Hey are you copying Doc?
No I’m copying Kayin. But nobody’s copyrighted the format of I played some games this year and want to talk about them so fuck it. Here’s every game I played in 2022 that I want to talk about:
Torchlight 2 & FATE: The Traitor Soul
These games are lumped together because they’re almost identical; and I’m not just saying that because they’re Diablo clones. They share a director, have a lot of similar mechanics, and FATE is basically a Torchlight prototype. And I love them both for different reasons.
FATE is a chill dungeon crawler. You have a town, you have a dungeon (or in Traitor Soul’s case quite a few towns & dungeons), and you just fight shit to get better gear & level-ups to fight stronger shit. But it also has just a tiny layer of playstyle variety to make it a bit more than just kill enemies, get loot, next floor.
Torchlight on the other hand is a power fantasy. You have four distinct classes with a variety of skills that obliterate absolutely everything in your path. Every level-up just makes you all the more broken, and that feeling is exactly what I’m looking for in a game like this.
Torchlight is arguably the better game (get the second one), but it’s different enough from FATE that both are worth playing (get the Traitor Soul)
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV since late 2017 and is my first real experience with an MMO. I had played World of Warcraft’s trial up to level 20 beforehand, but at that time I didn’t really understand MMOs as a concept and essentially played it like a singleplayer RPG.
Ironically, FFXIV strives to play like a singleplayer RPG, and I play it far more like an MMO.
Final Fantasy XIV is great. I don’t really like the story that much, but mechanically speaking it’s really solid. It’s very much a themepark MMO, with content always being the same when you play through it (and much of it can be grating to do over & over), and classes that don’t really have any leeway with how you’re supposed to play them. But it’s also a lot of themepark, and most of the endgame is just catching up on all the things you missed doing the main story. Even if you don’t keep up with ‘current’ content, it can easily take an entire expansion cycle to go through everything already present.
As for me though, I mostly just craft.
Minecraft, modded & unmodded
You’ve probably played unmodded Minecraft. I don’t need to sell you on it.
What you’re less likely to have done is played a Minecraft modpack. In my case I have two favorites: Valhelsia 3, and TerraFirmaCraft Reloaded (and I guess Reditus 2).
Valhelsia is a modpack compiling a bunch of automation-centric mods. Ever since Minecraft’s beta there have been a countless number of mods surrounding factory building or automation of some kind, and Valhelsia is the latest reincarnation of that. It’s got a good blend of magic-themed & technology-themed mods, of which I lean closer to magic (shoutout to Botania holy shit that mod is amazing), but you can lean either way or combine both. There’s even a goddamn village builder.
TerraFirmaCraft goes hard on survival & realism. It cuts out some of Minecraft’s fantasy elements which I’m not super on board with, but makes up for it by doing exactly what I wished Minecraft did pre-1.0. Instead of punching trees, you pick up rocks and bang them together to make tool heads and cut the trees down. None of the familiar Minecraft enemies spawn at night, but instead there’s carnivorous wildlife that can hunt you at any time in the day. Finding metal and digging underground is a multi-step process that you can’t just ‘do’ once you chop down your first tree. It’s one of my favorite Minecraft mods ever and I wish more people knew about it.
Street Fighter 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Oh yeah, I play fighting games sometimes. I’ve cycled a few ‘main’ fighting games over the years: Clash of Ninja, Ultimate Ninja, Mortal Kombat, Injustice, Soul Calibur, and of course Street Fighter.
Street Fighter is pretty easy to pick up & play, though I don’t do it very often. Super Turbo is probably the one I play the most, but one of my friends suckers me into playing SF5 sometimes. I don’t like 3rd Strike or 4 that much at all.
Inscryption
I wrote about this on my now-defunct Tumblr. But if you want a summary:
Inscryption is a deck-building roguelite escape room with meta horror elements. If that interests you, don’t read my Tumblr review and go play it. And don’t quit after a few losses. Keep going until you get at least one successful run. I promise you, it’s worth it.
Borderlands 3 and then 2
I wrote about Borderlands 3 too. In that review I mentioned that Borderlands games are basically identical to each other, and playing one gives you a good impression of how you’d feel about the rest of them. But despite their shortcomings I’d still recommend these games if you’re a fan of Diablo-style gameplay but want to play a shooter. Also if you like Fallout 4, since that’s basically a Borderlands game too.
A while after 3 I got an urge to replay Borderlands 2 and picked it back up again. After making a fresh Maya build, I can say with confidence that I was so wrong about Borderlands 2 not being singleplayer friendly. Much like FL4K and Mordecai, Maya has so much self-healing potential it makes her a must for anyone playing the game alone. I was also wrong about Borderlands games all playing the same, as BL3’s movement mechanics are so much better than 2’s. You could easily play both & have a great time for different reasons.
Randy Pitchford still fucking sucks.
Diablo 2
I really want to write an article about Diablo clones someday, and figured I should try playing an actual Diablo game. That was a smart idea, as Diablo 2 is a lot of fun.
I think Diablo 2’s biggest strength is it’s light in content. Lots of Diablo clones make the mistake of flooding the player with options & side content, but Diablo 2 keeps things simple. There’s only seven classes with three pages of easily readable skills per class (and less than like ten skills per page), and there are only five major locations with a minimal amount of side quests per location. You could easily 100% the game on a normal mode run without getting overwhelmed.
I also like that the game’s meta builds only seem to be feasible on New Game+ runs, so you don’t need to worry about min/maxing on an initial run. Knowing Blizzard’s community I’m sure that’s not the case if you’re playing online, but I don’t play RPGs online if I have the option.
Persona 3’s New Moon romhack
Y’all want to hear an unpopular opinion?
I really like Persona 3’s dungeon crawling & combat.
I’m not joking either. Tartarus is genuinely my favorite part of Persona 3, and the combat is exactly what made me fall in love with Persona and Megami Tensei as a franchise. I went into it hot off the heels of Final Fantasy X, and seeing the game’s element weakness system for the first time blew my 16-year-old mind. It’s so goddamn fun.
During FFXIV’s expansion launch when nobody could log in, I spent my queues trying out the New Moon romhack for Persona 3. And it’s… Persona 3 but harder? I’ve only beaten vanilla P3 once and don’t remember every minute detail, so I don’t know what exactly New Moon changes. But Persona 3 is absolutely worth going through, even without mods.
I Get This Call Every Day
This is a weird one. I remember this game getting really popular in 2013 because it’s a game about how much it sucks to work in a call center, and the guy who made it got fired from his job at a call center for making it. A few people said this was an unoriginal game concept, but as a kid still in middle school it left an impression on me. This was my first time ever learning about the concept of working a job you hate, and having to deal with just how moronic people can be.
For some reason I remembered this game existed and wanted to play it, so I was pleasantly surprised to find its 2014 remaster has been made free for some time. It also immediately showed just how old the game was by starting with an anti-GamerGate splash screen. And… I’ve memorized the whole thing since I watched a ton of Let’s Play videos of it. But it was neat to go through again.
Monster Hunter Rise
I don’t think I like Rise.
I was gonna buy this on Switch, but its launch was in September and I didn’t prepare for it, and my FFXIV subscription drained out any disposable income I had. So I decided to just wait until it came to PC, and… I got bored.
Then Sunbreak came out, and I had friends to play with it! And… I still didn’t like it.
Monster Hunter Rise is definitely not bad, and it was smart of the dev team to try making something complementary to World rather than a direct replacement of it. But I vastly prefer playing World.
I like the Palamute, the wirebug, and the movement mechanics Rise introduces, but it also cuts out the hunting aspect of Monster Hunter. One of the main design goals of every entry is to show the monsters behaving instinctively, like animals, because they are. World is the first game in the series to really do that, in part to making the player find monster tracks & markings in the locales to literally hunt the monster. But in Rise the game just tells you exactly where the monster is on every location. They didn’t even bring back the paintball.
Rise is also the most fast-paced the series has been, but I think it’s too fast-paced. Older games have long breaks between hunts to gather items & prep for the next hunt, and even the act of just finding a monster helps to cool down the player after one hunt. But Rise is just hunt after hunt after hunt with no breaks and that gets exhausting really fast.
My biggest hope for the next Monster Hunter entry is it merges the hunting & ecology of World with the movement mechanics of Rise. Also bring back the food & arm wrestling you cowards.
Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel
This was my first time ever playing Yu-Gi-Oh.
It was alright. I think I prefer Magic (and honestly Pokemon TCG too), but if someone approached me with a spare Yu-Gi-Oh deck and asked me to play, I wouldn’t say no.
Guilty Gear Xrd & +R & Strive
Guilty Gear is probably my favorite ‘speed’ fighter. If I want to play a fighting game with lightning-fast attacks and a combo system that makes my opponent put their controller down while I finish mine, this is my go-to. I played a ton of Xrd & +R in early & late 2021, and a little bit in 2022 as well. But I burned out hard this year trying to learn how to play competitively, and haven’t picked it up in a while. I’m sure I’ll be back though, just after I get the confidence to do so…
I also need to mention every time the subject comes up that I literally met my current girlfriend through +R. Never let anyone tell you video games don’t get you dates.
Prince of Persia
I have a fondness for what the media calls ‘Cinematic Platformers.’ Essentially defined by a 2D perspective, fixed game screens, grid-based movement, and absurdly-elaborate animation on every little thing that happens.
Prince of Persia is the grandfather of this genre. It was made in 1989, and was noteworthy for the immaculate animation on your main character. This game influenced Flashback, Another World, Heart of Darkness, Oddworld, Blackthorne, Limbo, Inside, Deadlight, and many more games like it.
Being the first entry to a literal brand new genre, it’s incredibly janky. I think it’s because I have a USB keyboard, which reads inputs differently than the PS/2 keyboards of the time, since the manual demands I press two keys together that just will not register for some reason. Coupled with a 60-minute time limit and unforgiving checkpoints, I’ll probably never finish this one.
Metal Gear Solid and a bit of the sequel
Metal Gear Solid 1’s still my favorite in the series, I think entirely based on it being the last one where it was the hardware saying no to Kojima and not his development team. It’s the most narratively and mechanically comprehensible game of the series and is absolutely worth playing today.
I’ve played this game on original hardware, the PS3 re-release, and emulated on PC. This time though I tried out the PC port re-released by GOG. There was a fan-made source port before it, and the GOG version is definitely an improvement, but if you’ve never played MGS1 before I’d suggest playing the PS1 version first.
After beating MGS1 again I tried moving onto the sequel, and man do I sure hate it. There’s definitely more interesting things going on mechanically; I like being able to hold up the guards, I like the use of the PS2’s pressure-sensitive buttons, you can aim in first-person, you can shoot while prone, there’s some cool stuff here. But it’s also full of annoyances, and I think the biggest one is enemies being able to look up & down.
Sneaking is so much harder when enemies can account for 3D space. I get that it’s more realistic, but there’s a thin line between realism and just being annoying. MGS2 is the most frustrating game in the series for me and I have zero desire to replay it.
Boneworks
This was my first VR game. My Christmas present for 2019 was an Oculus Rift S, and while it was shipping to my house I bought three games: This, Beat Saber, and Hot Dogs Horseshoes & Hand Grenades.
When I played it as a first VR game, it blew my mind. One of the most important things to immersion in VR is interactivity, and everything in Boneworks is interactive. It was mind-blowing to play as my first foray into the medium.
But, it’s also incredibly janky. One of the biggest challenges with VR is letting the player do precise things, and VR technology really likes to be imprecise. Boneworks is imprecise basically everywhere: Grabbing stuff, lifting heavy objects, pulling things from your inventory, it’s a bit of a mess. It’s still a good game and I would recommend it, but be sure to play a few other VR games after it.
Disco Elysium
I don’t understand this game. I’ve attempted it three times now and I’ve yet to get past the starting zone because I keep running into things that piss me off.
The first thing is I just don’t like the protagonist. You play as a dude waking up from a hangover who lost his memory, discovers he’s a cop, has also lost his badge & gun, and is investigating a murder case he has no memory of taking. This is a protagonist that I just don’t find interesting. I don’t want to be the guy with his life falling apart & needing to pull it back together. I’d much rather be playing his partner, who’s much more collected & piecing things together, while also making sure his partner doesn’t do anything stupid. That sounds more fun to me.
The second thing is what really makes me quit every time I try: Something people praise this game for is its encouragement of ‘failing forwards.’ I like that idea in theory, and I tried really hard to get into the headspace for it. But it ultimately lost me after I succeeded a skill check, died before I could get a chance to save, it reloaded me before I made the check, and failed it even with assistance from a consumable item.
This is not failing forwards. If I succeed at a skill check, then the game puts me back behind that skill check, that’s literally failing backwards.
I don’t understand this game. Everyone calls it one of the best RPGs ever made, but every time I play it I just get pissed off.
Pool Nation
I played this for a fighting game group’s monthly Fight Night. At the time the server was fairly relaxed with what people could challenge each other in, and I really wanted to play Pool for a while. So I played it here.
I like Pool. It’s probably the only sport I get really invested in while playing, and Pool Nation is probably the best way to play it in a video game. Super cheap, too.
Final Fantasy 6&7
The last Final Fantasy pixel remaster came out this year, and it reinforced that I don’t like Final Fantasy 6. I already talked about 6 in my review of the pixel remasters.
I do however really like Final Fantasy 7, which is… Backwards FF6? Is that a good way to describe it? I love the materia system is what I’m trying to get at here. It’s basically espers reversed and they work so much better that way. Rather than equipping items that permanently teach characters new skills, it’s the materia learning the skill instead of the character; letting you hot-swap abilities between your party members if need-be, and retaining the skills it’s learned between them. Tonally it feels more like a 3D SNES game than a PS1 title, and like every FF game the story is painful to follow, but it’s still a fun time worth going through.
Elden Ring
I’m not really sure what to say about Elden Ring. I played 20 hours, beat a couple major bosses, and haven’t really picked it back up since. The highest praise I can give it is I tried really hard to think of things Dark Souls 1 did better, and I drew a total blank. It improves on all of DS1’s problems, incorporates all of the good mechanics of Dark Souls 2, eliminates all the bad mechanics of Dark Souls 3, and puts it all in a massive open world.
I guess the open world could be considered a flaw? Dark Souls 1 has some incredible interconnected level design that has yet to be replicated in any other From Software game, and being an open world isn’t really a replacement. Let’s call it a side-grade. If you like From Software games, you’ll love Elden Ring.
XCOM UFO Defense & Enemy Within
I am really bad at turn-based tactics. It’s one of the reasons I don’t play CRPGs. I have basically zero spatial awareness, and I physically can’t think ahead in the same way other people can.
Despite this, I still really enjoy playing XCOM. I like the gameplay split of tactics combat and real-time time world management, I like the gradual buildup of technology, and even getting my ass kicked I still enjoy myself.
Risk of Rain 2
It’s better than Risk of Rain 1.
Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator
One of my favorite DOS games is Street Rod. You buy project cars, fix em up, take them out for racing, and use your betting money to buy better cars & better parts.
Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator is… not that, but a spinoff of Car Mechanic Simulator, which took heavy inspiration from Street Rod. It even had an Easter Egg where you can find the game on a tablet in your office. People bring in their bikes, you find what’s wrong, you fix em, and get paid for it.
I would’ve loved this game for the sandbox mode alone & just a chill biking game, but the actual bike controls are terrible. I genuinely could not do a sharp turn no matter how slow I went. If you want a game that lets you just drive around & admire scenery, I’d honestly recommend just playing Grand Theft Auto V.
Kerbal Space Program
I got this in a Humble bundle to support Ukraine. I remember it being pretty popular at one point, but I could never really get into it. But something clicked in me on this most recent attempt because I got engrossed.
Despite being mostly about space travel, I ended up getting really into the plane building. Being able to build my own plane, successfully getting it to take off, and even managing to land it were all incredible feelings that I’ve never seen before. I had so much fun doing this.
Then the game wanted me to land on the moon, and that got a little too complicated for me. So I stopped.
Slay the Spire
I also got this in the Ukraine bundle. I was vaguely interested in this but wasn’t sure if I’d ever buy it outright, and after playing Inscryption I was all on-board for a deck-building roguelike.
Sure enough, it’s a deck-building roguelike. I heard someone say one of this game’s strengths is it’s fairly easy to win after only a handful of runs, and the real challenge comes after that when you unlock difficulty modifiers. I personally have yet to finish any runs, but I could definitely see where they’re coming from. I’d recommend it.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Some mad lads managed to manually decompile Ocarina of Time, and another group of mad lads used that to make a native PC port. So naturally I had to try it.
Ocarina of Time is one of only two Zelda games I’ve ever managed to finish (the other one being Twilight Princess). It’s pretty common to see it on best games ever made style lists, and playing it myself I can see why. The past/future mechanic is really good, and without spoiling anything the game does some creative things with it. There’s also a real sense of adventure despite it being barren N64 environments, and it’s a joy to explore.
At the time I played it, the PC port was really barebones. Your only settings options were modifying .ini files, including rebinding controls, and there wasn’t even a way to bind multiple buttons to the same action; meaning you had to use your right analog for item use instead of face buttons. Since then, the port has seen drastic improvements, starting to resemble the Mario 64 PC port, but still takes some finagling to get working; primarily in the ROM department. If you can manage it though, this may be the best way to play Ocarina of Time.
Legend of Grimrock 1&2
I feel like playing Grimrock 2 is becoming a yearly obligation for me at this point.
Legend of Grimrock 2 may be my favorite game of all time. It’s a first-person dungeon crawler that’s about as old-school as you can get without being archaic, and is an absolute joy to go through. There’s in-depth party building, tons of puzzle solving, treasures to find, bosses to slay, it’s just an all-around solid game and I recommend it to everybody.
At some point this year, one of my friends recommended I try Legend of Grimrock Master Quest: a mod for Grimrock 1 that enhances the dungeon crawling, and it was an okay time. I like that it implements some of Grimrock 2’s quality-of-life enhancements (and even some QoL that wasn’t in either game), but Grimrock 2 is just such a massive improvement over Grimrock 1 that it’s hard to play after the fact. I’d definitely recommend Master Quest over the base game, but I’d much rather play Grimrock 2. It’s so good.
Death Stranding: Director’s Cut
I was going to write full reviews of every game I finish this year, but after completing Death Stranding again I wasn’t sure what I would say about it.
Don’t get me wrong, Death Stranding is really good and you should totally play it, but I don’t really have a lot to add? It’s a survival game where you deliver mail in a ruined America and reconnect the country to an advanced internet. There’s resource gathering, inventory management, base building, some bandit raiding, Mads Mikkelsen tries to steal your child, it’s a fun time.
I guess I could talk about the director’s cut. The biggest things it changes are the Monster sponsorship is gone, there’s a new Very Hard mode (which I recommend turning off for Mads Mikkelsen encounters), Buddy Bot, a smaller-scale bridge that enemies can’t cross but doesn’t work in rain, a cargo catapult? A firing range for testing weapons, ability to replay boss fights, a racetrack, and a new car that just goes fast. There’s also a new mini-base to raid but it’s not very big.
Death Stranding is a cool game though. Good game to play if you want to scratch a survival itch.
Crystal Project
Since writing that review I’ve beaten the true final boss and have nearly 100%’d it. There’s some straggling optional bosses I’ve yet to hunt down.
I gotta say, after dealing with an alarmingly high amount of elitism in RPG communities around what the ‘right’ way to play a video game is, Crystal Project is an understated masterpiece. Because not only does the game’s entire foundation revolve around playing it however the hell you want, but its antagonist is a literal ‘creator’ who thinks its world’s inhabitants are finding adventure the ‘wrong’ way. The game explicitly portrays insistence on a ‘right’ way to play as villainous behavior.
This may be my game of the year.
PC Building Simulator
Postal 4
I have a soft spot for the Postal series. Not because of its satire, or that it’s deliberately offensive in places, or even for its violence. I love the Postal games because to this day they’re the best justification for immersive sim being a standalone genre.
I kinda hate the phrase ‘immersive sim’ because it’s not really helpful as a genre descriptor. Most games I see fall under the label are better categorized as RPGs, stealth games, survival games, or just plain shooters. But Postal 2&4 are the only games I’ve played where you could arguably call them immersive sims, because the violence is optional.
Obviously that’s not the ‘intended’ way to play. Both games escalate the Postal dude’s enemies until the whole town is out to get you, so it gets more and more tempting to just say fuck it and kill everyone. But you don’t have to kill everyone, and it’s very much possible to beat both games this way. And playing them in this manner highlights just how much detail is in the world & NPC behavior. Playing the game entirely as a pacifist gave me a better appreciation for the immersive sim genre, even if I still think the name is misused.
Teardown
The one thing I regret in this review is I wish I could explain my issue with the destruction without directly comparing it to Red Faction Guerilla. After writing this review I saw an unrelated game dev tweet that comparing games to other games in criticism is generally unhelpful & insulting, and I feel kinda bad about that now.
NieR: Replicant
One of my friends wanted to find ending Y of NieR Automata, and seeing her do so made me want to give Replicant a try.
It was pretty good. The combat feels great, with every swing feeling meaty & impactful, and I especially love the magic system. Enemies also bleed good when you hit them. I’m a fan of blood effects in video games.
Despite my enjoyment I’ve yet to actually finish it. Something about the game just started to bore me, and I’ve yet to pick it back up because of that. I had the same issue with Automata though, and I eventually got over that. So I’ll revisit this someday.
Jedi: Fallen Order
I wanted to write a review of this too, but I never got around to expanding on my thoughts & feelings. I usually write short reviews for friends on Discord before writing a full Medium review though, so here’s that:
A lot of people describe it as a Soulslike, though I don’t fully agree with that sentiment. It has the weighty combat, the checkpoints & death mechanic, and even a bit of the metroidvania design, but Soulslikes are also in-depth RPGs, and Fallen Order is very much action-focused first & foremost. The most variety you get is switching between a single or dual-bladed lightsaber, and even then both are situational rather than different playstyles you can build into.
The game itself is excellent. Lightsabers are weighty (which I never thought I’d want a lightsaber to be), and every strike feels great. While you only ever fight three & a half Sith, you do fight plenty of shock/purge troopers that put you on theoretically equal footing with the Jedi weapon. The only piece of combat I really don’t like is fighting the wildlife, as they’re harder to read than human enemies and doesn’t really fit a Jedi-centric Star Wars game. Wildlife enemies belong in a clone trooper or bounty hunter-centric Star Wars game.
On the nitpick side of things, the game also has a lot of procedural animations that like to bug out or sometimes just not work (most notably healing stims). It’s also got some performance issues, which I’m pretty sure are across every platform; having played it on both PC and Xbox One.
Overall though Fallen Order is hella good. Is it the best Star Wars game? Nah, it’s hard to beat Republic Commando. But is it the best Jedi-centric Star Wars game? Ehhh, I don’t know if I’d call it better than Jedi Academy. But it’s still absolutely worth playing.
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians
I really want to like this game.
This is a first-person dungeon crawler much like Legend of Grimrock, but what makes it unique is it employs hotkey-based MMO combat; aggression system and everything. It claims to simulate World of Warcraft mechanics almost 1:1, and reading into build guides it even lets the player do stuff like late-game tank swaps. In theory this game sounds awesome.
In practice though it feels off. I’ve restarted it numerous times to try and get a feel for a good party build, and every time it just doesn’t feel right. The game has eight difficulty settings, a custom difficulty slider, a bunch of assistance toggles, and even an option to halve the enemy count. But I still can’t find a balance with it.
Someone needs to study this game and give it the layer of polish it deserves. Singleplayer MMOs are an untapped market.
Final Fantasy 12
Playing the Fall of the Dungeon Guardians made me want to try Final Fantasy 12 again. Something about playing an unpolished singleplayer MMO made me want to try another, and FF12 was the first thing I thought of.
I used to really hate FF12. I wasn’t a fan of the combat, on the basis that Real-Time w/ Pause is something I just don’t really like in most video games, but now my opinion has improved to simply being ‘meh.’ I’ve also since played Final Fantasy 2, which dethroned 12 as my ‘worst game in the series.’ I might pick this back up again though, since I didn’t play much further than unlocking the gambit system. Who knows?
Hotline Miami
I got sent a Hotline Miami meme and hearing Hydrogen made me want to play it again.
This game is still great, but it’s jankier than I remember it being. Doors swing wildly, picking up items is weirdly precise, doing finishers on enemies is weirdly precise, it just feels a lot sloppier than I remember it. Still fun to play, but man there’s some weirdness to how it plays.
Shadowgate (original & remake)
I got tricked into camping and didn’t have much internet, so I played the NES version of Shadowgate on my phone.
I have a fondness for the Macventure games. They strongly influenced the adventure game genre as we know it today, and they’re still fun to go through despite their age.
The NES versions are probably the most accessible way to do so. They’re more linear than the Mac originals, making it less likely for the player to lock themselves into an unwinnable state, and they’re easier to process what exactly is happening on screen. I even ended up buying Shadowgate on cartridge.
With the announcement of Shadowgate VR finally launching outside the Oculus store, I went ahead and replayed the 2014 remake. It’s a beautiful reimagining of the original game, with its only similarities being little references here & there. The locales & puzzles are almost entirely different, giving a fresh experience for those already accustomed to the original.
Unfortunately the remake also teases a reimagining of Beyond Shadowgate (though more likely Shadowgate 64), which was sadly shelved due to behind-the-scenes complications and work on another project. It will happen someday though, I just know it.
Argonus and the Gods of Stone
This was that other project that put Beyond Shadowgate on the backburner, and gawd damn it’s not good. The performance is bad, there’s no FOV setting, the puzzles aren’t all that engaging, it’s just not a fun time.
Shadowgate VR: The Mines of Mythrok
This was even worse. It tries really hard to replicate the difficulty & sass of 2D Shadowgate, but what made it work there was the game being deliberately slower-paced. When you try adding action and reflexes to that, it just gets infuriating. Would not recommend.
Final Fantasy XI
I was always hesitant to play this since I already pay a Final Fantasy XIV subscription, but XIV was starting to grate on me and I really wanted something with more MMO depth to it. So I bit the bullet and I gotta say, FFXI is a lot of fun.
Final Fantasy XI predates the WoW Renaissance, being developed when the big competitor of the genre was Everquest. As such, it’s much slower-paced & methodical than WoW or FFXIV. There’s also a lot more ‘RPG,’ with roles more in-depth than tank/healer/DPS, and a lot more freeform class building. Compared to XIV I think it even plays more like a Final Fantasy game.
The thing that made me fall in love with XI though was seeing just how much more alive the world felt. There was one point where I was in a dungeon and saw a rare mob that was not only fighting smaller enemies, but gaining levels from fighting them. Enemies aren’t just a health bar. They have distinct stats, and if they’re humanoid they’re even a distinct class.
The one thing I don’t like about FFXI is it can be really confusing to navigate. Even after months of play I get location names confused & need to look up a guide. And even with a guide I’ll usually turn to other players for help since the wikis can be really poorly written at times.
FFXIV is the better option for a more modern world. There’s no PlayOnline bullshit, progression is a lot more streamlined, the crafting & gathering system is better, there’s more RP potential, PvP is more balanced, your subscription can be paid forward, you don’t need to pay for individual character slots, you can play cross-server, and there’s a bigger free trial with data that actually carries over to your sub. But Final Fantasy XI is still a lot of fun to play. Just know what you’re getting into.
Flash Point: Fire Rescue
This is an adaptation of a board game I’m fond of. It’s a cooperative turn-based game where everyone plays a firefighter with a specialized role and has to rescue people from a burning building. It’s a lot of fun to play, and even more fun with the expansions.
The video game is a near-1:1 replication of the base game’s rules, with a handful of custom maps to play through. It’s not a bad adaptation, though it’s not much more than that. It doesn’t even have any expansion content, and being a game from 2018 I doubt we’ll ever see it.
I got this in a $5 itch.io bundle, which should probably be its base price.
Last Call BBS
Probably the saddest gaming news to come out of 2022: Zachtronics has released their final game. It’s not for any negative reason, just that Zach Barth got a teaching job and won’t have time to make games anymore, but Zachtronics is a bigger deal than people think and it’s sad to see him go.
Fortunately he’s going out with a bang, as Last Call BBS may be his best game yet. It’s a collection of eight minigames (the best part of any Zachtronics title) that range from fun toys to brain-expanding challenges. There’s assembling Gundams, drawing D&D maps out of Nonogram puzzles, an arcade variant of a puzzle game from a previous title, wiring machines for a food court assembly line, two Solitaire minigames in both playing card & Hanafuda(?) variants, building microchips down to their silicon, and my personal favorite: Growing homunculi from cells by rewriting their DNA. There’s even space to program your own games in Javascript.
As of writing this I’ve completed five out of the eight games, though some of these are so hard I don’t know if I’ll finish all of them. Either way this game is fantastic and I highly recommend playing it.
While you’re at it, play the rest of Zach’s games too. TIS-100, Opus Magnum, Exapunks, and MOLEK-SYNTEZ are all worth it as well.
Cruelty Squad
There’s a Wes Anderson movie called the French Dispatch that came out in 2021. It’s three short stories, and the first one is about a prisoner making abstract art using a nude Lea Seydoux as a reference.
Adrien Brody finds this artist and sees potential to make money off his art. When pitching to investors, one of the things he shows them is a perfect illustration of a sparrow; using it to say that the prisoner knows how to make realistic art, but chooses to be abstract. He argues this is the difference between a good artist and a genius artist.
Cruelty Squad was made by a genius artist.
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Mega Mix+
Sega really got me to buy a Vocaloid rhythm game three times on three different platforms.
I love the Project Diva series. F2nd was basically my favorite game from 2014–2016, and I played it to death.
I can’t really say the same about Future Tone & Mega Mix though. It looks better, and has a much larger song library, but it’s also distinctly different charting from the F series which I’m not a fan of. They’re still good games that I enjoy playing, but part of me yearns for another F-styled Diva game.
The PC version of Diva features Denuvo. Do not buy.
Final Fantasy XV
I went into XV really wanting to say this wasn’t as bad as people said it was, and for a good chunk of the game that’s how I felt. I liked the dungeons, the combat, the open road, it was a chill ride that I did have fun with.
And then I reached the end of the game, and it just started to piss me off. Every Final Fantasy game has an issue of letting the player coast to the end without much grinding, then they reach the final boss and it’s just a brick wall of a level gap. But FFXV amplifies this issue by making the grinding process a goddamn chore. The only really consistent way to level is by doing monster hunts, which in-of themselves also require grinding to keep up with the player level, and there’s only like, three locations where you can pick up these hunts.
On top of all that, the PC version is an unstable mess that suffers extreme memory leak issues and can’t even hit a consistent 60 (which to be fair is also true on console).
Final Fantasy XV is a good game until it’s not, and it falls off hard.
The Ship: Murder Party
I was gonna write a Quick View on this but then I forgot about it. The Ship is a multiplayer game in which every player has to murder another player without getting caught. There’s a layer of The Sims-style player needs on top of it to prevent camping, which invites some RP potential if you really want.
I love this multiplayer concept, and I wish it was more common. Bounty hunter deathmatch, as I’ve been calling it, is severely underrated and surprisingly rare. Unfortunately The Ship has some noticeable flaws that make it hard to go back to.
The first issue is murders are handled in rounds. Once you kill your target, all that’s left to do is avoid getting killed by your hunter until the round ends, and that’s not fun. The game would be more fun if you were given a new target immediately after killing your current one, and ending matches at a high score (which the game already does). It keeps the pacing up, and discourages camping in safe zones when you’re not actively hunting someone.
That’s another problem: Safe zones. The game has locations with cameras, security guards, and a player witness system to encourage stealth kills. That can certainly add to the paranoia of being alone with someone, but I think it’d be better if it was just the witness system. Having guards & security cameras (at least outside the jail) just adds tedium waiting for your target to make themselves vulnerable. I’m not really into it.
Much like The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, someone needs to study this game and give it the polish it deserves.
Final Fantasy 4 (PSP and 3D Remake)
I never thought I’d say Final Fantasy IV is one of my favorites but it’s shaping up to be one. After going through the pixel remasters I’ve grown more confident in recommending Final Fantasy games and what versions people should play. I still think newcomers should play them in order and start with the pixel remasters, but it recently occurred to me that I never actually played the PSP version of IV despite me recommending it as ‘the best.’ So I gave it a try, and yeah I’d say go with this one.
I also gave the 3D remake a try, this time on the harder difficulty setting, and I can say with confidence you should not use that setting. It just makes the game way grindier than it needs to be, and the simple act of grinding is even more of a chore because of it. Would not recommend.
Satisfactory
I would wholeheartedly recommend Satisfactory if you want a decent factory building sim, or if you want to jump ship from Factorio’s alarmingly bad politics. But if you do, play with friends. Trying to play alone is so overwhelming it’s anxiety-inducing, but with another person helping out you can split the workload and it’s a lot more manageable.
Devil May Cry 5
At this rate I should just keep this game permanently installed on my machine.
Devil May Cry V is excellent. Not only is it a noticeable improvement to games before, it’s also one of the most genuinely well-written games I’ve ever played, and I normally hate storytelling in video games.
Creeper World 4
I played some custom rounds of Creeper World 4, which may be my favorite game of 2020. I talked about this on Tumblr and a lot of what I said there still remains. Absolute masterpiece of the RTS genre.
Creeper World 1/2/3
I finally got around to playing the old Creeper World games. I may write a full review of the series someday, but here’s some short impressions:
Creeper World 1 is a fairly simplistic RTS supported by the really cool premise of your enemy being an endless wave of biomass. It’s cool to try out if you want to see where the series started, but Creeper World 3/4 improve on it in pretty much every way.
Most of the series is a top-down RTS, but Creeper World 2 is an… ant farm RTS? The game is entirely 2D and based underground rather than covering a surface. It’s neat, and is unique enough to make it worth trying out at least once.
Creeper World 3 is where the series really hits its stride, and it’s unique enough from Creeper World 4 that you can play both for different experiences. I think CW3 is a little more crunchy(?) than CW4, having a lot more fiddling & planning required to keep your defenses running. But give both games a try. These are some deeply underrated strategy games.
World of Warcraft: Ascension
Getting sick of FFXIV made me want to try some other MMOs, and WoW Ascension has been the most fascinating. It’s a private server for World of Warcraft that makes the game entirely classless. The holy trinity of tank/healer/DPS is still there, as are the… classes, but leveling up gives you points to spend for unlocking skills from any of these classes. Play long enough and you can unlock profiles to switch between these classes freely. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ll definitely play more in the future.
Valheim
This was a birthday gift! I really wanted to play a comfy survival game and Valheim is mostly that. It plays like a fusion of Minecraft & Breath of the Wild with minimalist survival elements, an in-depth building system, and bosses to slay. I love how it encourages base expansion through its crafting expansion, making your dedicated station increasingly larger with every upgrade to it. I also like how food is beneficial rather than a requirement, giving massive buffs to the player. I’ve only beaten two bosses so far, but goddamn writing this makes me want to keep playing it.
The one thing that keeps me from playing it though is I’m really, really sick of survival games making me drop my inventory on death. Until the game hits 1.0 or someone makes a mod to disable that, it’s going on the backburner.
Into the Radius
Starcraft 2
A friend wanted to play Starcraft 2 with me. We ultimately never did, but I got to play some rounds against bots and it was a fun time. Definitely an improvement over what I played of Starcraft 1, but I’m still a Command & Conquer boy at heart.
Papers Please
This game got a mobile port, which made me want to replay it. This was my third playthrough of the game, and its translation to a mobile interface was interesting. It’s played vertically, cutting off the desk space you get on PC, instead scrolling between documents one at a time. You can pin wanted criminals on the wall, but can’t take them down, which can get you unavoidably fined on certain days.
The game itself has… aged. Some of the things it implies are kinda gross in hindsight; most notably regarding gender, but overall for half the price as it is on desktop I’d recommend it.
ULTRAKILL
This game does what Doom Eternal tried to do, but unlike Doom Eternal it succeeds tremendously. Highly recommended.
PlateUp!
I bought this on a whim because it looked like Overcooked but more organized & comfier to play. Then I discovered it’s a roguelike and refunded it out of frustration. Then one of my friends pulled me back in through Remote Play Together and I ended up appreciating it more. Apparently it turns into a factory building sim if you play long enough.
Final Fantasy XI Braver
A friend recommended this to me and it’s… interesting? Basically someone decided to reconstruct as much of Final Fantasy XI as possible in a 2D RPGMaker environment, and what little I played of it has been fun. It’s definitely not a replacement for FFXI, being strictly turn-based and most noticeably lacking the multi-class system, but it’s still something worth checking out.
League of Legends
In all seriousness it’s not that bad. I was a Dota 2 kid in high school so I never played League, but I can say it’s a perfectly enjoyable experience. It’s been recommended you play with friends to minimize salt, and I could definitely see that. I’m generally immune to salt though (I think), so I can put up with it.
Steam Deck
I started writing some general impressions but I had so much to say that I made a full review. I almost did the same with League but I didn’t play it enough.
Half Life 2: VR
This was something I just saw in my Twitter feed one day & decided to give a try. You could already half-ass Half Life 2 in VR by jumping through Garry’s Mod hoops, but this is a standalone mod you can install & play separately, adding additional VR features. Obviously not everything in Half Life 2 translates perfectly, but if you like HL2 and you like VR, You may like this.
Dragon Quest XI
I have a review of Dragon Quest XI sitting in my drafts, waiting for when I end up doing a third playthrough so I can gush about this game being the single greatest old-school RPG ever made. But nah, instead I’ve been cleaning up the ‘definitive’ edition’s lackluster bonus content.
Don’t worry, I’ll talk about this one in further detail. Maybe next year.
Bonelab
It’s both better and worse than Boneworks. It’s a lot less janky, I get caught on things less, precision is a little easier, there’s procedural assistance when climbing onto ledges, switching between standing/seated is easier, and there’s some genuinely significant VR tech in it. BUT, there’s still noticeable jank, I still get caught on stuff sometimes, it still feels kind of imprecise, and climbing onto ledges can still feel weird.
The big issue is it doesn’t tell you a lot of basic mechanics, and some Boneworks logic doesn’t carry over. There’s no reclamation bins, no bullet shops, and you’re thrown into side stuff immediately rather than at the end of the campaign. Objects are unlocked by capsules you have to pull apart, which I figured out early but could definitely go over players’ heads until they’re close to the end.
…assuming they even know there’s an end, since you’re thrown into a hub early on & it’s not immediately clear how to progress from there. I and most people on Steam got confused & assumed progression was behind side content, but it’s not. You have to do an elaborate crane game to unlock progress, and you have to do it again as you approach the end.
It’s also a lot shorter. There’s a lot more side content to compensate, but I really wanted a more fleshed-out campaign. Where Boneworks was a great singleplayer in way too janky an engine, Bonelab is a much more fleshed out engine in a lackluster singleplayer. I enjoyed my time overall but waiting for a sale is recommended.
Metal: Hellsinger
Metal makes everything better.
Trombone Champ
Baboons make everything better.
I ended up getting every achievement in this game. I almost never do that.
Overwatch 2
Well, I wanted to play this, but the game wouldn’t let me. Tried installing it on PC, game wouldn’t boot. Would just straight-up close soon as I opened it. So I tried installing it on Xbox One instead, and I got in! Did some runs through training, but wanted to wait till my girlfriend wanted to play. When that time came, it wouldn’t let me connect to its servers. Just flat-out refused. I didn’t really want to bother trying on Switch, so I have nothing to say about it.
I did find an article though about how most players can’t find queues because nobody plays support classes. Gee, maybe hard-locking role requirements was a bad idea. Maybe balance your goddamn classes instead of artificially forcing a role that no one wants to play.
Inside the Backrooms
For every good creepypasta, there’s thousands of fan works that completely miss the point of the creepypasta. The Backrooms are no exception, and Inside the Backrooms is a prime example of that.
God of War (2018) and God of War Ragnarok
Before buying Ragnarok, I went ahead and replayed God of War 2018. I thought it was pretty great my first time through, but nowadays I’d call it simply standard as action games go. The Leviathan Axe is a lot of fun, and being able to throw it & switch to your fists is especially fun. I RP this a lot in tabletop RPGs, and it’s cool to have a game replicate it.
Ragnarok is more of the same. Shields have alternative variants, which is nice. Buying & upgrading equipment has merged into the same shop menu, which is also nice. But the most nice thing is playing as Atreus, which is a lot of fun. As-of writing this I haven’t finished Ragnarok yet, but I gotta say it runs for just a little bit longer than it needs to.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
I wrote a quick view of this. It was almost positive but it just pissed me off too much.
Pokemon TCG Live
Wow, the meta sure got terrible since the last time I played.
Are there any modern digital card games that aren’t complete dogwater?
Kingdom Hearts
I have a lot of nostalgia for the first Kingdom Hearts. It was the first PS2 game I ever played, before my brain even understood the concept of saving progress, so I ended up dicking around on Destiny Islands for most of my nostalgia.
Playing it as an adult, it’s… aged. The camera is terrible, attacks are janky & imprecise, the platforming is atrocious, and navigating it is a confusing labyrinth of loading zones that prompted every future game to have a minimap and more linear design. I still think there’s some charm to be had, but there’s no harm in skipping straight to 2 and watching the cutscenes for KH1 & Chain of Memories if you really care about the story.
The newest release of KH1 even has a theater mode where you can watch all of the cutscenes without playing the game itself. Seems even Square thinks it’s dated.
Kingdom Hearts 2
Holy fuck this is so much better. The camera’s better, combat is faster & more responsive, drive forms add an extra layer of depth to movement & combos, the gummi ship is a lot less annoying, Atlantica is easier to avoid, it’s just a better game in every way.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion
People were really misleading in how much of a remake this actually was. I was expecting it to be some drastic ground-up recreation of Crisis Core when really it was still the PSP game with a new coat of paint. But it’s also a really solid Final Fantasy spinoff. Combat feels good, there’s some neat customization with materia just like regular FF7, and the mission structure makes it easy to pick up and play, just like a PSP game.
It’s still got problems. I like materia fusion in theory but I’m not a fan of how it functions. It also has the animation locking that FF7 Remake has, and I also really hate Zack as a character. He reminds me too much of Tidus. Despite that though, Crisis Core is still totally enjoyable and I would recommend it.
Okay I think that’s everything
I’m probably not gonna do another list like this again. My goal this year was to write about games more, and I tried to keep a list of everything I played & finished, but that just made writing a lot more of a chore. So next year I’m just gonna write about whatever the hell I feel like writing about at any given moment. We’ll see how it goes.
