Every Game Played in 2021
A full list of every game I've played this year, regardless of release date, along with occasional notes I had while playing them.
List items
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2020
One of those 'just wouldn't die' games for me. I don't think Cyberpunk is an out-and-out failure as a game, more a fun, shoddy Deus Ex-like with wildly uneven storytelling capability and art direction. Yet, I kept playing and playing it. Maybe it was the years of anticipation or maybe it was the story threads CD Projekt managed to follow through on, but either way I found myself booting this up over and over again until I saw credits. The closest equivalent to Cyberpunk 2077 for me is probably 'b-games' of the PS2 era in spite of the supposedly better, prestige-tier classics in your library; it's like Enter the Matrix or something. Just fun enough - and just *broken* enough - for me to enter a perpetual cycle of 'eh, why not one more try at it.'
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2018
A ton of fun and just as resplendent as I'd been lead to believe, but the entire time I had this nagging feeling like, without VR, I was only getting about two thirds of the requisite Tetris Effect experience.
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2020
I wasn't a huge fan of Bastion, Supergiant's first claim to fame, both because I thought the combat was loose and unsatisfying and because I thought the storytelling was largely only pretty good. By contrast, I like Hades so much that it's got me questioning my own take on Bastion. Roguelikes are a perfect vessel for that 'one more run' style gameplay that used to be mainly the purview of arcade titles and as such aren't typically suited towards complex narratives. Hades layers an award-worthy narrative over each element of its rogeulike loop with so much elegance...it's a genuinely wild take on the genre. It feels revelatory, even.
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2021
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1987
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2020
Still digesting what's going on with Fuser. I love the conceit, and the energy is there, but the core mechanics are still a little up in the air to me. Fuser seems to be inherently less of an arcade title than Rock Band, which is fine, but it's got the same scoring structure of one; or, at least, if it *is* similar in structure the parameters for a 'perfect run' are unclear to me.
What really stuck out with me after trying this out one weekend was what a tremendous, hilarious time the free mix feature is. Spent literally hours just experimenting with different pitch values and time signatures to make the perfect nightcore/pseudo accapella mix, and it *swallowed* me. I meant to mess around with this mode for maybe 15 minutes and set it down hours later. I don't mean this as a pejoritive, but it's an incredible toy for music nerds.
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1985
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1981 (NES)
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1986
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1985 (NES)
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1992
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1994
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1993
Genuinely strange to me to play through Super Mario Bros. 1 with updated artwork. In comparison to 2 and 3, SMB 1 may be an introduction to game design course in and of itself but it's also a thuddingly mechanical game first and foremost. SMB 3 is already stylish and SMB 2 has it's own visual character, but seeing 1-1 repainted as a Super Mario World level just feels...wrong, somehow.
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2020
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1994
I'd casually played about half of Super Metroid before, but it wasn't until this time through that I've really come to appreciate it. The pseudo-open world design and deliberate pace make its use as a template for not only Metroidvanias but many other non-linear titles really obvious. While the world design does act to mask otherwise linear level progression, the slow reveal of roadblocks and seemingly unreachable pathways twisting in and out of familiar spaces makes Super Metroid just as much a cartographer sim as it does a platformer, and the feel and mood of the game are incredible, especially for the era. Any positive text written about Super Metroid's design at this point is probably redundant, but I guess I hadn't realized up to this point what a bullet point it is on a timeline that leads to titles like Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild.
Edit: finished this game for the first time this year, and MAN what a ride. I sometimes try out classics for the first time and am dissapointed to find that I don't gel with them as much as I might have if i tried them at the time of their release, but that isn't the case at all with Super Metroid. Genuinely stunned by the art direction, tone, pace, and fun, pseudo-free flowing structure. Sure, you could argue a lot of that tone and art direction are derivative of, say, Aliens, but filtered through the lens of the colorful, pixelated maximalism of SNES games, Super Metroid creates quite a bit of distance between it and its wells of inspiration, and it's better off for them anyway.
I mean, I can't stress enough that Super Metroid managed to actually shock me, twice, during my playthrough. The first time was during a mid-chapter boss who burns alive in a vat of acid - just, genuinely flabbergasted the Super Metroid devs got away with something as disgusting as that sequence making a Nintendo game in the mid '90s on 16 bit hardware. The second was during the final boss fight, which - ew! That rubbery, brainy guy was gross and horrifying!
It's wildly redundant to point out that Super Metroid is good, actually, but having played Prime, Prime 3, Fusion, Zero Mission and Other M I'd say I was pretty well suited to have seen all this somewhere before already. Super Metroid is genuinely timeless that way.
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2020
The Falconeer's gameplay and structure seem pretty neat, but the onboarding ramp it provides is abysmal, with a tutorial that's somehow both too mechanical and lacking in explanation. Once the open world was revealed I was doubly confused, because I had *no idea* there even was an open world to begin with. I bounced off The Falconeer faster and harder than I have with a game like this in years, but I'll give it at least one more shot.
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2019
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2010
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2016
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2018/2019
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1986
I don't think I'll ever complete Metroid or Legend of Zelda, or if I do, it'll be under weird circumstances. They're really unfriendly games that cast you as a cartographer more than a video game player, and I have so little of the time or the patience needed to map out a bunch of NES screens, and I genuinely don't think the time investment could come anywhere near justifying the potential payoff.
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2019
Like a lot of Yakuza titles, I have about a dozen concurrent yet parallel takes about Yakuza Kiwami 2.
1. The Song of Life/Judgement era Yakuza combat streamlines the *feel* of fistfighting in a satisfying, visceral way. Fights have weight they didn't before, and the smooth transitions between combat encounters vs. the staged, random RPG battle-like combat instances of Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1 make Kiwami 2 feel almost like a Kiryu life sim. But - and this is a big but - the combat mechanics have also lost quite a bit of momentum without the arcade-frenzy beat 'em ups of past entries, and the wildly riciulous use of ragdoll make even the most dramatic of encounters feel wacky and graceless, rather than wacky and graceful.
2. Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2, and it's so, so good at re-coloring sequences from the PS2 title with flashy AAA sheen. Sometimes Kiwami 2 gets *too* excessive, adding a ton of unnecessary details or dramatic framing to sequences the PS2 game smartly sprinted through as comedic asides (I'm looking at you, conspicuous chandelier quick time event), which makes the overall re-telling sometimes too laborious. It's the same with any reboot with a budget the original never got - sometimes the added details are a lot of fun, and sometimes they sink otherwise solid work.
3. Kiwami 2 is also an opportunity for Ryo Ga Gotokou studios to close the loose ends introduced by Yakuza 0, a prequel which was imagined and produced after the 5th title in the franchise, and which introduced new characters beloved by the fanbase which would never appear in the series again. Some of these wrap ups work really well! I love to see characters in crime fiction leave the story not because of tragedy, but because they were afforded the space in their lives to return to normalcy. Others, like the cabaret club, are so wrong-headed and driven by the need to produce more 'game' content that I'd almost have preferred the thread been left dangling.
4. The cabaret club campaign is...bad! It's bad. Kiwami 2 hoists a mode from Majima's Yakuza 0 campaign into Kiryu's, set two decades later, and the shift is totally unearned. It's weird to see Kiryu act out a role directly written for a polar opposite character, especially considering they copy/paste some of Majima's animations into Kiryu's. Not to mention, Yakuza 2's plot is quite a bit more bleak than Yakuza 0's, and without Yakuza 0's framing of the shady deals happening behind the scenes in Tokyo's night life, this full fledged 5-10 hour campaign feels wildly anachronistic. For it to also place characters from the original campaign in nearly identical circumstances as their original story just to learn the exact same lessons they already did makes it that much worse.
5. The Majima Construction campaign, while admittedly a lackluster copy/paste of Yakuza 6's clan creator mode, is a terrible tower defense game. It's really difficult and I sort of hate it, but the story is at least pretty fun.
6. Yakuza 2 jumps the shark in spots. I started the series with Yakuza 0, and while that game also gleefully departed from reality, it was also a game about excess. Kiwami 2 features a sequence in which a castle is split in two, revealing a second castle made of gold, which contains two tigers Kiryu must face in combat. It's...completely fucked lol I don't know how else to put it. The wild shifts in tonality are a lot of the fun of Yakuza, but moments like these are stupid enough that when the game shifts back to drama mode the entire story buckles under the weight of itself.
7. The substories, Yakuza's version of side quests, are top tier in Kiwami 2. Sure, a lot of them boil down to 'fight this guy for no reason,' but the circumstances around these fights are more meta than ever before, and they're a huge step up from Kiwami 1's sometimes threadbare mini stories.
8. Kiwami 2 is the skeeviest game in the series I've played so far, and some of its content is genuinely creepy. There's a photography mode in which you take pictures of models that...idk man, it's icky. Really offputting and not fun.
9. The AAA redesign of Sotenbori and Kamorucho as AMAZING. If not for the many NPCs wandering around, they'd be near photo-realistic depictions of Tokyo. Multiple times now I've taken a break from the actual game to take walks - the only other game to inspire me to do this was Red Dead Redemption 2. Kiwami 2 is far from the technical masterpiece that is Rockstar's magnum opus, but it crams a TON of detail into the tiny shops and restaurants around town. There's a phenomenal amount of flavor and character here. I realize Kiwami 2 uses a repurposed version of Kamorucho from Song of Life and Jugement, but it's still immensly rewarding to have played 0 and Kiwami 1 and be allowed to explore these spaces in first person, upscaled to a maximum degree.
10. The early goings of Chapter 13 features some of the most incoherent storytelling I've seen in a game, and it's certainly the stupidest and worst I've seen the Yakuza series get so far.
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1995
Found myself frustrated with how stringently procedural the combat is in this game vs. how flamboyantly unreal everything else about it is, then discovered Virtua Fighter was originally directed by Yu Suzuki, which...makes Virtua Fighter 2 make a lot more sense!
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2018
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2013
Briefly revisiting this, I was struck by how immediately engaging the blunt force tactic of 'the descent'-ing Lara Croft is. It's an approach worthy of criticism, sure, but the sheer punishment Lara undergoes at the start of this game and the ensuing burgeoning trauma are *effective*. It's a trainwreck of an 'in media res' approach in the best way possible. Though, this game is also a bit of a joke - once I realized that Tomb Raider's world is basically a pillar of salt that crumbles, explodes and evaporates as Laura leaps from precipice to precipice, the game gained a nearly comedic timing to its supposedly harrowing set pieces.
Also - not for nothin,' as both Rise and Shadow are tremendous benchmarks of video game nature simulacra, but goddamn how did they make this game look this good in 2013. It's still phenomenal to look at.
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2020
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1996
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1990
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1997
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1990
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1988
Never tried this before! Only put a little bit of time into it but *man* is it weird! I already know the backstory about how it was another game entirely that ended up having Mario stapled on top of it, and the characters are definitely a weird fit for the kinds of mechanic and art in it vs. Mario 1 and 3. That said, the mechanics and art in it are fun and pretty weird! It's pretty crazy how the mechanical conventions for the primary Mario cast started here and stayed true for decades afterwards. I played Super Mario 3D World for the first time immediately following setting this down and that kind of continuity is weirdly powerful. The logistics of the Mario world are completely arbitrary but any derivation from them whatsoever would feel like heresy at this point.
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2013 (Super Mario 3D World)/2021 (Bowser's Fury)
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2018
Dontnod were doing something fun here, and I don't think they quite got the credit for building a pseudo-open choose-your-own adventure structure with this free intro chapter to Life is Strange 2. It's weirdly ambitious for a free, 1-2 hour game. The plot of Captain Spirit is so thin you could explain as: 'little boy wakes up, plays with toys, interacts with his father and then something goes wrong' and that would describe the entirety of the game's plot. What's interesting is that Captain Spirit allows you to spend free time chasing six different objectives at your leisure before initiating the endgame cutscene. None of them are essential to completing the game or comprehending the story of Life is Strange 2, but all of them teach you something about this game's protagonist and his situation (at least one of them has major cosmetic effects for a portion of the main game, as well). I think that's a really neat idea, and we're unlikely to see a lot of games experiment with open design that way in a Telltale format for quite a while. Other than this game, I can't think of a Telltale-like that grants the player free, open time in which they dictate the sequence of events of the story, or in which they can actively choose not to engage in those events at all.
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2017
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2019
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2019
It's weird to say that a Metroidvania is...nice? But this one is nice. I mean, honestly, skip the vania - this game is all Metroid if Samus was a cat in a robot suit. It's super compact, too. I sometimes find myself craving the exploratory gameplay of a Metroid but don't have the patience to deal with a whole 15 hours of exploring/mapping a place, but Gato Roboto scratches that itch and is super compact. I wish more indies that were gameplay-first were bold enough to make a big first impression like this one and get out quick. Way too many bloated games these days.
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2009
I'm six hours in to Yakuza 3, and STILL nothing has happened. The game tutorialized its beat 'em up mechanics with some perfunctory fights at the jump, but other than that and the random battles this game is, so far, an Okinawan Dad Simulator. I'm playing in chronological order, and have hit this game after completing Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2, so this tonal disparity is incredible to me. The dramatic plummeting of the technical quality is also quite a bit to grapple with, but still, I find myself more interested in the shift in tone. This game is slowww, way more willing to explore quieter, non-explosive problems for its hero, and I think that's great.
Edit: The pacing in this game is truly crazy to me, especially following the (rather maniacal) breakneck nonsense of Yakuza 2. I realize Yakuza 2 is beloved by fans for escalating the franchise and creating the groundwork for the absurdity that was to come, but starting at Yakuza 0 like most western players probably do, Yakuza 2's fucking wild tonal zig-zagging makes the games drama feel weightless and arbitrary; it feels like a game for the PlayStation 2, in other words. Yakuza 3, by comparison, feels like a game for a more mature audience interested in a good story. It cares more about grounding its characters in some version of reality, and while it certainly escalates towards classic, wild Yakuza-isms, it also cares very much about human problems. Kiryu isn't an action guy with a daughter attached, but a father figure invested in building a life rather than destroying an institution. His reformation puts his capacity for empathy at the forefront just as much, if not occasionally more, than his physical prowess.
The game even goes as far to challenge the island of peace and prosperity he's supposedly built for himself and his children. The land he's built the orphanage he runs is put in precarity when a mad-land grab for the orphanage's island breaks out between the government and a large corporation. Both parties have conflicting views on what should be built on the land, and both plans will destroy the locals' homes. This is a plain factor in all of our lives - you can try to seperate yourself individually from the greater problems of the world, but the greater problems of the world WILL find their way to you eventurally.
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1998
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2019
Bounced off of this harder than I expected to, or at least much quicker than I expected to. This is a game about painting a gorgeous island inhabited by animal-head folks in which 'painting' is using the snip tool on Windows to make a screenshot. That's what a 'painting' constitutes in Eastshade. Not to put too fine a point on it, but even if this mechanic gets more complex later, seeing it for the first time is like running into a brick wall. It captures very little of the experience (or the context!) of what making a painting is like, abstracted to such an extent that it calls the entire purpose of the project into question.
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2017
Didn't find that NieR:Automata hit me quite as hard as virtually everyone else who played it to completion when I tried it, and for some reason I've been thinking about it off and on for an entire year so I'm replaying it from scratch. Probably will be a few notes here as I slowly roll through it.
On a first playthrough, I didn't (and still don't) like the sexy gothic lolita look for the main cast. 2B is relentlessly sexualized, and the constant upskirts, inevitable thanks to her bizarre uniform, make many otherwise serious cutscenes unintentionally hilarious. I still feel this way, whatever the justification you have for designing every woman in your game as a sort of customizable doll can't possibly be worth undercutting the drama. I do at least find it interesting that, outside of the many anonymous NPCs in the game's safe areas, there literally aren't any traditionally masculine strongman type protagonists amongst the cast to speak of. Literally every character of import is a hyper-feminized woman. Considering the androids in this series are humanity's last gasp at capturing the human form, this is an...interesting choice, I guess.
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2018
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1999
Will probably make a few notes here as I try this game out.
Easily one of the most baffling intros to a video game I've played. After a slideshow of CG cutscenes and what appears to be a music video/intro cutscene that makes no sense out of context, the player is booted into a theme park/zoo/university campus/military academy complex and forced into a very long tutorial sequence about """junctioning.""" Complete nonense.
Edit 1: After about 6 hours, I've gotten a grip on the core 'draw' and (*shudders*) 'junctioning' mechanics, compartmentalizing them as trading card game and item/armor/equipment mechanics, respectively. That's essentially what FF8 is - shove a trading card game into Final Fantasy 7, but present the trading card game as normal Final Fantasy RPG mechanics.
It's bizarre and seems to flow against the core joys of the ever-increasing stat bar skinner-boxing of JRPG mechanics generally, but it's extremely clever all the same. FF8's monsters and core characters are, in a very literal way, objects, commodities who opt-in to be traded as commodities. So far, the closest textual equivalent piece of media to FF8 I can think of is Starship Troopers, what with its bleak, in-universe uncritical celebration of military youth and jingoism. Because it's Final Fantasy, it's also insanely over-complicated and clunky, but, hey - I dunno if I would want it any other way with this series.
Edit 1: That assassination setpiece is predicated on some incredibly stupid decisions by the main cast, but oh my LORD does it hold up. Incredibly cinematic for a game made when video games just weren't cinematic. Speaking just in sheer technical execution, nothing in FF7 can compare to that sequence.
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1993
I know this one was way, wayyy late in the NES' lifespan and developed by Nintendo, but holy shit did they get a lot of leverage out of that limited hardware in this game. It holds up as an aesthetic object, bar none, and it plays just as tightly (if not moreso) than contemporary Kirby games.
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1991
Like Ninja Gaiden if Ninja Gaiden was nice to you and thought Miami Vice was cool.
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2002
As someone who found Oblivion too rudimentary and plain-faced to really dig into, I knew Morrowind might be a big ask but...oh my god. This was...this was rough to start.
It's got personality, though. You can learn a whole lot about Bathesda's output and their effect on gaming from Morrowind and Oblivion. From a first impression, Morrowind has a true visual identity and a lot of personality, but oh my lord does it seem like a nightmare to play. Oblivion is, by contrast, hyper-flexible to the player and easily grappled with. The structure of the game itself is satisfying, and immediately opens the game up to a wider player base - but man is it a boring world with shitty characters. I mean, it's the blandest high fantasy setting I've *ever* seen. Can't we have both?
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2012/2013 DLC
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2016
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2012
Oof, this one really didn't come together for me. Thought critics might've been a bit too harsh on it with all the lukewarm Diet Portal criticisms it got at the time of its release, but trying it out for myself I think that might've been generous. The level design is hyper function-first, to the point that the potentially fun conceit that you're exploring your crazy uncle's science mansion is lost entirely. Spaces are literal puzzle boxes first and nothing else second. Worse, the art design is very straight-to-DVD Dreamworks rip-off, which is just about the worst aesthetic I can imagine a game like this having. It's like a shittier looking version of the already shitty-looking Hello Neighbor. And the writing is bad. It's the same tone as Portal, with a megalomaniacal scientist narrator booming through speakers littered throughout each puzzle room, except this one is a shitty, verbally abusive parental guardian instead of a psychotic A.I. gone rogue. Instant uninstall.
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2017
Only in the starter zone in this game. Was a bit hesitant to see if this game could hold up to all the hyperbole from (geez) four years ago now, but so far, I'm having a really, really, really good time poking around in it.
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2020
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What Comes After (2021)
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2021
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2009
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1991
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2010
Don't you sort of miss games like this? Games with just one big idea and a series of generic gameplay functions to surround it? Playing a game like this is like going to a theme restaurant, or any restaurant with a 'home of the ____ burger/sandwich/other meal' plastered somewhere on the front of it. Good to eat junk food now and again.
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2014
EXTREME flash game energy from Duck Game. But - a very good flash game! I think there's a ceiling to how frequently one would want to play Duck Game, but it's terrific for a few rounds of pure chaos.
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2021
OK listen - we really, REALLY need to let go of this reverence for '80s mass media. It's been DECADES of this junk. We're like, what, FIFTEEN years past James Murphy reprimanding us for our 'borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s' and we're STILL stuck in here? Back to the Future was good! The pop music was good! Tron was good! They weren't THAT good!
Narita Boy not only weaponizes '80s toys/movies/neon nostalgia as a blunt object to the temple, but it painstakingly reconstructs familiar '80s archetypes with an obsessive zeal. It's so weird to see a team dedicate such painstaking effort towards saying something everyone else has been saying for years and years and years. It's weird, even. Like, at the beginning of this game, the protagonist has to deal with his mom's insistence that video games are a waste of time before venturing into Tron to save the digital world or whatever. Like, really??? What level of emotional regression is this game at, exactly?
Probably not as ear-piercingly annoying as Ready Player One, but close.
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2019
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2002
Fun fact: this game straight up just doesn't have subtitles! Every time I play an older game that lacks any kind of accessibility options it brings me right back to the PS1/PS2 era. Accessibility wasn't just far from the minds of devs, publishers and critics back in the 2000s - it wasn't even on their radar! Wild times. The first Assassin's Creed, even, has no subtitle options whatsoever! Completely bizarre to me.
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2012
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2004
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2020
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2017
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2012
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2015
I dunno if Ori *quite* hit me in the way it seemed to hit so many people. It's picturesque, but picturesque by way of 'general fairy tale' vibes. It's a fairly fun metroidvania, but each new area to explore feels like either a ticked box on a list of standard level types or a decent enough take on a design trope I've seen before. No single element of its design stands out.
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2021
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2019
Booted this up for one more run before it left Game Pass. I still love it. A full-assed take on what a contemporary Doom-clone SHOULD be and a prestige-tier rogue-like, but these mechanics also act as the vehicle for a fun, dry, heavily British corporate dystopia.
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2021
Knockout City is heavily promoted and discussed as an online competitive dodgeball game AND a Rocket League successor, but it's neither of these things. I think the dodgeball comparison bothers me the most, as Knockout City doesn't capture what made dodgeball such a fun gym activity, even on an at a glance level. The fun of dodgeball is in the kineticism of dodging projectiles - catching a ball is an exclamation point during a dodgeball match, not a core feature of moment-to-moment play. Knockout City is really more a competitive three v. three shooter without the burden of precision aiming, which is - fine, I guess, but but also makes it feel more derivative and threadbare than popular reception would have you believe. I also don't love how shamelessly it apes Jet Set Radio's aesthetic, right down to the charismatic disc jockey narrator. A swing and a miss, for me.
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2019
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2018
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2008
The most blindsided I've ever been with a video game. Far Cry 2's commitment to its central thesis is implausible as a AAA game with a budget, a devastating piece of narrative art in a series otherwise famous for being exactly the opposite. While the sheer quality of its narrative delivery can be questionable, especially regarding the bizarre speedreading-style performances of its cast, the overarching theme of cruelty and man-made disaster is spelled out in each and every firefight.
Far Cry 2 isn't *fun*, exactly; arguably, it's unpleasant to play. But that unpleasantness is the point. By the game's end, I had gone from traipsing through blazing fires and the chaos of war-time violence in the way I would in any video game to suddenly actualizing that my mastery of the game's mechanics had turned the game into a defacto war crime simulator. The best players in this game about war will have become the worst characters in the narrative.
Far Cry 2 doesn't achieve this ambitious reversal of FPS tropes via a blunt-force 'pulling back the curtains' trick, but by introducing several dynamic elements to the game's structure that throttle the player's ability to fully control any given situation. You don't win or lose, per se, so much as you directly and indirectly accumulate material means to the detriment of every single other actor (and natural element) in the game world. This is a game where your enemies will try to save one another when you hurt them. This is a game where killing a 'buddy' may be kinder than trying to save them. You set fires in Far Cry 2, but once you do you can't put them out - you can only fuel the them higher.
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2012
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2010
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2014
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2019
An intriguing if sometimes schmaltzy visual novel about a cab driver stuck in the surreal doldrums of the Parisian night shift. Each fare features a new character and sub-plot, or even a series of sub-plots for riders that request repeat service, but these can be hit and miss. Sometimes, characters are multi-faceted people whose problems feel genuine and reflective of reality, but too often these characters are used as blunt weapons to complicate popular per-suppositions of certain personalities or social classes. Would you be surprised to learn that the young, smack-talking tough guy in the backseat is carrying around classic literature because he loves reading? Honestly, no, not really! Most of these character reveals are ultimately nice from a progressive point of view, but they all feel like gotcha moments rather than genuine expressions of character.
Some of the fares are hammier than others, revealing the heavy-handedness of the author: a pregnant woman from England whose partner got deported from the country after they both voted for Brexit twists herself into a knot justifying her politics to the player, whose only available responses are to shame or express disbelief in this person's perspective. Maybe it's the American in me, but I've gotten very, very accustomed to people proudly voting against their own interest over many years and I have never once heard someone both actualize their logical fallacies while also articulating in an unfiltered, cogent way that the neo-lib 'shame the dummies into action' culture of the media class prevented them from voting the right way. This is a fantasy conversation if I've ever heard one - far too many of the characters in Night Call feel like fantasies that way.
Night Call is also a murder mystery, although a sub-optimal one. You're given exactly a week to gather as much evidence as possible before the game will force you to identify the killer, but you still have to work as a cabbie each day. Clues are hard to get by, as your cab job is already barely profitable and it takes time and resources away from your earnings to pursue the most important leads. No worries, though: the game basically gives you the correct answer at the end of the week if you guess wrong.
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2018
Sharp, witty, and iconic for how minimal the art style and gameplay is. The pace is a *little* off for me, though. Too many quirky diatribes and too few snappy conversations for my tastes. The pure gameplay, which consists of speaking with one NPC until one of them gives you an item that will enable more conversation with a different NPC makes the game feel too much like pacing around a tiny space. Both of these things would be alleviated if the game was able to shift in tone at all, but every character is written with the same quirky disaffection, which can make the game feel as if its monologuing with itself; although, remove the first person perspective and allow me to snap to each character from a menu and I might've been too enamored with the vibe of it all to care.
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2010 / Justine Expansion (2011)
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2021 (Demo)
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2019-2021
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2018
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1997
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2021
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2020
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2018 (Picnic Panic DLC 2019)
The Messenger starts as yet another one of those 'remember that?' nostalgia fests, this time for the 8-bit era of Ninja Gaiden. It's better than most because, for whatever reason, no one is making Ninja Gaiden-likes and the mechanics are (mostly) tight, but it very much fits alongside other meta, self-referential titles that feel overindulgent. The big trick to The Messenger, though, is that it also contains a 16-bit Metroidvania, and even further than that, a time travel mechanic in which the player must switch between the 8-bit and the 16-bit version of the world in order to solve puzzles and traverse the suddenly huge map.
It's a big trick, and it *works*. I'm glad I stuck around with this one to the finish, as its sometimes regressive, sometimes spine-tinglingly dorky sense of humor can feel grating. I mean, one of the death screen jokes is a reference to the movie Dodgeball - like, THAT Dodgeball, the one you probably willfully forgot about if you're a Millennial because goddamnit you're an adult now and not in middle school anymore.
The plot ends up being way more twisty and fun to pick apart than you'd initially think, so much so that I'm anticipating a sequel. That means more than you'd think, as my level of tolerance for 'ugh, remember how cool the 80s were?' is a fast track to annoyance for me more than most.
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2014
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2013
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2014
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2012
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2019
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2016
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2018
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2021
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2018
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2008
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2009~
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2015
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2018
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2010-2011
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2011
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