I think this one was worth the wait.
ULTRAKILL / Hakita / September 3, 2020
Steam tells me I last played this game on January 3, 2023, and I have 106 minutes logged, so while I can’t say too much about it, I will say that those 106 minutes were a hell of a time.
ULTRAKILL scores you based on speed and lethality while you progress through each level, and there is a whole lot of DOOM DNA baked into the way your character—a robot fueled by blood—moves and shoots. There are also some crazy techniques that I came nowhere close to competency with in my short time playing.
This is one of those games that is being developed mostly by one guy, and I don’t think he’s done with it yet, so I would like to revisit it once it gets a full release.
Overwatch 2 / Blizzard Entertainment / October 4, 2022
2023 is the year I stopped playing Overwatch, probably for good.
From the 2022 List:
So it turns out ‘the part of the game that was meant to justify adding a “2” to the name’ not only isn’t ready but never will be. They recently announced that PvE development has been gutted and they’ll instead be adding story missions on a seasonal basis. I don’t know that I really want to get into what this means here, but it should be said that this game might have a solid claim for the title of Most Mismanaged Game.
On one hand, it’s nice to know I’ll be able to do anything else with the time I might have spent playing the PvE mode. On the other hand, I think it’s a shame that I will never know what story the devs wanted to tell in this game that has been out for 6 years.
In a cruel twist of fate, Overwatch players now have to accept the game for what it appears to be instead of daring to see it for what it could be.
There’s only so much time in a day, and I’d rather spend it playing other games.
I miss Zarya, but I also have a D&D character who strongly resembles her and who will get to have an actual story. I’d say that puts me going out on top.
MARVEL SNAP / Second Dinner / October 18, 2022
I’m a little surprised that I stuck with this one, but it has ended up being one of my most-played games of the past year.
The breaking point would have been new cards. There just wasn’t a good way to get them for about half the year. I have decks that I like playing, like Thanos and lockdown-style decks, but I also like to change things up and try out new ways to play. There’s a new card added to the game every week, but before the midway point of the year, the only reliable way to get them was to spend a hefty chunk of money. 🐳
Fortunately, this was on the devs’ radar. In general, Second Dinner seems to keep a finger on the pulse of the playerbase, which is essential to running a service game. Their card acquisition solution was to add Spotlight Caches to the main reward track of the game, giving everyone a chance to get either a new card or another rare card or variant.
Around this time, they also started putting out balance patches 3 out of 4 weeks of every month, so the game itself has rarely felt stale. There’s almost always something fun to try out.
And I have a nice little group of friends who are into the game now, so it feels good to have an avenue for discussion.
There’s another knock-on effect for having stuck with this game that I’m going to drop into the win column. In the past, I would habitually pick up my phone throughout the day and immediately open Twitter to start scrolling. Nowadays, I pick up my phone and open SNAP instead to play a few hands. The twilight of social media continues unabated.
Dungeons & Dragons (5E) / Wizards of the Coast / July 3, 2014
Your group has been contacted by an informant who brings word of cultist activity deep in a remote mountain range known as the Keel. It’s said that the cult is planning a ritual that is necromantic in nature. If they succeed, the fallout is sure to be deadly and wide-reaching.
This particular cult is known to employ psycho-acoustic magics to accomplish their ends. It’s for this reason the informant has approached your group.
Only a band of your caliber can hope to counteract the ritual. Be prepared to infiltrate the ritual grounds and disrupt the cult’s activities by any means available to you.
This was my pitch for a one-shot D&D adventure I ran late last year. It was my first time playing D&D as the Dungeon Master (DM), and I loved it. Was this partially a ploy to trick my friends into listening to a bunch of death metal? I’m not at liberty to say. What’s important is they also had a great time (I have sworn affidavits).
Or maybe what’s important is that I want to DM more in the future. I’ve got other ideas that I think are neat, and I want to see if I can make them work as well as that first one.
In other news, my table wrapped up our big Tiamat campaign, cementing it as an experience I will not soon forget. I rolled a 20 to finish off the game’s namesake, and then one of my friends rolled an even more improbable 100 on a d100 to bring matters to a close. You had to be there.
Stories end so that new ones can begin. The larger table my core group is a part of has started a new campaign. In that one, I am playing a leonin paladin (this is the “Zarya at home” character I mentioned before). I’m excited to see where that adventure takes us, and also having a lot of fun in a nascent campaign with the core group.
Oh, I didn’t even mention the other one-shots I played in last year. So much D&D! Ask me about it—I could talk for hours.
Plate Up! / It’s happening / August 4, 2022
This game was made for people whose favorite part of Jenga is when the tower falls over.
Vampire Survivors / Poncle / December 17, 2021
I think this might be a perfect video game, but I haven’t settled on why that’s the case.
Maybe it’s the simplicity. You wander around defeating monsters to collect gems. Collecting gems makes your weapons stronger and gives you access to new ones. You repeat this process until one of two things happens: You either succumb to the hordes of enemies, or the grim reaper comes to collect your soul (unless you are playing on Endless mode).
It might be the packaging: A pastiche of vampires from various games and cultures, lovingly rendered in pixel art, and presented without an ounce of seriousness. The soundtrack is also better than it has any right to be for a game where the stakes are so low.
But if I had to dig deep and make one good guess, it’s this: In 99% of possible realities, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game. The most obnoxious kind of mobile game where you get to play for 10 minutes a day before your character runs out of stamina, but you can buy a gem infusion to extend your run by 5 minutes, and by default you only get one weapon, but you can pay to unlock additional weapon slots, and for another dollar you get an exclusive temporary super weapon that will overcharge your gold acquisition meter, and if you die then you can continue your run if you agree to watch 10 minutes of the worst ads you’ve ever seen.
Instead, Vampire Survivors stands in contrast to the kinds of exploitation used to justify lesser games that cost more. Point of fact, there is a mobile version of Vampire Survivors, which differs from the main game in two ways: It’s completely free, and you actually can revive your character by watching an ad (just one). The lead developer admits that they released this version to counteract copycats, which are rampant on the app stores. It’s also free because Poncle couldn’t find a mobile distributor that was willing to implement non-predatory monetization.
We’re living through the period immediately following an age of unchecked growth, one where a lot of checks are starting to bounce. In times like this, it is refreshing to play a game made by someone who knows the value of their work and refuses to ask for more.
Elden Ring / FromSoftware / February 25, 2022
In 2023, I entered the “start several runs that I don’t finish” stage of my Elden Ring career.
Although an expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, was announced, we spent most of last year without any idea when it would release. I think the notion of keeping the game fresh for whenever the expansion actually got here kept me from spending too much time in the Lands Between.
In the absence of more Elden Ring, there were plenty of other games to play.
Hi-Fi RUSH / Tango Gameworks / January 25, 2023
One of which was this game, which had a surprise release out of nowhere.
Hi-Fi RUSH has the energy of a Gamecube game, and I mean that in a good way. Crucially, the devs captured what feels like the right amount of nostalgia in that the game plays like how we remember character-action games of yore and not as they actually played. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It doesn’t let its ideas get stale. It’s not punishingly or unfairly difficult.
For a game that is all about music, its soundtrack more than lives up to the premise and is the key to making every other aspect sing. The characters are charming, the jokes land, and the story has a lot of heart (even if the ending is a bit of a sellout).
I have nothing bad to say about this game.
Dark and Darker / IRONMACE / August 7, 2023
The demo for this game may have convinced me that I don’t have much interest in extraction style games.
Your goal is to enter a dungeon—with friends if you have them—find loot and treasure, and then find an exit. The rub is that, in addition to monsters, you may encounter and compete against other players.
There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t feel great about this game. Some stuff, like the clunky movement and heavy combat, is intentional. Other stuff, like the way classes and weapons are balanced, is just because the game is still early in development.
But mostly it’s just what the game is. I’m rebuffed by games where I might end a session having lost ground. It could be that I just need to get better at the game, but I’m at a point where I worry about how much effort I would need to invest to achieve that level of proficiency.
It’s certainly not an investment I will make in an unfinished product.
Metroid Prime Remastered / Retro Studios / February 8, 2023
This was another surprise from last year. Sure, it’s been like 6 years since we heard anything about Metroid Prime 4, but here’s the first game with updated controls and a fresh coat of paint. Not a hard sell for me.
Risk of Rain 2 / Hopoo Games / March 28, 2019
Still haven’t killed the big crab.
Destiny 2: Lightfall / Bungie / February 28, 2023
I didn’t think I would be writing about Destiny this year.
Lightfall was fun to play but disappointing in ways that I don’t think are interesting to write about at this point. The seasonal updates this year have been seasonal updates much like any other year.
With nothing else to say, I figured I would wait until The Final Shape, the upcoming conclusion to this 10-year saga of Light and Darkness. After that, I could revel in the finality and reckon with what it’s meant to play a game like this for that long.
But that revelry might be short-lived, and the reckoning seems to have come early.
Trust is essential for an ongoing game. There’s a kind of compact between the people who make the game and the people who play the game, which I will attempt to simplify. It’s something like this:
The developers make a cool game that is fun to play, and the players show up to play that game. If the game ever becomes less cool or less fun, the players make that known, and the devs work on making the game cool and fun again.
There’s a measure of flux here. Games like this are big, so there might be aspects of it that are cooler than others. Some parts of the game might be less fun to engage with. There’s never a point where the players are not pointing at something and saying, “Hey, this needs work.” So the devs keep on working (and there is generally a large portion of the playerbase that doesn’t understand just how much work goes into the game or how long it takes to make things feel right).
A lot of players showed up for Lightfall. Lightfall’s story was not very cool. The activities—the things you do in the game—were not very fun. And so a lot of players stopped playing very quickly. And that’s a problem, because there is a third party to this compact that doesn’t have meaningful interactions with either of the others: The people who make money off of the game.
In the case of Destiny, that third party encompasses executives at Bungie and Sony, the latter of which spent $3 billion and change to acquire the former in 2022.
Now, you may think an ongoing game that makes enough money to fund its continued development is a success, and you would be so, so wrong.
What kind of world do you think we live in? The adults in the room have set projections. They have cast their auguries and read the bones and foreseen that the game should hit a specific profit margin, heralding limitless growth and a new golden age. And if, in reality, the game doesn’t make as much money as was prophesied, well…
CALAMITY. Fie, oh fie, and let slip the dogs of war! A great doom comes, and when it does it will take those who claimed the deep sight. It will swallow them whole, along with their vesting schedules and their P&L statements and—just kidding.
It’s the developers who must pay the price.
In the wake of Lightfall’s tailspin, Bungie underperformed their estimates to such an extent that they were at risk of having their board of directors dissolved and taken over by Sony. To avoid that, they laid off 100 people from their staff of 1200. Soon after, they put out a statement saying that The Final Shape would be delayed, with reports emphasizing the desperate need for this capstone expansion to be a real hit.
The games industry often struggles to give credit where it is due. People become overly familiar with the names of so-called auteurs while rank-and-file devs have to settle for being another name in a long crawl of credits. It’s likely that most players couldn’t name a single developer for a majority of the games they play.
But after playing a live service game with that compact in place, I have learned a lot of names through the years.
Community managers are one of the most important roles on a team, and Destiny’s team has been recognized for their work in the past. That didn’t stop the higher-ups from letting Liana Ruppert and Sam Bartley go (as well as Griffin Bennett, a social media manager).
It’s unusual to know the name of a lawyer in the games industry for a good reason, but Don McGowan, Bungie’s general counsel, has been at the center of some groundbreaking litigation. Bungie has ruthlessly filed suit against the makers of cheats in ways that few other developers bother with, and the studio also won something of a landmark case against a fan who had serially harassed a former community manager. That kind of success did nothing to protect McGowan’s job now that Bungie can just rely on Sony’s lawyers.
No departing name got more attention at the time than Michael Salvatori, the composer with credits going all the way back to Halo. His music has done more to set the feel and tone of this universe than just about anyone else. And yet veterans must stand out for other reasons when aiming down the barrel of a balance sheet.
They got Michael Sechrist, too, the composer of “Deep Stone Lullaby,” among other fan favorites—two Mikes for the price of one, I guess.
And there are plenty of names I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to learn. In livestreams and blog posts, Bungie used to talk up the testers they had embedded in every major team as essential pieces of the development process. Now, the QA team has seen major losses, and a significant portion of testing is outsourced.
The studio has given big spotlights to employee resource groups like Pride@Bungie, Women@Bungie, and Black@Bungie, but apparently the membership of those groups were hit hard by the layoffs.
The end result of these layoffs is that fewer people now have to spend more time working on the next (last?) expansion, which hovers over them like the sword of Damocles. If The Final Shape isn’t a smashing success, if it doesn’t blow people away and make it rain, what comes next?
Destiny has endured for a decade, and while it has often been born aloft by triumphs, it has also acted at times like it was too big to fail. The Taken King took what was a game that missed its full potential at launch and transformed it into one of the first “Hey, this game is good now” success stories. It’s a cycle that has repeated more often than either the fans or the devs probably would have liked, but the game has endured nonetheless.
Now, with the light at risk of sputtering out at the conclusion of this saga, I find myself considering all the ways that Destiny has failed to be big.
Where are the novelizations that tap into the deep wells of lore buried within the game?
Where did the limited run comic series go?
Where are the flashy animated shorts that show us the scenes we never got to see in game?
What does it mean that former game director Luke Smith holds the current title “Executive Creative Director, Destiny Universe”? What “universe”?
For some time, it’s felt like Destiny has been in need of a paradigm shift. It is a game about running around and shooting aliens set in a world that wishes to offer more than that. Yet every expansion since Forsaken has just delivered “more Destiny”, never “Destiny, but more.” Based on everything we’ve seen so far, I doubt The Final Shape will break the cycle.
Years ago, when Michael Salvatori was talking about his team’s work on the music for Destiny 2, he said:
One of the things that has run through the thread of everything we’ve done is that, no matter how bad things get, there’s always hope … Maybe it’s not musical so much, but in the game itself, we like to keep reminding the players what they’re fighting for.
The refrain of hope always comes through with every new soundtrack added to the game. We might be overdue for another reminder about what we’re fighting for, though.
DREDGE / Black Salt Games / March 30, 2023
“Eldritch horror fishing game” was not on my bingo card for games to play in 2023, but DREDGE had a lot of good buzz, and it was deserved.
Mechanically, it’s a simple game. You have a boat. You can catch fish, store them in your boat via a Tetris-style inventory system, and then sell them. With the money you earn, you can buy better fishing equipment, upgrade your boat’s engine(s), and add additional storage space. Rinse and repeat.
Until you catch a fish that’s wrong. It has too many eyes. Or its scales are made of ebon shale. Or its mouths drip a viscous fluid that you can hear dripping long after the sun slips below the horizon, even over the incessant waves as it clogs the bilges and whispers up the back of your neck, urging you to keep looking, keep searching, for the ring, for the key, for the book, deep, deeper in the hadal depths where they shouldn’t be found, shouldn’t be retrieved, shouldn’t be… and yet it’s the only way.
It’s a fun time. I should check out the DLC.
Return of the Obra Dinn / Lucas Pope / October 18, 2019
I’d had a couple of friends hounding me to play this game for the longest time, and you know what?
It’s as good as they say.
I’ll give it my recommendation and say nothing else. You may think it bewildering at first, but I assure you:
All will make sense in time.
Season: A Letter to the Future / Scavengers Studio / January 31, 2023
I haven’t finished playing this game.
I started it one night in April, when none of my friends were online and I was feeling introspective.
It’s a game about leaving one place and going to others. The character you play sets out from her home atop some lofty mountains with a camera, a recorder, a journal, and a bicycle. Her mission is to document the end of the season.
The journey itself feels a little more like watching the world end, one lonely vista at a time.
The equipment you are given is the game. While you travel through eerily deserted fields and valleys, you’re tasked with capturing whatever views strike you as memorable, recording whatever sounds cut through the noise, and writing down your impressions of the places you visit and the handful of people there are left to meet.
Being a game, there are limitations. Your journal is less a blank slate and more a checklist, the items for each area hidden until you discover them. It would be fun to play a game like this where I really could write whatever I wanted and author my own memoir of this era’s close. But that would be an exceptionally difficult game to make, especially if the creator had their own story to tell.
I will credit the devs at Scavengers, though. They did a very good job of crafting people and places that are worth remembering. A make-shift shelter under a rainy underpass with music boxes left behind by those who had stopped there. An abandoned farm where the remaining cows still offer a warm welcome. A field of flowers that contain memories so vivid and so loud, you risk fracturing your mind if you walk in without a protective charm.
That last one is a hint of what the wider game might be about. In this world where each season defines an age, memory is volatile. It can be wielded as a ward or ruptured and spilled out like a contaminant. It can be safeguarded or weaponized. It is, in the end, the only thing that people get to carry from one season to the next.
If I want to know what might be worth remembering, I’ll have to find a good time to return and finish the game. Here’s hoping I do.
SIGNALIS / rose-engine / October 27, 2022
Horror games are not my usual fare. I have dabbled here and there in the past. The gothic horror trappings of Bloodborne don’t really make it a traditional horror game, and Inscryption had plenty of spooks but wasn’t committed to horror for its full duration.
So SIGNALIS might not have been on my radar if not for some persistent pings from voices I tend to listen to.
SIGNALIS lays its foundation with specific legacies—its explicit references and homages to the Silent Hill series are most prominent—and my lack of history with games in that genre could have left me at a disadvantage. I rarely felt that way while playing, though, and I wonder if the opposite could have been true. If I knew that walking into a level called Nowhere was a direct callout to Silent Hill 2, would that have enhanced my appreciation, or would it have distracted me?
Those horror conventions are not much of a barrier either. There are elements of the game that are scary or unnerving—the soundscape of screams and stamping metal feet, the dark corridors where zombie androids lurk, the inventory that only lets you hold 6 items at a time—but these never feel overwhelming.
Terrors and dread are not the story of the game. Instead, SIGNALIS tells a story about two women who are trying to reunite across the stars. And while there are monsters, known and unknown, that get in the way, I felt compelled to overcome them, just so one character could keep her promise to another. If you keep pushing, and you play on after the game tries to tell you it’s over, it turns out that the love shared by these two space lesbians is strong enough to shatter reality.
Maybe that is the most frightening thing the game has to say.
Rusted Moss / Faxdoc, Sunnydaze, Happy squared / April 11, 2023
I heard this game was a Metroidvania with a cool grappling hook, and playing it taught me that those two things do not automatically make a game I want to play to completion. Also, the grappling hook was not that cool.
F.I.S.T. / TiGAMES / September 7, 2021
Another Metroidvania, this one where you play as a rabbit with a giant robot arm. This one was actually really fun, I just got pulled away to other games.
Darkest Dungeon II / Red Hook Studios / May 8, 2023
After 2021, I wrote of Darkest Dungeon II’s early access release:
This game isn’t finished yet. I hope I’ll be more interested in playing it when it is.
Well, it’s done now, and the finished release did not hold my interest, but I don’t lay that fully at the feet of the game. Compare its release date to the next game on this list and you can see part of the reason I only spent a few hours guiding my stagecoach toward the mountain.
And yet, when faced with the choice of playing Darkest Dungeon II or another game—even once the initial period of Zelda hype had passed over—I routinely chose to play other games.
I think part of the issue is that, as a roguelike, this game asks for an awkward time commitment. If you mount a successful attempt and make it to the mountain, you’ve probably spent 3 hours on the dismal road to ruin. It feels like a steep bill when compared to some of my other favorite roguelikes—30 minutes for a (leisurely) run of Hades, an hour and change for Risk of Rain 2 or Slay the Spire. Hell, you can run 3 or 4 dungeons in the first Darkest Dungeon and feel accomplished after a 2-hour session.
Sure, you can stop at any point, and the inn at the end of each act (a full run has 3 acts plus a finale) might be the right time for a break, but you only get a payout at the end of your run, win or lose.
This is the only barrier I can think of keeping me from engaging with DDII. The art style, the animations, the music, the combat, the Wayne June—everything else makes for a game I should enjoy just as much as the first one.
I hope I’ll find a way through that barrier at some point and give this game its due.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom / Nintendo / May 12, 2023
In most open world games, I don’t fast travel if I can avoid it.
It was The Witcher III that taught me this. Riding across Velen or the outskirts of Novigrad, it isn’t long before your map is covered in signposts that you can use to warp from place to place.
But the most interesting things happen between those fast travel points, either on the road or just off of it. That’s how you stumble upon the guy pulling an oxcart full of corpses who is mysteriously immune to the plague. Or the royal gryphon darkening the skies over a dusk-lit ridge. Or the place of power thrumming within a shaded copse.
This isn’t to say that the developers don’t intend for players to use fast travel. It’s obvious that they do, especially later in the game when your objectives are farther apart and you’ve already been up and down the map several times over.
In Tears of the Kingdom, it feels like you’re intended to fast travel from the very beginning.
As a sequel to Breath of the Wild, the map of Hyrule has undergone a transformation. Following a great upheaval, groups of islands appear floating in the sky, and you spend the opening hours of the game on one of the largest of these archipelagos.
Once you make it down to the surface, there are different ways to get back into the sky. You can get launched out of a survey tower, you can swim up certain waterfalls, you can even build a flying machine (batteries not included).
There’s another layer, though—a whole kingdom beneath the surface. You’re given an early quest to scout out one of the many chasms that have opened up across the land, and when you jump into one, you fall.
And you fall.
And you continue falling, long after sunlight has given up on reaching the bottom.
The depths are almost pelagic in nature. Motes of dust float in whatever scarce light you can provide, suspended in the air as if by unseen eddies. There are giant ferns and fungal trees that tower overhead. And the ground you walk on has the texture of bleached coral. Roots suffused with a corrupting gloom stretch out for miles, tendrils of an ancient threat that has once again awakened.
And from the bottom of the chasm, it seems for all the world like the simplest and best way to return to the surface is to take out your magical tablet and pick a warp point somewhere topside. That’s what I did after my first excursion underground, eager as I was to follow some other adventuring urge.
Before long, I found myself in the depths once more, and that’s when I got curious. Was there another way out of here? Did I really have to use fast travel?
After some thorough exploration, I found answers. There are 3 ways to get yourself out of that hole.
The first is the least reliable. Similar to the sky islands, you can build a vehicle to traverse the chasms in reverse. I’ve found the most success with rocket-powered hot air balloons, but getting the alignment right can be tricky.
The second way out is the most dangerous. If you know where to wait, and you’re patient, you will eventually encounter one of three dragon spirits. With ingenuity, you can land on their back and climb aboard, riding them up to the surface. None of the dragons are hostile, but they’re all hazardous to approach due to their auras. Dinraal superheats the air around her, Farosh charges the atmosphere with electricity, and Naydra causes temperatures to plummet well below freezing. You would need the proper gear to survive the trip.
Which brings me to the final way out: Ascension.
In Tears of the Kingdom, Link has inherited blessed powers from a borrowed right arm. One of these is the power to Ascend. In the right conditions, he can permeate any ceiling and swim through solid matter until he pops out the other side. For this to work, Link has to be able to reach the ceiling, and the roof of the cavernous depths is usually hundreds of feet overhead.
But there’s still a way. If you’re diligent about exploring, you will find what I’ve taken to calling Ascension Pillars. These structures look like stone gazebos, the roofs of which touch the top of the caverns. They’re spread out across the depths with clear intention, granting one with the power to Ascend a straight shot to the surface. Via this route, you might even find new points of interest on the surface. Maybe you’ll pop out in an abandoned lab, or in a mountain hot spring, or overlooking a flame gleeok that guards a great bridge of old.
While playing Tears of the Kingdom, I haven’t fast traveled since my first trip into the dark below. That gives me a particular satisfaction, best summarized by the words that came out of my mouth after finding my first Ascension Pillar, just as I had uttered them after a dozen other discoveries made while playing these games:
“They thought of that.”
Valheim / Iron Gate Studio / February 2, 2021
My friends and I checked back in with this game last summer, and I really like what they’ve added. They’re working on another big update, so I reckon this one will make the 2024 list, too.
Baldur’s Gate III / Larian Studios / August 3, 2023
What should I say about one of the best games I’ve ever played?
Too many things, in all honesty. So let me tell you just one of the stories from my first time playing through the game.
I was playing as a blue dragonborn named Raijil who had rejected his family, a clan of some nobility, to live as a monk. This was a recent change for him, so he struggled often in the early days of the adventure.
His training in the monastic traditions had been interrupted, so the true meaning of balance was lost on him—did the masters mean balance between right and wrong, between his emotions, or between all things?
He would regularly get called out for parroting some koan that he had heard at the monastery without understanding its deeper meaning or how it might apply to the situation in front of him.
Detachment from the material was another new concept, and he was used to having stuff, so why shouldn’t he pick up every item that wasn’t nailed down?
He at least didn’t have trouble finding the right side of the conflict he found himself thrust into. The choice between becoming an Illithid thrall or searching for a way to avoid that fate is a no-brainer.
But it wasn’t until arriving at a crossroads—not his own, but another character’s—that Raijil caught a glimpse of enlightenment.
Deep in the Gauntlet of Shar, down at the bottom of a swirling vortex of screams within the Shadowfell, my party confronted a necromancer. Negotiations broke down immediately—this was not one of the rare good necromancers. He raised more than a dozen skeletons, bringing them to bear against my party of 4.
But Raijil is quick on his feet. He acted without hesitation, sprinting over to the enemy mage and connecting with a well-placed palm strike. The necromancer tumbled backward off the cliff, never to be seen again.
Dusting off his hands, Raijil turned. To his horror, he realized the battle was not over. The skeletons were still attacking—and two of them that towered above the rest had taken advantage of Raijil breaking away from the party, shoving two of his companions off the ledge, sending them to the same terrible fate as the necromancer.
Fear did not grip Raijil’s heart, nor rage, nor despair. Instead, he untethered himself. Embraced the void. And so emptied, he became the perfect storm—his steps thunder, his fists lightning.
One of my companions was still alive, locked in combat with a single skeleton archer. In the time that it took him to best that cadaver, Raijil disassembled the enemy horde. He led the skeletons to one side of the arena and then leapt to the other side in a single bound, tossing bombs and unleashing scrollbound magic. Skulls and vertebrae crunched beneath his fists, and when at last he exhaled, naught remained but bone dust.
In the aftermath, Raijil revived his fallen companions. One of them confronted a darkness within her heart and learned to trust herself, rejecting lies she had been told since her youth.
At the same time, a powerful new ally regained her resplendence and set off to rekindle the fires of resistance.
And Raijil remained quiet, reckoning with what he might be capable of were he to let go completely.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon / FromSoftware / August 24, 2023
I’m finding it particularly challenging to write about what is unquestionably one of my favorite games on this list, so instead I’m just going to ramble incoherently about mechs for a second.
It’s tough to put into words the feeling I got the first time I activated the assault boost on my armored core (AC). I’m not sure how to describe the look on my face after I barely managed to fend off a pack of helianthus machines. I can’t efficiently unpack the barrage of emotions invoked by the name “Balteus”—the pile of wrecked ACs with my name on it serves as a much clearer illustration.
There are no people in this game, but there are bodies. Others have judged that all mecha fiction is necessarily about the connection between the pilot and the giant robot that transposes their being onto a scale incomprehensible to our earthbound perspectives.
So, while the story unfolds like a radio play, its characters cloaked by callsigns and insignia, something is still felt within every drop of rocket fuel expended on a skyward thrust and in every casing ejected from a shotgun the size of a bus and through every atom sliced apart by a spinning laser sword.
That something is either joy or dread or power or purpose or control or emptiness. Or it’s all of them, a combined consequence of tethering ourselves to these things that tower overhead, a weapon that we couldn’t help but give our own shape.
The voices on the radio wax on about the choices before you. They say you alone have the will to choose.
The truth is that after you choose to get in the robot, all other choices vanish. From then on, all that remains is your response to the words
“Activating combat mode.”
COCOON / Geometric Interactive / September 29, 2023
This puzzle game was made by some of the people who worked on Limbo and INSIDE, the latter of which I consider a perfect video game.
I don’t like employing schlocky words like “mind-bending,” but I think that’s an apt descriptor for the puzzles in COCOON, which treats its alien worlds like a matryoshka. The art direction plays a big part in that, as does the music. Actually, the way they did the music here is my favorite part of the game.
Many games will give you a jingle after you’ve solved a puzzle. COCOON’s music reacts while you’re still trying to resolve your present predicament. When you take a step in the right direction, the synths get excited, beginning a steady crescendo until you’re past that obstacle and onto the next. It’s a clever bit of payoff that can also offer a sonic hint if you’re not sure what you should be doing.
Laika: Aged Through Blood / Brainwash Gang / October 19, 2023
The title sequence of this game had me wanting to play it to completion in one sitting. Instead, I got distracted and set it to the side. It’s a cool game, though, and I’d like to find time to finish it.
Puzzmo / Orta Therox and Zach Gage / October 16, 2023
Zach Gage has made this list several years running with games like Good Sudoku and Knotwords. It feels inevitable that he would be one of the names behind a platform that is basically “the puzzle section of a newspaper without the rest of the paper—you’re welcome.”
Slay the Spire / Mega Crit Games / November 14, 2017
Had to pick this game back up to get some inspiration for a D&D character. Climbed up a few more ascensions on each character as a result.
Risk of Rain Returns / Hopoo Games / November 8, 2023
Despite loving the sequel, I had never played the original Risk of Rain. This is that game remade with some modern quality of life updates. It’s fun.
But it’s damn hard.
And ultimately, it’s fun and hard in ways that are not quite as interesting to me as Risk of Rain 2.
I’m always grateful for more excuses to listen to Chris Christodolou’s music, though.
Chants of Sennaar / Rundisc / September 5, 2023
There’s a common icebreaker along the lines of “What media property/memory/other thing do you wish you could experience again for the first time?”
If you’ve ever thought learning how to read again would be fun, you should play Chants of Sennaar.
Or go learn an actual foreign language, I suppose. We’ve all gotta decide on the best use of our time.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen / Capcom / April 23, 2013
Dark Souls was released in 2011, several months before the original version of this game came out and 2 years before the Dark Arisen expanded version. There’s likely a branched reality where the industry spent the next decade chasing Dragon’s Dogma instead of the Souls series.
It’s a pity that it took me so long to get to it because I could have been one of the true Dragon’s Dogma sickos that have been whispering about “the best 7/10 game you will ever play” for years now.
This is a game that was made for me, the guy who avoids fast travel. It’s a game where the day/night cycle matters because when the sun goes down it gets dark. This game has an encumbrance system so punishing that it’s only outmatched by Death Stranding, a.k.a. Encumbrance: The Video Game.
Dragon’s Dogma wants to tell you to go on a quest to kill a gryphon, send you through mountains and badlands, battling marauders and driving winds just to get to the ruins where the gryphon nests, and then when you barely succeed in besting the beast, you have to walk all the way back to town half a world away.
(Or that was the intent prior to Dark Arisen, which vastly relaxed the restrictions on fast travel.)
All that inconvenience, all that friction, that’s the point of Dragon’s Dogma. Some people will rub up against it and get burned. For me, I see the makings of a campfire that’s perfect for telling stories around.
And that’s why I’m as excited as I am for the sequel. Because the thought of a game with this kind of vision that actually has a budget feels almost too good to be true.
No Man’s Sky / Hello Games / August 9, 2016
In the years since its release, No Man’s Sky has followed a path similar to many other games that release in half-baked condition (see: Destiny). Open communication leads to recalibrated expectations leads to quality updates and improvements leads to people saying “Hey, this game is good now.”
They were already saying that about No Man’s Sky 6 or 7 years ago, and Hello Games has continued to add and adjust and refine, to the point that now people say “Hey, this game is great.”
I tried it out over the holidays, and I didn’t have much trouble touching several different games within the game that I would be interested in playing on their own.
I could focus on building and expanding a mining base.
I could purchase, manage, and expand a fleet of space freighters.
I could hire myself out as an ace mercenary, defending those freighters against pirates.
I could prioritize research, traveling to far flung planets and star systems to discover new flora, fauna, and minerals.
I could even run a salvage operation, seeking out derelict spacecraft, repairing them, and flipping them for a big payday.
Some of these are overlapping experiences, but all of them are in there, right alongside an overarching objective to reach the center of the galaxy and uncover the secrets of the universe. Y’know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
And it’s honestly a bit overwhelming. Even if I boot up the game intent on doing one particular thing, it’s so easy to get tugged in other directions that I often find myself standing still.
Fortunately, the galaxy that Hello Games has made is a pretty good one to just hang out in.
Final Thoughts
Let’s wrap this up with some stream of consciousness.
I wonder with some regularity whether I’ve become a worse version of myself in the wake of the pandemic.
Am I more of a recluse? More of a consumer? More averse to risk?
I think it was easy to learn the wrong lessons from lockdown. Imposed isolation lends itself more to mindlessness than mindfulness.
Maybe “worse” is the wrong word, but it felt like I had some momentum prior to 2020, and I’ve since struggled to regain my impetus.
My suspicion is that I’m not alone here, and we will for some time be unraveling all of the ways that the pandemic—and the way we responded to it—has made everything, subtly or not, just so much shittier.
I don’t hesitate nearly as much to say that the pandemic has contributed to our current “economic context,” primarily by making certain C-suite people much stupider.
As an example, let’s consider the arc of the games industry from 2020 until now.
Most of a society is locked inside for the better part of a year. While movie theaters and local businesses disappear one after another, an interactive entertainment medium that is accessible to anyone with a smartphone sees a boom.
From their cushy perches in the finance office, the money people run their tongues across their teeth while they watch the line go up.
“This will continue,” they say. “It must continue.” They will observe the bounty reaped by a once-in-a-lifetime societal disaster and declare that this number be doubled, from here until the end of time.
The thing about aspiring to unmitigated growth is that there are a hell of a lot of things that can mitigate business, such as when people are collectively granted the choice to go back outside.
(To be clear, this is an aggressive simplification of what’s happening here. There are other contributing factors like interest rates and the ballooning cost of game development at play, and these are more difficult to address. The push for uncontrolled, unsustainable growth is simply the most pernicious issue in my view, and there’s a useful name for that kind of growth: In another context, we would call it cancer.)
I’ve been over this, so I won’t belabor the point again. The money people got it wrong, which means game developers have to lose their jobs.
And they have, by the thousand.
In a spree of mass layoffs that has garnered its own Wikipedia page, an estimated 18,000 people have lost their jobs since January 2023. I’ve already talked about Bungie, but that isn’t the only studio to have seen losses on this list.
Following the $70-billion merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, the team making Overwatch 2 saw significant cuts to their staff.
Scavengers, the developer of Season: A Letter to the Future, laid off more than half of their team after the game underperformed.
Larian is an independent studio. They’re privately owned by someone who believes in sustainable growth. But many of the people from Wizards of the Coast, who Larian worked on Baldur’s Gate III with, were laid off as part of a restructuring at Hasbro.
And in the past several weeks, Nintendo announced a reorganization of their North American QA division, resulting in scores of testers not having their contracts renewed.
That last one underscores how little we understand the full extent of the damage. Layoffs get reported (sometimes), but it’s harder to see when contracts aren’t extended or when a return-to-office mandate forces someone to resign.
Reading over this list, I’ve talked about some games released in the past year that are all-timers for me, and 2024 already has some contenders, too.
It isn’t a huge leap to say the full impact of these layoffs probably hasn’t hit the storefront yet.
The pandemic knocked me down, but I have been trying to get back up. I’m taking small steps. Trying to stabilize my exercise routine. Trying to travel more. Trying to—stop me if you’ve heard this—write more.
I see my friends also striving to self-correct, and their efforts inspire me to try harder. I want to be better.
What does that look like on a larger scale? How does an industry made possible by creatives recover from grievous wounds at the hands of a rapacious, craven sect of executives?
To my eyes and ears, there are plenty of people who still want to make video games. I just think they’re going to have to figure out a different way to make them.
subjunctivitis 