I have a lot planned for this following week, as I imagine we all do, so this Saturday Summaries is going to have to be a relatively concise one. I suppose that is to say, expect something more Anna Karenina-sized instead of my usual War and Peace weekly text dump. Since we're approaching the end of the year and I want to spend the very last Saturday Summaries of 2017 to talk about the games I'm looking forward to in 2018, this feels like as good a time as any to discuss plans for 2018's new blogging schedule.

The Top Shelf, my PlayStation 2-based headliner for this year, will be drawing to a permanent close next Tuesday. I've pretty much tapped that well dry, barring a sudden influx of new (to me) PS2 games to write about, and I'm ready to move onto other consoles of yesteryear to base features around. For that reason, my next feature will concern the Super Nintendo Entertainment System: now that I've had some time away after completing that wiki project of several years, I've realized that there's many SNES games that are deserving of some acclamation with all the heightened interest in the console following the release of the SNES Classic, as well as those that I simply never found the time to conquer at any point over the intervening decades. However, all that time spent working on their wiki pages has impressed upon me how much of the Super Nintendo's library is generic and bad: as the market leader, everyone was hitching their wagons to the thing, whether they had any business developing games or not. So expect a heavily curated look through the obscure and semi-obscure highlights for the system, focused primarily but perhaps not entirely on its North American and European output, as I fill some longstanding backlog holes and help to give the games that didn't make it onto the SNES Classic their own time in the sun. Just haven't quite finalized a name for it yet: Either "The SNES Classic Mk. II", with the conceit of the feature being that we're crafting a hypothetical sequel product, or "The Best of the Rest of SNES-t", which I'm only humoring because some small part of me wants everyone to suffer terrible wordplay all the time.

As for the Indie Game of the Week and the Saturday Summaries features, they'll continue on as they are currently. Looking at the Indie games in my Steam and PSN libraries there's clearly no danger of exhausting my supply, and there's many new entries from 2017 (and 2018, I've no doubt) that I intend to pick up and check out very soon, including the likes of Cuphead, SteamWorld Dig 2, Hollow Knight, A Hat in Time, Absolver, What Remains of Edith Finch, Snake Pass, Night in the Woods, Poi, Thimbleweed Park, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, Kingsway, Hob, Golf Story, Battle Chasers: Nightwar, Vaporum, Hidden Folks... well, the list is fairly endless, and I don't imagine I'll have any trouble finding another fifty games to highlight in 2018. Honestly, that feature is more for my benefit than anything else, as it gets me to put down the 100-hour JRPGs and open-world games long enough to try out something new.

Before I leave you all to enjoy your holidays, let's take a look at the week that was:

• The Top Shelf concluded its third and final round of eliminations with a gigantic Battle Royale between five SRPGs from Nippon Ichi Software: La Pucelle: Tactics, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Phantom Brave, Makai Kingdom: Chronicles of the Sacred Tome and Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. I determined I only needed one of those time vampires on my shelf, and I ultimately went for Disgaea after it scored highly in every category I could muster. Still, I don't think there's any wrong answer here and while I doubt I could ever pick up another one of those games, for the sake of my own sanity, there's no denying the value for money each one presents as well as the enjoyment I've derived from their subversive anime charms. The next The Top Shelf entry will be the finalized list and therefore the conclusion of the feature, so watch out for that around Boxing Day.
• The Indie Game of the Week, which re-emerges after the conclusion of Go! Go! GOTY!, is the much-lauded national park lookout interactive fiction Firewatch from Campo Santo. I figured it was due time seeing that Campo Santo recently debuted a trailer for their next game at the Game Awards (that would be In the Valley of Gods). Firewatch feels like a movie that the player is directing, not by picking when and how scenes happen, but in how they choose to build the relationship between the two principal characters by carefully selecting the responses and actions that Henry performs. It's role-playing in the most literal sense, rather than the sense we've standardized as video game terminology, and while it's not always a thrill-a-minute with environmental puzzles that will surprise and confound you, there's some very competent storytelling at work. There are trickster gods that are less low-key than this game, and I think it's to its credit.

Prey

I'm ultimately glad I didn't decide to rush through Prey for the sake of getting my GOTY material together in time (though it's going to be more of a crunch now, for sure) because it's definitely the kind of game that deserves to be played slowly. Whether that's exploring every nook and cranny for resources as well as bits of incidental lore and storytelling, taking the time to hunt down the corpses of your employees to see what befell them and where they took their final stand - the poor woman who asphyxiated in her EVA suit just outside the station, for example, who was too terrified to leave a small alcove due to the technopathic horror waiting for her just outside - or just soaking in the atmosphere of every new section of the spacestation.

I think that's reflected in the visual style they went for, which takes on the appearance of the future as imagined by those living in the 1960s and 1970s. The sci-fi of the late-1960s and 1970s in particular diverged from the goofy adventure fun of the B-Movies of the 1950s and started to take on a more contemplative approach: consider the likes of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green (1973), Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972), Michael Anderson's Logan's Run (1976), Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Gary Nelson's The Black Hole (1979), or Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - they would frequently take their time to establish a mood and a sense of place before slowly threading in the thriller aspect that would accelerate the later acts of the movie towards a dramatic conclusion. It was a very interesting age for cinematic sci-fi, and I'm not surprised a few games are following their example (Headlander is another recent example, though a deliberately sillier one) and trying to recreate that leisurely-paced build up of suspense for a new generation.

If I have a bone to pick with Arkane Studios it's how they always design their achievements to not only require multiple playthroughs but cases where you have to bar yourself from many of the tools you have available. In their Dishonored series, that meant trophies you could only earn if you refused the Outsider's powers or avoiding any of the special abilities that would quickly kill your fellow humans. Likewise, there's two sets of powers that protagonist Morgan Yu can acquire - a set of optimal human abilities, acquiring the prodigious skills to hack any computer like a code wizard, wield any gun like a decorated war vet, or simply exhibit enough physical strength to lift anything blocking your path, as well as abilities conferred by the Typhon aliens that include their ability to mimic any inanimate object or take over human minds and machines with telepathic powers. Because I'm a sucker for trophies, I denied myself the Typhon powers. I wasn't really interested in the combat, and the human powers contain the majority of traversal abilities - lifting heavy objects, hacking door panels, fixing the power, etc. - so it worked out for the best overall. Still, I think there's probably a better way of crafting a set of trophies than insisting on all these forced limitations.

There's also an in-game justification for wanting to avoid Typhon powers too, though: going too far down the Typhon route has dire consequences for Morgan's sense of empathy for her fellow species, and you can absolutely choose to play the game as, essentially, one of the Typhon - killing whatever humans are left and ensuring the Typhon's plans come to fruition. The idea the game frequently revisits is that, for all their heightened psychological abilities, the Typhon are not sapient and don't "see" humans as anything more than noisy resources to be consumed: this, like the xenomorphs, makes them something far more terrifying to deal with. After all, you can't reason with a Typhon any more than you could with a deadly pathogen or an asteroid.

Anyway, from the early footage of the game I saw I anticipated it would be a fairly routine example of another Dead Space or BioShock. Ultimately, though, I think I prefer it to both of those franchises. The heightened emphasis on story and atmosphere over standard FPS combat (though there's plenty of that, still) and jumpscares (and those) made it a more compelling setting to explore, and even with all my self-imposed deadlines for blogging content I was in no rush to see it through. Well, until it started getting pretty annoying at the end for story reasons I won't get into. Highly recommended, if you happened to sleep on it this year or gave it a miss because Dishonored wasn't your teleporting cup of tea. (Just keep in mind that it can be pretty darn terrifying at times.)