Yours Truly's 2022 Game of the Year Awards
This was a year I spent way too much time in long, long, looooooooooooooooooong hour games of an alarming level of complexity.
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The thing with Roguelites is they tend to replace the self-betterment and random events of Roguelikes and Roguelike hybrids with grinding and guarenteed victory (after grinding).
Vampire Survivors turns that on its head and smashes thru it to codify a new genre: Auto Shooter Survivor (or reverse bullet hell, or whatever). So many fun things to collect as a goal in and of itself, plus various brilliant ways to break thru the trappings of the game previously to gain further power and new spins no play.
Speaking of brilliant, the loadout choices are amazing and full of neat synergy ideas. Is Garlic good? Is too many high-damage moves actually a problem? You'll hear dozens of takes on this; a sign of good Balance in Imbalance.
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This game sets up and knocks down so much so well. Regret. Art direction. Multiple art directions. The way text is shown and changed. How all that and more are used. Its masterful.
Its all thanks to removing of sales requirements. No-stakes meal mini-games is the kind of thing that would have been excised or over-gamified in a huge modern production. Weaving Early Modern technological and religious changes into a mystery that is timeless and personal to such a skillful degree that even people unfamiliar and uninterested in the sheer depth of the historical accuracy follow along without problems.
It also is one of the multitude of titles whose creators looked at Disco Elysium and LEARNED from it. How not to be the hero. How not to treat NPCs like books. How to show an inner mind of a protagonist (best dream sequence since Trails in the Sky: SC!).
I did notice some characters barely say anything in acts but are really chatty in others, but its a minor quibble.
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Like with Nintendo, From Software somehow ended up being a company doing something interesting with open world design. Yall know the famous story how the art direction of Brütal Legend was done so every scene looks like a heavy metal album cover? Its like that but with the best vistas looking far out to more From Fun. Plus that secret spice: its dangerous. Its 20% symbols on that map and 80% dangerous shit. And there's ALOT. Im frankly shocked how it didnt wear out its welcome over 110 hours. There's just enough at worst to keep things interesting thru many hillsides and many catacombs. There's a deftness to that.
Also, there's alot of gear! And most of it is distinct and weapons utitlize that DS3 Special Move thing well given how broad everything is. Its great having an Urumi kitted out for knights and stacking +Jump damage for dual katana power stancin'.
Also, Torrent is the best video game horse.
There are problems. Some later bosses enforce a flavor of DS2's un-Soulsy What-When combat but also add a ton of randomness when you do leading to lots of waiting and running at best, endless dodge vortexes and 3 second wind-up Instattack™ at worst. It got so bad the penultimate boss looked like a Team Fortress 2 aimbot at times.
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I like when developers work towards a better holistic goal (and are allowed to by publishers). Monolithsoft, after alot of great advancements and lateral explorations, have done that, as X3 is clearly the culmination not only of the previous 3 Blades, but also their previous Sagas and Gears too.
The cutscenes are as long as Gears but are meticulously choreographed and never waste your time. The battle system is a smart grab-bag of the previous 3 games, and the story puts alot of the series threads to rest pretty nicely.
And that cast. Look, I've gotten really cold on "random people following the leads" in RPGs, either JRPGs "our character designer gave us this list of designs" (see Billy from Xenogears) or CRPGs "companions slash life story exposition checklists" (see Pillars of Eternity) where they fade into the background after their Very Special Episode. X3 is NOT that. These are strong characters that make a strong team. They banter, bicker, and rely on each other. No conversation is awkward when it shouldnt be. Yes, even Noah and Mio, learn to love subtlety. :P
Great music too, if you're interested.
Did find the previous games' dearth of tutorials has lead to THIRTY hours of them here. Long, step by step explanations that leave no step unpresented. On everything. For THIRTY hours.
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Dwarf Fortress. The Über-game. The whispered title so complex and intricate one had to see into the matrix to delve into the myriad of bizarre narratives and fun failures. But that complete lack of mouse, menus, and graphics huh? Kinda added to the problems sussing this out huh?
Well, people have helped the brothers out. All half a million of us, and they gave us this much more post-1990 interface to get into this raising of Dwarven might to STRIKE THE EARTH!
And losing IS fun! I think every other fort so far has failed from me just learning how systems interact (the other two were from a werebeast attack and nearly no metal anywhere BUT platinum) but I dont care that much. Just learning itself is a joy watching the various dwarven personalities, supplies, earthen layout, monster attack, and random WTF sing to have mayors elected on the back of farmers and hunters due to too many less-talented in crafting, or giant keas stealing my only two picks, or bards in my tavern getting everyone into a rousing drinking song and dance that goes on for 10 minutes.
I do have issue with how janky getting militia and hospitals and a few other routines are (routine stuff, not like, Stupid Dwarven Tricks involving magma and caged monsters). The devs helping the brothers with smoothing these oddities out while they finish off the back half of their mad journey.
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A great party game from the descendant of one of the best comedies ever. It's got a good interface, the use of vulgar sounds works far too well for one of these games to have to not been done until now, and what clips they use have a lot of open-ended opportunities for riffin' and snark.
I just wish there was more on here to riff. You can even notice which jokes are the baked-in ones after several sessions.
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(Specifically the expansion pac Tower of Oannes)
Hell Temple. Fun place, so it stands to reason the sequel would have one too, and yeah, more Hell Temple but with Fish.
Gotta love how dealing with actually finding the place and gaining entrance is as difficult as making one's way thru this.
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BS2 and its prequel are remarkably frank as games go. Multicultural and LGBTQ+ life, successes, and setbacks usually fit a particular mold, especially ones involving contemporary gamer nostalgia works (oh god, the late Aughts are now a target for nostalgia, aint they? UGHHHH). All this without becoming groaningly-twee or wallowing in references. It's also got how conversations turn bigoted and the word choice and body language of it down pat, word for word, like, alarmingly so.
The perspective thing fades the cohesiveness the original had, as it becomes less an ensemble thing and more "the current main" thing (Diya especially fades into the background).
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An small snack to tide us over for Not-Suikoden-But-The-Only-Suikoden this year, Rising is what it is: a window onto this new world's storylines, an introduction to some of the characters, and a self-contained plot, via people not working on Rising.
Its got Suikoden but in a slow lane feel; I wont deny it feels like part of both it and Trails where the Venn diagram overlaps in that regard, and is snappy. Could have used better rigging for combat tho; it looks stiff and disjointed (but outside of that its fine; Isha's "Naturally."/"Fuck you pay me" gesture it suffices just fine).
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There's been alot of "West" games lately, and the "real time sim" genre got its revival along with the PC Golden Age III. The problem this one ran into was not the former, but latter.
Holding that line between being able to gun one's way out of a jam and the need to keep stealth and subterfuge valuable is a tough one. WW's problem is fourfold: with larger maps making dumping a ton of bodies a chore, bosses and other elites run around like idiots necessitating Max Paine Time, aggro is wierd and difficult to guess (visual, timing, and sound notices dont make sense a good deal of the time), and the hired hands (even your other mains) are bigger idiots running far into battles upon seeing new enemies out of LOS, into traps, etc.
It even extends to quick and manual saves defaulting to a different floor (apparently right in front of a boss!) It shakes out to either doing a perfect commando run or just shoot everything on every story map.
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