The gaming press, the Internet, and even the business media have been buzzing over Microsoft’s splashy announcement that they are spending nearly $70 billion to purchase Activision Blizzard. A lot of the discussion has focused on how this will play into Microsoft competing in the traditional AAA market and even the mobile market, where Activision subsidiary King has some very profitable titles. As far as I can tell, however, nobody is looking at the most reasonable explanation for the purchase and especially the timing of the announcement. Nobody is looking at the 6,000 pre-order gorilla that’s about to break down the gaming industry’s door and change gaming and, if we’re being honest, American culture, forever.

On Friday January 14^th Intellivision posted a statement of facts that demolished all the criticisms about its hotly anticipated new game console and made it very clear that they are a serious player in the games space and they didn’t come to take prisoners. The following Tuesday Microsoft announces the purchase of Activision for $68 billion. Somehow the press, even the ‘responsible’ mainstream business press, has so far failed to draw the obvious line from point A to point B. Can I prove that Microsoft CEO of gaming Phil Spencer saw the Amico statement on Friday afternoon, called Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and begged for access to Microsoft’s considerable war chest to make a Hail Mary pass to save the struggling Xbox division? And that Spencer then called Bobby Kotick on Monday in a blind panic to toss him a $68 billion life preserver in the hope that two sinking ships could somehow pull each other up out of the ocean’s embrace? No. I can’t prove it. But that’s the way Occam’s razor cuts here.

Everyone is focused on the biggest core games involved in this blockbuster deal. Call of Duty. World of Warcraft. Overwatch. But Microsoft already has a lot of games like that. Halo. Elder Scrolls Online. Gears of War. Microsoft doesn’t need Activision to give it shooters and Western RPGs. What Microsoft doesn’t have, but Activision does, is games from the simpler time that gaming will inevitably return to once the 3D and online fads have run their little course. Games like Pitfall and Frostbite. Games that everyone can understand and play. Starcraft is so complicated that only the most dedicated gamers can make heads or tails of it, but do you know what anyone can grasp after a few minutes? Fishing Derby. The really valuable part of the portfolio is not the flashy stuff but the bedrock games of the past that are poised to make a huge comeback, especially after Amico takes the market by storm and disrupts Xbox’s whole business model.

Phil Spencer is a smart guy. He knows that people are getting bored of playing variations of the same FPS games and open world bore fests painted over with slightly newer graphics and a rehashed map. He knows that what today’s kids really want are the games that their weird, childless, uncles vaguely remember playing at a friend’s house 40 years ago, like Astrosmash and Dynablaster. The endless virtual expanses and creative building of Minecraft is far too open ended for young people growing up in a scary and changing world. What children are really into is a video game version of Farkle, a dice game so old fashioned and obscure that nobody knows how it originated in the 1980s or, more importantly, why.

Microsoft put on a brave face by announcing 25 million subscribers to Game Pass in its big Activision purchase announcement. They wanted to reframe the bad news that growth has dramatically slowed this early and pretend it’s a win. There are 3 billion gamers in the world. Xbox’s offerings appeal to less than 1% of them. That's the market Intellivision is looking to corner, and Farkle will charm them all.

Amico has already proven to have a unique appeal in the gaming space. When a piece of electronics is popular and desirable people say that retailers can’t keep it on the shelves. With Amico, retailers can’t even get it to those shelves in the first place. Amico had thousands of pre-orders over 2 years before it was released. Do you know how many pre-orders Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch had combined 2 years prior to their releases? 0. Not a good look for the companies that claim to be the major players in gaming. Amico has sold and shipped tens of thousands of physical games without a release date for the console itself. None of the other companies even tried. That’s how far ahead Amico is.

Amico’s statement of facts and announcement that they were going to make an announcement of the console’s fourth scheduled release date clearly sent shockwaves through the $2 trillion behemoth that is Microsoft. They saw the writing on the wall, the universal appeal of simpler, easier, games, and they panicked to the tune of a year’s worth of GDP from Myanmar, a country of over 50 million people. That’s a whole lot of panic over Shark Shark! But it makes sense. Microsoft doesn’t have the old, long forgotten, properties to revive and do battle with Amico’s big guns, like Biplanes, a game whose reference to a long abandoned and obsolete technology perfectly fits into Amico’s philosophy. At least it didn’t until the Activision purchase, bringing along a host of older properties not just vaguely remembered but beloved by weird uncles throughout the western world.

Will it work? I don’t think so. Amico’s games have been in development for years, honing everything to a perfect level of polish prior to the big release, which will likely be before the Activision purchase closes in 2023. The names are less familiar, which makes them more intriguing. You can’t fight Astrosmash with River Raid and Megamania. You can’t take on Shark Shark! With Seaquest. You certainly can’t fight Intellivision Skiing with Activision Skiing. Or Slalom by Rare. Microsoft also owns Slalom. It won’t help them though. You can’t win a war fighting on the defensive, and that’s what the panic buying of Activision is. Microsoft armed itself for the wrong conflict. Its expensive studios and 3D online fad franchises are the Maginot Line of gaming. And Intellivision? The company relying on German grant money to finance much of its game development? I think we know who they are in this scenario.

Yesterday was an Amico kind of day for me. I wanted to play games but I didn’t want to play anything overly complicated or taxing. I was looking for some accessible quick fix fun, the kind we used to have back in the 8-bit era where gaming didn’t require 10 mapped buttons or 3D camera control. The exact kind of gaming experience that the Amico is selling itself on.

I started out with Mighty Goose, which I downloaded for “free” off Game Pass. This is a Metal Slug style run ‘n gun. It’s teen rated, but if you removed a little blood and a few bones that fly out when you run over enemies in a vehicle it could probably get an E. This is a Metal Slug style arcade run ‘n gun with a pretty forgiving difficulty curve. It even has a system similar to the Amico’s much touted “karma” engine that gives you extra health and weapon pick ups if you die too much on one checkpoint, tailoring the game’s difficulty to the player’s skill. It’s 2 player local co-op as well. In other words it’s exactly the kind of game that you’d expect to find on the Amico based on what they’ve shown so far. Except I’m not sure the Amico could handle the game’s graphics, since there are lots of screen filling effects when things blow up and it has large sprites with detailed animation. Maybe it could.

Amico proponents will argue that this is a “hardcore” game and a different market, but that has never made any sense. Two of the system’s games that people anticipate are Finnigan Fox and Earthworm Jim. Both of those are different forms of run ‘n guns, with a similar cartoony art style to Mighty Goose. I’ve finished Fox ‘N Forests, the game that Finnigan Fox is a reworking of, and though they have promised to make Finnigan Fox easier than that version I can tell you that Mighty Goose is much more accessible to non-gamers than even a reworked Fox ‘N Forests will be. Fox ‘N Forests requires collecting seeds to open up new levels, many of which are hidden or even invisible in the level, and others of which require backtracking with new abilities from older levels. Mighty Goose just requires you progress left to right, blasting everything in your pass. Fox ‘N Forests had constantly respawning enemies and tightly timed puzzle areas that required you to manage a magic meter. Mighty Goose is firmly based in the arcade mindset that it should be fun and obvious from the first time you pick it up. If I had to choose a game for a non-gamer to enjoy Mighty Goose would be the easy answer.

Mighty Goose does cost $20 if you don’t have Game Pass, which is twice the price of Amico games, but with Game Pass that cost comes down to 0 and even without it I’m sure it will go on sale from time to time. But more importantly…you don’t need to buy any new hardware to play Mighty Goose. It’s out on pretty much everything. Switch, PS4, XBONE, PC…if you have access to any of these platforms you can get Mighty Goose. It’s not locked behind a $250 investment, and while you do have to own at least one of those platforms, most people have one and they can all do a heck of a lot more than just play Mighty Goose.

This is a fundamental issue for the Amico. The Switch and the PS4 have both sold over a hundred million units. I won’t even attempt to estimate how many PCs are out there in the market, but it’s a lot and even without a dedicated graphics card most of them can run something like Mighty Goose. How many people are there out there who want to play games but don’t have one of these platforms, or a cell phone, or an Android tv streaming box that can play games? How many grandpas exist who A) like video games, B) don’t just want to play certain huge hits that they remember from the 80s like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, since those people are covered by cheap plug ‘n plays and C) don’t already have something to play games on? I don’t know any of these people and it’s hard to imagine them. My mom liked Tetris when I was growing up and she dabbles with Words With Friends on her phone but she doesn’t like anything more complicated than that, but she doesn’t want dedicated gaming hardware and she would have no interest in Astro Smash, though she might play it for a few minutes if you handed her a controller to be polite.

After I finished Mighty Goose I downloaded Clubhouse Games for my Switch because it was on sale for $27. This is Nintendo’s compilation of 51 versions of popular games, mostly card and board games like solitaire and chess but with a few more videogamey minigames like a target shooting game and a golf game. It has a charming, family friendly, presentation with you taking the role of a little board game miniature and each game being introduced with a short, funny, voice over description by one of these little figures. It makes a lot of sense as Switch software because it allows you to play these games without any set up or clean up and through online multiplayer on the Switch’s network. It would be great for a camping trip if you want to play Connect 4 or Othello at night without having to buy or bring a bunch of those travel versions where you can lose the pieces, but it also makes sense in a small apartment without a lot of room for board games or even just a quick game in the living room if you want to play a few different things without having to dig up your old chess set or clear off space on a table to throw dice.

The presentation here is many times slicker than anything the Amico can offer, which you’d expect because the Switch is much more powerful and because Nintendo is…well..Nintendo. The Switch has a massive userbase and Clubhouse Games has sold over 3 million copies, meaning that it would have been profitable even if Nintendo had spent $50 million to make it, though I very much doubt they did spend that much. Amico projects seem to have a budget closer to the $50-200,000 range, so there’s no way they can compete in terms of polish.

Clubhouse Games nicely covers another genre that the Amico is aiming for. One of the Amico’s pack in games is Farkle, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but I can’t imagine it’s particularly more engaging than the Yacht Dice game included in Clubhouse Games as one of more than 50 options. Farkle comes ‘free’ with the Amico but the Clubhouse games cost less than $1 a game even at full retail price, and at around $30 including tax I paid a bit more than 50 cents per game. That’s not free but it’s not far from it. Clubhouse games offers way more variety, a much slicker presentation, and, most importantly, online functionality. I haven’t even gotten to arguably the biggest draw of the package, which is that you can play these games with friends or family or even strangers across the globe. Obviously there are lots of free online chess and board game options, but this puts everything in a nice package within the safe boundaries of the Switch’s online service.

I enjoyed messing around with the Clubhouse games for a bit and playing some mancala and connect 4, but one game I didn’t enjoy very much was their version of golf, which is entirely from the overhead view and weirdly presents wind speed in meters per second, which is not a way that I think about wind and cost me a few strokes because of unexpected ball curving. It’s just not a great video game version of golf, and it left me wanting to play something a bit deeper and better. So I loaded up Neo Turf Masters, also available on the Switch, and played that for a bit.

I feel pretty confident that even if the Amico does end up releasing and doing well it will not offer a better version of video game golf than Neo Turf Masters. That’s not any slight on the Amico developers, but Neo Turf Masters was created by an exceptionally talented team during the height of the 90s arcade craze and caught lightning in a bottle. Its gorgeously detailed pixel art graphics, intense and exciting presentation, and finely tuned great-feeling controls make it a version of video game golf that hasn’t often been topped in the 25 years since it came out. The only games that have done it better have been high budget golf sims (not something the Amico will even attempt) or Sony’s Everybody’s Golf series, which leveraged the power of modern hardware and its own high budget (for the time) to create something that at least rivals the Neo Geo masterpiece. Neo Turf Masters is available on Switch for $8, though, and that’s about the price that Amico games are targeting. The Amico can argue that it’s not competing with Nintendo’s $60 Mario Golf game, but it is competing with at least hundreds and arguably thousands of old arcade and new indie titles available on Switch at a much lower price point, and it’s not clear how it can.

I think that the Amico makes two massive mistakes that have doomed it, and which compound one another. The first is its price point. By charging almost as much as a Switch for a much less capable machine with much less brand recognition it makes itself the Great Value version of a product that exists but without actually having great value. Imagine going to the store and seeing the store brand peanut butter on the shelf next to Skippy, only it cost 80% as much and came in a jar half as big (much less functionality.) Who would buy it?

The second issue is not being a semi-open platform. The Amico promises that all of its games will have unique content of some kind (originally it was that they’d all be exclusives but this was quickly abandoned as unworkable.) That highly limits what’s on the system. There are thousands of great indie games that could run on the Amico and if it was a port friendly development environment (which it likely is if it uses an old mobile phone chipset that developers are familiar with) it might be able to get some of these amazing games to bulk up its selection and give it more of a library. The Atari VCS is using this model and while it isn’t setting the world on fire it would have almost literally nothing to play if it didn’t have these ports. Atari is also supplementing its own game development costs for the system by selling those games on other platforms (with slightly less content) so it’s not stuck in the trap of having to make games to attract people to its system but only being able to sell games to the small number of people who come on board, generating massive development costs with a tiny market until it catches on. Even the mighty Nintendo had to learn this lesson and abandoned the idea of having a ‘siloed’ system with mostly unique games when it created the Switch. It actively courted ports from anyone who would put a game on its machine, and its status as a semi-open platform is in large part responsible for its success. Nintendo realized that even as one of the biggest game developers and publishers in the world it could not make enough games to support a modern platform, so to avoid the pitfalls of the N64 and Wii U (where you’d buy it for the Nintendo games but have nothing else to play) it filled its release gaps with bucket loads of indie games and last/current gen ports, and Switch owners happily devoured those offerings in between the bigger Nintendo releases.

Intellivision management looked at that hard won lesson that finally got through to the notoriously hard-headed Nintendo leadership team and said “nah, you had it right to begin with, exclusives only is the way to go.”

The Amico essentially has three arguments as to why it would be a better choice than the Switch. The first is based on things that aren’t on the system. It doesn’t offer T or M rated games and it doesn’t have complicated “core” gamer games. This argument doesn’t really make sense. The Switch has parental controls to prevent kids from accessing games with inappropriate content, and the mere existence of Fire Emblem on the platform won’t be an impediment to people who just want to play Animal Crossing and Clubhouse Games. How many Wiis were sold to nursing homes even though that platform also hosted Mad World and Xenoblade Chronicles. You might make some headway with hardcore evangelical Christians who object to the mere existence of Doom 2016 on any platform (demons! gore! Medkits that may contain covid-19 vaccines!) but the Amico doesn’t seem to be targeting that group, even though it’s arguably the console’s best bet. I haven’t seen any outreach to church groups and there aren’t any Sunday Funday Wisdom Tree type games announced for the console. If the team is smart they’ll make this pivot, but they haven’t yet.

The second argument is related but distinct; which is that the Amico will have a tightly curated game library, releasing one new game every 10 or 14 days, which will help avoid people getting overwhelmed by the massive libraries on modern consoles and also help developers by highlighting their games in a way the Switch or PS4/5 cannot. Nobody wants this. Anyone who is going to be comfortable with an online only game store is going to be used to picking through a flood of options to find the thing they want. They’ve all used Netflix and Spotify and a dozen other services at this point. There may be grandpas out there who haven’t used those things and are scared and confused by them, but they will also be scared and confused by the online only nature of the Amico, and even if they haven’t used Netflix they’ve probably dealt with a flood of content on cable TV. Artificially limiting your offerings is not good business in 2022; that’s why Nintendo abandoned this model and opened its platform. Developers, on the other hand, might like the idea of a captive audience, but not a tiny one if they have to develop extra content for it. You might get them on board if they could just port their Unity project to your platform with a couple people putting in a week or two to make sure it runs okay, but if you demand they add new modes or levels or anything else that requires considerable development resources they aren’t going to be interested unless you can offer them at least a hundred thousand potential buyers, and the Amico certainly can’t. The Evercade, a physical only system, also curates and releases a limited number of games (though its library is in the hundreds if you count every title on each mutli-cart) but because it packages pre-existing games in pre-built emulators it doesn’t actually require any development time beyond testing and tweaking emulation, which can likely be done by one or two people without a ton of work. The PlayDate does have an all exclusive library, but it keeps development costs dirt cheap by offering a very easy environment (it has built in development tools) and an intentionally weak chip with a black and white screen. This makes it an ideal platform for single-person passion project development. Selling the games via ‘season’ subscription also assures at least some audience for these super cheap to make games. Amico doesn’t do any of these things to ameliorate its problem of trying to get exclusive content for what will likely be a tiny audience.

The last issue with the Amico is where we get to their “Statement of facts.” Amico responded to Sam Mackovech’s Ars Technica piece with some combative claims about what he allegedly got wrong about their system, including the costs of the parts. In this response they cited the costs of the controllers and the LED lights on the system as two of the reasons why the cost of manufacture was more than what Mackovech claimed. I’m not going to speculate on the actual costs because it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the Amico’s controllers have apparently driven up the system’s price while not offering anything nearly valuable enough to justify charging almost as much as the Switch for it. I would hope the LED lights are not that expensive because they do even less and are likely to prove annoying for anyone who wants to play in a darkened room, but both these features seem to be born not out of necessity for any particular game application but because they seem like they would be ‘cool.’

Gaming consoles have a long history of including things that seem like they would be cool but actually don’t do anything of value. Popular history seems to have it that the Wii’s motion controls were cool and that’s what drove sales of the system. I don’t think that’s true. Both Sony and Microsoft tried to copy Nintendo’s success and both failed. The PlayStation 4 has motion controls and a touch pad and LED lights on the controller and with a very few exceptions the only uses those things have are in VR, where the motion controls come in handy and the LED lights allow the camera to track the controller. Other than those VR applications you only get a few gimmicks like shaking the controller like a flashlight in The Last Of Us and a couple weird experiments like Blue Estate, a light gun shooter that uses the PS4 motion controls to simulate a light gun and kind of sort of works. The Switch has motion controls and my main experience with using them has been in ports from the Wii and the Wii U, like the Super Mario Galaxy port where you pick up the star fragments with an on screen pointer controlled by motion. They even gave an option to turn off the motion controls in Skyward Sword because people don’t really want to use them. There are other applications, like gyro aiming in Splatoon and some other games, but motion controls are not a core feature. Meanwhile other features like the IR camera are used by almost no games, to the point where the Switch Lite doesn’t even include it.

The Nintendo Wii was successful because Wii Sports was a phenomenon, not because it had motion controls. A lot of people bought that console to play tennis and bowling and that was pretty much it. The system had a notoriously low attach rate because people were buying it just for the pack in and then not buying anything else. You can’t replicate the Wii’s success with control gimmicks, only with must have games. Amico’s big controller in the screen gimmick has been tried twice before, once by the Wii U and once by the Dreamcast, and neither of those systems were successful because the gimmick seems cool but has limited applications. You see the same thing with current gimmicks. Both the Switch and the PS5 have advanced rumble features that were used to great effect in launch titles (1-2-Switch and Astro’s Playroom) and then mostly ignored. For all its hype there are very few people talking about the Dualsense a year after launch. People might like the controller fine, and they may appreciate some of its features, but it’s not driving conversation or sales.

The games we’ve seen so far seem to utilize the Amico controller in gimmicky ways, often doing things that other controllers could also do. The controller shows you the color of your ship in Astrosmash. The PS4/5 could do that with its LED. The controller lets you know which oyster will have the next pearl in Shark Shark!, and that’s something that could be accomplished via HD rumble. Showing the dice on your controller screen before you roll in Farkle and then transferring that roll to the screen is kind of neat, but it’s also Farkle. That’s something you can physically play with a few dice and a pad of paper. Wii Sports let you play baseball and golf and boxing in your living room. Clubhouse Games packs dozens of games into a portable system that can be played on an airplane or in the waiting room at the dentist, and adds online functionality so Aunt Gladys can play with you from 3,000 miles away. Is there really much call for even a kind of neat version of video Farkle you need to gather everyone by the TV to enjoy? I’m not saying it’s pointless just that it’s not exactly a system seller.

And that’s what the Amico lacks. A reason to buy the system. It has some games that look bad and some that look fine and even a few that look pretty good, like the version of Breakout by the talented team that made the Bit Trip games. It has some gimmicks that have been tried before without a lot of success. It’s not particularly attractive on price, it’s not an open platform that will attract a wide variety of games looking to be bigger fish in a smaller pond, it lacks basic features like online gaming and it has precisely zero killer apps. Astrosmash looks fine for what it is, most likely, but Xbox Games With Gold is giving away Space Invaders Infinity Gene right now and I can’t imagine that Astro Smash will be able to compete with that or any of the other ‘retro reimagined’ games that have come out over the years and are available on various consoles.

No console maker has been able to go it alone when it comes to development for a very long time, and those that have tried have failed and have opened up their platforms. Gimmicks like LED lights and simple touch screens on the controller aren’t going to change that, especially when there is no killer app to show them off. Video games are common place enough that everyone who wants to play them can find an accessible way to do so, and you’re not going to sell a $250 machine to people who just aren’t that interested. One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone who is excited for the Amico plays all kinds of different games and consoles, and most of them are collectors. They’re interested in a new iteration on something they already have lots of access to. They don’t need the Amico to pursue their hobby but they’re interested in it because they’re hobbyists and they like weird and obscure ideas for the same reason that a lot of film buffs like obscure low budget films; it’s something different and creative and cool in a format they love. But nobody ever tried to sell a special DVD player that would only play films made by Troma, and if they did it would have been a massive flop, even if it had come with some kind of special gimmick like smell-o-vision. The economics for media production, where extra copies can be made for at most a dollar or two, are very different from the economics for electronics. You need some kind of plan, generally involving either leveraging pre-existing content to keep development costs down (Atari, Evercade) or intentionally creating a machine that’s very cheap to make games for (Playdate.)

The Amico’s plan is a cheap touch screen on the controller and excitement over a 2022 version of Shark Shark! How do I set my LED lights to skeptical?

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Mighty Goose came out in 2021 but I wanted to play it so I'm including it anyway.

Game: Mighty Goose

Game Type: Run 'n Gun

Time Played: Approximately 4 hours.

Completion level: Rolled credits. Messed around with New Game+ but did not complete.

Approachability: High. It's very simple to control and not too difficult but has a bit of violence and some blood.

Should You Try It?: Do you like Metal Slug?

Mighty Goose is a Metal Slug ‘homage’ starring a well-armed goose as some kind of space bounty hunter. I think for about 80% of people that will be enough to know whether or not they will like the game and the rest of this entry will be superfluous. Nevertheless I will persevere.

Many games have taken their inspiration from Metal Slug but few have been quite as shameless. The cartoony visuals are nowhere near as detailed as those of the famed SNK run ‘n gun, but this is an indie effort and even back in the arcade heyday of the 90s those ultradetailed sprites and environments proved too costly to produce in the long run. Mighty Goose’s visuals are pleasant enough, evoking 32-bit 2D platformers with bright colors and lots of large sprites. If it weren’t HD and widescreen you could imagine this having a cult following on the Saturn. The soundtrack is peppy, upbeat, and jazzy. It doesn’t reach quite the heights that the best indie soundtracks do but it’s only one or two notches below them. You probably won’t seek out streaming versions of these tunes but they’re quite enjoyable within the context of the game. The gameplay is faster and more responsive than Metal Slug’s, especially after you unlock the loadout option that makes your goose go faster, and the game includes a dodge roll move and the ability to stay aloft after a jump by firing continually below yourself. Your standard arm cannon is pretty effective but you can pick up temporary upgrades including homing missiles, a machine gun, and a powerful shotgun and tesla gun, which are both great fun to use. A deep-voiced male announcer announces each time you pick one of these up, which is the only voice work in the game. You have limited ammo on the extra weapons but pick ups are relatively plentiful, giving the game some nice natural variation as you slightly change your tactics depending on what you’re armed with at any given moment. Enemy variety is adequate, ranging from standard troopers to small insects to enemies in vehicles such as bombers. There are a handful of bosses, which are enormous and challenging without being overly difficult or cheap. The final boss is especially satisfying to take down, without being unfair or breaking the difficulty curve.

I mentioned a loadout system earlier and it’s a slightly unusual one. You earn options as you complete levels and each of them has a certain energy cost associated with it. You have a limited energy budget so you have to pick and choose which of these you want active in your loadout for a given mission. You can’t change the loadout while on a mission but you do get to toggle things on and off before you embark. The upgrades themselves are fine but not exciting. You might increase your move speed (basically necessary) or increase the amount of ammo you get for your weapon pick ups or the amount of time you stay in your semi-invincible super mode lasts (this charges as you kill enemies and is activated by pressing both triggers.) You also get to select a companion character to travel with you and they do things like attack enemies or occasionally throw out a weapon powerup. Sometimes another companion will join you when you rescue them during a stage. You collect coins during gameplay, which you can spend through an in-game phone app for powerups…I think. It’s not tutorialized and I never used it. None of this stuff is particularly interesting but it doesn’t hurt the game either. There are also vehicles called warmachines you jump into that very much resemble the Metal Slugs from…Metal Slug. This adds some welcome variety and you get 4 extra hits before they blow up (you can also refill their health with a wrench icon) so they’re useful, though you can generally continue on foot if one gets destroyed. Your goose also has 4 hits, and can refill their health through medkits, which keeps the game from being too frustrating, though checkpoints are rather far apart so a death can set you back 2 or 3 minutes. It feels like a tough but fair nod to the genre’s arcade origins and you can retry as many times as you like. There’s also some behind the scenes ‘mercy’ programming that gives you extra weapons and health if you find yourself dying at the same checkpoint more than a couple times. The only penalty you take is to your stage grade, which is pretty harsh anyway. I got a D on stages where I only had one death, and also on stage 2 after I died almost ten times against the boss, so I don’t actually know how much it matters.

Mighty Goose isn’t perfect, of course. It puts a ton of explosion effects and screen shake on screen after you destroy certain enemies and I took lots of hits from enemy bullets I couldn’t see because the screen was bouncing around and there were seemingly dozens of pieces of scrap obscuring my view. It’s also not always clear when you can advance to the next area and I got hit trying to move forward because the screen didn’t scroll and instead a wave of enemies came at me. There are some instant kill hazards that don’t feel particularly fair because sometimes you have to blind jump down into a pit to continue and sometimes the pits are just bottomless death, and there are lava pools that might kill you even if you barely graze them. I got stuck in geometry a couple times and died to projectiles while I couldn’t move. These kinds of annoyances aren’t anywhere near enough to ruin the experience but are the kind of issues that small team projects sometimes have when they don’t have quite enough resources to fully polish the product.

Mighty Goose does have a story, I guess, but it’s incomprehensibly choppy. Characters appear with no introduction and give you assignments or fight you before disappearing. There are only a few lines of dialog per level so fortunately the developers didn’t make the mistake of stuffing the game with awful storytelling, and you don’t really need a narrative in a game like this so it’s fine for what it is. You’re a goose with an arm cannon, you shoot everything except the ally characters you can’t shoot and you move from left to right, occasionally using a vent to fly upwards or moving back to the right to hit a switch and open a door. A game with arcade roots doesn’t really need to be any deeper than that.

Mighty Goose is good, shallow, fun. There’s not a ton of content here, though it does offer New Game+ mode with remixed levels, as well as 2 player local co-op. The lack of limits on lives or continues means you can get through this in just a couple hours, which makes its $20 asking price a little steep for a game that’s decent but nothing special. I feel like $10 would be more appropriate for something like this, or maybe $15 if you really like the genre. On the other hand as a Game Pass game it’s pretty darn good. It’s very accessible, bright, colorful, and fun for a play through or two. It’s a great game to play in between huge open world behemoths or when you need a break from your latest hard as nails roguelite. It’s the kind of game that used to be called a good rental, a well-made title that just doesn’t have enough content or replay value to be worth its asking price, which back then was often at least $50. I always felt a little bad saying that about a game because this project was made by talented developers who made the game they wanted to make, made it well, and made a game that I enjoyed. I like Metal Slug! They also avoided artificially extending the length with arcade style cheapness or limited lives or continues and I appreciate that. Should they be penalized for working in a genre that’s expensive to produce on a level by level basis if it’s also a genre that many people like?

Game Pass offers one potential model for how to monetize arcade style games at a time when actual arcades are all but dead. Apple Arcade, of course, is doing a similar thing on cell phones. Of course there are far too many games coming out these days for even Microsoft or Apple to want to put them all on their service, at least at a price that’s fair to developers. But for those that do get selected this is a great way for players to enjoy these kinds of short games without feeling like they spent too much while the developers get paid for their work, though based on the credits this game was also supported through Patreon, presumably by people who really love Metal Slug. I hope they were happy with the product they ended up getting. I suspect they were.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING (out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

Game Pass Gambols 2: Olija

What does it mean to be the “year of” something? It doesn’t mean that thing is the highest selling. Within the video game sphere 2020 was the year of the PlayStation 5 even though the Nintendo Switch sold more units, because the PlayStation 5 captured the attention of the gaming world and became an object of desire among the frenzied masses who battled bots and scalpers more vicious than any fungus zombies or Norse gods to try and get one. It doesn’t mean that thing is the most popular. 2021 was arguably the year of Xbox and Game Pass even though the PlayStation and Nintendo brands remained stronger, but Xbox gained relative position in the market and people’s mindshare, garnering positive attention for strong game releases and additions to their service and forcing Sony to react by planning a similar service for its own system. Instead I’d argue that to be the “year of” something that thing has to have the best year relative to its starting position and make the most positive progress in the market and public opinion compared to where it began.

With that definition in mind it seems all but certain that 2022 will be the year of the Amico.

The Amico starts the year with several powerful advantages. The first is that very few people have heard of it. It’s easy to make impressive relative progress when you’re starting from ground zero. On a relative basis selling a single Amico system would increase its market share more, as a percentage, than Sony or Microsoft could by selling millions of machines into a market that already contains tens of millions of PlayStations and Xboxes. Amico also has the advantage of having a dreadful reputation that would be easy to improve. Among the small but dedicated group that already knows that the Amico exists just having a mediocre performance would create a massive improvement in the machine’s perception, since outlets like Ars Technica are already predicting its failure and the collapse of Intellivision, the company that plans to release it.

But it’s more than just how easy it will be to improve its relative standing that makes Amico all but guaranteed to win the remaining 352 days in 2022. It’s the product itself and the company behind it. The Amico is a true disruptor in the marketplace. While its competitors are focused on cutting edge graphics and the fool’s errand of “photorealism” the Amico offers up the comfortable and pleasing aesthetics of the mid-2010s cell phone market, considered by someone, somewhere, probably, to be the pinnacle of gaming aesthetics. While other companies have foolishly wasted money on the fad of online gaming the Amico has the vision to offer only in person gameplay, which is bold and disruptive in a pandemic stricken world where many are afraid to interact with others. Is the Amico the product that will finally coax the population out of hiding to spread joy and saliva droplets with their loved ones? You can’t prove it isn’t.

The Amico has also disrupted console and controller design. While Xbox and Nintendo try for a subtle, modern, angular, look that blends into your living space and the PlayStation 5 evokes visions of the future with its spacecraft like sweeps of black and white plastic, the Amico proudly looks like a Fisher-Price footbath for aliens, complete with even more bright LEDs than the Wii annoyed owners with a decade and a half ago whenever it needed one of its frequent software updates. Even the Amico’s controller is a market disrupter, eschewing such pointless features as dual analog sticks and sleek ergonomic design to offer up something that looks like the result of an illicit affair between a garage door opener and a cell phone from 2007. It doesn’t even have face buttons, choosing instead to marry the much loved pleasures of touch screen action gaming to the smooth controls of its 64 direction sliding disc, previously seen on the original Intellivision, the 3DS (kind of) and nothing else ever even though it’s been around for 40 years. A true disruptor doesn’t just make something new, they take something old that nobody liked and make it irresistible.

Amico is also disrupting game design by zigging while the rest of the industry zags. As games become more expansive and demanding of players times in the hopes of creating long term revenue streams Amico is shrinking game design back down to the kinds of experiences that were provided in the 4 kilobyte roms of the 1970s. Dying Light 2 may take 500 hours to experience everything but who has that kind of time? Wouldn’t you rather play a game where you’re bored and ready to move on after just a few minutes? In addition to encouraging people to get together by not having any online Amico is encouraging people to put down games and go outside or pick up a book by offering only tedious, repetitive, experiences we’ve all had before presented in an outdated graphical style that will have your jaw hitting the floor when you realize that yes, this is a game released in 2022 and it looks like that. If you’ve ever played an old cell phone game and said “I wish this cost ten times as much and could be played on my TV” then congratulations, you want an Amico! Amico will also keep greedy developers away from the system by charging 50% of the purchase price on their online storefront. This is not a system for game makers who are only in it to turn a profit, this is a system strictly for those who are in it for the love of the game and a desire to support Intellivision.

Parents can feel safe buying an Amico because unlike other systems it has no physical games for little Timmy to beg for in the store. Tired of walking past the video game section in Walmart and having your child point and beg at the latest and greatest? That won’t happen with Amico, because all Amico games must be purchased online and even the physical products have to be validated and downloaded with an Internet connection. And Timmy won’t be excited by new releases in store because Amico conveniently bakes the store into the OS home screen, differentiating between games you own and those you don’t own yet only by fading the icon of your future purchases. Keep the game begging at home, in private, where it belongs with the power of Amico.

But Amico saves its greatest disruption not for games or console design but for capitalism itself. Many consoles famously sell for as low a price as possible to expand their userbase and make their profit selling games. Amico, instead, acts like a true luxury brand, charging premium prices for bargain basement components and making its money up front with each console sale. Some console makers, especially Nintendo, have been accused of keeping supply low in order to drive demand and make people snap up any systems on store shelves so they won’t miss out. Amico takes that one step further by not releasing any product at all, surely driving consumer desire to a fever pitch. People are paying double or triple MSRP for PS5 systems that are all but impossible to find in stores but with Amico even the scalpers don’t have any, meaning that demand can build to a true fever pitch. Despite the fact that Intellivision’s COO has announced that they are currently planning to formulate a plan to release the system (the only thing better than a plan is a planned plan to plan a plan) there are rumors that Intellivision might not release a console at all, ever. This would be a masterstroke of capitalism, driving demand absolutely through the roof. That demand could then be turned into pure profit through various means such as Intellivision’s innovative idea of making every game an NFT, helping destroy the planet and driving people back indoors to play Amico before they get bored in five minutes and decide that death by heatstroke is preferable to yet another round of Shark Shark!

Whether the Amico releases or not and whether it sells its projected 1 to 2 million units by the end of the year or only sells the 6,000 or so that have been pre-ordered, one thing’s for sure; there’s nowhere to go but up. Or at least to the side. It’d be pretty hard to go down at this point. Even just ceasing operations would probably prevent them from being clowned on as much. Because of this limitless potential for growth and very low downside 2022 is all but guaranteed to be the year of Amico. Hold on to your butts, people, it’s going to be a thrilling, schadenfreudy, ride!

A lot of words have been written about the death of the “AA” game. “AA” games are games that don’t have the enormous budgets of what have come to be known as “AAA” games, massive projects that soak up tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but still have the backing of large publishers and enough budget behind them for serious marketing budgets and frills like licensed music and well known voice actors. People have fond memories of games like these from the 6^th and 7^th generations (prior to that most game development teams were small enough that AAA size projects were vanishingly rare) and I’ve seen many laments that these kinds of projects have disappeared as budgets have bloated and publishers have consolidated.

The thing is, they haven’t, really, they’ve just changed.

AA games used to look like AAA games just a little bit smaller or less polished. Halo and Call of Duty were your AAA series with huge money behind them, and then you’d get smaller, less ambitious, FPS projects like Bodycount or Singularity. These games were sometimes disappointing (Bodycount) and sometimes quite well regarded (Singularity) but they were less polished and often a little bit edgier or more experimental than their more expensive counterparts. Gears of War had to hit all its marks and appeal to a huge audience in order to make back the millions funneled into it, but the perception was that a game like Binary Domain was less expensive and so could make its money back with a smaller, cult, audience of fans.

Was that perception accurate? It’s not clear. What is clear is that as game development prices increased there was also increased pressure to make every game a monster hit. Sales that would have been huge successes in the PlayStation or PlayStation 2 eras became cause for alarm by the time the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 came around. The Tomb Raider reboot series is infamous for selling millions of copies but being branded a disappointment because it didn’t sell enough millions of copies to make its publisher happy. Publishers saw that truly successful games could make billions with a B and became much less interested in supporting projects like Urban Chaos: Riot Response that might or might not make back their budgets but would barely be noticed in the flood of cash that a true big hit could bring in. That became even more true when the ‘dream’ of ongoing streams of revenue from microtransactions became a reality and games could pull in ten or eleven figures of income every year. Entire gaming empires were built on the backs of titles like Grand Theft Auto V and Fortnite and nobody wanted to make Vanquish or Shadows of the Damned anymore because you can’t build an empire on a one and done niche project.

At least that’s the story that we’ve been hearing for awhile now.

The truth is more complicated. It’s certainly true that the big publishers release fewer games than they used to. It’s also true that a lot of the older smaller publishers got bought out or went bankrupt or both. THQ famously flamed out, but Eidos Interactive got folded into Square, LucasArts was gobbled by Disney, and even the mighty Bethesda was absorbed into Microsoft. Even a company with the pedigree of Konami has all but given up publishing games, preferring to focus on other businesses and occasionally needle fans of its old franchises by releasing pachinko machines or horrible Contra games*.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is the emergence of a new group of publishers who seem to specifically target the market gap left by the departed bigger companies. Companies like Focus Entertainment, Annapurna, and the massive Embracer Group are all putting out a ton of games with relatively large but not astronomical budgets. Many of those games, like A Plague Tale: Innocence and The Outer Wilds have garnered a lot of acclaim and attention. Even the much maligned Electronic Arts continues to make games of moderate size. Game Award GOTY It Takes Two was made by Hazelight, a studio of under 100 people, and EA also put out Lost in Random, a lengthy, polished, adventure.

These games don’t look like the AA games of yore. They’re not really competing with the huge projects like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed. Instead they’re offering something different. They’re more like medium sized independent films, designed to reach an audience that the blockbusters aren’t serving and to attempt things that the huge games aren’t attempting. Whether that’s old fashioned storytelling, a focus on pure co-op, or just something else, they’re different kinds of games. Sometimes these games were made by tiny teams (The Outer Wilds was made by Mobius Digital, which is tiny.) Sometimes the teams are more substantial (Hazelight has dozens of employees.) That was true for older AA games too. What these games have in common is the backing of a publisher, which doesn’t just mean a budget but also access to PR staff, potential shared assets with other developers working for the same publisher, funds to outsource art and QA and the like, and all the other advantages that make publishers more than just the financial and creative vampires many gamers view them as. The AA space was always a bit like this, spanning the space from quasi-indie to big, established, companies with legal departments and HR and all the rest of it.

I think that people overlook the current flourishing of smaller but not quite indie developers for a number of reasons. One is that many of them are not in the United States so we just pay less attention to them. There are language barriers that prevent us from reading interviews, or we don’t have anyone close to our social circle who is even tangentially attached to one of them, or they just have less of a presence here for whatever reason. The second, and perhaps biggest, reason is that, as mentioned, the games they make look in many ways more like indie titles than the AAA extravaganzas, which was not always the case. The aforementioned Singularity was basically a Bioshock rip off, but something like the Ori series is a Metroidvania, which is a genre we associate with tiny independent teams. I’ve seen Ori called an “indie” even though it was published by Microsoft and made by a team of close to 100. That’s not an indie by any reasonable definition. It’s AA. The last reason is that these just aren’t the teams we’re used to. As the gaming space has gotten bigger and more diverse there’s been the same death of the monoculture that has occurred everywhere else. Growing up it was possible to keep track of every game being released because there just weren’t that many. The Nintendo 64 has fewer than 400 releases. The Switch has over 4000. Even though many of those are shovelware it’s still impossible to stay abreast of everything worthwhile that comes out on that thing, especially since so much gaming media time is soaked up by those megagames like League of Legends or Fortnite that also soak up such a huge percentage of gaming time and revenue.

If you like playing slightly off brand FPS or third person shooter games now is not a great time to be a gamer. There are fewer big releases than ever and a lot of the indies are intentionally retro. There are new Build Engine games being made and new professional campaigns for the original Doom and Quake, but not a lot of those straightforward modern 10-12 hour campaigns with some tacked on multi-player. The same is true for most of the major genres. Games like Blur or Split/Second basically don’t exist anymore. But if your gaming tastes are a little broader the AA space is thriving and producing lots of amazing games. There’s still a space in gaming that exists between indie and AAA and it’s got plenty of stuff to play, it just looks a little different now. We don’t have Ghosthunter anymore but we do have SnowRunner and Call of Cthulu. And even Necromunda: Hired Gun, Greedfall, and The Surge if you insist that your AA games look and play more AAAish. This stuff is still out there if you know where to look.

*Some of those recent compilations of old Konami titles, like the recent GBA Castlevania collection, are pretty alright.

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: Olija

Game Type: Puzzle/Action Platformer

Time Played: Approximately 5 hours.

Completion level: Rolled credits

Approachability: Medium. It is fairly intuitive and very easy but its graphic violence and dire tone might be unpleasant for many.

Should You Try It?: If you read a review and think it sounds appealing you’ll probably like it. I think most people won’t get much out of it.

Olija is one of the weirdest games I’ve ever played that doesn’t seem to be intentionally weird. At its heart it’s a 2D action platformer built around the use of a cursed harpoon that you can throw into certain targets and then teleport to them. Its main gameplay focuses are puzzles and combat. There’s a little bit of reflex testing platforming here and there, but most of what you do is hit switches or plot out routes through a given room and then use the basic move set of jumping and harpooning to work your way through them, and fight enemies using the harpoon and a suite of secondary weapons you pick up along the way, including a rapier, a short range musket, and a repeater crossbow. Neither the puzzles nor the combat are particularly challenging or interesting, which leaves the focus on the presentation.

It is in that presentation that Olija’s weirdness really blossoms. You play Lord Faraday, a lord and captain from a poor village who is on the sea seeking food when his ship goes down in the ocean and is washed ashore on an island in an archipelago whose inhabitants have seen better days. You quickly stumble upon a cursed harpoon and set about helping your castaway crewmen assemble at a makeshift town on one of the islands. In order to do this you must take on the Rottenwood clan, a group of people who seem to have made some kind of deal with an eldritch horror of some sort in exchange for the power to dominate the rest of the people in the land. It is from them that you rescue your crewmen, and also Olija, the queen of the kingdom that held power before the Clan took over, a woman with whom Faraday is immediately smitten.

If this plot seems fairly straightforward that’s because it is, but it’s told in an unusual way. There’s some narration, a few conversations with NPCs you encounter, and some cut scenes that take place away from Faraday whether other characters talk to one another. There’s no real voice acting in the game with the exception of a few names (the game loves to ominously say “Faraday”) but instead you get English-subtitled gibberish (or possibly some language I could not identify), all spoken in low and threatening tones that sound like the whispers of madness. The story itself is full of allusions to ancient legends and curses, full of poetic proclamations of doom and half-stated threats. The game also does some visual storytelling, having Faraday travel through areas where there is no combat (and where he distractingly walks like he very much has to go to the bathroom) and showing gruesome sights like piles of bodies or desecrated shrines. Sometimes Faraday will walk past some people who chat with him and then return back after accomplishing some objective only to find them slaughtered.

All of this serves to generate a powerful tone of foreboding without developing much in the way of characters or plot. There's a boatman who has much of the game's dialog but his main character description would be "spooky." You rescue your crewmen from cages but don't get to know any of them in any meaningful way. Olija is clearly intended to be unsettling. The graphics are clearly modeled, in part, after the classic game Another World, which came out 30 years before Olija did and featured thin, faceless, characters against alien landscapes. Olija’s art style seems to reflect the same aesthetic but in a world of Lovecraftian horror. Enemies are either all mouths and writhing tentacles (not totally unlike the leeches in Another World) or humans who explode in viscera and body parts. I was surprised that the game is rated teen, probably because of its throwback graphics that don’t have the realism of something like Mortal Kombat, because it is extremely violent. Enemies spray blood and lose heads. There are mindless slaves, halfway between starved refugees and zombies, who wander around and often follow Faraday, dying brutally as they stumble into pits that he jumps over. The hints about what the queendom was like prior to the rise of the Rottenwood clan imply that it was always a brutally unjust place and what has changed is more who happens to be the master than the fundamental unfairness of life there. Olija does successfully manage to impart this tone to the point where I felt a little uncomfortable while playing it, like I had stumbled upon the half-rotted corpse of an animal in the woods and just wanted to get away from the sight of it, while also having a bit of perverse fascination in the way the bone breaks through rotted skin and the sight of organs being devoured by fungi.

Probably the most unusual aspect of Olija is that for the most part it’s a non-scrolling platformer. The camera pans a little bit but mostly you move between static screens, like you did in pre-Mario Brothers games like Pitfall. The game’s state is persistent from screen to screen (you can hurl an enemy off the screen you’re in and follow them, and you can leave the harpoon in one screen and travel to another) but you only get camera cuts when you reach the boundary. This is very unusual in a modern platformer, and Olija does abandon this choice in certain areas like boss fights in favor of a more normal scrolling playfield, but it gives the game a decidedly old school feel that matches its otherworldly aesthetic of ancient rot. It also allows the game to surprise you by hiding enemies or hazards at the beginning of a new screen, and to hide secrets by making what seem like bottomless pits actual transitions to new screens. There are some hidden items like ships in bottles and music boxes concealed behind walls you can pass through or pits that seem bottomless that aren’t, and there is little in the way of hints to tell you which these are. The health cost of falling into a bottomless pit is low and healing relatively plentiful, though, so experimentation isn’t too painful.

Olija’s strong aesthetic is unusual but not in and of itself weird. What’s weird is how little it is reflected in the gameplay. Olija is, as I previously said, something of a cakewalk. I can’t think of one even remotely challenging sequence in the game except maybe the final boss, and I beat him on the third try. I’ve complained in the past about games being too difficult but I think Olija goes too hard in the other direction. The puzzles are all simple and straightforward, the combat amounts to slashing guys with your rapier until they explode (or whatever your weapon of choice is, I guess) and…that’s really it. The platforming doesn’t even try to be difficult. It’s just kind of there. Olija’s entire aesthetic seems to suggest it’s going to be this brutal unforgiving game and it’s just…not. That in itself is not a problem.

The problem is that it’s boring. Olija just isn’t very mechanically interesting or engaging, it has only the barest bones of a narrative to drive it forward, and the graphics are fine but they’re sparse and don’t change much so you won’t be pulled forward wanting to see what’s around the corner. It’s more scrub brush and weird pulsating eyes. It lacks momentum. It’s a short game, around 5 hours, but I played it over the course of 6 or so days in short sessions that still felt a little bit like slogs. It’s not unpleasant to play; everything works reasonably well and it mostly feels fine to control but it’s too repetitive for its own good. It introduces new equipment and mechanics over time and it has a basic upgrade system that lets you buy new hats that come with abilities, so it’s clear that the developers meant it to have a normal progression, but the extremely low difficulty makes everything feel too samey. You’ll never be agonizing over which hat you should equip; the one that lets you heal is almost always the right one and you’ll never be puzzled about how to work with the new mechanics because their uses are obvious and straightforward.

I’m mostly done with the review and I haven’t even discussed the game’s biggest gameplay ‘hook,’ the cursed harpoon that you can throw into certain targets and then warp yourself to. You use this for much of the platforming and puzzle solving and can also use it during combat to impale enemies and warp to them. Many of the games puzzles are built around this mechanic and it can be useful in combat but it doesn’t feel like anything new or innovative. Aiming the harpoon doesn’t feel great with a controller and the game moves so fast that using it effectively in combat is both chaotic and unnecessary given the difficulty curve. Like the rest of the game it isn’t bad per se but it’s not an exciting or particularly fun mechanic. Even when the game introduces another way to warp to certain points it really only provides 2 or 3 puzzles that require you use the combination of abilities, and they’re all incredibly obvious. Compared to games like Flinthook or Bionic Commando Rearmed the Olija harpoon grappling mechanic is pretty ‘meh.’

I played through Olija because it was short and I wanted to be as fair to it as possible because I knew I was going to write about it. I really wanted to like it because I feel like the developers were trying something different and they had a vision and that they executed reasonably well. My problem with the game is that the vision isn’t compelling to me. It’s atmospheric and inoffensive to play, but that’s only enough to get you to “not actively unpleasant” not enough to make it something that’s actually worth someone’s time unless they really vibe with the particular atmosphere the game is presenting. There are long “story” segments in the game where you’re just slowly walking from one screen to another while something silent happens to in the background and I found them excruciatingly boring, as I did most of the long dialog sequences. It’s impossible to care about these people because you don’t know anything about them, and there’s so much suffering in the game that Faraday’s particular troubles aren’t of great import. It feels like you’re supposed to care about Faraday and his crewmen and Olija and think they’re trying to accomplish something important by defeating the Rottenwood clan and their eldritch sponsor but the game also implies that you’re not actually changing anything.

Olija did relatively well critically, with a metacritic over 70, and I think that’s in part because critics also wanted the game to be more successful than it actually is. I think there are a select group of people who will really like it and a much larger group who will find it offputting, baffling, or just unpleasant. Does that make it a good fit for Game Pass? Maybe? On the one hand you’d think that Game Pass is best serving up games that can be enjoyed by all of its nearly 20 million subscribers. On the other hand you can imagine that if even 5% of the players are people who would like Olija then that’s nearly a million people who could get value from the game, and by providing diverse offerings that please the various subgroups in the subscriber base you can provide something for everyone even if not everything would be for everyone. I think that anyone who looks at the game or reads a review and thinks it’s for them will probably enjoy it, and the rest of us can find other things to play on the service. I like that Game Pass takes chances and offers up weird projects even if they’re not to my personal tastes.

I struggled rating Olija, swinging between 2 and 3 stars depending on what part of my playthrough I was in. I thought it was interesting at the beginning, annoying towards the middle, and a little better again towards the end once it had fully developed its ideas and focused its narrative a bit more as it came to its conclusion. In the end I split the difference. One thing I learned from Olija is that I need to take more seriously the fact that I only promised to play 1 hour of each game. I don’t need to finish them. I didn’t need to finish this game. It wasn’t for me. That’s okay. It might just be for you. I hope it is.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING (out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: The Pedestrian

Game Type: Puzzle Platformer

Time Played: Approximately 4 hours.

Completion level: Rolled credits/all achievements.

Approachability: Very high. Intuitive controls and no objectionable content.

Should You Try It?: Sure, why not?

It’s appropriate that the first entry in my Game Pass Gambols starts with a bit of a pleasant stroll.

The Pedestrian is a simple puzzle platformer with a polished presentation. The credits indicate that the game took six years to make and it seems almost cruel to boil down that much effort and iteration into one simple sentence, but the game itself is simple and direct. You control a little pedestrian icon, the kind you might see on a pedestrian traffic signal at an intersection, and travel through connected 2D areas within a 3D environment. These start out looking like simple traffic signs but take a few forms through the game, including video screens at various points. Your little figure can pick up a few items, push boxes, throw switches, jump, and fall through certain platforms. That’s basically it. In addition you have the ability to zoom out of the 2D play area a bit and use a cursor to interact with the connected 2D spaces. You can connect doors and ladders to their appropriate counterparts (an up ladder in one area can be connected to a down ladder in another, and the same for left and right facing doors) allowing you to traverse between the play areas. Once you have traversed one of these connections you cannot sever it or you will reset the 2D playfields. You can also rearrange the 2D playfields (with a few exceptions) which is necessary because for the connections to work they must be oriented appropriately (e.g. to go up a ladder into a new playfield your current playfield must be below the one you want to ascend to.) Once you have traversed a connection you can move the pieces so it is no longer valid and you cannot traverse it again, but as long as you do not sever the connection the puzzle elements will not reset and you can reposition the pieces again to make the connection valid and re-open it.

This combination of simple puzzle platforming and 2D piece rearrangement forms the backbone of the gameplay in The Pedestrian. As you move between the 2D pieces you also move within the 3D environment and your goal for each level is to find a component for a Gameboy-like portable gaming machine and then make your way to a subway car or elevator where you input a code and move to the next level. This is supposed to somewhat mirror the concept of being a “pedestrian” like your icon but the game’s camera swoops and flies in ways no human can. This is not really going for a walk or commuting unless you’re Superman.

Sometimes you can directly affect the 3D environment in ways that interact with the 2D play area/puzzle pieces. For example you might connect an electrical wire that causes a gate in the 3D environment to open, allowing you to move a 2D puzzle piece out of the area it was trapped and reposition it so you can create a valid connection and get at the switch or item within it. Other than those limited interactions the 3D environment acts mostly like a pleasant background to the actual play areas and almost reminds me of old puzzle games from the 90s that might have animated backgrounds to the sides of the play field, or like The Tetris Effect with its trippy visuals outside the playfield (though obviously this is not in VR, at least on Xbox.)

I think The Pedestrian is a very competent puzzle platformer. It’s quite visually polished, it manages to introduce new mechanics every level that keep things relatively fresh, it has a wonderfully pleasant soundtrack and it’s paced pretty well so you never feel like it’s repeating itself too much. It even pays off the 3D environment gimmick well on the final level in a sequence I will not spoil here. There were a few puzzles that took me a good amount of time to figure out but everything felt fair and I didn’t end up having to look anything up. When I finally got to the solution of a tough puzzle my reaction was generally “that’s clever” rather than “that’s annoying,” which is exactly the reaction a good puzzle game should provoke. My main complaint about The Pedestrian is that it can sometimes be tedious to have to move all the pieces around to set a solution back up if you make a mistake and have to restart the puzzle, especially on controller, even though the controller cursor controls are excellent as these things go. On PC using a mouse it would be a little less tedious but there’s still a fair amount of repetition and it can take a long time to try a new iteration of a solution if you’re not sure what order the links need to be in etc…

But my biggest actual complaint about The Pedestrian is just that it’s a puzzle platformer, and a pretty vanilla one at that. I’m not sure how fair it is to penalize a game for just being another good example of an overstuffed genre. The developers clearly had a specific vision when they made this and they executed it about as well as they could have, though the final twist could have lasted longer and iterated a little more fully on its ideas. There are clearly a contingent of people out there who absolutely love puzzle platformers, and this is a more polished than usual version of that formula. But it doesn’t do anything spectacular or new, and though I enjoy the genre I couldn’t help but feel like I was, ironically, treading old ground with a fresh visual presentation painted over some rather creaky mechanics. I enjoyed my time with it well enough to finish the relatively short game, but it was just a pleasant diversion. I usually ramble on at length in my blogs/reviews but it’s hard to come up with anything interesting to say about this game. It’s bland but well made. Like a good bowl of oatmeal or tomato soup.

This is the kind of game that is often termed “perfect for Game Pass” but for me that term means something other than “a competent game that I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for.” I like when Game Pass games give me something new or weird, even if it’s not as polished or playable as something like this. I’m not saying there’s no room for these kinds of games on the service, of course. There are lots of people who aren’t as burned out on puzzle platformers as I am, and I could see this being a hit for families who can work on the puzzles together and would appreciate how pleasant and child-friendly the presentation is. I think the tougher puzzles would frustrate kids, though, and the presentation is definitely adult oriented in that it’s somewhat muted and subdued and emulates a walk through various city locations rather than being full of colorful characters and the like.

I like The Pedestrian fine and would recommend anyone interested to check it out. If nothing else the slick presentation of the 2D playfields in the 3D space is worth seeing some of. I would not term this a must-play though, and if you play a lot of games you might find yourself a little bit bored. That’s no fault of the devs, but there are only so many times you can do the same things in similar games before it all starts to feel a bit…pedestrian.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING (out of 5):

Last year I wrote down my ranking of the games I played in 2020 but I never got around to posting them. This year I’m putting them up. This ranking only includes games released in 2021, not the many, many, games from prior years that I played. I am also not including games that I bounced off or did not put substantial time into, though I didn’t finish every game on the list. Whether an unfinished game got onto the list or not depended on whether I felt like I understood enough about how it played and how I felt about it to comfortably rank it. Most of these games I’ve written more substantially about elsewhere, and you can find my opinions on my blog or in the forums for the relevant games.

This list is mostly for my own purposes, to keep track of what I played and what I thought about it. I may write up a longer list including every game I played at a later date, and I have some ideas I want to reflect on to write up later too, but for now this is my list. Next year I hope to get to at least 30 games but we’ll see. 23 is already quite a lot for me.

I also noted what games I played on Game Pass because that's how I accessed so many of these games and it shows the value the service provided me, though I played older games on it too!

23. WEREWOLF: THE APOCALYPSE – EARTHBLOOD

Monotonous, janky to the point of seeming unfinished, and relentlessly dull, I played this game with relatively low expectations and it failed to live up to any of them. It’s not the worst game I’ve played in my life but it’s one of the worst I’ve finished in recent memory and it’s a missed opportunity for a property that could be made into a great game and had a decent AA studio behind it. Probably at least partially a victim of COVID, this is a game where you play as a mighty werewolf who spends most of his time sneaking around bland offices. Blech.

22. BALAN WONDERWORLD

Perhaps the most infamous whipping boy of 2021 games, Balan Wonderworld is legitimately bad. It has a few defenders and some genuinely good music and decent level design in points, but its laborious costume system, baffling one button control decision, and numerous other issues (including a frustrating camera and a story that was removed from the game to be sold as a companion novel) doom it to mere curio status. I was excited for this game at the beginning of the year, put off by the demo, and only ended up playing it because a friend bought it for me. Thanks, bud.

21. RAIN ON YOUR PARADE (GAME PASS) (NOT FINISHED)

This game has you playing as a cloud who goes around disrupting various events by raining on people and things to cause chaos and destruction. Later levels have you doing everything from zapping folks with lightning to raining volatile substances down to cause fire to sneaking through a base in a parody of Metal Gear Solid. The problem is that none of it plays great. It’s adequate for the purposes of the jokes, but the jokes aren’t particularly funny and I ran out of steam before 50 levels was done. Not a horrible game and one that I could see some people enjoying, but none of it feels great and slogging through annoying gameplay for some very mild chuckles wasn’t worth it for me.

20. F.I.S.T. FORGED IN SHADOW TORCH

This game irritated me the whole way through. There’s the bones of a good metroidvania in here somewhere but the garbage storytelling (and so much of it), frustrating imprecision, weird interruption mechanics, and various other frustrations meant that it was just good enough not to abandon but mostly a bad time. It has camera problems. In a 2D game. In 2021. What? It wouldn’t take that much work to fix it and make it a legitimately great game, but they didn’t do that work. I don’t like it.

19. KENA: BRIDGE OF SPIRITS

This game got great reviews and I kind of understand why, but it never clicked with me. It’s pretty for an AA release, and the combat is okay but there’s a lack of enemy variety, most of the puzzles tended towards the annoying rather than engaging, and I thought the bosses were too damned hard for the kind of game that it was. There were also some technical issues that made my playthrough less enjoyable, chief among them that I hated hated hated the camera (though you can turn the worst aspects off in options.) I really wanted to like this one but I just didn’t. It’s not a terrible game and I understand why it resonated with others, but it didn’t with me.

18. RETURNAL (NOT FINISHED)

Another game that didn’t resonate with me at least in part because it was too difficult. Even more so than with Kena I can appreciate what Returnal is trying to do and even what it does well, but the spooky alien aesthetic isn’t really my thing and I didn’t love the weapon feel or the aliens. The world felt unpleasant and hostile and I didn’t want to spend time there, and I got tired of making successive runs without feeling like I was making progress and being forced into using weapons I didn’t really enjoy. Just too bleak and repetitive a game for my tastes. I may finish this one at some point but I don’t look forward to returning to it.

17. THE MEDIUM (GAME PASS)

The Medium is a game of medium quality. Ha! A pun. Skulking around an abandoned communist Polish resort has its charms and the graphics are genuinely quite nice, but despite a strong main character the story didn’t really work for me in the end. The parts where the game tries to be more than an adventure game and introduces stealth or fleeing action sequences annoyed me, as did the strange attempt at combat. It’s a game that’s still worth playing for its atmosphere and characters, but one that ultimately garnered more attention for its split screen gimmick than for the actual game presented, and for good reason.

16. SABLE (GAME PASS)

This contemplative exploration game pulled me in at first and managed to be intermittently engaging as I picked away at it over the course of the rest of the year, but ultimately it’s a little too empty and, for lack of a better word, boring, for my tastes. I like the idea of a low key game with a small story and I loved the graphics and music, but the game can be frustrating at times when there’s an apparent climbing route that doesn’t quite work when you get up to it, and managing the location of the bike is a constant chore. These are specific choices made with thematic intent, since the game is about growing up and there are false paths and frustrations to be had in that process, but eventually I got the point and I was still left with the annoying mechanics. Well worth playing nonetheless.

15. CHICORY: A COLORFUL TALE

This game is gorgeous and unique. It is a draw ‘em up about coloring in a black and white world but more importantly about self doubt and imposter syndrome. I loved a lot of what this game is going for and I really loved the sound track, but in the end I found it a little bit shallow and unsatisfying. I admire the intent and I mostly enjoyed my time with it but I’m probably just a bit old and jaded to fully engage with the message.

14. THE GUNK (GAME PASS)

A very light 3D platformer with some basic puzzles that gets by on story and charm. The Gunk has you exploring an alien planet cleaning up clouds of ‘gunk’ that are suppressing the natural life of the world and resolving your issues with your life partner while she grumbles about your debts and tends to your small scavenger ship. I was expecting more from the Steam World team but this is what I got and it’s a pleasant and low key way to pass four hours or so. Approach it expecting a decent, chill, game about exploration and you’ll have a good time.

13. ECHO GENERATION (GAME PASS)

This 80s and 90s pastiche has a pleasant look and plenty of amusing absurdity. It also has a far better soundtrack than it has any right to. It’s a short, light, RPG adventure game hybrid and I found it pretty charming, if not much more than that. I would liken it to something like The Touryst, with which it shares a lot of aesthetic similarities. It’s a fresh take on an old genre and worth a playthrough for the humor and weirdness.

12. THE WILD AT HEART (GAME PASS)

This game has one of my favorite aesthetics of the year, with a really nice 2D look, good music, and charming character designs. As a Pikmin clone that simplifies the formula I appreciated that it was doing something different from most indie titles, and I found the story charming and intriguing. Unfortunately it has a lot of small interface issues that can make it a frustrating experience and keep it from getting higher on this list, but I enjoyed my time with it. If you love high production value indie games and especially Pikmin then this is a game that’s worth your time.

11. OUTRIDERS (GAME PASS)

I didn’t experience any substantial technical issues with Outriders so I’m judging it as a game for what it offers, specifically as a single player experience. That ends up being an overly long kind of forgettable campaign with some pretty good but not perfect third person shooting action. The best thing about Outriders is the way that its mechanics encourage you to play it as an in your face action game where teleporting behind enemies and shooting to heal are winning strategies and sitting behind cover plunking at them is not. This makes it feel different from other games in its genre, and that’s a good thing. The worst things about Outriders are the boring enemies, bad loot odds, mediocre boss fights, and choppy story. Not to mention a campaign that just drags at the end, throwing you into more environments than you’d expect but not doing anything particularly interesting with each new chunk of the map you open up. This game isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be live services or a one and done campaign and it ends up not nailing either of them. I still enjoyed the shooting until it got boring, and some of the areas you explore are pretty impressive. A messy, problematic, but overall fairly fun game.

10. LOOP HERO (NOT FINISHED)

I ultimately gave up on this one because it’s very repetitive and progression eventually slows to a crawl. The strategic elements of tile placement are where the actual game play is and it’s kind of opaque and confusing, but I got pretty far and I found it a very unusual and engrossing game for the time I put in. A combination deck builder, idle game, and strategic tile placement title isn’t something I’d have thought would work as well as it did. It’s fascinating to see

9. CRUIS’N BLAST

This game is a confusing oddity in 2021. It’s a legit port of an arcade game that plays like it was made for the N64 and looks like it runs on the Dreamcast but actually came out in 2017. It doesn’t have a ton of content and it’s almost unimaginably janky for a modern game that costs $40 at MSRP, but damned if it didn’t hit all my nostalgia buttons for the simple arcade racers of yore. It’s loud and colorful and takes itself just as seriously as you’d expect any game where a neon unicorn can race against a triceratops and a hovercraft would, which is to say not at all. I didn’t play this for very long but it made me feel and remember things that no other game did this year.

8. FLYNN: SON OF CRIMSON (GAME PASS)

A fun little platformer that’s halfway between a traditional stage based game and a Metroidvania, its charming graphics and engaging combat are enough to carry it through its relatively short running time. Plenty of variety in enemies and abilities, a satisfying upgrade system, and tight controls make this an excellent fit for anyone who misses 32-bit style 2D adventures. I wouldn’t call it a must play, but it’s a good choice for anyone craving retro style platforming action.

7. LOST IN RANDOM

The second funniest game I played this year (after my top game of the year) and a really creative and fun adventure overall. I loved the world building and characters, was impressed by the sound track, and really enjoyed much of my time with the game. The reason it doesn't rank higher is that the combat is just so-so and there's a lot of it. If the weapons were more fun to use or the pace of the battles were brisker or there were more interesting powers to discover it would be in the upper echelon of my top 10. As it was it felt like it ran out of gameplay ideas about half way through, and it was very focused on combat in the back third or so, making it a bit of a chore to finish. Still worth the time, especially since the story wraps up pretty tightly for a video game.

6. THE ASCENT (GAME PASS)

This game is a throwback to when PC RPGs did not hold your hand and were more focused on presenting complex world building than being player friendly. Not nearly as hard as those games of yore but capturing much of the spirit that they had I was glued to this for a couple of days despite its issues. If you’re in the mood for deep world lore and some decent shooting action mixed with a fair amount of frustration and some annoying backtracking you’ll have a good time here. I was especially impressed with the dialog, which managed to be believably savage for people living under totally unbridled capitalism in a hostile and broken world.

5. DEATH’S DOOR

This cute and absurd little Zelda clone perfectly accomplished what it set out to do. It provides good combat, good puzzles, a striking look, memorable boss fights, and a very original story. It’s about 10 hours long and it’s a pleasing adventure for its entire run time, wrapping things up nicely at the right moment. Sometimes execution matters more than ambition, and Death’s Door exemplifies that. It doesn’t try to do anything but repeat a formula with a little narrative twist, but it’s such a fun, playable, experience that I couldn’t help but really like it.

4. RATCHET AND CLANK: RIFT APART

I have played the entire Ratchet and Clank series barring some PSP spin off games over the past couple years and I really like the series. Rift Apart was another very solid entry and one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. I was concerned about them separating Ratchet and Clank from one another, which they’ve done before in A Crack in Time and I did not really appreciate, but here it worked much better and the new characters are all great. It’s more Ratchet and Clank and that’s a very good thing. An extremely solid action platformer with broad appeal.

3. FORZA HORIZON 5

I love the Forza Horizon series. It’s my ‘default’ gaming when I can’t think of anything else to play. The bright, welcoming atmosphere and fun mix of exploration and racing have struck a cord with me from the first game in the series now through the 5^th entry. That being said, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. Having played Forza Horizon 4 on and off for the last few years Forza Horizon 5 definitely felt like more of the same, and in some ways worse. I like the idea of the new expeditions campaign but the actual ‘story’ missions were kind of boring with uninteresting rewards. The map has a ton of variety but didn’t quite satisfy me as much as England did. I still love this game and will play a lot more of it but I’m hoping the series does more to reinvent itself the next time out. That being said I own the expansion pass and they’ve done crazy things with that in the past, so I might not even have to wait that long to see it freshened up. Still a great time, even if it’s not the series peak for me.

2. SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD + BOWSER’S FURY

Okay, Super Mario 3D World is obviously not a 2021 game, but Bowser’s Fury is new this year and it’s pretty much a stand alone game so I’m including this package. I had a fantastic time with Super Mario 3D World after the first few levels, but Bowser’s Fury was a revelation. I loved this tiny island-themed Mario package and I really hope the next Mario game takes some inspiration from it. The soundtrack is also next level good. Bowser’s Fury shows that just because a game is short without a metric ton of content doesn’t mean it can’t be a wonderfully polished experience. I don’t know if it’s my favorite 3D Mario but it certainly stands up there with the best the series has to offer, which is saying quite a lot. Wonderful.

1. PSYCHONAUTS 2 (GAME PASS)

Something about this game didn’t click for me during the first quarter or so, but after it lets you leave the Psychonauts headquarters and explore the area around it I was hooked and hooked hard. An above average 3D platformer with fun powers mixed with one of the best stories in all of gaming and some spectacular level design and locales, I genuinely loved this game. Psychonauts 2 is the rare game that will stick with me long after I completed it, with characters I genuinely cared about and liked. It’s optimistic in a way that most games for adults aren’t, and continuously surprising and delightful. If I’m measuring games by how much they made me smile then this is easily my game of the year.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is an easy game to admire. It’s a small indie effort with a ton of originality and a sweet and positive message at its core. It’s a game that tackles themes of the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that plague a lot of young people and it isn’t afraid to make those themes front and center in its narrative rather than making them substories or side points. It’s got really nice art, one of the best soundtracks of the year, and though it doesn’t control wonderfully on console it makes a strong effort to adapt the clearly mouse and keyboard designed control scheme to the dual sense. This is a really well made video game product.

I didn’t really connect with it.

I want to say all that at the outset because I really don’t want to criticize this game. It’s so well meaning and clearly had so much effort and love put into it that I want to reflect that love back at it. And there is a lot to love. I unabashedly love the soundtrack. I love a lot of the ideas the game has both about game design and life itself. And yet…it was just sort of okay for me and I was glad when it was over. I’d like to explain why.

First let’s start with a brief overview of Chicory as a game. You play a character you name after your favorite food (you don’t know you’re naming the character when it prompts you to do so, but you can also rename her if you so desire). You’re the janitor in the Wielder Tower helping keep it clean for the Wielder, named Chicory, who controls The Brush, the only artifact that can bring color to the world. One day all the color vanishes from Picnic (the name of the area where the game takes place, though it’s not really defined whether it’s a country, an island, something else etc…) and you find the Brush outside Chicory’s room. She’s not responding to you so you take the brush and go out into the world to restore color and make your mark on the world.

Mechanically the game works sort

of like Zelda 1, though with puzzles instead of combat (for the most part.) The map is made up of a series of interlinked static screens and you walk around it. You also control the brush as a separate entity meaning you can paint anywhere you like on the screen even if you can’t walk there. You solve puzzles through a combination of movement and painting. Some objects respond to being painted, such as plants that grow or shrink when colored. Sometimes you need to push an explosive gas bubble into place to blow up some rocks. Later you gain additional abilities that let you do things like jump and swim. You walk around talking to people and getting quests and then make your way to whatever your destination is by getting through the areas obstacles, which tend to be themed around particular ideas such as hidden patterns you need to copy to open doors, or navigating a series of tubes you can swim through to make it through a maze.

You soon learn that Picnic is faced with these curious black trees and roots that seem to be some kind of corruption. Since you have the brush people assume you are the new wielder and expect you to deal with the problem. After you find a source of corruption, usually by solving some puzzles, you face it in a boss battle of kinds where you use the brush as a weapon and avoid attacks by the corrupt entity, which can take various forms. These battles are long and can sometimes be complicated, with rules that the game doesn’t explain, but they are well checkpointed and not very difficult. They’re mostly fun but can be a bit…sloppy for lack of a better term. Especially with a controller it can be hard to get the brush exactly where you want it to be, and some of the enemy attacks come in chunky pixels and the whole thing can feel slightly out of control. That dovetails with the game’s themes, but the battles can drag on a bit and feel a bit annoying. They’re not hard, especially with the generous checkpointing, but they’re intense and lengthy and very at odds with the rest of the game’s chill and relaxed vibe.

As the game’s plot advances there are two main narrative threads. The first is your character coming to grips with her new role as wielder and the second is her growing friendship with Chicory. Obviously the two of these are closely intertwined, and they both focus on the same themes of imposter syndrome, worthiness, legacy, and systematic unfairness. Almost every interaction in the game serves to either forward or comment on one of these themes or ideas. People are excited to learn you’re the new wielder and ask for your help, or they talk about Chicory and prior wielders, or they talk about the current state of the world, implicitly asking for your help in getting things back under control. You have a lot of conversations in the game with a lot of different people, ranging from your parents to random shopkeepers and hoteliers. Some will ask you to design something for them. Some will act as your fans. Some will give you sidequests, like finding lost kids or discovering what happened to some missing furniture. There are a few shops where you can trade in the litter you pick up for décor that you can place in your house or some other locations. The world has a fair amount of interactivity, and underlying it all is your ability to color the world around you at any time, with paint that mostly stays in place and permanently marks the landscape (though you can also erase the colors) These colors are visible from the world map, making the entire land of picnic something akin to one of those paper tablemats at diners you can draw on with crayons, which is a neat effect. You’ll note a slash of color that you used to open a door down in some square you haven’t been to for a while, or a place where you colored a building at someone’s request, and it really does feel like you’re having an impact. There are also collectables, including clothes (wrapped in gift boxes) and brush styles for the brush (wrapped in…larger boxes) and you gather up quite a collection of these over the course of the game.

Ultimately my issues with Chicory stem from the writing. This is a game that’s about visual art, but it has quite a bit of story and talking in it, and a lot to say verbally. There are long dialog sequences, some optional some not, and an absolute ton of conversations and discussion. The message at the heart of Chicory is admirable; everyone doubts themselves and everyone is capable of more than they think they are, and the writing isn’t awful, but it’s so focused on getting this message across that it doesn’t leave room for things like interesting characters or much humor or the things that make writing pop. The characters in Chicory are consumed with whatever their central problem or idea is, and don’t have anything much to say beyond that. Chicory herself is a character built around being a workaholic without outside interests, which makes her…very underdeveloped. She doesn’t really know who she is outside her role in the game world, and you don’t really get to know her either, despite the growing friendship being so central to the story. Your own character goes through a similar arc, and while some of the other NPCs are focused on their own lives, none are particularly memorable or interesting. There’s a hotel employee who is at least funny, and the denizens of the bug queendom are at least different enough to be amusing, but almost everyone else seems to have one character trait each, generally tied in to self-doubt. It makes the whole world feel like a big therapy session.

Which would be okay if the game’s take on psychology wasn’t so simplistic and facile. This is yet another game whose central message is “you’re enough, you can do it!” That’s admirable, but it’s also not nuanced or textured here. The fact is that sometimes self doubt is good and sometimes believing in yourself is not enough. I understand that’s not an easy message to do well in video game form, and people want happy stories, but for me the constant parade of positivity in so many modern games has started to wear thin and seem false. It’s a bunch of fake digital folks convincing themselves that everything is okay and all their doubts and worries are just impediments to success and it starts to seem like The Secret after a while. Chicory tries to do a little bit more with this, and I don’t want to ding it too hard because its heart is in the right place, but I didn’t connect with its ultimate message. Maybe I’m too old or too jaded (I have always been a cynic) but I feel like the game is putting on a happy face while telling the player that it’s fine to be sad sometimes. It kind of wants to have it both ways. I think Lost Words: Beyond the Page is an example of a game that handles this better, with more concessions to the fact that sometimes it actually won’t be okay in the end.

This positivity also effects Chicory’s gameplay. It’s a game about color and art where everything is equally valid and there are no actual challenges or puzzles built around art. There are times you have to draw things or use color but how you do is totally up to you. It’s just that you apply line or color that matters, not how you do it or how good the result is. This again ties into the game’s core message (all art is valid! Talent is whatever you think it is) and from a practical perspective it’s impossible to have a game really judge you on your art, but it makes the actual art parts of Chicory feel like a side issue to things like platforming or puzzle solving. For a game about art that’s a problem. It’s a great message that what you do with the art only matters to the extent it matters to you, and coloring in the world is fundamentally self-directed and fun, but there are literal art classes in the game and they don’t even try to teach you anything. It’s fine to make the art in the game about whatever the player wants it to be about, but ultimately that makes the art stuff both a side show and kind of a not great version of a toy to play with. The game limits you to certain colors on certain screens (though you eventually get your own brush style you can color however you want) but it doesn’t teach you why or how to use those colors and I just wish it did something, anything, more with the concept. The game is generally pretty friendly with its challenges. There's a sheep who challenges you to put together outfits for her, but you can get whatever clothes you want from any area you've visited so you don't need to collect the right stuff to fulfill the challenges, just go to the swap shop and pick out the clothing that the obvious hints tell you to get.

I realize I’ve been complaining for a while and I feel bad about that. Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game that some people really connect with and that’s great. Not every game is for every person and maybe I’m outside the demographic, both in terms of age and mindset. I can accept that. It’s also a game made for PC and I played it on PS5 and maybe would have liked it more with the greater precision of a mouse vs the right stick/trackpad combo I used. It’s certainly easier to do two separate things with mouse and keyboard than with a controller. About 19% of the people who play the game on PS5 get to the end of the story, so I’m not alone in having trouble fully connecting with it (I did finish the main story of the game, and did a lot of side stuff) but that shouldn’t stop anyone who is interested from giving it a try. It’s unique and for some people it will be quite special. I always like when a game executes its vision with confidence and focus, and that’s certainly the case here. It just wasn’t a vision that ultimately resonated with me.

2021 was a year of upheaval around the world but I think it's safe to say that it was also the year that Giant Bomb changed forever. With the departure of three of the longest tenured members, all of whom dated back to the Gamespot days, and the relocation of remaining staff away from the Bay area I think it's safe to say that the Giant Bomb we all fell in love with no longer exists. A lot of us old timers think of Giant Bomb as a scrappy upstart of a few 30 something guys in a basement in Sausalito, and it hasn't been that for a very long time now, but a lot of the ties to that era have now been severed. Giant Bomb is different now. It is the ship of Theseus and it has been rebuilt to the point that it's a new thing.

A lot of people are upset about this. Some have canceled their memberships. Some have stopped visiting the site. Some have angrily flounced, making their displeasure known on the way out. This is not that kind of post and I don't want it to become that kind of post.

The truth is that everything changes. Everything has to change. The people who founded the original Giant Bomb have changed. The Internet has changed. The economy has changed. The video game industry has changed. The world has changed. It is impossible for Giant Bomb to remain static when the world where the original site came to be no longer exists.

But the ideas that Giant Bomb represented haven't really changed.

What Giant Bomb has always meant to me is a personality driven site, focused mostly around games, with a goofy, weird, sensibility and a commitment to editorial independence. The version of Giant Bomb that exists in 2021 is still all those things. The personalities have changed. That stings to those of us who grew to love the old guard, but Alex, Vinny, and Brad are still out there making content at Nextlander, which lessens the sting. Giant Bomb has always rotated personalities, though, and has always remained the same website. We learned to love Austin's depth and analytical approach to games. We learned to vibe with Abby's sometimes dry humor and completely different history with games than the rest of the site's cast had. We learned to appreciate Dan's chaotic energy and...sometimes chaotic mind.

The current cast brings a lot to the table. Jeff continues to have an incredible knowledge of games and unassailable list of contacts in the industry. Jason is a great producer and brings an infectious enthusiasm for the genres he is passionate about. Jan is a delight. Others we are still getting used to and learning their strengths. I'm not sure what this @rorie guy is all about or whether he'll fit in with the Giant Bomb vibe (does he even like Alpha Protocol?) but we need to give him a chance. Giant Bomb has also added some part timers who don't interact with the main cast much, but each of those people (or groups) brings a different energy and set of strengths to the site. And they each fit in with that central mission in their own way.

Like a lot of people I haven't loved every new show that Giant Bomb has put out in 2021, but the truth is that I've never loved every single thing the site has done. There are widely beloved features of the past that just weren't for me for whatever reason. A site where everything is for everyone is a site that puts out a lot of broad and not very interesting content. That's never been what Giant Bomb has been about.

I was thinking about whether I wanted to resubscribe to Giant Bomb and I came to the conclusion that I did not just for the stuff I liked from 2021 but for the potential for 2022. GB is going to be expanding its core cast and hopefully continuing to settle into a new rhythm after this massive disruption. The Bombcast chemistry of the current cast, which is good, will continue to improve over time and reach the heights that some prior eras did when everyone was used to working with one another for years (and, at the time, shared the same physical space, which helped.) There will be new shows and ideas and contributors and I am sure that Jeff and crew will figure out what works for the audience and what can be tweaked and improved. I hear that Jeff Gerstmann is a smart cookie who knows what's up. He has like 7 copies of Gex. Probably. So he's got that going for him.

After all these years Giant Bomb remains one of the most positive places on the Internet for me. It remains committed to goofy humor and doing dumb things in the smartest way possible. Some of the stuff will resonate with you and some of it won't, but at least for me that's always been the case. Just because this may not be your favorite period doesn't mean that your favorite period isn't right around the corner. This new direction has just started and its already generated some awesome stuff. 2022 should be unlike any prior year the site has seen.

And meanwhile the forums and other community features of GB remain among the most positive and friendly places on the web for video gamers, with the ironic exception of discussions about the site itself, which tend to emphasis people who are angry or disappointed. I think we all understand why. It's unusual to post "hey, this thing I like is doing pretty good, let's hope it keeps doing that and doing well."

I guess I just wanted to start the new year with a show of support for a site that has meant a lot to me over the years and that I still fundamentally believe is doing good work despite difficult circumstances. A lot has been said over the last year that the staff of this site don't work hard, and I don't think that's true at all. I think that it has been an enormous amount of work to keep this thing going despite a fundamental change in how it does business, mass staff turnover, and a lot of behind the scenes stuff we don't know about. I think that part of the job is not letting those things show because the cast are ultimately entertainers, and when they're doing a good job that work is taken for granted.

So thanks to the cast of Giant Bomb, past, current, and future, and to the community moderators who have created the best video space for video game discussion on the web, and the community members who continue to stick around and contribute and keep making this place viable. Giant Bomb has meant a lot to me over the years and I'm glad it's still around and fighting the good fight.

It would be great if others could post something positive here as well just to start the year off on a more supportive and positive vibe, but I'm also fine just saying this stuff into the void. Expressing hope and gratitude are good for the soul. Just like a nice anecdote from Jan on the Bombcast.

P.S. I'm sure that @rorie kid will figure out how he fits in eventually. We just gotta give him a little time.