Best of 2023: Chride Edition
Is my game of the year Baldur’s Gate 3? It’s likelier than you think. I haven’t been much of a blogger this year, but since we’re in the cheese-filled liminal days between Christmas and New Year’s, let’s wrap up this year like I did last year.
Disclaimer: Most of the things I list here didn’t come out in 2023–2023 just happens to be the year these things came into my life in a big and personal way. This post is about as much a personal snapshot of what I like and want to remember made me feel things. I’ll keep this spoiler free, but not opinion free.
Song of the Year — Dreams (1977) by Fleetwood Mac
It’s only me who wants to wrap around your dreams, and
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell, dreams of loneliness?
Like a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
Let’s preface this with: I don’t pretend to be much of a music aficionado, nor someone of distinguished taste, and this year’s song is one that’s seen rather a lot of radio play.
There’s a bit of a joke in my circle about being in that mood when you listen to ‘Rumours’ on repeat but genuinely, in my book one of the most albums of all time. Apologies for the very online lingo here — but it’s such a cohesive, emotionally charged, and beautifully performed album without a single dud.
The song I chose as my song of the year is ‘Dreams’. Compared to last year’s song it doesn’t really have a clear connection point to something specific in my life, but it is a song that I was learning in my voice lessons, and we listened to it on our roadtrips in California. There’s something about Stevie Nicks’ vocal performance that just cuts straight into my heart. The mellow yearning feels raw and honest, unedited. It’s a song that looks you right in the eye with defiance and disappointment without melodrama; a vulnerable moment.
Book of the Year — The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I guess we’ll continue the topic of feeling things. I read many books this year, and many of them were great — I’ll honorarily mention Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Still, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller left me feeling completely drained and filled to the brim at once, and thus simply has to be the book of the year for me. I started reading it on the bus home from the archipelago, and could not put it down until I turned the last page, a sobbing mess.
The book is a retelling of the myth of Achilles and Patroclus, set in the years leading up to the Trojan war, told from Patroclus’ perspective. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that it is a tragedy, but it came as a surprise to me how much of a romance it is as well.
In Steering the Craft, Ursula K. leGuin speaks about writing as craft; the sound of language, the flow of it, and as I was reading The Song of Achilles, I marveled at how beautifully written it is. Miller’s prose manages to both be gentle as a stroke of spring sunshine on your cheek, as well as precise and sharp like a shard of glass hidden in the sand on the beach. It’s very deliberate and achingly lyrical.
In a world where queer relationships are still routinely washed from history, The Song of Achilles felt very relevant despite being set in antiquity. I thoroughly recommend it.
Games of the Year
It’s award season, so I’m going to bestow my very own Chride Awards to a few of the game gems of this year. Overall, this year I played a lot of [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted] for work, and then a few other games just for fun. So let’s look at the ones I played for fun.
AAA Game of the Year: Baldur’s Gate 3
With around 160 hours in Larian’s multi-award-winning Forgotten Realms-romp, I can safely say Baldur’s Gate 3 is my most played game this year.
Is it any good? Yes, yes it is.
Do I like it? Yes, yes I do.
Would I recommend it? Well, ahh. About that… let me info dump. Spoiler-free.
The thing with BG3 is that while I have played 160h+ of it, I have not yet finished the game. That’s the first thing: this is not a casual game, and while it’s not difficult, it’s quite complex, which means it’s not the perfect game to pick up as your first RPG.
The thing I like about BG3 is that it’s very similar to D&D. The thing I dislike about BG3 is that it’s very similar to D&D. And, by that I mean, that while D&D (5e) is loved for the creative roleplaying it allows, at the core, in the rules as written, it’s a rather crunchy turn-based combat game with ample depth in combat mechanics, but it’s not very well-balanced nor accessible to inexperienced players. The part we love the most — social roleplaying and getting to be someone else somewhere else — doesn’t really have much to do with the number crunching or remembering how many level 4 spell slots your wizard has.
Now, BG3 does a fantastic job of hiding away the numbers (while preserving cool dice rolls!) and letting you focus on the fantasy as much as is possible within the 5e system. BG3 makes some key streamlining and adjustments that lend itself well for usability and translation into a digital game, and it obfuscates some of what would feel like railroading to a tabletop player (such as the branch-and-merge campaign structure). You don’t have to think about spell slots or the skill points if you don’t want to, but they are still there for players who want to do math and minmax their damage output.
BG3 has an insane amount of lines for NPCs and companion characters alike, and even a narrator voice that gives commentary on key things when you need a description. Quests a-plenty! You can talk to animals! Eat poutine! There’s Karlach! You can dress your pretty wizard in leather and smooch him under illusory stars (regardless of how many spell slots he has left)!
Still, the downside of BG3 being D&D in digital format is that there is a lot of combat, and combat is slow. There are ways to avoid fights, but for an inexperienced player those ways might be hard to find.
I know a lot of people love the writing in this game, and I’ll agree that there is good writing, moment-to-moment, but personally, I find the story lacking. There are two core problems that get in the way of this feeling like a satisfying interactive narrative — to me.
Firstly, D&D 5e is what we’d call kitchen sink fantasy — you throw in all sorts of elements from any traditions of storytelling, be it vampire thralls, or trolls or mechanical automaton knights, or eldritch brain-eating spaghetti faced Mindflayers, or myconid kings, or giant teleporting spiders, and you can tell whatever story you want with those kind of ingredients. Now, you might ask, which ingredients did Larian choose? The answer is, all of them. Okay, maybe not every single monster in the Monster Manual, but we’re talking Avengers: Endgame levels of throwing everything at the player. At worst, nothing feels truly thematically cohesive, and whichever macguffin you chase at any given moment feels arbitrarily chosen from a table of Wondrous items. Anything can be explained as ‘eh, a wizard did it’ and, since the world also allows resurrections and reviving the fallen, consequences never really quite stick.
You know what other problem happens when you have an inherently absurd setting with losey goosey rules, but try to tell serious stories? You get a problem of constantly raising the stakes. Maybe it’s the same problem that befalls most high-level D&D campaigns, but it sort of breaks the immersion to me that ‘we’re going to save the whole world and there’s all of eight of us’ and ‘we still loot skeletons in dungeons for pocket change to be able to take a long rest’… It’s sort of similar to what I’d like to call the Steven Moffat problem (those who were in the Doctor Who fandom ten years ago might understand what I mean — somewhere along the way, the tone gets lost when the Doctor literally saves the world from certain destruction every episode).
Now, the thing that did surprise me is that BG3 mostly pulls it off. It’s able to reconcile the absurd and illogical with the serious and the high stakes. But personally, I would have been happy with less world-saving. Maybe, uh, less in general, now that I think of it.
The second problem I have is around banter design and dialogue tree depth. This might seem like a real nitpick, but in a game with this level of budget, I feel like there’s an overabundance of ambient dialogue from non-essential NPCs, and a lack of meaningful banter between your companions. The accessibility isn’t great in the ambient dialogue nor banter either. Lines aren’t interrupted or spaced out in a way that makes them intelligible and easy to process, but rather will just play all on top of each other. Subtitles, rather than appearing at the bottom of the screen with speaker tags, are displayed above the speaker, and oftentimes not at all, sometimes overlapping each other.
When it comes to dialogue tree depth again, what I mean here is that the illusion that your companions are real people is broken very fast when there will be stretches of 10+ hours when they have nothing new to say apart from one-liners about the most recent A-plot advancement. On one hand, the game really makes us fall in love with our companions, but then on the other, there isn’t really much chance to get to know your beau or belle once you’re dating them, or you’re actually in their companion quests. When taken with how much non-essential dialogue there is, this feels like a strange choice of priorities.
As a whole, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have the most thematically cohesive game storytelling I’ve seen, nor does it really do what I want it to do well: force me to make difficult choices and live with their consequences. Ones that I know are right for my character, but will not be approved of by my found family, for reasons rooted deeply in who they are. And in order to do that, well, you would need to have companion characters that truly have their own will, rather than ones that can always be manipulated into siding with the player. Sure, Astarion disapproves of my soft-hearted bard’s actions, but he never actually expresses that in actions… Those who can read between the lines her can tell what I’m going to say: it doesn’t quite scratch my BioWare itch.
Still, the game is so much fun. As to whether I recommend it — It’s genuinely quite good, and it is certainly worth the price tag. Romance Gale at your own peril. Five miniature giant space hamsters out of five.
Indie / Underground Game of the year: Spiritfarer (2020) by Thunder Lotus
For a second game I didn’t really finish — this one for different reasons — but also have strong feelings around, I wanted to highlight the game Spiritfarer by Thunder Lotus.
Spiritfarer is a bit of a genre-defying game .Journey around a strange archipelago in your own boat, invite spirits to stay with you, take care of them, finish their business, and finally, learn to say goodbye to them.
It’s a game about death and grief and letting go, with gorgeous hand-drawn and hand-animated graphics, and a hauntingly pretty soundtrack. Compared to BG3, it’s also a much more manageable length. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Tabletop Game of the Year: Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right
What goes together perfectly with absolutely adorable woodland critters illustrated by Kyle Ferrin? Bloody guerrilla warfare. Of course.
I bought Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right (2018) because I couldn’t resist it. We started playing it this year with J and some friends, and it’s a rather more intense game than we expected. For fans of strategy games like Risk or Ticket to Ride, this one is quite nice, if a bit more complex to learn.
Mobile Game of the Year: Marvel Snap!
As a mobile game designer, I’ve been a little embarrassed about not really having much of a mobile gaming habit or favorite game. Not, like, really. But this year, I dove right into Marvel Snap. Globally released in 2022 on mobile, currently published by gods-know-who-has-the-money-to-scale-the-game, and now available on PC as well, Marvel Snap is brought to you by some of the designers behind Blizzard’s Hearthstone (which I didn’t play). This time, however, with all the improvements that make a game really work on mobile like one-handed portrait play, a soft learning curve (great for players who aren’t familiar with collectible card games), short sessions (which means you can play a good few games on your commute), and enough randomness to keep the game interesting for bad players (which is essential for a multiplayer F2P game’s long-term retention).
Having the Marvel superheroes on the cards both adds to the collectibility of the game, and makes it easier to differentiate between the cards in the small format. The designers have also done their research in pairing the card abilities with the characters; for instance, Carnage grows stronger from ‘devouring’ other cards, while Venom absorbs them.
Still, the thing I enjoy the most in this game is how insane the chain reactions and stackings can get in this game. My favorite way to win isn’t by staying up-to-date on the latest meta or the best win-rate deck; it’s the moments when the randomized locations, your cards, and your opponent’s choice of cards happen to coinkydink into a cascade of ludicrous effects. Like that one time I ended up winning with an army of Kitty Prydes because of Bar Sinister (which fills the location with copies; however, at the end of the turn, Kitty Pryde returns to the hand and gets stronger — yet retains a cost of 1. I ended up with 11 Kitties; too many to fit in my hand… Anyway.).
For a while, most of our Helsinki Game Designers of Finland gatherings descended into comparing deck strategies. As a game designer I genuinely enjoy this game, and for aspiring mobile designers, I see it as required reading.
My Review of 2023
Politically, 2023 has been a very cynical and quite dark year. From the slow genocide in Palestine to the war in Ukraine, to the tightening borders and rising nationalism in Europe, to the right-leaning government here in Finland, it’s felt like things are not so much sliding backwards as rugs being pulled under you at a pace that punches the air right out of you just as you’ve managed to get back up.
I personally have always believed that social welfare shouldn’t rest on the conscience of individuals, but I gave my Christmas bonus to the Red Cross this year and made a donation to the local food bank as well. It doesn’t feel like enough, because it isn’t.
When looking back on the year on a personal level… 2023 was definitely an improvement on my 2022. Less uncertainty. Less… stretching. Less expectations on myself. More sleep. More time spent with loved ones and friends. Now, not all things were good, but some painful things came to closure, answers, and paths forward.
The Best of: Personal Edition
In January, it was time for Finnish Game Jam, as usual, and I went back to form and participated as a participant at the Helsinki Arabia site. Together with a wonderful team of new collaborators and old friends, we made a hopeful game about anxiety called CRACKS.
The game turned out quite nice and we finished it post-jam and showed it at the local IGDA meetup. Now, this was the first time when I’ve let people test the game, and rather than ask “what did you think of the game?” we asked “what do think it was about?”.
During February, I had the joy to pen a few characters for the BLUSH LARP. It was a lot of fun, and though I missed the event itself, it seemed like the players had a great time. Huge props to the organizing team for the effort they put in!
In March, I packed my bags and went to California. This was partially to attend GDC with a few of my colleagues at Nitro — pitching a few games to prospective clients and publishers, dinners, industry parties — but mostly because J had been invited to attend a research stay at UC Berkeley’s Simons Institute. And, me not being too eager to be home alone for two months, went to stay in his Air BnB with him. It was quite fascinating to live abroad for a little while, and we made a few trips to Muir Woods, Yosemite, Big Sur, and San Francisco during the trip.
GDC ’23 was lovely as well. Compared to ’22, it was bigger, and I knew more people. Spent a few evenings in the Golden Gate Taphouse with the game narrative folks, attended excellent talks, dared ask questions, and got to know some absolutely stellar folks. I also hosted the hopefully-soon-traditional Game Writer’s Picnic Lunch in Yerba Buena Park. With the other Nitro folks we went to Bubba Gump’s for a shrimptastic company dinner, and attended Remedy’s GDC party. I must say, it was quite nice to take a Lyft “home” across the Bay from San Francisco rather than find my hotel, and to commute by BART each morning rather than walk a few blocks from a busy hotel.
The downside of being halfway across the globe is that you miss things at home. J’s father passed away in April. We were back home in Finland for the funeral in May. I missed a childhood friend’s Bachelorette party, and my father’s 60th Birthday. Due to when we traveled, I also wasn’t able to pre-vote in the Parliamentary elections here in Finland, and my voting kit arrived literally two days before the return deadline.
The summer was relaxing and warm. We have a company policy of taking all of July off for summer vacation, and it was lovely to get to just rest and read books and attend weddings and snack on strawberries. I spent a week out in the archipelago with my dear friend’s family with limited internet and electricity, and it left me feeling quite mushy and mellow and ready for new things.
In July, I picked up RingFit Adventure, of all things. Right now, I’m on day 42 of the adventure. Not that I care for those kind of numbers, but I’ve lost around 7kg (or, 15lbs) this year with a combo of nutrition and exercise, and according to one of those in-body measurement things, my muscle mass is peak for my age and assumed gender, so I guess those have been good new habits. We also took a short dance class with J this autumn, and now we have a space in our neighborhood booked once a week for practice.
In August, my piano lessons ensued, and while I don’t have an expectation to ever get better than an elementary school kid at playing it, my teacher said I’ve made great improvements this autumn.
Throughout the year, I’ve been playing a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons, both oneshots and campaigns. Just in time for the Holidays, we wrapped up our Waterdeep Dragon Heist with wonderful Sami as our DM. I retired my elven bard Dew Manysea and sent him off on an engagement tour/Harper mission with Renaer Neverember to the Moonshaes. Now I play a cheerful gothy alchemist tiefling called Poppy Brassbrook, and her curiosity might just get her into, let’s say, interesting situations.
Professionally, it’s been a strange year of noticing I’m more established in this industry than I thought. It just sort of crept up on me. The industry-wide layoff wave has spared me this year, but my heart goes out to those it hasn’t. Remember, you can always reach out, and it’s not your fault.
My job at Nitro Games has been quite fascinating, honestly. I have a title of Game and Narrative Designer, but what I do on our little BizDev team is that I come up with concepts for new games and prepare proposals for internal and external use. It’s the kind of job I was convinced doesn’t exist. I literally come up with ideas for games, and then back up those ideas with market research, mockups and concept art. I get to work with sales folks, producers, the C-level in the company, other designers, concept artists, and various IPs ranging from TV and film to AAA games and even toys. My workdays can range from playing fan favorite games, to researching a ’00s cartoon, to frantically fitting CVs into Google Slides.
I’m also the go-to person for sales and presentation materials, and I help our PeopleOps team in strategical planning around skill building and learning. So for instance, right before the winter Holidays I was working with our Autogun Heroes team on something quite cool, in the summer I helped write job ads, and during the autumn, I helped run the Unreal Engine development club at Nitro with our tech lead Atso. It might seem a bit far from my core job, but I see it as that 1) in order to come up with good proposals for our team(s), I need to know what our people are good at and 2) in order to make sure we get the best people working on the projects, I need our people to develop their skills.
The downside of my job being in BizDev is that I can’t talk about who we’re talking to or what I’m working on. That is, until the deals are public. And this year, our little team landed two big deals that are public.
The first one to go through was development work for Digital Extremes on Warframe. For that deal, my contribution was mostly in graphic design and aiding the technical and design reviews we were delivering as part of the proposal by giving feedback on the UI/UX reviews, and templates for the technical reviews. Polish and project management work, just to make sure we’re delivering the excellent quality we’re known for.
The second deal is a $9M+ deal with Netflix, for a game based on an unannounced IP. Of course, nothing is done alone, but I honestly can take credit for the game concept and its initial creative and narrative direction, which feels very strange. Let’s just say it’s one of those things where I genuinely sometimes think ‘huh, I actually did that’. The whole process, from initial Request for Proposal to signing, took quite some time, and we had wonderful support from across Nitro and a bit beyond as well. And of course my BizDev team lead Renata did an absolutely fantastic job.
In my job there always comes a time of handing over your project to the team that will actually foster it into an actual game. After a quick in-person kickoff in Los Angeles in November, during which we met our Netflix collaborators, the team is now off to a fantastic start and I’m thoroughly looking forward to what they make based on the pitch. And to being able to talk more about it. It’s so damn cool, and that’s all I’ll say. For now.
Personal projects then. In my last year’s review, I was able to share some writing that I felt quite proud of. This year though… I have genuinely done less. I’ve made some dice, embroidered some dice bags, I made a Hollow Knight costume for our company Halloween party, and I redid the balcony furniture but in terms of writing?
I have three longer things I noodle on when the creative itch comes along; a fantasy trilogy, a new longfic, and a TTRPG. I’ve made progress on all of them, but I haven’t really sat myself down to hash them out for real. All of them are projects that deserve a bit more headspace. And I think I’m kind of accepting that, rather than kicking myself about it.
I do want to share a poem with you:
My uncle was a pianist (December 5th)
When we were young, my sister and I
We would draw music onto Birthday cards
And he’d play them for us, strange sheet music never before heard
Written down in silenceNow he’s gone
The keys are still
And I sit at the piano, wondering
If kids will ever draw me music to play
Compared to how I felt about writing and my own projects a year ago, now I kind of don’t feel like I have anything left to prove, really. And that makes it a whole lot less stressful to create, or work, or exist as a person in this world. I still haven’t really found a good substitute for spite or ambition as the creative driver — curiosity is a little bit fickle, let’s say — but maybe I’ll find it next year.
Last year, I ended by review with this call for myself to be more open and honest to those around me:
But I’ll leave you with this: I will try to make 2023 a year of expression. Whether that’s in words, in the way I dress, in art, the media I consume, the jobs I go for, in singing, piano, or in being open and honest to those around me.
And while I have fewer things to concretely show for it, and I absolutely didn’t remember that being my theme of the year, I have actually been quite good at doing exactly that: expressing myself and being more open and honest about what I am and what I want. So what’s up next year?
Looking on to 2024
We have at least one portent that 2024 might turn out better, on the whole, than 2023: in a Promethean twist, the Gävlebocken yule goat has been devoured by birds. Let’s hope it’s a good sign, a satisfactory sacrifice.
Joking aside, I’ve been quite happy these past few months after a long burnout recovery period. Still, I wonder if it’s just the rather unhealthy post-achievement high, and whether I’m actually ready to weather storms again or if I’ll break once the wind picks up around me. On the other hand, I feel like I’ve learnt to bend, and I feel like I’ve learnt not to take certain things personally. Maybe it’s that I’m shaking my impostor syndrome, and those toxic expectations I’ve had on myself, but interpersonal conflicts and personal and professional failings that I’ve gone through this year haven’t really left me broken the same way as before.
I really liked the year of Expression 2023. I think what I’ll go for in 2024 is a Year of Curiosity. Maybe that will mean exploration and trying new things just to abandon them a week later, maybe that will mean Wikipedia deep dives in the night, maybe it will be reading, or travel, or learning, or getting to know new people. Let’s see.
