We're back with the Mega Archive, a feature that deep (well...) dives into every release on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis in chronological order while simultaneously sprucing up their wiki pages. I may be retiring or retooling this series when I eventually hit 1993, but I couldn't just abandon it right at the end of 1992 like this. Especially when December 1992 is such a significant month for Sega, not to mention one of the busiest.

Reason being? Not only were the shelves stocked with potential 16-bit Christmas gifts, but the newly launched (in America) Sega CD peripheral would be releasing many of its dubious "highlights" during this holiday period as well; Sega of America out here promoting its newest weapon in their technological arms race with Nintendo as hard as they can. The two bangers mentioned in the title are really only the tip of the iceberg, though that's not to downplay the vast amount of licensed shovelware popping up towards the end of 1992 too. It won't be easy to pull some facts that aren't already widely known: an occasional issue with this feature, though having fully developed wiki pages at least makes that half of the process easier.

December 1992 will see a total of twenty-four Genesis and Mega Drive debuts. We'll get started on ten of those in just a moment, but first here's what we've covered so far:

Part XXV: 351-360 (December '92)

351: Ecco the Dolphin

• Developer: Novotrade
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-07-30
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: December 1992
• Franchise: Ecco the Dolphin
• Genre: Sonar 'em Up
• Theme: Save the Dolphins, and They'll Save Us from Xenomorphs
• Premise: When Ecco's whole pod is cast into parts unknown, he embarks on a long journey to find and rescue them. It's probably something simple like unscrupulous human fishermen, right? Probably.
• Availability: Its standalone Steam release is probably the most convenient. It's also been on iOS and the Wii Virtual Console in the past, various compilations old and new, and there's a fancy 3D variant for 3DS.
• Preservation: Ecco's one of those major Sega sub-fandoms with which I have very little experience - my attempts to play the game in the past were stymied by how awkward I found it, since the whole game is essentially one giant underwater level - so I'm not going to have too much personal insight into one of the Sega Genesis's most distinctive games, and one as closely associated to the platform as Sonic the Hedgehog and ToeJam & Earl. Inspired by thriller novels set in the ocean and the trippy works of Pink Floyd, Ecco repurposes the traits of the common bottlenose dolphin - their underwater echolocation, their enigmatic singing as a form of communication, and their limitations as a mammal that forces them to stay close to the surface or some other source of air - as video game mechanics. It's also deeply strange, as anyone who has made serious progress into the game can attest: time-travel, alien invaders, Atlantis, and an enormous sapient DNA strand that represents all life on the planet are featured in the plot. Notorious too is the game's high difficulty: due to the game's relatively short length, its creative director purposefully made the game harder to stop kids from beating it in a single rental. Can't get more honest than that for artificially boosting a game's challenge. We'll see Ecco again for its two sequels: 1994's The Tides of Time and 1995's Ecco Jr..

352: Captain America and the Avengers

• Developer: ISCO / Opera House
• Publisher: Data East (NA) / Sega (EU)
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: April 1993
• Franchise: The Marvel Video Game Universe
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Assemblage
• Premise: Cap and his superhero friends are out here fighting for that rarest yet somehow most elusive of things - a good Avengers video game.
• Availability: Data East arcade ports have been popping up here and there courtesy of new owners (as of 2015) Marvelous, but not this one due to some obvious licensing issues. At least, that was the case until this recently announced Arcade1up cabinet.
• Preservation: Unless it was Technos or Capcom, most arcade brawler ports for consoles tended to fall way short of the mark, especially when their strengths (multiplayer, many enemy sprites on the screen at once) were often removed or minimized. However, because the original Captain America was fairly modest as arcade games go - with comparatively smaller sprites and more emphasis put on maintaining the simple look of the comics over super-detailed graphics - the Genesis port didn't have to sacrifice too much fidelity and turned out fairly well. While the arcade game was developed by Data East, the licensing rights for the Genesis version went to ISCO who then sub-contracted to Opera House; the previous of these Data East/ISCO/Opera House collaborations was the Two Crude Dudes port (MA XVI) earlier that February. Something I discovered was that one of my favorite VGM composers, Hitoshi Sakimoto, was involved with the soundtrack for the Genesis version in particular: he's been involved with many games since, most recently arranging the futuristic synth of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim through his independent music company Basiscape.

353: Clue

• Developer: Sculptured Software
• Publisher: Parker Brothers
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Clue
• Genre: Board Game
• Theme: Murder Most Foul
• Premise: Flames... flames?... flames on the side of my face... breathing... breaths... heaving breaths...
• Availability: There's been several Clue video game adaptations before and since, including most recently Clue: The Classic Mystery Game for iOS and Switch. I'm sure Tabletop Simulator has a not-strictly-legal version of Clue also.
• Preservation: The second of three Parker Bros. adaptations for the Sega Genesis published directly by that selfsame board game manufacturer, sitting between Monopoly (MA XXI) and Risk, Clue actually makes way more sense as a video game because of how important information can be dealt to the player(s) without cheating or accidental subterfuge. I'm definitely of the persuasion that the only Clue-related thing that needs to exist is the 1985 movie, but if you really wanted an expensive video game version of an inexpensive board game, this doesn't seem abjectly terrible and even has little animated vignettes for all the possible murder variations. It was developed by Utahan developers Sculptured Software, which also did Monopoly (and will also do Risk) and was later bought by Acclaim: that's why some Clue reissues were released under Acclaim's Ballistic label.

354: Disney's Ariel: The Little Mermaid

• Developer: BlueSky Software
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: 1992-12-14
• Franchise: Disney
• Genre: Splashction-Adventure
• Theme: Collecting Dinglehoppers
• Premise: Video games like Ocarina of Time have proven many times over that it's usually not "better down where it's wetter," and this Disney adaptation corroborates that.
• Availability: Best not to assume any rereleases from Disney. If this sees the light of day again, it'll be part of the "Disney+ Games" service. Of course, they'd need to reinstate their games division for that to work.
• Preservation: I talked about the Genesis's relationship with Disney properties back when I covered TaleSpin (MA XXIII) but in short, both the Nintendo systems and Sega systems saw different adaptations of popular Disney properties - Capcom made all or nearly all the Nintendo versions, while the Sega versions were all handled by different (usually occidental) contractors. The honor of adapting 1989's The Little Mermaid for Genesis went to BlueSky Software: we last met this Californian studio with NFL Sports Talk Football '93 Starring Joe Montana (MA XXIV), and they'll go on to make even greater contributions to Genesis history soon enough. Sadly, there's a reason why you don't hear about this game as much as you might, say, Aladdin or The Lion King: it's not so great. Doesn't help that it arrived the same month as Ecco the Dolphin, which stole much of its underwater exploration thunder. If you recall the TMNT level set underwater (I feel that's the only thing anyone remembers about that game), where you had to find a bunch of targets around a maze, The Little Mermaid is entirely that.

355: Garry Kitchen's Super Battletank: War in the Gulf

• Developer: Absolute Entertainment
• Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Battletank
• Genre: Simulation
• Theme: Gulf War (The First One)
• Premise: You know what they say - if you can't stand the heat of live ammunition being fired from a cannon, get out of Kitchen's Super Battletank. And by "they" I mean the terrible print ads Absolute probably made at the time.
• Availability: A 2003 GBA remake is about as close as you're going to get to a present day Super Battletank release. There are plenty of better/more realistic tank simulators on Steam and elsewhere.
• Preservation: I bring this up periodically but I've been having a much easier time on the wiki side of things lately because many of these games share a platform with the TurboGrafx (rare) and SNES (common), both of which have been the subjects of earlier wiki projects. As such, if I have to do anything with these pages it's just adding Mega Drive-specific data like releases and screenshots. It also means that I don't have to break my own spine trying to reach for something interesting to say about another dry-ass military simulator like Garry Kitchen's Super Whatever. Battletank is perhaps a little more relaxed than most, being made specifically for consoles as opposed to going through home computers first, but it's still the type of game where more than half the screen is filled with HUD elements and functions that you'll need a manual or a Drew Scanlon to parse. One piece of trivia I found is that Super Battletank's Game Gear port - a console I've been conspicuously ignoring, since I'm not the biggest fan - was the last game released on that system, I suspect because publishers Majesco forgot they made it and just dropped it in 2001 long past the point of anyone caring (the GBA also came out that year, to give you an idea of the timeframe). Majesco also put out the very last official Genesis release (we'll get to that in... 2028?), so I guess obsolescence was just something they were into.

356: The Great Waldo Search

• Developer: Radiance Software
• Publisher: THQ
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Where's Waldo?
• Genre: Stealth?
• Theme: Agoraphobic Nightmare
• Premise: Waldo isn't hiding, exactly, but he's still tough to spot in these various crowd scenes. Find him, and maybe he'll tell you where the hostage is buried before her air runs out.
• Availability: Just buy one of the books. Or get Hidden Folks on Steam/iOS, since it does a better job figuring how to pull this idea off within an interactive medium.
• Preservation: I grew up with the Where's Wally? (its original name here in the UK) books but not so much enamored with its various multimedia ventures, as most of them aren't able to replicate the core appeal of poring over a massive scene filled with incidental mayhem for a checklist of people and objects to find. Early Where's Waldo? video games like this suffered because of the limitations of their screen resolution, forcing players to scan each scene one zoomed-in region at a time. Eventually, as the technology improved, so did Where's Waldo? games and those inspired by same but at that point it was no longer the hot property it once was. Radiance Software is a name I've heard of but can find almost nothing on: they existed for a time in California and then stopped, is about as conclusive as I can get. At any rate, this was their only Genesis release, though they had a slightly bigger footprint on the NES, SNES, and TurboGrafx-16.

357: Muhammad Ali Heavyweight Boxing

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: Virgin Games
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: March 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Boxing
• Theme: Floating Like One Insect and Stinging Like a Different One
• Premise: Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, steps into the ring for his biggest challenge yet - defeating nine no-name NPCs.
• Availability: It's a licensed boxing game, so no rereleases. Maybe if they replaced Ali with Mr. Dream, but why would you do that?
• Preservation: Muhammad Ali Heavyweight Boxing represents the sort of sweet spot game developers were aiming for with their sports adaptations, finding a middle ground between realism for the fans of the genuine article and a sort of hyperrealism that exaggerates the sport for the sake of heightened entertainment. The boxers in these games get real messed up by the later rounds, having to carefully make their way back to their corner to recuperate because the canvas is slick with blood and they can't see out of one eye. The game makes ample use of sound design too, creating heavy punches that sound like someone being slammed with an entire cow carcass launched from a trebuchet. We're also seeing more experiments with pseudo-3D, seen when boxers circle around the ring for better positioning, and some cinematic zooming around before the bout starts. If you were to judge boxing games solely by the skill level of the endorsing celebrity, which makes some amount of sense given more money would have to be involved, I could see the logic of following that thought process to proclaim Ali's boxing game the greatest on the system (so far). Of course, developer Park Place Productions is no stranger to sports games: they helped create Madden NFL and NHL Hockey for EA, and Joe Montana Football for Sega. We'll see them again for a few ESPN sports games they made with Sony, as well as adaptations of the most gruelling TV sport of all: Jeopardy!.

358: Sunset Riders

• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: April 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shootin'
• Theme: Rootin' 'n' Tootin'
• Premise: Fill some bounties full of lead, and then bury them with their money. Or just keep the money.
• Availability: Port's not worth chasing down, but you could always buy the arcade version via the Xbox 360's Game Room. Hmm? What? Oh. Well, good thing it was released in 2020 on Switch and PS4 as part of Hamster's Arcade Archives then.
• Preservation: Now, I love Sunset Riders as much as the next hombre, but recall what I said about the Captain America port? How arcade games rarely make it to consoles unscathed, especially in the 16-bit era? Sunset Riders for Genesis has half as many playable characters, half as many stages (though those that remain are edited to be longer), and the graphics and sound were considerably reduced including the voice samples. Konami cheaped out with the smallest cart they could make, possibly figuring that if they didn't release it in Japan their reputation would remain intact. Like American movie stars doing weird-ass Japanese commercials they assume we'll never see. One thing I love about this game is that they took all the guns out of the PAL version's box art. We do have restrictive gun laws here, but that seems like a bit much, especially since six-shooters kinda came with the territory. Too bad they didn't replace them with walkie-talkies instead (they had those in the Wild West, right? How else could they have organized the train robberies?).

359: Superman

• Developer: Thinking Rabbit / Sunsoft
• Publisher: Sunsoft (NA) / Virgin Games (EU)
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: December 1992
• Franchise: Superman
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Indestructible Man Gets Punched By Green Goons, Dies
• Premise: When Brainiac and a bunch of his underlings come to Earth to make trouble, Superman flies in to the rescue. That said, he's not going to be at 100%. Video games have to be challenging, after all.
• Availability: No-one's made a good (solo) Supes game yet, and no-one seems eager to rerelease any of the failed experiments so far.
• Preservation: I was not aware there was a Sunsoft Superman game for the Genesis, which presumably came about due to their success with his sometimes-BFF Batman. Turns out there's a reason why people don't talk about this game much. In addition to completely whiffing on what makes Superman either a boring or a compelling hero (depending on who is writing him) - that he's more or less invulnerable - the game actually goes too far in the other direction, turning him into the kind of chump that gets clobbered by random henchpeople and robots. Instead of being faster than a speeding bullet, Supes is slow as molasses and has to wait to charge up his strongest attacks and instead of flying, he spends half the game on-foot. I sympathize to some extent: making a Superman game is a lot harder than making a Batman game, because the latter is human, and it translates better to a video game paradigm when the hero is mortal and must rely more on wits and equipment. Yet, if Volition can make a decent Superman game with Saints Row, surely someone else can?

360: Streets of Rage 2 / Bare Knuckle 2

• Developer: Sega CS / Ancient
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-01-14 (as Bare Knuckle 2)
• NA Release: December 1992 (as Streets of Rage 2)
• EU Release: 1993-01-14 (as Streets of Rage 2)
• Franchise: Streets of Rage
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Only Trust Your Fists, Police Will Never Help You
• Premise: Axel, Blaze, some kid on rollerskates, and not-Haggar have to prowl the angriest of avenues once again after crimeboss Mr. X returns.
• Availability: The original three Streets of Rage games are on Steam, as is the newly released fourth.
• Preservation: There isn't much competition to Sonic the Hedgehog 2's claim to most beloved Sega Mega Drive game of all time, but Streets of Rage 2 is one of the few acceptable alternatives. That the two games appeared within weeks of another was something of a coup for Sega; a good coup, rather than a bad coup that might hypothetically involve getting lost in the Halls of Congress and tasering your own testicles. With two new playable characters and everything else polished to a fine sheen, SR2 is considered the series peak, balancing risk vs. reward systems like special moves that eat away HP and a variety of boss and enemy types. The brawler genre would eventually hit a dead-end of sorts shortly after this game, though you could credit that with no-one figuring out how to improve upon its simple but effective formula without diluting it with unnecessary diversions and mechanics. This is Ancient's first credited Mega Drive game, though they have one other that we'll see when we eventually reach 1994. It's Yuzo Koshiro's company that he founded with family members, who is famous for giving the Streets of Rage franchise its inimitable soundtracks. Ancient's also credited with planning and production, along with Sega's own in-house studio Sega CS (Consumer Research and Development) which was the successor to their R&D2 division.

If you were wondering how the next hundred Indie Games of the Week would resume, a random explormer plucked from my Steam backlog is about as apt an indicator as any of how I intend to go on. Catmaze is very much a traditional dyed-in-the-wool explormer with a handful of major influences - Cave Story and the Castlevania Sorrow games - and a particular focus on Slavic mythology as a narrative basis. I've been using this feature to point out the latter whenever I see it; not just games that employ Eastern European folklore specifically but those from games industry "outsider" countries (Catmaze was developed in Russia) that have taken the opportunity of that status to highlight their own culture as a departure from the usual ancient Greek/Norse/Japanese represented many times elsewhere.

Explormers occupy an odd genre role in a similar case to roguelikes in that there's several signifiers that are beholden to that format (item-based progression, a non-linear map, etc.) and many developers are split between hewing as close to the model as possible for the sake of purity or taking that same type of game but add a little English (or Russian) to it in order to stand out after the genre has become, and I begrudgingly admit this as a huge fan, a little on the oversaturated side. Catmaze is absolutely of the former group: there's 2D platforming, real-time combat, a world map full of obstacles that can only be overcome with the right abilities (acquired much later, in some cases), and a slightly open aspect that still funnels you to one or two necessary locations to progress the story and find the next key - figuratively by way of a traversal-enabling upgrade, or a literal key item - to unlock further progress.

The game's story follows fledgling witch Alesta after a "spirit of sickness" called Mara carries her mother off due to it being her appointed time. Determined to get her back, Alesta embarks on a journey to discover a way to access the land of the dead, Nav, in any manner besides the easiest and most straightforward. This has her defeating and communing with various Slavic spirits, like the mushroom king Borovik or the dread Black God Chernobog, who she discovers are not quite as evil as they first appear. Likewise, she ends up meeting and helping various human NPCs in her overarching quest to find the enigmatic "Cat Bayn": a feline deity with all the knowledge in the world, with cats occupying a similar role in Slavic folklore as they do in ancient Egyptian by being some sort of earthly conduit between the worlds of the living and dead.

I spoke to its influences: Cave Story I see in the game's general aesthetic, with its correctly (if generously) proportioned protagonist and other human NPCs, and it's more expressively cartoonish non-human characters. It also has Cave Story's much disliked (by me) temporary power-up system, where the character grows progressively stronger by collecting resources dropped by defeated enemies but can lose that buff by taking too many hits. The Sorrow games, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, are alluded to by Catmaze's familiar system: Alesta doesn't attack foes directly but does so by equipping and summoning two types of familiar: melee and ranged. There are six of each, some of which have supporting roles rather than damaging (a melee familiar will refuse to attack, but allow you to use your magic familiars without mana cost), but must be found first along with everything else. Beyond that you have your standard HP and MP power-ups, some accessories which increase stats and can be upgraded further, a small stock of healing items and other consumables, and a system where you can gain extra temporary HP by praying at shrines and this power increases by finding runestones out in the wild. There's enough collectibles to fill the game's fairly decently sized map, and I'd estimate the whole game should take somewhere between eight to ten hours depending on how much of it you plan to see.

It does some have missteps. Most literal of which is a weird bug, possibly related to the slowdown I was getting, where certain waterbound platforms simply lose their corporeality and dunk you directly into the drink for some minor damage. It happened enough times that I'm sure it's nothing related to the controls (down+jump lets you hop down platforms) but was never a permanent issue; it just happened enough to be annoying. The game's script is decent, giving each of its characters various shades of grey with regards to their motivations and even waxing philosophical at times, but the so-so English localization has trouble keeping up with it at points, and typos abound. The main character's diary, for instance, has passages written so matter-of-factly that it occasionally made me laugh. Then there's the graphics, which as you can see in some of the screenshots can be a little inconsistent with their quality. The main character's animations and the backgrounds are generally OK, but the monsters often look like they popped out of the MS Paint nightmare dimension ready to throw down. This might be edging into the realm of entitlement, but I missed having a map that was more user-friendly: I've started taking user-placed map icons for granted in other recent explormers, though Catmaze at least has some in-game ways to locate remaining/missing power-ups close to the end of the game for those OCD 100% types who don't want to cheat and just dig up a game map on Google Image Search.

Finally, there's the more simple issue that Catmaze really doesn't do anything different or offer reasons to play it over the dozens of other explormers currently available on Steam and elsewhere, and that's made more apparent when I consider all the impressive time-travel/manipulation mechanics featured in the last two explormers I played, Timespinner and Vision Soft Reset. It isn't even the most cat-friendly explormer I can name, given Gato Roboto actually lets you control one of our furry friends. All I can really say in Catmaze's favor is that it has a real-life cultural basis for its world that's not commonly utilized in games, and that it's... just very competent at being an explormer.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

This isn't going to be doing a super elaborate round-up, in part because I feel woefully unequipped to talk about 2020's games in full given I played, like, twelve new games this year. However, I've been doing this since 2010 so it's going to feel weird if I miss one out, and it turns out I still have a lot of video game talk to get out of my system so, hey, let's have at it.

(JC Denton couldn't be with us this year because he caught a virus. Not COVID; it's a computer virus because he's like a half-machine guy.)

Best 2019 Game of 2020

Candidates:

• Luigi's Mansion 3
• The Outer Worlds
• Wilmot's Warehouse
• Reventure
• Vision Soft Reset

Just looking at the revised rankings in this "Adjusted" GOTY 2019 list I can see what the final top ten list should be: almost equal thirds of the best games I played in 2019, the best ones I played in 2020, and the best of those I've yet to play. I have a strong feeling Dragon Quest Builders 2, AI: The Somnium Files, Judgment, Disco Elysium, and The Surge 2 are all going to be high on that list when I can eventually factor them in.

Nonetheless, I still caught up with a lot of pressing backlog items, with Luigi's Mansion 3 being the most fun of the new batch if not necessarily the most elaborate or innovative. Turns out, 2020 needed some wholesome light entertainment more than anything else. The Outer Worlds proved Obsidian could make a compact New Vegas just as adroitly as compact Infinity Engine homages (I guess I just mean Tyranny, since neither of the Pillars of Eternity games were "compact" by any stretch). Reventure was endlessly inventive and genuinely funny, both qualities that are sadly rare for this medium, and a game ideal for anyone mourning the loss of the open-ended (so to speak) Don't Shit Your Pants. Wilmot's Warehouse found a brand new vein to explore within the casual puzzle sphere, relying on (and sometimes preying on) a player's organizational skills and OCD. Vision Soft Reset, meanwhile, was a little explormer that blew my mind with its intelligent (and intelligently accessible) approach to time-loops and time manipulation as mechanics.

Best 2020 Game of 2021?

Candidates:

• Yakuza: Like a Dragon
• Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
• Ghost of Tsushima
• Wasteland 3
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps

You'll see a little further down, or perhaps have already since I posted the list last week, that my current 2020 GOTY top-ten is looking a bit sparse. Even during the lockdown, the game industry was able to power through and deliver some memorable games this year, if relatively few all-timers. I'm inclined to say the newest Yakuza game is my most anticipated, just because I love the series and I'm curious about this paradigm-shifting reboot, but I'm not sure I'll actually get around to it in 2021: I've still got Judgment to play after all, and I can only usually manage one trip to Kamurocho a year.

Other potential post-annum 2020 GOTY entries include Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, a combination side-scrolling brawler and farming simulator that I started just last weekend; it's been tough going at the start what with all my food rotting almost immediately but I'm presaging the kind of game it'll eventually become with a few more mechanics and conveniences and liking what I see. Ghost of Tsushima seems like a highly competent and attractive if very safe open-world game, and I often find myself coming back to that genre's gift for comfort-food gaming every so often. Wasteland 3 sounds like InXile's best game in years: a much more confident approach to the gallows humor post-apocalyptic setting they reintroduced to the world with Wasteland 2, with better combat and quest design. The Ori sequel was 2020's best explormer by most accounts, so that was an obvious choice to fill out this brief roster of 2020 games I'll want to catch up on in short order.

Best New Character

Candidates:

• Sam and Lydia Day Break (Paradise Killer)
• Bob-omb (Paper Mario: The Origami King)
• Hachisuka Koroku (Nioh 2)
• Paige (Lenna's Inception)
• Becky Call (Murder by Numbers)

I'm sad that many of the game's best characters, or at least most talked about, came from games I didn't get to see: Hades and Yakuza 7 being at the forefront. Yet the games on my list still managed to produce some memorable characters, helped in part by my predilection for games with a narrative focus, with the married assassins of Sam and Lydia Day Break taking my top spot. Like the rest of the immortal cast of Paradise Killer, these two are initially suspects in a murder case and it's possible to implicate either as part of a conspiracy with enough evidence (also true for almost everyone else). However, I enjoyed their company so much - Lydia as a breezy cabbie/fast travel delivery service who always had some reassuring words, Sam as a skeletal bartender who kept the protagonist's favorite glass while she was in exile - that I purposefully avoided getting them mixed up with the court case finale.

Paper Mario The Origami King's Bob-omb - or Bobby as he was known to... well, just Olivia - was a single, unexceptional bob-omb who had lost his wick and his memory both, and followed Mario and Olivia on their quest out of having nothing better to do; just a wonderful deconstruction of the Bowser Army's most disposable underlings. Hachisuka Koroku has been a part of most of Koei's Sengoku-related content for years as a fan favorite vassal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, though Nioh 2's interpretation saw him as a boisterous and charismatic shiftling: a half-yokai like the protagonist, though in his case explicitly half kappa. The pun-loving librarian NPC Paige's whole reason for existing is to give the generic hero a few fetch quests to do, yet finds herself drawn to the mystique of the new unexpected protagonist Lenna to the extent that she eventually tags along with her as a helpful companion and sort of breaks free of her programming in the process; there's even an optional same-sex romance path for the two of them, though one perhaps doomed to misery. Finally, Becky Call's the acerbic stand-out of Murder by Numbers's eclectic cast of creative Hollywood types, and initially fulfils the broad stereotype of a mean-spirited and bratty starlet until you dig a little deeper into the reasons behind her ambitious drive for award season - she also has some of the best withering lines, and a fun sequence when she takes charge during an emergency.

Weirdest F'n Game

Candidates:

• Paradise Killer
• The White Door
• Moon Remix RPG
• Maneater
• Cyberpunk 2077

I keep this vague and ambiguous category in year after year because I like coming across games that defy convention and/or sense, either incidentally from developers who can't help but produce strange narratives and characters in spite of themselves, or those creators consciously trying to set themselves apart with something a bit oblique. Paradise Killer is definitely the latter: a deliberate effort to invoke Suda51's unique style while telling a story all of its own about an investigator working for a syndicate of immortal death cultists, examining a mass-murder heinous even to a pack of mass-murderers.

The White Door has some fascinating ideas for a narrative about a paranoid depressive in a mental wellness facility which manages to humanize its troubled protagonist and doesn't demonize mental health issues; Moon Remix RPG is a metaphysical obscurity once known only to hardcore Japanese RPG fans that finally saw a western release by Onion Games, one of the few working developers likely to do it justice; Maneater makes a killer shark the hero, though that's perhaps stretching the definition of the word, and tends to build quests around eating a lot of people and acquiring magic powers; and Cyberpunk 2077 is less a fascinating game than a fascinating mess, sadly typical of the top "AAA" echelon of game development companies that seem to care very little about their audience and own development staff alike. (I know Yakuza: Like a Dragon probably should be on here, but I've been avoiding spoiling myself on all its lunacy.)

Best Indie Games of the Week

Candidates:

• Vaporum (IGotW #155)
• Heat Signature (IGotW #159)
• Ara Fell (IGotW #177)
• Timespinner (IGotW #187)
• Wilmot's Warehouse (IGotW #195)

Another year means another fifty Indie Games of the Week, and as always it's enough of a challenge narrowing that list down to just five that I'm not even going to try to pick a single winner. It speaks to the sheer variety and volume of excellent games emerging from the Indie sector on a yearly basis that the more famous names I covered on the feature this year - Night in the Woods, Forager, CrossCode, Kentucky Route Zero, or Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince - couldn't match five games I had zero expectations for going in.

For instance, Vaporum is an older-style first-person real-time dungeon-crawler recently resurrected by the Legend of Grimrock games, and found its own niche exploring a steampunk-inspired tower of pipes and engines and mechanical monsters; beyond its thematic novelty, however, Vaporum is full of appreciated quality-of-life perks and far more lore than is usually offered by games of its type. Heat Signature, likewise, is a roguelite I was prepared to jump ship on after a couple of hours; instead, its inventive scenarios and combinations of space-age gadgetry and weapons made it a far more rewarding and tactical version of Hotline Miami's violent and chaotic free-for-alls. Ara Fell was an RPG Maker game (meh) with a generic fantasy setting (meh) that was nonetheless one of the most riveting and tightly-designed throwback RPGs I've ever encountered. Wilmot's Warehouse speaks to a part of the brain that goes underutilized and ignored by most puzzle games, while Timespinner narrowly pipped Monster Boy and Vision Soft Reset as my year's favorite explormer. (Other runners-up include: Clifftop Games's Whispers of a Machine (IGotW #167); Trinket Studios's Battle Chef Brigade (IGotW #190); Reventure (IGotW #191); and Team OneShot's OneShot (IGotW #196).)

Best Original Soundtrack

Candidates:

• Paradise Killer (Paradise (Stay Forever), Midori Eyes, The Lemegeton Bop)
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV (Constraint, Burning Throb, Mighty Urge)
• Streets of Rage 4 (Rising Up, An Exhibition, Main Theme)
• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (ISOLEUCINE, A Cruel Thesis, LONER)
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Receive and Turn You, Confrontation, Scenario Battle)

Beyond Paradise Killer's funky synthwave lo-fi beats to investigate and solve murders to, there weren't a whole lot of soundtracks that really stood out to me this year, at least out of the games I actually got around to playing. Everything else either had the one fun intro/credits song (Lair of the Clockwork God, Murder by Numbers) or a whole lot of competent "melts into the background" ambient music (Genshin Impact, Nioh 2). The others on the above shortlist I had to source from other lists and award blogs, such as @majormitch's always comprehensive musical rundowns, having not played them myself. While I like them in abstract I'll have to listen to them again with the acquired context someday.

I'm obviously going to promote the soundtracks to any Falcom games that were released this year, and Trails of Cold Steel IV did not disappoint on that front: it's the culmination of that particular saga, so while I was careful to avoid spoilers wherever I could you couldn't toss a stone at that soundtrack without hitting something intense and climactic. Streets of Rage 4 pulled the Shovel Knight trick of ably combining the old and the new, bringing in original composer Yuzo Koshiro for a few tracks while the lion's share went to Indie fixture Olivier Deriviere. Speaking of favorite long-time composers, 13 Sentinels was blessed with the involvement of Hitoshi Sakimoto: a VGM creator I enjoy so much I've written whole blogs dedicated to his music, and the more synthy near-future flavor of 13 Sentinels seems to have jibed well with his sound (I look forward to seeing what he does with Unsung Story, which - surprising me most of all - sounds like it might actually come out eventually, if not next year). Finally, there's the new Yakuza soundtrack, which are always invariably a treat; they added way more wub-wubs this year, though I can't say I'm displeased.

(Honorable Mention goes to Fuser: though all of its "ingredients" are licensed tracks, there's much potential for delivering unexpectedly catchy musical mutants.)

Giant Bomb's Best Feature of 2020

Candidates:

• Brad & Vinny Build Things! (Astroneer + Satisfactory + Scrap Mechanic)
• Breaking Brad: Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels
• Mass Alex: Mass Effect 3
• PlayDate: Mahjong Mornings
• We Be Drummin'

Brad and Vinny frequently indulged their DIY passions during this year: Vinny building woodcrafts for his family home, while Brad perfected his "Marvelous Mr. MiSTer" one mail-order component at a time. However, they also brought that dad energy to some entertaining if chill premium features - across the year, mostly while stuck in their respective homes, they crafted interplanetary mining operations in Astroneer and Satisfactory, and pushed their engineering skills to the limit in a one-off Scrap Mechanic stream. (Vinny also took apart some spaceships in a solo stream for Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game I hope Vinny and Brad both return to once it has more features, levels, and perhaps a co-op mode.)

Elsewhere on the site, we had an entertaining Breaking Brad feature on Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (a.k.a. The Real Super Mario Bros. 2) which isn't to dismiss Jeff's equally funny travails with the half-baked Super Mario Bros. Special for the PC-88. Mass Alex concluded the Mass Effect trilogy with all the slapdash business included with the third game, allowing Alex to share in the eye-rolling wonders that are Kai Leng and the tossed off multiple choice ending. Ben and Jan made a spirited effort to learn mahjong, only distracted briefly by Olive Garden starters, and even got fairly competent at the game of tiles after only a few short lessons on yaku and rons. Finally, where would the Giant Bomb community's sanity be without Alex's regular hang out drumming streams? I think he went live for 42 of the 53 Thursdays of last year, bringing us hot jams - and the occasional whammy - across setlists featuring over a thousand tracks total. That we're not even halfway through his full Rock Band library is reassuring for the near future, even if it makes us a little worried about his DLC spending habits. (Runners-up: Abby's various horror features, including the final series of Six Crazy Frights and the separate streams of Phasmophobia, Among Us, and In Silence; Jeff Gerstmann's Pro BMX XXX, which was the beginning of the end in more ways than anyone could've anticipated; and Jan's homebound adventures through Bloodborne and, briefly, Trails in the Sky First Chapter. Hoping he returns to the latter before too long.)

Best 2020 Game

GOTY 2020

	1. Nioh 2 While perhaps too big by half, Nioh 2 represents everything I love about video games: myriad gameplay systems and features all working harmoniously, heavy player customization and development that's as granular as I can handle, excellent atmosphere, storytelling, and worldbuilding, a decent challenge, and a reaffirmation of my long-standing belief that video game sequels are unique in how they buck the usual stereotype of "sequelitis" diminishing returns by being so much more confident and polished in their approach the second time around. It sands off the rough edges of the first Nioh, adding nothing but welcome modifications and additions to the original's vaguely Soulsian formula, and adjusts the difficulty curve to be more amiable without denying the player all the difficult duels and hazards they could want. As a half-yokai samurai who finds himself (or herself) deeply embroiled in the latter years of the Sengoku conflict, Nioh 2 puts you in a game built explicitly as a Souls ersatz but framed by a loot RPG sensibility and an instance/mission-based structure that makes the game convenient to play in bursts. Nioh 2 even tacitly acknowledges the true king of the Soulslikes - Bloodborne - with a new weapon class that transforms just like the Burial Blade, and is best suited for hunting monsters. Though exceptionally hard to quantify due to the sheer subjectivity involved there are those rare games that come along and just seem to grok you for the very specific type of player you are, and Nioh 2 was that for me this year.
	2. Paper Mario: The Origami King I've not visited the wafer-thin variant of the Mushroom Kingdom in quite some time, staying away from Sticker Star and Color Splash mostly through a combination of their mediocre reputation and the fact first-person Nintendo games rarely seem to drop in price. The Origami King, however, started seeing a lot of good press despite the continued diminishing of the franchise's RPG aspects, and I was curious enough to eventually try it out. While it still has that fundamental dissonance to its design - random encounters are detrimental to progress, since you gain nothing and often need to use up your stronger finite items to win them quickly - the combination of its puzzle-like approach to battles and the effortless charm of its script and characters made it an extremely pleasant way to pass the time. It didn't hurt, at least in my case, that the game was also full of collectibles and secrets to find and kept varying its approach from solving mysteries in the desert to sailing the high seas and discovering new islands in a style not dissimilar to The Wind Waker. When Super Mario games are at their best, they represent the purest and cleanest form of sheer entertainment and escapism this medium can muster, and The Origami King had that on offer during a year where such an experience was sorely needed.
	3. Paradise Killer I don't know if there is such a thing as a video game buff the way there is for movies and music - specifically, dedicated fans who hold the bold, the strange, and the obscure in the highest regard - but Paradise Killer feels like a game made for them. A murder mystery adventure that keeps detailed logs on every clue, hint, and statement you've found or been given, while also an open-world game filled with incidental treasures that almost always hold very little relevance to the central investigation but operate instead as a means to deliver some of the wildest worldbuilding I've seen in a game setting: A death cult of immortal beings who regularly create and destroy a series of tropical paradises in pursuit of the best way to commune with their eldritch patron deities, who use regular humans like chattel and must avoid being "tempted" by any one of their gods lest they find themselves exiled to a quiet villa for three thousand years, like the titular detective Lady Love Dies. It's a game that demands a lot of investment from its player, but offers enough narrative rewards for the curious mind to make that journey into madness worth it. Also, its mix of synthwave and '80s funk probably made for the best soundtrack this year, though I might have to do some more digging first...
	4. Lair of the Clockwork God Ben Ward and Dan Marshall made a pair of adventure games in the late aughts that, while hardly pushing the envelope (by design), were full of warm affection for the slapstick LucasFilm era of point-and-clicks and were unusual among their peers in how they managed to keep pace with the wild comedic energy of genre paragons like Day of the Tentacle or The Secret of Monkey Island: a rare feat for any game from this or any other genre. Lair of the Clockwork God is both the culmination of that wit and the inevitable result of observing and working within the Indie game development scene for over a decade. It is nothing if not irreverent, for both recent trends in Indie gaming and for where British culture and politics are at now in general, and feels that much more a personal expression from its two grumpy auteurs as a result. It also finds the pair at their most imaginative and innovative, creating a string of thematically varied vignettes loosely connected by an overarching plot of teaching a sapient supercomputer how to feel, and an excuse for a rapid-fire delivery of some of the best meta video game jokes and silly sociopathy since Jazzpunk. I didn't always see eye to eye with the game's platforming - Dan's fictional counterpart insists you can't make Indie games in this century without it, even if Ben staunchly disagrees - but this is a game absolutely worth playing through for its narrative content and humor (and yet another one that felt intended for me).
	5. Murder by Numbers Actress Honor Mizrahi, a very curious robot named Scout, and a cast of '90s Hollywood types (with some prominent LGBTQ representation) all find themselves involved with a series of strange murders, and the only way to solve them is to scan for clues (the interface for which looks eerily like a picross puzzle) to piece together what happened and who the culprit behind them might be. A Picross/Ace Attorney hybrid is a concept potentially fraught with issues - How do you maintain a decent delivery rate of picross puzzles without derailing the pacing of the ongoing story and investigation? Why would a picross puzzle of a cat tell you who the murderer is anyway? - but Murder by Numbers nonetheless found the sweet spot in its peerless execution, and coupled it with one of the most mature, realistic, and well-written stories I've seen in a visual novel while still dedicating plenty of time to moments of levity and goofing around. I'm glad the developers saw tremendous success this year (they also released Fall Guys) because it was well deserved.
	6. The White Door An adventure game about depression that hit me hard, as anything to do with protagonists suffering mental illness is likely to do, but remarkable in its ingenuity towards using the medium of video games to deliver a narrative that either contains a genuine descent into paranoid insanity or an insidious external conspiracy to falsify same. An initially nameless patient is put through an experimental version of systemic routine therapy: that is, following the same directions at the same times every day to re-establish a sense of normalcy to that person's world. (The game also incorporates a few clever narrative puzzles in here regarding passwords and backstory details that I won't spoil.) A few loops of this, bookended with flashbacks of how our protagonist reached his current nadir, eventually starts to give way to tears in reality and a breakdown of said normalcy; the game itself messing with you by subtly mixing up the safe routine you've been following. It's a well-paced horror story that doesn't diminish the dignity and humanity of those suffering mental illness, to its credit. Powerful and potentially difficult material that's very worth a glance if you're in a position to handle it. (NB: If you bought that Racial Justice and Equality bundle back in the summer, you should already have the means to check it out.)
	7. Assemble with Care A relaxing game about disassembling and reassembling broken electronics and keepsakes, with a simple and clear-cut interface that neatly places every component in a dedicated slot, and with no timers or scoring systems that might add any amount of tension. Just a gentle tale about an itinerant repairwoman working on commissions from the picturesque seaside town of Bellariva to pay for room and board during a local festival, with her expertise and empathy helping to resolve two different family conflicts in the process. Almost certainly the most wholesome game I played this year, and again something that really helped to combat the lugubrious and anxious mood of this year and its procession of bad news. Full disclaimer: Assemble with Care was originally a 2019 release for the Apple Arcade service - the interface is clearly built for phones and tablets - but we parishioners here at the Church of Rorie do not recognize Apple-based platforms so its 2020 Steam debut is the one that matters, at least for the sake of this list.
	8. Helltaker An exacting puzzle game about getting it on with demon ladies. Doesn't require any description more elaborate than that, though its simple approach to block-pushing puzzles can start to get tricky towards the end. Fortunately, the whole thing takes like an hour total to complete so don't expect to get waylaid (so to speak) for too long. The entire internet was thirsty for this thing for a hot minute, but it turned out to be a surprisingly wholesome trip through Gehenna with each demoness given enough of a personality to make their acquaintance worth the brain hurty effort. There's not a whole lot left to say about it without spoiling the story or puzzles except to mention that it's still free on Steam and won't take more than a lunch break to complete, so there's no reason not to check it out yourselves.
	9. Lenna's Inception A Zelda clone with a vaguely Axiom Verge premise of presenting an archetypal video game world twisted and corrupted by a strange and pernicious underflow glitch. That meta aspect to the narrative only really makes itself known at the start and the end of the plot, though, and the vast majority of the runtime is spent in large, uninteresting procgen Zelda dungeons and overworlds. I like a Zelda randomizer as much as the next guy, but robbing dungeons of some well-considered architecture also robs Zelda games of their essence. Solid enough gameplay with some neat narrative twists and goofy meta gags, but it doesn't half drag on at times. (This was free in the Racial Justice and Equality bundle too, fyi. I really cheaped out on this year's GOTY list.)
	10. The Lost Art of Innkeeping I perhaps like this game more for the conceit than the execution, as it's a rather dry RPGMaker project without a whole lot of graphical or mechanical flourish, but there was a time where I considered how you might build an RPG Innkeeper simulator back around the time when Recettear shined a spotlight on those nameless working stiffs manning all the vendor booths in our favorite RPGs. Developer SeaPhoenix hit upon an idea close to my own, where you'd have to decorate rooms in a specific way and complete unusual objectives to make each one of your idiosyncratic fantasy world guests feel right at home for the biggest payout. Add to that a game-long objective to repair the dilapidated mansion you inherited, fixing up rooms and opening up more floors to increase your guest limit, and spinning various plates on poles with timed events and tight scheduling. It's a little stressful in its strategic planning and money management, as running a hotel probably should be, but its decision to weave in a story and exploration elements to ensure it's more than simply a loop of checking in clients and cleaning up after them made for a compelling hybrid. (See above, re: Racial Justice and Equality bundle.)
	11. Genshin Impact [HONORABLE MENTION] Oh boy, this thing. An anime gacha game moonlighting as a surprisingly competent Breath of the Wild clone, taking Nintendo's many open-world innovations to heart when creating its rolling landscapes filled with incidental mischief with which to busy oneself. I'm never going to be that guy who pours money into a virtual slot machine in the hopes that some ultra rare waifu pops out, but Genshin's built in such a way where I don't have to be: the party you're given as part of the core story progression has more than sufficient skills and elemental coverage (which plays a major role in the game's combat and puzzles alike) to get you through the game's main content. You can toss all the microtransactions and gambling to the four winds and simply explore its world and take on its quests to your heart's content without paying a dime, and with two giant areas - and more on the way - it's a game I could see myself dipping into regularly throughout 2021 and beyond, at least until I hit that inevitable pay-to-win wall where progress screeches to a halt and the challenge level is insurmountable without monetary assistance. My only reason for excluding it from the main list is that it's far from finished: it may well be a GOTY contender for 2025 with the ambitious roadmap MiHoYo has intimated. (Also, what was it with "cute" mascot characters obsessed with food in pop culture this year? And to that effect, could Grogu fit a whole Paimon in his mouth? I'm sure there's fanart but I'm scared to look.)

Best Game Played (For the First Time) in 2020

1. Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter
2. Nioh 2
3. Tyranny
4. God of War
5. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
6. Tokyo Xanadu eX+
7. Paper Mario: The Origami King
8. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
9. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE
10. Ara Fell
11. Vaporum
12. Timespinner
13. Paradise Killer
14. Lair of the Clockwork God
15. Battle Chef Brigade
16. Wilmot's Warehouse
17. Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure
18. Gothic II
19. Reventure
20. Genshin Impact

A new category for this year, the above list represents the best twenty games I played this year regardless of their original release date. They were all new to me in 2020, even if the oldest - Gothic II - came out eighteen years ago.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter was not only the best game I played in 2020, it may well be in my top five RPGs ever. With the world and mechanics established thoroughly by the first game, the second chapter was free to elevate the challenge and the narrative stakes alike, creating a game that was thrilling every step of the way. Nioh 2 comes second as my favorite of the new games played this year. Tyranny is something I'm still kicking myself that I missed out on when it released in 2016, as it would've had a decent shot at topping my GOTY list for that year. 2018's God of War was something I evidently needed to try out given its many accolades, and that assertion turned out to be correct. Yakuza 6 was, well, my designated Yakuza game for that year - didn't surprise me at all to discover it was also one of the year's best. (The rest - a combination of Indies, deranged visual novels, Falcom games, and a relatively ancient CRPG I was glued to for a month - are all well worth your time also.)

That's going to do it for this year's awards. I felt it best to focus a little more on the older games I've been playing this year rather than try to hand out approbations to the same twelve games in different combinations, but it's becoming evident that this isn't a feature that makes a whole lot of sense moving forward given how few new games I play. Might just stick to the GOTY list instead in 2021, and refocus December/January writing efforts elsewhere.

Either way, I'm looking forward to Giant Bomb's GOTY content when it happens and seeing what the community picked for their underdogs and dark horses: I feel 2020 was a good time for both, with most of the larger games disappointing us one way or another.

Speaking of disappointing...

Bienvenido and be ready to present your passports as we enter the Principality of Technicality for this, the final Indie Game of the Week for 2020. Y'see, CrossCode is technically a 2020 game (its console debut), but it's also a 2015 game (early access on Steam) and a 2018 game (full release on Steam). I was wary about considering it for Game of the Year purposes, which is why it gets the honor of being a major milestone number for the Indie Game of the Week instead of lumped in with the rest of the 2020 highlights for this year's Go! Go! GOTY! feature. Neither here nor there, really, just the sort of odd scenario that happens more often these days when trying to lock down an accurate release date for one's notes.

CrossCode is a 16-bit-styled top-down action-RPG that's very much in the Ys mold, which is usually a good sign that I'll enjoy it. (Usually. We'll get back to that.) The story follows the adventures of Lea, a fledgling player avatar roaming around the state-of-the-art MMO CrossWorlds. Various interactions with other players suggests that the hyper-realistic (from their perspective; from ours it's a bunch of admittedly attractive pixel art) Virtual Reality setting is to some extent real and actually an Augmented Reality, and this was a discovered alien world that someone bought and terraformed for a video game. The real world outside the game is actually from several thousand years in the future, where humanity - after a massive war with itself for old time's sake - has settled into many centuries of gradual, peaceful exploration of the Milky Way Galaxy and the universe beyond, and taken to social games like CrossWorlds to pass the time and keep in touch with friends and family on other planets. It's thus a little hard on occasion to sort fact from fiction when both are equally out of reach: it's clear most of the ancient alien civilization here, vaguely based on Metroid's Chozo with its beaked lizardpeople and fancy mythology, is a fictitious creation of the game developers but the game has you questioning what is and isn't real on a regular basis. That ambiguous grasp on reality is all part of the story too, of course: CrossWorlds has a hidden side most players don't know about nor will ever see, but Lea ends up fording these secret glitchy waters nonetheless. If you're familiar with .Hack and its exploration of MMO culture combined with a real-world corporate conspiracy thriller bubbling underneath, you should feel right at home.

Despite having no jump button, there is an awful lot of platforming in CrossCode, and I'm more inclined to put it slightly towards the Zelda end of the top-down action-adventure sliding scale despite there being plenty of RPG elements too - stronger equipment, levels, skill trees; the whole enchilada. You'll spend most of your time hopping across raised platforms finding routes to treasure chests or puzzling your way through the game's many dungeon instances, and fighting becomes largely optional once you're happy with your current level as most enemies don't aggro unless attacked first (the dungeons are a different beast, and may indeed have different beasts in them, as most encounters down there are of the "defeat every monster in this arena before you can move on" variety). When you start acquiring elemental powers and discovering the doors they unlock, figuratively and literally, it's an exciting moment and yet another skill tree to demand your concentration. It's an overall compelling balance of disparate genres, one that Ys and precious few others have been perfecting for generations, and the unpredictable twists and turns of the story means you're never quite sure where you'll end up or what you'll need to accomplish next.

So... now it's time for the "but." I hate pulling this thing out as much as you hate looking at it, believe me, yet all the same we have to address that "but." CrossCode is a deeply, deeply obnoxious video game; one that feels like it was designed by sadists who took every lapsed game design concept - long since abandoned for the blatant disregard they demonstrated towards their players, and if you've played a lot of retro games you know the sorts of notions I'm talking about - and incorporated it deep within CrossCode's DNA to an extent where it cannot be excised or critiqued apart from the overall experience. However, it's difficult to explicate the particulars of why playing this game feels like you're getting mercilessly trolled every moment without dedicating half of this review on a big, infantile list of petty grievances.

So let's just go ahead and get started with one of those because I've really no shame left:

There are way too many regular enemies and bosses that constantly heal themselves, typically because you didn't do the one required thing to end the fight sooner possibly because you were too busy spooling your guts back into your abdomen to notice the subtle telegraph hints; there are too many bosses that love to drop waves of adds and go off to be invincible in a corner somewhere while you deal with the nobodies over and over; there are enemies (asshole birds, mostly) that spend 90% of the time in the air so you have to wait patiently for them to deign to put themselves in harm's way before you're allowed to get on with your goddamn day; split-second timing on at least half the puzzles and we're talking real close-to-the-wire, super reflexes-intensive stuff on a regular basis here, no points for just figuring out the solution without some perfect execution to go with it; a giant invisible timer to complete dungeons before your rival and fuck you if you spend over a hour carefully considering the puzzles or going for the bonus chests because then you get to enjoy losing out on an achievement and being gloated to; a punitive cooldown period before you can use your elemental powers again if you abuse them too much that lasts way too long given you usually need those powers to fight certain monsters or complete certain puzzles in the immediate vicinity, so you can just sit there and get helplessly pummelled and think about what you did you naughty little urchin; a jokey side-character turned regular PvP agitator who has the same class as you yet can nonetheless do stuff you cannot and break the in-game MMO's own rules and limitations for no clear reason, the supreme irony being that the character in question is a damn narc and a stickler for the rules; no post-damage invincibility period so you take unnecessarily huge amounts of damage from certain persistent attacks, e.g. a row of icicles that form in front and behind you; stealth sequences! Several of them! And escort quests too! Even slipped some tower defense in there! These are all bad, in case that wasn't clear!; a prominent bartering system that means all gear or healing consumables of any actual value all but require you to farm endlessly; extremely circuitous routes through areas to get to chests or farm the rarer resources, the latter synergizing wonderfully with the previous item on this list; a time skip in the story that puts your party members ahead of you in levels, forcing you to play catch up and feel like the weak link throughout; said skip then leads to a situation where the game's level requirement for story progress/side-quests jumps from 32 to 36 necessitating even more grinding and busywork; and let's not forget that pervasive and highly obnoxious feeling you only get with MMOs (or single-player facsimiles thereof) where it's always made apparent to you that everyone's already seen and done everything in a location before you got there and either want to spoil it for you or else treat you like an adorable oblivious moppet taking their first baby steps into a scawy new pwaygwound. (There's more, but after a point this list gets into annoyances with specific boss strategies and dungeon puzzles, and I'd rather not spoil those more than they've already been spoiled just by existing.) No single one of these kvetches will significantly detract from the overall experience I'll grant you but when they're all chained together one after the other like a grating persistent buzz bouncing around the ear canals (or, if you prefer, the world's shittiest conga line) it becomes an all-too-evident "death from a thousand cuts" scenario; or, as it so often felt the case, a thousand papercuts right in the fleshy junctions between your fingers. We've seen when promising games turn out to less than great because of a lack of budget and time, or the unwelcome interference of a company's marketing division, but it's rare when its own game design is the biggest culprit.

And so, we find ourselves with another case similar to HAL Lab's Part Time UFO from earlier this month where every mechanical aspect of the game feels polished and commendable, where there's a clear aesthetic vision and an attractive conceit for its gameplay loop, where there are systems and features and varied side content galore in which to lose oneself, and a narrative that can be as cute or as mysterious or as sinister as it needs to be without incurring any emotional whiplash, and... I absolutely loathe its guts in spite of it all. Yep, sorry, some games just rub me the wrong way regardless of their near universal acclaim and CrossCode was one of them (to perhaps accompany my apparently inconceivable distaste for Celeste two years prior).

Rating: 0 out of 5.

(All right, all right, fine, I'll relent - it can be annoying at times, but that's not enough to completely override the quality of the gameplay and the ambitious size and scope for an Indie. Consider this score to be the equivalent of the archetypal movie police chief saying how much he dislikes that loose cannon detective, but damn does he respect him. Hell, I still completed it, even if it was mostly out of sheer spite.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

• Game: MiHoYo's Genshin Impact
• Release Month: September.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 18/12.
• Completed: ???.

I'll preface this final entry in this year's Go! Go! GOTY! with two facts that everyone who's booted up this game on a whim already knows: Genshin Impact is both a lot, and it is far from finished. That isn't to say that it's filled with bugs or is terribly unstable (though it can be a bit frame-y on a core PS4), just that the developers have big plans for the rest of the game's content that will take a long time - and many microtransactions from a dedicated fanbase - to transpire. Right now, the game has two of what appears to be seven planned landmasses: the vaguely medieval European nation of Mondstadt, which focuses on the Wind element; and the more explicitly Chinese region of Liyue, which uses the Geo (or Earth) element. The other five nations will presumably all have their own elemental focus as well, and there's been a few hints via lore references and foreign NPCs as to what may lie in store. Despite being only 2/7ths done as of writing, what currently exists in the game still presents a significant amount of content: easily 50-100 hours of exploration and tailored missions, not including the daily tasks and dungeon instances. I've spent the better part of the last week just futzing around Mondstadt and completing its storyline. (Liyue may have to wait until next year, as I've still got one more 2020 game I want to fit in before Jan 1st.)

I should first assuage those concerned about the game's F2P and "gacha" aspects, as I was (and am): the game doesn't require that you engage with any of it at all, or at least during the first "chapter" set in Mondstadt. The purpose of the game's gacha system is to earn additional characters for your party, ideally those that have elemental coverage you're currently lacking (as intimated above, there are seven types in total, and many are used for puzzles in addition to being effective against certain foes or in certain environments). However, you are given three extra characters in addition to your player-named avatar as part of the story early on, giving you a team capable of wind, ice, fire, and electricity. The introductory gacha bundle guarantees you a geo character also, and you'll be given so much premium currency for free as part of the game's progression that you'll get more than a few gachapon rolls "on the house." The five-star characters and gear will of course require more luck and investment, either gleaned from a lot of grinding or a transfusion of real money, but they aren't strictly necessary except perhaps for the truly high-level stuff. I've been able to make consistent progress without these "pay-to-win" boons, though it took some figuring out of the game's unusual systems to get there.

There's two major aspects to how Genshin Impact's progression operates that I needed to suss out before the game started to click. The first is how experience works, which is applied to character growth as well as growth of weapons and accessories (you have five types of the latter to equip, so it's an involved system). Instead of earning a lot of XP from quests and killing monsters - you earn peanuts from both, in fact - you acquire plenty of XP-boosting items as rewards. The idea here, I believe, is that it gives players full control over who and what they want to prioritize the development thereof: if you've just picked up a rare piece of equipment, or an interesting new character you're motivated to use, you can save all these XP-boosters to catch them up to your current party quickly rather than be forced to drag them into high-level areas so they can siphon the needed XP from extended grinding sessions. Weaker items can be consumed as XP too, and identical weapon drops can be used to "refine" your current gear: this improves the weapon's passive bonus, such as a boost to elemental damage. (If you get an extra version of a character from the gacha system, meanwhile, you'll earn rare items that unlock new skills for them as well as some premium currency back.) This approach to XP is not an intuitive system, but it's one that now makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

The other major aspect is the game's "Adventure Rank": this works similar to Warframe's Mastery Rank, in that it's a gauge of the player's progress themselves rather than any single character's, and that progression not only leads to rewards for every new tier reached but occasionally whole new features will open up. The game's daily challenges, its timer-based "expedition" mode, or its multiplayer co-op system, for instance, all first require a relatively high Adventure Rank to access. Adventure Rank also unlocks new items in stores, new cooking and alchemy recipes to learn, new dungeons to tackle, new story missions to pursue, and eventually improves "World Rank": a system whereby all the world's monsters and treasures level up to be more competitive to your higher level party. If the game felt a bit rudimentary from the offset, it's only because it was waiting to mete out many of its features until I was ready.

The only information I knew about Genshin Impact going in was that it had a F2P economy - being free was a major part of my decision to include it here, after all - and it cribbed a lot of its mechanics from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. To that second point, the game is flagrant in its borrowing; really the only BotW traits not to carry over are the more controversial aspects, like weapon degradation and weather effects having detrimental effects to climbing and walking around wearing metal (though it may just be a matter of time until all that's included too, since the game is being updated constantly). Your character can climb almost any surface, though not when indoors, and the overworld is filled with incidental collectibles and treasures, many of which require a little environmental puzzle to solve or judicious use of "Wind Gliders" from a higher elevation to reach. Combat is similar enough also: it's all real-time and the environment plays a role via the game's elemental system - if you hit enemies with electricity magic while they're standing in water, for instance, it does more damage and spreads around to nearby foes. It feels a bit like a combination of BotW's use of the environment and the more in-depth manner that elements and the environment combine in tactical RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin or Final Fantasy Tactics. I've had to get used to quickly switching between characters to apply combined elemental effects: they tend to do a lot more damage in tandem than individually.

I feel like I could expatiate on this game's mechanics all day, as it is surprisingly elaborate for a free action-RPG, but I should probably get around to whether or not I actually like the game. I do. I think it's fantastic, one of the most confident action-RPGs to show up in a long while (since maybe Ys VIII and Xenoblade 2 from 2017) and it's ludicrous how much of its vast content can be accessed almost immediately, without engaging with its F2P economy or a huge amount of grinding and wait times for things to be built. I can just run around the world solving puzzles to find treasure chests, or reaching floating collectibles that can be exchanged for a boost to stamina (still very important, as it was in BotW), or diving into one of the game's many dungeons each with their own battles and puzzles to overcome, or tinker around in the menus to power up my gear and customize my growing team of heroes. I eventually hit a cash-related wall in Warframe despite enjoying its faster-paced mobility and character variety, and so I'm still anxiously anticipating that other shoe to drop in Genshin Impact also, but for now I'm having a grand old time just indulging in open-world collectathon nonsense and slowly figuring out its quirks and systems. I even don't mind Paimon too much, mostly. (And for whatever it's worth, Lisa's my current favorite. Early days yet though.)

GOTY Verdict: Hard to say. It's not finished yet, and I'm not inclined to evaluate a game until it is, but it deserves some sort of special credit since it's one of the best games I've played this year.

(LAST MINUTE EDIT: Typically, they're adding the third landmass in a matter of hours, just as I put a cap on the playthrough and this review. Huh. It looks kinda snowy?)

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020

• Game: Size Five's Lair of the Clockwork God
• Release Month: February.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 16/12.
• Completed: 17/12.

I've had quite a bit of drama with this one: first I had to disqualify it from this feature because I couldn't get the PC version to run properly, tossing a mea culpa in the "Welcome to Go! Go! GOTY!" type staging area linked at the bottom there, and then it suddenly dropped in price to something very reasonable on the Switch and suddenly manflesh was back on the menu, as it were. Lair of the Clockwork God, to introduce it for the first time again, is the newest entry in a series of adventure games that occurred just prior of the 2010s Indie boom and featured creators Ben Ward and Dan Marshall as what I can only assume are surlier and less morally restrained versions of themselves. The first two games, Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, were pure point-and-click adventure games: affectionate pastiches of the glorious '90s no-death LucasFilm era of examining objects, picking them up, and using them on other objects.

Lair of the Clockwork God is a bit different. Dan, the smaller of the two, has decided that he'd prefer to get in on the melancholy Indie puzzle-platformer racket, eschewing inventories and talking for collectibles and precise jumping controls. Ben, who is steadfast in not leaving his comfort zone of adventure gaming and its assorted hoary paraphernalia, rejects any notion of letting his feet leave the ground and will proceed with pointing and clicking as per usual, thank you very much. This creates a dichotomy of gameplay logistics between the two, though as before they must still work together to make any progress. The story is some deliberate nonsense about all the Apocalypses happening at once and the duo teaching a godlike mechanical entity human emotions to restore its empathy towards mankind before it will deign to put a stop to the world's imminent annihilation. It adroitly works as a narrative framing device for a series of vignettes and exploration sequences across disparate environments: some long and involved, requiring both partners to shift their weight, while others exist as brief one-off jokes or are exclusive to one character's set of skills while the other sits it out and snarks from the sidelines.

Dan's sections, as the would-be platformer hero, tend to involve a lot of tricky sequences where he hops between disappearing blocks and under lasers as they blink on and off; it's nothing particularly new or exciting, and while a lot of jokes are made at the genre's expense the platforming is also played relatively straight as a considerable portion of the game's content. Ben, meanwhile, has a point-and-click interface similar to the streamlined one introduced in Monkey Island 3 where most of the offered functions are purely contextual besides the universal "look at" and "use with inventory item." Ben cannot (or rather, refuses to) jump or drop even short distances, so much of the time Dan has to push blocks around or activate lifts to get Ben over to hotspots he can interact with, eventually allowing him to piggyback at the cost of a smaller jump. Later on, the game provides a number of different conveniences and upgrades for one or both of the protagonists: Ben can mix inventory items to craft platforming gear for Dan, for instance, the first of which are a pair of gas-producing shoes that allow for double-jumps.

The greatest strength of the original Ben and Dan games was the comedy: it's not easy being funny in a video game, and being funny about video games in a fourth-wall-breaking sense is even tougher, yet these two knuckleheads are consistently amusing throughout their whole series, with Lair of the Clockwork God a particular highlight. It helps that the Indie gaming satire is honed to an edge a Ginsu would covet, riffing on the past decade of Indie development that didn't quite pass the duo by (as far as I know, they've each been working independently on other projects since Time Gentlemen, Please!). So you'll get the expected (and some unexpected) jokes about "time-saver" microtransactions, pretentious walking simulator dialogue, "crafting," middleware companies, corporate sponsorship, loss.jpg, and the sheer antipathy most players feel towards sliding block puzzles. Yet despite plumbing these tired veins, the quality level of the humor is high throughout, balancing the persistent disdainful commentary (mostly from Ben, since this newfangled Indie Darling scene is something he wants nothing to do with) with physical comedy, really dumb puns, weaponized misanthropy, Gordian knot-style solutions to problems, and one unfortunately relatable sequence where the pair contend with how old everything makes them feel after convincing a judgemental social media feed full of slang they don't recognize to allow them into a nightclub. The writing is trenchant throughout, albeit very British; expect some colloquialisms and other mild culture shock if playing from outside the UK.

I wrote somewhere, now no doubt deleted, that Lair of the Clockwork God feels like this year's Horace. Both are evident passion projects that took their UK-based developers some time to put together, at least conceptually. Both balance exceedingly tough platforming (though there's a difficulty slider for that aspect in LotCG; there's a great deal of accessibility options, in fact) with some story-heavy interludes and puzzles. Both have narratives that twist and turn in ways almost impossible to predict, throwing you into one bizarre situation after another. Both even have incongruous 3D first-person sequences. And in both cases, while the action gameplay wasn't perfect, each has brilliantly witty writing, no shortage of inventive ideas, and a mostly cohesive and involved story that made it worth seeking out and playing regardless. I had a great time with this one, and it's killing me that I'm not allowed to spoil half the goofs to explain why.

GOTY Verdict: Right near the top of the list, going mano-a-mano with Paradise Killer for the number three slot. Gotta figure out if idiosyncrasy trumps dick jokes.

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020

• Game: Vanripper's Helltaker
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 15/12.
• Completed: 15/12.

There was a small stir on the gaming zones of the social media a few months back where everyone was suddenly getting thirsty for demon girls. It soon became apparent that the culprit at the center of it all was a freeware Steam game named Helltaker, following a similar set of circumstances that put a newly added feature in a relatively anodyne New Super Mario Bros. U Switch remake at the heart of an equally horny fanart catastrophe. Helltaker's a brief puzzle game that's perhaps best suited for mobile devices (it has that kind of style to it), but notable enough beyond its central conceit of obtaining a "demon girl harem" to be worth reviewing for this feature.

Helltaker is a specific sort of puzzle game I've referred to in the past (actually never) as the "perfect path deducer". That is, you're given a limited number of moves to complete a map, working your way from one point to another, and going over this limit will instantly end the attempt and start you over. These maps are invariably a grid of obstacles to overcome, from rocks to skeletal goons to spike traps. Rocks need to be pushed out the way (and regularly form inconvenient barriers), skeletal goons are also pushed out of the way but can be eliminated if shoved against a wall, and spike traps simply remove two steps from your limit rather than one though can be safely walked upon during their "off" state (they alternate every step). This is the basis of the first eight levels of the game, with the ninth and final switching the format to a more reflex-intensive real-time boss battle.

However, there is one more obstacle to overcome before a level is complete: you have to convince the comely demon girl at the end to join your harem, via a very dating-sim-like multiple choice prompt. Failure to convince them usually has them clawing your head off, which naturally proves as fatal as failing to reach them in the first place. The developers made sure to give each of these infernal paramours enough of a distinct personality, sharp "business casual" fashion sense, and distinct role in Hell's operation, which may have spawned the whole demon waifu business that spread out over the internet for a brief but prurient moment in time. Honestly, this all thematically dovetails with the allure of the immortal genocidal cult leaders of Paradise Killer also, which proves if nothing else that the internet can stan anything, even pure evil, if it's sexy enough.

Beyond all that, the game's about an hour long and I'm not going to spoil the puzzles or the encounters, and the game's still free on Steam if you're curious yourselves. I believe there's an option to skip puzzles if they turn out to be too tough (I'll admit to spending close to 15 minutes on the eighth stage, and the ninth sure wasn't easy either) so it's fairly accessible. A pleasant freebie surprise, much like Doki Doki Literature Club was for 2017. Just, uh, maybe put SafeSearch on if you decide to go Googling for more information (or don't; no yucking anyone's yums here).

GOTY Verdict: It's cute so it's in the running, but I don't fancy its chances in the long-term.

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020

• Game: Atmos Games's Neversong
• Release Month: May*.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 14/12.
• Completed: 14/12.

In the Devil's Kiss review, the second in this year's season of Go! Go! GOTY!, I talked about how veteran game parodiérs Dan Marshall and Ben Ward based their follow-up game Lair of the Clockwork God - temporarily removed from my itinerary, but recently added back in - on the premise that the Indie gaming scene is predominantly stacked with lugubrious and artistically aspirational puzzle-platformer games, a vogue started at the tail end of the '00s with the likes of Braid and several others. That trend has all but fizzled out by 2020, to what I imagine is some chagrin to Dan and Ben who probably wrote Lair of the Clockwork God's outline far earlier when the joke was still relevant. Turns out people actually are still making them though: Neversong is absolutely that type of game for better or worse, filled with momentum- and timing-based jumping puzzles and challenging boss fights that all act as the backdrop to one little orphan's quest to recover his beloved girlfriend from the sinister wraith Dr. Smile, and what might actually be happening beneath this familiar set-up.

Neversong is a quasi-sequel/reboot to a Flash game named Coma that creator Thomas Brush put together in his spare time as a student in 2010. He followed that up with the long-in-development Once Upon a Coma, which eventually morphed to become Neversong. Knowing that this game was a remake of a 2010 project made more sense in retrospect. Sadly, in the process of learning more about the source of the game after completing it (my usual practice, since I like to avoid spoilers whenever possible) I also found out that Neversong is actually a 2019 game: it launched on PS4 on the Halloween of last year. However, I'm counting it anyway because A) its European PS4 debut wasn't until the July of this year, which was months after its worldwide iOS and Steam launches in May, and B) I've already completed it so I might as well talk about it. I'll be sure to add an asterisk to it once I get around to my GOTY list.

So, Neversong. It's nothing we've not seen before, but in a thematic way I think that works in the game's favor: as a game led by a child surrounded solely by other children in a vaguely mid-20th century rural setting (the date gets a little murky for reasons that become clear later) one of the main themes is the doubled-edged sword that is nostalgia and the dangers that dwelling too much in the past can cause. Just like how protagonist Peet's adventures in his suddenly topsy-turvy hometown belies a deeper adult trauma at its core, being ten years out from the melancholy puzzle-platformer fad has made it the newest of video game genres to feel wistful about. (At least, I'm assuming that was a part of its successful Kickstarter push, though other factors - the game's distinctive, gothic, Edward Gorey-esque look and Brush's profile as the creator of Indie adventure hit Pinstripe - certainly contributed also.) The game's progress is demarcated by new songs obtained from bosses that, when played on the heroine's home piano, open up chests that contain new traversal items that allow Peet to explore more of the surrounding countryside. Despite this item-based progression system though, the game is markedly not an explormer: in fact, it's very linear barring a few collectibles you might want to backtrack for, largely for the sake of keeping its narrative trucking along. The other kids lend their personal takes on Peet's progress, but will often contribute in other ways: sometimes by giving him hints on how to complete upcoming, or being a component of those puzzles themselves. A few are there to give you fetch quests to complete, while others exist as eccentric red herrings to give the world a little more personality. I bring them up because the final act does something of interest to this little gang of yours, paying off the investment the player puts in learning their names and quirks early on.

Gameplay-wise, I was often at odds with Neversong, though the blame lies once again with my own inadequate hardware (specifically my PC, though the "hardware" that lives in my head isn't necessarily off the hook). I've noticed certain brands of game creator software really freak out if you don't have the adequate GPU chops to consistently run a game at its desired framerate, with certain physics-y objects like the climb-able and swing-able vines glitching into outer space and stymieing your progress until they eventually calm down or the player is forced to reload their last save. The lag introduced by these framerate problems also made the aforementioned momentum puzzles - the swinging on the vines as well as a skateboard that needs some run-up for larger jumps - quite unpleasant to deal with. Overall and exempt these issues, the platforming controls fine enough and I appreciated how clever some of its boss fights were, even if combat with normal enemies can be a bit mashy and unreliable. A very handy floating tool - an umbrella, naturally - would've been appreciated for the game's early jumping puzzles, though it's regrettably instead the last item in the game's progression chain.

On the whole, Neversong is every bit the type of emotionally-charged Indie puzzle-platformer that the industry has more or less moved away from in recent years. If you're still in the market for one of those, it's certainly serviceable and its peculiar artstyle, macabre sense of humor, and occasional flashes of gameplay ingenuity are additional feathers in its cap. The technical problems and some annoying puzzles towards the end meant my honeymoon period with the game concluded long before the game itself did, so I'm left mostly ambivalent about it despite those stated virtues. Ultimately: I didn't love it, but I would never say "never Neversong."

GOTY Verdict: Near the bottom of the list but not necessarily out of the running.

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020

• Game: Bytten Studio's Lenna's Inception
• Release Month: January.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 12/12.
• Completed: 12/12.

I feel like whenever I talk about an Indie action-adventure game clearly and purposefully built on the framework of the Legend of Zelda, I always gravitate towards my pet theory that every Indie Zelda-like emphasizes or de-emphasizes portions of the trinity, or triforce if you will, of that franchise's mix of open-world exploration, puzzle-solving, and real-time combat. However, there are also a handful of cases like Anodyne or today's game Lenna's Inception where the Zelda parallels aren't so much intended as a launching point for the developer's spin on that type of game, but instead serve as the foundation for some meta narrative trickery couched in a familiar framework.

The protagonist of the game, Lenna (though the player can rename her), is a schoolteacher in a very Zelda-like kingdom of vaguely medieval villagers and packs of slimes and other monsters roaming around just outside of civilization. Her school unexpectedly glitches into error code, trapping the kids inside, and in the process of finding a solution comes across the silent hero "Lance," wearing a familiar hooded tunic, and determines that it's her task as a teacher NPC to walk him through the tutorial so that he might save the world and restore her school. Lance then immediately croaks, and Lenna finds herself begrudgingly picking up his mantle as the world's chosen one. The plot goes through a few more twists and turns that I don't need to spoil, except to say that the data corruption - which originated elsewhere in the world by an accidental item underflow glitch, perhaps familiar to those who follow Pokémon speedruns - is an important development that the game sidelines for most of the playthrough. Beyond that element, however, the game is largely perfunctory Zelda game: there are eight dungeons, each of which concludes with a boss fight that adds to the player's max health and each contains a new traversal item or weapon Lenna needs to make progress.

One distinctive trait of the game that I've seen a few other Zelda-likes attempt, with very mixed results, is procedural generation. The world is generated anew each time you start, with the world's name also doubling as its seed. The game has a few example names for players to use if they can't think of one themselves, and it serves to reassemble the overworld, the items you obtain and in what order, and the layouts of the dungeons. However, as with most procgen projects, this only serves to make every dungeon feel the same, with similar "tiles" that you'll encounter over and over and enemy arrangements with inconsistent difficulty curves. If inputting a seed name wasn't a giveaway that the game has Rogue aspirations, the game's many potion types are initially unlabelled save for their color and consistency: a "fizzy red potion" could be anything from a heal, to increased fire resistance, to hovering or giant growth (both useful to brute force some puzzles), to many detrimental effects like poison, reversed controls, or slowness. The same is true for the many hues of tunic that the protagonist can wear, which provide a permanent version of the potion effect for as long as it's worn. The game's randomized "mini-dungeons," non-essential to progress but often containing helpful heart pieces or meteorite upgrade materials, will also have enemies under several simultaneous potion effects for a bit of variety.

The problem with Lenna's Inception as a procgen game is that there's very few monster types and dungeon tiles and so it feels like you've seen most of what the game has to offer within a few hours. It starts getting interesting again towards the end where there's a dungeon that encourages (and, in fact, requires) you to break the game and wander outside in the "out of bounds" areas, but before that it's a lot of generic randomized dungeons that suffer from procgen's intrinsic lack of creative direction. The overworld isn't all that interesting either, being built with a similar algorithm, and as far as I can tell the purpose for going the procgen route is twofold: to facilitate speedruns or harder playthroughs with additional harsh conditions (limited health, permadeath), and a "true ending" that is so obtuse and requires such specific steps that you'll almost certainly need to start over with a fresh run to see it. I'm typically not going to look fondly on a game that demands you play it several times over to get the most out of it, especially if I was already getting bored of it during the first playthrough, but I suppose I can at least see the logic of this approach. I think we're probably still a ways from implementing procgen effectively in anything other than short session run-based games like Spelunky or Hades, or games where the destination doesn't matter as much as the journey (e.g. No Man's Sky), and I wish the Indie game development sphere used it more sparingly.

I will say that the story and the meta way it factors in programming faults and bugs is kinda cool, in the same reality-busting manner that Axiom Verge tackled the explormer genre a few years back, and I appreciated quality-of-life features like the bicycle fast-travel system (which sneaks in another Pokémon reference), a NPC follower system that made fights quicker and sometimes added extra lines of dialogue to cutscenes, and a two-player mode if you wanted to take on a seed with a friend. Just taken purely as A Link to the Past ersatz it plays well enough and offers enough side-quests and interesting boss fights to take on, as long as you don't mind the long stretches of uninteresting procgen exploration in-between. I dunno, for what it's worth I liked it more than Songbringer, the last procgen Zelda-like I played.

GOTY Verdict: Hovering near the bottom of the top-ten, likely to get pushed out by next year's adjustment.

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020

• Game: Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer
• Release Month: September.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 10/12.
• Completed: 11/12.

In my bad habits, I sometimes lead my reviews with something noncommittal and inconsequential like "this game was not what I expected"; I feel like such a sentiment would be too much of a facile understatement when it comes to Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer, however, as it's a metaphysical murder mystery game set on an artificial island paradise pocket dimension built by immortal zealots who worship all-powerful cosmic entities. Functionally similar to something like Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa - that is, a visual novel driven by crime scene investigations and evidence-led testimony in court - Paradise Killer also presents a surprisingly vast open-world 3D game across an island filled with trash, treasure, currency, secrets, and sometimes valuable clues to uncover. The required nature of the last item on that list makes encountering the rest mostly incidental, though there's enough worldbuilding packed into those finds to make their pursuit worthwhile.

Speaking of which, the game is not shy about throwing the player in the deep end of a particularly abyssal pool when it comes to its oblique setting and backstory. In as brief and spoiler-free as I can make it: at some point in humanity's past we found ourselves in contact with beings beyond the stars that referred to themselves as gods. After many centuries, with mankind split among the slave armies of these various cosmic entities, we were able to throw off the yoke of oppression and either slayed, imprisoned, or chased off the gods that subjugated us for so long. In its dying moments, one of these gods gifted a small faction of loyal human zealots named the Syndicate both immortality and the ability to create "island sequences": tropical-themed pocket dimensions from which they could launch attacks on the newly emancipated human race and recover the gods they had captured, whom would then be interred in pyramid tombs until their strength had recovered. A regular influx of "citizens" - humans abducted from the real world - are used as slave labor and chattel, forced to worship the Syndicate's gods to supply them with nourishing psychic energy until it was time to ritually mass-sacrifice them all and begin anew on a fresh island. In the present era, the nine-member ruling council of the Syndicate has been slaughtered to a man, and it's up to a formerly exiled Syndicate investigator named Lady Luck Dies to determine the culprit or culprits.

It's a hell of a lot to take in, and naturally you have to derive much of this information yourself from context once you begin, but Paradise Killer luxuriates in both its absurdity and its style and you either find yourself rolling along in its distinctive groove or slamming up against its alienating strangeness like a brick wall. The closest approximation of what the developers were going for, as far as I could tell, was something like Grasshopper/Goichi "Suda51" Suda's Killer is Dead, or earlier projects like Killer7 and The Silver Case. Much of Suda's telltale aesthetic and narrative flair is invoked here, including electronically modified voice clips, heavily artifacted images used for items, random asides given to philosophical musings and silly jokes, and intentionally ludicrous names germane for the game's cast of quasi-godlike immortals like former assassin Lydia Day Break or the cybernetic medic Doctor Doom Jazz. Calling a group of suspects that includes characters named The Witness To the End or One Last Kiss "a rogue's gallery" seems woefully insufficient. Like I said, though, the surrealism of the setting is something you're encouraged to let wash over you as you dig further into the comparatively grounded reasons behind the game's central murder conspiracy, with relatively quotidian motives like jealousy, long-standing animosity, past betrayals, or a desire for power and/or recognition. A group of immortals taking it easy in a series of island paradises over many millennia is bound to produce lot of skeletons in closets, or in one case (seen above) serving drinks behind a bar.

Traversing the island becomes easier with a handful of expensive upgrades, like a double-jump and an air-dash, though you obviously need to first determine the source of these upgrades and then find enough of the currency needed to buy them. Many items are placed in odd, out-of-reach locations (and there's a succinct in-game explanation as to why they're all where they are: a demon did it) and you could go nuts trying to figure out how to access them all, or grow exhausted taking detours to higher vantage points where you can hop down to them. The fast travel stations ameliorate this process to some extent, though they also require some of the game's finite currency supply to unlock and use. (Said currency are crystals made of frozen blood: the most precious resource to a group of blood cultists.) Then there's the vital upgrades to the protagonist's PDA device, which are needed to get past a lot of the locked doors across the island via a so-so hacking mini-game.

With the exception of crime scenes and certain other areas of interest, most of the map is immaterial unless you're searching for more lore or following up certain leads: to help focus the player, there's an AR mode that highlights every NPC's location so you can make a beeline towards them, and this mode also helpfully indicates when you have something new to ask them about. New revelations often create new cases to pursue, and every character has some response to your inquiries even if they're often terse and unhelpful. There's a few visual novel indulgences with these interrogations: characters have a selection of stock voice clips they'll use that may or may not be linked to what's actually in the dialogue box, a cost-saving measure common to Japanese visual novels, and the player can choose to hang out with suspects in a vaguely "social link"-esque manner for the sake of getting to know them better as well as convincing them to let some incriminating information slip. Much of both the map exploration and NPC dialogue is thus inessential, but you've no way of determining that ahead of time: any clue or hint might eventually prove valuable to your investigation, after all. Accessibility-wise the game has a host of options for those with limited sight problems, colorblindness, vertigo, motion sickness, dyslexia, or insufficient night vision to handle the game's intense day/night cycles. However, it should be stated that the game has no auto-saving and limited save opportunities: that is, you can only save the game at the aforementioned fast travel stations. There's a "mature content" filter too, but I'm not sure what it toggles; possibly the copious swearing from certain characters.

While I think the game can be a little too abstruse for its own good and that so much of its content is filler designed to lead the more OCD of us around in circles or have them running up looping apartment staircases ad nauseum, I really can't fault the game's bold sense of style or the confidence of its worldbuilding. The orange sunsets and neon pastels of its tropical streets and vistas, the sheer overwhelming personality of its setting and characters, and in particular a sterling '80s funk/"citypop"-influenced soundtrack that soon earwormed its way to the top of my list of Best Music GOTY candidates this year all lend the game an inimitable aesthetic that is sure to stick around in the old grey matter for many years to come. I'll inevitably still kvetch over the fine details when it comes to picking the best games of this year - I encountered one huge revelation about the case almost entirely by accident while running around off the beaten path, and the game suffers from some poor script editing with its many, many cases of getting its/it's and whose/who's wrong (far more than you can chalk up to typos, at least; it was more like the writers and proofers honestly didn't know the right ones to use) - but I think Paradise Killer will stand as the type of beloved cult auteur game that people will be discovering and falling in love with multiple years from now, even if it never sees any major exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more artistically-inclined of Giant Bomb's myriad guest GOTY contributors put it high on their lists, even if Giant Bomb itself won't have much to say on it (especially with Abby gone, given her proclivity for off-kilter Indie adventure games).

GOTY Verdict: Very close to the top, though not quite passing some of my heavy hitters. It's in a pretty short list of games this year I'd accept could be someone's GOTY.

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2020