Howdy partners!
Since the year is closing out and this is still (ostensibly) a gaming board I thought it might be kind of fun to talk about what we played this year, what our GOTY was, the biggest disappointments, etc.
I didn’t really purchase many new AAA titles this year, I think Elden Ring and The Callisto Protocol were it. Of the two Elden Ring met my expectations and was excellent, and TCP was monumentally disappointing.
I spent most of my gaming budget on indie titles this year, and while I loved Elden Ring it was narrowly edged out by Infernax as my Game of the Year. Infernax was a huge surprise for me, I don’t usually expect much from the indie-retro-nostalgia bait but it blew me away. A love letter to classic NES titles like Castlevania 2, Link’s Adventure, and Faxanadu, it combines gorgeous pixel art with a banger of a soundtrack and a fun story with multiple endings and unlockable characters and I can’t recommend it enough.
A close second would be Cultic; some people have complained that Boomer Shooters are reaching over saturation by now but I play the shit out of every one and I think Cultic is the best of the lot. The shortest way to describe it would be Blood crossed with Resident Evil 4; you’re a cop fighting a crazed cult and demonic monsters in the seventies, there’s a fun arsenal of upgradable weapons, cool levels to explore, and a shitload of monsters to kill, everything a fps ahould have in other words, go nuts.
As far as what I thought sucked ass The Callisto Protocol is the only big letdown I can think of, and I’ve bitched about it enough so now I want to hear what you guys have been playing, what surprised you, disappointed you, and what you recommend.
Cheers all, and have a Happy New Year!
I'm not interested in practically anything newly released and rarely play AAA any more, so a year end recap for me is almost never going to contain stuff from that year. Also I've been focussing more and more on japanese games in recent years, for obvious reasons related to the spirit of this forum.
That said, I very nearly bought and played something new this year when I got Scarlet Nexus, from 2021. It was OK. I played only one of the 2 main character campaigns and I've been planning to do the other, but I've hesitated because though charming and pretty fun, it's very samey (in terms of combat gameplay, enemies and environments; the level environments are kind of nice but they get revisited like crazy). I don't expect the other campaign to be a significantly different experience.
Alongside Scarlet Nexus I also bought Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. Loved it. I had reservations about playing it on several levels - worries that it looked kind of plain, that the main char and others would be barely developed, that it would be a poor port, that it wouldn't be very good Japanese practice (part of what I get out of a game selection like this), and early on in the game that it would be too childish and cliched. But it's got nice crisp gameplay with great mobility and satisfying dodge/parry stuff going on, and as the story progressed it really came into its own. Great sense of innocent exploration and adventure, very likeable chars, a little bit of darkness and death out of nowhere, and even some challenging Japanese scattered around.
Aside from an atrociously bad ending (narratively speaking) which undermines a significant amount of the character-building that went before, it left me with nothing but good vibes, so I was able to enjoy the journey without holding the way it finished against it. Berseria was the same... I've gotten used to discounting the entire ending when evaluating JRPGs.
I spent ages reading it, since last year, but I finished reading Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa early this year. Excellent VN, definitely top 3 VNs I've ever read, maybe top 1 depending on the day you catch me, but then again I have skipped a lot of the supposedly godlike VNs people tout, because I don't like the look of them. It left me with a lot of themes to mull over in terms of Buddhism, pacifism, nihilism, justice and killing, which all coloured my increasingly philosophical direction in my thinking this year (which Muramasa was not at all the catalyst for, but everything helps).
I also caught up on my ancient gifted copies of Batman: Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight. Origins is jank trash, nobody can convince me otherwise, but hell, at least it was short. Knight is just tragic. It's got so much of Rocksteady's trademark loving sense of polish to the world and (some of) the gameplay, but the new designs, certain new combat and stealth additions, the Batmobile and the story in general are all majorly shitty ingredients that spoil the whole recipe. The Arkham Knight's voice acting was (unusually for the franchise) pretty shoddy and annoying, which didn't help since you hear so much of his taunting. Kevin Conroy great as always though, rip.
I liked Scarlet Nexus as well, it had a more interesting setting and story than I was expecting. Yeah Arkham Knight was a big letdown, I though a lot of the voicework was shoddy. Replacing so many of the animated series voices didn’t help.
Yeah the style and setting is underrated. It's probably the best depiction of ubiquitous augmented reality that I've seen, and the way they do it has a lot of in-world flavour and implication. I like that in the city there's a mix of projected storefronts and old fashioned painted signs, as if some stores are really old or else too poor to keep up with the tech. Or maybe they don't want to turn away 'dud' customers who can't see anything online. Speaking of which, the city is so incredibly drab and grey when the augment tech gets cut off, it makes you realise what the duds have been looking at all along.