Huff

While stuck in the frigid underbelly of a submarine tender in Guam, I played through a comfy little game called A Short Hike. You play as a small bird visiting her aunt in a provincial park in Canada and climb a mountain so you can get a phone signal. It's only a couple of hours long even if you take your time to find all the secrets and fully milk the fishing minigame, but I can't help going back to it around once a month and just messing around with it. A lot of media is overly sarcastic and ironic nowadays, and this game is genuine and good-natured. Also it's like if Animal Crossing weren't boring.

Hotline Miami has long been on my list of favorite games and it has spawned a long list of games inspired by it, aka "70% of games published by Devolver Digital". Among those is Katana Zero. I originally wrote this game off as just another copy of HM and let my fanboyism get in the way of trying probably one of the best strategic hack and slashes I've played. Katana Zero has a surprising amount of depth to its mechanics-finding the most viable route through a screen and executing it is very satisfying, and there's a surprising amount of content hidden away for those who desire to master the game. The hard mode is really good-it introduces exclusive enemy types and really pushes your skills to the limit. One day I'm going to pull off a no-slowmo power hardmode run and then I'll be done with it. Also this game is one of those made mostly by one guy I think? Bonus points for that if it's true, and the free expansion looks to be really good as well, even if it's taking forever. Also the soundtrack is incredible.

I think I played this around fall of 2021, but I'm still going to count it because I think I finished it at the beginning of this year? So far Sekiro is the only From Software game I've played; Silent has been urging me to play the others but I'm a little too challenged in my daily life to play such hard games yet. That, and I think I enjoyed the combat of Sekiro too much to move to something more methodical and deliberate. People always joke that Sekiro is a rhythm game or a Punch-Out!! sequel and the good thing is that I love Punch-Out!! and I have a good sense of rhythm so the combat really clicked with me. Not enough to go back and try again for the tiny little worm ending or anything, but I'll probably replay Sekiro before I try Elden Ring or DS.

I am odd in that like last time, it seems I'll be the last of my friends left playing Overwatch 2. I'm not as good as I was when I quit playing OW 1 (I just made it to Masters when I quit, and I'm just barely scraping the top divisions of Gold and the bottom of Platinum now), which is frustrating, but the core gameplay is still good. I've been trying to actively get better at more technical characters, but the odd ones are still there and still fun to play-Junkrat, Symmetra, and Junker Queen being new favorites. Despite the somehow even worse monetization and very wonky balance (I think Pharah and Sojurn players should consider suicide), I'm still having fun. Muting the chat and voice comms has made this game a lot more bearable too, so I think I'll continue playing for a while.

I was waiting to finish this before writing this post, but I'm pleased that Neon White has gotten such good attention recently. I have a vivid memory of seeing this revealed during a Nintendo Direct and becoming interested in it while some of the guys I was watching it with noting weirdness of the cards=weapons mechanic. A lot of people have noted the game's writing as being cringe anime shit, but... I don't really agree with that? Neon Violet may be my least favorite character of a lot of media I've consumed recently, but even then, her voice acting is good, just like the rest of the game's. Besides that, the other characters are enjoyable and the plot is more interesting than I'd have thought it would be. That aside, the rest of the game is stellar at what it does. The bite-size levels are fun to deconstruct and try to get perfect ranks on and the music is also fantastic. It's a bit of a niche game with a lot of heart and good stylistic choices that I didn't expect to succeed, but I'm glad it did.

I guess I can put the DLC here to give Bugsnax more representation because...

On 1/6/2023 at 10:40 AM, Silent said:

Huff played and streamed it all for us, and he has sworn by it ever since (just ask to see his collection of plushes).

I really do love the game an inordinate amount. It started with the funny meme song, but it's a game with loads of heart and a very fun gameplay loop. The soundtrack is also deceptively good and I have the voice clips of the snax on constant repeat in my head.

Bunger!

My game of the year is probably Metal: Hellsinger. Like Silent said above, it's kind of an evolution of the core gameplay introduced by BPM: Bullets per minute, but it's one of those games with an unexpected amount of polish put on it. I think I like the style of music a bit more than BPM's and the game doesn't actively look like it's made of melting chocolate, but the biggest advantage it holds is the simple fact that staying on beat matters more. In BPM missing a beat often doesn't matter much beyond maybe putting yourself in a bad situation or missing a shot that can be rectified with a dash or repositioning yourself, but in Hellisinger, keeping to the beat increases your damage, boosts your passive abilities,. and overall is your key to success. It's just a shame it's so short and that the bosses are very samey. I think if it had roughly 50% more levels, it'd be the perfect size. Maybe a heaven DLC/Sequel is on the way? Honestly I just want to listen to the narrator's faux-Matt Mercer southern voice more.

While the only game of the series I've really played to any extent was Smooth Moves on the Wii and DiY on the 3DS, I still consider myself fond of the Warioware series. That said... I found Warioware: Get it Together! a bit of a disappointment? I value Warioware for its variety of microgames. I don't think the addition of different characters to play as in the games make up for it having the lowest number of microgames in the series to date (I think? I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere...), even if there are some fun interactions like Penny's water cannon acting like real water and offering alternate ways to beat the games. That said, Penny's Song was really cute, and the Spanish version is probably even nicer.

While I think Pokemon Scarlet/Violet were... ambitious, I really can't look past what the series has lost since gen 6 came out. As the biggest media franchise in the world, I understand why the games have been so unfinished and unpolished recently given the strict time requirements of new merchandise, anime seasons, and so on that need to be met... but it doesn't excuse the games being technically shit. The amount of times I turned the camera around and saw an NPC walking at 5 FPS, a character or pokemon just walking 10 feet in the air, or an entire town in the distance turning into a scrambled mess of textures for half a second is inexcusable. The music is good (Maybe it's mostly Toby Fox's influence?) and the new pokemon are probably some of the best we've gotten in a long, long time, but the fresh gameplay isn't enough to make up for the shoddiness of the game. I'm in the minority here as well I think, but the open world structure has also resulted in a general loss of soul in the towns and routes. Can't go into buildings, a severe downgrade in NPC design (barring Larry, the best character in the game), and an unimpressive region... I just can't bring myself to say the game is good. I had some fun, but I dunno. For me it's just not enough.

I dropped The Artful Escape. Not much to say about it, somehow. Maybe I'll go back and try it again, but for a game trying so hard to be spectacular, it's just come off as a less heartfelt version of Wandersong with an indie rock coat of paint put on it.

I also played Psycholonials earlier last year. As the last person on planet Earth who cares at all about Homestuck, it's been heartbreaking to see it and Andrew Hussie's general reputation and storytelling decline. The thing about Psycholonials is that it is also generally a disappointment-the main characters are despicable without being entertaining like Vriska and Caliborn were, the music was kind of disappointing, and it's overly wordy without giving much interesting (besides maybe the central concept of a literally viral memetic culture?). The true value it holds is as a blatant and hamfisted metaphor for how Hussie views his relationship with Homestuck and its fandom nowadays. The climax of the game being the main character (a self-insert of Hussie) handing over control of the social movement she has created to a group of literal clowns which then proceed to backstab each other for control of the movement and telling the reader that she won't allow them to control her actions is worthless as anything but Hussie showing his thoughts about modern Homestuck's management and fandom. With him announcing the end of his involvement of the franchise last year, it's a shameful end of what I consider the most impressive story told in modern times, but at least he got to tell his story. Joculine is cute though. 

I played Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl? It was functional I guess? It's really such a shame it turned out so meh, because I loved the time I spent with Slap City, made by the same developers, but the lack of voice acting and relative shallowness of the game killed it for me after approximately two playsessions. The howie scream song and the devs being forced to remove a reference to the XJ-9 Zone animation were pretty funny, though.

I'll echo Silent's statements on the Cuphead DLC. I got through it very quickly though, so it didn't leave all too much of an impression on me. Really high quality though. The final boss was probably boss of the year for me, though!

• Deltarune and Undertale are two games that are so incredibly important to me. I think Undertale has been discussed to death in these kind of situations for me, but Deltarune is in an amazing sweet spot where it feels like Undertale 2 but also like its own thing. I have been legitimately obsessed with DR Chapter 2 for weeks now, and that feeling is similar, but just as intense, as what I felt back in October 2015. While Ghost Trick might still barely squeak past these two, it's on thin ice, and if Acts 3-5 of DR live up to what we've seen, it will finally abdicate its throne.
• I don't think I said anything about BOTW in my last one. BOTW is one of these games on here, alongside The Witness, Bioshock, and Dishonored, where the world and environment feels just as important a character as the heroes and villains. The beautiful part of BOTW is how it was willing to sit back and allow itself to be more subtle compared to previous Zeldas, which won me over. It's amazing to just explore at my own pace and take in the serene world.
• Disco Elysium is new on here too essentially. It has the best writing out of any game I've ever played, and honestly out of any media I've consumed in general. A lot of people misunderstand it, but it has superb worldbuilding, atmosphere, and a sense of verisimilitude that's unmatched. And at its core, it's a funny, sad, exciting tale of a broken man and the 16 skills in his fucked-up brain.
• Bioshock is up here! While Bioshock 1 may have the better story and Infinite has the most wasted potential, Bioshock 2 is in that sweet spot of perfecting the gameplay of the series while maintaining what made Bioshock 1 great. It has a comparable story, but the gameplay is just so well realized that I think it's still the peak of Bioshock.
• Persona 5 is up here, and its complicated. The writing is honestly subpar and the plot itself can be very messy (though Royal's exclusive content in the third semester is actually very very good) and I absolutely hate the fucking gameplay. But even after all that, P5 earns its spot here for the sheer power of its presentation. Visual style, UI mastery, music, animations, setpieces. This game has its own charisma that absolutely nails it and honestly carries the game for me on its own. Kawakami is my wife.
• Payday 2 is one of my favorite games, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

THERE'S A GENOCIDE ROUTE