Alan Wake II without much reservation. My only knock on the game would be that it isn't any fun to play on Normal difficulty, but then I found Story mode to be challenging enough on its own (I still died to a boss or two, and was still running out of flashlight charges sometimes) so that's more of an ego thing. More accurately I'd say I just don't think the combat, particularly the bosses, is designed very well other than capturing the "feel" if Resident Evil 2. It just whiffed hard on the balance.

Otherwise, I spent most of my time, according to the Playstation Wrap, in CD Projekt Red land, something I'd have never expected prior to the start of the year. The PS5 upgrade to The Witcher 3 is incredible from a graphical standpoint, instantly making that game one of the premier ray tracing benchmarks for the system. Sadly, the game is a little more broken than it was at the end of its PS4 run, particularly the Blood & Wine DLC, but the base game was something I marveled at for another hundred-plus hours, for better or worse.

Likewise, whatever you've read about Cyberpunk 2077, I agree. And I figured I might never touch that game again after getting in on the ground floor with the PS4 version. But it's a rollicking good time; worse than anything, after I beat the game, it took all of a week before I started a new save just to grind out the mindless NCPD fodder and spend more time in that city (the world building sucks but the world is incredible, if that makes sense).

I'll skirt through the rest of my actual 2023 nominations, because again I think whatever you've heard about these games, I mostly agree:

Resident Evil 4: It's one of the best games of all time, with just enough FF7R type tricks up its sleeve to feel fresh. I haven't finished it, and am not sure when I will, but it's a blast whenever I fire it up.

Spider-Man 2: Game feels amazing to play, as usual. The only games I play on the most ultra hard difficulty. Story was a let down in a lot of ways, but I wasn't thinking about that at all until it was all over. Turns out, it's apparently just that Web of Shadows game from the PS3 era?

MLB The Show 23: If my username is notable to you, you know I can't help but mention this game every year. Perfect for podcasts, perfect difficulty modulation, full of flaws but nowhere near as bad as its sport sim peers. Just a reliable 500-ish hour time sink through the spring and summer year after year.

Street Fighter 6: I recently reinstalled this game and Mortal Kombat 1 has fully destroyed my memory of how this game plays, but World Tour was awesome and the Battle Hub was hilariously fun until my casual buds dropped off. It's clearly a perfect fighter, or at least could one day be SFIV: AE's equal.

Jedi Survivor: I thought the boss battles in this game, like Alan Wake's, were terrible, and like Vinny I can't say I wasn't a little blasé about the plot. But I thought the level design was constantly interesting and the combat outside the boss fights was just as fun as the last time around. Just good fun video gamin'.

Mortal Kombat 1: I'm better at this than Street Fighter, and the actual story mode means this is more my type of game generally. I dutifully reinstall with each new Invasion arc and grind mindlessly through it. The monetization is the stuff of nightmares, sadly, so despite being the 1A of my 2023 Fighter Renaissance in my heart it can't possibly get that respect on a GotY list.

FFXVI: This is mostly just here because I barely finished ten games actually from this year. I enjoyed the combat, I thought the music was exceptional, the voice acting was generally pretty top notch...but I really don't get what all the fuss over Active Time Lore was (like, I really don't, it seemed quite flawed) and the meat and potatoes of this game, it's story and the structure of it, is hilariously bad. It also never ends. Yet I played almost 60 hours of it. So fuck me.

Baldur's Gate 3: I love how much others love this game. Like Alan Wake II, for me the combat on the easiest difficulty is intrusively difficult, except that it also takes so damn long to finish a fight that it's all I can think about with this game. I'm also not creative at all - talking to my sister over Christmas, she mentioned throwing grease on the ground then lighting it on fire, and I was baffled - so I mostly just whack my way through like it's XCOM. I've dropped this game more times than I can count, but I also put in 35 hours into just the first area of Act I over two different saves. So I know that it can be good, I just don't think I can let it be good.

Armored Core VI: Because I needed ten games from this year, and because I know if I'd kept playing it I'd have kept having fun with it. I just didn't keep playing it, I quit at the boss with the cauldron for a head.

Lastly, special shoutout to Tears of the Kingdom, which I played for over 70 hours and really remember nothing about other than really loving the approach to the sky kingdom boss fight and the guy with the sign. Like Baldur's Gate 3, this is a game about creativity, and I never played with Legos or action figures as a kid. That I played as much of this game as I did is a testament to the heft of my desire to love a Zelda game as much as I loved Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time back in the day, but this is not a game for me at all. I spent enough time with it that it has to get an 11th place honorable mention though.

Ever since joining this community, I've had my eyes opened to just how few games I get to in a given year. It's part of why I miss Quick Looks so much - I used to live much of the gaming year vicariously through the crew, and always selfishly wished they'd play deeper into games more often. The Nextlander crew has been focusing more and more on full Let's Plays it seems, which has been really cool! I never got into Twitch and I rarely watch even Giant Bomb live outside of E3, but I've always understood the appeal of watching people you (presumably) like play games you definitely like or wish you could find the time to play yourself.

That being said, after spending much of 2020 in a sealed echo chamber of work (in a restaurant), decompress (in a service industry-only bar), cry myself to sleep (usually at home), I was ready to freak out in 2021. Especially as the vaccines began rolling out and cases began falling off so significantly, hope was in the air and I was ready to put that stimulus money to work! I took a vacation to New Orleans that was incredible, and relevant to this discussion because I beat Hades for the first and still only time (run...47?) while waiting out a torrential downpour in the middle of the stay. I loved the hotel I stayed in (shoutout Old 77 Hotel & Chandlery!) but its decorations and overall aesthetic will partially remain engrained in my memory due to the rush I felt as I realized not only was I gonna beat Hades, it wasn't gonna be all that difficult. I know there's a Whole Other Game past that point, but I felt more than satisfied with just the one.

I came back home and, filled with consumer-lust after a spending spree down in the bayou - my usual M.O. being "oh God where am I gonna get my bills paid from this month" - that barely put a dent in my considerable savings, I set eyes on a PS5 next. I knew I wanted the digital edition - I haven't owned a physical copy of any media since inFamous: Second Son came alongside my PS4 - but wasn't having luck with either. That is, until I installed the HotStock app on my phone and realized just how often these things go on sale, even if it is still a mad dash with plenty of frustrating hurdles to clear seemingly at random on the way to a checked out cart. I wound up getting the disc-drive format from Wal-Mart, it arrived three weeks earlier than the shipping estimate (luckily I had a day off and stumbled into the box as I walked out of my apartment because it was not conspicuously packaged!) and I decided - why stop here?

So I pounced on sales, scooped up bunches of old games I might want to play again or always had a curiosity about. I played games in a way I never had before, dipping in and out of five or six at a time, dropping them like flies if they didn't suit my mood. MLB The Show and it's endless spring/summer grind has forever warped my brain and so I often found myself gravitating towards any game I could comfortably pump a podcast through the PS5 Spotify app while playing, which meant I often didn't do as much with certain story-based games as I'd hoped, but I did still play a lot of games this year if not necessarily new games. More and more it seems like people are accepting the practice of throwing an old game or two into their lists and personally I'm cool with it, so I've tried to hit ten actual games from 2021 with a few honorable mentions sprinkled in. Starting with...

Games I Put a Weird Amount of Time Into and Barely Remember

Madden NFL 20 - 11 hours played

Early in the year I came across a free month - or was it $0.99? - trial of EA Access and decided to give it a shot. Despite not caring much about football since, oh, 2013 or so (and especially after the Kaepernick debacle) I found this game weirdly compelling. I get why a lot of modern Madden players complain about this game - they all play Ultimate Team, and that mode sounds predatory in a supremely evil way - but I think the Franchise mode is actually pretty cool. I hadn't touched the mode since Madden NFL 14 or so, an era of Madden I would confidently describe as "dogshit" and was surprised to find a bunch of fun and sensible RPG mechanics tucked into the mode in addition to all the usual bells and whistles the mode has had for years. The game's got a good, dynamic commentary system thanks to using no-name voice actor dudes instead of established TV personalities (or that's the impression I get anyway) and the practice modes that give your players XP based on your performance are also really good at teaching football, something that's become way too complicated for the average person to understand.

These 11 hours were crammed into a little under a week, and when I dropped it I dropped it, because the knees on these players still look ridiculous and the running game still feels like a comedy of errors once the new graphic shine wears off, but my impression of this game was surprisingly pleasant given how down Alex Navarro has been on this franchise for, I dunno, most of his life? I used to almost exclusively play Madden and NCAA franchise modes as a kid while devouring new and favorite albums, and it was really refreshing to spend a week during the early optimism of Biden's presidency reliving a bit of my childhood.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War - 25 hours played

I wrote about my time with Shadow of War over on Backloggd (cool service!) so I won't say much here, in fact I'll just pull this quote from what I said there and let you who doesn't click through to read the rest of it do with the quote what thy wilt:

Suddenly I saw before the entirety of Mordor's landscape, constantly re-populating and endless, expanding towards the edges of knowable time. Was this a 200 hour journey I was embarking on? I realized I didn't want to find out; MLB The Show had arrived, and with it the One Podcast Game to Rule Them All.

Marvel's Avengers - 19 hours played

Similarly, I wrote about my time with this game on this very website! In summary: man, I sure wish they'd nailed it because I actually see a lot of potential in a Marvel game as service.

Detroit: Become Human - 12 hours played

And I'd have played it a second time, too, if it wasn't so damn stupid! This was the first David Cage game I found a lot to like about it, particularly the way my Connor arc played out. If you're familiar with the game, I actually highly recommend reading the Giant Bomb blog I linked back there if only to see how cool his story can become, something a surprising amount of players very likely aren't familiar with as many of my mid- and late-game outcomes hovered in the 3% to 20% range of outcomes across the player base.

That being said, what a dumb, dumb game.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 39 hours played

If I were including non-2021 games in my list ( was surprised to find I had 10, even if I had to stretch the definition of game a tad to get there!) this game likely would've ranked as high as 3 on my list below. I loved this game, as I wrote over on Backloggd, primarily for all the reasons it should've been an abject failure. What an insane achievement, so glad for Jan, Chris Plante and some others to have advocated so vocally for it during their respective Game of the Year podcasts and awards.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 39 hours played

I'd like to get on to the actual lists and mini-awards here soon so I won't say much about this game other than the following - it is bloated beyond all belief, full of pitiful side quests no sensible person would ever endeavor to complete and large open areas with little excuse for their existence other "hey, Uncharted doesn't do this, ya jerks!" That being said, it's still rooted in the same core combat and exploration loop that earned the previous games so much praise, drenched in a graphical sheen so ridiculously impressive that playing it on my base PS4 in the middle of winter, I often wondered if this wasn't secretly the most outright gorgeous video game of the generation.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite lacking in the creativity department and plenty's been said about Lara's questionable role in her own stories, but that's also just what this genre is and it's perfectly fine to both acknowledge the cultural quandries of the swashbuckler without letting it dilute the core fun of the experience. I'd say that if either The Discourse or somewhat mixed critical response dissuaded you from giving this game a shot, keep an eye out for a sale! It's cool!

The Yakuza Series - 69-ish hours played

I say "ish" only because it's impossible to remember how much of my 80 hours with Yakuza Zero were contained within calendar year 2021, or how much more of Yakuza 4 I'll squeeze in before the calendar flips over! What a franchise! Like so many Giant Bomb users, my time with this franchise has seemingly been a long-time coming, my curiosity having been stoked by the Beast in the East series before finally getting the push it needed via constant, deeply discounted sales on the franchise as well as the inclusion of Yakuza Kiwami as a Playstation Plus game last year.

I've written about my time with Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 0 (as well as Yakuza Kiwami) over on Backloggd pretty extensively so feel free to go get my full thoughts through those links if you'd like, but the bottom line: while it's clear that 0, Kiwami 2 and Kiwami are far more polished experiences than what I've seen so far from 3 and 4 (it's quite impressive how meandering and fat these games got in the PS3 era, even if it all feels a little empty and hard to extract substories from) I don't regret going all in on this franchise in the slightest, and I can't wait to see what's coming next. Some might say it's sacrilege that I listen to podcasts while playing these games and that I find the "gibberish" of the all-Japanese voice work easy to tune out beneath the English language of my pods (I do pause for the spoken cutscenes!) but this has been my ultimate, non-MLB comfort food for nearly two years now and never did I devour more of it in a single, gluttonous rampage than I did this year.

Just a Few Honorable Mentions Before We Get to the List (Yikes!)

NBA 2K22 - 34 hours played

Anybody who knows me knows that I never miss an opportunity to rant about how far this franchise has fallen, besotted by an addiction to MyTeam card pack sales and MyPlayer Virtual Currency sales that has left the MyGM mode in shambles and the core competency of the game - the simulation of the game of basketball - in many ways stuck in the halcyon days of its single player efforts, which inarguably crested a decade ago with the introduction of Michael Jordan and the Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11 - though the mode's follow-up, 2K12's NBA's Greatest, was arguably more comprehensive and feature complete.

NBA 2K22 is still all of that - it's gross, it's opportunistic, it's most interesting mode for older basketball fans - MyTeam - is still more casino than card collecting video game and still more "Christ we have to figure out how to make Shaq relevant in the modern NBA" rather than "hehe let's see these scrawny modern centers deal with the size of speed of the man who once played Steel on the big screen!" MyGM hasn't seen a significant investment of resources since, I mean, since 2K12 if we're being honest, though they'll always pay their lip service. And the game ultimately still slips into a bit of a scripting trap too often, a legacy issue dating back to the Dreamcast days that stands out all the more after two decades of basketball gaming and the competition completely snuffed out. It's online performance is also still fucking trash - I really don't understand how anyone could enjoy playing this game competitively with the state of the input lag, but I suppose that's been going on for long enough who has time to care anymore?

That said, the number's right there: 34 hours, honest as can be. For all its faults, NBA 2K22 is a great showcase for the newest consoles, MyTeam's abusive attitude towards players can't obscure that baseline dopamine hit of collecting even your least favorite favorite players from your childhood, and in the parlance of Deadspin (R.I.P.) Remembering Some Guys, while the on-court product might not look or feel exactly like basketball looks or feels these days but thanks to a new locomotion and animation branching system at least doesn't feel like giants stomping through a mud field anymore.

In other words, NBA 2K22 is still kind of terrible - but if you're a basketball fan, it's alright? Ugh.

"Deathloop" - 7 hours played

I wanted to like this game. I bought a huge Arkane Studios bundle - Dishonored 1, 2 and Prey plus all their DLC packs - for just $25 as a way to dissuade myself from jumping on the hype, a decision I felt better about as audience scores began rolling in with a vastly different reaction to the game than many critics. And yet, here I was in, the me of 2021, somewhat of a hypebeast, looking for something new to play, a new conversation to join in on. On the other side, there was Bethesda, already discounting the game to $40 on PSN just weeks after release. Why not?

I should've listened to myself. I think this game has a really awesome look and I actually think the guns are pretty cool. I just don't think the gunplay feels all that good and I've always been what you might call a fucking idiot when it comes to first-person stealth mechanics. Pair both of those things to a Shift ability that feels bizarrely worse than it did during my time with Dishonored: Definitive Edition, some other abilities that just seem kind of pointless, a bunch of environmental puzzles I'm actually not that excited to find the solutions to and bosses that, once you find them, you just kinda...shoot in the face a bit?

"Deathloop" is a game I'd deeply, deeply like to like - especially considering I spent that hard-earned cash on it all impulsively. It's not even the core thing I see getting complained about the most - the on rails type nature of it - that bothers me. That's actually, maybe, my favorite part! I like icons on the screen telling me where to go, I want to accomplish things and get moving - it's part of what has never allowed the Hitman franchise to click with me, after all, all that wandering around and studying and so forth. It's just that, y'know, I get to that mission icon and then there's either nothing all that interesting there, the thing is kind of interesting but linked to another thing I either don't know about or am not currently that interested in, or I just get shot a lot / do a lot of shooting then go back to the tunnel and start the loop again.

Yea, it doesn't help that I'm probably terrible at this game and have no patience for half of it's gameplay design - Matthew Rorie, I see you! - but dang am I a little bummed out how much I like everything about this game except for running around in it, trying futilely to make something interesting happen.

Hey Y'all, Let's Crown a Game of the Year!

10. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION - 2 hours played

I recorded myself playing about an hour of this game, including starting with it's stunning center piece installation of "How to Disappear Completely" / "Pyramid Song" / "You & Whose Army?". Let's just say, much like P.T. never left my PS4, this will likely never leave my PS5 in case I need to introduce some woeful soul to this incredible experience for the first time. While Radiohead is in a unique position with essentially infinite money and a fandom of basically unrivaled voraciousness, I wouldn't be surprised if this is something that more and more artists pursue as a promotional tie-in to their album release advertising. I wrote a bit more about this, as did some others, on the forums a bit earlier this year.

9. The Forgotten City - 7 hours played

Obviously, as with KID A and a few other games on this list, time played actually isn't all that important to me - I've just never owned a console that kept track of it for me before and find it a really interesting statistic! The Forgotten City doesn't aspire to much more than single sitting from its players, though there are some more obscure quest lines and trophy requirements for the completionists out there. While I think some critics got a little carried away with their praise for this game (I get it, 12 Minutes was a weird time in their lives) I'd still rank it among the most memorable experiences I had with a 2021 game in 2021. The writing is universally engaging and it's clashes between modern and classical philosophy a bit refreshing compared to a year otherwise defined by pretty blunt, pop experiences, while the world itself is a fun little puzzle to figure out.

Not that there's really that much figuring - the map is fairly tight and once you've stumbled onto one mystery you tend to find yourself barreling toward its conclusion unless you intentionally veer off the path. The game also intimates a sort of Outer Wilds-like timing structure that's either not present or essentially inconsequential, a bit of a disappointment considering its roots as a Skyrim mod and all that could imply about NPC behavior when you're not looking.

Minor quibbles aside, however, this is just a neat little experience with a finale that, whether you love it or hate it, fuckin' goes for it in a way only video games and comic books really can. I'm not a huge fun of the way this game wraps up, and I'm sure there are cultural critics out there who could wring a lot of Problematic Material out of its underlying argument concerning purpose and divinity, but during my time with The Forgotten City I wasn't there for that. I just wanted to track down the sinner, figure out the unlock conditions for the various endings and learn as much about these charming, lost Romans as I could. Just a simple little pleasure in a year that demanded such comforts.

8. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - 21 hours played

Let's get these things out of the way, because when I look back at my 2020's Game of the Year blog I'm always a little disappointed that I spend a lot of time complaining about some of the lower games on the list. While the game is a graphical stunner, I actually find the art direction itself, shall we say...hideous? Everything just looks weird and weirdly soft, sometimes at the same time. There's lots of goopy and gloopy and floppy things in this game, platforms and mounds of material that look like firehoses but are brain...matter... and a bunch of really bad outfits. Yes, they nailed a certain '80s aesthetic in those flashbacks - no, it does not look great! Also put my firmly in the Maddy Myers School of Won't These People Just Shut Up Sometimes, fueled in part by the many, many sequences in which the game hasn't been designed around the dialogue, resulting in the player having to consciously take a moment to stand around waiting for a conversation to end or just plowing right through it by walking through a doorway or over a ledge.

Oh, this is important: Star Lord is one of the great mis-cast actors in a very long time. His accent never crosses the rubicon into endearingly awful. It's just plain bad - which sucks to say, as you'd imagine Jon McLaren considered this a breakout role when he scored the part. He made some choices here, almost none of them good. Bummer.

In other words, so much of Guardians was A Little Too Much that it was genuinely exciting how often that didn't matter to me. The combat system is a bit impossible to translate from eyes to brain to fingers, and yet I dig the core loop of waiting for ability cooldowns, triggering said abilities and watching them do stuff. I might not understand exactly what I'm doing most of the time the way I might in similar games like last year's Final Fantasy VII Remake or Ghost of Tsushima, but I do know bad dudes are dying and that's enough for me. Likewise, I felt a lot of the branching narrative stuff was ultimately a tease the way so many of these things tend to be, with anything of consequence generally cresting on a hand-wave conclusion that's more about the journey than the destination.

But then, more and more I'm finding: isn't that most video games? People don't finish these things, and when they do that dedication is often met with a resounding thud. Terrible final bosses, messy and convoluted narrative conclusions, inconclusive and bland non sequiturs in anticipation of DLC - games often end like a wet shit and I might be done expecting any grand conclusions from all but the most proven storytellers in the medium. Likewise, while I might have my complaints with how pretty much every story arc in this game ultimately wraps up, their beginnings and middles are often full of charm and intrigue and Eidos Montreal has conjured up a pretty messy, detailed adventure that never stops never stopping. This is one of those games where if you don't like what you're doing - so long as it's not the gunplay, of which there is admittedly more than enough of - just wait 45 minutes and you'll likely be teasing out the next adventure.

I don't think it's accurate to consider Guardians of the Galaxy any sort of surprise - this is exactly the game Square showed far too much of during their press conferences prior to its release - so much as a revival of the kinds of surprisingly fun licensed action games that used to pop up every so often in the PS2 and PS3 era. It borrows from everything that's ever existed and doesn't do any of it better, let alone as well as, the sources it's aping from, but neither does it really embarrass itself in its pursuit of becoming the crossover generation's definitive action adventure game. It's just a really good one of these for those in search of a really good one of those, and that's good enough for me.

7. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - 13 hours played

I really, really, really, really, really liked this game.

I wanted to love it.

Ratchet & Clank 2016 revived something in me I thought was long dead: my love of the simple, 3D platforming collect-a-thon married to the unique and imaginative minds at Insomniac when it comes to weaponry and environmental design. I beat that game and then I leapt enthusiastically into New Game+ to collect the few trophies I'd missed the first time around as well as fully upgrade Ratchet's impressive arsenal. Not even the laughably bad story - lifted from the much-derided computer animated film released that same year - could keep me from falling head over heels for that game.

But perhaps that was as much time and place as the quality of this game? Hard to be sure, and I'd rather not interrogate it. The game is absolutely a powerhouse graphically, all the better for an animation style that's always favored bright shiny things and all the ways they can go boom and break apart. So many combat sequences in this game feel like a real "fuck you" to Knack and Knack 2 as the particles and effects fly all over the screen as if it were the second night of the Rolling Loud Festival or something. The guns remain effortlessly fun and the primary/secondary action of the L2 trigger is fun throughout, while the gameplay does a terrific balancing act of being approachable for kids but complicated enough for adults.

Essentially, this is just a grand new console showcase that doesn't break what doesn't need fixing, and while I might not be as over the moon about it as I was its predecessor that's no knock on this game. Highly recommended for anyone who can get their hands on a PS5 in the future and loves platformers, probably for as long as it takes for another one of these to come out.

6. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - 49 hours played

I simply cannot get the above image out of my head. As you can see, I've played a fair amount of this game and yet have a handful of facts to present:

• I have never solved the case

• I have never seen the above scene

• I have never seen more than just a couple of scenes you can find in a quick Google image search for The Final Cut, or at least the particular contortions of either the environment or the player character

• I'm not sure how much of what I haven't seen I ever will see, because this game scares me

All of this might lead a reasonable person to assume I should just go ahead and make some assumptions myself: that this game is more intricate, more detailed, more lucid, more hallucinatory, more interesting, more conversational, more intellectual, more more more than anything else on this list. You're probably right. Disco Elysium is confounding and stupendous and well worth the recommendation.

But it's also got kind of a horrible map, across three saves with very different characters I've found it a little too easy to get stuck in some pretty bland ruts depending on your build, and most importantly the PS5 version doesn't seem to accept I'm fine just reading the text (as accomplished as the voice acting is) simply because I read much faster than these actors would ever speak and I'm the sort that hates closed captions specifically because it spoils vocal performances. This is a personal pet peeve I wouldn't really knock the game for specifically.

In any sense, plenty of other people have gone to great lengths to describe this game's baffling greatness in ways I don't have the energy to right now. All I could do at the moment is complain about the little things that nag at me, that cause me to restart the game on a new save every few months and gladly twist and turn through its political intrigue all over again.

Again: 49 hours, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface.

5. Returnal - 15 hours played

I'm such a damn jerk. I watched this speed run earlier this fall after getting my PS5 and constantly waffling over whether I should make a move on Returnal. On the plus side: PS5 exclusive! DualSense examples galore! So pretty! Great for listening to podcasts! On the negative? $70 price tag. No saves. Hard as fuck. The negatives constantly outweighed the positives until I watched that video. I thought: that's it? I can do that! Who said this game was hard? Certainly not Bloodborne players.

Shortly after, the game went on sale for $40 and Housemarque patched in-game saves so it was a no brainer: I was gonna buy this game and kick its ass.

I have not, so far, kicked its ass. But I have had an awesome time! In fact, the inspiration to buckle down and write this post was just a few hours ago, as one of the best runs I'd ever had in this game ended with an ignominious fall down a pit after another of my patented Jump-Dashes Into Hell I've come to know myself so well for. It's, like, my absolutely favorite game within a game to play. I couldn't tell you when in the run I'll accidentally end it by falling into a pit of nothing thanks to my own panicked inputs, only that it will happen and I will laugh maniacally in frustration. Like a FromSoft game, that has been this game's most magic gift: I just today played this game for nearly two hours, excitedly collecting some very interesting sounding power-ups, some very useful feeling weapons and conquering some typically seemingly insurmountable challenges.

But more than anything, Returnal is always an emotional experience. Tension, fear, elation, anticipation, giddiness, trepidation, total sadness. It's all in there. See that clip I posted above this paragraph? I nearly cried when I died there. I felt the tears welling up. I booted up these forums and started writing this blog to quell the pain. I really can't tell you how exasperatedly I shrieked in fear when I arrived at the bridge (which leads to the boss) only to find that waiting for me - sometimes, after all, the bridge has no enemies guarding it at all.

If I were any better at this game (and, again, check out that clip: I'm such a fucking wimp) it'd easily be my Game of the Year. The music, the set dressing, the bullet hell, the sound effects, the enemy designs. This is an absolutely remarkable game that I'm just not fully cut out for yet and may never be.

I can't wait to play more.

4. Hades - ~35 hours played

The tilde because the Nintendo Switch has that oh-so-Nintendo "30 hours or more" descriptor and I've put another 5 in since the game came to Playstation.

This will be the slightest blurb here because this game was so widely praised last year, both by Giant Bomb, its guests, other publications and most importantly the users of this very forum. Who cares what I have to say about it - not me! All I'll say is I was gifted a Switch in January by the benevolent bar manager of the bar that'd gone mostly service industry-only during the worst of the pandemic, a watering hole for those of us who had no choice but to go outside and make the most of it.

Day after day in 2020, we attempted to claw our way out of a very real hell in order to be seen by the real world as more than just our occupation or position in society.

Finally playing Hades in 2021, I saw a lot of myself in Zagreus. Well, apart from the cool boons and the knowledge I'd emerge from a pool of blood fully prepared to do it all again should I die by any number of hell demons and their variants.

3. Psychonauts 2 - 22 hours played

We'll find here mostly meaningless distinctions between three and one, as well as one typed-out Nodima, so allow me to attempt to be succinct for once. As we wrap things up.

Psychonauts 2 was the most singularly stunning experience of 2021. Given its long, bizarre road to digital store fronts and aspirations to revive a style of game long thought dead through an intellectual property that was never more than a minor cult classic in its own time, the deck felt pretty stacked against Tim Schafer and crew for most of Psychonauts 2's production. Especially given the game's original director left halfway through production, there was no reason to expect the most heartwarming, intelligent, thoughtful storytelling of the year to come out of Double Fine's perpetual joke factory.

It's also, importantly, an amazingly beautiful game. While the XBox Series X experiences certain benefits the Playstation 5 does not and both consoles can make the Playstation 4 version look like a discarded chunk of coal at times, no matter how you gave this game to yourself you were greeted with some of the most confident art direction in years as well as the most imaginative level design of the entire generation, full-stop. In the same way DmC: Devil May Cry shamed so many third person action game designers with its explosive, propulsive ambition and design madness so to is Psychonauts 2 an experience that never lets its foot off the gas. While the gameplay isn't always the most satisfying the same can never be said about the environments you're enacting said gameplay within nor the story you're chasing down every last morsel of.

And the writing, holy shit! From primary cutscenes to random NPC banter while scanning for a clue where to go next, this is Schafer and his writing staff's most potent, clever, hilarious script since Grim Fandango, easily. I'd square Psychonauts 2 with anything in his catalog to be honest, and I could be convinced it's the best work he's ever done. Psychonauts 2's characters are just a delight to listen to and watch animate, so full of life and personality in a way that's almost overwhelming.

So much for being brief. I'll just let every other person that's going to rank this game over the coming weeks say whatever I haven't.

2. Kena: Bridge of Spirits - 15 hours played

I'll probably write something more verbose and definitive about this game at some point. Been mulling playing it over on a harder difficulty for the Platinum for a while now. I said I'd be succinct about Psychonauts 2, and if there's any game on this list I go on and on about forever it's this one, but all I've to say for now is this:

This was my Spiritfarer, this was my Florence, this was my Invisible Inc. This is the game for which I cannot understand there isn't universal praise, that single handedly grasped the power of video games to challenge and please in equal measure that no other game this year quite put its finger on. I had a great time, I had a hard time, I struggled and I succeeded and by the time I was done I wanted a sequel so immediately and so badly I could have leapt out of my desk chair and caught a train directly to Ember Lab's offices in California if only I weren't so stuck in my chair, stunned that the credits were rolling and that was all I could have for now of this incredible game.

A sequel might not be in the cards - first of all, the game's ending doesn't exactly beg for one nor does the general public seem to be clamoring for this game the way every last one of you should be - but no matter what, Ember Labs is on my radar in a way almost no first-time studio ever has been in my thirty-plus years of gaming. What a lovely, lovely surprise.

1. MLB The Show 21 - 703 hours played

And that's the least amount of hours I've played The Show since MLB The Show 16. Yet I accomplished more with less friction and more efficiently than in any previous year of Diamond Dynasty. Where so many Ultimate Team modes are finding more and more ways to antagonize their players and goad wallets out of pockets, Sony's San Diego Studios have zagged and searched furiously for ways to give the players what they want. Yes, of course, there is the grind of all grinds at the core of MLB The Show, but at the periphery is none of the bullshit, none of the gambling mechanics (packs, sure, but trust me when I say no reasonable person spends a cent on this game's packs and it's designed for that to be the case) and none of the obfuscation.

San Diego Studios has built an incredible baseball sim purely on presentation and gameplay, then built this mode designed entirely around taking advantage of players' nostalgia and desire to watch meters go up while card collections swell in size...only to focus exclusively on how to make those goals more achievable and constant for players. What they're doing should be one of the biggest stories in modern gaming, bucking every trend in its field and garnering unheard of positive sentiment as a result. This has been going on for years now, and has played no small part in how much time I've been willing to give this franchise - 900 hours into both 17 and 18, 800 into both 19 and 20 - year in and year out.

It is the perfect podcast game, it is the perfect barely pay attention and read the news game. You can treat it as a clicker if you want to or an insanely competitive, the best players in the world succeed three out of ten tries online competitive experience if you want to. MLB The Show 21 is the rare game that wants to cater to everyone and for whom reaching everyone is their one and only design goal. I haven't played less and less of this game over the years because I don't want to play it as much as I'm used to or am exhausted by a formula that's only seen slight alterations over the past five years. No, I'm playing the game less because San Diego Studios has made their game more and more accessible, easier for players to set long-term goals for themselves, achieve those goals and then accept that's the end of that year's grind.

Baseball is a beautiful game, and over the past five years The Show has reminded me of that. After several years listing it somewhere in the middle of my lists on this website out of deference to the annual sameness of it all, in a year in which I couldn't decide between two truly exceptional throwback titles, it's finally time to give San Diego Studios and their exceptional sports sim its due as the one game as a service that truly wants nothing more than to satisfy its fanbase no matter the cost to its overall value on an accountant's spreadsheet somewhere. Thanks for everything, SDS. Here's hoping you keep it up into the next generation and beyond.

If you're the sort to notice regular names on the forums you hang out at, you've probably noticed I spend a decent amount of time talking about MLB The Show. In the past four years, it has supplanted the NBA 2K franchise as my go-to timekiller, a game in which the audio quickly becomes repetitive, the gameplay likewise becomes practically 100% muscle memory and 0% creativity and there is an endless drip of Diamond Dynasty content to keep fans coming back for more. As a big fan, I spent much of the past week examining how the fanbase (and curious onlookers) were reacting to the news that the game would debut on XBox as a Game Pass title rather than a $60/$70 retail product. Between the positivity of the franchise's core fanbase and the fickleness of "sports-only gamers", the results were predictably mixed.

(Here's where I'll say: I'm not going to come to any conclusions or make any sweeping predictions at the end of this blog. This is just a blog for me that I'm sharing with you. If you think that's a waste of time, I can't disagree with you!)

That's not what I found most interesting, though. What I found most interesting is that on forums like r/games and r/baseball, most of the discussion came back not to why Sony wasn't immediately offering the game on PlayStation Plus for either PS4 or PS5 as well, but that everyone (and I mean just about everyone) was comparing Game Pass to PlayStation Now. I don't know about you guys, but until this January Playstation consoles had been the only gaming system I'd owned since an ill-fated year with a Gamecube sitting idly next to my PS2. I really like Sony platforms, and I like video games enough that I'm writing this blog on the Giant Bomb forums right this second - I do not think about Playstation Now, like, ever. Does PSNow have some kind of strange market penetration I'm not aware of? Is it just an easier phrase to keep in mind than PS+ despite most other streaming-style services going with "plus" or some variation of?

I didn't care much about that either, I guess (2.2 million is the number, down 16 million from Game Pass' base) but Playstation did happen to be offering a 7-day free trial last week and so I decided to check it out. The first thing that struck me was that, and I'm sure I was aware of this at some point, the service has slowly pivoted to a 50/50 hybrid of streaming and downloadable titles. Now, there's a lot of turds in the downloadable section, but a quick scroll shows some pretty substantial titles:

• Abzu
• Ace Combat 7
• Ape Escape 2
• The Bioshock Series
• Beyond Two Souls
• Bloodborne
• Brothers
• The Darksiders Series
• Dead Island
• Detroit: Become Human
• DOOM 2016
• Dishonored 2
• Fallout 4
• God of War III Remastered
• Horizon: Zero Dawn
• inFamous Second Son
• Injustice 2
• Knack
• Metal Gear Soild V: Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain
• Street Fighter V
• Until Dawn
• Wolfenstein: The New Order

And I skipped several games after MGSV just in the interest of my time. Point is, this isn't nearly (nearly) the amount of games available to Game Pass subscribers, but a person with limited budget for gaming in a world without brick and mortar rental stores could, feasibly, reasonably justify paying for this service over buying games directly. If I think back to my childhood of begging for $6 to walk down to the nearby Blockbuster and browse the shelves for an hour every Friday evening, browsing this list isn't all that different from your average trip to the PS2 section in 2002. So, trial in hand, I figured I might as well download Marvel's Avengers and give it a shot. After all, the one consistent bit of positive criticism I'd heard about the game is it's campaign is both enjoyable and manageably brief. What's the worst that could happen?

...But first, what good is a free trial if I don't give the primary function a spin? Obviously I had to stream several games and see where we're at with that tech, right? I won't spend too much time on this because anybody reading this should be able to guess what I'm about to say here, but just in case you're terrifying optimist: the situation, mostly, is pretty bad. Tellingly, if the game is downloadable, the first splash screen you see while the game loads is some friendly advice to download that game instead. The second screen is a tip that you can also use the service on a PC, which I imagine they put upfront because you're absolutely not going to want to use this service on your primary console television. The service also seems to pose a threat to the Playstation 4 itself, as these were the games I tried over the past week (here's where I'll note I stream movies on this PS4 with no hiccups or resolution problems at any time):

• Fantavision: This game is still an unenjoyable mess to me, but it does look mostly how I remember it looking on a 17" CRT. It comes out of the gate hot, however, as I had to cut my normal volume level in half just to not fear pissing the neighbors off. A success, I guess?
• Uncharted 2: I actually didn't have issues with controller responsiveness anywhere else, but here I just kept jumping off the damn train to my death. Weird! The game also looked like a heavily remastered PS2 game which is...not a compliment, exactly (it's an interesting look if you're a doofus like me, but I digress).
• God of War: Felt great but with all the brown, red and black in that opening boat level it looked like absolute hell.
• MX vs. ATV: Danny O'D has been talking these games up on the podcast lately and I figured it'd be an easy modern game to just dive into and see how it looks. Reminded me of Dave Mirra or Matt Hoffman BMX for the PS1. Controlled great, though.
• Wreckfest: What was nice about this was I could squint and tell it was a PS4 game. I tried it with both a one-on-one and 24-car 3-lap race on a figure 8 track and it was nice to see that, relatively, the service doesn't perform any better or worse than an actual PS4. I wanted to download this game afterward, which felt like the potential of the PSNow service fully realized.
• Bloodborne: ...And then I played Bloodborne. Or, I loaded Bloodborne. See, the service will notice if you have a save for the game already, and while I suppose in many ways that makes me the idiot for attempting to stream Bloodborne when I already own and have beaten it, this was still a pretty rotten experience. See, the Old Hunters DLC is not on Playstation Now, but my save file contains that information and so the game couldn't load either online or offline. To make matters worse, it seemed I didn't have any control of either the virtual console nor my own until I could get through to the game's actual menu, which I couldn't...and the service didn't seem interested in booting me for idling too long as advertised. I left Bloodborne running on Playstation Now for two full days with the console going in and out of rest mode (thankfully) until eventually I had to unplug the power cord and cross my fingers through the database reconstruction process for the umpteenth time. Yikes.
• inFamous: The game booted without sound, and originally I thought this was a funny flaw in the service. I played through the intro (the game launches with inverted Y axis controls!) that doesn't allow you to pause and when I finally could paise, realized the game doesn't have audio controls at all! I dipped out to the XMB and realized I had no audio, period. I had to go into the system settings and switch to Digital Out and back to HDMI to get audio again. The game looked about as good as God of War did. I was done streaming games.

The TL:DRof it all is this: overall I think the games play perfectly good over streaming, look slightly worse than they either do currently or I remember them looking, and eventually I ran into issues that had me worrying for the safety of my entire console. I can see a significantly small use case for playing these games on a much smaller screen where the graphical issues would hopefully be diminished, but considering those last two games, I'm not sure that's worth $10/month. Right?

Anyway, Avengers!

I've already written a lot here and we all know the deal with this game so I'm going to try to limit myself to just a couple of paragraphs, but I did want to talk about this game a little bit somewhere and this just felt like the best place to do it because it sat comfortably alongside my experience with the greater PSNow framework in my head. For the low price of nothing, I finally got to experience this game beyond it's beta and see the launch campaign through to it's conclusion. You know what? This game has so much potential that I can see why it still has fans. But it also so clearly should've just got to focus on its campaign and suffers greatly from not having been able to do so. Through the five main Avengers Crystal Dynamics was tasked with summarizing the entirety of modern game development in a single six to eight hour campaign. You've got a ton of Tomb Raider in there, a lot of Destiny, a frankly daunting amount of Diablo, just a smattering of Sekiro (or whoever we want to blame for health/stun-based combat since Jedi Fallen Order also came out in 2019) and not enough polish to make any of it feel as good as it should.

But it's also a pretty charming homage to the beat 'em up arcade classics of the Avengers' earliest forays into gaming (lovingly highlighted in an arcade during the opening A-Day sequence) if you can contort your brain to interpret it that way. All of the characters feel good and just unique enough to develop personal preferences (IMO, anyway) and the combat threatens a complexity it thankfully never fully demanded, at least during the campaign. The performance of Kamala Khan is a huge highlight in the first half of the game, and while ultimately a weird hard rock remix of the MCU's Infinity War story filtered through different characters (this time it's Thor who rescues Iron Man from dying in space, and you'll never guess who's along for the ride!) on a dramatically more brief timeline, you can see that the Crystal Dynamics team really tried the best they could with the limited time they had to make a game on par with the Marvel's Spider-Men of the world.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed my time with the campaign just enough that I figured I'd give the endgame a shot and...the endgame sucks, lads. There's some vague notion of what to do immediately after besting the big bad thanks to power requirements and some hint-laden VO, but it's immediately clear that these missions are just the same mechanics you'd been tutorialized throughout the campaign. I figured matchmaking and getting to see some gloriously overpowered superheroes fighting alongside me would dull the numbness I felt hovering over each activity I was leveled enough to attempt, but in all three missions we were loaded into one of the game's bland vacant city overworlds, tasked with a mission and then given no enemies to fight. That's right buds, the enemies just didn't load in! We ran around opening chests, solving light puzzles and running in circles around Inhumans supposedly held hostage by AIM bots (heh, remember AIM bots?) only there were no AIM bots to be found. Sure, they'd load up at random elsewhere in the level as we scrambled about, but the game seemed to get these weren't the bots we were looking for and showed no interest in granting us progress for robots destroyed purely out of a sense of duty. No, it was the droids what held the hostages or nothing, and those droids seemed to have lost their RSVP.

Am I mad I played Avengers? Hell no, it was free! Would I have been mad if I'd paid the $9.99 PSNow typically costs? I suppose I'd tentatively say no to that, as well. Having experienced it first hand, I'm reinvigorated in my belief that the Anthem of Marvel games is not gonna be my bag any time soon. But I also scroll back up to that list of games and think...if for some reason I had just bought a PS4, and was otherwise fairly strapped for cash, I'd probably strongly consider the subscription for the downloadable games alone. And it made me realize that PSNow really isn't that far off the Game Pass service, as it heavily favors Sony first-party and Sony-funded third-party games, or games that are at least broadly associated with the platform due to their communities or countries of origin (again, I skipped over a good chunk of games, like Dark Cloud 1+2, the God Eater series and Valkyria Chronicles Remastered).

Which, hey, brings me back to baseball! While David Jaffe has hewed closer and closer to gaming's equivalent of...some fallen comedian I can't think of (I was gonna go with Dennis Miller but couldn't decide who that was less fair toward) these days than a treasured voice in games, he did decide to ruffle some feathers this week insinuating he knew a guy that knew a guy who knows Sony's own version of Game Pass is on the way sooner than we think. And despite being widely mocked at the time, Jim Ryan did say just this past winter, "there is actually news to come, but just not today. We have PlayStation Now which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets." I see where he's coming from! Playstation Now is a lot more similar to Game Pass than I'd ever thought it was, it just lingers on in my mind as the muddy, buggy streaming service that it is rather than the curated rental platform that it's slowly expanded into being as well.

Like I said at the top, this is truly as bloggy as a blog can be so I'm not arriving at any conclusions here nor am I throwing out predictions or hopes for what Playstation Now can be, but I had a really interesting, sweet-and-sour kind of week with a trial of it and simply felt like sharing! Cheers!

Blade Runner. Detroit. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. L.A. Noire. Toy Story 3. Heavy Rain. Blade Runner 2049. The Matrix. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The Matrix Revolutions. Toy Story. Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within.

I thought about all these films and games while playing Detroit: Become Human this weekend, a game I've been sure I'd absolutely despise since it was announced, on through the early reviews and brief discourse on podcasts like Giant Bomb's and Waypoint's...and yet now that I've played it, I have very mixed feelings about the game. When it leans into the Blade Runner, L.A. Noire, Telltale-ness of it all it seems like Quantic Dream has finally hit the jackpot here. The direction (or the technology used to direct) has finally caught up to Cage's ambitions and many of the shots in this game are absolutely gorgeous. Connor is absolutely intimidating and stoic in certain frames, while Markus can come off as a crazed religious fanatic and Kara...well, the less said about her storyline the better.

I say that because Kara's storyline is emblematic of every flaw coursing through Detroit's blue-blood pumping veins. Her sequences consist almost entirely of oddly sketched stealth sequences, puzzles in which you reach all the yellow cards in your scanner before a timer hits zero followed by action sequences that inevitably spill out of failed stealth sequences, and worst of all most of her character building moments smear the most mud over exactly how these androids work. Much is said of their programming and intentions, but oftentimes Kara's campaign seems to exist solely to throw all that world building into doubt. The nicest NPCs in the game are introduced like it's The Night of the Living Dead for some reason, pretty much every android she meets is either a Sids playroom monstrosity or a...sorry, a RINO (Robot in Name Only) exhibiting every characteristic of a human being other than that little LED on their temple (which it seems only main characters prefer to remove, oddly).

Even forgiving that - and it's a video game, so ultimately I expect the logic undergirding its world building to buckle under the needs of the plot from time to time - Kara also deals with by far the most Cageian characters, whether that's the nearly identical alcoholic dad and sadistic mad scientist or all the cops who conveniently can't see you until the "skill" check pops you out in the open. The sequence where Kara has her memory erased, regains it in the span of five minutes (while freeing the aforementioned imprisoned misfit toys as well as a half-robot polar bear for some reason) then proceeds to fight Luther's Mr. X-like will throughout the house until they reach the backyard and he just...has enough? That was an ugly bit of Quantic Dream foolishness and had me set down the controller for the night, unsure I'd come back to the game.

But come back I did, in large part thanks to the flowchart feature that caps every segment. Until that moment I'd been making decisions that landed me in the upper-80 to mid-90s percentile, and while the game looked stellar and had some very good performances (forgiving that every android actor aside from Connor and to an extent Markus didn't find the inhumanity in their performances) I was also beginning to worry the game was just too on the nose for me to get anything out of it. Except, in the chapter prior, I'd flubbed a quick-time event and Connor had been run over my a crop harvester. I thought he was gone for good, and I wanted to see how the game would play out...especially since only 4% of players failed that sequence.

Well, if you've played the game you probably remember that Detroit would have had a hell of a time writing Connor out of the remaining 60% of the game (tellingly, Kara can die in the that very first sequence with Todd) and thus began my super-engaging experience with the Connor-Hank narrative. To that point Hank had been taking a decent-enough liking to me despite playing Connor mostly cold and distant, and this returning Connor openly joked with Hank while sobering him up and on the way to the Eden Club. However, once the investigation was under way I made some poor assumptions about the path of the sex robot and became one of just 10% of players to fail that sequence - not only had Connor ultimately failed twice in a row, he was racking up a pretty huge bill on Hank's expense report.

Later that night, Connor remained self-righteous about his purpose and his livelihood, and Hank murdered him in cold blood on the boardwalk - only 16% of players experienced this scene this way, likely because by this point they'd accepted the game's core argument that androids are humans too, but I wanted Connor to accept this new reality of his. Connor is a utility in the world of Detroit: BH, and what is dead may never die, but I was genuinely shocked, particularly because I (and Connor) had understood the subtext of that scene involved Hank's dead son but we chose to withhold that knowledge from Hank because it wasn't our goal.

And now that I had this mindset entrenched, that an android would pursue goals above all else, especially empathy, the game started really opening up for me. Markus killed Simon on the roof after giving a mostly peace-driven speech on the broadcast, which left me in the minority again with 22% of players. This also began my rollercoaster ride with North in which she did ultimately fall in love with me but seemed to be more reactionary and emotionally driven by every word I said than a pre-teen (or sitting American President). Later, investigating the crime scene (for those who haven't played, I think we can all universally agree this pair of sequences is the high point of the game) I stumbled my way into the kitchen, triggering events that would bring about the end of the vignette with, because Connor was aware he could return and Hank could not, Connor sacrificing himself to save Hank.

Three days of investigation, three dead Connors. Hank was wrecked. His partner just kept dying, reminding him of the artificial nature of androids and the corporeal nature of his son. There was nothing I could do at this point to earn his trust, and unlike their first meeting rooted in standard buddy cop tropes this hatred felt truly earned. Better yet, I'd come by it honestly. I wasn't manipulating the game to experience this side of it - I'd long before assumed it incapable of such honest storytelling. Following that, as Markus I hacked the police radio (5%) to get them off my tail and reveal the scarier side of an android/tech-led revolution. I peacefully tagged benches (59%) but demonstratively toppled the statue celebrating the "birth" of androids. I sent a strong, pacifist message (71%) but killed the police (14%) who killed my brothers and sisters in the street. As Connor was displaying a clear sense of fealty to his mission and the laws of Detroit's world, Markus was convulsing wildly within them.

Unfortunately, from there Connor meets a bad analog of the tech bro from Ex Machina while he and Markus both struggle with the existential question of whether or not they're Neo from The Matrix (complete with their own respective takes on The Oracle) while Kara...stumbles around in a really crummy recreation of the Underground Railroad that is neither truly embarrassing nor all that interesting. And then the game just keeps going and going, seeming to end multiple times and just going all out on more, more, more. Eventually, I just put the controller down and let the police beat the shit out of Markus before murdering him in the middle of the street.

Zero percent of players reached the same level of exhaustion I ultimately did if this game is to be trusted, so maybe that says more about me than it does the game. But for one beautiful three hour stretch in the middle there, and speckled all throughout the first third as well, Detroit has a game that I really could've loved in it. Unfortunately, David Cage made it and so it had to mean something, despite his long since proving he has nothing interesting to say about the world and its ills at all.

My Connor let Hank have his suicide, in the end. After all, the mission was over, and we wouldn't be coming back for more.

So I'm sitting here drinking some whiskey, pondering what is making me feel so restless during a snow-ice-other storm, understanding that it's all the stuff this year is. Apple News, and CNN, truthfully both, are telling me I might see $600 in my bank account before midnight. I bet I won't. I entered this year wanting to play more games than I had last year, buried in a grind of MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty (forgiving time just spent lingering on the menu, my sister made a point to send me an image of my 794 hours with MLB 20, 640 hours with 19 and 918 hours with 18 once she got a PS5 and had access to information even I didn't have) and stoked on a bevy of non-Giant Bomb podcasts to indulge, from Triple Click to Waypoint Radio to How Did This Get Played to The Besties...but, yea, I spent over 800 hours at this point with MLB The Show anyway. I uninstalled it early this month to make hard drive space...and the re-installed it when I realized re-installing Destiny 2 wasn't the answer.

I did not buy Beyond Light, but Destiny 2 is still Weirdly Good.

I also spent plenty of times on these forums talking about these specific games, some of them as recently as last night, so this is not the most novel blog ever committed to Giant Bomb hard drive space, but it is my blog for me to remember what resonated with me this year, and so...probably without many images of gimmicks, allow me to Rank Some Games.

#10: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2

The original Tony Hawk disc is one of two games I still physically own, or at least an aware of physically owning. The other? Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. Why these two games? Mostly for the same reason I'm not sure they're the only two games I still physically own - sometimes I move boxes around my apartment, and sometimes I dig through them before I do. That being said, I fucking loved these games and have a vivid memory of a key-lime green Playstation 1 memory card that contained two separate THPS1 save-states because there was a time in my life where I both only had THPS1 to play and needed motivation to continue playing it so Just played it again, Tony.

As I alluded to before, I was hoping to wean myself off the exceptionally passive (and rewarding) loop of MLB The Show as well as provide a salve to my withering early-30s, working-in-service-during-COVID morale this year and THPS felt like, well, the one. And once I'd installed it and started picking away at it, I certainly felt like that was going to be the case. These guys are asking me to grind for, what, 10,000 hours for a minuscule drop of reward points I can exchange for a mediocre board graphic and/or t-shirt? Sure! And I loved Bob Burnquisting through the primary campaign of the original game, debating with myself whether I realized as a kid how painful Downhill Jam is as a level or if I could ever remember how to get my skater to grind those overhead lights in the Chicago tournament park.

But, man...the game's initial decision to deny any other skater the basic progression through each level's tasks, as well as offering every skater the ability to swap and exchange special moves at will (barring a few specific, obscure ground-skate moves, it seemed) really sapped the replay-value out of this game for me. They solved that first problem eventually, and I love that, but by then I'd also realized I couldn't have any fun online because there would always be one guy who had never stopped playing Pro Skater games in the lobby, and that a lot of the game's objective modes were more inspired by Devil May Cry type min/max gameplay than, you know, casually skating around to Goldfinger and A Tribe Called Quest. In other words, THPS1+2 is exceptionally satisfying on a green hit, but as the bowl burns and burns (and the grab tricks multiply and multiply) I had to reconcile my hopes for this package with the reality that I'm not 13 anymore and I just don't have the patience.

One Truly Awesome Thing About It: Best control scheme of 2020. And 2015, and 1997.

#9: Spiritfarer

This game is going to make the last mainly because, y'know, I failed to play a ton of games in 2020 like I'd planned. I have so many complaints, primarily that I had to consult online guides multiple times to figure out where I should be going for certain materials or general progression demands. I played probably 35 hours of this game despite fully enjoying maybe 10, and a lot of that was due to treating it like a farming simulator when it was always best as a grief vehicle.

Or... was it? While the game's loop hits some strong emotional beats early on, it's late game passengers are uniformly demanding and picky in a way that, I suppose if you're a naturally reclusive person, causes you to resent them fairly quickly. I spent much of those first hours attempting to suss out favorite dishes, hugging and caring for all my passengers like an idealized aunty...only to find that impulse wither over the months to the point I was sprinting past everyone, aware they wouldn't die or come to resent me for doing so. I hustled spirits off their semi-immortal plane in haste and often found myself annoyed how many long, contemplative moments were dragging their goodbyes out from 30 seconds to over 3 minutes.

In the end, Spiritfarer fucked me up in the other way than it did other people singing its praises, in that I realized I may work in bars/restaurants/hospitality and derive a lot of self-worth out of those interactions, but I emphatically do not want to cater to people's very specific needs in my downtime. But more specifically, the mechanical aspect of this game made each passing feel less and less earned; artificial. I wanted to love this more, but it did feel like a specific moment in 2020 such that it deserves mention here. If only I could have done a kickflip when I finished collecting every type of item and material in the game.

#8: Cyberpunk 2077, or, Where I Start Using Some Games Just to Hit Ten

I'm all over these forums about this game, so it feels stupid to just go ahead and say more about it, but here it is:

I played on PS4. It sucked on PS4. I loved how much it sucked. One of my favorite things about FFVII Remake was that certain locations looked like they contained the PS2, PS3 and PS4 in a single play space. Cyberpunk, similarly, imagined a world in which very little had advanced in open world technology since Grand Theft Auto III other than being able to present a first-person perspective. It crashes all the time. It looks like an amateur oil painting imitating a professional watercolor painting hinting at a hobbyist's pointillism trials. The male V's voice acting is garish; the in-game advertising might be the first time in my life I've truly understood "advertising is gross" mentalities.

I'm continuing to drink whiskey as I write, because...

This game, before I uninstalled it and asked for a refund from Sony (that I still haven't received any update on, nearly a week later...) was fuckin' fun, choom. I liked Fallout 3 enough based on some Blockbuster rentals (because you could do that kind of thing when that game came out) but otherwise have never played a Bethesda game unless you want to count Obsidian's Outer Worlds. But that game ran perfectly fine and, despite ultimately small stakes and withering mission design, just got what it was in a way I understand Bethesda and/or "Eurojank" games to not. In other words, how bad this game was as an experience was novel to me, kind of like watching Wonder Woman '84 in a hungover stupor around eight in the morning the day after Christmas and thinking to myself, "that was objectively bad - primarily because Diana and Steve actively raped that man many times over - but I kind of enjoyed that wreckage?"

Cyberpunk wants to be of this moment, but it is just a reminder of how much work we have to do as players, as creatives, as consumers, as economists, as investors, as exploited underclassmen and exploiting single-digit percenters that...it kind of did it's job, even if it accomplished its success in the dirtiest, most unfortunate ways possible.

Plus some of the guns and melee weapons with random status effects break the game in such a way that it at least feels good to press a button and experience a result.

#7 Genshin Impact

I just spent way more time than I expected to describing my "end-game" thoughts on this game over in the comments of @mento's blog covering it, so I'll restrain myself here. My main hits: I didn't play Breath of the Wild, so the gameplay is pretty new to me. I haven't spent any money on the game other than a hat-tip to the battle pass when it was first introduced, and yet my Wish rolls have been pretty fucking killer on the character side. Lastly, while I was initially happy for the game to give me reasons not to play it all day long when I first started approaching progression spikes...I feel like the game ultimately emphasizes its repetitive and mind-numbing activities over what made the game appealing in the first place.

I mean...other than all the characters, plot devices and incidental dialogue which is some of the worst I've ever encountered in a video game. I switched the dialogue to Chinese (after attempting Japanese, and French...) mostly so I could completely ignore it, but when I do take the time to read what these characters are talking about I just imagine a cluster of French-Canadians in a basement somewhere struggling to convert metaphors into standard sentences and giving up halfway through. In that way, being walled off from more story is actually kind of preferable, though the story missions offer the most direct access to progress, so...

This game is very good. It sucks. I'll keep talking about it, and dipping in and out of it, as long as the internet discourse deems it entertaining.

#6: Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition

I feel like a lot of critics are having their cake and eating it too my throwing this into year end lists after doing so in 2013, 2014 or 2016 as well...but I kind of get where they're coming from. More importantly, I think this game's interminable-til-now development schedule works a bit in its favor. To wit: I've only finished Act IV (and the interwoven interludes) on this year's PS4 release, but did so in a single day, and kind of hated it yet really want to talk to everyone I know about it. Spoiler alert: nobody I know plays video games other than my sister, who will never play this game, so you, dear reader, get to be my Everyone I Know.

Remember Virginia? That game wanted to be an interactive Twin Peaks episode and sucked for it. I've never seen Twin Peaks, but I'm assured it sucks by a Twin Peaks superfan who played/viewed the game alongside me (I may not know game players, but I know how to sucker people into watching me play games). If you don't, KRZ reminds me a lot of Virginia. It also reminds me of Flashback, of Grim Fandango, of Full Throttle (weirdly enough!) and of Spiritfarer. At one point, you're literally on a large boat, seeming to ferry lost souls to their Great Beyond.

...But I guess I don't know if that's actually the point. You see, what starts (or started) as a very barebones adventure game in which a generic old white guy maybe-dad wanders around an environment reacting to the things the Hand of God asks him to react to eventually meanders into a thing in which perspective shifts from minute to minute - entire scenes are played out from the perspective of characters you never meet, while others cleverly play with player choice - and art-piece interludes primarily meant to sate Kickstarter and Patreon backers but are now integral to the experience can wander along forever...shit, I just played this game today, got to where I am in seven hours or so and I am beat.

Late in the game voice acting is added to certain esoteric bits and it made me realize something I probably already knew - my alcohol, marijuana and podcast-added brain is so beyond (or beneath) reading books that I'm missing something purely by not hearing these people speak these things. I think the playwright aspects of this game's storytelling are super interesting, but as much as I love Glengarry Glen Ross or Fences I'm not reading their scripts when I'm bored. And this game ain't them, anyway. The language is beautiful most of the time and the way these guys toy with perspective in certain expansive scenes is certainly a cool use of cinematography in games, but there is just this thing that maybe Act V and the interludes sandwiching it (if you've played this game, that was funny) can not do thanks to its largely text-based approach and long run time, which is make me truly care.

On the other hand, you can tell these developers cared more about this more than anyone other than perhaps, let's trope, Toru Iwatani developing Pac-Man. Games sure have come a long way.

#5: DOOM ETERNAL

No, I'm kidding. I hated this. I played DOOM 2016 to the halfway point in anticipation, then played it to completion (and a decent amount of DOOM II on the Doom Slayer's personal computer) to cleanse my palate afterward. But I get some people loved this one.

#5: Vampyr

So I'll take this time to acknowledge a game I was late to and yet want so much more of. Initially, this game sucks. The combat is a true definition of awful without upgrades and the Good Weapons. There are multiple moments in which you really just want to get past one bit to find out what the next is, and much like Spiritfarer there's a mid-game revelation that you don't need to mind Vampyr's systems nearly as much as it lets on. The main character's sister is the game's most compelling character and villain yet barely rates in its 40 hour runtime.

...And yet, the charm never stops coming. Sure, this game came out in 2018 and was properly regarded as a messy attempt at all that it is, but in 2020 this game just hit different. A lot of writers and publications have searched for the game from 2020 that perfectly encapsulated this year, but Dontnod nailed it two years ago. This video game ultimately ends in the way video games do, and that bit is a stinker, but the journey along the way felt so eerily of our time I couldn't look away, put the controller down or even get bored by all the random doors that led to Bloodborne-at-launch level load times. This game is wicked good, and wicked average, and I want more of it.

#4: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

I'll hold my breath here. I juggled Spider-Man between No. 3 and No. 1 through the end of 2018, and I can't exactly recall where I let it land, but this game is just more of that with an equally awesome hero. I reject that it's a more focused adventure - all the same side content is there, and nearly as much of it - the story is just a little less fleshed out, a little less lived in, a little less breathable. And yet! Spider-Man is still the proper expansion of Batman's videogame fight style, Nadji Jeter is wonderfully charming as Miles and I suppose there's no forced stealth sections (which were not bad, just slow) to contend with. It attempts to do some Naughty Dog stuff and proves how hard that is to pull off while also offering a villain that Jeff Gerstmann felt sucked awesomely while I felt he sucked generically. All that to say - they made a worse version, IMO, of a game I already loved almost unconditionally, and so I mostly love this version unconditionally as well.

The next game better let players choose between both Spider-Men throughout the story.

#3: Final Fantasy VII Remake

I just realized I was booking myself into a hole with this pick, until I suddenly realized I had a way out of it...so! My third favorite game of this year is this one! I personally hated the house fight, and there's been so much ink- and audio-spilled over how dull many of the sidequests are...but there's also that drag dance, an oddly compelling fitness mini-game (or two), the most memorable summon provider of the year, some weird cowboy whose purpose I barely remember but whose visage I still can conjure at will and all those neatly indescribable scenes in which NPCs looked like Final Fantasy XII characters while the background looked like a Final Fantasy X pre-render down-rendered and the player character(s) looked like Playstation 5 test cases...this game was cool.

But more than those novelties, it found a way to make a five hour section of a 60-hour game its own 60 hour experience - and an enjoyable one! - with relative ease while translating what was exhilarating about turn-based combat in the '90s when most other alternatives were beat 'em up or shoot 'em up in nature into an active system that both made a fool of sister series Kingdom Hearts while also offering an olive branch to the future of its parent franchise.

And then there's that ending. Personally, I thought it was stupid. Like, profoundly so. And yet. If this is going to be a 19-part series, drawn out over the rest of our nostalgia-addled lives, what better way to leave Midgar than (let me dance around it...) Will She or Won't She? Square-Enix turned the fate of She Who Shall Not Be Named into a Rachel + Ross situation (that's NBC Universal's Friends property, kids) and avoided making an absolute joke out of it, no small feat in an experiment attempting to turn video games' Darth Vader Reveal into an utter unknown. That alone is enough for inclusion in a blog struggling (and, look above, failing!) to name 10 games of 2020 as the best of that year, but that it is done so confidently, brazenly and, well, interestingly is enough to make a game that presents itself as a nostalgia commodity one of the truly great games from this year or any other.

#2: Ghost of Tsushima

I apologize, I intimated the stakes were high previously, but halfway through realized I had exactly two games left to mention. This was the one I forgot; perhaps appropriate for a game about "ghosts"! I would've never expected to find this game here, even if it satisfies a lot of things I've mostly ignored in this generation: I admit that big maps with lots of icons on it is something I've experienced through The Witcher 3, and then kind of through Grand Theft Autos, Mass Effect Andromeda, Watch_Dogses and so on, but when I took a dip in the specifically Ubisoft version of this pool I often found a distaste for it pretty quickly (I beat the former two, I hated the latter series both approaches). Tsushima felt right.

That's not to say it's activity feed is not oppressive. I came to resent the birds and foxes that littered its game world. So too did I realize (prior to Lethal Mode) that I was clearing camps primarily due to a desire to clear fog on the map as much as save my people. And I'm pretty adamant that the politics of this game are misguided - I wanted Jin to fully reject his social status in favor of collaborators like Yuna or Ryuzo, let alone the true side characters that went unnamed or at least un-Wiki mentionable. It's a game that often rejects colonialism explicitly and yet is so tethered to feudalism those goals are nearly rendered moot.

...Yet still, Lethal mode came out and it was wild good. The multiplayer mode dropped and I dropped off of it fairly quickly, but it was also wild good. In so many ways this was a generic game on paper and yet again and again it made sure to write on paper of impeccable stock. Sucker Punch found a way to translate inFamous' various combat styles into an Arkham Asylum context that was both a bit rote and many times over exciting in a way that kept rewarding players for hours and hours. It approached cosmetics in a tastefully useless yet useful way that kept me bouncing around uniforms depending on my needs at the time (yea, we who played probably all spent too much time in the ones that made side activities more obvious) without making the core game more tedious because I forgot which robe I was wearing.

Fans coalesced around this game in a weird and dare I say it unhealthy way, but damn if it didn't mostly, weirdly deserve that.

#1: The Last of Us Part II

The game we'll see on less critics' lists and more users' lists than perhaps any other game in the history of game of the year blogs.

The game that proved video games have a long way to go in narrative storytelling on the heels of the game the proved videogames were here to stay as a storytelling medium.

The game that completely rejected what players have come to expect from direct sequels in favor of...kind of totally giving players that game, just 15 hours into it and concerning characters completely unconcerned with the previous game that had set player expectations.

I could, or could have, spent the entirety of this blog espousing how many ways I think this game is brilliant as a game, or how it challenges reader expectations as a story, or how it fails in many ways at both things. But I don't want to do that.

Instead, I just want to say that I didn't need to run from COVID in 2020, I needed to confront it. And I didn't need to avoid my angriest impulses toward certain reactions to this pandemic in the Americas, I needed to confront them. And I didn't want to forget how fun Metal Gear Solid V was prior to its always-online updates, I wanted a reminder of how adaptable sandbox level design can be when given time to stew.

Most importantly, I just needed to bask in the totality of a Naughty Dog game (again, and again) this year, and I'm willing to overlook all the narrative question marks, questionable character motivations and somewhat goofy drifts into Capital V Videogames during both campaigns (eh, spoiler?) that undermine the thematic heights of those drifts...that I don't care how much of a problem this game was for some people.

I want to talk about it until I die.

First of all, apologies for using the phrase "disease of more" in the title of two blogs in a row. Unfortunately I find the phrase applies to so many variations of an idea you otherwise can't articulate - or don't hear argued for - that often: the idea that something can be so good it's bad. As a brief refresher for those unfamiliar with the phrase, it's meant to explain how successful/championship level sports teams manage to become worse without any significant changes to their character other than having previously reached the height of achievement in their sport.

Now, it's reasonable to argue Bioware, unlike Rockstar San Diego, had already experienced this phenomenon prior to Andromeda's release. Mass Effect 3 sacrificed clever, character-driven storytelling in favor of satisfying the series' intimidating premise that a trilogy of games would conclude with tailored responses to all of the questions you'd answered. I've never played the Dragon Age series, but my impression of those games is: the second had a lukewarm reception overall, and Inquisition featured much of the content creep that defines Andromeda's worst impulses while also featuring on many's game of the year lists.

If Inquisition had a lot, at least it seemed to have had All That on Bioware's usual terms. Andromeda, meanwhile, is a singularly exhausting experience. Even after several patches allowing for things like semi-normal facial animation, skipping the transition scene between each and every planet (but not system) in the galaxy and whatever else they fixed, two years later Andromeda suffers from a fantastic amount of bloat. One can't help but wonder if this team had just focused on one aspect of their game - mainly, the colonization of a new system - if they wouldn't have been onto something truly special.

Why did I complete Andromeda? Well, like Jeff said to Brad during a podcast a couple weeks after the game's release in response to Brad's lamenting he had played - and would continue to play - far more Andromeda than he'd ever expected to, I was looking for one more hit of Good Mass Effect. Personally, I found the opening hour highly compelling, actually. I loved how high the stakes were while also being contained within a small bubble of a story. I was upset when the father died because it was interesting to consider a Mass Effect in which your character's opinion isn't the one everyone in the galaxy abides by.

I think people forget how unique that first hour feels for a Bioware game because the following hours quickly diffuse that notion as alien creatures immediately understand the five separate languages of human, turian, krogan, salarian, asari and angaara (and this isn't hand-waved away until some small side dialogue sprinkled across side quests) and the player character quickly becomes a known quantity. I wish the idea of a "Pathfinder" had been a confusing notion for the native races throughout the storyline.

I also found the final two hours to be a neat return to that dark, small sort of space. I won't spoiler tag here, because I've said The Final Two Hours - The Final Two Hours. The writing doesn't muscle any of these ideas across the goal line necessarily, nor do the cutscenes sell any of what's going on, but Bioware had some ideas there. Archon severing Ryder's connection to SAM, Ryder nearly killing herself to awaken the Remnant fleet (after already dying three separate times only to be revived by SAM), all the colonies making a push on Meridian, and the hints of DLC to come...it's almost enough to forget that I ignored the main storyline for nearly 25 hours to hunt a bunch of outcast settlements down, track dozens of quests that had me jumping from planet to Nexus to planet to Tempest as if space travel and load times were inconsequential.

Andromeda opened enough interesting spaces that it's actually a bit sad the whole thing got shut down. If I could argue Red Dead Redemption was the Worst Good Game due to its long development cycle allowing its teams to overthink certain aspects of their game, Andromeda is famously a game that's Just Good Enough set in a universe that deserves far better, hamstrung by a publisher that unlike Take Two would rather half-bake a thing and get its money back than make sure the quality is there.

Is the writing bad? Kinda. Yes, mostly. Is the acting bad? It's certainly boring! Are the cutscenes hard to understand by modern standards? For sure. Is the combat a saving grace? Actually, it's kind of awkward, though Singularity + Charge + Nova + Krogan Hammer is still an endlessly satisfying loop. Still, there is something there in the general setting/theme of the game, the opening and the closing hours, and just taking some time to be in a world where they say a bunch of Mass Effect Words that it's disarmingly easy to overlook just how big a waste of time this game is. Queuing up a podcast, turning on subtitles, turning down the volume and just going with it is a little too much like comfort food, bad for your health and just mildly satisfying enough to take another bite.

I feel like the question of whether Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth it on any of its many deep discount sales comes up every time its on sale; I say buy it! I bought this game for $7.99 nearly a year ago on PSN and only just gathered the strength to play it during the lapse between Mass Alex season 1 and 2 because I don't have a working controller for my PS3 to play the original series. I wrung 70-80 hours out of this mess and only really ever hated myself because the mob had made me feel like I should. Will this game make you lament the fact that no truly great Mass Effect game is scheduled for any time soon? Yes, but it might also make you a bit disappointed in how fierce the reaction was to this game initially.

The team at Bioware Montreal famously received mock reviews in the 80+% range and breathed a sigh of relief, content that the game they'd made wouldn't be what fans were expecting, but like the leap from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 they would be able to polish their rough edges and deliver a work worthy of the promise the IP offered. Having finally played Andromeda, I unexpectedly find myself wishing that were still the future of the franchise.

It may have been a cheap trick, the final revelations of SAM and the Ryder Family Secrets paired with the hints at DLC during the epilogue, but I can't help myself pondering over who the benefactor is and why the last ark became so difficult to track down. I also am totally interested in where my choices would have led - SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS - as I let the salarian ark's traitor go free in exchange for his information about the kett, accepted the Primus' kill code and used it, made the Moshae ambassador and let Sloane maintain rule over Reyes. Who knows whatever choices I forget - weirdly, though the game treated almost all of these flatly and unceremoniously (often without any musical cues at all!) I still care about them.

Damn this brand and its inherent goodness. I hope it comes back, even if it sucks again.

Fans of the site have obviously debated ad nauseam those hard RDR 2 turns on the Beastcast. Likewise, anyone following the discourse surrounding this game online has probably noticed that while the critical consensus seemed to have Rockstar's latest opus pegged for Game of the Year material, not even a week after the game's release consumer response was much rockier. It's been interesting to watch the critics slowly drift closer to the center, unable to take back the concrete evidence that RDR 2, alongside Rockstar's own GTA V, is the best-reviewed PS4 game of all-time. I am far from a skeptic of video game criticism; of all the mediums, I find it to be the most challenging to critique in an even-handed and curious way without struggling to not sound like an entitled dweeb, someone who entirely missed the point or like someone who could never recognize why a game may or may not be for someone else at all. I admire anyone who pursues it as either hobby or career.

[Obviously, spoilers to follow.]

But as I settled into my seventh hour with Red Dead Redemption II nearly a month ago, there were two feelings I could not shake. One: holy shit, this is incredible. Two: I feel lied to. Over the next seventy hours, I realized that I hadn't actually been misled by the slow trickle of previews in the weeks leading up to its release, nor were the reviews entirely wrong in their presentation of the game's systems. Rather, I'd allowed myself to be swept up in the flowery ways Rockstar's combination of systems were described by writers as a sort of revolution in open world design rather than a culmination. The one that was really sticking with me was a line repeated in several previews that Rockstar had blurred the lines between primary and secondary content; in reality, everything remained fractured in classic Rockstar fashion, only this time the secondary content was far more fascinating and engaging than the primary story.

Jess Joho spells this out spectacularly in a recent article for Mashable that's far angrier at the game than I ever could be. After all, during that week I spent drifting through Chapter 3, completely disinterested in the familial spat between the Brathwaites and the Grays, I was in love. In love due to all the weird side stories I was stumbling into in the woods, all the pelts I was collecting as I learned I could go hunting with three horses in toe for maximum storage, all the locations I was discovering and marveling at and all the one-off side characters I was enamored by. By the time I returned to the group and got the story moving along, I quickly came to the realization that Red Dead Redemption II is one of the most repetitive, half-assed, unengaging campaigns I've played in some time.

By the umpteenth time Dutch said some variation of, "I just need time, and a plan," and Arthur gave some response of, "Oh, I don't know Dutch," or seeing Dutch once again walk around with his arms raised to mid-torso, rings glistening on his wiggling fingers as he smirks and promises you'll only be making a social call, I was just exhausted. It looked great, it sounded incredible, and I wanted nothing at all to do with it. Knowing where everything was headed (both because a friend had spoiled Arthur's story for me at the bar one night and because that's the nature of a prequel) just made me so incredibly exhausted by the cyclical nature of this game's storytelling. Going back to the Joho piece I linked above:

By beginning in the aftermath of a failed robbery, with Dutch and the gang in the midst of moral degradation, the narrative ensures it can do nothing but spin in circles.

We're subjected to (I repeat) a minimum 60 hours of a shitty dude getting shittier, leaving me to wonder whether the people around him are just that stupid, or just that poorly written. Arthur is left with nothing to do but say 1,001 variations of "I dunno, man, I feel like we already tried that one."

Before doing the same shit again anyway.

Which brings me back around to my time in Chapter 3, and the Epilogue. Despite the costumes you can unlock mostly looking super stupid, the game's lack of a power curve not making a compelling argument for completing those challenges and hunts in the first place, the arduous camp site / homestead chores, the countless number of systems that are arbitrary, meaningless or not even consistently applied to the game (isn't it weird that there is suddenly so much imposed fast travel during the epilogue?)...despite lovable characters embarking on a dumbass story, all I wanted to do was trot to my next objective. All I wanted to do was get off my horse, grab its reins and walk it through town. Get back to camp by nightfall so I could get everyone's opinions on the past day, eat some food (hey, you can just hold R2 to drink your soup or coffee all at once), go to sleep, wake up and change clothes before wrangling up my three horses and going back on another hunt for those meaningless pelts.

And then that epilogue. Was it sloppy? Hell yes. Marston meets characters Morgan met who react to Marston as if he was the same guy. The two enemy factions were shoehorned in and absolutely unnecessary. Charles was...man, I had issues with Charles all throughout the game. But that epilogue was everything I wanted out of this game otherwise. I walked everywhere, I did my farm chores every day (the most efficient route will have you producing eggs and milk to take to market, chopping wood and distributing water in nearly a full day, from roughly 8am to 5pm), I made sure my hair and beard didn't grow out too long so that I never deviated too far from John's look in RDR 1. I began fantasizing about an epilogue to the epilogue in which Red Dead Redemption suddenly became Stardew Valley.

As the camera came in on John and Abigail standing on their future gravesites, waxing idyllic about their ranching futures, I wanted to live in that fantasy with them. I wanted to rebuild the gang camp as a group of law abiding ranch-hands, make deals with nearby and far away ranches and towns to trade goods and services and build my ranch up into the best in all of West Elizabeth. I got caught up in this sudden fantasy that the campaign of RDR2 was half as long as it was; no Guarma, half as many half-assed villains and half-assed plots, half as many circular, token Rockstar-style travel dialogue where every character comes off like they hate each other's guts...and then, for no good reason other than I was lusting after it, a farming simulator with all the clunky, limited systems I'd come to master over the previous 70 hours.

---------------------

"The Disease of More" is an idea coined by basketball coach Pat Riley. In summary, Riley argues that once a team achieves the highest accomplishment in their field (ie. a championship, or the best reviewed or best selling game of all-time) the "more" they're pursuing begins to matriculate outside of the task at hand. What was once just a championship is now endorsement deals, record breaking contracts, starting new businesses, individual achievements, etc. Things that the outside observer may not care about - horse testicles, weather systems, weird hand-to-hand combat, nearly 600 animal species and survival mechanics - that prove the champs' worth to themselves, ultimately taking for granted what got them to that level in the first place.

I like Rockstar's shooting system (though the removal of the ability to swap enemies with the right stick from GTA V is an awkward, bad design choice) and I love the world, but once the game allows you to break away from it and fantasize about all the other things it could have been - a farming game, a hunting game, a dating game, a camp building game - coming back to the thing you originally came for - the story of the Van der Linde Gang - is a bit of a bummer. And then it's a slog. And then it just. won't. end.

Red Dead Redemption II is a great experience, my personal favorite experience with a video game I had this year. I am still thinking about an old lady I came across alone in her cabin, or a brother and sister I shared some not-so-innocent swigs of moonshine with, or a couple of passed out, drunk thieves hanging out in the basement of a house off the coast of Van Horn, or the time I stumbled across the Murfree Brood's cave and cleared it out dozens of hours before it became a plot point, saving a young woman in the process. I think I saw someone else say on these very forums that RDR 2 is perhaps the best argument for "video games as art" yet due to the wildly different reactions players are having to it, but I also think it's a wonderful entry in that argument because the best things about it are peripheral, oftentimes even brought to the game entirely by the player rather than the game itself.

But it finds its way to being a great experience by being the opposite of so much of what makes a great video game in 2018. It's slow, unresponsive, obtuse, full of systems and ideas that don't matter at all. Nothing is more annoying than upgrades that mean nothing, and as one member of the Game Informer staff says late in their RDR 2 spoilercast, "we're taught to appreciate these wheels of satisfaction in video games, and this game fucking throws those wheels in a fire and pours gasoline on it."

Somehow, myself and that person fell in love with that concept, wanting more of all the things that weren't actually in the game, but you could imagine they were if you squinted hard enough, and you could pretend they were there if you let yourself sink in. Red Dead Redemption II was simultaneously the best and worst experience I had with a game this year, completely underwhelming narratively compared to its predecessor and aggressively antagonistic from a gameplay perspective compared to any other great gaming experience released this year. Yet I can think of no other game that deserves to be talked about so exhaustively from this year, no other game that constantly caught me by surprise along the margins and took my breath away with every ridge I rode over or stream I walked along. It is both perfect and an utter dumpster fire.

Anyway, I'm halfway through the Golden Ridge section of Celeste and I think it's got me beat. Pretty incredible game, though.