2018: A Refuge of Video Game Awards in Troubling Times

Phew! Just... phew! Am I right!? So we made it out the ass end of a turbulent year and all I got was this chef hat full of cat hair and an irrational fear of quiet schoolgirls.
Here's a bunch of games Tobi and Allie played off our backlog and then strained to remember what the beginning of this year even felt like.


Best Character

Zeke, Pandoria and Turters (Xenoblade Chronicles 2)

Folks, I have a confession to make. I like cartoon villains. No, not the cool ones you’re probably thinking about. Think 70% cartoonier than that. I’m talking about stuff like Dick Dastardly and Muttley, Pete, Team Rocket, etc. Especially the latter speaks to me. The kind that’s whose confidence is inversely proportional to their abilities. The kind where one person says something to seem cool, and the other person chimes in with a firm YEAH, and then undermines the whole thing. The kind that prioritises their brand identity above all else. That’s pretty much what Zeke and Pandoria are like. They’ll do choreographed poses and have to duck and dodge each other’s poses when there’s not enough room. The moment they stepped onto the frame, I was already sold, and the heroes’ immediate dismissal of them sealed the deal. 

I know there seems like 3 whole names up there, but they really function together as a single identity, both gameplay-wise and narratively. Xenoblade 2 is a uh… very mixed bag when it comes to comedy, with equal parts uncomfortable anime cringe and genuinely good characterisation and laugh out loud moments. Zeke and Pandoria really carry the latter, they are introduced with a most impressively elaborate slapstick in-game animated cutscene that honestly kind of blew my mind. And on top of that, they aren’t just there for show, they also play an important role in the story and world, and beneath the “token rogues” exterior, Zeke has a certain amount of wisdom and sincerity that makes him genuinely loveable. Pandoria also features a dope costume design to go along with her tangy attitude. And turters, btw, is their pet turtle. He doesn’t really do anything but is cute.

Turters is a very good turtle.

Runners up: 
Kokichi Oma (Danganronpa v3), Kajiwara (428 Shibuya Scramble), Angus (Night in the Woods)


Worst character

Yosuke Hanamura (Persona 4)

I checked the menswear section of River Island and they don't sell any Basic Decency

Yosuke makes a pretty bad first impression, you’re introduced to him as he’s just broken his best friend’s favourite DVD and refuses to replace it even though he can seemingly afford to. I thought OK, he’s a rich fuccboi, but he’s kind of friendly and very passionate about solving crimes, which is really his only positive quality. I thought maybe he could learn and grow, but then I got my first seasonal event. And the next seasonal event. And the one after that. Each one of them was legitimately ruined by Yosuke. You see, he’s a raging homophobe. Granted, it sure seems like it’s because he’s an insecure closet bisexual himself, but he still just absolutely ruins everyone's day constantly. He “Ew bro are you coming on to me?”s at Kanji every chance he gets, and goads the group into proving their masculinity by… oh, did you guess it? Sexually harassing your female friends of course! Yosuke is the instigator behind every instance of stalking, peeping, sabotage, mean spirited pranks, etc that’s always played off as a “comedic misunderstanding” but it’s not really a misunderstanding, is it? You literally just did a crime and got caught. He’s also just perpetually salty and acts personally slighted everytime something goes wrong, which usually leads to him wanting to seek ‘revenge’ on like, his friends. He gets loads of shit, granted, but he 100% deserves it every time. #teamchie

I warned you, dawg. Yosuke is that entitled little shit that makes life harder for everyone around him, and yet somehow sees himself as the pitiable underdog that world is unfairly against. He’s inconsiderate and disrespectful to others because he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself, or people that can help him look good. He’s the human equivalent of a broken step on a stairway, that you really ought to deal with, but somehow let slide because you also have other things on your mind. Go away, Yosuke.

PS: Yosuke also tries to talk you into murder at one point, I’m just gonna put that out there.

Runners up: 
Monokid (Danganronpa v3), Gregg (Night in the Woods)


Best Soundtrack

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Maybe a year late, and in a year where there was a lot of strong music for me, but we gotta give credit where credit’s due. It’s easy take Xenoblade 2’s music for granted. Of course it was going to be good. Big name composers doing stuff in a style I knew I’d enjoy. It even did the thing where every big environmental track had a different version for day and nighttime. Another thing I can’t resist. They even did a prequel expansion with a lot more dope music. While the base game’s music is all grand sounding, the prequel DLC has a smoother, jazzy sound for its smaller scale, personal story. In a way, that felt a little fresher, even if I did prefer the stuff from the main campaign.

Yeah Xenoblade 2’s soundtrack didn’t stand out to me as much as other games in the series, but I didn’t really get mega obsessed with any game OST’s this year? If there’s one song that sticks out in my mind most for hunting down and wanting to listen to on repeat in 2018 though, it’s Torigoth (Night), an absolute jam. Importantly, the music in this game is both very competent and serves the atmosphere and worldbuilding of the game incredibly well. It’s easy to have some chill ambient music to make a mystical or melancholic atmosphere in a game, but more difficult I think to build the atmosphere for somewhere rowdy and exciting without being excruciating. Each continent is an unforgettable and unique feeling place recognisable by a distinct sound. Mor Ardain sounds like a wrestling match is about to kick off in a desert canyon, Temperantia sounds like you’re fighting in a typhoon, and Tantal sounds like a rescue mission in some frozen ruins perched precariously over a basin full of giant squids.

Runners up: 
Octopath Traveler, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom


Best art direction

Professor Layton Vs Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

Thank god it's not a stepladder...

Professor Layton and the Ace Attorney series are both notoriously good looking handheld titles. One features beautiful hand drawn backgrounds and stylised characters reminiscent of French/Belgian animation like Tintin and Les Triplettes de Belleville, and the other has Capcom’s signature punchy anime-ish style interpreted incredibly well in low poly 3D. These are meshed together perfectly into a game that uses the 3d’s tech to its full advantage somehow. I felt really bad that I don’t like to use the 3D feature because the 2D backgrounds have been meticulously constructed to be enhanced by it. The art is great, the aesthetic is great, the new designs are top notch, and the comedic animation is delightful.

You pretty much nailed it. It’s got one of my favourite aesthetics in a video game in such a long time. Everything about it so pleasant to me. From its use of colour, to its shapes, and general designs. I’m a big fan of both how the Ace Attorney and Professor Layton games look, but both art styles are actually radically different. I can easily see a version of this game where these two art styles clash, or one or more are compromised to the point where they lose their appeal. Not here though. Both are faithfully recreated, and only marginally altered that they retain their essence. A large part of this is actually done by the new supporting cast, which contains a healthy mix of both, becoming almost a missing link. Its biggest achievement though is translating this very 2D-looking art direction, into low-spec 3D models. Usually a process that ends up drastically changing the look of your game, often for the worse. Luckily this is something both Capcom and Level 5 have a lot of experience with, and you can absolutely tell. Everything looks exactly like it should.

Runners up: 
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Night in the Woods, OneShot


Ugliest art direction

Trine 2

Be honest: how long did it take you to spot the playable character?

There’s no way to do this category without being a little mean, but I’ll try to as respectful as possible. Trine 2 is a game where the art direction does not know restraint. They had access to a bunch of graphical effects, and they elected to use all of them. At the same time. All the time. It’s a mess of colours, effects and generic fantasy elements. It’s the type of thing I expect from a student who is learning to use a game engine, and is messing around with the stock-assets. I think they could have achieved much more if they were more restrained and did things more deliberately.

Would it be confusing to say that this game has the surface level *appearance* of being a beautiful game? Insofar as:  it’s a fixed camera affair with bright mega saturated lighting, elaborate setpieces, particle effects, glow, more glow, lots of glow everywhere, sunsets, rainbows, light bloom, fog, more glow… hopefully you see what I’m saying here. This game is just a bit *too much* so it becomes unnecessarily hard to see what you are doing.
In my DEFINITELY HUMBLE INDUSTRY PROFESSIONAL OPINION,  the worst thing an environment artist can do is actually disrupt the player’s experience by making it unclear where you can go and what is actually… functional. Tobi and I struggled a few times with exactly that in this game.

Runners up: 
Saints Row IV, Danganronpa v3


Best Story

Oneshot

But the good news is, if you fail everyone will be too dead to be mad at you.

I came in to this game with my expectations tempered by the fact that I already got mad into Undertale the other year and any game that looks and sounds a bit like The Undertales was going to be somewhat diminished by the fact that I’d already been there and done that. Good news though, Oneshot totally stands on its own two fluffy legs just fine. The similarities between the two pretty much amount to “small child lost in unfamiliar world with snes rpg-ish graphics and some meta mechanics.” In Oneshot, a small catboi called Niko who is NOT you, is cast into a dying world where the light has long since gone out and people are slowly retreating towards the central city until there’s nothing left. You are told that if the lightbulb breaks, that’s it, game over for realsies, giving you a feeling of anxiety and dread right from the start. The bleak and world is offset by the sugary sweet and charming characters you meet along the way. The whole game is just acutely adorable, sad, uneasy and unexpectedly chilling in a way that’s so sincere it can pull it off just fine.

I feel pretty much the same way. We’ve played games about games before, or games about meta-worlds. You can spot them pretty quickly, and it’s hard not to be cynical about it after a while. You sort of expect you know the entire bag of tricks, and that it just wouldn’t be able to grab you any more. Fortunately for OneShot, it still managed to convince me, in spite of being a jaded numpty. OneShot makes you invest in its world because it plays everything so earnestly. The characters are aware of the current state of the world, and where it’s slowly heading, and pretty much everyone actively wants you to do well, and helps whenever they can. I think the game’s moody journey would be undercut a lot if it had token video game combat, so I’m very glad they decided to not systemise any sort of combat mechanics. It’s just you, little Niko, the lightbulb, and your determination to help these virtual people. While the destination is an often referenced point, and ends exactly where you think it will, it’s the journey that endeared me to OneShot.

Runners up: 
Yakuza 0, 428 Shibuya Scramble, Danganronpa v3


Best original game concept

Papers, Please

First you draw a circle, then you dot the eyes, add a great big smile, and presto! It's Jorji's Passport!

This has been a long time coming, so I’m glad we can finally give it some props. Paper Please is a game where you play a customs agent at the border. You check people’s documents, see if anything is wrong, and accept or reject them as you please. You are graded on the amount of people you process, and are paid for it accordingly. Seems like a simple, relaxed puzzle game, but there is actually a catch. You’re at the border of a fictional country surrounded by conflict, and the money you earn needs to be spent on providing your family. They’re just abstractly represented by a bunch of numbers, but you genuinely feel the pressure of wanting to play a little loose with the rules, just so you can provide. Maybe letting in that one person without asking too many questions will help you put food on the table AND buy medicine for your daughter. It does such a great job at making you experience the descent into “corruption” so gradually.

Papers, Please is such a distinctive and unique game. It’s kind of a time management sim with an overarching story. Everything about it is well thought out. It seems impossibly difficult to succeed at first, everything gets harder every day and the constraints get tighter, but the game lets you restart from any day so you are encouraged to go back and try taking advantage of various offers and events that happen throughout each day. Everything’s on a set sequence of events and rather than simple failstates, the game has several different endings, with more than one “good ending” you can achieve with a combination of attentive decisions and getting better at the core mechanics. I can’t tell you how elated I felt when I finally discovered a good ending for myself after many playthroughs.

Runners up: 
D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Oneshot


Funniest Dialogue

Deltarune

Seamless self promotion.

Toby Fox’s new not-really-a-successor-but-thing-somewhat-related-to-undertale was bound to have the same brand of witty, unpredictable and alarmingly well integrated humour. With a new Alice in Wonderland inspired setting, reinvented gameplay system and some new(...ish) characters, Deltarune brings some fresh goofy jokes with sublime delivery. And dog puns. There’s a few familiar formulas in there but, I don’t know, I laughed.

If you’ve played Undertale, you pretty know what to expect here. If you haven’t, Fox is pretty good at anticipating or kneading behaviour to his whims. He can make you mash your way a little through rote dialogue, only to drop something strange. When you try to get that message back to confirm what you caught some snippets from, the message will be replaced by “Yes, you read that right”. Stuff like that. Deltarune pretty much follows that tradition. The theme of the game is pretty much that your choices don’t matter, and he goofs around with that quite a bit. But even beyond that, I just enjoy his style of writing a lot. It’s got a good balance between making you laugh and smile, and uses that to disarm you. I already mentioned my fondness of zany cartoon villains earlier, and this game also delivers on that front pretty well.

Runners up: 
Xenoblade Chronicles 2, 428: Shibuya Scramble, WarioWare Gold


Biggest Surprise

Deltarune

If y'all want kids to do anything try asking them in Cryptic Gaster Voice

Deltarune pretty much captures the spirit of the category the best we’ve ever had. It was a game that came out of nowhere, to a successor to game we adored, but was still its own new thing, and it wasn’t even presented as a new game. Basically on Halloween, Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale dropped “an interactive survey” on his Twitter feed. It starts out asking you fairly “normal” questions for the types of games he makes, but once you finished the survey, it casually drops you in a video game world that feels familiar, but weirdly different.

Yeah, what he said. People tend to get over-excited whenever Toby tweets anything cryptic, so I was fully prepared for… well, a survey, like what he said. Maybe at best, a teaser for a new project to come in another half-a-decade? What I was not prepared for, was to get home one evening and find i’d just downloaded an entire substantial chapter of a whole new game, one of my most anticipated sequels ever. And one that delivers in quality and originality, no less. Touche.

Runners up: 
Rayman 2: The Great Escape, OneShot, 428: Shibuya Scramble


Biggest Disappointment

Saints Row IV

And then you cut into it and its just a giant fuckin' malt loaf.

After getting a new PC a while back to run Overwatch, I suddenly remembered my old one was never quite able to run Saints Row IV either. Tobi and I had gotten as far as the intro before it would crash, and coming back to it we were pretty hype for a campy shootin’ and tootin’ alien busting adventure. Unfortunately, while the game was just about playable now, it was still super buggy, with some multiplayer missions crashing consistently and many inconsistently, the game had to be really worthwhile for us to continue with and, well, it wasn’t. I’d say if anything we gave it more time than it deserved. It’s somewhere between a GTA style game and a City of Heroes style game, though without different classes/roles. The missions are all minigames, some of which a cool and original use of the world and some kind of bog-standard. I couldn’t shake this perspective that the glitch aesthetic and “trapped in a virtual world” plot of the game seeks to just put a lampshade on the game’s shortcomings: Generic enemies, disconnected plot missions, buggy physics, minimal worldbuilding, low effort features (like having a parody of romance mechanics that’s just a couple lines of dialogue and an implied sex scene.) I know it’s a relatively small budget game, but it felt like there wasn’t really a lot there in the end. Apart from a really elaborate, front-loaded intro.

Yeah, unfortunately. I’m not into these open world games to begin with, but this one seemed like it might have had enough gimmicks to help elevate it above the rest for me. It dialled the stupid to 11. That’s good. It has over the top superpowers that let you jump and glide everywhere so you don’t have to use cars. That’s a definite improvement. It even had co-op, which is the thing that turns boring games into tolerable ones. However like Allie said, the game was held together by tape and gum, and would crash, disconnect people, or just had missions stop working. The problems ended up becoming so consistent that it seemed impossible to continue in co-op at that point. I tried to wrap things up on my own, but I don’t think I logged another 15 minutes by myself after that. My expectations were low, and I was still disappointed. 

Runners up: 
Mega Man 11’s music, Wrecking Crew, Tobi perpetually falling for the reverse gun in Duck Game.


Usual Suspects Award of Most Time Wasted

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

A Minute to Bottom... A Lifetime to Top.

I had a couple of big games that I sunk a lot of time into, but looking back on it, only one of them had me spend all that time in meaningful ways. The others had a lot of inherent repetition where you were just grinding things away out of obligation, not engaging with the core game itself. There were games where a lot of waiting and doing nothing was part of the experience. I can enjoy all of that, but being able to keep me hooked for so long using the actual meat of the game is something to be commended. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 gave me a world and a mountain of systems to learn and master, neatly spread out over the course of the game.

God, I spent SO much time on the post-game content, and it’s already a substantial game as it is. I didn’t even touch the DLC! I just sank over 250 hours into sidequests, mercenary missions, character stories, grinding legendary core crystals, and trying to beat some of the biggest enemies I could with that ridiculously enduringly fun combat system. I blame the whole gacha mechanics thing.

Runners up:
Minecraft: Sevtech Ages, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate


GAME OF THE YEAR

Overcooked! 2

Lazy Susan just became Extremely Vigilant Carol

So, um… hi. Full disclosure, I really didn’t play many new release games this year. At all. Like, worse than the last few years in which I said that. I think I played like, 3? That said, I feel absolutely no guilt or regret whatsoever in awarding Overcooked 2 my GOTY award. It’s like Overcooked 1 but just a teensy bit better in pretty much every aspect. Even better levels, more characters, more recipes, more modes, and a simple new mechanic that adds an extra layer of possibility on the core gameplay. I fucking love me some overcooked 2 and it did my whole christmas holiday for me.

The only thing Overcooked was missing, was more stuff, and that’s pretty much what this is. It’s Overcooked, with more stuff. A big new thing the sequel also brings to the table, is the ability to throw whatever you’re carrying. Seems like just something small, but the levels quickly show you its value, and before you know it, you’ll be throwing even when the game doesn’t ask it from you, just because it’s a good idea. It ended up being one of those features that feels so right at home that it’s hard to remember how it was before having this option. Another great thing is that my wheelchair raccoon character is back. He is such a precious little chef. We’ll probably put more hours into it in 2019, which is always a nice thing to say about your top pick.

Runners up: 
428 Shibuya Scramble, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate


DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released before 2008)

Metal Gear Solid

Man, karma really caught up with Snake for drawing attention to people's butts.

I wasn’t new to Metal Gear, but after so many sequels it’s easy to forget what an accomplishment this actually was. 3D games were still relatively new, and many games were still afraid of making use of the new options a 3D camera could bring to the table. Metal Gear Solid is a game where the majority of the runtime takes up watching flashy camera-work, or listening to long-winded cutscenes with voice acting. The actual quality of the storytelling and performances are kind of questionable, but it’s hard to deny the ambition they had. They were so confident in their product that they wasted a ton of time on adding silly easter eggs all over the place.

This game is such a weird sell. It’s hard to understand, slow paced, takes a lot of investment for a relatively smallish game, has a ton of bullshit you’d need a walkthrough for… and yet it’s actually a game I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t already played it. It’s just a good argument for its own genre. It’s really more like a linear adventure game disguised as an action combat/stealth strategy game where there are multiple solutions to many of the obstacles allowing you to feel a constant sense of discovering a secret that just made your life 90% easier, which feels congruent with the theme of being a spy rather than a warrior. It’s often problematic and snake is a proper creep, but it’s also bizarre and camp enough for it to mostly be a laugh while still making a decent commentary on the politics of war. Also, the art and music is niiiccee and holds up really well.

Runners up: 
Suikoden 2, Rayman 2, Mega Man X: Command Mission, Yoshi’s Island


Craziest Amateur Game

Doki Doki Literature Club

Just a normal product description there.

So if you haven’t already heard of this game when it went viral, sorry, spoilers, it’s a cutesy dating visual novel that slowly shifts into a psychological horror. If you wanna go ahead and play it before you hear any more, as I would recommend, skip the next 2 paragraphs and go look it up online, it’s free.

The game keeps up the ruse of compliments, blushing and writing and critiquing poems so long that I almost started to wonder if the whole thing was an elaborate troll. I was starting to like the idea of just playing a wholesome game where we practiced expressing ourselves. What makes this game stand out from other horror games to me, I think, is that instead of it suddenly becoming a murder mystery or a supernatural ghost/alien/whatever invasion, it’s a story that uses (albeit somewhat clumsily) themes of mental illness, self-loathing and depression. The cracks slowly begin to show in your friends group as characters begin expressing some alarming sentiments in their poems, start to have heated arguments. It gets quite intense quite quickly, more so than I expected going in with the knowledge that it was a twisty thriller.

Yeah, this game got me good. When I went into it, I knew there was -some- sort of twist. The people who recommended it to me would never play something like this played straight. Even with that knowledge, it’s hard to prep yourself for what follows. The game goes to some incredibly dark places, resets back to the very start, and continues as if none of it happened. It also constantly makes you choose between things, and aims to make you second-guess and regret all of it. It ends up being another one of those games-about-games, of which we played a decent amount in 2018, but it pulled it off well, and had plenty of tricks of its own to keep it interesting. Definitely not a game for everyone though.

Runners up: 
The Missing: J.J. Macfield And The Island Of Memories, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, 


Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Fashion Transgressions

Nim (Xenoblade Chronicles 2)

Dressed in arctic furs, for winter.

Not an easy year, honestly. We had a lot of dreadful designs this year, and if I’m honest, we could have probably done a top 10 just from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 alone. That game had a lot of guest artists contributing designs, and very few were actually any good. Most of them stood out like a sore thumb for being very different from the rest of the game’s art direction, but a couple, like Nim, also stood out for being kind of unpleasant. Nim is a weird shinto-inspired spirit where just draping a bunch of pelts over her acts as an outfit. She’s catgirl of the “lets add a cat-nose on a human face and call it a day” variety, and has two fox-spirits mounted on her shoulders at all times. Those two also look like they don’t belong in the game. There’s a lot going on here, but none of it is of any substance, and none of it really works together well. The character-version of how we described Trine 2 basically.

Pretty salty that of all the complaints about Xenoblade’s big titty ladies in skimpy clothes (I like Dahlia’s design, sorrynotsorry) haters failed to mention the real worst character here, fucking NIM. I super hate Nim. She’s got the face of a Dr. Seuss character, and everything else about her is like a neopets Mary-Sue fancharacter from 2003. She’s got fragments of white fox fur clothing draped around a clashing black bra which has no attaching straps, glowing blue tribal tattoos, glowing orange techno tattoos, black platform techno boots that grow out of her skin, kitty ears that may or may not be her hair, a massive fake(?) animal tail made out of furs and also leaves, and a fire dragon on one shoulder and an ice dragon on the other shoulder who are her companions that she talks to, and they are both quirky and she is also quirky and she can talk to animals and wants to be best friends with all the animals, passionately hates war and loves nature but is also happy-go-lucky, and despite being a mystical kitsune expert, seems to mess up every diplomacy attempt with animals with all the other characters telling her she just just needs to believe in herself and persist. There’s just no clear concept here, she seems like just a poorly thought out mish-mash of some designer’s desires. I used her a lot tho, cause claw healers are really good.

Runners up: 
G (Street Fighter V), Velvet Crowe (Tales of Berseria), Goro Majima’s make-over (Yakuza 0)


Maximum Swaggage award for Best Dressed Bae

Knights of Labyrinthia (Professor Layton Vs Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney)

I plead guilty, your honour!

Let’s be real, half the reason this game is so good lookin' is those KNIGHT BAES. The knights of labyrinthia have the dopest uniform ever. Smart silvery full plate armour with a matching skirt and collar with a gorgeous purple diamond pattern, and a subtley owl-like mask on the helmet. The diamonds and owl themes being common motifs for the whole land of Labyrinthia and subtle symbolism that foreshadows the adventure. But mostly, swag.

There’s a bunch of variants of them too, which are also fun. Especially a shout-out to Constantine the most adorable little knight. He’s a tiny little puppy with the same owl mask and diamond-patterned clothes. He’s also responsible for the little bite and scratch marks on the design of its owner, which is just great visual storytelling. The others include Dzibilchaltunchunchucmil, an old gossipy man, a snooty lady, a guy who loves to be stepped on, and so on. There's also one who for some reason is always injured and bandaged up. He even has bandages around his armour for some reason. Delightful.

Runners up: 
Morag (Xenoblade Chronicles 2), Duncan and Sukey (D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die), Chiaki’s laptop (428: Shibuya Scramble)


Headache of the Year

Kirby and the Amazing Mirror

If only I ate that cartographer...

I know Kirby normally has a reputation for being the star of baby games for babies, but this one put me in my place. I just did not understand how to play this simple-seeming platformer, even when using guides. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is a game where there are no “levels”. Just a bunch of interconnected areas, like how you would in a Metroid or post-Symphony of the Night Castlevania. In theory this is stuff that’s pretty intuitive, and a style of platformer that I enjoy quite a lot. The difference here though is that I simply did not understand how to orient myself or navigate in this game. Entrances and exits are often hidden, are one-way, require specific abilities, and often had multiple ones on the same screen. The game provided a map, but I sure never understood how to read it properly. I just kept going in circles and circles and circles. The guides I looked up on Youtube had people make the same mistakes I did, and those were the people trying to show how to play the game!

After an alarmingly long time of wandering around aimlessly thinking “This is ok, I’ll find where I’m supposed to go eventually” I started to finally figure out how the game actually worked. And I was like, “Oh no.” This is just not a game that’s welcoming to what I would presume is it’s target audience, casual handheld gamers looking for a friendly and easy to drop in game (it was originally multiplayer co-op!) If you don’t know exactly what hidden secret doors you are looking for, you’ll end looping around the same bunch of levels forever. There’s a few special power ups you need for very particular sections in the game, but it never seems to be clear what power up goes with what block. Like there’s green blocks, gray blocks, yellow blocks, wooden pegs… and *some* abilities work on *some* of those blocks, but I couldn’t even tell you which ones went with which.

Runners up:
Return of the Obra Dinn, Yoshi’s Island, A Virus Named Tom


Worst Trend of the Year

Collectors Editions… but without the game

I guess the bundle contains a jigsaw puzzle. That's kind of a game.

I was late on hearing about this because I mainly just buy Nintendo cartridges and digital PC games and usually several years late. But like, it’s bad enough you got all these day one collector editions at quadruple the price of the base game filled with nothing but tat like cheap t-shirts, a pamphlet sized art book, a mass produced model and some light digital filler content for the game. Like, £30 worth of tat surely. But now there’s been some releases calling themselves “limited/collectors edition game bundles” while noting in the corner that they don’t actually include the game. It’s just the junk! At a cursory market search this includes bundles touting the titles: Red Dead Redemption 2, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Battlefield 1, Gears of War 4, Resident Evil 7, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, Call of Duty: WWII, World of Tanks and Batman Arkham Origins.
Granted those are found by having the phrase (game not included) in the listing, but then following that is the compatible console platforms, PEGI ratings and they’re listed under, y’know, VIDEO GAMES. If there’s no intention to be misleading, why, pray tell, would one list a bundle of merchandise as a game when it is fundamentally not one?  Like, it’d probably be illegal for me to sell you a bottle of bleach in the refrigerated drinks section titled DELICIOUS FRUIT PUNCH (for use on sinks, do not drink) LEMON FLAVOUR, right? Well if that isn’t illegal, someone should probably get on that. 

Yeah, this stuff just irritated me whenever I heard about it. It never ever came up in the context of “look at this cool stuff I got from my collector’s edition thingy, I'm definitely glad I got this”. No, it was exclusively people being baffled at the fact that they bought a collectors edition, only to realise there was no actual edition of the game inside. It feels like these things only exist to disappoint people.

Runners up: 
Congratulating yourself for not having “loot boxes” while still having other ways to exploit consumers, Sony hates crossplay until big enough game calls them out, Battle Royale with cheese


Dumbest premise

Your mum was an incubation robot, so that makes you half-robot? (Binary Domain)

6 out of 10 combat models have experienced projectile dysfunction.

I actually really liked Binary Domain. It had all the makings of a good old sci-fi story, the kind that asks you questions that you know humanity will probably have to figure out eventually. Unfortunately, occasionally it trips up and serves you a plot point that make you put your controller down and say “...no, that’s not how that works.” Binary Domain is set in the future where AI and robotics were advanced enough to blend in seamlessly with real humans. So far so good, if not a little safe. But after a certain point, it reveals that one of your companions had a secret past they were unaware of themselves. You see, one of those secret-cylons mated with her father, and she was the result of that. Alrighty, that’s probably some heavy stuff to process, figuring out you were essentially a test-tube baby, and losing the assumed humanity of your mothe- wait, why are we talking about if she’s half robot all of a sudden? 

Yeah, what he said. The game’s overall tone and story worked for me surprisingly well, at worst it’s like a slightly more topical and coherent Resident Evil. But this particular twist just amuses me so much. They really put a lot of emphasis on how the somewhat unlikable protagonist Dan is a big ol’ robophobe, because y'know, they were tools of the enemy, he grew up at war with rogue robots, they pop out of skin disguises and come murder you with their spooky metal terminator skeletons. But his mind is changed and we all learn a great lesson about tolerance when he falls in love with a character over the course of the game, but twist! She’s half robot! No, not a cyborg, silly, I mean, she’s physically and psychologically a biological human (I guess?) but her incubator was a robot so she is HALF ROBOT THAT’S HOW IT WORKS, NOW SHE’S AN OUTLAW HALF BREED.

Runners up: 
Mickey and Donald get trapped in a magic box and are given magic powers like summon a flying carpet, summon a flying bubble, summon a flying card platform, and summon a box. It was all the work of Pete, who is currently a ghost. (World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck), I shall find someone who has my name spelled backwards, so I can steal his identity! (Mega Man X: Command Mission)


Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment

You’re dying and ask a wish-granting genie to see your daughter graduate from college. Rather than extending your life, your daughter becomes a genius that blazes through school and uni in record time. (Majotori)

A little obvious in retrospect, but DO NOT TRUST THIS WOMAN.

So I got this game on a bit of a recommendation from.. god knows where tbh, because me and Tobi like doing nerdy quizzes together, and this game was described as a quaint little adventure trivia game where you had to pass each trivia round in order to help a witch grant a characters wish and thereby help them each on their cute little stories. Sounds ace! What I wasn’t prepared for though, was how absolutely savage this game was. And this outcome was the *GOOD* one!

Yeah, this game doesn’t mess around. Most of the time there’s a cute little set-up, and a clear path to how it’ll resolve if you win the round of trivia. Early on in the game, the thing that happens is pretty much what you expect, but if you get it wrong, things go really wrong. Sometimes those characters die, or their life continues in much worse states. As the game goes on though, some people get horrible outcomes no matter what, and the game doesn’t linger on any of it. It shows you what happens and moves on in a snap. There’s honestly not a lot of additional details beyond what it says at the top. 

Runners up: 
"I LOVE YOU TOO, NIA… I LOVE ALL MY OTHER FRIENDS AS WELL" (Xenoblade Chronicles 2), Baby robots roleplay abusive relationships, incest, alcoholism, and bodyhorror (Danganronpa v3), Every goddamn holiday event involving Yosuke (Persona 4)


Most tears shed

Most of Night in the Woods

Are you ready for some EMPATHY STRESS over SAD CATS with NO FUTURE?

If I had to describe Night in the Woods, it’s “Anxiety: The Game”. You play as a college drop-out who is ashamed to admit she dropped out to her family, and tries to pick life back up where she left it before she moved away. Exposure to the outside world made her realise how small her home town is, and how it’s clearly rapidly declining. Realising your fall-back be a dead-end trap is some powerful stuff. The bit that really got me though, was when she made a new friend who opened up to her about his abusive past, and how casually he tried to play it off and move away from. It felt really raw in a game that makes you feel like you have it the worst.

The whole tone of NitW is one big sad times game. You start off as a messy teenage cat who’s dropped out of university, and just arrived in her hometown with nobody there to pick her up. The game’s setting is always hauntingly beautiful, lonely, desolate and somber and the choice to use adorable animals to represent the characters is really twisting the knife. You take control of Mae and try to make decisions to do what’s best for her, but somehow she always ends up insisting on messing it up and you end up feeling like you’re fighting for the steering wheel on her life. There’s the feeling of returning only to find everyone’s moving on and you’re left behind, the pressure to get a job and be good at something and find your place in life and being unable to, and also apparently a serial murderer of directionless teenagers at large in the town? I think the bit that really peaks for me in the feelings department is the period where they’ve discovered a dark secret. Mae nearly dies and her friends rescue her and bring her back home, and all the squad are gathered at Angus and Gregg’s house just reeling from the incident. They are wondering if they can call authorities or have the power to do anything and if they’re going to be OK and what’s going to happen next and so they just kind of get dinner and hang out knowing they can’t go back to their old lives but they don't have any power to fix the situation. It’s a really good representation of the feeling of hitting “rock bottom” and not knowing where you can possibly go from there, which matches with the theme of depression.

Runners up:
Ryoma’s “motive” (Danganronpa v3), Nanako fucking DIES (Persona 4), Too late for Maize (OneShot)


Most terrifying moment

Terrorist incidents (Paper, Please)

Still, beats retail.

I played a couple effective horror games this year, but I’m always a sucker for being caught off guard and giving a sense of dread from someplace unexpected. Well, I did anticipate Papers, Please to be somewhat heavy and emotional. But one thing that really sticks out, are my first and last experiences with terrorist attacks on the border. The whole game’s effective theme is giving you this feeling of being permanently intimidated. You’re in an uphill struggle against failure and poverty, if you fall into disfavour with someone you might not even recognise, that could end up costing your job, money, or even your life. You have to be tough but kind, but self preserving, but within the draconian rules. One day, the guard hands you a key. He says to use it to unlock your weapons drawer and shoot any terrorists that attack the border. You’re busy trying to file paperwork and stamp things as fast as you can when suddenly you hear gunfire, and across the top screen you see lil’ dudes coming towards your booth with guns. You have to do everything manually which adds to the panic and tension. It’s just a proper OH FUCK moment and I love it.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The game gets real in so many ways that you don’t expect it to escalate even further than it already does. Your stress levels are already at max, and when something like this starts to unfold, all you can start doing is trying to clumsily try to adapt while shouting AH CRAP NO! NOT TODAY! I DIDNT NEED THIS! NOT NOW! WE DIDNT EAT YESTERDAY AND ITS WINTER AND WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO PAY FOR HEATING. I stupidly used to play this game to wind down before bedtime, but this is the type of stuff that makes you the opposite of relaxed.

Runners up: 
Let’s test this hydraulic press! (Danganronpa V3), Yuri got dem crazy eyes (Doki Doki Literature Club)


Deja Vu award for ballsiest ripoffs

Westworld Mobile & Fallout Shelter

Should have gone for that "sleight of hand" perk.

There’s never really a lot to say in this category. It is what it says on the tin. Fallout Shelter was a decently popular, shallow mobile game that basically only existed to promote another thing. When it came time to make a game to promote the new season of Westworld, they just basically made the same game as the Fallout one.

It’s worth mentioning these games were both made by the same studio, but under different contracted publishers who owned the rights to the code, assets and design so they really shouldn’t be using any of same framework. But players noticed that the game was not only blatantly similar, it contained identical bugs to ones Fallout Shelter had in its original demo. So the publishers got ready to sue each other. Oops!

Runners up: 
Sony announces TOTAKU, an amiibo-adjacent series of collectible figures (that don't do anything but seem to be hoping you won’t notice), Super Saiy-...onic (Sonic 3 & Knuckles)


Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude

Kokichi Oma (Danganronpa V3)

Self-preservation mode is for casuals.

Kokichi is such a little shit, I hate that I love him but I do. He’s rude to everyone, lies for attention, even when it’s, like, a really really objectively bad time to be doing that. He won’t let nobody in on nothin’ and he’s frustratingly good at just running away if cornered. But he also tried to fuck up the master shitlord himself, Monokuma. And you know what? He actually pulled it off, the absolute madman.

In a game where murders happen and you need to figure out the truth, Kokichi is a constant thorn in your side. He’ll lie constantly, even when it puts himself at risk, and sprinkles in a truth here and there if he’ll know if it’ll stir more shit than a lie. It kind of makes it near impossible to tell when you can depend on his input or not, which is again not great in a game about figuring out mysteries. He’s allegedly not doing it to be evil, to be fair. He just really appreciates unreliability as a concept, exploring it a world of infinite possibilities, while the truth is just this one boring singular thing. On top of that, Kokichi is just a weird little man. For some reason when near the end of the game you can enter his room, he has an upside down wax figure of one of his classmates dangling above his bed. They never explain it, and I’m not sure if he’d want us to know.

Runners up: 
Poppi (Xenoblade Chronicles 2), Tama proving the effectiveness of Monster Hunter armour (428 Shibuya Scramble), Mae (Night in the Woods)

Commiserations! You made it to the end! Have a saucy wink on the house.

;)