This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It feels like it has been a little long since my last writeup, but the truth is I haven’t really had the time to dedicate to gaming that I would normally like. I also don’t have a good excuse as to the reason why, maybe it’s the usual doldrums that happen every so often where no game looks interesting, or perhaps its just having more on my plate at the moment then I normally do, but you fine folks don’t care about that. No, we are here to talk about video games and ranking them as to figure out what is the greatest game of all time. Well I have two lovely samples for us to talk about today. Technically I believe some people would argue that I have 1.5 games to talk about, but we will cover that later.

Our first game on the docket is a little independent game called “Submerged.” Submerged is a third person adventure game that asks the question, what if we combined Assassin’s Creed’s wall climbing mechanic, with The Windwaker’s boat mechanic and removed combat completely from both games? The result is a relatively mellow/relaxing indie game that puts nearly all of its eggs in the exploration basket over anything else. You explore a flooded city at your own pace with no time limits, no threats, and very little story motivating you forward. Your enjoyment will come solely from how deep you feel like learning about the world around you, and how much you like exploring.

Submerged main plot is about a girl who is trying to care for her brother after an accident, by locating medical supplies and taking them back to him in order to fix him right up. You go out on your boat, locate a building that might have a supply crate, and then climb your way from the bottom to the top using different handholds and jumping. After each successful supply crate, you are given little snippets of the story, but then you are off to find another crate until you have found them all. However, I need to explain that when I say “snippets” what I really mean is “little pictographs.” This game does have a story, and a lore, but none of it is explicit. When you discover a pictograph you can technically interpret it however you want, the game gives no explanation as to what it actually means. While there are set pictographs that you will automatically get via the main objectives, to get the full picture of the game, you need to find the collectables that are scattered throughout the world. Each collectable will result in a single image that goes in your notebook, almost always out of order, that you are left to interpret when you have gathered enough to try and make sense out of how this happened to the world. Choose not to engage or track down these images, and you might learn the story of the sister and brother and how they came to be, but why the world is flooded will remain a mystery. I was able to track down all but two collectables, so I wasn’t able to connect the whole story, but I think I know the gist of it and that was enough for me. I could have looked up the final locations, but trying to cross reference documents to see which two collectables I missed, seemed like more hassle then potentially what it would have been worth. To each their own, though.

Now in terms of the actual gameplay aspects. As stated earlier, this game is a relatively relaxing experience. There is no combat, and no health bar for your character or the boat that you travel in. Want to smash into a wall at full speed in your boat, great.. but outside of some light collision, nothing really happens. Want to try and fall from a great height while climbing, well… you aren’t really allowed to. I think in the few times I was able to “kill” my character by running off something, the game just fades to black and then fades up with your character back where they were. Boating is more of an open world, where you can explore the city at your own leisure, and you can technically go for any collectable or supply crate in any order. There is no time limit to how long your brother will survive in his current state, so if you wanted to uncover the whole map on your first trip, find all the boat upgrades (speed) or simply see the sights you can do that. When you eventually land at a location, then you get the less interesting climbing mechanic. You run around a building looking for ledges, ropes, handholds etc that mark where you can climb and you start your ascension. Listen, after AC1 I stopped thinking that this climbing mechanic was fun, and that doesn’t really change with this game. While boating allows you to go explore, for climbing there is only one path up a structure, any side paths will lead to a collectable and then dead end. I found myself towards the end of the game spending more time in the boat just trying to find collectables rather than climb another building because I bucketed that stuff as being pretty boring.

This game isn’t going to blow your socks off, it is a low stakes/relaxing exploration indie title that does enough right that you won’t be fighting the controls or jank in order to progress. Will you remember this game and its story 3 months later, probably not, but it does have a sequel that I have seen is better received then the original. All in all it is a short ( <8 hours), game that you can play whilst turning your brain off. Is that worth the $2-$5 for you? Only you can answer that question.

How did I do?

Now lets move on to the next game on the list which is where some controversy might come into play. I did two playthroughs of the interactive movie/game “Erica.” Before I even get into describing the game, let me say that I do consider this a “game” (whatever the hell that even means). It has interactive elements, it requires a system to be played on, you interact with it on either a controller or a phone app. Now those aren’t all defining aspects for what I consider a game, but its certainly has game elements.

Anyway, “Erica” tells the story of a girl who is haunted by the grisly murder of her father that went unsolved, and now X years later is starting to crop up again. Now there is certainly more to the story there, and we will get to that later, but I will warn that there will be some major spoilers ahead for that discussion. I’ll give warning later as well if you want to experience this for yourself. Now, though lets talk about how this game plays. Throughout the runtime there are moments that require you to (I played through the phone companion app) use your touchscreen to interact with objects or make choices in the game. To flick open a lighter you might need to first swipe your finger from right to left, to signify opening the lid, and then swipe your finger top to bottom to attempt to light the lighter. In other instances you will be given choices whether dialogue or action where you need to highlight the choice on the phone and hold it there to make a selection. In some instances these choices are timed and failing to act (or choosing not to act) is an option and the game plays out as if your character didn’t say anything or didn’t move.

The actual responsiveness through the app, is serviceable but it certainly would not be something that I would want to deal with through a game with more stakes. For instance, I don’t think you can get a game over by making a wrong choice, and while I certainly haven’t tried every permutation of choices, I don’t know if you can die in the game. So, when you are getting acclimated to the controls or handing the controller off to other people to play, at worst, you might miss a choice and have Erica remain silent during a conversation. To be clear, my complaint here is that sometimes you can lose the reticle you are using to make choices, and when doing motions (flicking the lighter, turning on a faucet, etc.) your motion may not register at first. Its serviceable and in a low stakes game, its fine, but I have played plenty of other games that use phone controls or companion apps, and rarely have the same issues.

Now, I normally try to talk about games without really spoiling too much about the story, because perhaps something I write will intrigue someone to check out the game. However, I can’t really avoid that with this game, because there isn’t really a bunch of gameplay systems I need to explain, or talk about the combat encounters, all we have is the story. If you know nothing about Erica before starting the game, the creators want you to play the game multiple times. They specifically state that you will not get the full story on a single playthrough, and the more you play the more you will be able to piece together the story. That line alone probably gives this game a little mystery to it, that you are going to be solving a puzzle that you can’t possibly understand on a single playthrough. It was what stood out to me upon completion of my first playthrough, where I thought I had a pretty good idea of what happened, but held me back upon writing a review until I forced myself to play it again. These playthroughs aren’t long, and I think you can get through a whole session in about an hour and a half, but how much “new” information you really get out of it is going to vary.

Spoilers ahead – So to catch you up to speed, without telling the whole story. Erica as a kid finds her Dad’s dead body, and he has a symbol carved into his chest. Erica sees the killer but does not get a good look at her face and the murder is never solved. Cut to, lets say, 10 years later and Erica receives a package of a bloody hand holding a necklace that has the same symbol that was carved into her Dad’s chest. You are then whisked away to a pseudo half-way house/ hospice care location that your Dad founded, this is where you will stay because the police are going to have security detail posted here since the murder. Throughout your stay you meet other residents, some of the staff, and lo and behold bad stuff continues to happen to you. Eventually you will come face to face with your Dad’s killer, who will unveil that the location you are staying at is far more insidious, and that they need to be taken down. She asks for your help in exposing its secrets and you now get to grapple with should I help my father’s killer, but eventually you will come face to face with the head doctor and make a decision that essentially determines your ending.

Now on my first playthrough through happenstance I befriended the right girl at the hospice who showed me a secret room, and then I trusted the killer and made a decision that his place was truly bad news, I killed the main doctor, saved the remaining girls, and burned the building down. Presumably all the loose ends got tied up and I was left with a pretty satisfactory ending. However, this is how I interpreted the story, surely if I made different choices, maybe I would see that this hospital is truly helping people and that the killer was the bad person all along. So, I made a conscious decision to do everything in my power to do different choices, and to engage with as little of the killer as possible. On a second playthrough, I refused to answer the ringing phones when I knew it was the killer calling, I refused to engage with the girl who showed me the secret room, and tried my best to help the cops catch the actual killer. Guess what!?!? It doesn’t matter. You still find yourself finding the secret passage, taking the killer’s gun, and coming face to face with the final doctor in the final scene. This time I refused to shoot him, and he sedates you and you live out the rest of your life drugged at this hospice.

I know that this is a relatively small project, and I also know that I didn’t attempt every playthrough making different choices, but it was such a letdown that despite trying to engage in the complete opposite actions as my first playthrough I found myself in story beats that didn’t make sense for my playthrough. My first playthrough it made sense that I found secret passages, took the gun from the killer, and found myself running through the secret underground of the lab and coming face to face with the doctor and seeing him as treacherous and escaping. All of those scenes made sense to me on that playthrough, but don’t fit my character in the 2^nd playthrough. I actively refused to help the killer when confronted, not once but thrice. I befriended the girl who doesn’t see anything wrong with the location we are in, I watched the one cop get killed because I took him to try and capture the true killer, and then I refused her gun. When shit starts hitting the fan at the end of the game, my girl should have sat in her room and locked the door, but instead she stumbles upon a hidden room.. she should have not had a gun (since I refused it), but the “refuse” in this situation is just to tell the killer that you won’t murder anyone, not that you won’t take it. I also didn’t have control over getting into a standoff with the main doctor, I basically had to point my gun at him, and then make wild accusations that I shouldn’t really believe.

This is always the danger of a game that promises that player-made choices impact the story. Eventually games will have to bottle you into seeing certain scenes or getting to certain points, even if it doesn’t make sense for your playthrough. My 2^nd playthrough didn’t fit my character, but the creators of the game didn’t take into consideration an Erica who rejects reality and does not want to engage with the mystery surrounding the house and staff at the hospice. However, what I think is far more damning is that I don’t think the game is really as mysterious as it wants to be. There doesn’t really seem to be that much ambiguity that is happening with the story. It is clear through two different playthroughs that there is something sinister happening at the house, and that the doctors and nurses are in on it. The police if they aren’t involved, are at least as incompetent as they come, because one killer is making a mockery of their whole department. After the first playthrough, I said to my wife, that one of the playthroughs probably hints that Erica might be the actual killer, and that she is schizophrenic or repressing the memories of causing harm to others. However, I can say with some certainty that there isn’t even the implication that Erica is “crazy” or delusional. I was truly anticipating a separate playthrough to make me come to a different conclusion as to the events of the game. Maybe Erica is sick and needs help, maybe she is the killer, maybe the hospice house is actually doing good, maybe the murderer is actually wrong… but I don’t think those exist unless you are wild with your interpretations. If I learned anything on my second playthrough that I didn’t already know, it would just be about the effects of the oleander perfume drug are farther reaching than initially thought, but that’s it. Doing everything I could to go out of my way to try and side with the hospital, still ends with painting the hospital in a negative light.

Even ignoring the “This would never happen in real life” issues with the game (A single cop taking you to a sanitarium to “protect you” from a murderer. The chief of police being murdered while you were alone in his house and a bigger stink not being created because of it. Etc. etc.), I just think the game is a little clumsy with its storytelling. I don’t think it is an actual bad experience, but I don’t think this game is worthy of multiple playthroughs, as there just didn’t seem to be that many alternating paths or a crazy different ending that is going to make it truly feel unique. In fact I think this is a game you play through once, and then you will have more fun pondering what the different playthroughs are like rather than actually going through them. It wants to instill a sense of mystery that even upon completion leaves you wanting more answers, but picking what girl you hang out with and whether or not to answer a phone doesn’t change the narrative enough to warrant multiple playthroughs. Maybe I got lucky and got the “right” ending on the first try and then everything afterward just doesn’t work for me, but I think it misses the mark as being a real conspiracy, loose-ends, type of story.

Are these the greatest games of all time?: No

Where do they rank: Both games are not groundbreaking and will appeal to a somewhat niche subset of gamers. I think Erica nearly edges out Submerged as a more interesting concept and "game" but I think it lets itself down in the end by trying to be more mysterious than it actually is. Submerged was a relaxing playthrough, but amounts to nothing more than a giant collectable finder and doesn't do enough to warrant a recommendation. I have Erica ranked as the 101st greatest game of all time between Glass Masquerade 2 (100th) and Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout (102nd). Submerged is the 112th greatest game of all time between Figment (111th) and Ganbare! Super Strikers (113st). This is out of 139 total games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening