Departure R, meanwhile, is a Capcom-esque "HD remaster of a reboot" - the PSP reboot of the first Star Ocean, to be precise. Could be the gateway I need to try to get back into that series, after bouncing from both Till The End of Time (the third one) and The Last Hope (the fourth one, and I see what they did there).
• December 10th has an even more exciting surprise: the final two free DLC campaigns for Shovel Knight. They include Shovel Knight: King of Cards, a single-player adventure with the supercilious King Knight, and the multiplayer brawler Shovel Knight Showdown. I liked the cute Plague Knight campaign just fine, but the Specter Knight campaign - Specter of Torment - was one of my favorite games in 2017 (no mean feat given how packed that year was) and expectations are high for round three. The title of King of Cards had me worried that there would be a strong Slay the Spire/SteamWorld Quest turn-based card-playing aspect, very much not my thing, though recent gameplay trailers instead paint a game closer to the original Shovel Knight - now with Wario Land-style shoulder charges! - with an optional Triple Triad-esque card game thrown in for color. If all of King Knight's quests simply boiled down to hunting rare cards to make himself look better during card game (k)night at the local tavern, I'd be so into that. Either way, I'm grateful to Yacht Club Games for this late-year gift. Fans of something more modern-looking can enjoy the new MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries or a PC port of the pur-port-edly excellent Dragon Quest Builders 2.
• December 11th (or maybe the 4th?) delivers the first of what will be several games based on World of Darkness tabletop universe, and specifically the Vampire: The Masquerade campaign setting. Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York looks to strip a lot of the role-playing aspects out for a pure narrative adventure game, of the Telltale and DONTNOD vein where there's a bunch of impactful decisions to direct the plot. Don't know much about it yet, but the story and character interactions were the highlight of Troika's flawed but compelling Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, so here's hoping Coteries of New York benefits from that purer narrative focus. Those of us who like getting our hands bloody with character builds and RPG mechanics will have to wait until Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 drops sometime in 2020.
• December 17th will finally introduce a troubled world to its potential cure: Wattam, the newest typically bizarre social experiment from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. I'm not yet sure if it'll have more "game" in it than his last game, Noby Noby Boy, but I'm hoping for a series of little social interaction puzzles - perhaps like those in the cute if basic Doki-Doki Universe - that, if not challenging, will at least prove to be delightful. Hard to stay mad at Takahashi, even after buying a PS3 game that amounted to little more than eating people and pooping them out at great speed (which got surprisingly old fast).

Before the December rush starts and I brute force my way through a stack of 2019 games for last minute GOTY entries, I wanted to take a brief break with something relaxing and contemplative. If Gorogoa is anything, it's unhurried; sometimes it pays to take things easy and look at the problem from a different angle. That's explicitly the crux of the game's puzzles too, as you work with perspectives and various layers of a scene in order to build a path to success.

Gorogoa is about a studious young boy who identifies a colorful dragon-like monster stomping through his town. He knows how to defeat it from his books - collect five special colored fruit into a bowl, which will repel the creature - but beyond picking out a bowl from his family's closet he's unsure how to proceed. That's where the player comes in, picking apart scenes by using a two-by-two grid to reconfigure layouts, or create additional layers that can be stacked on top of one another to create new gateways or new areas to explore. In addition to moving around geographically in the game's vaguely Middle Eastern setting, the player also moves forward through time, seeing the same young boy in various stages of his life, almost always on crutches or in a wheelchair. Evidently his battle will cost him dearly, though we're left to ponder how it will happen and if we're capable of stopping it in time. The five collectible items also provide the game's structure, as the quest for each one invariably becomes its own chapter in the story.

It's hard to describe the metaphysical brilliance of Gorogoa without seeing it in motion, and given the dialogue and text-free story it's working with it's a very visual game top to bottom (or left to right, as the case sometimes is). The destination is often evident enough, as is where the player must start as the young boy stands expectantly with a bowl ready for you to guide him. The journey, however, might take the player through one daydream, and then through a framed picture of a temple in the daydream, and then through a pattern on the wall of the temple in the picture in that daydream. Additional panels will break off into their own scenes, and you'll occasionally have obvious empty shapes that are meant to be placed on top other scenes to create a new composition. It's sort of like a game where you're charting a route through a Photoshop image, taking a path through each of the separated layers. Again, it's much easier to see the game in motion to understand what's going on, though even with that intuitive comprehension of what the game's doing the puzzles are rarely ever straightforward or simple.

As if to assuage the inevitable beanfreaking that these circuitous puzzle solutions might cause, the game is surprisingly chill given its themes of war and destruction. Even though you get a small window each into scene - by necessity, as they're each meant to take up only a quarter of the working area with up to three others - the player is able to at any time "blow up" the panel they're tapping on to see more of the detailed artwork or animations within. The Arabian/Indian/Middle-Eastern aesthetics come from a culture I'm not too familiar with (though I did just come from another game, Indivisible, that drew a lot of artistic inspiration from that part of the world also) but is rendered in beautiful detail here, and the surrealism of the game's mechanics are reflected well in the animations and art of these little scenes and windows.

The game's on the short side, which didn't surprise me given the clear amount of resources put into its presentation, but in that brief time makes you really turn those mental gears to make any headway - especially after the first couple of collectibles have been found. Though there's a limited number of scenes and hotspots to draw from in each chapter, there's an intimidating degree of convolution that starts to hurt your head after a while, albeit in an entirely positive way. It's sort of like collapsing after a full workout and discovering that the muscles that hurt the most were the ones you didn't even know you had. There's a mix of lateral thinking and spatial awareness utilized by Gorogoa's brainteasers that you rarely see in this or any other medium, and I'm struggling to recall a game that so expertly played with the malleable limits of reality in this fashion since 2013's non-Euclidean nightmare Antichamber. Just the sort of (legal) cerebral stimulant I was looking for as we start 2019's final descent into GOTY mania.

Rating: 5 out of 5.