I’ve Enjoyed Writing Top 10 Game of the Year Lists, So I’m Gonna Keep Doing it for the Forseeable Future!
I don’t even know how to start this article. Like, it feels like I need some sort of preamble here where I reflect on the year as a whole before focusing in on the games I played? That seems like a sensible and correct way to write something like this. But I mean… what the fuck do you even say about 2020 at this point that hasn’t already been said over and over again? People have been talking about what a crazy year it’s been since at least, what, April? March? There really isn’t a novel observation to be made about 2020 at this point. A lot of terrible things happened, and they were consistently exacerbated by the incompetence, negligence, and malice of those who had the authority to do anything about them. It was, you might say, a shitty year!
On a personal level, 2020 hasn’t been all that different from most years. Well, it has been, but not for, uh, “2020 reasons,” let’s call ’em. I’m a boring nerd who barely ever goes out even when it’s safe to, so staying away from public places hasn’t been as mentally taxing on me as it has been for a lot of folks, and thankfully my job wasn’t affected by the pandemic. The major shifts in my personal life this year have largely been positive. I moved in with my girlfriend, and that’s been wonderful! I launched a huge creative project, Eidolon Playtest, which has been a tremendously rewarding endeavor that’s also given me a great excuse to set aside time to spend with friends every week. If I look away from the news, things are actually going pretty okay for me these days.
I’m profoundly lucky and privileged to be able to say that, and that shouldn’t be the case; safety and moderate comfort shouldn’t require privilege and luck. Everything’s fucked! And I don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it! So, since the odds seem low that this article is gonna cure COVID or dismantle policing as an institution or bring an end to global capitalism and American imperialism… I guess let’s talk about some video games instead!
I dunno man, it’s been a weird fuckin’ year. I’ve spent most of it frustrated and angry, because I mean, how could you not. I’m not really here to vent about that though. I’m here to talk about some games that were really wonderful in a year that really, really wasn’t. So, let’s do that!
Honorable Mentions
Bugsnax
I wasn’t expecting a lot out of Bugsnax. The trailer was quirky and fun, but it also didn’t really show what the game was, like, about. Young Horses’ previous title, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, was sorta cute and had a similarly silly conceit, but once you got over the initial humor of the premise, there wasn’t much more to it. I was expecting Bugsnax to be similar, and I’m really glad that it turns out I was wrong!
Bugsnax is a really nice little game, sort of a miniature immersive sim set on an island that, while small, covers all the major Video Game Biomes; you got your beach zone, your canyon zone, your ice zone, and so on. Each area is crawling with the titular Bugsnax, adorable litle creatures that look like food with googly eyes, and for various reasons you need to catch a whole shitload of ’em. Each Snak is essentially a little puzzle. You’ve got to learn its behavior, then figure out a way to make it vulnerable to capture. There’s a little bit of Pokemon Snap here as you try to figure out how to use your limited toolset to manipulate the behaviors of these goofy little animals. Each puzzle is small and self-contained (had to take a second to figure out how not to say that they’re “bite-sized” or “easily digestible”), and there’s always another Bugsnak to catch as soon as you’ve trapped your current target, creating a really engaging gameplay loop that kept me hooked for hours.
On top of that, you’re spending time with a sizable cast of likable characters, each of which has a sidquest chain that involves getting to know them better and exploring their character arc. The whole thing is also peppered with pretty good jokes! It’s by no means perfect; the boss encounters can be a bit tedious and some of the individual character stories wrap up a bit too neatly to be truly satisfying. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed my time with Bugsnax, and I’ll be happy to revisit it in a few years when I’ve forgotten enough of hte puzzle solutions and story beats.
Crusader Kings III
“Grand strategy” is not really my genre of choice. The games always seem too complicated and unmanageable, too much shit all happening at once in a way that just sort of makes my eyes glaze over. Even a lot of the titles are a bit too much for me; you can get about 2 syllables into “Europa Universalis” before you’ve lost my attention completely.
As a result, Crusader Kings III sort of took me by surprise. This game is great! It’s just a big medieval sandbox that’s constantly changing according to complicated and opaque simulation rules, perpetually churning out new conflicts and new drama. The randomized, algorithmic flow of the game is paved over with just enough writing and narrative to encourage you to paint vivid pictures of ever-unfolding drama in your mind as your house rises and falls in power and the political landscape of (a sizable chunk of) the world gradually shifts over the decades and centuries. Failing to grasp all the systems at play is almost a boon here, as it keeps the entire thing feeling more like a magic trick.
The biggest reason this game is in my honorable mentions and not somewhere on my top 10 is because I’m fucking terrible at combat and I can’t seem to get better. As soon as war is declared, all the negative associations I have with the term “grand strategy” push themselves to the forefront. All the fun drama and political machination takes a back seat to a complicated military tactics game that I just can’t will myself to understand well enough to win consistently, even when the game assures me that the odds are overwhelmingly in my favor. War turns the game into a chore, and that sucks. I’d love it if they added some kind of “narrative mode” that automated the combat, or replaced it with some dice rolls or something.
Still, I had a game where my player character died and I assumed the role of his three year old granddaughter, now the Baby Queen of Scandinavia, who spent her childhood playing with her cat while her empire burned down around her, only to be possessed by a ghost as she reached adulthood and reclaimed her birthright county by county, ritually slaughtering every prisoner she captured in her ruthless campaign to regain her grip on northern Europe, and that’s pretty cool (and also, combat is a lot easier when you’re a whole goddamn empire and you pick on weak independent duchies).
Final Fantasy VII
I have never played more than about an hour of any Final Fantasy game before this year. In the past I’ve tried VI, VII, X, X-2, Tactics, and XV, and every time I just sort of run out of steam after the third combat encounter or so. Something about them just never really gripped me. But, with Final Fantasy VII Remake coming out, I found myself getting swept up in the FFVII nostalgia, and decided to finally knuckle down and see what all the fuss was about.
I’ll say out of the gate that I never could have finished this game without all the “cheats” they give you in the modern ports. The ability to speed up the game, heal to full health every turn, and always have a maxed-out limit gauge are what made this game bearable to me. I can’t imagine grinding at normal speed, or getting to the final boss only to find that I’m severely underleveled for the final phase despite being strong enough to handle everything up to that point without issue. This game is only playable to me because these days they let you break it.
And y’know what? I’m really glad they made that choice! FFVII is not at all the game I’ve thought it was. I’ve seen so many edgy forum signatures and moody fan art over the years that I was expecting something angsty and eye-rolling, and instead I got a surprisingly poignant narrative about a young man suffering from PTSD finding the strength to recover from trauma and build himself back up, set against a larger story about capitalism and humanity’s relationship with nature. But even all of that is sort of selling FFVII short, because one of the biggest surprises I had with it was that it’s not afraid to be funny, or even downright silly. It’s not a game about sword boys crying black tears at the end of the world or whatever, and I’m a little frustrated that its fanbase has given me the wrong idea about it for so long. I would’ve loved this game as a kid!
Oh, wait, right. I couldn’t have sped the game up as a kid, so I probably wouldn’t have had the patience for it. Still though, I had a great time playing through FFVII, and I’m glad to have finally checked it off the list of “games I should probably try at some point.”
And the Rest
I played… so many games this year. And a whole lot of them were great! I mentioned last year that I don’t really think there can be such a thing as a “slow year for games” anymore, and early on in 2020 I thought this year would be the one to prove that wrong, with so many games getting pushed back due to COVID slowing down development. The big tentpoles that did manage to release, like The Last of Us Part II and Doom Eternal, largely didn’t interest me. But despite that, there was still a huge selection of games to play this year. I played nearly 30 new releases, and there’s at least a dozen more that I never got around to. Just to give some quick shout-outs to a few other games I enjoyed:
- Lucifer Within Us has a great world and terrific gameplay systems, but in a lot of ways it feels like a prologue to a much longer game. I really wanna play that much longer game!
- FFVII Remake has a terrific combat system, and looks amazing when it wants to (and like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) when it doesn’t, which is sort of delighftul in its own way). The first two thirds or so of the game are a blast, until the pacing completely falls to pieces.
- Boreal Tenebrae, Act I: “I Stand Before You, a Form Undone” would probably be on my top ten list if a bug hadn’t broken my save file. I’m giving some serious thought to restarting from the beginning in the hopes that I can avoid that problem the second time around!
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 was an incredibly fun nostalgia trip. God I’m happy they finally managed to find a studio that could do right by these games! It’s been like 15 years since they did a good one, and they finally did a good one!
- Call of the Sea wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, but it was a fun and pretty-looking little puzzle-adventure. The two evenings I spent with it were undeniably A Good Time.
I could go on. Like I said, a lot of great stuff released this year! But out of all the games I played, ten of them were better than the others, and I’m gettin’ antsy to talk about those. So let’s get on with it and get to…
THE LIST
10. 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel
It’s sort of a truism that video games struggle with comedy. It makes sense; being funny can be a tricky thing when you have the player setting the pace of the experience, even moreso if it’s a game where the player controls a camera. Properly timing and framing comedic beats becomes extremely difficult under those circumstances. There’s certainly funny games out there, but for the most part the humor happens in cutscenes, artwork, and recorded voice lines, things that the player can’t fuck up.
5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel is one of the funniest games I’ve ever played, and its humor is almost entirely derived from its game mechanics.
At its core, 5D Chess works like chess. The difference is that in addition to moving across the x- and y-axes of the chessboard, you can also move along two temporal axes (I have no idea why it’s called 5D Chess when there’s only four dimensions involved. I assume that’s part of the joke). Each time a move is made, the previous board state is saved as a new board is created to reflect your move, and pieces can “travel back in time” in order to appear on these older boards. Or, a version of them, anyway. As the rules of the game casually assert, it’s impossible to change the past, so when pieces travel back in time, they instead create a new branching timeline. Pieces can then, in addition to traveling back in time, travel across timelines. Checkmating your opponent on any board at any time in any timeline results in a win.
Each piece’s moveset has been updated in ways that accurately reflect the rules of chess, but which feel like they’re going to break your brain when you first hear them. In normal chess, a rook can move as far as it wants to in any single direction. That’s true here as well, but it can also travel through time as far as it wants to, or jump an arbitrary number of timelines. Of course, since it can only move in one direction at a time, it has to appear in its new time period or timeline in the same space that it was occupying at the start of the turn. Bishops can move through any two dimensions at a time; they can move diagonally as in normal chess, go back in time and jump to parallel universes, or travel through time while traveling vertically across the board. And of course, the extra dimensions create a theoretical space for new pieces, the unicorn and the dragon, which can travel triagonally and quadragonally, respectively.
The whole thing is ridiculous, and even though the rules are completely consistent with themselves, they feel utterly incomprehensible for the first several games. Early matches against the CPU will often see you eating a checkmate after only a few turns, because a standard chess opening works just fine in the present, but it leaves your king wide open in the past. The more time travel you and the computer perform, the more the gamespace expands, until it becomes an absurd tower of chessboards, a dozen or more discrete games that also influence one another and from which new chess games can spawn at any time, a ridiculous web of strategic opportunities that you can’t possibly hope to keep straight. And then you make a random arbitrary move because you’ve lost all hope of playing with real intent, only to find out that you’ve somehow accomplished 8 different checkmates at the same time. And at this point, I’m crying with laughter.
That would all be enough to make 5D Chess pretty great, but what takes it even a level above that is that, once you get past that initial wave of nonsense, there’s actually a pretty interesting strategy game here! The more you play, the more you start to understand the game’s obtuse but logical time-travel rules. You start to learn to speak the game’s language, which is really another joke in itself; the idea that you actually understand the bullshit that you’re looking at is honestly even funnier than when you didn’t. Honestly, the only reason this game isn’t significantly higher on this list is because I couldn’t convince enough of my friends to get into it with me. Before long I could beat even the highest levels of the computer without much effort, and after the first week or so it became impossible to find an opponent through the matchmaking system. I would’ve loved to go deep into this game with some friends, but nearly everyone I showed this game reacted as if I’d shown them a piece of roadkill. The idea of figuring out how the fuck to navigate this absurd ruleset completely put them off. Without anyone to play with, the game lost my interest a lot faster than I wish it had. To any of my friends who are reading this: you’re all cowards.
9. Hades
I’ve spent a couple days now trying to figure out what the hell to write about Hades. It’s really great, but it feels like everyone knows that already? Every little nook and cranny of Hades has had piles upon piles of praise heaped onto it. It’s a really good roguelike! Writing a narrative that focuses on a cycle of death and persistence is super clever, and the execution is really impressive from both a technical and writing perspective! The game looks great, sounds great, and feels great to play. The randomized elements always seem to push you into weird and exciting new builds, and challenges that feel insurmountable at first become cakewalks. Beating Theseus for the first time felt incredible, and it felt even better when I got so good at the fight that it no longer took much effort. Mechanically, it’s sort of perfect, and every other aspect of it is pretty damn good too.
I don’t really know what else to say! Everyone knows what this game is and nearly everyone likes it. At first I tried to write about how and why I didn’t love it quite as much as so many others seemed to, but every angle I tried to come at that from made me sound more negative than I mean to be. I definitely have complaints; I’m not a fan of the ending, and I’m a little chafed by the fact that the only character with a single ounce of body fat is a big gross glutton-ghoul in the first area. There’s a magic hammer that upgrades your weapons, and it has nothing to do with Hephaestus, the Greek god who’s, y’know, a blacksmith. That seems weird, and I can’t shake the suspicion that he was cut because Hephaestus is supposed to be an ugly god, and the game’s art direction places a huge emphasis on every character being physically attractive. That’s not the best! But at the same time, it’s not a major complaint, and it’s definitely not the reason that Hades is on the lower end of my list.
I don’t really have any major complaints about Hades. At the end of the day, it just didn’t inspire me to put as many hours into it as most of my friends. I beat it a half-dozen or so times, once with every weapon, and then I stopped playing it. The last time I booted it up, I pulled off two successful runs back-to-back, and felt like there wasn’t really anything more for me here. I could keep cranking up the Heat Level, but… I dunno, that doesn’t appeal to me.
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Instead of trying to justify why this game is so low on my list, I should instead take the fact that it’s this low as a big credit to the eight games that beat it out.
…Yeah, sure, let’s go with that! If only because I’m tired of trying to figure out what to say about this damn game.
8. Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road
Night Road has some unfair advantages when it comes to impressing me. For one thing, I don’t play a lot of “interactive fiction” games. I don’t have anything against them, I just seem to have some kind of inexplicable aversion to ever actually trying them out. I’ve got a big long list of critically-acclaimed IF games that I keep meaning to get to, but somehow it hasn’t happened yet.
Also, I’ve never played anything related to Vampire: The Masquerade, and don’t really know anything about its setting, other than a vague sense that it’s, y’know, kind of Anne Ricey? Maybe that’s not even accurate. It always struck me as “D&D for horny angsty teens,” and while I don’t really have anything against horny angsty teens these days, I definitely did back when I myself was a horny, angsty teen.
All of this is to say that I really have no way to gauge how clever or novel Night Road really is. As far as I know, it could be a rote reproduction of the same kind of things that any well-made IF game does, using well-worn tropes and cliches that anyone who’s familiar with Vampire would instantly recognize.
But, I can only speak for myself. And for me personally, Night Road was awesome.
It hooked me right off the bat (heh), during the introduction sequence that functions as a stealth character-creator. You don’t play as a sexy vampire doing sexy vampire crimes in Night Road; you’re an immortal creature of the night, but you’re also flat broke, and stuck doing shitty gig work as a courier, running packages across the American Southwest on behalf of sexier, more powerful vampires. The game opens with your car breaking down on an empty desert highway just before sunrise, and you have to make a mad scramble to avoid being burnt up by the sun. Not long after that, I was forced to wait out a day by hiding in a trash can. The idea of being a “dirtbag” vampire is one that I don’t think I’ve seen before, and it was incredibly fresh and appealing to me. Again, maybe that’s not such a strange thing in the wider world of Vampire; if that’s the case, I need to get into Vampire (does Bloodlines hold up these days?).
In a lot of ways, Vampire strikes me as successfully accomplishing what Cyberpunk 2077 was ostensibly going for. Here is an incredible, fantastical world; it has all the same problems as the real one, and despite your cool powers and sick look, you’re still right near the bottom of a very tall pyramid. You’re immortal, and you’re still trapped in the gig economy. Your survival is conditional on the whims of the rich and powerful, and they’re not at all shy to employ violence to remind you of that.
I’ve got two main issues with this game. The first is that the save system is brutal. I’ve played Night Road through twice, and I didn’t get to the end either time. In both instances, I made it to a big climactic showdown, only to immediately eat shit and die. The only option at that point was to start the game alllll the way over from the beginning. It’s not that long of a game, but it’s long enough that that’s a pretty big ask. I’d love to know how the story wraps up, but I won’t until they either patch in a more forgiving save system or I find the patience to keep at it until I win that encounter.
The second issue is more… slippery. Night Road is a game that wants you to know that its heart is in the right place, and it’s a game that wants to say something. I respect both of those goals, but I dunno about how the game goes about them. Like, one of the 3 major missions is set at a border detention camp. Vampires have infiltrated the U.S. government and are using the camp as a cheap and easy source of blood. And like, I get the metaphor they’re going for here. It’s… not subtle. But even though they’re using this setpiece to voice a message that I agree with, it still feels… gross. Especially since you have the option to join in and feed on the prisoners yourself. The desire to write a Serious Story That Says Serious Things About The Issues of Our Modern Times ends up in this case feeling to me like it’s minimizing those very issues, turning them into toys for you to play with. I don’t like it!
Regardless, I still had a good time playing as a dirtbag vampire, and the other two missions largely avoid that kind of discomfort. It was fun to constantly stumble into complex and arcane vampire conspiracies, only to tell everyone that I didn’t give a shit about any of it. My vampire just wanted to make enough money that they could fuckin’ relax and not have to spend the day in a trash can ever again, and approaching this world from that perspective was a great time.
7. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
This game is wild. It’s a beautifully-rendered 2D adventure game featuring 13 different protagonists, whose stories all intersect with one another in complex and byzantine ways. The entire thing is told out-of-sequence, requiring you to pay close attention to figure out how different plotlines handshake with one another. The story also heavily features time travel, which makes it all the more difficult to keep things straight.
It’s kind of a miracle that it works at all, and even more than that, that it’s actually really fun! It’s an absurd roller coaster of a narrative, and every time you think you’ve got a handle on what’s going on, some new plot twist throws all of your assumptions into the garbage can. It’s so convoluted that it almost becomes the narrative equivalent of 5D Chess; the plot at times gets so entangled that it starts to feel like a parody of itself, even though it plays everything as seriously as possible.
Even when things threaten to completely derail though, the characters keep it grounded. All 13 of them are fun to hang out with, and I absolutely adore at least 10 of them. They can be a bit two-dimensional sometimes, simply because there’s so many of them and the story needs to make a lot of room for its convoluted sci-fi plot, but they all still manage to be extremely charming. Playable characters often show up as background players in each others’ stories, and it’s always a little thrill when you see them. They’re good kids!
My biggest complaints about 13 Sentinels all focuse on the ending. I don’t wanna spoil anything, so I’ll speak in broad strokes here: like I said, this game has a very complicated plot, which sort of winkingly features references to something like two dozen different science fiction stories, ranging from War of the Worlds to the 2011 film Source Code (Source Code in particular gets a bizarrely thorough extended homage). The game’s plot centers around time travel, with the characters all coming from different eras but for various reasons ending up in the 1980s, and thematically the narrative is all about how generations of people have to suffer for the mistakes made by those who came before them, with the kids struggling to break that cycle and build something new.
That’s a really strong concept!… but I don’t think it quite nails it in the end. The heroes of 13 Sentinels manage to overcome the specific threats that their ancestors bequeathed them, but in the end they more or less completely embrace the aesthetics and culture that led to those threats in the first place, which makes the whole thing ring a bit hollow. It reminds me of the conservatism that tends to fuck up the themes of the Persona series. It’s not as severe here (for one thing, 13S is not intentionally and directly homophobic), but the narrative still feels hampered by the creators’ own lack of imagination about what a better world might look like. The kids earn the right to shape the future however they want, and they choose to replicate the past. It’s disappointing and honestly a little boring, especially with how absurd and outlandish the game is willing to go up until its closing moments.
I’m realizing now that I’ve gone on for like five paragraphs now and haven’t even touched on the combat. It’s alright! It’s a pretty decent tactics game. You pull the trigger on your robot’s big guns and the entire screen erupts into fireworks. It reminds me of something you’d see on the PS2, and I mean that in the best way possible. Really though, it’s not the main appeal here; it’s more of a palette cleanser in between long stretches of narrative. Nitpicks and disappointments aside, 13 Sentinels was a really wonderful time, and it seems like it kinda got slept on. You should check it out!
6. The Pathless
One of the big surprise hits of this year was Genshin Impact. A ton of my friends got really into it, and one thing I heard over and over again was that it’s a better version of Breath of the Wild. I get where that opinion comes from; the landscape has a similar art direction, you can climb on anything, it’s got the exact same kind of stamina and gliding systems, there’s a more fleshed-out story, and the combat is much deeper and more involved. Plus, as far as I know, Genshin Impact doesn’t have an entire quarter of its plot dedicated to trans- and homophobia, so, you know, it’s got that going for it over BotW.
Still, when I tried it, I could immediately tell that it wasn’t going to grab me the way Breath of the Wild did.
The thing that kept me coming back to Breath of the Wild over and over again was the way in which that world felt incredibly… tactile, for lack of a better word. The combat kinda stunk in that game, but I just ignored it for the most part. The story blows, but I mostly ignored that too. The thing that just completely enchanted me about Breath of the Wild was the way simply existing in that world made me feel. Just the basic act of moving around in that game brought me joy in a way that I find difficult to explain. I’d often lose track of following an objective and realize that I’d basically been running in circles for a good 10–15 minutes. The combination of gamefeel and animation brought that game to life to me in a way that Genshin Impact just didn’t replicate at all. And that’s fine! It seems like Genshin stands up really well on its own merits. It’s just that, for me personally, it can’t live up to the idea of “a better Breath of the Wild.”
The Pathless can though.
Movement in The Pathless is some of the best I’ve ever I’ve ever felt. You have a stamina bar that you can use to sprint, and strewn throughout the environment are floating magic targets that you can shoot to refill the bar and get a burst of speed (and if you’re airborne, altitude). Before long, you’re zipping back and forth across the world, chaining targets together seamlessly. Just like in Breath of the Wild, I caught myself running in circles, because the feeling of maintaining that velocity and chaining together those bursts felt ecstatic. On top of that, you get an eagle friend who you can use to glide, and completing the equivalent of “Korok puzzles” earns you points toward boosting its flight capabilities. As the game goes on, you slowly progress from darting through canyons and crevices to having the ability to more or less fly indefinitely.
Plus, the “shrine” equivalents aren’t little sectioned-off puzzle rooms. Instead, they’re incorporated into world. As you fly and sprint across the landscape, you’ll constantly stumble upon ruins, temples, and towers, each of which has a small puzzle associated with it. The game lacks the weird physics-manipulation abilities from BotW, so the puzzles don’t quite have the space to get as complex and clever as some of the shrines in Zelda do, but they get a lot of mileage out of the limited toolset they provide you. And then, once you complete enough puzzles, you unlock a boss fight. All of a sudden, you have to weaponize that incredible movement system to hunt down a giant monster as it runs away. It looks incredible, and it feels even better.
Aaand then you run into one of the game’s major flaws: after chasing a boss down, you have to do a more arena-style boss battle against it. With the single exception of the game’s finale, these fights stink. They’re frustrating, they don’t play to any of the game’s strengths, and they feel completely unnecssary. Just get rid of ‘em!
The story of The Pathless is kind of whatever. It’s vague and nonspecific in a way that makes it kind of just not stick with you, and other than giving you another collectible to find in the form of lore snippets, it feels largely vestigial. It’s not really bad, but the game could have zero dialogue at all and I wouldn’t really feel any differently about it. Which, y’know? I’d rather a completely forgettable story over one that spends a dozen or so hours reminding you that the developers hate trans people!
Man can the Gerudo section of Breath of the Wild fuck off.
5. Signs of the Sojourner
I think video games as a narrative artform have a really tricky problem.
Think for a second about, say, an action game, like Bayonetta. Every fight represents a huge possibility space for action. You have multiple attack buttons, which can be chained together in a couple dozen different ways to pull of different types of moves, which can then canceled into one another to create fluid combos. You have fine control over your positioning, and can equip a bunch of different weapons to customize your attacks. You have meters you can fill up to do super moves. At every single instant you’re making a new, different choice, which is opening and closing the door on a bunch of different future choices. This is true even in a less intensive game, like, say, a random Mario title; do you walk or do you run? do you do a full-height jump or a short hop? Do you take the upper path or the lower one? Which power-up do you use? Your moveset isn’t infinite, and in many cases it’s even quite small, but you still have a ton of latitude in how you apply those moves to interact with the game world. Games are really good at creating spaces and letting you explore and move around them.
Now think about an RPG with a dialogue system, like Fallout or Mass Effect. Like with other games, you have lots of different choices and opportunities for expression when you’re out in the field or fighting enemies. But eventually, you’ll get put into a dialogue scene. And at this point, that wide breadth of choice vanishes. It gets replaced by a short list of 2 or 3 different dialogue options, maybe a couple more if you’re talking to a major NPC or it’s a particularly good game. If the writers of the game didn’t consider that you might want to answer a question a certain way, then you can’t answer it a certain way, period. When it comes to action, games give you massive amounts of space for nuanced and detailed expression. When people start talking, they suddenly fail to come up with anything more advanced than a Choose Your Own Adventure book from the ’80s. Maybe they slap a timer on there.
The problem here is that dialogue scenes are sorta, y’know, important for stories! There’s a whole lot of wonderful books and movies that feature little to no action at all, and even as games get more quote unquote “cinematic,” they struggle to replicate this kind of story. At best, they rip control away from the player so that you can watch a short video clip where the characters do all the kinds of actions that developers haven’t figured out how to turn into game mechanics yet. In the vast majority of video games, you don’t actually play the role of your character; you play as their stunt double, taking over for the action sequences and then standing back while someone else comes in to do all the non-action-oriented acting. Games that come outta this mold can be really good, but to me at least, it feels pretty self-evident that something is missing here, and that something is gonna remain missing until someone figures out how to mechanize dialogue in a fun, intuitive, widely-applicable way, the same way people have figured out things like shooting and punching.
Signs of the Sojourner doesn’t quite get there. Its dialogue system is not as universally applicable as, say, the camera controls in Mario 64 turned out to be. But it’s far and away the most interesting attempt at turning dialogue into a game system that I’ve seen so far. Its approach is to abstract every conversation; no game could possibly have enough writing for it to account for every single dialogue choice that a player might come up with, so instead Signs focuses more on the overall flow of dialogue. At its core, the dialogue system is a simple card game not that many steps removed from Uno; the goal is just to match shapes with your conversation partner.
Where the cleverness starts to come in is that it assigns each of these shapes a different emotional tenor. Circles are empathetic and understanding, while triangles are rational and explanatory. Squares are aggressive while rhombuses are imaginative. Instantly, the card game transforms into an easily-read metaphor for conversation; the goal isn’t just to match the right shapes on the cards, but to get on the same emotional wavelength as the person you’re talking to in order to build a rapport with them. Then the metaphor gets extended and played with; special cards give you abilities that make it easier to keep a chain of card-matches going, with flavorful names like “Chatter” and “Accommodate” that help you understand how these abilities map to conversational styles and techniques. Each round is punctuated by a bit of written dialogue that helps to keep the abstract game grounded in the logic of the current scene.
I think this whole thing is fuckin’ genius. There’s so many little moments where they play with the card game in a way that makes the metaphor feel more potent, like when you meet a friendly dog who has a deck of wildcards that can match with any shape, or when you come back home to your friend after a long trip on the road and find that you’ve lost all the cards you would use to relate to them, because your life experiences have diverged too heavily. Again, I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t think it’s ready to just pick up and jam into any other game. As clever as it is, Signs tends to frame dialogue as this very transactional thing, where the goal is for two people to mirror each other, rather than come to an understanding in spite of major differences. This works in the context of the game, because you’re a traveling salesman working to make business connections, but it would make a lot less sense if you dumped this system into, I don’t know, Life is Strange or something. It’s also too binary, with every conversation only having two possibilities, a positive outcome or a negative one. All the same, I think the game is an incredible proof of concept for a direction that dialogue scenes could take, and I really hope that other developers take note of it and come up with their own riffs and wrinkles on the concept, while hopefully the team behind Signs continues to refine and improve what they’ve got.
I’ve gone on for a while now about this game, but I wanna touch on something about its story real quick: Signs of the Sojourner is a post-apocalyptic game, but it’s got a wildly different tone from the vast majority of post-apocalyptic stories I’ve experienced. It’s not a game about fighting off zombie hoards or raiders, it’s not about starving people shooting each other over limited resources. It’s not a game about people turning into animals as soon as their comfort is no longer guaranteed. Instead, the story in Signs is about communities forming to help take care of each other, even in the most dire circumstances. It’s… I dunno, it’s just really nice to see a story in this genre that doesn’t feel like the writer expressing their thinly-veiled desire to go on a mass-shooting spree, y’know?
4. Paradise Killer
Mystery solvin’ games are fuckin’ good, y’all. If I play one there’s a high chance it’s gonna end up in my top five for the year. Like, listen: I like The Pathless a lot. But COUNTERPOINT: what if, instead of little golden icons, you were collecting clues to a murder mystery? Instantly a better game. Stardew Valley? Delightful little farming game! But WHAT IF one of the townspeople wound up dead, and in between farm chores you had to get to the bottom of whodunnit? That sounds like the best thing ever!
Anyway, Paradise Killer is a terrific murder mystery. It’s set in a bizarre pocket dimension on an alternate earth, where a death cult ritually slaughters hostages to appease their horrific alien gods. Paradise Island is an incredible setting. It’s a grotesque and beautiful island full of towering works of strange, golden architecture. It feels like walking through a vaporwave screensaver… until you take a wrong turn, and realize that so much of the world you’re exploring is just a facade. Behind every hundred-foot-tall golden idol is an endless ocean of ugly, utilitarian air conditioning units. It feels like an amusement park, a space meticulously designed to look beautiful and perfect, until you see it from outside of the intended viewing angle and explose yourself to its drab industrial undercarriage. It’s a playground for an elite class that have cast themselves as demigods, and it’s powered by slave labor and bloodshed.
Like Night Road, the metaphors at work in Paradise Killer are pretty blunt. The comparisons between Paradise Island and America are so obvious that it feels kind of like a waste of time to even bother pointing them out. It’s a world that’s completely spotless and sterile, and yet at the same time drenched in blood. It’s a world where murder is so commonplace that no one even really cares about it… until the wrong people end up falling victim. Then it suddenly becomes a crisis, requiring the work of the Investigation Freak, Lady Love Dies (every name in this game is fucking terrific).
Paradise Island is almost entirely empty as you investigate the murder of the island’s ruling council, because hours beforehand, the entire civilian population was ritually slaughtered. The idea that solving the murder of a handful of elites would even matter when you sometimes literally have to swim through the blood of thousands of nameless victims is as absurd as it is cruel. Lady Love Dies at times recognizes the obvious, bald-faced hypocrisy on display, while at other times seems to refuse to let herself acknowledge it, because she needs to believe that she’s enacting some sort of “justice” even as the framework she’s working within clearly doesn’t allow for such a thing. Without giving anything away, the conclusion of the game drives all of this home in a major way; the final moments before the credits make it clear that the only “justice” present in Paradise is a fiction that power uses to falsely justify itself. If there’s a better, truer justice out there somewhere, Lady Love Dies fails to ever find it, or even look for it all that hard.
What makes Paradise Killer so strange is that, in spite of how dark and upsetting its message is, its vibes are immaculate. The music is fun and poppy, and the artwork is beautiful. It has an artistic sensibility that I associate with the Dreamcast, with lots of gorgeous sky-blues and pastel pinks. I have lots of nitpicks and criticisms about PK in the way that it handles its narrative, constructs its mystery, and structures its open world, and they all fuckin’ evaporate as soon as I hear a few notes of the title theme. That aesthetic beauty rests right alongside the horror that undergirds Paradise. It’s so easy to ignore how apalling this society is and simply admire the beauty of the island, or to be charmed by characters like Sam Daybreak or Crimson Acid while ignoring that they’re all mass-muderers when they’re not being quirky NPCs.
At first, I thought this was a weakness of the game, that it was too in love with its own aesthetic to bare its claws as fiercely as it ought to. Giving it more thought though, I think that’s exactly the point. Paradise Killer tells you exactly how vicious and cruel its world is right at the beginning, and then spends a dozen hours trying to hypnotize you into loving it anyway through beautiful art and a kickass soundtrack. At the end of the day, it understands that the point it’s making is self-evident enough that it needs no further underlining.
3. Umurangi Generation
At some point or another I’ve had this game on just about every single position on this list. I’m extremely torn about it. I think it has an amazing look and an even better soundtrack. I love the messages it expresses, and the way it uses environmental storytelling to express them. I think it uses its mechanics in really brilliant ways to evoke certain feelings in the player. I don’t like playing it even a little bit.
Umurangi Generation is a photography game. You get dumped into a level with a timer and a list of subjects you need to take photos of. Each photo you take earns you a little bit of money. The money doesn’t actually matter, and neither does the timer; you only need to worry about them if you’re trying to complete all the bonus objectives. And I mean all of them; you either take the bonus photos, hit the assigned money threshold, and find all the hidden film rolls in a level in ten minutes or less, or you don’t get credit for doing any of them. Those film rolls? They’re very small and hard to find! I never managed to find them all in a single stage.
I find all of this… frustrating! And there’s a strong case to be made that the frustration is the point, that the game is trying to make you feel like a freelance photographer scrounging for cash while working under oppressive deadlines. I can understand that, and even see the logic in it… but it doesn’t change the fact that I spent the majority of my time with Umurangi at least a little bit irritated. It doesn’t help that I’m not much of a photography guy; it’s just not an art form that interests me much. The game doesn’t care about whether your photos look good, just that they contain the right subjects, and occasionally that they use the requested lenses. Anything else is left to the player, who’s given a whole suite of adjustment tools to tweak their pictures to their heart’s content in order to express themelves. It’s really neat!… if you’re into photography. I’m not, which meant that for most levels I slapped on the fish-eye lens, backed myself into the furthest corner of the map, and took a picture of everything, nabbing most of the objectives in a single photo. Then I spent a good long while picking over the environment to find the pictures that I couldn’t score by pulling that trick.
For the first several levels, I really didn’t get what all the fuss was about here. The photography felt aimless and frustrating, the movement didn’t feel good, and the storytelling seemed sorta boilerplate. Like, I got what the game was going for; just outside the scope of the levels you run around in there’s some kind of cataclysm taking place. It’s a game about people dealing with the fact that the world as they know it is on the brink of complete and total collapse. The photography mechanics force you to slow down and really examine the environments and think about what they say about the people who live in them. Which is great… except that I still wasn’t enjoying the actual act of taking pictures. If I’d been doing anything else in this world (like I dunno, solving muder mysteries??), or if there was a bit more meat to how the photographs were judged, I might’ve been more engaged. Mostly though, I was just bored. I was frustrated with the game, and frustrated with myself for failing to see what it was about this thing that was garnering so much attention and praise. I felt like a rube.
And then I hit the first big turning point. The far-off conflicts of the world suddenly come home to roost, and the game forces you to confront them directly, and watch as previously-visited environments are radically altered by their presence. Places that I’d spent so much time in had suddenly been invaded and destroyed. It had seemed like the disaster was somewhere far off in the distance, but the truth was that it had always been horrifyingly close by. Worse, it seemed like the people around me weren’t particularly surprised by this turn of events. This is just how things work here.
I finally started to “get it” at that point. If I’d stopped there, Umurangi would probably be hanging somewhere near the bottom of this list. There was clearly something really powerful here, but I was still too wrapped up in how much I disliked actually playing the damn thing.
And then I got to the Macro DLC.
To be clear, Macro doesn’t make the game any more fun to play, not for me at least. It adds in several more options to expand your choices when taking pictures, but again, that’s just not that much of an appeal for me personally. Where Macro really succeeds is in the ways that it further develops the themes of the base game.
Paradise Killer, Night Road, and 13 Sentinels all want to talk about similar subjects in their own ways. They all want to discuss the violence and brutality that underpins our world, the ways that the strong prey on the weak and, bit by bit, make the world a gradually worse and worse place. 13 Sentinels loses its nerve to really go for the jugular in this regard, and Night Road can feel a bit too much at times like it’s using real-world horrors in order to tell a story about cool vampires, instead of vice-versa. Of the three, Paradise Killer feels like it stays the most on-message, but it does so through subtext and implication. It puts you in the shoes of the oppressor, and just sort of leaves you alone to come to your own conclusions about things, even if it loudly telegraphs the conclusion it wants you to reach.
Umurangi Generation: Macro comes out and just fuckin’ says what all of these games are trying to get at through implication and metaphor. I said earlier that Paradise Killer understands that it doesn’t need to fully spell out its message to make it clear, but, y’know? Umurangi makes a strong case for writing that message out over the entire page in bright-red Sharpie. Without getting into specifics, the final stage of Macro is a full-throated scream of anger at an unjust world, with a pointed, specific venom behind its messaging that’s sorely lacking in just about everything else you can play that touches on the same issues (the game even takes a swipe at Watch Dogs: Legion for being so mealy-mouthed about the problem of police militarization).
Umurangi is a game that understands exactly how and why the world is so fucking awful, and it’s not afraid to demand something better. It’s also not afraid to show exactly what tends to happen when people make those kinds of demands. It’s the only piece of art made in reaction to the events of 2020 that actually reflects the thoughts and feelings that I’ve had about those events. Instead of falling into the Night Road trap of bending real-world atrocities to fit into its own fictional landscape, Macro lets its internal fictional logic break down enough that it can directly call out the failures and, unfortunately, the successes of those who hold power in the real world. It’s stunning, and as much as I still really don’t like playing the game at all, that final stage is gonna stick with me more than just about any moment in any game this year. It’s an absolute must-play.
2. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2
There is… just no way for me to pivot from Umurangi to Puyo Puyo Tetris without seeming like kind of an asshole. Umurangi Generation is a small-scale indie game that speaks clearly and with righteous anger to the most pressing issues we currently face; PPT2 is a cute puzzle game about popping grapes and stacking blocks, put out by a major gaming corporation. Like… I’m the guy who’s putting it here, and even I feel a little bit like I’m being shitty.
But, um. Here’s the thing. Puyo Puyo Tetris is really fuckin’ good.
Everyone likes Tetris, right? Feel like that’s not a controversial statement. It’s nearly 40 years old, and really, it’s so good that it sorta begs the question of why we’ve continued to churn out so many goddamn video games when Alexey Pajitnov kinda nailed it way back in the ’80s. I spent an, uh, unhealthy amount of time playing Tetris DS in high school. If I had a free moment, my face was buried in my DS Lite, either drilling the endless mode for practice or matchmaking with other players through Nintendo’s shitty online service. Competitive Tetris is fuckin’ rough. Like a lot of competitive games, you don’t realize just how bad you are at it until you play someone who actually knows what they’re doing, and completely kicks your ass. Over the course of my sophomore and junior years, I managed to get pretty good at Tetris, at the expense things that actually, you know, mattered. Then at some point I stopped playing it and moved on to other things, and honestly sort of forgot that I’d had such a big Tetris phase.
Then, Puyo Puyo Tetris came out in Japan around 2014, and I was invited to play an import copy of it in a hotel room at PAX. It was like I had been activated like a Manchurian Candidate. All that built-up muscle memory was still there, and by the end of the night no one was willing to play against me anymore, because I was too good and it wasn’t fun. I imported the game myself to play online, and then bought it again in 2017 when it finally released in America. It’s one of my all-time favorite games.
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 has some new features that set it apart from the first game. It contains a sequal to PPT’s story mode, and a new “skill battle” mode that seems to revolve around leveling up a team of characters? I am never going to touch either of these modes. I’m never going to touch any of the modes besides online ranked Swap Mode, where you have to switch between a Tetris board and a Puyo board every 25 seconds. This was also the only mode I ever played in the original PPT; for all intents and purposes, I just bought another copy of a game I already own multiple copies of. And y’know what? I am completely fine with that. Puyo Puyo Tetris’ Swap Mode is, perhaps, the single most perfect game anyone has ever designed, mushing together the two greatest puzzle games the same way Reese’s mushes together peanut butter and chocolate.
I don’t have nearly as much experience with Puyo Puyo as I do with Tetris. We had Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine when I was a kid, and I remember playing a fair bit of that with my parents, but I never had a phase where I got as deep into Puyo as I did Tetris.
I mean, y’know. Other than like, right now.
When I played the original PPT, I primarily leaned on the Tetris skills that I’d picked up as a teenager. I learned a few very basic strategies for Puyo Puyo, but shied away from going too deep down that well. This time, I’m determined get good at it. And… that’s a pretty big hill to climb. For as brutal as competitive Tetris can be, it pales in comparison to competitive Puyo. Puyo Puyo is a color-matching puzzle game featuring cute little jelly beans and fun, cutesy anime characters; it’s also the most vicious battle of wits mankind has ever conceived.
Okay, maybe that’s being a little hyperbolic. Just a little, though. It really is a shockingly complex game that requires a deep and intuitive understanding of its rules, which are deceptively simple: when you match four or more blobs of the same color, they “pop,” disappearing off the board. Everything that was above them drops down, and if that results in a new match of four or more, then those pop too. The more blobs you pop in a single chain reaction, the more “garbage” you send your opponent’s board. When it’s full, they lose. It‘d be an easy game to play optimally if you could think about it for as long as you wanted, but you can’t; your opponent is right there, doing the same thing you are, and every second you spend thinking is a second of advantage you’re giving them. You have to be able to plan out a complex sequence of moves, and you have to do it as fast as you can make the Puyos fall if you want to win. And PPT adds in the extra wrinkle that every 25 seconds you have to stop thinking about all of that in order to play a completely different game.
It’s just incredible. No game gives me more satisfaction than Puyo Puyo Tetris. Every fight is thrilling, and the skill ceiling on both games is so high that I’ll never reach it, even though I can always feel myself making more and more tangible progress. My Puyo game is getting pretty solid, enough so that I’m starting to feel the need to pivot back to Tetris; I should really finally learn how the hell to do T-Spin triples consistently.
Just… Fuck. What a good fuckin’ game. I could keep loading it up with praise, but I think you get the idea at this point.
Fuckin’ love it.
1. Kentucky Route Zero
I’ve been a fan of Kentucky Route Zero since its first episode dropped way back in 2013. By the time its third episod released the following year, I had become… pretty insufferable about it. I’d go around saying things like, “Kentucky Route Zero is the best game ever made and it’s not even done yet,” “no other game’s writing even comes close to Kentucky Route Zero,” and “hey wait where are you going I want to gush about Kentucky Route Zero to you some more.” I regret being that way now! It was a hyperbolic and obnoxious way to talk about an experience that had really deeply touched me. My masturbatory declarative statements about how good the game is definitely didn’t convince anybody to play it; it definitely did convince some people to never play it out of spite, and for a lot more folks, it primed them to dislike the game if and when they did try it, because I’d framed it so confrontationally. What’s worse, I wasn’t alone in talking about KRZ that way; it’s been a pretty profound experience for a lot of folks over the past seven years, and people have been very loud about that fact, in a way that really does nothing positive for the game’s reputation.
Which is a shame, because, andI’m going to try to say this with a minimum of hyperbole: Kentucky Route Zero is one of the single best experiences I’ve ever had with a video game. I said years ago that KRZ would automatically be my Game of the Year whatever year they happened to complete it, and, well, here we are.
If you don’t know, Kentucky Route Zero is an episodic adventure game. Initially, you take on the role of Conway, an aging delivery driver and recovering alcoholic, who’s making one final furniture delivery before retiring. The trouble is, he can’t find the address he’s supposed to deliver to. He ends up taking some advice from a weird old man at an even weirder old gas station, and soon finds himself on The Zero, a surreal highway that travels through Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves. Along the way, he meets an ever-expanding cast of characters, and before long Conway is no longer the protagonist so much as one member of a large ensemble.
Kentucky Route Zero fills every corner of its world with signs of the rot of capitalism. This theme wasn’t all that obvious to me back in 2013, but that’s really more of a sign of how dumb I was than anything else, because it’s ubiquitous right from the start. The roads you travel down are filled with closed-up shops and run-down buildings, people suffering in poverty and fingerprints of the rich who thrive off of them. The first major setpiece takes place in a mine that flooded, killing its workers; hours later, you’ll find a monument to those who lost their lives and a vitriolic screed against the company whose negligence let it happen. As an early character tells you, “it’s hard times all over.”
Despite that, the game is frequently light-hearted, funny even! The harsh circumstances of their environment fail to quash the humanity of the characters that populate The Zero, and they manage to find joy even as they understand how badly the powers that be are fucking them over. Some, like Junebug and Johnny, are managing to live their best lives despite everything. Still, there’s a precarity to it all. It could all come crashing down at any moment, and for some characters it does. KRZ never tries to suggest that just because some folks manage to find happiness that these conditions are at all acceptable or sustainable.
There’s a constant, smouldering anger here, in contrast to the explosive fury of Umurangi. In the final act of the game, the part that actually released this year, you learn that just like in Umurangi Generation: Macro, Power has definitively and violently won. There’s an elegaic quality to the entire thing, but as the act progresses, that smouldering anger starts to bubble up. Kentucky Route Zero suggests in its final moments that yes, Power won, but Power only won this time. Will it win again next time? Well, that remains to be seen. For the time being, it’s appropriate and understandable to take the time to mourn our losses. Power has beaten, murdered, and stolen from us, and building a space to grieve isn’t a sign of weakness. But, when that grieving is done, it will be time to get back into that fight.
It’s honestly tough not to give into that obnoxious hyperbole that I felt so strongly 5–6 years ago. From about Act II onward, KRZ has constantly found new heights and depths of emotion to bring out in me. I love these characters, and I love this world. I love how everything looks, and I love how everything sounds. “3rd Floor: Bears” is a joke that’s murdered me every time I’ve revisited it; the final sequence of Act V made me break down in tears. At this point, it’s very difficult to go into Kentucky Route Zero without your expectations being all weird because of jackasses like me yelling about it for half a decade, but I really do think everyone ought to give this thing a try. It’s not gonna connect with everyone the way it connected with me, and I certainly wouldn’t try to suggest that it’s perfect. But I do think it’s something special, and that even now it stands up as a pretty major achievement in the field of interactive storytelling.
