The year? 2022. The list? It's a bunch of video games I've played through to completion. Is there a third part to this bit? There will be when I think of something.
I've got some dumb ideas for features this year, but I also have my usual ones. Anything marked as an Indie Game of the Week, for example, has a much more detailed review attached to its wiki page (just click the game's entry on this list, check its forums tab, and there you go).
06/01. (The first game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) A pleasant enough Indie explormer I probably spent way too much money on, Ender Lilies is certainly attractive and well-made but its struggle to find an identity of its own rather than an amalgam of other, more established explormers probably hurt it. It feels like a modernization without being a paradigm shift; the sense that it's polishing what's already extant rather than blazing a new trail for the format. You'll enjoy this if you like these kinds of games, but you might struggle to remember much about it months later. (4 Stars.)
07/01. The two-hundred-and-fifty-first Indie Game of the Week. I was drawn to these Opus games after playing the second one last year, and the first deals with one of my favorite subjects - astronomy - so I was definitely curious about it. It's a bit like the planet scanning mechanic in the Mass Effect series isolated and turned into its own mini puzzle game with a narrative wrapped around it, the latter taking more of the focus as you continue to get closer to figuring out where that dang ol' pale blue dot went to as issues keep piling up on your orbital telescope station. Wholesome, hopeful, and chill: just what I was looking for. (4 Stars.)
07/01. (The second game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) One of a few run-based type games to double-down on the randomized gambling aspect of that genre; those where your chances of winning are more down to good fortune rather than the player's own skill and judgment. There's no guarantee you'll find a lucrative synergy of slot machine symbols in any given run on Luck be a Landlord, but it's certainly satisfying when a set comes together and you're raking in the dough. At least, enough dough to keep your landlord vulture at bay. It's a game that requires some experimentation and a lot of failure before it clicks. (4 Stars.)
09/01. (The third game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) Really not a whole lot to say about this micro-sized platformer beyond that it goes for a slightly uncommon black-and-white crisp 8-bit aesthetic - one I suspect was due to playing a lot of Game Boy games on an emulator rather than the real deal, since the pea greenness (not to be confused with the green penis) isn't quite as apparent - and a mechanic where you can temporarily absorb light and use it to walk on air. Over before it really starts, though simultaneously at a point where you feel like it's shown all it has to show. (3 Stars.)
15/01. The two-hundred-and-fifty-second Indie Game of the Week. My first impression of MagiCat wasn't wholly positive: it felt a little too generic, both in its cute but unremarkable 16-bit appearance and in its simple, straightforward 2D platformer mechanics. It wasn't until I got a few hours in that I realized that I hadn't seen the same level gimmick repeated more than once, and there's more than sixty stages in the game total. That, combined with a decent challenge level and some intriguing puzzles around its collectibles (like in the more recent Super Mario games, there's three per level and half the fun of the game is figuring out how to find or reach them) eventually won me over. (4 Stars.)
18/01. (The fifth game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) This is specifically for Chapter 2. Happy to see that Fox hadn't missed a beat when it comes to introducing new characters that you immediately love, whether they're some cute one-off or a recurring antagonist like Queen, and I enjoyed the whole cyberworld aesthetic and the subtle mechanical improvements to the combat and the mini-games. The soundtrack was off the damn chain too, especially the boss tracks, beaten only by Ys IX that year. It's probably going to be a while before the next installment, and I'm not certain I won't replay the first two chapters when that year arrives. (5 Stars.)
19/01. (The sixth game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) A melancholy adventure game about leaving behind a life and a partner you loved due to economical circumstances that oft befall struggling creatives. The game isn't shy about its adoration for Kentucky Route Zero, throwing in as many stylistic allusions to that episodic misery sim as it can get away with. If you feel the "game as autobiography" is a concept with some legs, I'd recommend giving it a shot. Conversely, those that avoid games that are likely to bum them out might want to try something else. (4 Stars.)
19/01. (The fourth game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021.) A run-based game about configuring the world as you go, building a cyclical route that is neither too tough nor too simple for your wandering hero to gain the strength and gear he needs to conquer the local boss. It's a game all about savvy judgment, from your character's equipment to the type of positive synergies you can make with the cards in your deck. I really liked its early DOS aesthetic and soundtrack too; like Return of the Obra Dinn, it's a nostalgia-fluffer that forgoes the usual time periods most others invoke. (4 Stars.)
20/01. The two-hundred-and-fifty-second Indie Game of the Week. A charming fairytale adventure game about a firefly on a mission and an ornery group of forest spirits that help and hinder her in turn. Very much one to appreciate for its aesthetic and storytelling rather than anything elaborate in terms of its puzzles and mini-games. Probably a great game suited for kids if you're figuring out what your little ones might respond to, though adults can certainly enjoy its earnestness as well. (4 Stars.)
24/01. (The eighth and final game in Go! Go! GOTY! 2021. The seventh, for the record, was Cloud Gardens which I did not complete.) One of those rare and precious puzzle games that takes a hoary format that has existed in paper form forever and figuring out a way that the video game medium can do something original in a fashion exclusive to the format. In this case, it's taking Spot the Difference - a mainstay in every newspaper's kids' section - and turning the two images into 3D dioramas that you can spin around and view at any angle. The dioramas alone are fun enough to explore; the simple process of finding five elements that don't match in the two otherwise identical tableaux is the icing on the cake. (4 Stars.)
27/01. The two-hundred-and-fifty-third Indie Game of the Week. Perhaps the Platonic ideal of the run-based explormer, after I'd played a few narrow misses that didn't quite capitalize on both sides of the hybrid form. A Robot Named Fight! is very much based on Super Metroid, from its aesthetic down to its gameplay feel to the way it hides its secrets. It also takes a leaf from The Binding of Isaac where it not only randomizes the world each time, but continues to introduce new power-ups and areas as the player unlocks progress milestones and achievements to, if not guarantee, then make far more likely that the next run will have something you've never seen before. It's pretty replayable as a result. (4 Stars.)
01/02. I wrote extensively about my feelings for Ys IX: Monstrum Nox in my 2021 GOTY list, but to briefly reiterate: while Ys IX falters a little in comparison to VIII, which set such an absurdly high bar for this new era of open-world Ys, much of its core is still exceptional. In particular, the traversal powers dovetail nicely with exploration of the game's central urban location of Balduq, the music is still great even if I'm always hoping for more tracks from Unisuga and Jindo, there's tons of little advancements and crafting and QoL stuff to keep you occupied between dungeons, and absolutely nothing about the arcade-like combat has diminished since the Napishtim era despite this much broader scope. This series is phenomenal in its consistency, which is why it's one of my favorites. (5 Stars.)
09/02. The two-hundred-and-fifty-fifth Indie Game of the Week. A strategy RPG in the FFT mold but given a more P&P attitude with its focus on lucky draws and rolls. The cards you deal are what attacks you can use and the dice determine factors like additional damage, special conditions for the attack, self-healing, or a reduction of enemy counter damage. The luck focus makes the game frustrating and exciting in turn, as it means no strategy is ever foolproof. (4 Stars.)
11/02. The two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth Indie Game of the Week. Wholesome if mostly uneventful romance VN about a pair of treasure hunters driving around the American southwest, one an irascible and withdrawn cynic and the other an outgoing ditz ingenue. Mostly an excuse for many cute falling in love scenes, the game also has something of a tourist promotional aspect as the heroines travel between SW USA landmarks like Arches National Park, the Grand Canyon, Vegas, and Palm Springs. (4 Stars.)
18/02. The two-hundred-and-fifty-seventh Indie Game of the Week. A very nostalgic type of 2D puzzle-platformer most developers have abandoned for greener pastures, Nippon Ichi Software's very fond of these aesthetic and mechanical diversions from their usual SRPG output. This gothic melancholy tale involves a girl cursed by magical thorns using that power, alongside an invincible stone buddy, to transfer life to and from objects to progress through the broken remains of a kingdom. Some real rough edges regarding the physics mar an otherwise attractive platformer. (3 Stars.)
25/02. The two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth Indie Game of the Week. Ever since the rise and fall of the LucasFilms golden period of graphic adventure games, Indie devs have endeavored to not only produce the same level of satisfying point-and-click puzzles but to be anywhere near as consistently humorous and charming as the likes of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. Paradigm's one of the few to manage it: a bizarre, eastern-European-themed shaggy dog story of a narrative beholden to silly cutaways, background goofs, and characters like a genetically-engineered sloth that vomits fully wrapped candy bars. Its many jokes occasionally trend towards the meme-tastic but a few got me. (4 Stars.)
03/03. The two-hundred-and-fifty-ninth Indie Game of the Week. A cute if unassuming platformer that, like VVVVVV or Life of Pixel, mostly exists to venerate a much older era of computer gaming in a modern context. There's not a whole lot to its array of stage-based shiny collectathon challenges but it's kinda neat as a time capsule sort of affair. (3 Stars.)
05/03. The two-hundred-and-fiftieth Indie Game of the Week. I actually started this game at the end of last year but it's taken this long to finish the main story (and there's still more content to go). Making a fully-featured life-sim with multiple gameplay modes with a small Indie studio was hard enough when ConcernedApe did it in 2D, which makes Portia's fully 3D environments that much more impressive. Of course, with that amount of ambition comes no small amount of teething issues, but Portia's got a wholesomeness and moxie that makes you root for it regardless of any number of technical issues and hideous Klasky-Csupo-ass character designs. (4 Stars.)
12/03. The two-hundred-and-sixtieth Indie Game of the Week. An isometric action-adventure game that builds on the developers' earlier Titan Souls with its hectic evasion and well-timed attacks, rendering it at times closer to a Ys sort of experience which is of course something I'm very on board with. It's also got a strong aesthetic - cribbed partly from Ghibli movies - and a heightened sense of exploration and puzzle-solving than its forebear. A really great evolution that makes me excited to see what this studio does next. (5 Stars.)
16/03. Though curiously rough around the edges given its evident huge budget and the delicacy with which the Star Wars name is handled (though I guess that didn't stop all the bad LucasArts Star Wars games past), Fallen Order creates a distinct and very pleasing amalgam of Soulsian caution, explormer traversal, Jedi Knight's ingenuity regarding the application of Force abilities, and a cinematic flair borrowed from the likes of Uncharted or Tomb Raider. It can definitely feel like a "production," while still giving you plenty of quiet moments to explore planets, solve environmental puzzles, read up on lore, and chat with your well-realized ship companions. The occasionally iffy execution ultimately doesn't hurt it in the face of its myriad strengths, though frustration can sneak in here and there (especially against that unpleasant final boss fight). (4 Stars.)
17/03. The two-hundred-and-sixty-first Indie Game of the Week. While there's nothing particularly impressive or innovative about Kelvin and the Infamous Machine, very much working with the same love of B-movies that inspired Maniac Mansion, it is a very solidly made point-and-click with a reasonable puzzle difficulty, all the modern concessions you might want (a highlight all hotspots button, for instance), and occasionally chucklesome jokes. I'd normally rate something this forgettable a 3, but its lack of any significant faults elevates it to a 4. (4 Stars.)
28/03. The two-hundred-and-sixty-second Indie Game of the Week. This steampunk dungeon-crawler prequel is absolutely cut from the same cloth as the original Vaporum, and delves into what happened in the titular Arx Vaporum research tower shortly after the event that killed everyone while working to expand the world's lore and perhaps introduce a possible third entry set after these first two games. Some minor additions to the formula include a heavier emphasis on status effects that the player must either mitigate when confronting enemies that inflict them or utilize themselves with their own weapons and abilities. Otherwise, it's more of the same first-person dungeon-crawling, with perhaps a slightly larger ratio of puzzles over combat encounters. (5 Stars.)
02/04. Aesthetically striking and bolstered by a strong melee combat core that takes a leaf from Arkham Asylum's book by giving you the tools to overcome groups of combatants with a mixture of martial arts counters and parries and tools that can stun or confuse your foes to keep the crowds manageable. The narrative has some well-acted characters but is straightforward to a fault with each of its twists telegraphed a mile away, and tends to opt for the most dour outcome to any side-story which can make the game feel like an emotionally-draining ordeal after so long.
It is also, at its heart, the same type of checklist-ticking, completion-percentage-boosting, outpost-clearing, open-world action game we've seen a hundred times before: even so, running around eliminating all the ?s on a map and seeing your numbers go up has a certain therapeutic appeal that makes it great to play on autopilot while you stick on a podcast or something. I've mostly moved beyond games like this where it can feel like 10 hours of content stretched across 50 hours of repetitive filler, but the occasional one can still hit the spot, especially when they're this competently put together. (4 Stars.)
07/04. The two-hundred-and-sixty-fourth Indie Game of the Week. A FMV horror game that slightly improves on its predecessor which mostly takes place on and around a dead woman's smartphone. By digging through her apps and correspondence, you eventually get into contact with some of her fellow business partners, all of whom are in danger of being the next to mysteriously die to the same malady. A mix of horror beats and satire about the cutthroat world of internet influencers, it's not my kind of thing usually but as an adventure game fan I'm always into trying new takes on the genre. (4 Stars.)
19/04. The two-hundred-and-sixty-fifth Indie Game of the Week. A turn-based RPG that uses a horizontally-aligned grid similar to those found in the Mega Man Battle Network games (or One Step From Eden, to name a similar Indie). It has sort of an "The Owl House" plot about wholesome LGBTQ+ witches learning more about their magic school than they ever anticipated; some of the characters are fun, and their talents offer some pretty interesting party dynamics. One unusual twist is giving a lot of precedence to timed hits, elevating their importance from little damage bonuses into integral elements of your strategy (for accessibility's sake, you can modify how impactful they are if you really can't get the timing down). (4 Stars.)
21/04. The two-hundred-and-sixty-sixth Indie Game of the Week. A cute if paper-thin explormer about a bird trying to find his flock. There's no hazards or enemies to worry about; it's largely a game about discovery and musical rap battles with other birds (that I believe are also impossible to lose). Might work best as an entry-level platformer for younger audiences, especially if they're into music or ornithology. (3 Stars.)
22/04. A fun nostalgia blast, even if Jupiter didn't really do anything special with this game besides put Sonic and Shining Force characters into it. Like, no new puzzle formats or anything that wasn't already in Picross S3 onwards. It did at least inspire me to play some more Mega Drive games in the coming months, and possibly resurrect that wiki blog series on same. (4 Stars.)
30/04. The two-hundred-and-sixty-seventh Indie Game of the Week. These first-person puzzle games have all but dried up now thanks to Portal's long dormancy barring the occasional newcomer like Manifold Garden or Superliminal, but there were so many made that I don't think I'll run out if I ever feel the need to carry boxes around a room or redirect lasers. The Turing Test's energy-redistribution puzzles aren't anything special in a genre that has already gone a lot wilder - nothing's topped Antichamber in my view - but its philosophical musings on machine intelligence give it a slight edge. (4 Stars.)
01/05. There's certainly room to grow with this new format for Yakuza, where it's departed from the old brawler action combat in lieu of a turn-based format deliberately reminiscent of Dragon Quest (but perhaps closer to Shin MegamI Tensei in practice), as I wasn't wholly on board with this first entry in the adventures of Ichiban Kasuga despite being a bigger fan than most of slower-paced JRPGs.
That's no knock against Kasuga himself, who is a great protagonist that brings together Kiryu's oblivious goodnaturedness and Yakuza 5's Shinada's goofy charms, or the party members he recruits throughout the game who all have this world-weary cynicism Kasuga helps them overcome. The presentation and side-activities are all still classic Yakuza, mostly untouched from Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 6 for better or worse (I would've liked a different selection of arcade games, at least; there's only so much Fantasy Zone one man can take) though with notable exceptions like Can Quest and the vocational school's trivia tests. It's still 90% the Yakuza I know and love, just with a new combat system that'll take some getting used to (and could use a handful of improvements, like dropping the whole "if the protagonist beefs it, it's an instant game over" rule). (4 Stars.)
04/05. Spent May playing a bunch of Mega Drive RPGs. Well, RPG-adjacent. First was Treasure's take on a dungeon-crawler, which was typically odd (why am I fighting a WW2 tank?) but not as odd as you might hope. It's not too bad as a game though: there's plenty of exploration with mysteries and puzzles to solve, though the combat could be a little imprecise owing to its isometric perspective. A strong enough start to Mega May. (4 Stars.)
05/05. The two-hundred-and-sixty-eighth Indie Game of the Week. The "A Normal Lost Phone" people are back with another adventure game with an eccentric twist. In this case, you're trying to solve a national mystery by recording clips from call-in radio shows and broadcasting them back to other stations as responses. Finding the right path through this maze of audio samples can be tricky and a bit on the abstruse side, and the game is relatively short and only hints at alternative routes without providing any. An interesting experiment for future games to build on more confidently, perhaps. (3 Stars.)
07/05. The second Mega May Madness game. The system's other Legend of Zelda ersatz, along with the previously-covered Beyond Oasis, Soleil/Crusader of Centy has some original ideas - mostly revolving around a crew of helpful animal companions - and looks and plays great. Most novel is its bizarre story, which I imagine was inspired by Quintet's heady SNES output in that you eventually solve the world's problems by travelling millennia back in time and removing the source of the conflict. (4 Stars.)
14/05. The two-hundred-and-sixty-ninth Indie Game of the Week. An explormer with a satirical streak as you take down monolithic game developers that have gone all-in on gambling mechanics like lootboxes and microtransactions. It has a solid presentation and its combo-heavy combat system made for an appealing hook, though there was precious little in the way of meaningful platforming or puzzles as a consequence. It also rubbed me the wrong way by gating items (and thus 100% completion) behind doors locked by QR Codes, which I had no way to decipher. (3 Stars.)
19/05. The two-hundred-and-seventieth Indie Game of the Week. A sci-fi adventure game in the mold of something like J.U.L.I.A. or Mission Critical, where you're solving space travel-related survival problems with resourceful thinking and taking the time to explore a barren planet with a few mysteries buried deeper within. Very slight game, for better and worse: having fewer hotspots and screens to worry about minimizes the amount of getting stuck, but the game's over almost as soon it's started. (4 Stars.)
20/05. The fourth game of Mega May Madness (the third was Shadowrun, which I did not complete). A cartoonish action-platformer-RPG hybrid with some comical asides localized, with mixed results, by Working Designs. This was one of Falcom's earliest forays into comedic content, blazing a trail for the likes of Zwei and Gurumin to follow, and has some appealing mechanics (including switching protagonists to exploit enemy weaknesses) but the localization also made the odd choice of artificially raising the difficulty way too high that made it pretty frustrating in parts. (3 Stars.)
23/05. The fifth game of Mega May Madness. Sega themselves made this Ys clone based on an original story from a mangaka they'd worked with several times before, yet never thought to release it overseas. A pity, since it's actually a half-decent action-RPG by 1992 standards with lots of narrative twists, secrets, and challenging showpiece boss fights to conquer. A lost classic for the system. (4 Stars.)
28/05. The two-hundred-and-seventy-first Indie Game of the Week. A graphically-stellar sequel to Alwa's Awakening that uses the same set of mechanics where the protagonist can summon traversal tools with her magic, including blocks for pushing onto switches and bubbles to climb through the air. As solid as the original, but also as generic-feeling. (4 Stars.)
30/05. The sixth and final game of Mega May Madness. The dungeon-crawler that spawned a hundred blob-stacking puzzle games, the Mega Drive port of Madou Monogatari is unique in that it replaced the turn-based combat with real-time fighting that uses an interface similar to Street Fighter's D-pad inputs for its spell casting. Its tower-like dungeon is also full of secrets, necessitating much note-taking and backtracking. As a Dungeon Master fan, this was surprisingly compelling stuff while also being very cute and silly. (4 Stars.)
11/06. The two-hundred-and-seventy-third Indie Game of the Week. A sci-fi visual novel with a bit of an otome flair with its three romantic options (including one same-sex couple), the art and narrative are fine but it's otherwise unexceptional in its construction. If you're just looking to spend some time in a curious, lore-dense setting chatting up hunky dudes (or a Samus Aran ersatz for you ladies that like ladies) it should do you fine for an unhurried afternoon's worth of prose. (3 Stars.)
14/06. The two-hundred-and-seventy-second Indie Game of the Week. Taking a leaf from Undertale, or perhaps Deltarune, Virgo's an RPG that balances some deeply tactical turn-based combat with a whole lot of incidental world-building, as almost everything in the environment has some amusing flavor text. The game is also beholden to the OFF school of world design in which everything has several layers of obfuscation to its terminology and setting: the only concrete goal is that you play as the constellation Virgo, essentially a cosmic deity, and are looking to coerce all the other zodiac constellations into agreeing to your plan. This plan can change depending on player choice, presenting Virgo as either a domineering bully with a pure heart or an outright zealous tyrant. (4 Stars.)
18/06. The two-hundred-and-seventy-fourth Indie Game of the Week. An action-adventure "character action" game that resembles those that used to be everywhere in the 360/PS3 era, Raji is a gorgeous looking game that, in part, aims to be an interactive exhibition of centuries of mythology from the Indian subcontinent. It's a little lacking in some departments like exploration and a bit antiquated with its approach, but it's a visual marvel with distinctive and authentic middle-eastern flair. (4 Stars.)
19/06. Played this for a secret Final Fantasy project, otherwise I'm not sure I would've bothered. I appreciate that the Crystal Chronicles has its own audience - as with Four Swords Adventures, it's for those looking to enjoy a multiplayer experience in a franchise that traditionally does not offer that - but I'm not sure I necessarily belong to it. Bonus points for being an isometric dungeon-crawler puzzle-platformer though, sorta reminiscent of a sub-genre popular in the UK way back when, and I can't say I hated my time with it. Real weird that the Wii version was basically a DS emulator though... (3 Stars.)
(HoloCure: Save the Fans!)
29/06. The two-hundred-and-seventy-sixth Indie Game of the Week. A rather thin (for now) but still compelling spin on the Vampire Survivors model of being surrounded by enemies and trying to not die as your character automatically fires all their weapons at set intervals. Having said characters be Hololive vtubers adds a certain appeal to it also, and it's very fanservice friendly. I'll no doubt return to it in the future as new content is added. (4 Stars.)
08/07. The two-hundred-and-seventy-seventh Indie Game of the Week. The idea of a self-effacing, fourth-wall-breaking musical in the form of an action-platformer with a handful of explormer embellishments is a compelling one on paper, but I can't say I enjoyed the execution of the first half of that particular elevator pitch. I suspect it might be a language barrier thing: many of those jokes (and the rhymes, and the scanning) probably landed a lot better in the developers' native Portuguese language. The half that's a game, though, is decent enough if nothing revelatory. I'll also shout out the non-lyrical part of the BGM, which had an unexpectedly orchestral quality to it. (3 Stars.)
13/07. The two-hundred-and-seventy-fifth Indie Game of the Week. This series is definitely within the "love to hate" category, as a confusing mess of expository clues and instant-death traps that in practice works like a combination of Fez and Spelunky, but based on a specific type of game model that precedes both by over 30 years. This is absolutely a game you're going to need a lot of patience and an open notebook app to enjoy in full, but the sheer scale of its structure and the rewarding feeling you get for every roadblock passed makes the painful journey worth it. The only thing stopping it from earning the full 5 stars is this odd Pavlovian revulsion I still harbor for its many hardships. (4 Stars.)
24/07. The two-hundred-and-seventy-eighth Indie Game of the Week. Talking of harbors, Spiritfarer balances a life-sim sort of progress-meter-jamboree of growing crops and farming resources with some very emotionally deep storytelling as you take on passengers in your afterlife boat, help them through their lingering regrets, and send them on their way to whatever comes next. I particularly enjoyed its enormous Wind Waker style ocean of islands and other curiosities to discover, each contributing towards the needs of my passengers. It also looked fantastic - Thunder Lotus are the ones to beat for fluid character animations outside of a Moon Studios - and nailed the saturnine but hopeful atmosphere such a setting required. Absolutely top-notch adventure gaming with some exploration and life-sim indulgences on the side. (5 Stars.)
28/07. The two-hundred-and-eightieth Indie Game of the Week. I think you could reductively rank Coffee Talk as a lesser and smaller VA-11 Hall-A but ironically for a game about serving coffee and tea it trades out a lot of that game's bitterness for more sweetness, as each of your regular customers are delightful people you root for once they're back out into the world and overcoming the obstacles in their path. The inclusion of fantasy races leading otherwise quotidian lives in modern day Seattle is quietly appealing without going fully overboard into Bright territory with the social commentary, though it did make me curious what Frasier would be like in this universe. (4 Stars.)
30/07. In some ways The Surge 2 improves a lot over the original, adding a great deal of quality-of-life improvements while tweaking the health injectable and drone systems to be less prone to abuse and more accessible to a wider audience who perhaps didn't quite follow the nuance of the first game's unusual new approach to a Souls-like action-RPG. In turn, the game's difficulty scale is a little off - I found it got far easier past the mid-point due to how many broken ways you can spec your character, and the directional parry system is way easier to exploit than similar systems in other games - and the story is a little more urgent and railroaded and less about gradually finding your feet in a catastrophic environment. More Half-Like 2 than Half-Life, for better or worse. Honestly, though, these guys get what makes a Souls game tick almost more than any other dev working in this space right now. Well, besides From themselves anyway. (4 Stars.)
06/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-first Indie Game of the Week. I've seen Indie throwback RPGs imitate certain genres and eras, but rarely is the focus as specific as Amberland's homage to the first half of the Might and Magic series. While it has a large world map packed with content, including dungeons and side-quests, it still feels relatively flat compared to the source of its inspiration. Almost like a Cliff's Notes version of the real affair, and for those trying to break into those old dungeon-crawlers I might even recommend this game as a half-step. Otherwise, it's kinda cool from its concept to its aesthetic, but perhaps a little repetitive and under-developed. (3 Stars.)
12/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-second Indie Game of the Week. Four short narrative adventure games about various young prodigies across 19th century Vienna, including a composer suffering writer's block, a tortured artist, a genius mathematician questioning their gender identity, and a former comfortable journalist who has suddenly found himself needing to be an inspiration to others. As you might expect from that premise, it's a very emotive and thoughtful game that takes things slowly and won't throw too much in the way of difficult challenges for you, since the narrative takes the focus here. I thought it was attractive and well put-together, if not generally my sort of thing. (4 Stars.)
13/08. Like many others back when this game came out, I was bowled over by its ambitious sense of storytelling in how it breaks its already complex time-travelling narrative up across thirteen protagonists with their own intersecting routes and places all those scenes and scenarios in an achronological order. It expects a lot from its player to keep up, and I think that's partly why it's engendered such an dedicated fanbase. Then you factor in all its other strengths: a compelling and occasionally thrilling real-time strategy mode against hordes of kaiju; an incredible soundtrack from Hitoshi Sakimoto's Basiscape that is very reminiscent of the early PlayStation; and an ethereal, detailed art style that has long since become Vanillaware's best trademark. This is the sort of game you'll either bounce from immediately or fall in love with; no middle ground. (5 Stars.)
20/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-third Indie Game of the Week. An action-RPG platformer that is not exactly subtle about riffing on Dead Cells, presenting an alternative universe take where it dispensed with the run-based and procedural generation business and presented a straightforward series of rooms and outdoor areas filled with enemies to fight. The combat in the game is exceptional, effectively balancing melee and ranged by having your melee attack restock your limited ranged ammo in a similar manner to the Doom reboots, and the pre-rendered sprites have some damn smooth animations. It can be a little dry and samey in the way many action-RPGs with color-coded loot can get, but it's a real nice alternative to Dead Cells if you aren't getting anywhere in that game. (4 Stars.)
24/08. I had no idea what Eien no Filena, or Eternal Filena, was prior to a blog that studied its animation and video game adaptations simultaneously, but I was pleasantly surprised by a few aspects and somewhat put off by others. Its setting is a fascinating mix of antiquity-era barbarism and near-future technology and while the story of a deposed royal, raised in secret, taking back her kingdom from the despotic empire that destroyed it is maybe a bit too familiar, the part where said heroine has a burgeoning romantic subplot with another woman isn't quite as commonplace, especially in the mid-90s when the game and anime were made. The game's about as standard a turn-based RPG as they come, though it has some interesting ideas like letting you equip multiple weapons at once and switching between them in-battle to exploit enemy weaknesses. I won't claim it's some hidden SFC gem like the recently rediscovered Live a Live, but if you're an advocate for same-sex relationships in games and wanted to witness an earlier (PG-rated) example it might be worth checking out. (3 Stars.)
25/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-fourth Indie Game of the Week. (This and the next two games were all included in the same blog.) Macbat 64 is a short, cute little homage to Rare's N64 platformers, particularly the ones like Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 with its open levels and collectibles to find, often via completing some kind of puzzle. Its handful of stages pare that process down to its skeleton, so don't expect to spend too long exploring each one and finding all its secrets. If you can look past that, and its evident tiny budget, you might find it to be a satisfying nostalgia kick. (3 Stars.)
25/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-fourth Indie Game of the Week. If Macbat 64's riffing on Rare platformers, Toree's more about the arcade-style Japanese action games that were big on overstimulating graphics and sound design and tended to find their way onto PlayStation 1 and Dreamcast. Toree is nine stages of linear obstacle courses with a small amount of replayability as you try to beat your fastest times, but doesn't offer much beyond that. Recommended if you're into games riffing on that PS1 aesthetic that isn't some blocky survival horror thing. (3 Stars.)
25/08. The two-hundred-and-eighty-fourth Indie Game of the Week. It's really just more of the first game, just with a bit more polish and personality. It's also more player friendly, resetting the timer when you reset to checkpoints to help the speedrun perfectionists out there. If you missed the collectathon aspect of Macbat, its post-game bonus stages should sort you out. (3 Stars.)
30/08. Tapping my way through the first big picross video game, where a lot of the early mechanics were established and many others - now staples of the picross genre - had yet to be codified. Feels practically primordial these days, but still has that Nintendo second-party quality to offset the lack of expected QoL touches. The game has some well-hidden secrets too, almost styling itself like Super Mario World as you hunt down all 300 of its puzzles. I'm probably going to move onto other SFC picross games after this to see if there's any improvement. (4 Stars.)
31/08. Like Eien no Filena above, this PC Engine game was part of an anime-game hybrid review blog that I eventually ended up completing. In Bubblegum Crash's case, though, it was purely due to the fact that the game is very short and could be beaten in a single session. Struggling to find the right way to adapt the cyberpunk adventures of the all-female Knight Saber exosuit vigilantes to a video game, it opted for a combination of point-and-click graphic adventure with some action mini-games, all based on the events of the first episode of the Bubblegum Crash OVA. While inventive with a decent presentation, its annoying mini-games do it more harm than good. (3 Stars.)
03/09. The two-hundred-and-eighty-fifth Indie Game of the Week. A decent enough investigative adventure game with anthropomorphic animal characters going out and solving crimes. It creates an entertaining mystery to solve and is oddly wholesome, though the choice to go with a very basic looking pixel aesthetic robs the game of a higher level of detail conducive to the detective genre and adventure genre alike. (4 Stars.)
09/09. The two-hundred-and-eighty-sixth Indie Game of the Week. An inventive puzzle-platformer with a really solid presentation, combining some stylized graphics for its sign-based levels on top of the more realistic looking background environments in which those signs exist. An attempt was made to alleviate the frustration of messing up its multi-layered puzzles by keeping its individual puzzles short, but there's still a lot of trial and error and starting over involved. Kinda rare to see a puzzle-platformer in this day and age with this kind of production value behind it though. (4 Stars.)
16/09. The two-hundred-and-eighty-seventh Indie Game of the Week. An open(ish)-world RPG in which you combat your insectoid foes, and solve most of the environmental puzzles, via typing words quickly. The papercraft aesthetic is striking, the number of different utilizations and different power-ups for the typing-combat aspect, and the enigmatic and largely meta story all make for a loop compelling enough to follow to its conclusion. (4 Stars.)
17/09. An InXile RPG that follows their original Wasteland reboot/sequel, moving the action from sunny and arid post-apocalyptic Arizona to an equally arid but frozen solid post-apocalyptic Colorado. You're given a mission with multiple ways to resolve it: this is the type of RPG where decisions matter a great deal, and playing nice with various factions is required until you decide the direction you want to go. The combat's now much more like XCOM and its ilk too, with pretty versatile skill and character development systems to make a team of Rangers that can individually stand out and work effectively together. It's got some jank here and there, like many ambitious CRPGs made by relatively small teams are likely to see, but I quite enjoyed my time exploring its wintry world. (4 Stars.)
24/09. The two-hundred-and-eighty-eighth Indie Game of the Week. A platformer with a classic 16-bit style that feels like an amalgam of various less-appreciated games from that era, such as Sega's Ristar, Treasure's Gunstar Heroes, and Success's Umihara Kawase. As a stylistic exercise it's a lot of fun, but the accuracy of the grapple hook and some of the more iffy combat aspects like some poor hitbox detection and enemies getting the jump on you immediately as they appear makes the game a little less enjoyable to actually play. (3 Stars.)
28/09. Like Lost Sphear, the previous Tokyo RPG Factory adventure, Oninaki has an attractive if somewhat archaic and overly morose presentation and some really neat ideas concerning character development. Each of your "Daemons" - recruitable spirit characters - have their own weapons, skilltrees, and backstories to explore, with some being more entertaining to use than others. However, the action-RPG combat is rough in spots in part due to how skills have some overly long recovery periods or the way some enemies can just stun-lock you into oblivion. With a bit more polish on the combat aspect this could've been a solid contender for something like the Ys or Tales franchises, both notable for their fluid and fast real-time fighting. (3 Stars.)
30/09. The two-hundred-and-eighty-ninth Indie Game of the Week. A lo-fi explormer that uses its abstract less-than-8-bit world as part of its overall enigmatic vibe, creating many mysteries to uncover as you follow the standard explormer cycle of finding new traversal power-ups and exploring the areas that have now opened up as a result. The presentation is an intriguing choice, but the slow and awkward combat lets the game down (as it has with a few of the prior games, just my luck) especially in moments like boss fights where it's integral to further progress. Still, with so many forgettable explormers coming to Steam, having an unusual atmosphere does help it stand out. (3 Stars.)
08/10. The two-hundred-and-ninetieth Indie Game of the Week. A cute little open-world exploration game about cleaning up trash and taking pictures of wildlife, giving the game a sort of gentle social environmentalism theme that has a narrative impetus but never makes you feel hurried. Very brief, but a relaxing way to spend a few hours on a picturesque island with nothing but a camera and a wildlife identification app. (4 Stars.)
13/10. Been moving through all the SNES/SFC Picross games for RetroAchievements, since it's a good thing to stick on while listening to podcasts. Oekaki Logic doesn't have a whole lot of bells and whistles, but it does let you play the game without timers unlike most others for the platform. (4 Stars.)
16/10. The two-hundred-and-ninety-first Indie Game of the Week. An excellent, deep explormer with a moderate-to-high level of difficulty. There's no punishment for death besides losing ground—in fact, dying is the only way you can buy upgrades, much like in Rogue Legacy—but it happens often enough if you aren't careful because of how few opportunities there are to heal. Presentation's decent enough, but this is one you'll want to take on for the gameplay and challenge. (4 Stars.)
21/10. The two-hundred-and-ninety-second Indie Game of the Week. Micro-sized horror-themed adventure game about a little girl with a ribbon helping various underworld figures (in the supernatural sense, not the crime sense) sort out their baggage and move onto the great beyond. The game gives you some leeway in how you solve these scenarios, with the longer route usually being the more empathetic and satisfying. A bit rudimentary and laden with typos but it's got heart. (3 Stars.)
29/10. The two-hundred-and-ninety-third Indie Game of the Week. A "dark fairytale" narrative in a conventional point-and-click adventure game format, Fran Bow has the titular heroine first escape a mental asylum and then gets progressively more bizarre and lore-intensive before kinda puttering out towards the end. Don't want to spoil much, but there's some Pan's Labyrinth vibes throughout. (4 Stars.)
01/11. I have in mind a FF-related list idea for later this year and this particular spin-off was the final piece of the puzzle. Developed by the same team behind the DS FF3 and FF4 ports (the ones with the polygonal characters), 4 Heroes of Light feels like a reimagining of that third Final Fantasy, adopting the Job system as a means of both diversifying your team dynamic and solving environmental puzzles.
It's really difficult and kinda hostile to the player due to a number of unusual design choices: bosses in the second half the game level with you, making the game harder if you choose to grind; your characters have strict inventory limits of fifteen items (which also includes all their equipment and spells); and you're required to pay close attention to elemental superiority to survive most boss fights, either coming with the right elemental-affiliated gear or leaving in a bodybag. The level of challenge made it rewarding, but downsides like the boring dungeon design and the aforementioned strict limitations made it just as frustrating also. (3 Stars.)
05/11. The two-hundred-and-ninety-fourth Indie Game of the Week. An explormer with a stronger focus on its narrative, presenting a sort of bleak but hopeful tale of a dwindled community seeking to exit their now-overrun lands. High quality visuals and fluid controls correct for an odd choice to have all three protagonists on-screen at all times, which makes it harder than it needs to be to keep everyone alive. (4 Stars.)
26/11. The two-hundred-and-ninety-seventh Indie Game of the Week. An enormous open-world collectathon/explormer type game with some real fun traversal tools and no shortage of silliness and secrets to find. Really solid stuff, and it's been some years since I've seen a game of this type adopt a first-person 3D presentation. (5 Stars.)
01/12. The two-hundred-and-ninety-fifth Indie Game of the Week. A brief but stylish platformer that feels Mega Man-esque (especially the later X/Zero games) with its run-and-gun combat and heavy use of a multi-directional shield for deflecting attacks. Bows out far too soon, and tends to repeat bosses a lot, but what little there is is slick and satisfying. (4 Stars.)
01/12. The two-hundred-and-ninety-eighth Indie Game of the Week. Zen-like puzzle game about putting everything in its proper place during a series of moves. Reading between the lines to understand why these moves were precipitated is an interesting storytelling device, and you get lots of smaller cases of same by noticing which items tend to survive each move. Real cute, though not without a dose of pathos. I'm a sucker for anything isometric too. (5 Stars.)
04/12. First game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. Presenting itself as a wholesome little Zelda-like with an adorable fox protagonist, the game eventually reveals itself to be a hard-as-nails action game in the Souls vein with a very deceptive puzzle streak hiding beneath the surface. Its use of the game manual as as in-game collectible set that absolutely need finding if you want to understand all this world's nuances was a masterstroke of nostalgic game design, but overall it can be a bit too unfairly tough and uneven as an action game. (4 Stars.)
06/12. Second game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. An extremely stylish survival horror game that uses Resident Evil mechanics like item scarcity and map familiarity with a heady dose of psychological weirdness to punctuate its chapters. It's never 100% clear what's happening to this independent replika gynoid as she seeks out her missing (human) partner around a mining colony that has seen better days, but even if the particulars elude you it's worth letting its personality and that wonderful lo-fi PS1 graphics wash over you as you struggle to hide, sneak, and live. (4 Stars.)
08/12. Third game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. The Pikmin angle is largely perfunctory, so what Tinykin really is instead is one of the most confident, best-looking 3D platformers I've ever seen from the Indie sphere, coupled with some fantastic nuanced level design (doing the micro-macro thing with an enormous home trapped in the '90s filled with sapient bugs) and traversal that is purpose-built to minimize the amount of running around you need to do between its many little shortcuts and your own soapbar-surfing fast movement. It's an absolute joy to play and will no doubt hover around my top ten for 2022 for years to come. (5 Stars.)
09/12. The two-hundred-and-ninety-ninth Indie Game of the Week. An explormer that uses the aesthetics and narrative of Record of Lodoss War, specifically the early chapters as it follows the hero Parn and his immortal elf girlfriend Deedlit. The game's on the short side but is packed with challenging boss fights and a polarity-switching elemental system that regularly has you switching around to negate damage and enhance your own. Feels like the map should've been larger and more varied given how elaborate its systems are, but I was grateful for what I got. Great soundtrack too: felt like a shmup at parts. (4 Stars.)
12/12. Fourth game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. A return to form for one of graphic adventuring's biggest franchises, with Gilbert reining in the sort of old-school player-unfriendliness that made The Cave and Thimbleweed Park ordeals to get through. Though we are revisiting a lot of previously explored territory (and jokes) with this knowingly-nostalgic sequel, its level of craft and its puzzle quality are nothing to sneeze at. (4 Stars.)
15/12. Fifth game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. An explormer that goes for atmosphere over all, with a planet setting that genuinely feels like a living and hostile being ready to reach out and throttle the possibly-spectral protagonist for daring to explore too deep. A slightly open structure and a really cool idea for a melee/ranged alternating approach to combat made for a more compelling time than most in the genre, but it has a legion of minor annoyances (an example would be its limited fast travel) and rough difficulty spikes. (4 Stars.)
16/12. The three-hundredth Indie Game of the Week. A thoughtful and surprising first-person puzzle game that uses perspective and dream logic as tools in its arsenal. Very much in the same vein as an Antichamber, though with bit more of Portal's or The Stanley Parable's amiable if sardonic sense of humor. Short, but also the perfect length to avoid too many repeated puzzle instances. (5 Stars.)
22/12. Seventh game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. The next Barlow/Half Mermaid joint in the "how do I know if I'm satisfied?" mini-series of FMV-enhanced detective adventure games. Though the performances and the footage are improved here, the game mechanics take a big step back in what feels like the most unforced of unforced errors. Steps appear to have been taken to make it as hard as possible for you to want to keep digging into the game's mysteries, and its big secrets aren't particularly explained too well nor does the game let you revisit any of these revealing scenes after watching them once. Some real odd choices scupper what might've been one of the year's most intriguing stories. (3 Stars.)
25/12. Eighth game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. A brutally tough explormer that, for some reason, reserves said brutality exclusively for its NES-style platforming with very limited stock of lives rather than the showcase boss fights against its enormous, grisly foes due to how generous the game's healing can be. The morality system is kinda wack too, because you're not so much playing a sympathetic villain making tough choices in its evil route so much as an irredeemable psychopath. Some great ideas, solid controls, and a fantastically gnarly aesthetic aren't quite enough to overcome these flaws, but it's certainly a close thing. (4 Stars.)
30/12. Tenth game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. A delightful if short and threadbare 3D collectathon platformer about a little kiwi that can use its beak to climb walls and a set of collapsible wings to glide. In a bigger and more ambitious platformer these traversal controls could really shine, but as it is the game is scarcely a tech demo much like Siactro's prior works. Good to know he's managed to effectively nail movement in a 3D platformer, as it's notoriously difficult to do for even the bigger developers out there. (4 Stars.)
31/12. Sixth game covered by Go! Go! GOTY! 2022. An oddly-compelling sci-fi job simulator where the goal is to cut up pieces of a decommissioned spaceship and deposit those parts in the appropriate zones for incineration, processing, or repurposing. The game constantly finds new wrinkles to challenge you with, from pressurized ships to dangerous reactors to "haunted" AI nodes that mess with you as you try to remove them. I didn't particularly care for the story about the evils of corporations and the good of unions (though I certainly agree with it) or the repetitive bluegrass music that I soon switched off for various synthwave playlists from YouTube, but the rest is very strong and made for some excellent short sessions all across December. (5 Stars.)
31/12. It's hard to talk about Elden Ring with any kind of detachment because I've been in this thing's thrall for nigh on two months straight and emerging from it now feels like escaping some whack job's torture prison basement after weeks without sunlight. It's not a totally inaccurate analogy either, as the game's high challenge level and frequent unpleasant surprises did make for an occasionally rough time, but the sheer scale and ambition of its open-world coupled with the number of disparate and enigmatic threads and character arcs that you could or might not witness first-hand made the game one where every part of its process was compelling: finding out more about the world, entering some minor dungeon for unique resources, riding Torrent over to a patch of the overworld that might contain anything from a valuable plant to a surprise boss encounter to one of those enormous walking mausoleums. It's shocking how a single-player game could be 200 hours long and still give you the motivation to keep at it. If it has a downside at all it's how the boss quality is overall rather low (kind of inescapable given its size and how often bosses are recycled, or unnecessarily grouped together for an artificially difficult time) and especially for the final few encounters, though I may well have just been suffering burnout by then. It's the one game from 2022 I think everyone owes it to themselves to check out... except I think everyone already has? (5 Stars.)
