Hello I'm back, almost a month into 2024 to tell you that, at the very least, like half of this blog was written in early January. We still have our Christmas tree up, no major new releases have come out (for like two days) so this is still relevant and cool, damn it. I'm not going to wallow in it, but my life is in a weird place right now and my writing output has suffered. Listen, there was grad school and then there was health issues and then there was a cat and now that cat is my former roommate's cat, and it was not a great year. For those of you stopping by to have a look, thank you. If you'd like more consistent updates into the exciting world of me, a cishet white man in his 30s with opinions about vidya games no one has thought about since 2003, I would highly recommend you follow me on Twitch or listen to the Deep Listens podcast, which I'm frequently on. We're gonna do an episode about Fear and Hunger! I'm the host of Off the Deep End now?
For now, I plan on continuing to post my written nonsense on Giant Bomb until it no longer makes sense to do so or I finally get over the inertia and start cross-posting to an external blog. I will not stop. You cannot stop me. Since some smartass made a comment about my last list, this one is in descending order. I hope you're happy.
10. TRAG: Mission of Mercy
It’s to my great displeasure that this current run of The Tower of Dubious Horror Games hasn’t yielded more secret gems. While I’ve certainly played my share of weird or fascinating junk, there hasn’t been a real Blue Stinger, Illbleed, or Countdown Vampires-level event. The exception to this is TRAG, an also-ran tank control adventure that is closer to something like anime Die Hard than Resident Evil. TRAG, known as “Hard Edge” in Japan, is a video game with tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds but also combos and a private detective named Burns Byford who punches robots and mutants with his fists. Most importantly, it’s also a delivery mechanism for some of the “best” voice acting of the PSX era. Every line read is a winner.
It’s the kind of forgotten game that was dismissed at the time for being “a Resident Evil clone” and was basically ignored by all but the weirdo youtuber types I follow who care about survival horror. That’s… entirely understandable, given what else was coming out in late 1998, but here and now I’m gonna say this: TRAG is good. Is it great? No. Probably not. But you’ve already played Resident Evil 2. You’ve probably even played a Devil May Cry. Why not slum it and play a game that will never get re-released from a company whose current output appears to be almost entirely mobile and pachislot related? There’s an anime cyborg teen girl who uses a pair of tonfas and goes into the matrix at one point! You can’t do that in Onimusha, can you?
9. Evil West
I’ve come to the realization that if your video game was made in Poland, there’s at least a 75% chance I’ll be interested in checking it out. From NecroVision to The Witcher to Chernobylite to Two Worlds to Outriders, you cannot understate the consistency of this country’s video game developers in making stuff I want to at least look at. I’m not going to claim all, or even most, of those games are stellar, but they’re rarely boring.
Evil West is an Xbox 360 video game from 2007 that was cryogenically frozen and woke up in 2022. It’s to Flying Wild Hog’s credit that a video game where a steampunk cowboy punches vampires is even more brazenly stupid than the premise would imply. It’s not the deepest combat system, but there’s enough game juice and feedback to make it satisfying. Moreover, it has co-op despite clearly not being designed around that feature. Is it repetitive? Yes. Is it a little shallow? Sure. 7/10 would play again.
8. Outward
I played through a good chunk of Outward, weekly on stream with “friend of the show” Relkin. This turned out to be the best and worst way to play a very bespoke, very jank open co-op RPG. Outward definitely has some similarities to the likes of Gothic and Two Worlds, although it’s unfortunately “made in Canada” and not central Europe as I originally assumed. If you’d guess that an open world fantasy RPG with heavy emphasis on survival and crafting elements would have some layer of cruft to it, you’d be right. If you thought I’d be into that, you’d also be right. There’s a level of dumb clownery that can only happen when you’re playing with another person
If I have a serious problem with Outward, it has a lot to do with certain crucial mechanics and abilities very much being hidden behind player experimentation, buying the right crafting recipe, or otherwise dipping heavily into consumable items. Since there’s no leveling, the only true progress you make is via equipment and purchased skills. If we’d looked at a wiki sooner, rather than intentionally going in blind, we’d probably have had a better time. That said, I don’t regret my time with it, and in fact enjoyed myself enough that it’s on this here list.
7. Gothic
I’ve finally lived up to my German ancestry by playing a Piranha Bytes game to its conclusion, and it turns out that Gothic is good, actually. With this out of the way, there are only a handful of stamps left on my “Late 90s/Early 00s CRPG” bingo card. My credibility? Still in hand. My brand? Intact. Just don’t ask me to finish Arcanum, I tried that this year and still couldn’t do it.
As one of the foundational texts for both Piranha Bytes as a studio and the modern Eurojank RPG, it’s impressive to see how much Gothic gets right the first time around. The prison colony the game takes place in feels like a real place. It’s small and contained enough that you get a pretty good grasp of its geography, its characters, and its power structures, then throws your nameless chump in to disrupt it all. It’s so good that I can see why they proceeded to do some variation on that idea for the next seven games.
Now, to be fair, Gothic is not an easy game to love, and it took a few hours before I fully decided to approach the game on its own terms. Between the bizarre keyboard-only control scheme, the aggressive difficulty curve, and the complete lack of guard rails even for a game from this era, you can see why it’s a “cult classic” (probably among people who aren’t native english speakers) and not a mainstream genre touchstone. Certain skills are of questionable use, certain aspects of the economy can be cheesed with a little enterprise and you can absolutely make a compromised character if you spread your points too thinly. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, you can tell the exact moment they ran out of time and money, and it’s the last dungeon.
Gothic II is apparently a better realization of all of these ideas, and I look forward to seeing it. Then probably not playing any more Piranha Bytes games after that. Listen, I’ve played Elex for a few hours. I’ve seen that Billy Idol concert in Elex 2. You’re not tricking me. The weird corollary to Gothic being good is the knowledge that PB got worse at making the same game over the course of 20 years.
6. Northern Journey
Northern Journey is a bizarre indie FPS(?) adventure(?) made by one very strange guy from Norway. For a quirky indie game that could very well go off of vibes alone, it’s also shockingly varied and smartly paced; a hiking journey through a weird, extremely Nordic wilderness. If you’ve ever wanted the experience of what it’s like to live in a place where the sun doesn’t shine for more than two hours for half the year, this feels like a pretty solid encapsulation. It’s also the kind of thing where a lot of the joy of the game is seeing what comes next, so I’ll refrain from spoiling more than that. Give it a look.
5. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2
In order to justify myself I feel like I need to express I was not “a skating child” in the late 90s and early 2000s. Skateboarding was something cool kids did, kids with more pain tolerance, or maybe kids with better coordination than me. I was also a Nintendo child, as previously established, which was not the place to play games about skateboarding. I mostly bring these up to excuse myself for never really playing a Tony Hawk game seriously until this year.
It turns out, regardless of how cool one was in the early 2000s, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is actually kind of amazing. I know I’m roughly 25 years late to the party on this one, but now I know the lyrics to Superman by Goldfinger and also how to do a benihana. I apologize for my lateness on this one. So here I am, growing older all the time. Looking older all the time. Feeling younger in my mind?
4. Panzer Dragoon Saga
2023 was the brief moment in which I realized the Saturn weirdos might actually have some valid ground to stand on. If the Dreamcast is a machine full of nothing but arcade ports and weird, commercially unviable niche Japanese games that are someone’s favorite, then the Saturn is that but also all of those games either never came out over here or had a very limited number of copies made. Also unlike the Dreamcast, which was broken wide open while it was still alive, Saturn emulation was in a pretty bad spot until a few years ago. It’s the kind of console that feels like undiscovered territory; the kind of thing that hasn’t really been covered to the same cultish degree as its successor. It’s ripe territory for future streaming and writing, and you can expect more from me now that I’ve gone through the trouble of getting Mednafen to work. Also? Burning Rangers is dope.
If you listened to our podcast on the game, you’ll hear me say this and I’ll say it again here: shockingly, Panzer Dragoon Saga manages to mostly live up to the hype bequeathed upon it by the five individuals who actually played it over here. While not without problems, I genuinely think this is the kind of game that would’ve been heralded as one of the great JRPGs of the 1990s… had it not come out on a dying platform with a criminally miniscule number of copies. As Sega’s response to Final Fantasy VII, it manages to go toe-to-toe with Square’s equivalent offerings, with an amazing soundtrack, fully voiced, lip-synched cutscenes three years before FF X, and some of the goddamn prettiest fully-polygonal environments on a 32 bit console this side of Vagrant Story. The combat manages to take the principles of a linear shmup and apply them to an active-time JRPG battle system in a smart and innovative way, blending menu based shit with the kind of reaction and pattern memorization that defines Panzer Dragoon.
While this would’ve been a minus at the time, the part where PDS is only like 15~ hours long is actually a plus these days. It keeps the combat from outstaying its welcome, and makes the weird chaff sequences where you aren’t on the dragon more tolerable. While the story isn’t the deepest thing either, it has its share of pathos and a few fun meta moments that are cute and neat. If there’s one game on this list I’d actually recommend people check out, it’s this one.
3. The Legacy of Kain series (Except Blood Omen 2)
Picking my Soul Reaver save from last year back up was actually an inspired decision on my part, because it led to me finishing that and eventually the entire Legacy of Kain series. 20+ years on, these games are still a remarkable achievement in video games, not necessarily for how they play, but in terms of tone, storytelling, vocal performances, and homoerotic vampire time travel fuckery. It’s the perfect combination of self-serious melodramatic soliloquy and late 90s video game-ass video game pulp that really makes it work. I cannot overstate how good Michael Bell and Simon Templeman are as Raziel and Kain respectively, giving the perfect level of gravitas and heft to soliloquies about the nature of free will or the nature of the block puzzle in front of your character. In an era where video game voice acting was still usually terrible, the quality of the Legacy of Kain series stands out even today.
The weird thing about LoK as a series is that it doesn’t really have a consistent identity structurally. Each game is accidentally part of a different genre. Blood Omen is a top-down action/adventure in the vein of 2D Zelda, Soul Reaver is basically an attempt at 3D Zelda, Soul Reaver 2 is more of a linear action/adventure, and Defiance is closer to a cut-rate Devil May Cry. Blood Omen 2 exists. I wouldn’t call any of them best-in-class, and they all feel like they had plenty of corners cut in order to ship. Eidos wasn’t exactly a great publisher, even before Square-Enix took over. That’s fine. Blood Omen 2 excluded, they’re all moderately playable titles of that era. Not bad, considering they were also all built on the same tech responsible for Gex.
That cobbled-together nature is also present in the series’ story, but the way it manages to thread the needle of its myriad different timelines, plot threads, and recurring characters is good, actually. It’s worth remembering, there was something of a legal kerfuffle between Crystal Dynamics and Silicon Knights over the series, which is part of why Soul Reaver is such a different game than its predecessor. The way Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance try to tie those two games back together through retcons, timeline fuckery, and characters who see the wholeness of history is great. It’s the kind of thing that would probably attract the lamest kind of youtube “plot holes” breakdowns today, but I have to give Amy Hennig and co credit for managing it as they went along. If you have a character monologue gravely enough, I am willing to excuse time travel as an explanation for anything.
Unfortunately, the way Defiance ends is *absolutely* something of an unresolved cliffhanger, setting up for one last game which never got made. (Crystal Dynamics got put in charge of Tomb Raider around that time, which was a far more lucrative and popular series.) People love to champion a tragic cause, and Kain’s ultimate fate is one of them. It’s probably for the best we didn’t end up getting the 360-era soft reboot from the Her Story guy, or the asymmetric multiplayer game that was salvaged from *that* game’s ashes. If The Embracer Group stops shutting down half of the studios it bought within the last 3 years and actually tries to reboot Kain, I dunno if I’d want that either. More than many other games, part of the appeal of this series for me is its very specific place as an artifact of the late 90s and early 2000s. I don’t know if you could make something like that again and have it work for a mainstream video game audience. Maybe you could! I don’t envy anyone who tries.
2. The Armored Core Series (but especially the 3rd and 4th gen)
Listen, I’ve already written a whole thing about my experiences with Armored Core in 2023. You can read that if you didn’t. Listen, I liked the first four or five generations of AC so much I thought 6 was slightly disappointing because it’s slightly different from those games! I’ve become that person for a *different* video game series than the ones I’m already that way for! I haven’t even played Armored Core Verdict Day for more than a few hours, so I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other on how the 5th gen mixed things up. If I had to rate a top 3, it’d probably be 3/Silent Line, Nexus, and For Answer. The only one I’d absolutely recommend against is Nine Breaker.
The thing I guess I will say (if it wasn’t already obvious) is if you liked AC6, it might be worth your time to mess around with some of the older games in the series. Old Armored Core doesn’t get dual analog control until Nexus, but most of those games are less difficult than their reputation would suggest. At least, they were for me. Maybe I’m just really good at video games, who’s to say? I did beat Last Raven, and people say that’s the hardest game FromSoft has ever made!
1. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Sure, I didn’t play the “relevant” Zelda game for more than a few hours in 2023, but that’s because I instead decided to play Skyward Sword as a goof, a jape. Now it’s one of my favorite games in the series. Whoops. Outside of maybe Spirit Tracks, which is derided because no one in the United States cares about trains, it’s the one mainline Zelda game whose reputation feels mostly muted. I was fully expecting to go into this thing ready to tear it apart, but it’s been so long since I’ve played “one of these” it actually looped back around into genuine surprise.
As the last traditional 3D Zelda game, probably ever, Skyward Sword feels like the application of everything Aonuma’s team learned over the course of making four other 3D Zelda games. What also surprised me was seeing some of the foundations for ideas that would show up in Breath of the Wild. Sure, those ideas aren’t implemented as well but you can see where the important building blocks came from. What it all comes down to for me is dungeon design. You use items to solve puzzles outside of the dungeon you get them! How novel! How exciting? But seriously, there’s an understanding of how a 3D Zelda dungeon should flow, how they should introduce concepts and ideas for puzzles and then ask the player to execute on them, that I think is some of the best the series has to offer.
For all the complaints I remember this game having, about the slow introduction, the relatively small real estate of the different areas, the backtracking, I don’t think any of them are particularly egregious? What I do think the game deserves some shit for is the absolutely perfunctory nature of the side stuff. I’m not the kind of person who gets all the heart pieces in any given Zelda game. The side ventures in Skyward Sword feel even more pointless than they usually do in these games. There are upgrades and collectibles and extra bottles and none of that really matters because: A. you still get more rupees than you know what to do with and B. the game is, for the most part, quite easy.
One of the things that helps with Skyward Sword is that, a decade-plus removed from its existence, I’m not tired of or angry at the concept of waggle. I think a large chunk of that has to do with the higher precision of the joycons compared to the Wii Motion Plus, but it also helps that motion controls are weird and novel again. Skyward Sword is a game whose entire identity feels predicated on the very Nintendo-like problem of “We need to justify the features of this console.” But they work! They’re cool! It was a genuine surprise! Video games!
Poor Choice of the Year: You and Me and Her
This year in Visual Novels was the year I finally had enough self-destructive inclination to do the unthinkable and install an 18+ patch because people on the internet said “it’s important for the story.” That was a mistake. Don’t listen to those people. You and Me and Her: A Love Story is best known in the West as the primary inspiration for Doki Doki Literature Club, which should already give you an idea of what it’s trying to go for. Just… with a lot more NTR. Like, a lot more. I’m not going to tell you, the reader at home, what is or is not acceptable as far as kink, but it’s not my thing. And to be clear, that’s A LOT of what this game’s story is ultimately about. It positions itself as a lampshade hanging meta-commentary on dating sims, gal games, and VNs in general, but is also more than willing to exploit those tropes for the sake of being horny.
The line between “VN with 18+ scenes” and “Eroge with a censored version” can be a very blurry one, given the medium’s history and the incentives that were built around it during the PC-98 era. The thing is, I do think You and Me and Her’s all-age version probably loses something if the story is just about kissing and holding hands. I also don’t think it’s a particularly great story either way. “It’d be really messed up if characters from dating sims remembered things from other routes” is a novel idea, but You and Me and Her doesn’t really have anything to say about love, relationships, or the dating sim genre *beyond* that. The meta-trickery aspect is something that feels like it would’ve hit harder when the game was new, before every modern indie title tried something similar.
I’ll give it this though: when the game goes for upsetting, it’s certainly upsetting. It’s nice to know I haven’t been fully desensitized by my time on the internet. I just dunno if the payoff for fucking with the player (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) is nearly as smart or profound as it thinks it is. It sure is good that I didn’t make that mistake again in the same year! Oh. O-oh. I also played some of YU-NO. Uh. Yeah. Maybe I’ll end up writing something about that.
Visual Novel of the Year: Chaos;Child
Thankfully, there are plenty of options in the world of VNs that don’t involve having a rhetorical debate over the merits of pornographic scenes. Take MAGES Science Adventure series, for example. Best known for spawning Steins;Gate, there are actually eight games in the series as of this writing. I’ve said before that I think Steins;Gate is fantastic, fun time loop anime fringe science storytelling in both its VN and anime forms. But did you know it wasn’t the first game in the series? I mean, probably. If you’re the kind of person who remotely gives a shit about “What if Anime Was Books And Those Books Took 30+ Hours To Read” you are likely aware.
Only officially released in the west last year, Chaos;Head Noah is the updated version of the first SciAdv novel first released in 2008. I’ll be as generous as I can be here when I say maybe there’s a reason why Steins;Gate was the big breakout hit and not this one. Focusing on psychic teens, group hallucinations, and gnarly fucked up serial killings, it’s also a pretty on-brand snapshot of Japanese otaku culture circa the late 00s. It also has, by design, one of the more pathetic and irritating protagonists I’ve seen in a story like this. Takumi Nishijo is a deeply paranoid, deeply neurotic shut-in who is scared of girls, life, and humanity in general. While this is the point, it also makes him an incredibly passive protagonist. There’s a lot of good dread and paranoia to be had from that perspective, but it’s also a 30+ hour VN where the ostensible hero of the story spends a good chunk of it metaphorically or literally in the fetal position cursing his fate.
Chaos;Child isn’t really a direct sequel to Chaos;Head, outside of being set in Shibuya and having psychic teens, Japanese internet culture, and serial killers. There are references and callbacks, but nothing crucial. This one benefits greatly from having “a cast of characters” who “do things,” and a protagonist whose personal arc isn’t resolved in the last hour of the story. There are still some weird last-minute ass pulls, a particularly goofy and unnecessary twist near the end, but the emotional core holds. It’s definitely one of the best VNs from this series.
Adventure Game of the Year: Unavowed
As part of a continuing goof at the expense of my friend/co-host/antagonist Chris "ZombiePie" REDACTED, I played a couple of adventure games in 2023. If you watched his streams, you might have the impression that the adventure genre died because it's full of terrible Euro-trash myst clones written by people who actively (instead of passively) hate women and minorities as much as they love the worst bullshit puzzles fathomable by humans. Adventure games are not normally a genre I get along with particularly well, but goofing around with Wadjet Eye stuff was a good reminder that, yes, the genre in fact has merit. The Secret of Monkey Island? Totally okay! Not nearly as funny as it thinks it is (or people thought it was 30+ years ago), not to mention the enhanced graphics of the XBLA remaster have aged like milk, but it's charming enough. Unavowed though, that's the good shit.
Other than being Urban Fantasy, a genre that always feels a bit under-represented in video games, the thing that makes Unavowed work is the part where it secretly just applies the concepts of a BioWare game to a point and clicky. You have companions to bring along, who have their own unique skills and perspectives to help solve puzzles in different ways, tackling cases in vignettes rather than a contiguous series of adventure game nightmares. It's good! I will play more adventure games! They will be better than the ones ZP plays!
Also special shout outs to "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" which is also excellent and successfully conveys that England is a place no human being should live.
Baffling Thing of the Year: The Callisto Protocol
In a year where I played multiple Sonic games, including BOTH versions of Sonic Unleashed, the actual most ??? video game for me this year was the fucking off-brand Dead Space. The parallels between The Callisto Protocol and The Evil Within are abundant and easy to make. Both are games acting as spiritual successors to beloved franchises, spearheaded by industry veterans and backed with not-insubstantial resources by a newish publisher. They’re both awkward cross-gen experiences with notably terrible PC ports and decidedly compromised last-gen versions. They’re also both crushingly disappointing and not worth your time. I’ve made my thoughts on The Evil Within and its sequel fairly clear over the years, but I think The Callisto Protocol might have them both beat in terms of truly inexplicable AAA experiences.
There is a world where The Callisto Protocol is good. You can see bits of good ideas and design expertise peek through the cracks, but for whatever reason those ideas are subverted by bad ones, or questionable design, or some of the weirdest, most frustrating encounters I’ve seen in a video game. This is the kind of game that should get a tell-all article about its development, assuming anyone even remembers it exists in a few years. Is it a hardcore survival horror game? Is it a weird clown game? Is it a fucking mess? Yes to all three.
A more melee focused Dead Space set on a prison colony should be an easy sell! And indeed, for the first half of The Callisto Protocol I was very much of the stance that “hey this isn’t nearly as bad as people say it is.” Sure, the plot and characters are non-entities that feel like they had half their scenes cut, but playing punch out with not-Necromorphs and bonking them with a stun baton is a fun time! And then it turned out that was all the game had up its sleeve. Outside of some truly wretched stealth sequences and an emphasis on environmental hazards, it’s kind of the same thing for its entire 12ish hour run time, but it gets worse as it goes along. You never get enough ammunition to make ranged weapons a primary option, though the kinesis equivalent is solid given the number of grinders and spikes placed everywhere.
Should you play The Callisto Protocol? Given it’s never getting a sequel and frequently goes on sale for like $15, my answer is “maybe???” I know I just said above you shouldn’t play it, but if you’re sick and have a morbid sense of curiosity it might be worth your time. Of course, you could also just use that time to play through the RE4 remake again.
Replay of the Year: Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Sigma 2. Not 3. 3 is still terrible.
No other character action game captures the level of high speed ultraviolence like Ninja Gaiden. If Devil May Cry is concerned with being stylish and God of War is concerned with being gratuitous, then Ninja Gaiden is the power fantasy of being a cuisinart. Even playing the Sigma version of 1 and 2, where the violence is inexplicably toned down, it’s still incredibly fun to play as Ryu Hayabusa and just leave a pile of limbs and arterial spray from whatever fucked up demons, mercenaries, and evil ninjas cross your path.
What stuck out to me this time? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ninja Gaiden Black is still the superior version of the first game. While there’s more wiggle room and debate about Sigma 2, the changes made in Ninja Gaiden Sigma in general make it a slightly lesser experience. I’m not the hardest corest Master Ninja or anything but even I can see the way certain quirks and differences, plus some jank-ass PS3 visuals, make for a worse product. THAT SAID, the way people talk about it you’d think a crime had been committed instead of just certain difficulty and enemy behavior changes alongside some truly spurious Rachel levels. If you don’t feel like dragging out an Xbox console to play Black, you’ll be *just fine* with Sigma.
It probably doesn’t bear repeating, but I’m just going to emphasize: Ninja Gaiden 3, even in its Razor’s Edge form, is a bad time of a video game. Whatever improvements made to the combat over the original version can’t really salvage the fact that it shares a spot with Resident Evil 6 in the pantheon of “Japanese Developers attempting to appeal to the west and failing miserably” games that line the libraries of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The core combat is fine, if even messier than 2, but any izuna dropping ultraviolence to be had can’t really compensate for the fucking awful scripted sequences and boss fights that are scattered through its runtime.
Vtuber(s) of the Year: FuwaMoco
BAU BAU
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