2018 is an extremely weird year to rank. As someone who doesn't own a Switch or a PS4 - and am operating on a thin budget - my year was divided between two enormous, 80+ hour games and two dozen short indie titles. It's weird to compare and contrast the infinite shiny racing game and the twenty minute PS1 psychological horror Thirty Flights of Loving-like, but, well, here we are.
To Be Added: Wandersong, Pandemic, Frostpunk
I've played and replayed IO Interactive's Hitman games for years now, and never once has an entry in the series felt quite as complete as Hitman 2. Besides the inclusion of the Hitman 2016 levels, all newly remastered with additional detail, it follows, for the first time in series history, a narrative that connects many of the disparate narrative themes woven incongrously from game to game since the year 2000. Every single Hitman game up to this point has been a clear attempt at reinvention, with the hopes of widening a niche playerbase; Hitman 2, in contrast, feels like the product of a confident studio with nothing to prove.
There's always been a disparity between the larger, better-remembered Hitman titles and their more experimental sequels. The original Hitman 2, subtitled Silent Assassin, featured levels that felt classically cinematic, or that at least pulled from the ether of assassin fiction writ large. There's a mansion occupied by the Italian mob, a shootout in an old church, and a motorcade sniper assassination. You could easily map any of these missions onto any similar action franchise; Silent Assassin and Blood Money in particular, while excellent, can feel like staged recreations of classic scenes from action films, a kind of greatest hits of assassin fiction.
Silent Assassin's follow up, Hitman: Contracts, was more esoteric. The opening mission is a monochrome fever dream escape from the cloning facility which built 47, which leads to a level featuring a leather orgy/rave in a slaughterhouse, which itself leads to a mission in which 47 infiltrates a weapons deal on a beached warship in Russia. I deeply prefer *this* style of level Hitman level design, which allow you to explore unusual spaces, spaces which in turn have more in the way of the little side stories and unusual methods of problem solving that make the series special.
Hitman 2 is the contemporary AAA realization of this style of Hitman title. The first main mission of the game begins with the inspired choice of a NASCAR simulacra in Miami, Florida. It is without question one of the most perfect levels in the history of the franchise. It nails that unique sense of wanting to peak behind the curtain of a familiar space, and the ultimate feeling of satisfaction when you can so deeply subjugate the clockwork level design that your target is, say, doing a poisoned shot of Jaegermeister with you in the race’s winner’s circle.
There’s the Mumbai map, which was you stalking a skeevy Bollywood producer on the set of his latest big budget debacle. A rival assassin has taken residence in an apartment building and set up a perfectly positioned sniper’s nest in one of the film’s production offices – except, the target needs incentive to enter his office. Another target owns a sweatshop across town in which an inattentive middle manager allows his employees to be worked into the ground. Perhaps, if one were to take up the middle manager’s position, a drastic improvement in work conditions could incentivize a public appearance from the target…
There is also, of course, the fictional Isle of Sgail, Hitman 2’s satiric crown jewel. In short, it’s a castle full of the world’s 0.1%, burning money for fun and discussing their various escape plans from global warming. The targets in this one are a bit more straightforward, but the space is a tremendous cartoon of class stereotype.
All of this is to say, Hitman 2’s levels are *flavorful*. The act of solving these puzzles doesn’t feel like finding the B inbetween the A and the C as in past entries – this time each hit is a series of surprises, one more unbelievable than the next, right up until you realize exactly what needs to be done to accomplish the mission. These levels don’t feel like homages to other fiction. Instead, they feel like brand new, innovative entries in an established canon. It makes for a less iconic game, sure, but also a far less forgettable one.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a compelling mystery that redefines our relationship with the murder mystery novel. In a murder mystery novel, besides the act of simply digesting the plot as it unfolds, there's also the indirect game being played between author and reader. The murder mystery author isn't only telling a story, but building a puzzle. Successful mystery novels feature two basic types of clues that resolve the story's central mystery: the obvious clues the reader is led to by the narrative explicitly, and implied or hidden clues interlaced in the rest of the narrative, there for the reader to compile and review after the solution to the mystery has been presented.
Return of the Obra Dinn game-ifies this 'hidden' mechanic in mystery novels - it is the subtext of the murder mystery author/murder mystery reader relationship made explicit. The game leads the player to certain mysteries and solutions like a horse to water, but the game's most difficult mysteries can't be solved without diligent review on the player's part. There is no 'second read' in Obra Dinn in which all the subtle clues read as obvious later - the Obra Dinn only reveals its final mysteries and the full gist of its narrative once the player/reader has done the work of demonstrating a perfect understanding of each unsolved case.
The game's demand of the player to execute a cohesive timeline for each crew members' end extends beyond plot comprehension; Obra Dinn's ambitions are greater than that. If Obra Dinn was simply a perfectly executed murder mystery plot it would be great, but what makes it special is that revealing the plot information using this mechanic also forces the player to reach a comprehensive understanding of who each of the deceased crew members were, as regular people. Our relationship with the Obra Dinn's crew begins at the casual morbidity of running a human being's death against a corporate spreadsheet that either awards financial restitution to a grieving family or a final blow to a thankless life, but it ends somewhere else.
We learn about their various motivations and alliances, but we also learn about their humanity. We get to observe these people at work, what they like to do in their spare time, the kinds of friends they tend to make. It's this humanity to Obra Dinn that elevates it. To watch Return of the Obra Dinn's end credits isn't just to feel the satisfaction of solving a puzzle, but to see the bitter end of the lives of working people; to see someone best-laid plans and dreams unfurl into tragedy, and to feel empathy for even the most treacherous of the game's cast.
I played Donut County in a single sitting. It’s VERY good, and very funny. I’ve heard quite a few people discuss the ‘way too millennial sensibilities’ of Donut County – these people are bitter and not to be trusted!! This is a game in which a racoon – who correctly assumes almost everything in this world is trash – attempts to fill out an encyclopedia of human objects called the Trashopedia. Just like the rest of the game, it’s heavily inspired by Katamari Damacy to the point of copy cat-ing, but so gloriously stupid that I love it anyway. Every entry is perfect.
I think once I get around to deciding who the character of the year is I’ll be tempted to sensibly place Sadie Adler from Red Dead at the top spot, or maybe the lovable underhog (wow I just thought of that I AM A GENIUS) Borman from Mutant Year Zero, but I will be lying, because it’s BK that is closest to my heart. It’s probably just that I love Ben Esposito’s rapidfire-ridiculous sense of humor, but I love that small garbage raccoon and his Trashopedia. I love his Trashopedia so much, I want to *eat* his Trashopedia, because it is perfect. My favorite entries are below:
Cool Snake: Alive spaghetti with the ability to hate.
Popcorn: Corn that was punished.
City Building: Some apartments don’t allow pets, but you can keep bats if you pretend to be upset about it.
Gecko (small): If I had sticky feet I’d walk on the ceiling and scream.
And hey, side note: this game has an INCREDIBLE soundtrack. I listened to Donut County's soundtrack outside of the context of the game so much I forgot it was video game music. The game's final boss fight uses the same synthesizer-vocal effect used in the theme from Policenauts, which is an EXTREMELY cool thing to do.
I find it impossible to discuss Red Dead Redemption 2 without conjuring both glowing hyperbole and disappointment. If I had to catalogue my 90 hour playthrough, I’d say: Red Dead Redemption 2 is 40 hours of immersive western drama, 30 hours of unnecessary but still quite good content, and 20 hours of mashing the A button and staring off into space as I rode a horse from one place to the next. Those 40 hours are blissful, game of the year quality material…but those 20 hours with the horse are *unforgivable*.
Some people like slow travel, and I respect that. In certain games I prefer long, quiet trips too, but in Red Dead – well, you don’t really get long, quiet trips. Plenty of people will describe this game as too deliberate with too little happening, but that’s not quite right. Instead, random events occur everywhere, all the time. I can’t think of a single trip I took in the entirety of my lengthy playthrough in which I didn’t see a man get mauled by a wolf, or a gang try to rob me, or someone get their leg trapped under a dead horse, or an aggressive woman beg me to race her in the opposite direction I was traveling in. It’s not long and deliberate, then, but full of noise. It’s the worst of both worlds, in a sense: you don’t get to have your gritty cowboy fantasy of living off the land without a cartoon shootout erupting, and you don’t get to simply enjoy the story or side content at a reasonable pace.
I think about these twenty hours and I’m mad, more at myself than anything, that I spent so much time doing something I didn't want to. But then, I think about those 40 hours. I think about taking that photograph in the game’s epilogue, I think about the simmering tension in the camp in the late game, I think about drinking with Lenny, I think about taking Mary to a vaudeville show, I think about the long walks I took through San Denis – voluntarily, I took walks in this video game with no objective in mind other than to sightsee because this game is so fucking gorgeous it's turned me into a virtual tourist – and I realize those 20 slow, horse-poopin’ hours are the price I had to pay to enjoy the rest of the game. It’s punishing in a very ‘eat your vegetables’ kind of way, except the vegetables have, uh, no nutrients. And the desert is world class. This is a good metaphor.
I digress. The math dictates I spent more time loving Red Dead than I did swearing under my breath about it, so I’ll make this clear now: Red Dead Redemption 2 is great. Arthur is a phenomenal, far more layered and complex protagonist than Rockstar has ever written. Literally dozens of moments occurred in this game in which I was just stunned at the craftsmanship on display. I can’t forgive Red Dead 2 for being so infuriatingly deliberate, but I can’t help but feel that everyone who stopped short on this one after the opening hours is missing out.
Prey: Mooncrash
I'm still amazed about how good this turned out to be. It turns out, forcing survival sim mechanics and a rogue-like structure overtop of Prey's shock-like mechanics was not, in fact, a desperate attempt at driving sales to an underperforming title by slapping popular mechanics on the front of it - instead, the rogue-like structure and asynchronous storytelling fit so neatly with the rest of Prey that it almost feels like the game should have just been Mooncrash from the start.
I'm someone who loves procedurally generated content and enjoys the structure of roguelikes, but I NEVER finish games in either category. Even ones I love! Spelunky has always taken the cake for me as the 'perfect' roguelike, but I couldn't bring myself to see the end of that game. With Mooncrash, it would've been harder to pull myself away from the game then back into it.
Mooncrash is so elegant in design that it made me re-examine what makes a rogue-like or a proc-gen title worth developing in the first place. Prey has the same problem as the BioShock/System Shock series it draws inspiration from, in that it gives you this broad and dynamic toolset designed to solve problems that frankly would be more easily solved with either a big gun or the right vent to crawl through. The stakes of having just one life, an inability to plan what might be around the next corner, and a timer that ticks down the minutes before the game either doubles in difficulty or ends forced me to respond to problems organically. It's rare, especially in the early goings of Mooncrash, that you'll have all the tools - or, even, all the information about the world around you that you'll need to brute force a path to the goal.
The end result is Mooncrash starts to simulate the most harrowing moments from movies like Aliens or The Thing - you're stumbling around a corner with a broken leg, your only available tools a wrench, a pistol with 14 shots and a single EMP grenade only to run smack into a huge, gooey Typhon. Unlike the main game, in which you'll either save scum your way into smacking it with your stupid wrench or (more likely) you just run the hell away and wait, but in Mooncrash there's no time to hide and you may well not be equipped to kill it. You might instead, say, stun it with the grenade, break a nearby window to leap into another room, hide in a storage closet, and throw some junk you find on the ground into an adjacent office to trick the monster into investigating some place you aren't.
The restraints on your abilities don't *feel* like restraints, in other words - they feel freeing! Without a perfect, low-effort solution to most problems, Mooncrash encourages you to be creative and think your way out of problems, breathing so much life into the tired Shock formula.
I am powerless to resist Paratopic. It’s got: PS1 graphics that invoke psychological horror, pacing that resembles Thirty Flights of Loving, a soundtrack that recalls John Carpenter, FUN dialogue trees, moody drives through a hellscape and liberal use of the word “friendo.” It’s the full package.
When I was a kid, I owned both a Playstation and an N64 because I was spoiled. I loved games, but that specific era of technology produced grimy, block-shaped graphics that left a lot to the imagination. In the right hands, you can make some *real* unsettling art with this aesthetic. It’s easy to be scared by something you can’t truly see.
Paratopic reminds me of one of my all time favorite games, Lone Survivor, which used blown out, hyper zoomed in pixel art to reduce monsters to writhing, shambling collections of shapes. They were unknowable, and therefore creepy in spite of the otherwise quaint technology. Paratopic hits closer to the bone for me, as I grew up very much afraid of certain PS1/N64 games. There’s something sharp and unrelenting about enemies even in non-horror games like Turok or Defcon 5, and Arbitrary Metric have tapped into that vein expertly.
It’s also just generally speaking an excellent mood piece. After completing this game once I had to immediately play it again, partially because I wanted to better understand the plot, but also partially because I just wasn’t ready for it to be over.
A breath of fresh air in a difficult year, Florence is a romantic comedy brimming with personality and spirit. I love this game. Without a single spoken word, Florence communicates more about finding yourself in your twenties – the joyless repetition of an office job, the dreams set aside, the feeling of escaping into your headphones to get respite for just a moment or two – than nearly anything I’ve seen, read, or played in recent memory. I say ‘almost’ because, fortunately for everyone under 35, Greta Gerwig exists.
Contrasted with intentionally bloated AAA titles like Fallout 76 and Red Dead Redemption 2, Florence also feels like one of the *smartest* games of the year. This is a game without any wasted space whatsoever. Its gameplay mechanics are largely metaphoric, and always charming. My favorite scene in the game is the one in which Florence goes on a first date with her crush. The player is tasked with making small talk by filling a speech bubble with a half dozen misshapen puzzle pieces. Doing so is awkward, and requires attention to detail. As the date goes on and the two develop a rapport, the puzzle pieces become larger and easier to fit together until they no longer require attention from the player at all; the conversation begins to flow thoughtlessly, naturally.
This moment is not only brilliant – it’s also cute. How often can you apply the word cute to a game mechanic? Not so often! At least, not since that Boy and His Blob remake with the hug button was released.
I guess I would be doing Tetris Effect a disservice by calling it the most transformational experience I've ever had playing Tetris. The long and the short of it is, Tetris Effect is an *emotional* journey - it's a rousing, exciting challenge for casual puzzle fans like me, too, but it's a staggering, weird, transcendent experience, and that's what made it such a fixation among critics at the time of release. It's a pure distillation of Tetris' mechanics that also acts as a complex art piece. It's simple, but that push and pull of Tetris Effect's challenge mixed with the implied narrative of each stage really does hit home.
I played Tetris Effect via the Tetris Effect: Connected upgrade, which adds a phenomenal suite of multiplayer modes to accompany the original game's single player narrative. These are great, but there's something so singular about Tetris Effect's original 'story' mode that I honestly couldn't bring myself to return to it so soon. Completing Tetris Effect feels like a moment - it feels like, at the end of Tetris Effect, your game console should grow wings, say goodbye in your native language, and fly off into space.
Mutant Year Zero’s cover art *screams* derivative, but at the end of the year it was the only game I regularly wanted to play. A lot of that comes from how friendly the developers have managed to make XCOM-style combat, but mostly I just can’t help but love Borman, Dux and Farrow. But mostly Borman. I *love* Borman. He’s a squat pig man who is a gruff war-hardened mercenary. There’s a level in which the crew stumbles onto a camp ground with a cartoon drawing of a moose advertised on a billboard, which is popularly referred to as ‘the horned demon’ by post-apocalypse dwellers. With no irony whatsoever, Borman asserts that the horny demon can blow him, which is just such a *thing* to say for a gruff pig mercenary.
He’s also relatable! There’s one optional high difficulty dungeon that is littered with bodies in its first few rooms. When you see them, Borman immediately says ‘OK I’m just gonna say it: this is like *really* scary.’
Borman: he’s great!
Also, who knew stealth would work so naturally in a genre like this? Granting the player the ability to decide when the game becomes a traditional turn based RPG is a smarter way to handle those old fashioned mechanics than almost any other game in the genre I’ve played.
LIS 2 Episode 1 doesn’t quite have the tidy singular nature of its prelude, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, but it doesn’t matter: this is one of the most important games of the year. Many developers do what they can to make the world a friendlier place via queer/POC visibility, but this game is just *about* being a Mexican American in 2016. There are heavier moments of action-drama and the usual LIS paranormal twists, but they only underscore the story Dontnod clearly want to tell. There are threats of calling ICE. There is talk of ‘The Wall.’ None of it is from an armchair. All of it is difficult.
I’d rather not throw out anything on here as a spoiler, so I won’t get too heavily into it, but it’s rare that a game this intense and political is released from a major publisher. I’ll be waiting with baited breath for episode 2.
I have little interest in realistic racing games, even in a passive sense, yet I fell for Forza Horizon 4 hard. It’s a game that wants you to have fun ALL of the time. Even more than past entries, it feels like a game produced by a studio who are masters at their craft and cannot WAIT to show you the next cool thing they made. There are so few negative vibes in this game it borders on suspicious.
Even though the entirety of Forza 4 takes place on a single land mass that is comparatively tiny to other open world titles, each race is so carefully handcrafted and full of interesting turns and difficult terrain, you’d never notice.
One criticism: the radio in this game fucking BLOWS. It’s filled with dance music hits from literally a decade ago. There is a dance remix of MGMT’s Kids, which I find personally offensive. Do the right thing, new Forza players: turn that nonsense off and throw on your own playlist or podcast.
There comes a point in every Zelda game in which I get completely lost. Maybe I needed to grab some key from the last dungeon or deliver a letter to a shopkeeper someplace else to proceed, but I missed all that and am now literally mashing the A button to concuss Link to death on a wall, because in video games, suicide is preferable to boredom.
Minit is a 2D-Zelda style game where that sense of being lost is the point – except, unlike Zelda, the loop of being given an objective, rolling into a wall and stumbling into an obscure solution happens in a minute or less.
The thing is, I don’t actually *like* when this happens to me in Zelda, OR this game. Minit is just so aesthetically striking, fun and weird that I played through it all anyway. On a (uh) minute to minute basis, Minit is a treasure trove of bizarre discoveries and quirky townsfolk, but by the end it somehow attains the sense that it’s a grand adventure anyhow.
State of Decay is a game in which you get out what you put in. You play as a semi-procedurally generated group of survivors in a zombie outbreak, tasked with building a society in the post apocalypse. There are explicit choices to be made – maybe you’d rather negotiate treaties and unite colonies rather than take siege of places – but there’s only so much in the way of an explicit story. It’s really more about how much you’d like to interpret in the randomly generated nature of the world around you.
I give State of Decay credit for providing me with some of my most memorable moments in gaming this year. The first survivor I recruited, a terse but talented marksmen, repeated to me ad nauseum that we needed to hunt the plaguehearts (a kind of super-zombie generating mass of organs) before we were overwhelmed by the infected. As a player, I was more interested in building bridges with other camps of survivors and was more or less ignoring her requests for weeks. When I finally decided to hunt a plagueheart, my primary survivor (who the game dubbed a ‘sheriff’ due to my playstyle) was exhausted from that day’s work and needed rest. Without thinking about it, I switched to my marksmen and equipped most of the sheriff’s weapons as I set out to finally kill a plagueheart. It was 1 AM in-game. It felt like my marksmen was stealing away in the night, disobeying orders from her leader to get what needed to be done, *done*. The ensuing fight was brutal. Death is permanent in State of Decay, and I had come within a single swipe of losing one of my favorite survivors.
It was thrilling, but I still ended up falling off before I completed the game. Survivors in State of Decay *constantly* demand your attention with problems, and the game is intentionally designed in such a way that you can never please everyone, which is a whole lot like my job IRL. Once I made the connection between State of Decay NPCs and clients at work, I couldn’t shake it. Sorry, everybody in my camp! Hope things turned out swell!
Started this thinking I'd check it out for a date or two, but my partner and I ended up playing Speed Dating for Ghosts almost entirely in a single sitting. It's just so charming and warm-hearted that it's hard to resist. And it makes good on the 'speed dating lost souls' premise! A successful speed date with a ghost will lead to a follow-up date, in which you learn all about the trauma that ties them to the Earth. Even when the game leans the most into horror, the game always gives you a way-in to each of its ghost's humanity and likability. There's something so small and vulnerable about admitting you'd like companionship, and you can't help but attach yourself to each monster pouring their heart out to you.
Dragon Quest XI is the JRPG zenith. Contained within it's languidly paced text is a permutation of every JRPG fairy tale archetype, elegantly repainted for a new generation of fans but also faithful - stringently, theologically faithful - to the core ideals of the genre. Dragon Quest XI is not a game which subverts these core values, but a game that recognizes the best qualities of past JRPG magnum opuses and examines them through every incontestable lens it can; this is a game about standing in the breeze and watching the flowers blossom, not a game that questions the intrinsic value of a monomyth.
Despite my lack of interest in JRPGs generally, Dragon Quest XI is a convincing thesis in the genre's favor. The RPG mechanics are trimmed to their roots, ensuring combat and traversal mechanics are legible even to a newbie like me. The fun of push-and-pull RPG combat and the thrill of dynamic boss fights ending in single digit victories thanks to improvisational stratagem is a good time when every numerical element of the gameplay makes intuitive sense.
Dragon Quest XI makes concessions to modern game design, but only aesthetically. Battles are stop-and-start/turn-based in the tradition of the original Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy or Pokemon games, but the game lets you navigate the full 3D battlefield as you would in an action game during battles anyway, and it does so purely for the player's interest; there's a tool tip that explicitly explains this feature as a 'just for fun' thing, encouraging the player to move characters around either for perspective purposes or even just to make the fight look cooler. That's a weird, chill idea in a genre as stringent as the jrpg.
Dragon Quest XI is a friendly game. It refuses to sacrifice accessibility for complexity, in contrast with every other contemporary JRPG out there, most especially mathematical noise-a-thons like Bravely Default or Xenoblade Chornicles. It's a game that, saving it's final, demanding last act, never once tasks the player with grinding out levels to meet the challenge of a boss fight, instead leaving the option open to customize the difficulty of battle at the player's will. The first two acts of Dragon Quest XI are fun-first, through and through, a happy go lucky jaunt through a Pixar-like, Toriyama-drawn multicultural world. Seeing each new city and getting a feel for its culture was a greater joy than the story or combat, and the game is constantly encouraging the player to chill out with its many quirky NPCs.
The player's ability to divorce themselves from mechanics-first game design is arguably essential to their enjoyment of Dragon Quest XI. I've read multiple articles which accuse this game of 'lacking depth' in its tertiary mechanics, specifically calling out features like the turn based combat's free roaming character placement for lacking a concrete gameplay function of any kind. If you demand every feature in Dragon Quest XI possess a mechanic which either compliments or complicates the core gameplay loop, I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the game.
Dragon Quest XI, in a very Nintendo-ian way, *insists* that the JRPG be simple to understand, and fully commits itself to being the friendliest iteration of a very unfriendly genre of video game. Steering itself away from new innovations in favor of radically beautifying ancient game mechanics is, without any question at all, the game's most all-encompassing intent. There's little subversion here. Dragon Quest XI is the old school, all-welcoming JRPG it advertises itself to be as hard as it can manage to be it. Critics who call out it's relatively threadbare set of gameplay functions are missing the point.
But then, the final act comes around, and it's a doozy. This is a rich, rewarding, clever, and eminently likable game - right up until the end, in which Dragon Quest XI suddenly becomes a completely different JRPG. There's quite a bit of text online about Dragon Quest XI's 'post-game' content, but all of the 'you can just skip all the hyper difficult stuff at the very end!' apologia does not pass the spit test. While I understand Dragon Quest's use of JRPG structure implies there's a clear stopping point somewhere around the 70% complete mark, I can't for the life of me imagine the kind of 'casual' Dragon Quest fan who would somehow stick with the game for 60-70 hours but feel the remaining 30-50 hours of game, most of which contains important story content, are fun extras to be skipped.
I'd go as far as saying the story content of the 'post-game' quests is key to comprehending Dragon Quest XI as a text - and it just so happens to also be a demanding, ludicrously time consuming second trip through some of the game's most difficult and repetitive content. To see this game's true ending, the player must max level every character, complete a second run through almost every dungeon in the entire game, and display a mastery of near every cold, hard, mechanical element of the game which up to that point had been seamlessly blended with narrative.
It's an enormous mis-step in an otherwise gorgeous game. There's so much more here to like than dislike, and I'd recommend Dragon Quest XI to anyone who loves simple but elegant storytelling and has at least a little bit of nostalgia for the difficult JRPGs of decades past - but, I'd only do so with that qualifier.
If you have the patience to see it through, Dragon Quest XI is immensely satisfying - exhausting, but satisfying. It's a milestone JRPG fit to stand alongside FFVII and Chrono Trigger as a hallmark of the genre, even with an asterisk attached.
I generally don’t care about co op shooters, but Vermintide II’s combat feels so good I completed the entire campaign almost twice. Matt Ward also *nailed* the Avengers-ian, ‘4 super heroes up against impossible odds’ script. There are more than enough levels and random elements to make Vermintide II worth replaying again and again, but the real reason to come back is that smashing the low-level enemies is just *so satisfying.* They’re all, like, screaming rat guys who are sopping with sewage matter and y’know what, I like bopping them with my large hammer and I don't care who knows it!!
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a difficult game to discuss - not because it's a particularly bold or challenging game, or because it's especially complex, but because it's fucking *huge.* Odyssey may well be the longest game I've ever played, and despite the fact that the entire experience has been designed to be as friction-less as possible, it's also probably the most arduous game I've ever completed. No matter how thin the conceit of its side quests, no matter how tacked-on its secondary systems are and no matter how interchangeable its *impossibly* huge cast of characters becomes, Odyssey is a video game which simply never stops producing authored narrative content. If you have the same predilections towards what "completing" a narrative game as I do - that completion means "seeing all the authored narrative content" - then Odyssey will surely remain installed on your system of choice for the better part of a year.
Like all Assassin's Creed games, Odyssey produces a luxuriously imagined action movie epic within the confines of a specific period of history, in this case ancient Greece. Odyssey's Greece is a gorgeous, lush, and vibrant world which never fails to amaze. It's a game space which seems incapable of producing aesthetically displeasing spaces in even its most drab of environments.
On the other hand, these spaces are sparsely populated by some of the clunkiest and ham-fisted collectives of NPCs since the original Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed Origins, the preceding title in the series, depicted a hard-scrabble and thoroughly lived-in ancient Egypt. That game placed a conspicuous focus on human labor, community and art, which gave its world a sense of richness Odyssey frankly lacks. To compare the two would be to compare gallery artwork to a postcard.
Odyssey's depiction of history is similarly taciturn. It subverts popular conceptions of famous people and places sometimes, but other times it feels like a transparently ideological re-coloring of a period of history as complicated as any other. I wouldn't put Odyssey's ancient Greece that far from, say, a Doctor Who episode. It knows enough historical trivia to poke fun at Socrates, but is so credulous of the surface-level study of the era that it dips into some truly (accidentally?) nefarious shit in its depictions of historical slavery or in its depiction of Athenian politics. Everything inbetween these interpretive pillars unfortunately just feels like Wikipedia.
Unlike other entries, Odyssey is ultimately glued together by its extremely compelling main character, Kassandra. Kassandra is the best thing to happen to this series since Ezio, bar-none. She possesses unique qualities which make her sort-of hard to ruin in the way other series characters eventually begin to feel predictable and rote. For one, she's a mercenary who knows her worth. It feels important to me that, even as the stakes of the plot grow exponentially bigger and the obstacles in Kassandra's way become more mythic, Kassandra *never stops haggling.* She is a force of nature with a hero's destiny, but she's also pragmatic and generally cynical of power, a perspective which helps elevate some of the game's more rote diversions.
There are also an endless number of vestigal systems which add some fun extra flavor for the first 30 or so hours of play but which also feel dreadful to deal with during the remaining 70-80 hours of play. I know that ratio feels dire, but some of Odyssey's 'innovations' in the genre feel *extremely* ill-advised.
There's the Shadows of Mordor-esque Mercenary system, in which Kassandra regularly is pursued by high-level boss enemies with unique descriptive flavor text and abilities, which adds spice to early missions and an unnecessary time-sink to later missions. Mass Effect-esque moral choices, which are almost universally gotcha-style choices in which the obviously ethically correct answer always leads to some catastrophe down the line while the immoral action prevents further negative consequences. An early game quest asks, "will you allow children recovering from the plague to be killed as they beg for their life?" and answers your "uh...no???" with "well, I guess that means thousands of people die of the plague then." There's also the tacked-on premium currency, which allows you to buy game-breaking equipment and non-sequitorial magical armor for your character, which is always a sore spot in a game like this.
Like I said, there's a truly nefarious amount of content in this game, and most of it fails to pay off in any meaningful way. Still, the core experience of this game, as generally shallow as it is, is pleasurable. To borrow a historically appropriate term, Odyssey is in so many ways the platonic ideal of the open world game Ubisoft has been trying to make since Far Cry 3. Odyssey is in certain respects the 'forever' Far Cry, which presents the player with such a profound breadth of content that any reservation about its design or nitpick with its perspective can be hand-waved away by the sheer scale of this massive, nearly endless single player game.
Despite the fact that Ubisoft titled this game "Odyssey," it's really not an Odyssey. Bayek's trek through ancient Egypt was much closer to a Homerian epic than Odyssey in basically every way that matters, creating a protagonist with a strong moral center who becomes enmeshed in a crucial, personal struggle to correct societal wrongs. Kassandra's story is much closer to a 12-season run of a comfort-food TV show. It's a lesser game, sure, but there's merit to that, too.
The best way I can describe Vampyr is that it's a game designed for people who liked clicking the investigate tab in Mass Effect. As far as vampire sims go it's far from haunting, but it's conceit is incredible: you are a doctor attempting to cure the plague in early 20th century London, all the while being a lethal force of nature yourself. Each district the player can visit has a specific community of residents, all named, all with relationships to one another, some of which are obvious, some of which are hidden.
Indulging in your vampirism means removing a member of the community, but removing the wrong member - say, a bar owner who presides over the last gathering place left in a district, or a friendly neighbor secretly caring for those in need - can prove disastrous. It's a game of Jenga, but with people.
Vampyr works because a tremendous amount of care has gone into every single character in the game. In my forty hours with it, only a couple of NPC's ever seemed to be truly one dimensional, and the cast is, surprisingly for a game otherwise rotten with technical issues belying a limited budget, tremendous.
Perhaps because of this, Vampyr seems content with the player NOT engaging in its social mechanics. Although I received plenty of tool tips alerting me of the fact that I could be leveling much faster if I started chomping on my fellow Londoners, I rarely felt like the game was penalizing me by leaving me under-leveled.
Which brings me to the combat - for some reason, Dontnod opted to build clunky, Dark Souls-y combat encounters in every area of the game not inhabited by named citizens. I can't say I disliked the combat, but there's no question it's the least polished and meaningful part of the experience; it almost feels like it exists solely to provide some stakes for players who opt to go pacifist, but it's hard not to imagine what Vampyr would've been like if the game found some other, more narrative-driven source of dramatic tension.
Worse is the fact that Vampyr straight up runs badly. You can't sprint two blocks without it pausing for several seconds to load, and dying during any combat encounter leaves the player with a punishing two-minute load.
All that said, Dontnod is clearly a studio that prioritizes story over mechanics, and the story here is mostly excellent. It manages to gracefully avoid all the corny, b-movie pitfalls most other vampire horror narratives bang straight into, and several of the incidental characters are so carefully considered and evocatively performed that it's impossible not to want to spend time with them.
The big secret about the supposed sadomasochism of navigating an 'I Wanna Be The Guy'-style obstacle course or souls-like dungeon is that doing so is relaxing, actually. When life gets difficult, these games feel reassuring to play, even hopeful; maybe things at work are insane, maybe you have deadlines you have no idea how to meet, but in this moment, in front of a sequence of platforms so menacingly placed that you literally don't understand what the hell is going on at first glance, you're going to forget all that, fall down, and stand back up again. Ultra hard games become a mini-testament to your ability to keep trying.
Celeste is the first game I've played that *explicitly* leans into this theme. Madeleine, the protagonist, is the embodiment of trying your best, even if it means failing sometimes (or if you're me playing, it means failing, like, a lot). Her need to change her life for the better, to tackle a seemingly arbitrary task that blossoms naturally into the more salient, personal challenges in her life that led her to the mountain in the first place, emotionally ties her directly to the player. The ending of the game - I'll do my best to remain spoiler-free - is powerful and resonant. Seeing Madeliene come to grips with what it means to succeed on your own terms, to embrace feelings you'd rather avoid, was a breath of fresh air in a suffocating year.
This year was drowning in Metroidvanias and 2D platformers, which unfortunately means that Dandara got buried under its competition. I think it does something differently than other titles in the genre, though. It uses the familiar back-and-forth area-unlocking loop, but more as a means to reveal the nature of the world you’re exploring and what it’s become than as a means to empower the player through new abilities. Thematically Dandara is about a world on the wrong end of colonization, in which rich cultures and traditions have been subverted by powers that propagate and consume simply because they can. There are plenty of contemporary works of pixel art out there, but Dandara is a platformer with a purpose.
Graveyard Keeper is Stardew Valley if it had some *things to say* about labor and capital. It’s a game in which the player is overwhelmed with debtors, corrupt figures of influence and obligations to money-grubbing religious institutions. Even attempting to complete a simple job such as tombstone building reveals a spiderweb of favor-currying tasks for elite shitheads that need to be satisfied before any work can be completed. By the midpoint of Graveyard Keeper, you’re *happy* to compromise yourself ethically to survive. The alternative is inescapable drudgery.
What I’m saying is, this is a classically Russian text, which is to say it is *depressing.* I wish I could say I stuck with this game the whole time, but truth be told, I got tired of the headache after a while. God what I wouldn’t do for a fuckin run button in this slow-ass game.
Ryo Ga Gotoku describes Yakuza Kiwami 2 as an "extreme remake" of the PS2 original, and from that perspective, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a sort of insane leap in quality from the 2006 version of the story. Taken as the next entry in a series that begins with Yakuza 0 and is preceded by Yakuza Kiwami 1, as I did, or even as the next release by a development team who put out both Yakuza 6 and (later) Judgement, Yakuza Kiwami 2 doesn't fare as well.
Ryo Ga Gotoku are approaching a photo-realistic depiction of their fake Tokyo district in fits and spurts, sure, but they're doing so in Yakuza Kiwami 2 by modifying the realism achieved in their most recent titles, even in spite of the fact that Yakuza 2 takes place about 10 years before that entry. It's only "extreme" if you played Yakuza 2 15 years ago and then re-entered the Yakuza franchise back at Yakuza Kiwami 2 or started the series chronologically but are somehow unaware of the other two most recent entries in the franchise - for virtually everyone else, this is more like a repaint of the Judgement Kamurocho but with an ugly shade of 2006 layered on top.
The story they're adapting into this new visual model was designed for an era where this level of fidelity was impossible, which makes for a sometimes uneven-feeling experience. On the one hand, Yakuza 2's most dramatic set piece moments are revelatory in the new visual style and hold up remarkably well - on the other hand, the story's sometimes wildly sophomoric, mid-tier soap opera antics rendered in high fidelity make them come across almost worse.
People discuss Yakuza 0's relatively gargantuan plot density like its an outlier in video game storytelling, but Yakuza games are sort of all like that. What makes 0 special is (in spite of how it might look for a first timer to the series) the surgical precision with which its hundreds of plot twists are intertwined with one another. There's an art to the pacing and editing of Yakuza 0, as wacky as it may be.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 lacks that care and grace. It's full throttle all day in this game, and events of unequal quality are often treated with equal significance. Worse, the story hasn't quite settled on what kind of a person Kiryu is, yet, which might've made sense in the 2006 sequel, but which feels practically unthinkable now. There's a scene late in the game of Yakuza Kiwami 2, in one of the game's many filler chapters, in which Kiryu nearly signs the parenting rights of his adopted daughter away to - no joke - a random man on the street in the middle of the night who claims to be from the entertainment industry. The whole thing is forgotten as quickly as its introduced, which almost makes matters worse. This is literally hours after this kid was kidnapped for the FOURTH time, which Kiryu duly notes.
I kept having to remind myself, playing through this story for the first time, that it was originally designed for a PS2 title, which makes it all click so much better. The wild shift in tonality just doesn't work, and no matter how brightly recolored or better visually defined this remake is, it can't mask how much this series has grown and how much growing it had left to do back in 2006.
The side content, unfortunately, does not always fare much better. The standard side quests are sometimes too meta for the game's own good. Casting Kiryu as a video game voice actor or an advisor for the director of a Yakuza film series is at first a delightful twist, but it all works to remind you how goofy and meme-ified the tone of this series has become. Kiwami 2 may *chronologically* occur as the 3rd game in the franchise, but it's the 13th game in this style by this studio. Things are getting long in the tooth.
This is further evidenced by the side campaigns: an exact rehash of Yakuza 0's hostess club Diner Dash-like and Yakuza 6's tower defense Clan Creator mode. It's not that these campaigns are somehow inherently bad, just...lacking in identity when contrasted with the titles they were originally made for. As excited as I was to see the Yakuza 0 hostess club cast return for this sequel, the story they're thrown into may as well be identical to the original - even down to the game's animations, which sometimes *are* identical to the original.
The hostess club campaign also re-casts Kiryu as a nightclub manager, which...I don't know, I have to admit, the intangibility of Kiryu is by far my least favorite quality about him. In the main campaigns, Kiryu is consistently characterized. In the series' many goofy side quests, he's more flavorful and emotive, but ultimately mostly consistent. These big side campaigns, though, give him all these attributes that feel way outside of his character. He's a genius realtor, a construction foreman, a pro slot car racer, a hostess coach, a nightclub manager...Kiryu is way too elastic in this series. He's good at literally everything by default, and it can get tiresome.
Look: ultimately, this is still more Yakuza, and Kiwami 2 is unquestionably a step up from Kiwami 1's somewhat thin 'what if Yakuza 0 again but with a PS2 story' take on a remake title. Even with the arguably clunkier Yakuza 6/Judgement melee combat and the wildly anachronistic PS2 storytelling, Kiwami 2 at least goes for broke in every department. I'll always take another trip to Kamurocho, even if the stories I'm fed have a 60% success rate rather than a 90% success rate.
Sharp, witty, and iconic for how minimal the art style and gameplay is. The pace is a *little* off for me, though. Too many quirky diatribes and too few snappy conversations for my tastes. The pure gameplay, which consists of speaking with one NPC until one of them gives you an item that will enable more conversation with a different NPC makes the game feel too much like pacing around a tiny space. Both of these things would be alleviated if the game was able to shift in tone at all, but every character is written with the same quirky disaffection, which can make the game feel as if its monologuing with itself; although, remove the first person perspective and allow me to snap to each character from a menu and I might've been too enamored with the vibe of it all to care.
I love how Deconstructeam built their oppressive neon dystopia. Besides being an adventure game that heavily features player choice, the primary way in which the player engages with The Red Strings Club’s hyper-advanced sci-fi world is through immutable human craftsmanship. You spend most of the game as a bartender, mixing drinks that cater to patrons’ personalities, but there’s a really neat early-game sequence in which you play an android who crafts human mods via a pottery tool. This new/ancient dichotomy plays well and does wonders in breathing life into the game.
The Red Strings Club is also without question the most intellectually dense game I’ve played all year. There are lengthy dialogue sequences in which the player is asked to give input on the inherent immorality of mass marketing (or the moral good of it if you’re, uh, that way), the moral obligation of corporations to act ethically, etc. These conversations sometimes come at the expense of character – for all it’s deconstructive ambitions, this is still a game that heavily uses sci-fi/noire tropes as a crutch – but I’ll definitely be thinking about this one for a long time.
A surprisingly empathetic and poignant game about surviving life in an American cult.
Sagebrush is a first-person Gone Home-like in which the player explores the long-forgotten remains of a Midwestern Christian-American cult, examining found objects, listening to interview recordings and solving light puzzles to progress deeper into the history of its fringe society. It's a reflective game set in a lo-fi world of rusted metal and rotted wood that emanates alienation and paranoia.
Sagebrush doesn't have the elegance of design of a Gone Home or Firewatch, and the somewhat large-scale farmland that make up the game's world is too big (and the player is too slow!) to freely explore. The lo-fi aesthetic is a stylistic boon to what could've been a flat space, but it's also dark and difficult to navigate.
Sagebrush is a true indie game, then, with all the rough edges that that entails, but it achieves a lot with what it has. It's a game with something to say about characters who are grounded and complex, which is a lot more than I can say of many sleeker, more expensive games.
This game is ostensibly a teaser for Life Is Strange 2, but it’s so good it deserves to be critiqued as its own work – cliffhanger ending aside, that is.
Quick content warning here (and spoiler warning, for what that’s worth), but this is a game about an abusive relationship between a father and son. This set off alarm bells in my head at first. In Life is Strange Season 1 (which I loved), there is a character who suffers from severe clinical depression. While she was written with empathy, the developers cheapened her experience a bit by making her situation…’solvable,’ I guess is the word, in a gameplay sense.
Luckily, Dontnod seem to have matured. This is far from a hopeless game, but there is no easy escape route for its protagonist, Chris. We become acquainted with his survival mechanisms, his love for his father, and the strength of his spirit. This is a game about vulnerability, but it’s also about the will to keep going. It’s a difficult story, one that feels like it *needed* to be told, rather than a calculated marketing piece for a larger franchise.
The Messenger starts as yet another one of those 'remember that?' nostalgia fests, this time for the 8-bit era of Ninja Gaiden. It's better than most because, for whatever reason, no one is making Ninja Gaiden-likes and the mechanics are (mostly) tight, but it very much fits alongside other meta, self-referential titles that feel overindulgent. The big trick to The Messenger, though, is that it also contains a 16-bit Metroidvania, and even further than that, a time travel mechanic in which the player must switch between the 8-bit and the 16-bit version of the world in order to solve puzzles and traverse the suddenly huge map.
It's a huge shift in scope, and it *works*. I'm glad I stuck around with this one to the finish, as its sometimes regressive, sometimes spine-tinglingly dorky sense of humor can feel grating. I mean, one of the death screen jokes is a reference to the movie Dodgeball - like, THAT Dodgeball, the one you probably willfully forgot about if you're a Millennial because goddamnit you're an adult now and not in middle school anymore.
The plot ends up being way more twisty and fun to pick apart than you'd initially think, so much so that I'm anticipating a sequel. That means more than you'd think, as my level of tolerance for 'ugh, remember how cool the 80s were?' is a fast track to annoyance for me more than most.
An extremely effective short horror game. For a game that lasts exactly five minutes and thirty seconds long, September 1999 is so subtle and well-paced. I used to live in an area in the middle of nowhere, and driving there would take you through all these long stretches of highway with half-abandoned towns and dilapidated houses. I remember driving past this one shack in the middle of the night. It was rusted out, but seeing it through my headlights, it also didn't look abandoned, exactly. September 1999 is my imagination made manifest about that shack.
The Song of Life, the most disjointed and perfunctory of all the mainline Yakuza games, is exemplary of the perpetual paradox crackling beneath the surface of all Ryo Ga Gotoku games. Here is the seventh game in the Yakuza series (or the 13th depending on how you keep count), the grand finale of the Kiryu Kazuma saga - the end of an era - and we are presented with yet another nonsensically twisted, knotted nation-wide conspiracy which nevertheless mainly functions as a countryside vacation simulator in practice. The Song of Life is a game about soap operatic melodrama in which nearly all the momentum of the series up to this point in the story is supposedly driving towards an inevitable climax that nevertheless sees the player spend hours and hours socializing with barflys, learning to harpoon fish, and participating in a regional baseball tournament between likeminded middle-aged men.
Everything in The Song of Life's narrative carries the implied weight of Series Finale Import except the game itself, which is otherwise filled to the brim with a breezy and low-effort stroll through the quiet life of a fiftysomething, fitness-obsessed, cam-site-enjoying, baseball-playing ex-con layabout. I don't care what the main story suggests: for all intents and purposes, The Song of Life seems to be a game that takes place *after* the conclusion to a series and not during one. Here we have an action hero in the bliss of retirement. All that plot, as far as I'm concerned, is just some other stuff that happened.
This disparity in tone isn't a new phenomenon in the series; in fact, the wild shifts in tone between Yakuza's main story and it's comparatively goofy optional content has always been a feature, not a bug. Yakuza 0, the fan favorite prequel, would seamlessly transition between, say, a gruesome torture sequence and a sequence in which Kiryu would hire a chicken as a regional manager at his real estate firm. What makes The Song of Life so uniquely positioned within the series as a tonally incoherent project is that it's so much better at the vacation sim than it is at the crime epic.
Ignore the lavish production of The Song of Life's campaign, and you'll find that quite a bit more thought has been placed within the margins of the story than the story itself.
The Song of Life is a Yakuza game in which things that have already happened happen again, to the same people, in the same way, for the same reasons. By the story's conclusion, Kiryu quite literally opts to leave the series, leaving us with the thought that the only way for series fans to see the "finale" of the Yakuza games is to simply *stop playing Yakuza games* - and even then, *this isn't even the first time a Yakuza game has ended on this note.* If The Song of Life's side-content is a leisurely stroll, then the main campaign is a treadmill that the player is handcuffed to.
None of the Yakuza games are perfect - frankly, the series is too bonkers for perfect, and I say that as a compliment - but The Song of Life is so full of carelessly recycled series tropes that it becomes a parody of itself. In the story's early goings, Kiryu comes into contact with a small, beach-side Yakuza family who are charmingly inept at their jobs and function as pillars in their own communities. I've seen so many comments from fans and critics praising the game for introducing these characters right at the end of the series, which puzzles me. I find it a little annoying that these characters are mirror images of the small, beach-side Yakuza family who were charmingly inept at their jobs but nevertheless functioned as pillars in their own communities from Yakuza 3. They're the exact same characters, again, in all but name. It retroactively makes Kiryu seem callous, considering the relationships he developed with the Yakuza 3 versions of these characters were of major import in that game and then of explicitly *zero* import in any game ever again. Like every newly introduced supporting character in this series that isn't a kind of running gag, they've all been memory-holed.
Haruka, Kiryu's adopted daughter, gets the worst of it. I have never seen a character in a video game - hell, in fiction, generally - fridged as brutally as Haruka does in this game. Up to this point, Haruka's agency has a character increases exponentially with each passing title. In the beginning, she mainly exists to imbue Kiryu's story with some actual stakes due to her inherent vulnerability as a child, but by Yakuza 3 she gains some dimensionality as a character and possesses her own motivations, and by Yakuza 5 she's a full-on playable, main character. In The Song of Life, she is not only put into a coma for the entirety of the story, but she also gives birth to a grandchild who becomes Kiryu's new Haruka; in a very real, literal way, she yet again becomes a sort of 'plot stakes' vessel for the men in the story before she fades into the background for the sake of her son. And, of course, she is kidnapped and held at ransom for the sixth - the SIXTH - time in the series.
At the end of the day, The Song of Life is still a 'good' one of these thanks to the side content, but for the first time in the history of the series, it's a 'good' one of these in spite of the series' tropes rather than because of the series' tropes. It's painfully obvious at this point that Ryo Ga Gotoku had exhausted themselves of Kiryu and his antics, to the point where large swaths of this game feel, in a real, palpable way, like emotional regression.
Some complicated thoughts on this one...
The tone is right: Peter Parker is a man of boundless optimism in the face of adversity, and the city is a glittering metropolis full of people who are ultimately good. Yet, Spider-Man is, for all intents and purposes, a cop. Not only that, he's a cop who loooooves busting non-violent drug deals with indiscriminate violence. He's such a cop that he institutes a literal, full-on police state, replete with Big Brother surveillance cameras and Minority Report-style databases. And this all just happens; no comment from Mary Jane Watson the reporter, no criticism from the various unhoused residents at the support shelter, no critical eye on the part of any character whatsoever - that is, save for far-right-substitute podcaster J. Jonah Jameson. Yeesh.
There's the thrill of overhearing a mugging on the street, swinging by, and saving someone from a dangerous guy with a gun. The first time I stopped a crime in this game I felt like I was having a dream. It's *such* a pitch perfect a simulation of the Spider-Man mythos. Seconds later, you hear a police call about an armed robbery. Then seconds after that about a runaway car. Then seconds after that an army of ghost Yakuza are shooting cops. Then seconds after that a rogue mercenary force is arresting civilian protesters. And so on and so on forever. NYC transitions from a bright and shining open world of possibilities to a flat-out dystopic landscape of brutal murder and mayhem in seconds flat. You literally cannot just exist in this world without disregarding a murder. If nothing else, at least it accidentally proves the point that citizens are no safer under a police state than not.
SPOILERS: there's the story itself, which is a fun, sincere re-telling of some Spider-Man origin stories. That's great! Unfortunately, that's all it is. If you're even tangentially aware of Spider-Man, this is not a game that will greatly surprise you. We know who Dr. Octopus is. We do *not* need yet another rehash of that plot. I was genuinely amazed when, with no twist whatsoever, Spider-Man presents us with a rapidly decaying, angry mad scientist who grows over-attached to his new robot arms. Like...we know what was gonna happen here! Why belabor the point? If we're going to use the standard Doc Ock plot, can't we at least use it to explore an idea beyond the prototypical 'singular revenge is a great evil' thing?
The beginning of every new thread in Spider-Man begins as revelatory, then settles into the familiar pattern established in the decades and decades of comics, cartoons and films about the character. I like Spider-Man! A lot! But these game mechanics, amazing as they are, can only go so far to impress when they're used to reiterate something familiar rather than to establish something new.
Watching the Sonic Fox v. Go1 Dragon Ball Fighterz match at EVO in 2018 was both exciting AND baffling. I've never been a Guilty Gear/BlazBlue/Anime fighter guy, and seeing DBFZ's fluidity made it impossible to parse. Thanks to the excellent adaptation of the DBZ's animation style, to an outsider like me, it kind of just looked like a flat version of the show.
Now having had my own time to play it, I'm flabbergasted by how simple it is to play. Arc System Works have perfected the balance between newbie accessibility and flashy anime excess. DBFZ has all of explosive appeal of an anime fighter without any of the finicky complexities you'd expect from the genre. And it's all so *fast*. It's everything you'd want from a Dragon Ball fighter.
That is, everything except for an exciting single player component. There's a full original story mode to sit through, but it's a cookie cutter series of easy fights and slow, still conversations behind dialogue boxes. The arcade mode's a bit more fun, but it's really basic and lacks anything in the way of player reward - even the still images you unlock in MVC 3 would've been welcome.
I digress. I had a great time with this one.
A souls-like boss rush game on the surface, but there's a bit more here than other derivative titles. Each boss in Sinner is representative of one of the cardinal sins, and in order to fight them, you need to sacrifice a matching stat or ability. To be able to fight greed, you first have to place a cap on your max health, to fight wrath you have to remove your armor, to fight sloth you have to slow your recovery time, etc.
While Sinner is obviously a 'Dark Souls - with a twist!' title right down to its crumbly-castle-filled-with-grotesque-giants aesthetic, it's also a really interesting inverse of other games in the genre.
By the end of a Dark Souls game, your level, stats, armor and weapons are testaments to your persistence. You enter the final boss fight with your skill literally on your sleeve. In Sinner, you enter the final boss fight mostly naked and with scant little equipment. As this is a game about sin and redemption, it all fits together neatly. You aren't here to succeed - you're here to be penitent. Some writers dismiss the punishing nature of Dark Souls as a conscious reframing of how players engage with difficult game design, or of reframing failure itself as inevitable, something to find comfort in rather than to avoid. In Sinner, failure is the literal text. It's neat!
All that said, it's just not quite tight enough in the gameplay department. Part of what makes Dark Souls work is that it's *very* rare that something completely out of your control takes you out. In Sinner, some bosses' hitboxes feel off, as if they're occasionally unable to hit you when you're standing right in front of them, or are impossible to hit from only a few feet away.
Yo, the Gardens Between gets SAD once you get what it’s all about. It’s an extremely sentimental puzzle game in which two childhood friends relive moments of their lives via non-linear time puzzles. Because it’s a puzzle game and I’m an impatient idiot it somehow took me like two months to complete all two and a half hours of it, but I’m glad I did.
I enjoyed Monster Hunter: World for some of the same reasons I enjoyed Red Dead 2: I love interacting with simulated nature, apparently. However, I found Monster Hunter too flatly about hunting to actually care to play it. I think it’s a beautiful game, but without any story or Red Dead-style base camp to adorn with monster hides, I couldn’t find anything to latch onto. It’s pretty much a hunting game in which the only objective/reward is that you’ve hunted. So, uh, big up to this game for being gorgeous and cool, but not necessarily for me.
(Bonus Episode)
This early in the year Life is Strange prequel episode is good, but I can’t say I loved it. Just like the main game, it builds tension and features some terrific moments between Chloe and (this time) Max, but it collapses under the weight of its sequel. We know where this story is going, and it doesn’t do anything to subvert those expectations.
To even begin to compete in the Souls-like space, most especially as an indie title, uniqueness is absolutely essential. Ashen gets this mostly right - it doesn't look, or on a first try, *feel* like playing a Souls game, or at least, it feels like a Souls game so radically re-contextualized as a sort of mythic fairy tale that the comparisons between it and Dark Souls are solely mechanical. This feeling doesn't last - as each new area of the game ramps up in difficulty, the old rhythm of the Souls series reveals itself and Ashen's distance from that series feels less and less.
Ashen is still probably the gold standard for 'indie take on Dark Souls,' moreso than the comparatively more radical take on the formula in 2018's Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, but its use of the old Souls plot obfuscation just doesn't feel as compelling without that jagged art style and that wealth of near-impenetrable lore.
Call of Cthulhu is one of a few semi-big budget video games which attempt to adapt Lovecraft. Like all of these AA Lovecraft games, it gets certain aspects of Lovecraft very right and drops the ball on a bunch of other stuff.
First, I'll get this part out of the way: H. P. Lovecraft was a terrible man and his racism is inseperable from his work, because his racist fears are what drive every one of his stories. This is why games like Call of Cthulhu feel weirdly anodine in comparison to the stories they adapt; they seek to recreate the effect of Lovecraft's stories without interfacing with the sole motivating factor of those fears, and the results tend to be mushy and nonspecific. Amnesia: The Dark Descent, The Last Door and Eternal Darkness are the only games to ever subvert that motivating factor without losing something in the process.
In this game, there are a lot of insensitive depictions of mental illness and nonspecific visions of demons in the darkness, which are its biggest weaknesses. Most of the time, Call of Cthulhu just isn't that scary as a result. Occasionally creepy, usually foreboding, but never *scary.*
That said, it's got its strengths, too. Choosing to cast the player as an alcoholic detective with a customizable RPG skill set was really smart, as the variable quality of the main character kept me invested in certain aspects of the mystery I likely would've bounced off of otherwise. The depictions of wet, cavernous nightmare spaces are also, if nothing else, very evocative of that 'madness within the ocean's depths' Lovecraft style.
This one's worth checking out for fans of the genre, but probably not quite strong enough on its own to really recommend to anyone else.
Following Toys for Bobs' last unprecedented remake trilogy with Crash Bandicoot, Spyro Reignited is both a welcome second dose of uncanny valley 'sort of identical, sort of completely different' nostalgia and an invitation to relitigate the quality both series.
I think it's Crash that ultimately wins out - Spyro's postage stamp level design is more welcoming to new players, sure, but the series' glaring reliance on timing-sensitive minigames are as likely to be reliant on chance as they are on precision, and they're mostly very irritating anyway. The most difficult level objectives are few and far between, but they're often also the most obtuse, and I wasted wayyy too much time stumbling around wondering 'wait, what the fuck am I doing here?' for a game that's otherwise a breezy shrug of the shoulders in terms of platforming design.
As Spyro's feature set expanded across the original trilogy (and as the incidental writing and character designs improved), the level design got more and more complicated and unnecessarily cyclical. Spyro: Year of the Dragon is by far the worst offender, tasking the player with returning to stages again and again with unlockable characters to complete shitty, minigame-based bonus objectives that're usually a whole lot more of a hassle than the primary gameplay.
The gem collecting tasks are always a nagging issue. Unlike Crash, *every* collectible in Spyro levels are mandatory to unlock the final stage, and there aren't any items or trackers to make hunting them down any easier. It's a serious waste of the player's time. The fact that I can exit a level with 398 out of 400 gems in a level without then being granted with a map or gem-hunting compass of any kind is a ridiculously non-fun premise to replay a video game, and if nothing else should be relegated to bonus content for completionists. A single gem can be worth 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, or 100 gems apiece, which makes even figuring out how much you've missed an issue.
My least favorite part: new coat of paint or not, the character designs in the Spyro series are terrible. The original games had some reaaal rough edges, but even with Vicarious Visions' laudable clean up work, the enemies in this game are inherently annoying; they're all huge, loud, low-IQ fury muppets. At least on the PS1 things were so roughshod anyway that you could ignore it, but even redesigned in high def they're still shrill and irritating
I enjoyed Tomb Raider's reboot because I felt it was a fun, Metroidvanian take on an aged series - and it had the energy of a rollercoaster ride. With little in the way of meaningful character and new tricks, Rise of the Tomb Raider was in all honesty best used as a nature exploration sim.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider, however, is...the most predictable blockbuster film version of Tomb Raider since the actual blockbuster film version of Tomb Raider. It's a gorgeous game that features a variety of stunning visuals - a mid-game sojourn into the remains of a long-forgotten war ship, for example, provides a welcome break from all the luscious greenery - but even then, Shadow's world is so much more fractured and mechanical than even the prior game's Syberia.
I think Crystal Dynamics' insistence that Lara Croft truly only ever raids tombs is getting ridiculous. She makes a character like Batman look like he has a robust inner life. There's a sequence in this game in which we flashback to Lara's childhood as she *pretends* to raid tombs. Even the most broad characters in popular media have at least *one other thing* going on. Imagine if, say, the next 007 film featured a flashback in which a pre-teen James Bond taped a laser pointer to his watch and attempted breaking and entering? Literally even the *very first* Tomb Raider games gave us a glimpse into Lara's life via the mansion tutorial levels, in which we see Lara's gymnasium, swimming pool, sound systems, classical instruments, etc. It's just, like...relax, lady! Find a hobby.
A silly, bombastic third person co op game that just doesn’t lean quite enough into it’s best elements to be lovable. The basis for its four heroes, all archetypes from 20th century adventure serials, are solid, but none are unique enough to remember. Similarly, it’s level design can often feel same-y and repetitive. I’ll likely still boot this up and play a few games here and there, but there’s just not enough here to keep it going long term.
I play video games solo, which makes Sea of Thieves a literal, accidental version of Graveyard Keeper’s mundane taskwork. Ask a faction for work, spend a great deal of time in transit, pick up a box, return the box, receive a meager reward.
When you’re playing alone, it’s fucking *depressing*, this game. If you somehow find pleasure in the banana-cronching skeletal combat, chances are other players with friends – i.e. not lonely old you in your fuckin bullshit sloop – will almost definitely rob you and sink your ship. This happened to me *over and over*. After a couple hours I had to take stock of my life and ask, “do I hate myself?” Turns out, I don’t, and consequently don’t play this game anymore.
A game about chowing down on lunch while pretending to listen to a friend. Extraordinarily good high concept, but lacking a key ingredient: in baking the gameplay of this title on cooking the food and responding correctly to the last thing the friend says, the player never really indulges in either aspect of chowing down or being an active listener. Needs a little more in the way of compelling dialogue and sumptuous food to really work.
The Hidden Ones DLC
Assassin's Creed Origins was a radical change of pace for a franchise that was producing games so wildly uneven in quality that, for a time, it seemed like no one was happy with the state of the series whatsoever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Hidden Ones, the first major expansion pack to the only universally beloved entry in the series since 2010, treads water. This is more Origins; no more, no less.
The Hidden Ones gives the player access to a new map in a different part of Egypt with slightly different political problems than the ones encountered in the main game. There are still violent colonizers to stab in the head, but this time there's also a radical in the supporting cast who threatens to undermine the newly formed Brotherhood of Assassins. In other words: prototypical Assassin's Creed stuff.
The best I can say about The Hidden Ones is that it shows us a meaner, angrier Bayek is not begrudging about violence, but instead uses violence as a first resort. That makes a lot of sense to me, emotionally, after the events of the main game. He kills like 6,000 dudes! That guy probably gets scarier as he gets older.
The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC
The Curse of the Pharaohs is everything I was worried Assassin's Creed Origins would be. All the Assassin's Creed pretense for its magical components is diminished once the player *literally travels to Ancient Egyptian heaven and slaughters magical creatures* by the end of the first act. It's the worst piece of content released for Origins by a wide margin.
One of my least favorite Hollywood tropes is that real history is somehow inherently boring and must be punctuated by invented history, and that any amount of magic or unreality introduced into historical narratives can be explained away by the fact that people were somehow dumber centuries ago and didn't understand what they were seeing, or that they failed to record magical events (see: Dr. Who).
Up to this point, Assassin's Creed has been careful about how and when it deploys some of its bullshit conspiratorial ancient aliens stuff. The objects of Eden have always been a driving force to propel the core AC story along, but not the reason to engage with the AC story in the first place. The Curse of the Pharaohs reverses course on that. The only reason to engage with this DLC is to see magical ancient aliens bullshit.
To make matters worse, the new characters introduced in this DLC are interchangeable AC NPCs who spend the entirety of their time onscreen discussing the mcguffin of the moment. In making the most radically ahistorical version of a history game yet, they also fail to find *one* aspect of actual history (as embodied by a character or place) that they can tell a satisfactory story about.
The worst part about this DLC is that it retroactively cheapens the rest of the game. The thing that made Origins such a profound experience was that it took its history really seriously, showcasing a wide-ranging perspective on the lived experiences of ancient people. None of that really matters if the world they live in is intermittently magical! Whatever changes to the level design and imagery in the game the devs wanted to reproduce, it was not worth it considering the effect it has on the rest of the story.
Indecision.
The developer of Indecision. refers to this game as a ‘video game haiku.’ It’s a loaded descriptor, but it’s not terrifically far off. Each sequence begins with a single word or phrase on a black screen which acts as a clue to solve the forthcoming puzzle. It's all a bit slight and often too quick to be clever instead of substantive, but I enjoyed myself all the same.
Onrush seems cool, but it's too overwhelming to make any immediate sense of. That's a death knell for quick, arcady games like this. I don't think any of the vehicle choices visually communicate what it is they're going to do on the battlefield, either. I want to like Onrush because I think it's cool, but I just can't get myself to enjoy it.
98Demake's OK/Normal exists in a few relatively unexplored spaces in horror media. It tasks the player with exploring a sort of cursed PS1 game, which slowly devolves and transgresses the fourth wall as the game progresses. It's also drenched in a vaporwave aesthetic, which I can't claim to have seen in a horror context before. All in all, OK/Normal is a great idea for a project.
It doesn't all mesh together, though, and frequently becomes a slog during play. The player is constantly tasked with picking up collectibles in each level, and while wandering around a series of bright neon-red environments while the logical consistency of the world around you slowly evaporates is, in theory, VERY fucking cool, the fact of the matter is there are just too many enormous arenas to wander around to actually engage with the game. I missed one collectible in a late-game sequence and fell off of a platform, forcing the entire ten + minute sequence of slow-walking around hell geometry begin anew.
OK/Normal is just *too slow,* and punishing the player by resetting sequences shoots any tension the game managed to generate dead in the ground. I would even argue that resetting sequences seems to contradict the fourth wall-breaking narrative the game introduces in the second half.
If it was Hazelight Studios' goal to make some sort of video game equivalent to The Room, A Way Out is a genuine masterclass in game design. It has the veneer of an art film so brutally un-edited, so unhinged from any relatable human experience, that it exceeds the quality of consumer art and becomes a shapeless, singular, amorphous blob of a work. Like The Room, it's just too flagrantly ridiculous too much of the time to warrant serious analysis from any discerning player.
A Way Out is supposedly about two cons escaping prison to take revenge on a mob boss who betrayed them - but, for much of the play time, it's a game in which two idiots walk around plastic-y mock ups of familiar spaces, bark non-sequitors at NPCs and play with toys.
There's a whole sequence where one of the protagonists discovers their wife is about to have a baby. You and your teammate rush to the hospital, but once you're inside the game encourages you to play a game of Connect 4 first - and also to walk up to every single person sitting in the lobby and ask, "so why are you sick?" When you get to the maternity ward to talk to your wife, the game then challenges you to see how long you can pop a wheelie in an unused wheelchair - seconds later, you're in the hospital room trying to patch up your marriage and meet your newborn child.
It's not as if A Way Out is unaware of the comedic effect of these sequences so much as it seems to assume its surreal relationship to reality will blend seamlessly with its by-the-numbers cop show melodrama. The problem is, both the weird playroom sequences and the cop show sequences are equally absurd, the only difference between the two is tone. Even at the game's outset, in which the protagonists disconnect a toilet from their jail cell to break out of their cells, we discover that, in A Way Out, toilets aren't connected to any plumbing. You can freely move them around the environment and put them back good as new; they're just poop chairs.
All this makes A Way Out a phenomenal ride with a like-minded companion, but this game would be DREADFUL in any other context. Grab your 'let's watch a shitty movie together buddy' and have a blast - otherwise, steer clear.
OK I know this isn’t cool to say, but here goes: I wish this kid would finally just find his game hidden by mom already.
I've been a fan of Quantic Dreams' output since Indigo Prophecy. That game straight up cribs scenes from The Silence of the Lambs like its a film school student, and uses The Matrix as a crutch for its entire aesthetic. In one scene, a character has sex with a reanimated immortal zombie man while a tragic string arrangement of the main theme plays. I was 14 years old, and to me this was art.
At 17, I played and adored Heavy Rain. I thought it was a watermark of maturity in game writing. Playing it now, it's clear Heavy Rain is the equivalent of a longform Criminal Minds episode, but it somehow also has the temerity to reward the player with a trophy that reads "Thank you for supporting interactive Drama" after you start playing.
I was even on board for Beyond: Two Souls. I was in college at the time, and thought it was pulpy, but fun. I wasn't quite past praising David Cage as a writer - and also Elliot Page was in it.
I realize now that not only is David Cage a clumsy writer who's up his own ass, but that he's also getting *worse* with each new entry in his gameography. The hilariously titled Detroit: Become Human is one of the most brazen, idiotic explorations of racial discrimination I've seen in quite some time. Even skipping past the obvious stuff - namely how the game utilizes artificial intelligent life as a proxy for white people to experience racial oppression firsthand - Detroit is just generally badly written. At its best it feels like pulp that aspires to fit alongside this year's slate of Oscar-bait-y dramas. At its worst its a vicious combination of thoughtless and earnest, a trite yet secondhand-humiliating parable that overstays its welcome for, like, *ten* hours.
I dunno, man, just - this game is called fuckin DETROIT. Yeah its pretty, yeah Quantic Dream know how to pace their games like Christopher Nolan films, yeah the performances are good. But...it's called *Detroit.* It's as if they were like 'oh wait, I know, we'll use that place where I heard racism happens that Robocop was set in. Detroit! This is an acceptable title for our video game about robot racism we're making in France.' Ugh. So bad.
It's genuinely difficult to quantify just how large a failure Fallout 76 was at launch. Even Fallout 76's most ardent fans - and it does have its share, however slim, of positive-minded critics - seem to enjoy the game for reasons that are either unrelated to the game's core selling point of a Fallout 4 MMO or even directly counterintuitive to the game's direction. This is a game about exploring a wide, empty, anachronistic post-nuclear West Virginia, quietly building resources for housing and combat, forever scrounging for food, and killing the few remaining survivors towards this goal. This game wants to be The Road, in other words - but, imagine a version of The Road in which the protagonist lacked either friend or foe, had infinite and plentiful resources, and could live in a majestic, impossible getaway cabin for the rest of his life unopposed.
Most of Fallout 76's fans dig it because it's simultaneously a digital hiking sim and an infinite Fallout content treadmill. As a long-time Fallout fan, I find myself knee-jerking against both of these core components. Fallout 76's pristine wilderness, which remains somehow untouched by the nuclear winter affecting the rest of the US while simultaneously being full of every classic Fallout monster from elsewhere in the series. I just can't get myself to buy the justification for radscorpions or super mutants thriving (or frankly existing in any reality) halfway across the country from where they spawned just 25 years after the bombs dropped. Other Fallout titles set themselves centuries after the end of the world to keep you from thinking too hard about logistics. Seeing a super mutant enclave or a colony of mutated mole rats just a short walk from a pristine lake an d a preserved hiking trail ruins the illusion.
Similarly, the fanservice-y quests and iconography that hooks some players feels more like a death march for some character designs I used to love rather than a treadmill of fluff content. Fallout 4 already played so fast and loose with the concept of a Fallout RPG, and so carelessly tossed around some of the series' core conceits that I could actively feel myself slipping from the franchise. An endless loop of Fallout signifiers totally out of context feels like the final bullet in the franchise, to me.
I dislike Fallout 76 enough - most *especially* as a follow-up to Fallout 4 - that the mere announcement of a new Fallout title isn't enough for me to get invested. Bethesda has a lot to prove at this point.
This game was free on Xbox, and even as a hardcore Metal Gear fan who didn't have to pay for it, I just could not stomach Metal Gear Survive. It’s a SyFy channel horror story stapled haphazardly onto Metal Gear Solid 5, but without any of the pleasure of miserable acting and second-rate special effects. They also added survival mechanics, which suck and are bad! I don’t want to think about how thirsty I’m getting on my sneaking mission! Unless it’s Metal Gear Solid 3! In which case I do very much want to think about that!
I hate to rag on this little-talked about stealth adventure game, but I kind of have to if I’m honest. Thief of Thieves is a mess. Its a sort of Tell Tale Games-style adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s hack the world comic series that also wants to be a semi-isometric Hitman. It nails *neither* of these things. It’s all promising at first; there’s a flashy intro, bombastic spy music and stylish camerawork. Then, the game starts, and suddenly it’s all getting spotted by a guard halfway across the room you can’t see because the camera is pointed the wrong direction.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with a camera *this* stupid before. In one sequence, I had it literally swivel around an entire staircase until it got fixed out of the bounds of the level, and then snapped back to its usual useless shot that covers a bare 30% of the room you need to see.
Thief of Thieves expects you to hide from guards that it won't show you. It gives you disguises that fool less people than they alert. To succeed in Thief of Thieves is to attain saint-like patience. On top of it all, it looks like a mobile game that runs on flip phones.
Just like any red-blooded 'shock-lover, We Happy Few's debut trailer set my brain ablaze. And just like all of the people who bothered to play it, I left it feeling dumbfounded.
Who, possibly, is We Happy Few for? It's certainly not for fans of immersive sims. Although the survival mechanics have been drastically reduced from the early access version, even the least committed player will find their playtime *far* more consumed by stamina bar management than exploration, puzzle solving or action. The remaining survival mechanics, meanwhile, are so watered down that I can't believe survival sim diehards will find much to love either.
I don't care for survival sims, but I was willing to give We Happy Few a shot anyway for its story and Orwell-lite dystopia. The premise is *extremely* 1984, except with only a fraction of the surveillance. We Happy Few's Great Britain is a more palatable Oceania. There are still cameras around, but no one closely monitors everything; the Ingsocs' blurry, muddy-colored cities are only a stone's throw from the Proles' grey, also blurry shacks. The second the game's exciting intro concludes, in which the protagonist, a milquetoast guy named Arthur, makes an abrupt, context-free decision to forego his state-mandated happy pills and go on the run, the sense that We Happy Few is not what it appears is *palpable*. It makes me wonder what I thought I was seeing in that trailer.
Getting into the game proper, We Happy Few is like Deus Ex or BioShock, except literally everything and everyone is stupid. Because the developers stapled a half-finished immersive sim onto a half-abandoned survival sim, there are still elements of the game world that are randomized for each playthrough. City blocks cascade into one another without any rhyme or reason; I frequently ran into streets that led to nowhere, or even directly into buildings. Alleys are placed with no regard to conventional logic, north/south-facing roads lead directly into the sidewalks of east/west roads. It's madness.
There are up to four NPCs in each city, all of them recycled ad nauseum. You'll see the same squat elderly woman having the same conversation with the blond guy or the dark-haired guy wherever you go. All of these people break reality by sitting inside one another, playing hopscotch inside a bench, or getting caught behind shrubbery. It's not even amusing because even the game's *glitches* are repetitive.
I decided, for some reason, to play through it all anyway. There are moments of promise, sequences in which combat, stealth and resource collection are put on the backburner in favor of drug-fueled escapades into government facilities. These moments are few and far between, and rarely last more than ten minutes. They're all followed and preceded by *hours* of walking to a place to talk to an NPC or pick up an item, and then walking to *another* place to speak with a different NPC in regards to that NPC or item, who will sometimes - *I swear to you* - then ask you to return to the first NPC and begin the process all over again.
I INSIST that you know the following fact about We Happy Few: running is considered a crime until you get a certain perk, and it is impossible to do without wasting upwards of 10-15 minutes being chased by guards for no reason. The walk animation IS SLOW.
If I ran my own video game awards show on the internet that featured a category for *worst* moment or sequence, this game would place at least twice. The first time would be for a late game moment, in which you finally make it into the an administrative office you've spent a full game trying to break into. It's very, very far from the quest-giver who tells you to go there. You run - sorry, you WALK all the way there, get to the door, and an NPC tells you to get an item before you're allowed in. That item is located with the aforementioned quest-giver. You walk all. the. way. back.
The second moment - the winner of this hypothetical award - is when you beat the game. The whole point of the plot is that Arthur wants to escape the dystopic city of Britain. And you do escape! I haven't mentioned it, but every single character in We Happy Few wears a white jester's mask, for reasons unexplained. I assume its because it makes recycling NPCs easier. Once the gates of the city finally close behind you, the camera swivels around and as Arthur takes his mask off. This sad gesture at a narrative bookend lets you know that finally, *finally*, the game is complete. The past 15-20 hours of aimless trudging from place to place is at an end. We Happy Few is over.
And then
as you wait for credits to roll
A vaudevillian title card appears
it reads
ACT II: Sally
You're not done. You're not even half done, motherfucker. Not that I would know, because I stopped fucking playing We Happy Few.
