Another year has gone & come, and my continued lack of a current-gen console has driven me to explore the deeper nooks in the PC Library. Luckily, there's more great, cheap games than ever to tide anyone over. So which games kept me the most occupied this year?

10. Gems of War

My podcast game of the year. The devs behind Puzzle Quest built a F2P game expanding upon the original ideas of Puzzle Quest. Instead of a single hero with multiple abilities, you send a party of 4 into the fray. A combination of the fighters in front getting colored mana first and losing a character's ability if they fall in battle makes the party-building more interesting and easier to grasp than the typical gacha game, while the basics of getting mana & attacking via matching gems is still a great twist on Match-3 gameplay even after all these years. My biggest complaint about it is the prices and time investment for guild activities are too much unless this is the only game you play, but there's still more than enough meat on the basic gameplay to keep me falling back on this whenever I can't play a more demanding game.

9. Polytopia

The perfect mobile port of Civilization. Distills the key components of Civ into a game you can finish in about 40 minutes and combines it with a cute, clean interface that tell you everything you need to know without cluttering up the small mobile screen.

8. Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs

Eastern European studios seem to enjoy bringing back hibernating genres. Regalia is a bright, cartoony grid-based strategy game about a group of siblings trying to revitalize their inherited kingdom (and pay off a centuries-old debt) through adventuring. Both the grid-based combats and the townbuilding are solid, and the characters you interact with are pleasant, albeit a tad goofy. It's a pity barely anyone else has seemed to notice it, it deserves more coverage than that.

7. The Messenger

A loving homage to Ninja Gaiden that has better controls, writing, and graphics, but still makes you want to throw your controller through a wall just as much. The way it unfolds into something much larger in the second half of the game is just icing on the cake.

6. Disgaea 5 Complete

I loved Disgaea 1 & 2 back when they came out. Between the mobility of the Switch and the quality-of-life improvements in Disgaea 5, I decided to get back into the series. I proceeded to lose about 150 hours to grinding my way through various levels and items, at first to see how the story unfolded, and then to tackle the absurdly hard end-game content.

5. Path of Exile

While Blizzard's putting Diablo 3 out to pasture, Path of Exile has just picked up steam since its launch. Between the Fall of Oriath update ripping out the traditional "repeat the campaign at 3 difficulty levels" arc in favor of a new plotling that has you revisiting the aftermath of your adventures, and the recent Betrayal update replacing the previous hideout/crafting/daily quest systems with new activities they've been testing in the quarterly leagues over the past year, Path of Exile has become the best Diablo game out there. It also gets loot in a way Diablo never did; it's not just about rolling well on the RNG (or finding someone that did), it's about taking a good item and carefully tweaking and modifying it to be great.

4. Dead Cells

The best-controlling action platformer I've ever played. The controls are smooth as butter, letting you move exactly how you want and then some. Yet it's also challenging enough you need to master the combat to survive, while its timed bonuses encourage you to get good at rushing through the zones you already know by heart rather than explore every nook & cranny out of obligation. It controls well, it's smartly designed, and its graphics and music are distinct and high-quality. The perfect game to try "just one more run" of well into the night.

3. Two Point Hospital

With as much as Danny O'Dwyer gushes about Theme Hospital, I wanted to try it myself. However, it hasn't aged well. Two Point Hospital captures the same style and absurdity Theme Hospital did, while combining one of the best interfaces I've seen in simulation games with increasingly challenging gameplay that demands the utmost efficiency to prevent patients from dying while waiting in line. It's one of the best simulations I've ever played, and certainly the one I've invested the most time into trying to save as many Two Point citizens as possible.

2. Into the Breach

I suspect, years from now, Into the Breach will be seen as a revelation in the strategy genre. Many people have talked about how it eschews nearly all randomness in favor of showing you exactly what'll happen next, so your success relies entirely on your strategy rather than the dice rolls, but its emphasis on defense and crowd control rather than killing everything also subtly encourages nail-biting close calls against an endless horde of giant bugs. The small maps encourage tension and claustrophobia while still giving you enough room to maneuver, and the way the UI shows you everything you need to know is a minor miracle in itself. The end result is a game about desperate plans, staring at the screen for a half-hour trying to figure out how to save everyone, and occasionally deciding you can't and making a tough choice about who to sacrifice.

1. Space Station 13

Back when Red Faction Guerilla Remarstered was released, I was looking up YouTube videos of its Space Asshole song when I stumbled upon one listed as "Space Station 13 music". One Google later, I was knee-deep in learning about arguably the most cult classic game of all: a freeware sci-fi massively multiplayer role-playing game about a workshift on a space station gone horribly wrong, hosted on an archaic game-design/hosting service and held together by spit, duct tape, and several rabid programmers. It's archaic, obtuse, prone to crashing, its combat system is a joke... and it's also the most fun I've had playing games all year.

The keys to its success is that (nearly) every character is run by a player, from the crew of the station to the antagonists sabotaging it to the aliens Xenobiology creates, and that there's no character advancement. At all. The game takes place in 2-hour self-contained "shifts" in which everything goes to hell only to be reset to a new shift at the end. There's a score tallied up at the end, but the points don't matter. Whether you survive, die, or go insane, you start fresh the next round. With no reason to grind and no worries about permanently ruining your character, you focus on interacting with other players and screwing around with the myriad systems instead.

The end result feels like a 2-hour improv skit. It's a game where a serious discussion between the Detective and the Coroner over how an Engineer was killed can be interrupted by the wall next to Chemistry exploding. Where you can step out from a rather mundane shift in Hydroponics only to see blood smears all over the hallway and people running past screaming. Where Security can be too busy filling out paperwork about the Captain sacrificing the Clown to a group of demonic rubber duckies to stop an alien infestation that proceeds to take over half the station. Where a convoluted series of events can lead from a swordfight in the Morgue to the Head of Security getting sucked out of a breach trying to execute an escaped convict in a chicken suit.

It's an MMO focused on actually talking and role-playing with other players. It's a game that encourages you be entertaining and watch the story unfold in all its catastrophic, anarchic glory. And even though it's 15 years old, it still feels like a breath of fresh air today.

(NOTE: I play Space Station 13 on the Paradise Station server, which has just enough moderation to keep the nastier shit out while still letting people get quite absurd. Other servers' rules and moderation differ; delve at your own risk.)

2017 has been a mixture of balancing my (slim) paycheck and indulging in one guilty pleasure: a Nintendo Switch. I honestly wasn't planning to get one this year, but Nintendo's lineup was so strong I caved in. I don't regret it, although my attention's been stretched thing between all the good games released this year; even without an Xbox or a Playstation, the Indie scene on PC is going strong.

10. Cosmic Star Heroine

All the CRPG press has been on Divinity: Original Sin 2 (and to a lesser extent Torment: Tides of Numenera), but Zeboyd Games also released their magnus opum Cosmic Star Heroine earlier this year. Inspired by Phantasy Star and Chrono Trigger, it builds upon the traditional JRPG combat system by making most abilities go on cooldown until your character Defends, forcing you to think about when you should use them. If you're looking for an RPG that isn't as dense as Original Sin, give this a go.

9. Million Onion Hotel

My mobile game for most of the year had been Fire Emblem Heroes, until I tired of its grinding and dropped it. I bought Million Onion Hotel as its replacement, and it quickly went from a pleasant diversion to a vexing challenge. I went from matching single lines to focusing on doubles to actually finish the game, and I've had to rethink how I play the game twice more just to make any progress on the High Score goals. From button mashing to strategy to restraint & focus, the game forces you to peel away the layers of its mechanics like an, uh, onion.

8. Fight'N Rage

8. I'm a sucker for sidescrolling brawlers and fluid pixel art, and Fight'N Rage scratches both itches well. It seems standard at first, but the multiple branching paths, character-specific plot scenes, and nuances of the (difficult) combat keep me coming back to it... or at least considering another round.

7. Sonic Mania

My last experience with Sonic was muddling my way through the levels of Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, on the rare occasions I played a Genesis. The first half of each world in Sonic Mania reminded me of those times; the second half realized what a Sonic game should be, as my previous halts melted into a smooth blur of speed. Stage design makes or breaks Sonic, and these devs know how to make good stage design. Now if only they could transfer that expertise to 3D stages...

6. Endless Space 2

Aside from (most) Sonic games, Sega's studios seem to be firing on all cylinders, between Yakuza, Total War, and Endless Space 2. From the devs of Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 puts its own twist on the old Space 4X genre, and for the most part succeeds. Its races feel properly different and alien, the story & cooperative quests give you a bit more to do than just pursue long-term Victory Conditions, and the combat is aggressively streamlined (although some may not like the hands-off approach to it). While it's not as ambitious as Stellaris, it's more fun to play.

5. Heat Signature

I was busy infiltrating a ship for an assassination mission when a hostile ship attacked it. A missile hit near me and I was sucked out of the breach, so I used the recoil from the shotgun to propel myself into the hostile ship's airlock. I killed everyone onboard, took the helm, and rammed it into the other ship until my target and both ships were rent asunder. Heat Signature is a fun way to mess with high-velocity objects, vacuum, and plans gone horribly awry.

4. Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

Before this year, I thought my days as a Final Fantasy fanboy were long gone. It turns out I was looking in the wrong spot. Final Fantasy 14, and by extension its Stormblood expansion, are an oasis of traditional storytelling amidst the teen-obsessed wasteland the rest of the franchise has become. It eschews coming-of-age stories and romantic interests for a tale of loss, struggle, and revolution. It knows to put its spectacle in the boss fights, not in cutscenes. It also introduced my favorite MMO zone ever, the Azim Steppe: a Mongolia-like land filled with a dozen tribes ranging from mute merchants to berserkers who believe in reincarnation. It's easily up there with World of Warcraft for me.

3. Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

This was the last place I expected to find a good alternative to Xcom, but Mario+Rabbids is a shining example of how to put your own twist on an idea. Less accuracy finagling, more movement options, and status effects (like launching an enemy into the sky) that simply wouldn't fit in the grim future of Xcom, this shows Ubisoft still has some creative chops left in it. Their absurd take on Mario is just icing on the cake.

2. Super Mario Odyssey

Super Mario Odyssey is just a joyous and fun game. The controls are great (except for the Side Somersault), hunting down the various Moons is (usually) fun, and it feels less self-serious and more self-aware than other Mario games. I often booted up this game to play for a half-hour before going to sleep... and ended up staggering into bed 3 hours because I lost track of time.

1. Breath of the Wild

The most fun I've ever had exploring an open world, bar none. Memorable landscapes, weird nooks & crannies, and unobstrusive story quests make it easy to lose yourself just wandering. The world feels so big, and direction is so sparse, you naturally carve out your own path, investigating interesting locales and getting distracted by whatever you stumble upon along the way. It also has my favorite "final dungeon" of any video game: the entire grounds of Hyrule Castle, along with the freedom to assault it via the main road, its side cliffs/towers, or even underground tunnels.

To improve crafting systems, we need to understand how they work. The first step to that is being able to describe and categorize them. After several weeks of mulling over crafting systems in everything from MMOs to survival games, I've settled upon some simple definitions that should describe nearly every crafting system out there:

Availability of Materials:

• Unlimited: The player will always be able to gather more materials; the only restriction to how many materials he can gather is how much time he devotes to it. These crafting systems are akin to Quest Logs: a series of goals to accomplish. Most MMOs and open-world games' crafting systems fall under this.
• Limited: The game imposes restrictions on how many materials a player can gather, either by limiting the amount of resources or how much time a player can devote to gathering them. The player (usually) has to give up making B to make A. These crafting systems are akin to Moral Choices: decisions to make between different options. Most roguelike and strategy games' crafting systems fall under this.

Range of Product's Quality:

• Uniform: All of the products of a crafting recipe are the same; there is no variance among them. WoW is an example of this: each Handstitched Leather Cloak is the same as every other Handstitched Leather Cloak.
• Tiered: The products of a crafting recipe can be split up into a distinct number of variances, often with obvious "best" and "worst" results. Items in the same variance are exactly the same, but differ from items in other variances. Final Fantasy 14 is an example of this: the result of any crafting can either be Normal or High-Quality, with High-Quality having better stats.
• Variable: The products of a crafting recipe cover a large range of stats, usually determined by a math formula. Few products have the exact same stats. The Elder Scrolls series are an example of this: a product's stats rely on the creator's stats, traits, and buffs, with no limit to how powerful crafted items can get.

Quality Determinants:

(Crafting systems with Uniform Quality Ranges don't have these.)

• Material-Based: A product's quality is affected by its materials' quality. In these systems, the quality and traits of the materials are important. Final Fantasy 14 is an example of this: High-Quality materials increase the odds of the product being High-Quality.
• Stat-Based: The crafter's stats (and his equipment bonuses) affect a product's quality. Crafters with high stats create better products than crafters with low stats. The Elder Scroll series are an example of this: high Alchemy/Smithing/etc skills mean more powerful potions/weapons/etc.
• Skill-Based: The player's performance on a minigame affects a product's quality. Atelier Sophie is an example of this: doing well on the crafting minigame increases the stats of the product and gives it extra effects.

Example Categorizations:

• WoW: Unlimited Uniform
• Final Fantasy 14: Unlimited Tiered Material/Stat/Skill-Based
• Elder Scroll Series: Unlimited Variable Stat-Based
• Atelier Sophie: Unlimited Variable Material/Skill-Based
• Thea: The Awakening: Limited Tiered Material-Based (could also be Limited Uniform, assuming you treat each material combination as a separate recipe)

Appendeum:

• You could argue buying/selling items is closely related to crafting systems, with coin being the only material for a wide variety of "products".
• I initially thought of adding a categorization for whether recipes required specific items (1 Iron Bar, 1 Cedar Branch) or any item in a similar group (1 type of Metal, 1 type of Wood), until I decided recipes that accepted similar items would have Material-Based quality determination instead.
• The difference between Uniform systems and Tiered Material-Based systems gets a bit tricky when arguing whether each combination of materials should be treated as a separate recipe. My current thoughts on this is that asking for a type of item, rather than a specific item, encourages different behavior from the player (more experimentation, less filling-checklist) and thus should be categorized differently.
• I debated whether the chance of wasting materials on a failure was important for categorizing a crafting system. I ultimately decided against it, since you could (potentially) treat it as a Tiered system (with the "worst" tier being the one where you don't get any product at all).

Thoughts?

The Flame in the Flood is a survival roguelike set on some giant, unnamed Midwestern river. The river is unnamed because it appears to have taken out most of civilization with it. Houses and factories peek above its waves, rusted cars float on its currents like so much debris. It's a world where staying outside at night after a soaking rain is more dangerous than the wolves circling the only shelter around.

It's also rather easy, which is not what I expected for a roguelike focused on a young girl surviving an uncaring wilderness. It may be one of the easiest roguelikes I've played; I beat Campaign mode on my first try on Easy mode, and I'm well on my way to beating it again on Normal mode. I nearly have a full set of wolf clothing for the cold, enough jerky and water to survive several days, my raft is almost fully-upgraded, and I have enough traps and arrows to kill anything short of a full pack of wolves.

So why is it so easy compared to most roguelikes?

• No Long-Term Debilitations: If one of your meters (Food, Water, Warmth) runs out, you die. If it's at least 1, you're fine. Not even broken bones have any long-term effect once you put a Splint on them. Between that and how common the ingredients for bandages & splints are, very few injuries become an occurring problem.
• Water is Moot: There's enough rain throughout the game, and plenty of jars to store it in. Since it only takes a few seconds to fill a jar with rainwater, you can gathers 3 days worth of fresh water from just a short shower. In both games, my water filters were barely used. The ease of gathering water means only 2 meters (Food & Warmth) are tough to keep filled.
• Spacious Inventory: The inventory system is based on stacks of items rather than item weight. Five jars full of water, or 3 unassembled spear traps, take up the same inventory space as 10 cattails. In addition, your raft can carry even more slots than just your backpack. Combined with the ability to upgrade your backpack & raft to carry twice as many slots, there's no reason not to carry everything you might need, plus a few spares. This is one game where an encumbrance system would be fitting.
• Easy Enemies: You rarely, if ever, need to kill one of the predators roaming the wilderness. Not only that, but it's easy to retreat from them with getting injured, and any injuries you do get can usually be easily healed with no long-term effect. Granted, you do need to kill a few to sew clothing warm enough for the later regions, but you just need one boarskin to start sewing wolfskin clothing, and you can easily kill wolves by tossing poisoned meat to them or luring them into a snake or bear.
• No Time Limit(?): I thought there was an advancing wall of doom to force you quickly down the river, but if there is I haven't seen it yet. You can visit every landing spot you pass by, spend multiple days at ones with plenty of resources to gather, and never feel rushed into moving on. This gives you enough time to gather all the resources you need, instead of just grabbing the most important ones and praying you chose right.

In short, Flame in the Flood feels easy because there's few tough choices or planning to do in it, which is disappointing for a game about survival.

So, after sinking another 100 hours into a game I vehemently rejected after they killed my favorite mode, I suppose I've returned to playing Orcs Must Die! Unchained daily. It still stings they killed my favorite MOBA-like of last year, and their new competitive mode is garbage I only tolerate for daily quests, but with the addition of Chaos Trials in the last patch, I feel like I can now suggest trying it if it sounds interesting.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained, or OMDU, is an online free-to-play sequel to Orcs Must Die, a third-person tower defense game released when those were still all the rage. The original stood out by using traps instead of towers (including physics traps that flung hapless orcs across the map) and bringing Tom & Jerry-ish absurdity to the mass slaughter of cartoonishly stupid orcs. OMDU expands upon the 2-player coop mode in Orcs Must Die 2 by making 3-player co-op the norm, with several characters to choose from and a few dozen traps to upgrade and customize. Playing levels grinds out skulls, traps, and XP necessary to tackle the nastier levels, but once you began 5-starring the most difficult levels, that was it. All that was left was seeing how far you could get in Endless mode (which only has 6 levels) or playing competitive Sabotage, which is the worst competitive mode I've ever played in a game.

Imagine a competitive mode where you never saw the other team, like Vs Tetris with the other side blacked out. Imagine instead of nail-biting turnarounds, 90% of matches are decided in the first 3 minutes yet still take 15 minutes to resolve. On top of that, all of the special abilities come from randomly-drawn cards you won from other matches instead of from how well you are doing. Oh, and using a card consumes it, so if you fell behind in the first 3 minutes, there's negative incentive to use them. It is the worst parts of pay-to-win multiplayer without the joy of actively fighting your opponents. Remembering they replaced Siege mode with this makes me die a little inside each time, and knowing they originally intended for this to give the game replayability makes my skin crawl.

Fortunately, the devs followed up that horrible idea with Chaos Trials, which extends the replayability of the cooperative mode by adding random modifiers to the regular stages, such as doubling the cost of ceiling traps, adding highly-dangerous TNT archers to each wave, or making the minions immune to a certain type of damage. Beat the stage with those modifiers and the game gives you a new stage with more modifiers tacked on; the initial TNT Archers with No Mana Drops become more difficult when your Barricades cost 3x as much to place and you dance every time a boss is killed. The game continues adding modifiers until you fail 3 stages, at which point you have to restart from the beginning with a new Chaos Trial.

The third set of Chaos Trials I tried had triple-cost Barricades on a stage which normally required a lot of Barricades to create a maze for the minions. Facing the prospect of going broke just constructing the maze, we quickly improvised a new route which used less Barricades and tried it out. It worked. The next modifiers were double-cost Wall traps and Barricade-destroying TNT Archers. Our party leader swore. That's when I realized I would really like Chaos Trials.

With their inclusion, I feel the game finally has some legs again (after they were chopped off with the removal of Siege). I no longer plan to drop the game once I finally 5-star the last levels, and now I can actually recommend other people try it out instead of just treating it like my guilty pleasure. As much as I gripe about its various issues, the core gameplay is fun in a way most F2P games aren't, but the Chaos Trials are the first time I still felt like playing after I put an hour or two into finishing up the daily quests.

As of tonight, I am about 3/4ths through Ever Oasis, the new 3DS game by Secret of Mana creator Koichi Ishii. Imagine Animal Crossing if you had to explore Zelda dungeons to recruit/entice residents. And some part of me is wondering why I'm still playing it. It's as light as the Animal Crossing games without the customization, the combat feels like simplified Secret of Mana fights in a Zelda dungeon, and you can achieve the goal of the game (keeping all your residents happy) relatively easy. So why have I put 20 hours into it?

Because growing your Oasis is just involved enough to be entertaining. Every potential resident requires you to complete a favor for them before they join, whether it's gathering a certain material or building a certain kind of shop. Once they join your Oasis, you can set up their shop along your roads, as well as various decor to increase how much visitors spend there. To keep the shops stocked, you have to keep gathering materials, which is easy at first but gets progressively harder as you have more materials to check off your list. (Fortunately, halfway through the game you get the option to send townsfolk on gathering expeditions so you don't have to keep farming earlier areas.) Once a shop sells enough goods, you can complete another favor to upgrade it, which increases the number of items it sells (and how many materials it requires) and gives the shopowner an extra ability when he's adventuring with you. While a short miniplot follows each shop's upgrades, it's so light & fluffy as to be forgettable. And many of the abilities are too focused (like +30% gathering on a single specific material) to see much use. No, your goal is make an avenue of giant shops.

Your avenues of shops is your customization for this game, and it's more enticing than I expected. There's simply something neat about setting up a line of restaurants and watching it grow & develop, or swapping it out with a line of clothing shops for a Fashion Festival. It's no Planet Coaster, but just because it's aesthetic doesn't mean it's boring. And that's... pretty much the high point of the game.

There's a crafting system and weapons with different abilities, but it's hard to gather up all the necessary materials for crafting and the weapons' abilities are never explained, with many of them having no apparent effect. Not that I think it really matters; the combat in the game is pretty rote, mainly consisting of bringing along the right weapons & mashing buttons with the occasional dodge. Healing items are so plentiful I really haven't felt threatened by anything yet.

The puzzles are slightly better, with several approaching the (old) Zelda style of figuring out what tools to use where. Your "tools", in this case, are special abilities of various townsfolk you can bring along with you on your adventure. The bad news is, if you don't have the right townsfolk for a puzzle, switching them involves warping back to town, putting them in the party, and warping back to the dungeon. You can always warp right back to where you left off, fortunately. (Or perhaps it's unfortunate, as it lets you refill your health almost any time you want.) The entire mechanic feels... awkward in a modern game.

The quest system feels similarly awkward. You can only have one sidequest Active at a time, which means there's no chance of finishing 2-3 quests in a single run. Getting a quest into your Quest Log requires activating it, but activating most quests also removes any warps you currently have up, which could lose you a bit of progress. This quest juggling is the most irritating part of the game and makes it feel like it was developed in the 90s.

The plot itself is nothing special either: Chaos threatens the land, blah blah blah, etc. It has the open-world problem of occasionally interrupting your oasis building & exploration to pull out Chaos weeds (which is a bunch of busywork that probably could've been removed from the game entirely) and highly encourage you to focus on finishing the next dungeon rather than leaving you to your exploring and town-building. I'm frustrated by it and would probably ignore it completely if several residents & upgrades weren't gated off by your progress in the story. It definitely could've taken a cue from Breath of the Wild and just shoved the plot off to the side as much as possible.

All in all, it's entertaining but nothing special. It would be a good game for pre-teen children, and has enough meat to keep adults occupied, but none of the systems quite mesh together in a way to make it a challenge or stimulating. And while the desert world has some charm to it, it's not striking the same chords the "of Mana" games did for me when I was younger. Still, I hope he makes a sequel to it... and makes that sequel much meatier.

I'm glad the new Zelda isn't on Xbox or Playstation. If it was, it would have an achievement for finding everything. Instead, there's no way (and barely any reason) to tell whether you've found everything. To determine if you've scoured a region of everything it has to offer. And it's a stronger game for that.

The 100% goal is the pursuit of a "complete" playthrough of a game, which is treated as synonymous with perfect. The allure of perfection drives us to play a game far longer than our own interest in it, running our enjoyment of it into the ground. I think Zelda's avoidance of telling you just how much is in a region (and complete lack of missions about 100%ing anything) is deliberate. Without an artificial goal compelling you to complete everything, you just do stuff until you're satisfied and then you move on. Zelda doesn't overstay its welcome.

Note: I Kickstarted this game at a high enough tier to get a free copy.

Gonna keep this short because I got other things to do.

It feels like Torment. I can't exactly articulate how yet, but it feels like Torment more than any other RPG I've played in the past decade. The casual weirdness around every corner. The weird echoes of past lives. The 90:10 dialogue:combat ratio. (In the 5 hours I've played so far, I've only fought for 20-30 minutes.) The reams of text with a half-dozen ways to respond. This is a game where not only can you talk your way out of a "mandatory" fight, but you can do a favor for the instigator later to make up for costing him a bounty.

(Spoilers for first 30 minutes)

The majority of the weirdness is, surprisingly, not tied into any quests at all. There's an item merchant whose merchandise is slowly turning her into an insect. A man whose body is becoming a musical instrument who constantly whispers about the Choir. A mutant running an inn who persuades people to spend the night with calming pheromones. An otherdimensional being studying every method of procreation. All people you can interact with (or ignore) without getting any requests to solve something for them.

Meanwhile, even the straightforward quests seem to branch off in unusual ways. A simple quest to clear out a ruin for study involved negotiating a truce with some scavengers, a decision whether to let someone else take the glory in exchange for some intel, and an optional chance to sell the info about it to extraterrestrial robots.

As a last note, the "alignment" system here is... unusual. Rather than the typical good-evil axis, it's divided up into 5 different motivations. Two of them, justice & compassion, substitute for the usual Good alignment. Meanwhile, the Evil alignment has been replaced by 3 amoral motivations: passion, knowledge, and glory. (At least, I think they are; the game does a poor job of describing some concepts in the world.) It's an interesting take on the usual alignment system, although I haven't seen yet how it affects the gameplay.

Will report back later once I've dug deeper into the game.

So I spent most of my waking hours for the past week playing Atelier Sophie and just finished writing a review on it. There's several thoughts on the game I couldn't squeeze into the review that I figured I could put down as a regular blog post, an appendeum to the review itself.

I gauge the amount of thought games require by how many pages of notes I take on the game. Atelier Sophie clocks in at about a half-dozen pages, including several lists of what Accessories/Items to put on each character, along with which Traits to craft into their equipment. I recall several times I had to quit the game for a bit because my brain overloaded trying to figure out the chain of crafting necessary to get, say, the +25 All Stats trait onto a piece of paper for burning while making a metal bar, rendering me temporarily incapable of coherent thought. It's been very enjoyable, and I dread the day I finally crack the mechanics and easily get the ultimate Traits onto my equipment, essentially finishing up the game.

At least the combat mechanics are also some of the most robust I've seen in an RPG. The Offensive/Defensive stances a whole new layer to the tactics, and being able to block attacks against teammates turns the Guard command from the "poor choice" it is in most RPGs into a vital component of your tactics. Seriously, I can't stress how much of a game changer it is to purposely set someone up to soak up attacks, and the threat of the Break gauge filling up (and stunning a character) encourages rotating your defenders, too. Oh, and did I mention that attack items, rather than being a poor alternative to spells, are the strongest attacks in the game? It emphasizes your crafted items so well. I love it, I just love all of it, it's one of my favorite RPG combat systems ever.

Of course, I didn't really appreciate the combat system until the second half of the game. The first half, once you get a 4th party member, is actually pretty easy; it felt like your leveling and crafting quickly outpaced the enemies' levels, and most fights were a walk in the park. It was only once I reached Max Level about 2/3rds through the game and started hitting the endgame zones that I realized these enemies were legitimate threats. You could easily die to a random encounter if you were reckless. And once I started taking bounties on the optional bosses, I was really impressed by the curveballs the game tossed at me. For instance, one boss could only be damaged by filling its Break gauge to stun it, while another boss healed itself up whenever its Break gauge filled, forcing me to use only single-hit, strong attacks to minimize how much its Break gauge rose. Both forced me to analyze the boss's patterns and adjust my strategy on the fly mid-battle, which I really appreciate.

Unfortunately, while the setting/social part of it takes some cues from Persona 3/4 and Stardew Valley, it doesn't do nearly enough with either. It has months divided into weeks divided into days, but the passage of months doesn't seem to matter at all, what week it is doesn't matter, and the only difference between days is whether it's a weekend or a weekday. Furthermore, everyone's dialogue only changes 2-3 times over the course of the whole game, making the whole town feel lifeless. I found myself just warping straight to the shops rather than exploring the town, and even the other playable characters felt kind of flat, let alone the barely-characterized townsfolk. There's no NPCs that really jump out at you, like the Funky Student or Mysterious Fox from Persona 4. It all feels like a wasted opportunity.

Then again, quite a bit of the game feels barebones. Many of the combat zones are barely 2-3 screens across, the variety of enemies feels lackluster (I've beaten the game and only encountered one dragon-type enemy), and if it wasn't for the crafting system I could've probably beaten the game in about 10-15 hours. They even recycle some of their models in ways that are utterly baffling and don't make sense. For example, the weekday waitress at the local cafe is just a reskin of the Female Shopper, which makes it really weird to see an on-duty waitress with a purse slung on her arm. The most egregious example is a cutscene of a man cradling & stroking a log while the protagonist takes notes- it makes slightly more sense in context, but I couldn't help but make innuendo jokes about the whole scene.

Speaking of which, the random borderline ecchi in the game was probably the worst aspect of the game and actively detracted from it. I don't mind some of it- after all, I enjoyed Dragon's Crown a lot- but this stuff went everywhere from outright confusing to borderline disturbing. For instance, I was kind of expecting the childhood friend to have boob physics, but I was shocked to realize she was the only one with them. There's major NPCs (and another PC) in the game with chests twice as large as hers and they're rock solid compared to hers, and my utter confusion at why they decided to apply physics only to hers still baffles me. In fact, the only other character with any type of jiggle physics is Oskar, the boy with the large gut. Then there's the fact a major goal in the game is creating a humanlike doll to house Plachta's soul, and the clothes designed for her (by one of your party members) look like, as someone else put it, "Victoria's Secret designed outerware". And then the protagonist gets a similar outfit that, while not as scanty, looks like a magical girl outfit complete with exposed midriff, shorts, and a fancy hat. I rolled my eyes at its reveal, and while I eventually grew accustomed to it, I still kept switching back to her old outfit with the giant coat & high boots. You know, stuff that you'd expect an alchemist to dig up plants and fight monsters in. Did I mention both of them look like they're in their mid-teens, and one is explicitly mentioned being too young to drink?

Even the cutscene camera seems intent on angling itself to get upskirt shots of Plachta, assuming she's even wearing a skirt. I gave her a skirt because when the game enabled me to change her appearance & stats, the very first thing I did was try to find her less-revealing clothing. After accidentally giving her a bikini swimsuit ("No, no, no, no, no..."), a combat skirt was the closest thing I could find. I left it at that, but someday, by god, I will find her some pants. Or at least a skirt that doesn't reveal her ass to every camera angle at knee height.

Anyway, ignoring the ecchi elements as much as possible (seriously, they feel so out-of-place in this game), the mechanics in this game are top-notch. Utterly addictive. The bane of obsessive-compulsive perfectionists. I've beaten the game and am working on tackling the optional bosses, and I still need to upgrade over half my items & equipment. I spent nearly two hours yesterday tweaking an attack item to have max power. While the game's systems aren't perfect, they hit pretty close to the mark, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the sequel being released stateside next month.

P.S. Did I mention the music is pretty good? It's pretty good. The graphics that aren't actual characters suck, but the music makes up for it. Except for the music in your Crafting Room. Seriously, can't you rotate the song list in a room you know the player is going to be spending over an hour in at a pop?

I was going to start this with some spiel about how the year went, but then I realized it made me sound like a pretentious twat so I tossed it. Instead, immediately into the breach we go!

• 10. Frog Fractions 2: My opinion of Frog Fractions 2 lies in that fuzzy area of enjoying my time with it while believing it wasn't worth the amount I paid for it. Perhaps that's due to how many other great games came out this year, or my frustrations with the puzzles in the early- & lategame, but there was about 4-5 moments in Frog Fractions where I stopped a minute to laugh they had actually gone that far with a joke. Not in terms of offensiveness, mind you, but sheer amount of work for a one-off joke. A glitch. A secret. A merger of two wholly different genres. The moment Frog Fractions 2 won me over was when I ended up in a Carmen Sandiego homage set in Dante's Inferno, complete with Rockapella-esque choir music. The almanac you use to figure out where to go next? The entire translated text of Dante's Inferno. I scrolled through the entire thing, thinking, "Did they really put in the whole thing?" They did. It ended with an I Agree checkbox (a joke that wouldn't have worked if it was shorter) and a Continue button. I agreed and continued... into a translation of Dante's Inferno New Game Plus. Which is apparently the same as the original, except Dante's guide is now Macho Man Randy Savage. With exactly the type of dialogue you'd expect. It even references the Dante's Inferno action game EA released years ago. When I mentioned it on Twitter, this is the response I got:

Everything about Frog Fractions 2 is a joke. Including its very creation. And that's why I love it.

• 9. Orcs Must Die Unchained!: This is frankly even iffier than Frog Fractions 2. I joined the open beta in March and fell in love with its multiplayer, which was a third-player MOBA where you used traps to prevent enemy minions from reaching your nexus. This foundational change affected everything from discrete roles for defense/offense, to the increasingly frantic ebb and flow of battle as waves survived longer and longer, and even allowed for player creativity in trap selection and killbox layout. I put over 300 hours into the game, despite its many bugs and flaws, and considered it a breath of fresh air after playing League of Legends for years.
  Then they gutted it from the game completely, citing a lack of players, and instead focused all their attention on the traditional (boring) co-op mode. I quit the game and uninstalled it soon after.
  The game I sunk hundreds of hours into, that I believed was a fun branch off of the standard MOBA formula, is no longer playable. It's only memories and Let's Play videos now. One of my favorite games of the year is also a cautionary tale on the fickle nature of multiplayer modes and early access games.
• 8. Salt and Sanctuary: In a year where I couldn't run the actual Dark Souls sequel, this served as a valid substitute. Sure, it blatantly rips off Dark Souls' style, but the simple move to 2D, along with a host of minor tweaks (replacing stat upgrades with a skill tree, Metroidvania-style movement upgrades and exploration, and choosing which vendors to install at each save point) keeps it feeling fresh.
• 7. Dragon's Crown: My guilty pleasure of the year. Decades ago, I was awestruck when I found Capcom's D&D: Tower of Doom in the arcades; I deemed it my favorite side-scrolling brawler ever. This topped it easily, mainly by adding randomized encounters and loot drops akin to the Diablo series. The biggest standout, however, is the boss battles. From screen-filling dragons to a single small and extremely vicious rabbit to fighting hordes of pirates over a genie's lamp, there's enough variety in Dragon's Crown stages and bosses to power me through playing through it twice over. And amazingly, for a 2-year old PS3 game, it still has enough people playing online you can occasionally partner up, even if they're usually on the other side of the Pacific. The usual Vanillaware art style doesn't hurt, either.
• 6. MechWarrior Online: In Paul Barnett's Top 6 of 2016, he mentioned the difference between young people's shooters (Call of Duty) and old people's shooters (World of Tanks). MWO is an old people's shooter, except it has giant walking mechs instead of tanks. This is a game where positioning, tactics, and recon win fights, and the mechs move/turn slowly enough that hair-trigger reflexes and pinpoint accuracy aren't necessary. Oh, and you're giant mechs that crush tanks underfoot and use buildings as cover.
• 5. Darkest Dungeon: I love Lovecraftian horror. I love art that looks like Hellboy. I love interesting and unusual RPG mechanics. This game scratches all of those itches.
• 4. Stardew Valley: I played the original Harvest Moon for the SNES; I never got as deep into it as I did Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley combines a well-crafted daily/monthly cycle with a map that's just barely large enough that you can't visit every location each day. Toss in multiple giant farms you can customize to your heart's content and a cast of characters that are flawed, quirky individuals and you have one of the most appealing gameworlds created all year.
• 3. Overwatch: I put hundreds of hours into Team Fortress 2, and Overwatch is a worthy successor to it, with various abilities making timing and combos more vital than ever. It doesn't hurt the characters have a ton of charm to them, even if the background plot is cobbled together and taken almost too seriously for its own good (compared to Team Fortress 2's plot, whose tongue is so firmly-in-cheek the futility of constantly fighting battles over the same territory is a plot point). It's become my go-to game for whenever I just want to play against other people for a half-hour or so.
• 2. Hitman: I always admired the Hitman series from a distance, but could never really get into it. I got into the latest Hitman hard, cackling with glee at all the stupid things I could do that alternated between satisfyingly easy and brow-furrowing hard. While it can often be a thriller, it is usually a comedy show where 47 plays the straight man to everyone's antics (including his own). It is a game where a can of expired spaghetti sauce being more dangerous than an AK-47 fits perfectly. It is a game where, having spent 30 minutes setting up the target to have an interview while sitting beneath a precariously hanging stuffed moose, it will let you drop the moose when you decide to, confident that any player with a hint of panache will listen to nearly the whole interview waiting for the perfect statement to drop the moose for maximum irony. And of course those perfect statements are in there, because the writing's sharp and self-aware. Hitman is a game of performance art, even if the audience is just you.
• 1. RimWorld: I know it's in Early Access, but I've sunk over 400 hours into various failed and/or abandoned colonies, picking wildly randomized starting conditions, just to see what results. I've had a colony run by a supervillain who harvested prisoners' organs to sell for income on the black market. I've had a colony who was forced to kill an uber-powerful thrumbos just to have enough food to survive the winter. I've had a colony that barely survived a tribal assault because the survivors did guerrilla warfare while the tribals were looting the interior buildings. I've had a colony where the sole survivor got taken down by an enraged pet because its owner died. I've had drug farms. I've had polar bases. I've had desert mountain bases where giant bugs tunneled into my freezer so I cranked up the air conditioners to freeze them to death. I've had (most recently) a tundra base whose goal for the past two years was making enough food to last a month-long trek to the temperate coastal region, complete with a half-year delay due to toxic fallout. I've even had a single colony that survived long enough to build an escape spaceship. It is the perfect game to play while watching a stream or listening to a podcast, and the numerous randomized locations/colonists, strategic choices, and storytelling beats ensure that each game could be memorable.