I can think of no better way to kick off The Bonus World’s Game of the Year extravaganza than by talking about games that explicitly did not release this calendar year. I’ve played a lot of stuff this year and not all of it came out in 2024, let alone this century, so I’d like to highlight some of them here.
Aside from the Honorable Mention below, this list is in no particular order. All of these games are excellent, and some of them will even get their due elsewhere.
Honorable Mention – Chants of Sennaar
I am 100% certain that you will be hearing me talk about Chants of Sennaar in some other list this year, so I won’t harp on it too much right now. This is an incredible puzzle game focused on decoding and translating languages. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever played and I cannot recommend it enough.
The Case of the Golden Idol
2024 was the year that I truly fell in love with puzzle-solving games, and The Case of the Golden Idol is one of the main reasons why. It is a game about deductive reasoning that requires you to really take in your environment, identifying who and what is in each scene along with the context of those elements.
What really clicked with me in hindsight is how The Case of the Golden Idol was both presented and played. It’s a unique spin on traditional point-and-click adventure games that I described in more detail back in the October Spotlight:
It isn’t clear who or what you play as in The Case of the Golden Idol, but you inhabit some sort of third party spectator who arrives at the moment of, or shortly after a grizzly murder has taken place. Through a point-and-click interface, you explore each heinous tableau, rooting around pockets, cupboards, and trashcans for pieces of information that can steer you towards identifying who people are, who was present, and what motives existed. At the end of each level you input your assumptions into a Mad-Libs-styled notepad, filling out the story with its key figures, items and whatever other relevant information is needed.
I don’t want to spoil anything because the story is kind of the whole game, so you’ll have to forgive the vague platitudes. But trust me when I say that The Case of the Golden Idol is a remarkable puzzler in the same vein as another beloved deduction-based game, The Return of the Obra Din. Maybe keep a notebook handy though, you’ll probably need it.
Super Mario World
It only took me three decades, but on some idle Tuesday in March I finally whipped Bowser’s ass on my own instead of relying on my older sister to do it for me. I genuinely forgot how much of this game we would skip on a regular basis, usually opting for the Star Road route directly to Bowser’s soon-to-be graveside. I think I put it quite eloquently when I said:
I stomped all of his children’s collective asses and then stomped his too. It was the first time I had ever personally beaten Super Mario World, and it was absolutely worth the 3 or 4 hours it took. Playing it on the Switch was a nice bonus too because I was able to make use of save states and the rewind feature a few times. Put an asterisk next to my accomplishment if you need to, but I could not care less. I beat Super Mario World and killed Bowser and his whole family. I am a hero.
Mamma-mia, this game is a masterpiece.
Baldur’s Gate 3
They said it couldn’t be done. They said there was no way he could find a way to give Baldur’s Gate 3 some sort of award a year after it was released. Not only did this absolute gem of a game win last year’s GOTY (spoilers I guess?), but apparently I honored it back in 2020 when it was still in early access. Who knew?
But that’s how fantastic this game is. I still think about it fondly, months after finally uninstalling it, freeing up the 6 petabytes worth of data it occupied. I’ve said my piece about this game over and over again, and I’ve also lauded it as the game that finally made me like CRPGs, which in retrospect isn’t really true.
Since being swept up in its splendor and eventually moving on, I’ve tried other games of its ilk. I think I’ve come to the realization that I still don’t like this genre of game. I don’t have the patience for any of these games. I don’t want to drink the right potions, or spec out my characters to make a cohesive team composition, or attempt to set up some wild chain reaction of events I know isn’t going to work because I planned it. I just don’t enjoy that stuff.
But in Baldur’s Gate 3 and only in Baldur’s Gate 3, I fucking love doing that stuff. I see people creaming their jeans over Path of Exile, Pillars of Eternity and the Divinity games, and I’m real happy for them, but I just want to play this game with these characters, and this story with its writing, and not engage with this genre in any other form until its inevitable sequel.
Whether it’s a lack of patience or general lack of brain power, I do not enjoy these kinds of games — EXCEPT for Baldur’s Gate 3, which is one of the best video games of all time.
That’s day one of Game of the Year in the books. Come back tomorrow for another list of games. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.
For the month of March, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.
Games
Minecraft
Yeah, I’m confused about this one too. Earlier this month, my friends and I were looking for something we could all play together when someone jokingly mentioned Minecraft. Pushing past the joke, a few of us actually committed and rented a persistent server that we could just log into whenever we liked. It all happened so fast.
Admittedly, I didn’t play as much as my friends do, so it was a nice way to play something together without holding them back from progressing in any meaningful way. While they were laser-focused on hollowing out the earth and invading other planes of existence, I played the role of a wandering cartographer.
It was really nice to have a sort of asymmetrical, communal game in my back pocket that weirdly hearkened back to my MMO days nearly two decades ago. Typing that last bit hurt me a lot, but my point still stands: Minecraft was a fun, sometimes infuriating, sometimes emotionally challenging experience that I was able to share with my friends. And if I happened to leave a bunch of signs all around the world calling any potential readers a jabroni, then so be it.
The staying power of Minecraft however, wasn’t really there for me. You can only do so much exploring in that game before you actually have to hit the mines and collect a bunch of resources so you can defend yourself from the seemingly endless amount of enemies that want to kill you. So eventually I played less and less of Minecraft until I didn’t play anymore. It was a short yet fun experience, but I’ve gotten my fill of Minecraft for the time being.
Super Mario World
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually played Super Mario World, but for some reason the spirit moved me this month and compelled me to dive back into this 30+ year old game. Turns out that Super Mario World is still an incredible platformer that has way more puzzle solving in it than I remember, although it’s not surprising considering I’ve never technically beaten the game.
In reality it was my big sister was the one who beat Bowser’s ass into a bloody pulp back in the 90s, and she was kind enough to bring me along for the ride. Since then I’ve played Super Mario World plenty of times but always bounced off of it during the Forest of Illusion set of levels. For the uninitiated, those levels all have secret exits but only one of them will actually let you progress in the game (I think). Knowing that, I was able to make pretty short work of this world that would routinely stop my progress in its tracks. Once that hurdle was cleared, it was a straight shot to Bowser’s house where I could whoop his ass in the same way I did with his children.
And that’s exactly what happened. I stomped all of his children’s collective asses and then stomped his too. It was the first time I had ever personally beaten Super Mario World, and it was absolutely worth the 3 or 4 hours it took. Playing it on the Switch was a nice bonus too because I was able to make use of save states and the rewind feature a few times. Put an asterisk next to my accomplishment if you need to, but I could not care less. I beat Super Mario World and killed Bowser and his whole family. I am a hero.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
In anticipation of the impending sequel, I decided to dip my toes into Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen to see what all the fuss was about. I had tried the original Dragon’s Dogma around the time of its initial release but was pretty immediately rebuffed by it. While I can’t say that I spent drastically more time with Dark Arisen this time around, I did finally understand what all the hubbub was about. More importantly, it cemented my desire to try out Dragon’s Dogma 2.
My biggest hurdle with Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was just how poorly it aged. Coming to the game in 2024, it isn’t a great game to look at or even interact with. Although to be fair, I don’t think many of the games from the 360/PS3 era particularly aged well. From it’s drab looking color palette comprised exclusively of browns and grays, which was the style at the time, to its incredibly archaic and unfriendly menus, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is undeniably a product of its time.
Looking beyond aesthetics, archaic menus, and unfriendly mechanics, there’s a really fascinating action-RPG to engage with in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. I played a few hours of it before I decided to save my RPG bandwidth for when Dragon’s Dogma 2 releases — and if the previews are any indication, then I’ve made the right choice.
PowerWash Simulator
I’m fairly certain I’ve spoken about PowerWash Simulator before, extolling its meditative and mindless gameplay. Every so often I’ll check back in with the game when some significant piece of DLC is released, and this time around it was some Warhammer themed DLC that got me back into the cleaning spirit.
To be clear, I have never played Warhammer in any of its forms but I am aware of its existence and the many memes around it, so clearly I was the target audience for this piece of DLC. Turns out there’s a lot of gunk in the Warhammer universe, and it’s just as fun to blast that brand of gunk with my water gun as much as any other kind of gunk.
There’s some mechs, tanks and other vehicles of destruction that need a good rinse, and while it’s all just as fun as any of the other levels in the game, there seemed to be a lot more nooks and crannies that required more effort to clean than I was expecting. But yeah, if you’re into Warhammer and PowerWash Simulator, this is a home-run.
Immortals of Aveum
I’ll be honest with you, I only picked up Immortals of Aveum because it was 8 dollars and I wanted to play an FPS. Now, I could have sworn that there would be guns in this particular game, but it turns out that in this shooter you’re mostly firing off spells instead of a more conventional form of ammunition.
In Immortals of Aveum, you play as a guy who is swept up into this magic war because the bad guys killed his friends and/or family. He was going to die too but in a moment of desperation discovered that his magic was better than the magic a layman could cast, which led to a whole “chosen one” thing that wasn’t particularly exciting. I did think that the setting was kind of cool, especially the opening settlement which consisted of massive, tiered, interconnected city blocks that were built onto the support pillars of a gigantic bridge.
Aside from some cool designs though, I haven’t really felt compelled to press on with the game. The shooting is fine on its own but it’s in service of a loot system that feels kind of bolted onto the experience that I never felt emboldened to understand, let alone engage with. Immortals of Aveum also didn’t run that great on the Xbox Series X which was a turn-off. The frame rate was hit or miss when things started popping off and the textures looked kind of grimy and popped-in a bit too much for my taste.
I’m sure this game has its fans, but Immortals of Aveum just wasn’t for me.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Earlier in the month I took a chance and dabbled with Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen and found it to be an engaging, albeit obtuse game that someone with a lot more patience than I had could enjoy. It served as a nice table setting for the sequel, and I decided not to burn all of my RPG bandwidth for the month on a game that was nearly 15 years old. Stupidly, I thought that Dragon’s Dogma 2 would be a more modernized entry in this long dormant series, ironing out some of the rough edges of its predecessor while retaining its obscure charm. I was incorrect.
I won’t belabor the point: Dragon’s Dogma 2 is too punishing for me. It isn’t punishing like a Dark Souls game is punishing, rather, there’s just a lot of weirdly archaic decisions being made that make it feel more like busy work than a rewarding gameplay experience. Fast travel is by design a chore, there’s no enemy lock on or dodge mechanic to speak of, just about everything in the open world wants to kill you, making those fast-travel-less treks across the landscape even more tedious, the early quests are mostly uninteresting and repetitive, and there’s not one accessibility or difficulty setting to speak of that might alleviate some of my frustrations.
I think the big issue for me with Dragon’s Dogma 2 comes down to an ideological difference with what I want from games I play and what this game is. Dragon’s Dogma 2 wants its world to feel treacherous and make you feel like you’re surviving in a hostile environment where every interaction is dynamic and chaotic. By all accounts, it absolutely nails what it’s going for. I mean this is the most positive way I can, but everything in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a hassle, and some people will read that and be stoked about playing this challenging and meandering game, while others like myself will just not have the patience for it.
I just want to feel powerful in this fantastical world without having to struggle my way through it. Often times it feels like Dragon’s Dogma 2 is so singularly focused on maintaining immersion, that any sort of modern game accessibility or comfort that is counter that immersive vision is cast to the side. This game is very much about the journey rather than the destination, but the fact that the journey is so arduous makes for a game I don’t want to play.
The best way to convey how divisive this game will be, is probably with a story that will either infuriate you or excite you. Early on, there’s a mission to travel around the map and clear out some monster encampments in the vicinity of the first city you visit, which is standard fantasy quest stuff. I loaded up, gathered my crew and proudly marched out the city at dawn’s light, expecting some resistance here and there, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
I made it maybe 500 feet outside of the walls of the city when I spotted a gang of goblins who were fighting some roving wolves. Shockingly, they all turned their focus towards my party and I and charged at me. But it was just wolves and goblins, “not a problem,” I thought. During the skirmish, I noticed a lot of my party members were going down for some reason, which is when I quickly discovered that a fucking griffon decided to swoop down and join in the fracas. On one hand it was really cool to see how dynamically Dragon’s Dogma 2 handled all of this, but on the other hand it was my first time setting out into the open world by myself and I nearly got one-shot by this angry bird in full view of some city guards who did nothing to help. I ultimately had to beat feet and hoof it back into the city with my main pawn on my shoulder. The ones that I summoned in from the internet — they’re in a better place now — or the griffon’s stomach to be more accurate.
It’s nice that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is being hailed as a big success among fans of series and masochism in general, but would it have been too much to ask for just a difficulty slider or a mode called, “I’m old and don’t have patience for this but very much want to experience some of your very pretty looking RPG.” I’m bellyaching and I realize that. I don’t even think that I’d say Dragon’s Dogma 2 is too difficult for me, but it’s a little too hardcore for me. Honestly, I really like a lot of what Dragon’s Dogma 2 is doing on paper, I just wish it was a little more welcoming.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
The Halo franchise holds a very special place in my heart. For many people my age, they were the go-to console multiplayer games for all of my friends whether we were in person or online. While the franchise may have fallen of the tracks at some point, the newer games haven’t undone my affection for the original trilogy and its spinoffs. That’s why it was easy to agree to a coop campaign through Halo: The Master Chief Collection with a friend of mine.
Instead of playing them in order of the stories, we just dove into Halo: Combat Evolved and figured we’d get to Halo: Reach at some point. We’ve made alarmingly little progress through that game for a handful of reasons, chief among them being how little direction you’re given. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think Halo: CE aged particularly well. Sure the pistol is a lot of fun, but every level we’ve played so far has been a meandering nightmare filled with identical hallways and repetitive encounters. I forgot just how much of that game was about clearing enemies out in an area and waiting for the story to happen at you. I guess that’s a reductive way of describing most shooters, but in Halo: CE, most of the time we’d be wondering what our next objective was, only to have to track down an alien that was caught on some geometry in the distance before we’d get any guidance on our next steps.
But shit, it’s still Halo, and Halo is still really good. I’m excited to dive back into the campaign and possibly dabble in some classic multiplayer. Halo is a very special series, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a phenomenal trip down memory lane.
Gato Roboto
Gato Roboto is a challenging, bite-sized, pixelly search-action game where you play as a cat that’s piloting mech suit. I had a lot of fun with this game even if there were more than a few instances where I felt under powered or like the game was being a bit unfair, but it was nothing that stopped me in my tracks. I would offer this advice to potential players of Gato Roboto: don’t just skip through the dialogue like I did. Doing that led to me wandering around aimlessly for a good hour or so in search of my next objective because there’s no good way to get that exposition again. Otherwise, I had a really nice time with Gato Roboto, and I think fans of search-action games with a heavier emphasis on the ‘action’ part will enjoy it too.
Trombone Champ
There isn’t much to say about Trombone Champ except that it’s one of the most delightfully stupid games I’ve played this year. At its core, Trombone Champ is basically Guitar Hero but with a trombone, except that no matter how good you actually are at the game, the songs will always sound ridiculous. It’s a hilarious goof that’s executed perfectly.
Watch List
The Bear
The Bear is an extremely intense show that did its best to push my partner and I away with its first few episodes. It’s a chaotic glimpse into the life of a world-class chef who returns home to run his late brother’s greasy spoon of a restaurant. The employees are resistant to change and stymie his every effort to turn his money pit into something worth a damn.
Luckily, The Bear did not push us away and we were treated to some of the best television I’ve watched in quite some time. Watching the characters grow and regress in equal measure, being won over by seemingly irredeemable figures, and feeling my own heart rate accelerate as shouting voices overlapped one-another in what I can only describe as some of the most authentic dialogue ever written or delivered, all made for an unforgettable viewing experience.
I didn’t think I enjoyed The Bear as much as I did, but when I sat down to write this, nothing but positive thoughts came to mind. It has maybe one or two episodes that missed the mark for me, but overall I cannot recommend The Bear enough.
American Ninja Warrior
I was surprised to find that I enjoyed watching American Ninja Warrior as much as I did, especially considering that when I used to watch old Ninja Warrior episodes on G4TV back in the day, it was always a signal to change the channel because the video game stuff was over. But shit, American Ninja Warrior is kind of a blast to watch.
You get to see all of these people in peak physical condition and terrible gimmicks, tackle an obstacle course devised by what I can only describe as a very hateful person. The leaping, climbing, jumping and everything else in between is just crazy to watch. I’ll admit that it doesn’t feel great to watch American Ninja Warrior, and hear things like, “they just don’t have the core strength needed for that one,” come out of my mouth while I’m balancing a pizza on my stomach cause the table is too far away, but that’s a me problem.
I will say that I found it really weird that a large portion of the contestants seem to be outwardly religious folks. There must be a page in the bible or some Mormon proverb that says something like, “and lo’ my child, get a shredded core so thou might overcome the most righteous set of obstacles in Las Vegas, Nevada for a shot at one million dollars,” but apparently a lot of other people did and they’re competing in American Ninja Warrior.
Game Changers
I’ve had a Dropout subscription for years exclusively because of my love for Dimension 20, one of the best TTRPG actual play shows around. Only recently, spurred on from a series of random comments on the internet extolling the value and quality of the content on the service, did I actually try and watch something not RPG related. That’s where Game Changer comes in.
Game Changer is a game show where the game is different from episode to episode and the players have to figure out what the game and its rules are in order to win it. As the host, Sam Reich says at the beginning of every episode, “the only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning.” Whether it’s mimicking increasingly more absurd noises, being trapped in an escape room, playing a knock-off version of survivor or engaging in the most brutal version of Simon Says ever, just about every episode of Game Changer is gold.
Listening Party
Albums & Artists
Instead of writing a whole thing for each artist or album I’m listening to, here’s just an unorganized list of notable albums I’ve been jamming on.
I Am The Avalanche – I Am The Avalanche
Mean Everything to Nothing – Manchester Orchestra
Reconstruction Site – The Weakerthans
Enema of the State – Blink 182
The Rest
The Songs We Sang
I wrote a whole thing about the band Brand New that I’m pretty proud of. It’s an article about a band that heavily influenced me at one point, but no longer holds that same place of reverence for one reason or another. It was a pretty emotional write up and I encourage you to check it out.
Piranesi
I finished up Piranesi this month and I’m delighted to report that it’s a very good book that managed to catch me off-guard with its ending. Without spoiling anything, there is a moment in Piranesi where it got really captivating and held my attention for the next 100 or so pages, right up until the ending.
Piranesi isn’t a flawless book by any means though. I found the second chapter to be a really long slog that was essential in hindsight, but was very slow in comparison to the pace and events that immediately follow it. I also thought the ending was a little underwhelming primarily because of how rushed the final chapters felt. The climax of the story doesn’t really get a ton of breathing room before you’re ushered into the epilogue, but it’s still a very enjoyable read nonetheless.
Fantasticland
Described as a “modern take on Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale,” Fantasticland tells the story of the titular imaginary Florida-based theme park and the harrowing events that occurred within its walls after a massive hurricane cut it off from the rest of the world. Told through several interviews with the survivors, Fantasticland chronicles the series of events and communications breakdowns that explain how a theme park filled with roughly 300 employees devolved into absolute chaos
I like Fantasticland, but I did find some of the leaps in logic to justify the descent into madness that occurred a bit too farfetched at times. It’s entertaining in that it’s both thrilling and horrifying in places, but it is very much a work of fiction that embraces a fantastical kind of anarchy very early on and runs with it.
Regardless of how believable the premise is or not, it’s still an entertaining read. I found myself pretty engrossed in the escalation of events, partially because they were intriguing, and also partially because each interview effectively hypes up the same event for half of the book. It eventually got to the point where I got sick of hearing characters mention how impactful this one event was, without actually describing any of the things that happened until much later in the book. Despite all of that, I ultimately found Fantasticland to be an entertaining read.
News
Turns out Marty O’Donnell Sucks and Wants to be a Congressman
Who’s that finishing the fight against woke culture and rampant immigration issues? Well it’s former Halo and Destiny composer, Marty O’Donnell. Running on a platform of, you guessed it, “traditional family values” and securing the border from the “millions of people coming in,” Mr. O’Donnell will be trying to get that coveted congress seat in Nevada’s Third Congressional District. So why do I think Mr. O’Donnell sucks? Well there’s a line at the bottom of that article that says, “Whether he wins or not, O’Donnell said that he’ll vote for former president Donald Trump in November.” So, like, that’s a red flag.
Gamers Fear Diversity
That’s right, yet again gamers are all up in a tizzy over the perceived notion that a narrative design company, Sweet Baby Inc., is “ruining” games with forced diversity and identity politics. Unsurprisingly, they’re complete idiots and just want to be angry about something.
The reality here is that Sweet Baby Inc. helps make sense of narrative beats within a story as they relate to the characters and world. It’s not about injecting diversity into a project, but ensuring that if there’s a character who is part of a marginalized community, they are granted a level of authenticity and handled with the level of care you would expect.
I feel like we get one of these stories every month or so, and it’s never not exhausting. Representation and inclusivity are good things.
The Battlefront Collection Lands in the Sarlacc Pit
What an absolute bummer it is to hear that the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is a heaping pile of poorly optimized garbage that’s missing core features and content. What should have been a home run, feel-good moment for the series and the Star Wars license at large, turned out to be a tremendous letdown.
Larian is Done With Baldur’s Gate
While it’s sad that Baldur’s Gate 3won’t be getting any Larian-made DLC or sequels, it doesn’t necessarily mean that some other studio won’t step in and try to release an expansion for the game. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but Wizards of the Coast would be insane to not get someone to support this beloved game any further. I’ve personally never been so offended to see a company not try to milk more money out of me.
But consider the possibility of Larian making something else and what it would look like. In my heart of hearts, I’d like them to try making a Witcher-esque game that maintains the RPG bona-fides the studio is known for, with a type of combat I enjoy. Imagine what the Larian equivalent of Skyrim or Mass Effect could look like. It’s probably not what they’re going to do, but I can dream.
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of April with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
Before we dive into the meat of this post, I feel that a little housekeeping and contextualization couldn’t hurt. This is the Spotlight, a new feature I’m launching here on The Bonus World. It used to be that whenever I’d do anything tangentially related to my hobbies I’d find a way to turn it into a piece of content for this website. As time wore on however, I felt that impulse to transcribe any meandering thought into an article diminish significantly.
The Spotlight is effectively part newsletter and part blog post. It’s meant to encapsulate what’s been going on in the TBW orbit for the past month. Games played, articles read, movies watched, an so on and so forth, The Spotlight is intended to be the big bucket that everything falls into. So here’s the bucket, hopefully you enjoy digging through it.
Welcome to the Spotlight, a monthly recap of what’s been going on in my particular corner of nerdiness. Whether it’s a rundown of great or miserable gaming experiences I’ve had, movies or television shows that I found engrossing, books, albums — truly anything I can recommend, it’ll be here in the Spotlight. With this being the first one of these, I’m going to cover both January and February of 2024, mostly because at this point I can’t differentiate between the events of each respective month.
Let’s dive in.
Games
Baldur’s Gate 3
Starting with a big one, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be an obsession of mine, although I can feel its grip on me starting to loosen. I thought I did a pretty good job of combing through everything during my first playthrough of the game, but surprising no one else but me, it turns out there’s a lot of hidden goodies left to find and experience.
I will say though, I’m finding it a little hard to muster up the enthusiasm to progress the story forward. Knowing what the main beats are already and being overly familiar with the fights and locations I’ll have to trudge through doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement to experience that stuff again. It’s a tremendous game with great story, but I have so little interest in emptying the Goblin Camp or navigating the Shadowlands ever again.
What I am curious to see is how long until the Baldur’s Gate 3 community goes all Skyrim on me, and creates total conversion mods that reshape the bones of this spectacular game into a completely different experience altogether. It’s bound to happen at some point, especially considering that official mod support is on the way. I think putting BG3 on the shelf for now makes sense, even midway through my current playthrough, that way I won’t burn out on it completely and never return to it.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Back in the middle of January, I was looking for something I could really sink some time into that wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3. Coincidentally, I had heard pretty phenomenal things about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a search-action game that, by all accounts, was a “must play” for 2024. If you’re deeply into the search-action genre of games then there’s definitely something here for you, but I was left feeling a little cold from the whole experience.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown isn’t a bad game, it just never clicked with me. I found it overly punishing to a degree that really thwarted my willingness to explore and go off the beaten path. In some of the tighter platforming sections, I had a lot of difficulty getting the controls to feel responsive. I know I’m getting older, but I’m not ready to blame my failures at safely navigating enemy-free areas on my old bones and wavering reflexes.
I’m sure that I’m in the minority on this, but I just didn’t have a ton of fun with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It’s also worth mentioning, it’s basically a full priced game, retailing for 50 bucks which might be a little steep for what you’re getting, but that’s an entirely subjective matter and I get that, so your mileage may vary.
Fall of Porcupine
Fall of Porcupine is the most Night in the Woods-ass looking game since Night in the Woods. Talking animals? Check. An fun art style that makes you think that the subject matter couldn’t possibly be that dark? Check. A lot of talking to seemingly depressed anthropomorphic animals who seem to be trapped in the day-to-day drudgery of modern life? Yeah, that’s there too. It’s eerily similar to Night in the Woods, one of my favorite video games ever, except for that Fall of Porcupine isn’t very good.
Truly heartbreaking for me, but this game doesn’t hold a candle to Night in the Woods. But I can’t just keep comparing it to that game, so here’s what’s up with Fall of Porcupine. You play as a pigeon named Finley who recently moved into a small town named Porcupine where you just started your residency at the local hospital. The game is supposed to shed light on the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical turmoil our healthcare workers experience, which is absolutely a story I’d like to play through. But from the jump, the game exposes itself to be this overly verbose, meandering and listless experience, where nothing makes sense and everyone talks way too much about nothing.
I know that’s a weird criticism to drop on an adventure game, but everyone, especially your main character, talks way too much about everything. Not one ounce of subtext remains as Finley will tell you in excruciating detail his conflicted feelings about the offerings in a vending machine. It’s brutal and the game isn’t great about letting you quickly breeze through dialogue. Everyone pontificates about nothing for so much longer than they need to, and it’s such a slog.
I can’t even tell you if it gets better though, because after about an hour of playing Fall of Porcupine, I’ve reached a point in the game where I need to go to a certain part of the hospital, and every time I reach the first floor, the game crashes. I would love to know if Fall of Porcupine gets any better, and I would probably see it through regardless if it just could hold together long enough for me to do so. I guess I’ll never know.
A Little to the Left
To me, there’s nothing like a good “vibes” game. That doesn’t necessarily mean it makes you feel good, but the overall atmosphere and gameplay are just really pleasant. A Little to the Left is absolutely one of these games, even if it occasionally veers off into obtuse puzzle territory from time to time.
A Little to the Left is a puzzle game about organizing household items, sometimes to an excessive degree. The game starts simple enough, having you adjust some crooked picture frames and put some cat toys back into the wicker basket they came from. Several puzzles even have numerous ways to complete them, reflecting different organizational impulses, one of which involves a shelf of multicolored books of varying sizes. The game accounts for several gut reactions for organizing, and will accept organizing them by color or size. Once you complete the level it’ll let you know that there was another way to do it, so you can go back and tackle it again.
Things get a little weirder later into the game, where the granularity of the items you’re organizing is kind of odd — at least to me. Several levels involve you finding room for single thumbtacks, a gold tooth, and a handful of bent nails. That last one strikes me more as an opportunity for throwing it away rather than finding a way to fit it into your life. Like, when am I going to need a bent nail? A lot of the later levels feel nonsensical in relation to the overall organizing theme, because more often than not it’s a smokescreen for a pattern recognition puzzle dressed up as tidying your home.
All things considered, A Little to the Left is a chill puzzle game that isn’t too taxing. Despite being available on the Xbox, I’d suggest doing this one either on PC or mobile purely because interacting with this game via a controller isn’t spectacular.
Brotato
The first time I booted up Brotato I thought it was a stupid game with bad art. While my opinion of the art hasn’t really changed, I was eventually won over and pleasantly surprised to find a game that played into my love for Vampire Survivors without being a carbon copy. Just like Vampire Survivors, Brotato is an auto-shooter that’s focused on random drops that upgrade weapons and stats that you can then use to make your potato person more deadly and effective against the ever growing onslaught of weird alien enemies.
In Brotato, you start a run by picking a particular potato character from a list of well over 20 potatoes. Each of these guys has stat bonuses, specialties and in some cases, significant drawbacks. You’ll get guys with no armor but incredible health regeneration rates, or classes that can only use melee or explosive items. You pick your opening weapon and difficulty, and square off against your first wave of enemies. Once the wave ends you can buy new or upgrade weapons or bump up your stats if you’ve leveled up during the wave. That’s kind of it, really.
While Brotato can be tough, I found it to be an overall kinder and gentler game than Vampire Survivors is. While the art never won me over, the gameplay certainly did. If you like auto-shooters, maybe give this one a whirl.
Enshrouded
Enshrouded is a game that by all accounts I should not enjoy, but I really do. It’s one of those stick and rock games that has you punching trees to collect resources and what have you, but it quickly reveals itself to be something much different than your run-of-the-mill survival game.
The core conceit of Enshrouded is that the world is covered in these pockets of “shroud,” which is basically an area where zombies and other baddies are spawned from and hang out. These zones range in deadliness, with the earlier and easier versions just slowly ticking away at your health, while the worse ones will just insta-kill you the moment you step inside of it. How do you avoid that? Unsurprisingly, the answer is crafting. But in a shocking twist, it isn’t just crafting.
Enshrouded is a very lightweight survival game, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. The core idea is that if you engage with the survival mechanics, you’ll find it to be exclusively additive rather than punitive. For instance, drinking water just makes your stamina meter bigger, and food makes your health bar larger and helps with regeneration. Not engaging with that stuff isn’t a death sentence like it is in other survival games, it’s just something that only helps you.
Aside from the light survival mechanics it’s also a decently fun action game. Fighting enemies in these kinds of games is usually a slog, rewarding the items you bring into a fight more than your ability to fight. So if you crafted a better sword than your enemy, you can just hold the attack button and whittle away more of their health than they can of yours. Enshrouded is not like that. Combat feels good and weapons have some weight to them. There’s also a good dodge roll that allows you to tumble around your enemies like some sort of bootleg Dark Souls game.
I haven’t dug too deeply into Enshrouded just yet, but I’ve really enjoyed what little I’ve played of it thus far. It’s a game that’s interested in letting you explore the world and spec out your character however you want with a wide variety of skill upgrade paths for you to explore. A lot of survival games I’ve played in the past felt like they were more interested in me building a safe zone where I could be sustainable, whereas Enshrouded feels more about exploring and fighting bad guys.
Ultimately I think Enshrouded is great and I can’t wait to see how it evolves over the course of its early access period.
Warioware: Move It!
I don’t know about you, but I love myself a good Warioware game, and Warioware: Move It! is a very good one of those. There isn’t a ton to say about this one other than it’s got a lot of fun and sometimes inscrutable micro-games that come at you fast and furious.
My partner and I played the hell out of Warioware: Move It! for the few sessions it took us to completely annihilate it, save for a handful of micro-games that are, in my professional opinion, absolute poppycock. The fidelity of the Joy-Con motion controls aren’t great which led to a lot of my frustration, but they were good enough to get us through 90% of the game without issue.
Warioware: Move It! is great and if you’ve liked those games in the past, you’ll enjoy this one too. Oh, also I should mention, if your body is like mine and is constantly betraying you and making new and horrifying noises everyday, try to remember that the game is tracking the movement of the controllers and not your actual human bodies. There is a particular micro-game that was responsible for me throwing out my back, twice, because it encouraged me to dodge something as if I were Neo in the Matrix. So look out for that one.
Return to Grace
Return to Grace is a first-person adventure game that tells the story of a space traveling archaeologist named Adie as she goes out in search of the titular Grace, an AI god who went mysteriously went dormant centuries ago. In the most reductive terms, Return to Grace is a walking simulator that, for better or worse, has a lot to say.
That isn’t a knock on the actual content of the story of Return to Grace, which I think is pretty decent for what it’s worth, but quite literally, this 2 to 3 hour adventure game is mostly about listening to dialogue, whether it be in the form of the many bickering AI fragments of Grace you meet along the way, or the dozen or so audio logs you find throughout the retro-futurist facility you’re exploring.
Exploring the abandoned facility in Return to Grace feels a lot like how I would imagine it would feel to wander through a long abandoned Rapture from Bioshock. It’s unnerving being the only living soul walking around this gigantic (for lack of a better term), space station. This place served as the holy site for all of Grace’s followers from across the galaxy, but there isn’t a body or skeleton to be found. It’s the visual presentation of Return to Grace that really does a great job of engaging you with its mystery and really goes a long way to keeping you on the narrative hook.
But for all of my praise for Return to Grace, it has one massive shortcoming: it’s an absolute slog to play. You’d think that the story wasn’t well written or paced or something to that effect, but it’s none of those things that ultimately slow Return to Grace to a crawl, it’s outrageously stupid gameplay decisions that kill any momentum you start to build. In a game about walking, talking and inspecting things, you would expect to be able to do some of those actions simultaneously.
Truly the cardinal sin of Return to Grace is how often it stops you from doing anything until dialogue is over, and like I said earlier, this game is 99% talking. Those AI fragments of Grace have a lot to say, and bicker constantly. Should they be doing that while you want to open a door, that’s too bad for you. Even worse, if you decide to listen to an audio log, you’re not even allowed to move at all. You just have to stare at your fancy wristwatch as an audio file plays at you. It feels like the developers didn’t want you to miss any dialogue, so they ensured that you couldn’t by stifling your ability to move forward.
Return to Grace‘s biggest strength is in its storytelling, but it suffers dramatically in the act of telling you that story. Because of this weird limitation in your actions, this 2 hour game effectively doubles because your character is incapable of listening and opening a door at the same time. Even with that though, I still think Return to Grace is worth playing or at least watching a playthrough of. Sure, the story it’s telling walks through some well-worn territory, but it’s still effective in how it does it. Just know that this is a game that you cannot rush, no matter how hard you might try.
Role for Initiative
Updates from the Campaign
A little while back, my TTRPG group and I finally wrapped up our 2+ year long Eberron campaign that much to my dismay, didn’t have the narrative payoff I was hoping for. We were pressed for time and at a weird spot, so I had to basically cut a boss fight in half and rush through a lot of stuff — but we had fun nonetheless. Shortly after that campaign ended we pivoted into our latest one, took a long break because someone (me) had to move, and eventually picked back up.
I found that between moving and job searching, having to write an entire campaign from scratch was going to be a nonstarter, so I opted to run the very well-received anthology book, Keys From the Golden Vault, as a campaign. Me being me, however, I decided to write a whole-ass story to exist in parallel to the missions in the book. Honestly though, I’m finding this story to be infinitely more coherent and engaging than my previous one.
Additionally, I feel as if I’m doing a much better job of taking my hands off the wheel in this campaign than I did in our last one. At some point in our last campaign, I kind of wanted the story to end and was maybe a bit more obvious about which thing they could do would advance the story. I’m sure I’ll get around to telling some of the weird stories about our current campaign, like the time one our characters used a dead body to mulch their garden, or how one of my players is 2 for 2 on ending up in a jail during a mission, but now isn’t that time.
Watch List
Modern Family
At the time of writing this, I think my partner and I are pretty close to rounding the corner on the tenth season of Modern Family and begin its eleventh and final one. Despite being around for 11 seasons, this is the first time I’ve ever watched any of it, and to be honest, I think it’s a pretty funny yet flawed show that’s just endearing enough to keep me from tuning out completely.
My chief complaint lies in the fact that while there’s a lot of character growth that’s implied to be happening at the end of just about every episode, none of the characters ever seem to stop engaging in the toxic behaviors that we’ve just spent an entire episode witnessing. From season to season the characters never actually learn the lessons of their past and continue to act like caricatures of themselves, continuously neglecting and manipulating one another. Most of the conflicts in these episodes could simply be resolved with marginally better communication, and it’s very frustrating to watch that theme be so pervasive throughout the dozens and dozens of episodes we’ve watched.
That kind of lack of growth normally bothers me in long-running shows. I tuned out of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a few seasons in because I found none of the main characters redeeming at all. No one grew or learned a lesson, they were consistently shitty to each other and everyone they met, and I felt like I could never root for these people, because they’re ultimately bad people. Modern Family does just about everything I didn’t like about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, except I think it has a lot of heart that makes it incredibly endearing. At the end of the day, they prioritize their family and make the right decision, even if by the next episode they’re just pulling the same shit again.
The other real sticking point for me is how haphazardly the show adopts and abandons plot points and characters. Maybe it’s intentional, but it feels hilariously sitcom-esque in how new characters and plot devices are constantly rotating in and out. For example, there’s an episode about a character having a job interview that goes hilariously badly, but in the end they still get the position. It’s been like 15 episodes and that has not been addressed again. Does that person have a job? It sure seemed like it, but I’ve yet to see that come back into play.
For all of my kibitzing though, it has proven to be a consistently enjoyable show for my partner and I to veg out on the couch and watch, even if it does mostly serve as background noise these days. The jokes still land and we still laugh. I am scared for what we’ll do once we exhaust all 11 seasons though, because we have a tough time agreeing on things to watch.
Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run
This is probably going to be a theme in these Spotlights going forward, but I’m a big fan of the McElroy Family and a lot of their content, including the very funny Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run. To break the title down for those who just see a jumble of nonsensical words, Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run, is a randomized playthrough of the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, where all of the items and enemies have been jumbled up, and Link has been replaced with an excellent Guy Fieri sprite that dies in one hit.
If any of what I’ve said sounds remotely interesting to you, then I heartily encourage you to check it out. Despite having watched it before, I find it to be excellent background noise for when I’m playing a game or half-focusing on something else.
The Daily Show
Not since Jon Stewart retired back in 2015 have I watched an iota of The Daily Show, not because I doubted it was still a decent show, but because I couldn’t really imagine anyone but Jon Stewart behind that desk. That was then and this is now. Jon Stewart is back, only if it’s just on Mondays, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always liked Jon Stewart and his interpretation of current events, and it’s good to see him back in the saddle. Here’s hoping that he does more than just Mondays at some point.
Listening Party
The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited
If you ask me, 2003 was an excellent year for music. I twas jam-packed with some of my favorite albums of all time, from Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, The Postal Service’s Give Up, Fall Out Boy’s Take this to your Grave, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Take Them On, On Your Own, Brand New’s Deja Entendu, and of course, The Artist in the Ambulance by Thrice.
Twenty years later, Thrice decided it would be super cool to remind every fan of that album about the passage of time and our mortality by rerecording and releasing the whole dang thing with some help from some other musicians. Wouldn’t you know it, these 40+ year old men still have got it. This album has always ripped and continues to do so even in its rerecorded state.
Not many things from 2003 have aged particularly well. The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited is certainly one of the more pleasant time capsules you could open up, granted you’re into that kind of music. Regardless though, 2003 was crazy good for music. Seriously, look at this list, I’m sure you’ll find something excellent.
The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula
I told you that this McElroy Family stuff was probably going to be a consistent theme throughout a lot of these posts, so here we are again. The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula is the latest D&D 5e campaign that the McElroy Family is running, and it’s an absolute laugh-riot.
For the uninitiated, The Adventure Zone is a podcast where the three McElroy brothers and their father play role-playing games together, the first arc of which, called “Balance,” being my favorite campaign by far. It’s ebbed in quality and won’t gel with everyone, especially considering the group’s, “rules-light”, approach to playing games. The priority is telling a fun story over stringently adhering to the rules, which I find to be a great on-ramp for TTRPG-curious folks.
I’ve had a pretty complicated history with The Adventure Zone and a lot of the campaigns they’ve run, often times feeling a lack of grounding or sense of place. In the past I’ve felt that some of the game systems they’ve used in the past weren’t particularly interesting to listen to people play or weren’t conducive to the kind of story they were trying to tell, which is why the return to 5e was somewhat comforting.
I approached this campaign with cautious optimism, but was immediately won over within minutes of the first episode. Not only is it hysterical, but the players have excellent chemistry with each other and just enough familiarity with the game that they’re playing that keeps the pace of play and jokes nice and quick without letting the show from getting bogged down in rule clarifications. The setting and story are fantastic, and I’ve yet to feel overwhelmed by the information that DM Griffin McElroy has doled out thus far.
As of writing this, only a handful of episodes are out, so maybe the quality falls off a cliff or something. But as it stands, I think I’ve listened to that first episode about a half a dozen times, and it still hasn’t gotten old. If you’re looking for a D&D flavored way to kill an hour, I’d give the first episode of The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula a listen.
My Horrible Upstairs Neighbors
If you’re a fan of silence and quiet contemplation, then I’d recommend you don’t actually listen to my horrible upstairs neighbors. I’ve never met these people, which is honestly a good thing cause I don’t think I’d have anything nice to say, but they seem like some of the most inconsiderate folks around.
I’ve identified two of them based on the noises they make. There’s what I presume to be a teenager in school, because the noise they make tends to stop occurring during school days from like 7am to 3pm, and another who doesn’t show up until later in the day, who apparently does everything in their apartment in the clackiest heels you’ve ever heard. Together I think they have bowling ball dropping competitions or practice juggling hammers, and we get front row seats to that every night.
They drop a lot of stuff, they have either one or seventy small yappy dogs, the teenage one may or may not be a streamer because they play video games in the most over-the-top fashion I’ve ever heard of, ever. I legitimately thought there was an actual problem at first cause all I would hear through the ceiling was someone shouting, “Help me. Save me. Stay away,” and other things of that ilk. Soon it was followed by taunting other players or screaming for revives in a way that let me know that they were just a HARDCORE GAMER who occasionally uses some pretty miserable language.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this at all, let me just provide some context here and say that my office is directly underneath where the uber-gamer does their thing, and they may or may not be doing it right now. Ultimately, the saddest part about this whole experience is that they aren’t the worst neighbors we’ve had.
The Rest
Piranesi
Turns out that they make books that aren’t just reference materials for running TTRPGs. I know that because I’m actively reading one of these books, and there isn’t even a single goblin in it — yet. Piranesi is a very tough book to describe, but at its basest form, it’s a fantasy novel unlike anything I’ve ever read before.
The titular Piranesi is an inhabitant of this massive, seemingly endless 3 story mansion boasting decadent halls filled with marble statues and little else. It is written as a series of diary entries that this man is making as he chronicles his days and expeditions into more unknown sections of this endless mansion.
It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with a piece of media that’s hooked me in purely on my curiosity alone, but Piranesi truly has me in its clutches. I want to know more about literally everything that’s happening in this world, which may or may not be a bad thing to some extent. The early portions of this book are a bit of a tough read purely because of how ephemeral everything feels. There’s very little to ground yourself with because everything is being described by someone who may or may not have any understanding of the real world, if there even is one in the fiction of this book.
While I’m still not done with it, I’ve heard it eventually gets to the, “I can’t stop going,” point and really pays off. A few chapters in though, and I’d gladly recommend the one fiction book I’ve read in the past 5 years to anyone who would ask. Although I guess technically my many TTRPG books are fiction.
A+ Certification
CompTIA is the voice of the world’s information technology industry. (PRNewsFoto/CompTIA) (PRNewsFoto/)
I’ve been studying up for my A+ certification test for a few weeks now and boy let me tell you, there is no more miserable feeling than voluntarily watching the rug be pulled out from underneath you. I thought I had a decent grasp on technology, not an extensive or particularly great one, but a decent one. I’ve built computers, I’ve troubleshooted lots of hardware, software and network issues in the past, so I thought I wouldn’t be too far behind when it came to pivoting onto this career path.
It turns out that I knew absolute bupkis before and somehow know less now. Despite hours of reading and researching, tutorials and study guides, the internet to me is basically invisible magic what sometimes makes pornography appear. Seriously, 75% percent of what I’ve learned so far has been jumbled mess of letters and numbers. LDAP, 802.11, 802.3, TELNET, SCADA, DMARC, plenum-rated cables, subnets, octets — there’s so much of this that it feels borderline impossible to learn.
It’s overwhelming and time consuming but it’s also what I want to do professionally. I’ve spent a lot of my life meandering and not committing to anything career-wise, but this is the first time in a while that I’ve felt consistently motivated to fight through those instincts that are shouting at me to “just quit.” It isn’t just about getting my career going so I can maybe be in a better financial situation, but it’s about proving to myself that I’m capable and smart. So it’s back to the IT mines for me.
News
The Riffmaster
They’re making a new plastic guitar for Fortnite. While not a player of Fortnite, I do play a lot of Clone Hero, and my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul guitar finally stopped working, so I think I’m legally required to buy this thing whenever it comes out.
Xbox, Everywhere
What’s that behind you? It’s an Xbox. Making a sandwich? That’s not ham, that’s an Xbox. Getting frisky with your partner? That’s actually them, but there will be an Xbox in the corner, watching. There will be an Xbox everywhere, even if it’s on a PlayStation.
Baldur’s Gate 3: The Toxic Community
Oh look, another story about a fan base harboring some truly repugnant figures who just can’t seem to not harass the developers of a game they claim to love because a feature isn’t in the game yet. Seriously, what’s wrong with these folks?
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of March with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
I could argue that 2023 has been one of the best years for video games ever and I don’t know that I’d get too much push back for that. 2023 was jam-packed with games that would take top marks had they been released any other year, but somehow they all got smushed into one, very overwhelming year.
To set the stage a little bit, I played and enjoyed a lot of games this year, and tons of them aren’t on my hodgepodge of a list, primarily because I didn’t want to make this list a top 30 or whatever it might pan out to be. I also had a lot of positive experiences with games that I really didn’t have more to say about them other than, “I liked them.” Games like Sea of Stars, Super Mario Wonder, Super Mario RPG, Stray, and plenty of others just didn’t make the list because I don’t really have much more to say about them than, “they’re good!”
With that said, let’s just dive in.
Honorable Mentions
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
What better way to start off a Game of the Year list than with a decade old video game for a long abandoned platform? This year, in an attempt to find more games my partner and I could enjoy together, we both found ourselves getting hopelessly addicted to Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS.
Our addiction and obsession stems, not only from being long-time fans of the series, but also because the latest entry in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, played a key role in our burgeoning relationship back during the early part of the pandemic. It helped us stay together during a time when people were forced to be apart, and going back to play New Leaf together has really reinforced how special this series is to us. It also helps that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is arguably the best entry in the series, jam-packed with content that, despite our ravenous rate of play, we’ve only scratched the surface of.
Disney Illusion Island
Another game that my partner and I bulldozed our way through, Disney Illusion Island was a fantastic platformer that was easy for both of us to enjoy. It was interesting and varied enough for my seasoned gaming sensibilities, yet accessible and welcoming for my my partner to enjoy. Beautiful art and the decision to not have any combat in Disney Illusion Island, also really helped grease the wheels. Having to only focus on navigating the world without the headache of some random enemy try to ice us, really made for a more enjoyable cooperative experience that wasn’t subject to the normal difficulty spikes one might find in other Metroidvanias.
While the game was a little too long and simplistic for my taste, it was an excellent way to spend some time with my partner, and that alone earns it a spot on this list.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
As someone who never really got into the newer style of Assassin’s Creed games, Assassin’s Creed Mirage was a refreshing return to form for the series that I found very mechanically satisfying, even if the story and setting weren’t my favorite. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a lot of fun playing an Assassin’s Creed game.
Narrowing the scope of these games feels like a necessary change to the bloat and grandeur that’s invaded the more recent entries, both in terms of mechanics and concept. I like just being an assassin and having to focus solely on doing a good job at that, which is the majority of what this game gave me. If Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the foundation for the direction of the series going forward, then I’m onboard for whatever is next.
Lil’ Gator Game
Lil’ Gator Game is an earnest and relaxing take on the recent Zelda formula, that I was absolutely taken with this year. You play as the titular “lil’ gator,” who conscripts every person who lives on their home island, to play along and effectively be NPCs in the adventure game they’ve concocted. As the gator, you go on a DIY, Breath of the Wild-styled adventure across the island, slaying cardboard cutouts of enemies and solving puzzles, all in an effort to get your older sister to stop working on her college coursework, so she can play with you like she used to.
It’s a very sweet and very fun examination of responsibilities and growing up, while also being incredibly low impact and not demanding. I really enjoyed Lil’ Gator Game on just about every level, and I think it’s worth checking out.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Two Spider-Men and a Venom? That’s right folks, for the price of one video game, you can play as two Spider-Men and one whole Venom. That’s just the excellent value you can expect from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the very good sequel to two very good games.
Realistically though, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a really good sequel that takes what you loved about its predecessors, shaves down some of the rough edges, and sprinkles on more of what people liked about those earlier entries in the series. They even brought back those bad stealth segments where you play as Mary Jane, except this time they gave her a stun gun that’s more effective than either of the Spider-Men you play as.
While I found the enemy variety, move sets, expanded world and story pacing to be greatly improved over Marvel’s Spider-Man, there were some really lame bits of storytelling and uninspired mission design on display. There’s also the fact that the good, Spider-Man-based stealth, has been minimized both in terms of opportunities for it and its effectiveness. It sucks because I really enjoyed the stealth mechanics and focus of the previous entries, and now it feels like you can only get away with so much before combat is foisted upon you.
The overwhelming sentiment I was left with once I rolled credits on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was an excited curiosity to see what Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 was going to be about, because despite my criticisms, I still am very invested in seeing this story continue or resolve.
Runner Up
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a phenomenal game, just like its direct predecessor that came out over six years ago. It is the successor to one of the most groundbreaking open world games of all time, and if not for the next game on this list, it probably would have been my game of the year. But despite all the well deserved praise, it’s a very iterative experience that didn’t deviate too far from the winning formula that Breath of the Wild established.
I truly loved The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and all most its new mechanics, some of which really changed the way I approached combat and puzzles, and some of which could be completely ignored if you just didn’t want to deal with it. Fusing objects together to make ridiculous weapons was great fun, even if it was a bit tedious and a way to backdoor crafting into the game. Ascending through ceilings and being able to reverse the flow of time really changed how I approached platforming and navigating the environment, even if I kept forgetting I had access to them.
But then you have the absurdly named Ultrahand ability, which allows you to build all sorts of vehicles that can help you, quite literally, fly across Hyrule faster than any pathetic horse could ever hope to. It’s an amazing feature in its execution, but it’s a total bummer for people like myself who have no interest in engaging with building things in games. I just don’t have the patience to sit and finely engineer the perfect flying machine that won’t flip over the second I board it, when I could just walk to my next location. And even if I did want to engage with that system, I’d have to spend ages grinding away to build up enough battery capacity to run these things for more than 30 seconds. It’s this entirely optional system that’s been added, that’s responsible for a good portion of what’s new about Tears of the Kingdom, and it’s just something I had no desire to engage with.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a great example of taking what worked, and giving the player more of it. “Not enough dungeons? We added a bunch more. Not enough boss fights? Here you go! Not enough korok seeds? How’s about we triple the amount then?” Hell, they even added a bunch of floating islands above Hyrule, as well as an underground area that’s just as big as the mainland, just to see how much they could strain the CPU of a Nintendo Switch. Granted, the floating islands are cool, albeit fairly empty and more limited in number than I’d like. Meanwhile the underground area is just one large grayscale nightmare zone that isn’t fun to explore and filled with things that want to kill you.
I don’t mean to harp on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, because I really did enjoy it quite a great deal. But just about every positive aspect of it is something that I got out of Breath of the Wild, six years ago. Sure the sky islands are cool, sure the traversal options are fun, and sure, the story is much better than the one in Breath of the Wild. I’m not denying that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent game that is worthy adoration, but it does sometimes feel like the “director’s cut” version of a movie I’ve already seen before.
Game of the Year
Baldur’s Gate 3
Defying all reason or logic, Baldur’s Gate 3, a tactical role-playing game, is my game of the year in a year that was filled with some of the most laudable games of all time. A genre of game that I absolutely do not enjoy, didn’t just win the top spot on this year’s list, it’s forever cemented as one of my favorite games of all time.
Initially, I bounced off of Baldur’s Gate 3 when it first was available in early access, opting to spend more time with it once it fully released rather than battle against constant progress-wiping updates that were to be expected in its preview state. When it finally did release fully back in August, it did so to a deluge of fanfare that left me excited to get my hands on it in a, “eventually I’ll have time, but not right now,” kind of way. I put it off until this October, where I proceeded to pour about 100 hours into a game I thought I’d just like.
And despite how I felt about it in 2020, where I thought my familiarity with D&D mechanics would be the thing pulling me through the game, it turned out that the combat was my least favorite part of the whole thing. The story, the setting, the characters — most of the characters, they were the things that kept me coming back with ravenous desire. They were the things that made me restart the game 4 times until I “got it right.” While I don’t think there’s actually any choices you can make that will force a fail-state in the game, which I should point out, is an incredible feat of game design and execution, I still didn’t want to chance it and accidentally doom the future of my campaign.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is not a game without its faults, to be sure; the path finding is a joke, performance is spotty, the camera hates indoor spaces despite how many of them there are, quest tracking was iffy at best, and there were some sections of the game that I did not find to be fun at all. There are sections that I’m dreading having to do again in an inevitable second playthrough, but those low points are incapable of outweighing the towering highs of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was easily the best and most addicting game I played this year. It wasn’t just because of excellent world building and punchy combat, but its writing, acting and narrative that all worked in tandem to deliver some truly emotionally impactful moments. Very few games have ever moved me, and I did not expect Baldur’s Gate 3 to be the latest addition to that list.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was an adventure I got to go on with this group of ragtag NPCs that, for the most part, I grew to genuinely care about and get invested in. But most importantly, it’s a game that adapted to me and actually accounted for the things I did and chose. I wasn’t just playing a game, I was writing my own story, and the game was going along with me. Baldur’s Gate 3 gave me the most personalized and unique gaming experience of the year — hell, the most unique gaming experience of my life, and that alone makes it worthy of calling it my Game of the Year.
Thanks for taking the time to read this list, I really appreciate it. The Bonus World, if nothing else, will return in 2024 to make another one of these lists. Hopefully more stuff is posted as well, but at the very least, another Game of the Year list is scheduled.
Regardless, I hope your holiday season was as stress free as possible, and your new year is better than the last. Have a good one, everybody.
While malformed and incomplete, 2023’s release schedule is already looking pretty impressive full. In the first few months alone we’re getting highly anticipated titles like Forspoken, the Dead Space remake, Atomic Heart, Octopath Traveler 2 and Destiny 2: Lightfall. While I don’t necessarily care about those games, other people seem pretty jazzed about it. But hey, let’s take a look at the announced titles that I actually am looking forward to thus far.
Hogwarts Legacy
I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of the Harry Potter films or books, but even I can appreciate the atmosphere of the source material enough to want to play a game set in that universe. Considering Hogwarts Legacy is set around 100 years before the events of the film, I feel like I can get away with playing this game and not feel like a sucker for not being a diehard fan.
Based on the trailers, Hogwarts Legacy is visually impressive and certainly nails the feeling of kicking it in that old, wizardly castle that we all know and love. It also looks like its got a speedy and mechanically satisfying combat system coupled with some cool in-world RPG trappings, mostly surrounding making and learning new wizardly abilities by taking their respective classes, which to clarify all sounds pretty rad to me.
Outside of a trailer or two, I haven’t really kept up with much of the marketing blitz or promotional materials which has allowed me to live in blissful ignorance about whether or not Hogwarts Legacy is actually going to be the game for me. The one thing that does worry me and give me pause about actually buying the game surrounds J.K. Rowling being a miserable transphobe who monetarily benefits from my purchase, along with the fact that the lead designer has a history of being a shithead. I’ll wait and see how this one reviews when it eventually launches on February 10th, 2023, but I don’t know if I can justify a purchase.
Wild Hearts
On paper I really like the main conceit of the Monster Hunter franchise, but in practice I’ve found them to be clunky and unsatisfying to play. I know that I’m in the minority with those complaints but they’ve always been obstacles that have kept me from enjoying this wildly popular franchise. I’m hoping that the upcoming Wild Hearts can scratch that long unattended monster-hunting itch for me with what looks like much faster and more action-oriented combat.
The idea of teaming up with friends and setting out to hunt down some monstrous prey is extremely tantalizing as is, but Wild Hearts looks to blend in some light tower defense elements into the mix which if done well, could be a real game changer. In my mind I’m imagining a game that isn’t just about tracking creatures down, but also setting up traps and acting on what you’ve learned about said creature to use its natural instincts against it. I assume that’s something that happens in Monster Hunter, but I’ve never played long enough to know for sure. I also am well aware that this being a game about hunting legendary beasts, there might be less natural instinct to work against and more ancient magic or whatever.
If the combat and the tower defense mechanics actually deliver on their promise however, Wild Hearts might be the first monster hunting game I end up enjoy playing. Lastly, and this is a minor quibble, but if the menus in this game could be more straightforward and less of an Eldritch mystery that requires a damn cypher to decode, that would be huge for me. Wild Hearts is slated to release on February 16th, 2023, potentially becoming the second video game I end up buying in a six day period.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
While not perfect, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was one of the best pieces of Star Wars media I’ve consumed in the past few years and a fun game to boot. The characters were likeable, the gameplay was tough but satisfying, and the story, while underdeveloped, was still filled with interesting and surprising moments filled with nods to deeper Star Wars lore for the hardcore fans.
Hopefully Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will build upon its solid foundation, adding in more variety in both lightsaber and force power combat, the latter of which in my opinion should resemble the Stormtrooper flinging simulator that was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Judging by preorder bonuses, it also looks to address the pitiful lack of customization options of the previous entry by offering more character skins that aren’t just color swaps of the tunic you’re wearing.
My only real fear here is that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor leans too much into its ‘souls-like’ or ‘masocore’ inspirations, tweaking the difficulty curve to be more inline with other games in the genre. Hopefully with it being a licensed game of one of the most popular franchises ever, the game will boast a wide variety of accessibility and difficulty options that’ll let even a casual like myself enjoy it. Guess I’ll find out when it releases on March 17th of 2023.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I feel like I really shouldn’t have to explain why I’m excited for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom considering its predecessor is probably one of the greatest games of all time, but I’ll give it the ol’ college try.
I’ve never been a big Zelda guy, but Breath of the Wild was such a phenomenal experience that dropped you into a painterly version of Hyrule with the simple goal of ‘stop Ganon.” You could always look toward the castle to see wisps of his menace swirling around and encompassing it just begging for you to come and square off against the horrors within. But before you’d even attempt to tackle that, you could see seven other interesting places to explore, all of which led to several more.
Breath of the Wild represents the pinnacle of motivating the player to explore their surroundings and all I can hope for from a sequel is more of that. More places to see with more tools at my disposal to explore them. I’d also super love to not have to worry about weapon degradation anymore. I know that’s a common complaint and hot debate topic amongst fans, but for once I’d like to see Nintendo give a shit about their players and offer some accessibility options, specifically one that lets me use the Master Sword as much as I want without having to go through hell to do it. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom allegedly comes out on May 12th of 2023, but I won’t hold my breath.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that I’m a big fan of the Suicide Squad or anything, but I’ve certainly been won over by what little I’ve seen Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Granted, there hasn’t been a ton of gameplay or anything for me to reference, but I trust Rocksteady Studios’ ability to make compelling gameplay so much that I’d play a game solely about Calendar Man if they made it.
In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, you play as one of 4 members of the Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, or Captain Boomerang, as you square off against a Brainiac controlled Justice League that’s doing some real nasty shit. I don’t know too much more about it other than it’s cooperative, but will fill in computer controlled allies where you need them which will come in handy when you can’t find anyone to play as Captain Boomerang, a character I know nothing about aside from his dumb name.
I’m excited to play this game because I’m a big fan of the Arkham games and trust that Rocksteady is going to make something that’s fun to play. As long as they don’t add some boring but mandatory Batmobile-tank battles to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League like some other Batman games, I think it’ll be a great time. They say it’ll be out on May 26th of 2023, but I’ve been lied to before.
Baldur’s Gate 3
This one’s interesting because I’ve already played Baldur’s Gate 3 back when it released into early access approximately 14 years ago and liked it despite its rough, buggy busted-ness. I made the conscious decision to not play it until its full release because every major update brought with it a wipe of save files and I didn’t want to deal with that, so I just put it back on the digital shelf so it could marinate longer.
But now Baldur’s Gate 3 has a projected release window for August of 2023, and once it does I’m fully anticipating losing a lot of hours of my life to what might become the best Dungeons & Dragons video game of all time, depending on who you ask. I for one have high hopes for Baldur’s Gate 3 because it represents the first real turn-based RPG I’ve ever really enjoyed, which is a colossal feat in itself.
The biggest thing for me about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s using the 5th Edition rules, and since I’m fairly well-versed in those I’ve had a much easier time playing this genre of game without essentially having to learn two games at once. I just want a good way to play D&D without having to be a DM or even finding a group, and Baldur’s Gate 3 seems like it’ll fill that void for me.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
I really enjoyed both Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, so being excited for their inevitable sequel doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Insomniac Games already proved that they know how to make a mechanically sound Spider-Man game that can also deliver a compelling narrative, and that’s kind of all I want out of a sequel.
A lot of folks are clamoring for some sort of cooperative play between Miles and Peter, which would be cool for sure, but isn’t something that I need from Marvel’s Spider-Man2. All I want from the sequel is a little more variety, both in terms of main story missions and side quests. Sprinkle in some new abilities and costumes, and you’ve got yourself a solid follow up to one of my favorite games of 2018.
But therein lies the exciting part, cause I don’t know what Insomniac could do outside of the things I’ve already listed in order to top themselves. I’m sure they’ve got something wonderful cooked up for players, but I’d sound stupid even attempting to predict what that could be. Sure I could theorize payoffs for the last game’s cliffhangers, but I’m more excited about what mechanical changes are implemented. I suppose I’ll find out at some point in 2023.
Mina the Hollower
For those unaware, Mina the Hollower is the next title from Yacht Club Games, makers of the tremendous Shovel Knight series. If Shovel Knight was their Mega-Man, then Mina the Hollower looks to be their Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, which an incredibly exciting concept to me.
Full transparency: I backed Mina the Hollower on Kickstarter because it not only looks dope as hell, but is being made by a studio I trust. What really sold me in its initial pitch was the core mechanic of digging through the earth as a quick means of transportation, hence the ‘Hollower.’ That coupled with the variety of weapons, enemies and zones in the world made it really easy to throw 20 or 30 dollars at this unfinished product.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m not really a Zelda guy, but as I’ve essentially screamed at the top of my lungs twice already, I think Yacht Club Games could be the ones to finally make that math work out for me. It doesn’t have a concrete release date just yet, but they’re aiming for 2023 at the moment, but something tells me that date wont stick.
Starfield
Call it wishful thinking or misplaced optimism, but I really hope that Starfield is good. My feelings about Bethesda as a competent game maker aside, I would love for a good sci-fi RPG cause I haven’t had one of those since Mass Effect was set in the Milky Way. I guess The Outer Worlds was pretty good, but it didn’t really leave a lasting impression despite really enjoying it at the time.
What excites me about Starfield is the fact that it’s a fresh start in terms of lore. Despite enjoying some of the Elder ScrollsV: Skyrim, I could not tell you much of anything about that world because of how dense the lore was. I can’t say for certain, but it definitely felt like I was missing a lot of context for the universe by not following the series since its inception. Starfield represents a chance to get in on the ground floor and have Bethesda introduce not just myself, but everyone to this new setting.
Aside from lore, I just hope that Starfield isn’t as buggy and busted as some of its predecessors, a thing that most fans seem to find endearing for some reason. I also wouldn’t mind if the shooting was good. I get that it’s an RPG first, but there has never been anything less satisfying to me than shooting a character in the head being met with them just losing slightly more health. I mention this because as a sci-fi game, I would expect Starfield to rely more on gunplay than Fallout did, which I would hope would result in weightier combat, but what do I know? Those and other questions are bound to be answered when it releases sometime in 2023.
This list could have been a dozen or so more entries long, but these are kind of the big ones that I could think of from where I’m at in 2022. I’m sure a bevy of things will be announced and released as the year progresses that I’ll be equally excited for. There’s also the possibility that something on this list will slip into 2024 which would be insane considering most of these games already have been delayed. But hey, I’m sure we’ll talk about that stuff as it comes up during the year.
Everything is so chaotic right now and it’s insanely difficult to focus on anything outside of the ever growing train wreck that is American politics. Even now as I write this, I fear that by the time this article goes live some horrible bullshit will have happened. I pray that everything goes smoothly and America doesn’t collapse in under its own weight, but literally anything is possible these days. But at some point I can’t keep staring at the wreckage and need to focus on things that make me happy. So here are some of the distractions I engaged in last week that brought me joy.
BALDUR’S GATE III
During my Game of the Year 2020 articles, I mentioned at one point that I wanted to check back in with Baldur’s Gate III and see how it’s evolved since receiving a few patches. Considering I had to restart the game because all previous version save files were no longer compatible, I trudged through the prologue once more and made it back to the first real explorable area. I can’t really say that I’ve noticed many differences in performance or features, but admittedly I’m still very early on and haven’t quite had the chance to really see the majority of content available in the game. They did fix the camera though, which is absolutely huge and was one of bigger issues with Baldur’s Gate III when it launched into early access late last year.
Even though I’m really enjoying playing Baldur’s Gate III, I’m still struggling with the idea of whether or not I want to dedicate too much more time into it. Considering it is an early access title, I can only imagine that save files are going to be in jeopardy a few more times during the course of development, and I don’t know that I want to play through that prologue more than I have to. It’s a decent enough tutorial level but I’ve already played it like 6 times at this point, so I might still wait on that. But in the meantime, I could always dip into Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny to get my CRPG fix.
HITMAN 3
The rebooted Hitman series of games that started in 2016, have become some of my favorite and most anticipated titles with Hitman 3 being no exception. Technically the game doesn’t launch until the day that you’re reading this, but knowing that I’ll have a Hitman game to distract me from whatever misery may come tomorrow is good enough for me to mention it. I think what I love about the series the most is how it makes you have to improvise and adapt on the fly, dashing all of your well made plans into pieces because some guard walked around a corner for the first time ever and spotted you choking the life out of your target. But that’s why you get a cool gun.
I don’t know if Hitman 3 will be any good, but the early reception on it seems overwhelmingly positive. I’m really looking forward to getting to play this one whenever the download finishes.
WANDAVISION
I didn’t expect to be this into a superhero themed TV show, but here we are. WandaVision is an insanely cool take on the Avengers characters of the same names, placing them in this incredibly weird and unsettling version of a 50’s/60’s sitcom. It’s like watching an episode of I Dream of Jeannie that occasionally does its best impression of a psychological thriller, which doesn’t sound like a great fit on paper but it totally works. While the first episode left my partner and I both unsure of whether we wanted to stick with the series, the second episode really got its hooks into us. Or maybe it just hooked me and they were being nice. Who can say?
All I know is that WandaVision is so far one of the coolest things that Marvel has done with one of their properties. My only concern is how well it will actually stick the landing. As of now, I have some ideas and theories about what’s happening or where this is all going, but it does feel like one of those stories that could end with a lame twist like saying it was all a dream or something. I don’t think that WandaVision will do that, but you never know. Regardless, we’re gonna keep watching the show.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
This one shouldn’t be surprising in any way, but it might be the biggest thing that’s brought me joy over the past few weeks. See, we recently decided to ditch our previous campaign in favor of one that was in a less boring setting. We landed on the Eberron setting, which is basically a magical version of the steampunk aesthetic that’s infinitely less insufferable. One of the biggest motivating factors for the change was the lack of any of the slice of life stuff that people usually engage with when playing a role-playing game. Our last setting didn’t have any real opportunities for the players to do anything outside of killing stuff and drinking ale, which made for a formulaic and uninspired game. I don’t think they minded it as much as I did, but I sensed a bit of fatigue with the module we were using. Also, I was fucking over it.
But that’s not the point. The point is that our campaign is set in a massive city that’s teeming with life and opportunity. We went through extensive character creation sessions where we really defined who their characters are. This was in service of not only creating fully realized characters, but to get my players invested in their avatars and understanding their motivations. Previous characters they made definitely wanted things, but without a setting to support those desires their characters were just walking murder-husks, devoid of any real direction.
I also changed our storytelling format to allow for more downtime and opportunities for their characters to grow through their actions. By using a combination of one-shots and custom campaigns, I’m able to hit them with story threads when they need it, and allow them to fuck around if they’d prefer that. It also allows me to react to their actions better than if I had tried to plan for said actions in advance. Everything about this campaign has been streamlined in a way that has taken a lot off of my plate. While I have a bunch of one-shots that are narratively linked together, an overarching story is something that’s entirely up to them and how they interact with the world. I might write in a bad guy here or a mission there, but I’m waiting for those plot hooks to come up naturally rather than me trying to force my players into it, all of which has made for a much more rewarding and fun Dungeons & Dragons experience for all of us.
So that’s it I guess. Hopefully when you read this, everything is cool and great. I would really prefer if we could just have something uneventful happen here at the finish line and I can go back to talking about video games without having to worry about if the former president is going to try and overthrow the government again. But yeah… good luck America. Good luck everyone, honestly.
I don’t know that I necessarily have the words to properly describe my feelings about the events of last week, nor do I know that I want to go into too much detail about it. In short, it’s been extremely difficult to watch my country rip itself apart at the behest of a sore loser who refuses to believe that more people told him to go fuck himself than those who begged for him to stay. Things are bad right now, and with the ongoing threats of violence all around the country planned for the next few days I think we’re all kind of just hanging in a limbo and waiting for whatever is coming to finally arrive. It’s times like these that I’d normally try and turn to my hobbies to distract myself from the hourly misery that’s been foisted upon us, but there hasn’t been a video game that’s done that for me in the past few months.
But where video games have failed to do the trick, I’ve found myself diving into the various Dungeons & Dragons books I own in an effort to flesh out my next campaign. I’ve been doing a ton of world building and story crafting which has been a lot of fun for me as well as a welcome reprieve from the world I live in. Not to say that any of the stories inside of those books are particularly happier than those that take place in the real world, but I guess it’s just easier to disassociate when they’re talking about goblins and orcs.
One of the things that bums me out about this period of ambivalence I’m in, is that there are games I want to play but never have the energy or will to actually start. For instance, I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate III in a few months and that game has received some significant updates that I’m eager to check out. I’ve also had the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn installed for quite a while, but I still haven’t launched the damn thing. Ideally I’d like to play that game before the sequel drops at some point this year. There are quite a lot of games that I really would like to spend more time with, but I just rarely have the energy or desire to actually do so.
The only thing I dip into regularly is NBA 2K21, a game that is literally just a way for me to occupy my hands while I watch or listen to something in the background. It’s a comfort food that’s going down real smooth these days, especially after what happened at the capitol last week. I’m just kind of using that game as a way to turn off my brain for an hour or so but I still have a ton of other games I really want to play. There’s just no motivation for me to dive into something new.
Look, I know these blogs have been overly dour and a bit more rambling in nature than I usually opt for, but it’s hard to write about video games right now with all of this shit going on. But I’m sticking it out the best I can, and I hope you’re doing the same. Be good to each other folks, and be safe.
Welcome to 2021, a year that I will set no expectations for because we all saw how well things turned out in 2020. But before we leave 2020 to rot in it’s rightful place in the universe’s dumpster, let’s bid one last farewell to the worst year I’ve ever experienced by celebrating the games that got me through it.
It took a long time and a lot of effort to get to a place where I could even list ten games I truly enjoyed this year, partly because nothing really stood out to me for most of 2020, and partly because the year itself was a debilitating nightmare that not even video games could distract me from.
HONORABLE MENTION: NBA 2K21
Every year I find myself dipping into the latest entry in the NBA 2K series and pour hundreds of hours into it, and NBA 2K21 is no exception. It’s like this nice bit of comfort food that I can just dip into and have a decent time with my favorite sport as I live out my wildest fantasy of making the New York Knicks a good team. I never participate in the more exploitative modes that try to milk you for money in order to boost your stats or wear a cool hat, but I still have a bunch of fun just running through a couple of years of the franchise mode, adjusting rotations and negotiating contracts and whatnot. There isn’t much else to say about the game otherwise. It’s a solid basketball simulation that manages to consume a lot of my free gaming time throughout the year, which is enough to make it onto this list in some capacity.
10 – RISK OF RAIN 2
Risk of Rain 2 opens up this list not just because I think it’s a good game worth sinking a couple dozen hours into, but because it was one of my favorite multiplayer experiences from this year. It’s one of those games that if I had played it on my own I’d be completely lost thanks to its large levels of inscrutability and ultimately back away from, but when I had some friends acting as my Risk of Rain 2 navigators, I found it to be an overwhelmingly good time.
The game itself is a tough as hell rogue-like shooter that is relentless in how much it throws at you. Eventually you reach a point where you’re inundated by items and abilities that don’t exactly explain themselves well, but thankfully I had people around me to help fill in the gaps. Aside from Risk of Rain 2 just being a really well made game that really shines when you play with friends, the soundtrack is amazing. It’s this incredible progressive-rock soundscape that washes over you while you play it and is quite well done. If nothing else, you should listen to the soundtrack.
9 – SPIRITFARER
When I think about the absolute misery that was 2020, it’s important to try and counteract the constant stream of negativity with the few moments of pleasantness I was able to find. Spiritfarer is a game that granted me some reprieve from the horrible world outside, by making me the shepherd of departed souls that’s been tasked with ferrying them to the other side. While that pitch sounds grim as hell, I assure you that the game itself is a heartwarming experience that provided an incredible story despite dragging in a couple of places.
The real thing that won me over in Spiritfarer was just how it looked. Everything about the presentation is warm and inviting, masking the reality of the task you have to take on as the titular Spiritfarer. You learn about the people you’re ferrying along and who they once were through talking to them and doing side missions on their behalf, most of which were really touching. It’s also got some farming simulation and management stuff in there to help break up the monotony with a different kind of monotony. But aside from some of the slower and less story relevant bits of the game, I think it is just a tremendous title that was well worth the time I put into it.
8 – HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER
As an unapologetic lover of games that “simulate” relatively mundane professions, Hardspace: Shipbreaker was a particularly exciting blend of that concept and my love of science fiction. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you’re just a person whose job it is to break down and salvage derelict spaceships. Armed with some cool laser beams and a recently added explosive charge, you can really destroy your frame rate with how granular you can get when dissecting these floating behemoths. But it isn’t without some challenge, because one wayward cut could result in a catastrophic explosion that will obliterate much of ship along with any salvageable materials.
What I really enjoy about Hardspace: Shipbreaker is how it takes this fantastical world of accessible space travel and decides to focus on this mundane concept of just being a scrapper rather than some fighter pilot. It reminds me of all of those Star Wars side stories that focused on like a Death Star janitor or something. It’s also just an intensely satisfying and meditative experience to just get in there and slice a ship apart piece by piece while listening to a podcast or something.
7- FUSER
If it wasn’t for Fuser, I don’t think I would ever have discovered my secret ability to create true auditory hell-scapes, and that’s a newfound talent that I’m incredibly proud of. But Fuser isn’t just about making nightmarish song combinations, it turns out you can actually make unlikely mashups of classic and contemporary songs that sound really good. That’s the power of Fuser.
I’ve always been really keen on making music but never really had the understanding nor the desire to dip my toes into the world of being a live DJ. I don’t foresee myself ever buying turntables or any of the other required pieces of equipment to live out that particular fantasy, but Fuser allows me to dip into that world without much prior knowledge needed. It’s an incredibly accessible and instantly fun, albeit a fairly thin experience.
Fuser more of a game I can dip into a couple times a year and have a blast with as opposed to a game I’d spend consecutive days playing, but that’s honestly fine by me. It’s also just a really fun thing to pop on and show friends, although that particular party trick will have to wait until I can once again entertain people. But till that happens, I’m perfectly fine being a DJ for an audience of one.
6 – I AM DEAD
I don’t think many folks actually know about I Am Dead and its particular style of puzzle solving, but I would implore anyone who wants a fairly light and breezy puzzle game to check it out. Despite the overly morose title, I Am Dead is actually a really pleasant game with a heartwarming story. It isn’t overly difficult and doesn’t soak up too much time, clocking in at around 6 hours or so. I found the main puzzle mechanic of peeling back layers of the world to reveal hidden objects to be pretty satisfying without ever wearing out it’s welcome.
It’s also just a really pretty game to behold, with an overall aesthetic that can simply be described as colorful and endearing. It’s a delightful little game that I feel didn’t get its due when it released, something that I’d describe as criminal. I fear that going into more detail about the game would teeter on the edge of spoiler territory, so all I’ll say is that you should absolutely check out I Am Dead if you’re in dire need of a puzzle-based palette cleanser from this miserable year.
5- BALDUR’S GATE III
Baldur’s Gate III is still in early access and will probably remain that way for most of, if not the remainder of 2021, but it still deserves a spot on this list. The game itself launched in a pretty rocky state, but has only been improving as time has gone on. Many of the issues I had with Baldur’s Gate III when it launched into early access have been addressed or are at least on the list for tweaking, which is a great sign for someone like me who has no love for traditional CRPGs.
But therein lies the real reason why Baldur’s Gate III is on my list. See, up until it released towards the end of 2020, I very much wasn’t a fan of CRPGs and would even go as far as to say I had an aversion to them. But Baldur’s Gate III managed to capture my love for Dungeons & Dragons in a way that made me willing to give the genre one last shot. It turns out that all I needed to connect with this genre was a good entry point and Baldur’s Gate III gave me that. Now I’ve got like 4 other CRPGs in the backlog that I’m eager to dig into which might have been a little ambitious if I’m being honest, but it is what it is.
Aside from how Baldur’s Gate III basically opened up a world of new games to me, it’s just really fun even if it plays a little fast and loose with the rules of D&D. They recently patched in an update that fixed a lot of the graphical weirdness and camera issues that I had, but it also invalidated all save files from before the patch, so I’ve been putting off playing through the intro for a fourth time. But I truly think that when Baldur’s Gate III enters a 1.0 release, it will be a titan of a game. Even as is, the game shows so much potential both mechanically and in terms of it’s story. I just wonder how much time I want to put into it between now and then.
4 – CALL OF THE SEA
You awake in the middle of the night to the sound of your old timey telephone ringing. Since it’s like the 1930’s and there’s only one phone in your home, you throw on your nightgown and head into the room with the phone in it. You pick up the receiver and say “Hello?” That’s when you realize that on the other end of the call is no person, but the sea itself, calling to check in on you. Because the sea is in a different time zone they called you thinking it would be okay, but the sea realizes now that they’ve made a poor decision and are terribly sorry for disrupting your sleep.
So Call of the Sea is a really cool puzzle and adventure game that didn’t seem to get too much press, probably because it came out like two days before Cyberpunk 2077 did. But instead of playing that game, you should all play Call of the Sea instead. Call of the Sea is a narrative driven adventure game with some pretty challenging puzzles to solve, as well as a really intriguing mystery that unfolds and only gets wilder as you progress.
When I first launched the game I didn’t think I would end up spending too much time with it, but the story that kept unfolding around me was enough to keep me going to see it through to the end. I don’t really want to go in depth on where the story goes, but the setup is that you’re this woman who is heading to this mysterious island to find your husband and his expedition crew. They went in search of a cure for the mysterious disease that your character is afflicted with, but too much time has passed and your character is worried and decided to just find her partner on her own. Aside from the really captivating mystery of your missing husband and his crew, there’s a very touching love story that’s unfolding around you as your character recalls all the reasons why this man is so precious to her. It’s a very sweet subplot in a game that has a very haunting story, and I think it all comes together pretty flawlessly.
3 – ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS
By the time June rolled around I was pretty sure I hated Animal Crossing: New Horizons, something that came as a surprise to me considering that like the rest of the world, it dominated every free moment I had when it launched. I feel bad for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, because I think a lot of people had that same trajectory with it. The truth of the matter is that it released as one of the darkest moments in human history was unfurling around us, thus thrusting it into this position of being everyone’s go-to game for both escapism and social gatherings. The problem is that Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t meant to provide you with long gaming sessions, rather, it’s a thing that’s designed for you to check in with once every few days.
But the pandemic just started an the world entered lock down, leaving us with nothing but the newest and cutest game out there to keep our minds off of the misery outside as well as keeping us all connected. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a lifeline for so many people, myself included. My partner and had a lot of date nights on our islands in lieu of being able to actually see each other in person, and I’m thankful as hell for that. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a really good Animal Crossing game, but might actually be better described as the most important game of 2020, similar to how Pokemon GO! was the biggest cultural event of 2016.
Around November I eventually found my way back to my island much to the delight of my little virtual animal neighbors, and I started playing it the way it was intended. Once I got into that rhythm with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I started remembering why I was so taken with this series in the first place. It’s pleasant and charming and never aims to stress you out. It truly is the best foil to 2020 that we could have asked for, and for that alone it deserves a spot on this list. But because of how well made it is, minus some quality of life improvements that Nintendo just refuses to make for some reason (doing anything that involves the internet), it would have been on this list regardless of a pandemic or not.
2 – TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 1+2
What isn’t to like about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2? It’s a fantastic remaster of two of the most beloved games of all time that was able to make good on how I remember those titles looking and feeling. From the soundtrack to the levels and challenges, everything was pretty much just how I remembered it, although I did appreciate how they went ahead and aged up the skaters to reflect what they look like now. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is really just a celebration of two classic titles that despite the efforts of some later and more mediocre entries in the series, never were overshadowed or forgotten.
It only took an hour or so for my muscle memory to kick in, allowing me to pull off some insane lines and combos that I would inevitably fuck up because I tried to do one too many rotations in mid air. You wouldn’t believe it, but I miss that particular brand of frustration. I remember being a younger man and bashing my head against so many of these challenges while listening to the first two minutes of every song on the soundtrack. I usually try to catch myself when something is trying to play off of my nostalgia in such an explicit way, but I fully embraced what Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 did to me and I’m much happier for it.
1 – MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN: MILES MORALES
And here we are, at the number one spot chilling with Spider-Man himself. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the refined version of its 2018 predecessor, Marvel’s Spider-Man. That game was fantastic, but Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is even better. It’s story is emotional and moves along at fast enough pace that you don’t feel like you’re ever losing the plot. It also cuts out a lot of the bloated side content that existed in Marvel’s Spider-Man, but isn’t completely without some truly lame side missions. That just seems to be a pitfall of most open world games though.
But Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales wastes no time in letting you bounce around the city as a much more competent Spider-Man, circumventing the need to spend upgrade points on essential traversal abilities. From the jump you’ve got way more combat, stealth and traversal options at your disposal, and Miles has his own unique set of upgrades to work with that make him feel very different from 2018’s Peter Parker. The game as a whole manages to skirt the line of being a “Spider-Man living in the shadow of Spider-Man story”, by making it obvious that Miles is his own character and his struggles both as Miles and Spider-Man are just as important and impactful as anyone else’s.
I truly loved the time I spent with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and basically devoured it within the first few days of its release. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a truly fantastic game that tells its story incredibly well and efficiently, is mechanically rewarding and engaging, and it doesn’t even cost as much as a full priced title. It’s a truly exquisite game that every Spider-Man fan should play. For all of those reasons and more, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is my game of the year for 2020.
Well that’s it I suppose, another year in the books. Thank goodness. I’d like to personally thank you all for sticking with me this year and reading the things I write, it truly means more to me than you could ever know. But that’s it y’all. I hope your 2021 is demonstrably better than 2020, although that can’t be too high of a bar to clear. Thanks again everyone.
Not so long ago I wrote a lengthy piece about my issues with the state of the early access release of Baldur’s Gate III. Without rehashing that entire article here, the main crux of it focused on the mechanical liberties Baldur’s Gate III took with the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. My initial thought was that translating the rules of D&D into a video game would naturally require a ton of concessions, however another CPRG named Solasta Crown of the Magister recently entered early access and proved that theory wrong.
Solasta Crown of the Magister is a turn-based, isometrically viewed, party-focused RPG that might not have the best presentation, but impressively implements the rules of D&D in an easy to understand fashion. It’s actually been quite refreshing to be able to jump into a CRPG and know exactly what I’m doing for once, because usually it feels like I’m trying to learn a new language with these types of games. Solasta Crown of the Magister uses the SRD 5.1 rule set to great success, managing to appeal to veteran players of D&D without compromising accessibility to new players, and that’s something that deserves to be praised.
When you start Solasta Crown of the Magister, you can build an entire party from scratch or use some of the pre-generated offerings if you like. When building a character, you can choose from 8 playable races which include specific race variants (i.e. High Elf & Sylvan Elf), 8 backgrounds and 6 character classes. You are walked through character creation step by step, letting you know everything from what a particular god is all about, what benefits a certain background might grant and much more. I genuinely love the process of creating a character and think it’s fantastically well done, with the exception of how the character actually looks.
Therein lies my main hangup with Solasta Crown of the Magister. The actual appearance of your character is pretty rough. There’s only a handful of face and hair options to choose from which is particularly underwhelming for any role-playing game, but it highlights this hilarious imbalance between how mechanically sound the game actually is, versus the customization stuff. That point is only exacerbated by the facts that not only do the character models look very rough, but all of the NPC’s in the game are made from those same options. It led to a lot of moments where I’d see the same “dude with a beard” as both a quest giver, and a random bandit attacking me in the night. There isn’t any real variety for physical appearances, which desperately needs to be addressed.
But hey, it’s early access, and I honestly prefer having a mechanically sound game versus a pretty one. If I could mash up both Solasta Crown of the Magister and Baldur’s Gate III, we’d have ourselves one hell of a CRPG to contend with.
I also really appreciate that this game starts with your adventurers meeting in a tavern and sharing their stories (tutorial missions) about their journey here to each other. It’s a very funny jab at the fact that all good D&D campaigns start in a tavern, although it really tries to force some of your characters into specific tutorial boxes. For instance, my party is comprised of a paladin, a fighter, a cleric and wizard, all of whom shared their “tale of triumph” with one another.
The first tutorial taught me how to just move around the world via escaping a prison, the second taught me how to kill wolves and push them off cliffs, the third taught me how to utilize light, resting, and healing potions, and the final one was a stealth mission. Now, you may have noticed it too, but I don’t have a rogue in the party. However, Solasta Crown of the Magister made a decision and decided that my cleric was the perfect fit for the job. She handled it well enough, but I’m certain the rolls were weighted in my favor for the tutorial. It’s nothing game breaking by any means, but it certainly is immersion shattering when the game just decides on a character trait for the sake of a tutorial.
Once through the tutorial, you get your first chance at navigating dialogue situations. Each player was given a set of tags to choose from during character creation based on their alignment and background, which I believe (although I’m not certain) impacted who had a certain dialogue option to use. I didn’t see any dialogue choices in the traditional sense, but a tutorial tooltip made it sound like the game would automatically select the character with the highest stats to perform a particular dialogue skill check. But from what I saw in the first hour or so of playing was that each character just has one dialogue option to interject into the conversation. Hopefully this expands as I play more of Solasta Crown of the Magister, but as is, I do appreciate how every character is at least involved in the conversation.
Solasta Crown of the Magister really shines in a lot of different areas despite being pretty rough in the presentation department. The voice acting is hit or miss and the characters all look pretty bad, but it’s mechanically competent for a D&D video game. One of my favorite touches is how you’re placed into a visible grid when you enter combat, leaving no ambiguity about where you are or who you’re vulnerable too. Honestly, the user interface in general is much easier to follow than it is in Baldur’s Gate III.
Another really intriguing aspect about Solasta Crown of the Magister is how it’s structuring campaigns. From the looks of things, there isn’t going to be one overarching campaign that will occupy you for hours upon hours. Instead it looks like they’re going for a more anthology approach, with Crown of the Magister being the first playable campaign. It’s a really interesting approach that comes with its own set of pros and cons. For instance, I can see a really easy post launch support structure that just injects new campaigns into the game, but it also makes you wonder if you’ll get any of the inter-party drama that you would get from other games like romance options and new recruits.
Solasta Crown of the Magister is in early access, so my gripes with the game as it is are bound to change, but without a development roadmap to refer to, all I can do is speculate at this point. Most importantly, it should be noted that this comes from a very small studio that hasn’t shipped a game before and found their funding via Kickstarter, so their resources are a bit more limited. To expect Solasta Crown of the Magister to offer the same amount of features and intricacies that something like Baldur’s Gate III is implementing would be unfair, but in my opinion they’ve already tackled the hardest part by successfully translating the D&D rules into a video game. That alone might be a good enough reason to check it out.
Change is good, isn’t it? Like, exhibiting personal growth and being able to look back and recognize that maybe you were a little too harsh on something just because you didn’t know any better and changing your opinion because of it is something to celebrate, right? That’s where I’m at with Divinity: Original Sin II, and I honestly couldn’t be happier to be wrong.
I don’t think I ever really hated Divinity: Original Sin II, rather, I would just write it off as a game that people other than me could actually enjoy. Hearing the rave reviews from critics and friends alike made it painfully obvious to me that the game was excellent, but it just always seemed like an experience that just wouldn’t resonate with me. Then Baldur’s Gate III entered early access, and everything changed.
I’m not going to reexplain everything I’ve mentioned in my previousarticles about Baldur’s Gate III, so you can read those on your own if you’re so inclined. Instead, I’m just going to say that because Baldur’s Gate III managed to sink its claws into me, I was able to easily make the transition to Divinity: Original Sin II. Let’s be clear though, I want to play more of Baldur’s Gate III far more than any other game I own at the moment, but it’s so early and janky that I’d rather wait and play a similar, yet structurally sound game for now.
Divinity: Original Sin II isn’t a perfect game, nor is it scratching the exact itch that Baldur’s Gate III was, but it’s still a good time. I’ve been told numerous times that Divinity: Original Sin II has something of a difficulty spike towards the end of the campaign, but that’s why easy mode was invented.
Not only did I make the decision to not only play on the easiest difficulty, but I also opted to load the game up with mods to make it a more “interesting” experience. I’ve got custom classes and unique weapons falling out of my ass at this point with all the shit I’ve injected into the game, and I’m enjoying this play-through much more than my initial, mod-less one. And I can already hear the cries of, “aren’t you going to play the game normally?” to which I say, “no.”
I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin II in a way that’s enjoyable for me, and I have no interest in looking up optimal builds or guides that will basically tell me how to play the game step by step. I’d rather just wade into the game on my own terms along with the ability to summon any item in the game whenever I damn well please. Sure it isn’t the “intended experience” or whatever, but I’m happy with the version of the game that I’ve created called, “Divinity: Original Sin II: Ari’s Bastardized Edition.
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The Bonus World 