Well well well. If it isn’t Covid. Still here I see? Well fuck it then. Halloween month. I put lights up, I got all the spices associated with pumpkin, I got some gummi sweets, and I'm gonna whip something promising out of the old backlog.
Thinking you should consider changing optometrists.
This year's spook-em-up is Tango Gameworks' The Evil Within. A little bit of a spiritual successor of Resident Evil 4, one of the highest acclaimed games in its genre and in general. If you've played a shooty game in the past decade, you've probably got a decent idea of what you're in for. A third person over-the-booty shooty with Not-Zombies™, crafting, and gross toilets. How about you lead us in on the story and characters, Al? What is The Evil Within about?
So it’s about a Bruce Campbell lookin' cop dude who is supposed to be investigating a massacre at a mental hospital(?) with his 2 cop buddies but instead he starts trippin' balls and next thing you know the city explodes. Also you collect jars of piss green goo which are EVERYWHERE. And you inject them??? Directly into your brain with some medieval murder chair looking thing????
No seriously, medial school credentials? second opinion maybe?
Now now, maybe only half of it is in jars. The rest can be slurped off the filthiest, muddiest, blood-caked ground. Regardless of how it's sourced, more brain juice makes you brain harder. Seems pretty simple to me, and Sebastian doesn't hesitate or question it for a moment. There is something to be said though that he needs to inject his skull with stuff to think of impressive upgrades like "I can carry an extra bullet of 1 specific type of gun in my back pocket", or "what if I carry 6 matches instead of 5?"
Didn’t get far before I'm clocking that this whole series of events is taking place in some sort of… subconscious brainscape. Some dreamosphere mind prison. Seb keeps passing out and waking up in the next area, and seeing ghosts and shit. I guess it could be frustrating if you don't roll with it, but I'm kinda fine with them making it convenient to just skip to a bunch of wacky locations without having to contextualise a sense of time and place. Now I just never know what's gonna happen.
OK on some level I kinda knew this was gonna happen.
I thought it worked well too. Transitions tend to be really in your face, and met with audible confusion from the characters. When you see the characters roll with it though, it's pretty effortless to just go on the ride along with them. Speaking of "them", I suppose we should do an official rundown of the major players of the game as well. We kind of hinted at Sebastian Castellanos already. He's pretty much your cookie cutter Sad Cop™. The jovial beloved family man, who at the same time is also a workaholic that is always too busy to actually spend time with his family, and then falls into alcoholism and depression when his family is taken away from him. You're expected to just trust them on the former, because you only see the post-tragedy version of him, who's just a jaded, hard boiled arse with sexist baggage.
You’ve got buddy cop Joseph Oda, I think he’s supposed to be kinda stuck up but I love him he’s just doing his best. Other buddy cop Juli Kidman, who's a very Ada Wong-ish high heel kickin’ running off ahead-ing morally unclear kind of associate. Everyone is obnoxiously sexist towards her, nicknaming her “Kid” and complaining that she gets too cocky. She killed a zombie with her foot, Seb.
Watch out Costa, they're coming for your maple hazel lattes!
Joseph would never disrespect her like that. He wears glasses like a real human boy. It's mostly Sebastian and her boss that talk down to her, because she knows how to do things, and it annoys them I guess. But yeah, I like Kidman and Joseph. They're a little underdeveloped, but you quickly care more about them than you care about the lead. There's also Leslie, who's just a scared little boy who you chase around. Not much to say about him. He just freaks out a lot and is terrified of the monsters. Fair though. Then there's some obviously shady dumb professor guy who's way too chill about the nightmarescape full of death and destruction. Immediately sus, and you kinda wait for him to eat dirt. Can't even say if he does in the end though.
And then finally there’s “Ruvik”, a mysterious ghost in dorkass Assassins Creed cosplay who likes to appear every now and then just to shit you up. On top of that there’s your token videogame not-zombies and an exciting rogues gallery of pretty terrifying ghosts mutants including WOMAN WITH ALL TOO MANY LIMBS and OBVIOUSLY PYRAMID HEAD INSPIRED GUY WITH A SAFE FOR A HEAD. I sound snarky but their encounters are actually fantastically tense and each new enemy design you encounter fills you with dread. You got a favourite enemy encounter, Tobi?
Damn bitch you live like this?
Oh boy, do I ever. The most terrifying and startling enemy in the game for me were the friggin' bomb traps. They're these proximity sensing devices that will know if you're near, and will blow you up into bits. You can catch them off guard by crouching and sneaking, which lets you safely disable them and recycle them into scrap parts for arts and crafts. They place these bombs all over the place. Often around corners or at the start of new rooms. My most memorable one though is when you enter a room, see some ammo or a jar of tasty tasty brain juice in the distance. As you approach it though, you pass a stack of crates, and immediately behind it is one of these beeping suckers, ready to pop. Not only did it startle me good, it also got me again when I watched Allie play. Absolutely disgusting.
Ok yeah fair point. This game resembles Resident Evil 4 in a lot of ways, but it adds in some new hooks that lend well to what's already there. One is the traps that create a whole new kind of jump scare, and the other is the CROSSBOW weapon. You have a (frankly rather pointless) craft system to make speciality bolts of your choice, where can zap enemies, flashbang them, blow them up. 2 outta 5 of your options are actually any good, but they do a lot of damage and have decent range, and it's pretty fun to pin a ghoul to the wall and watch their ragdoll do a little jiggly dance. Not so scary now- well ok that's actually horrifying I guess. Any more thoughts in that big juicy brain of yours?
Hello im a local representative from the conservative party can we count on your vo-
Not really. I thought it was good. Not Resident Evil 4 good, but I liked it. Will play the next one at some point. Fun game to play, and a fun game to backseat hassle someone else over. It never does anything terribly original, but I guess that wasn't a huge problem.
I give this game a ZOMB BOMB out of 10. It was flashy, campy, and it didn’t disappoint. I think I enjoyed the hell out of it. I tend to prefer a more actiony game to the stealth horrors like Outlast and Alien Isolation, and this one managed to prove that you don’t need to spend *all* your time hiding in cupboards and fixing generators to be a properly tense, scary game. Though ok, it had a bit of that too.
Ah, to be an advertising agency in a Japanese horror game.
It was 2020 my dudes. Video games. We played some. Here's our personal awards for the games Allie and Tobi happened to pick up off the pile in the year 2020! Our leisure time was barely affected as we both got to work from home, but we still played a pretty strong assortment of games this year.
I identified very quickly and strongly with Majima tbh. He’s rude, highly strung, open-minded and game for all sorts of crazy shenanigans, and utterly shameless. He’s not really a “good guy”, but he’s extremely warm hearted and wants to help and protect those around him, especially if they can relate to him in some way as he definitely feels like an outsider to larger society. Even though a large part of his story is running a cabaret club, compared to Kiryu who feels a lot more patriarchal and repressed, Majima tends to treat women more like allies and equals, and shows interest in “feminine” things. All the characters in Yakuza 0 feel surprisingly deep and well-realised, and having a playable character who really vibes with me? A psychotic sweary bisexual bastard with a heart of gold? Goals.
Runners up: Sylvando (Dragon Quest XI), Kabbu & Vi (Bug Fables), Michel Bollinger (The House in Fata Morgana)
Worst Character
Elro (Iconoclasts)
Big year for eyepatches though.
Elro is the doting older brother of Robin, your stoic and adorkable protagonist. They’re both going through some really tough times as tragedies repeatedly strike their small settlement. And Elro in particular never catches a break which might almost set you up to feel sorry for him… almost…
But nah, he finds this way of dealing with everything in the worst, most frustrating way possible. When you repeatedly prove that you’re an absolute badass who might even be capable of saving the world, he shows up to insist that you go home so he can protect you with his sharp stick and XY chromosomes. He’s so clearly a hypocrite, as he constantly tries to stop Robin from doing anything he deems risky and then he launches himself into red hot revenge quests that, oh yeah, attract danger to them all. He stubbornly refuses to listen and keeps getting in the way as best he can. PUSH THE FUCKING BUTTON ELRO!!!!
From the moment you meet Elro, you can tell he's carrying a lot of "man of the house" baggage. Like Allie said, he doesn't just dismiss what others have to say. He actively tries to sabotage people from trying to do anything he didn't sign off on. His official bio also has nothing listed under the things he likes, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest. What a tedious, stubborn jerk.
Runners up: Ota (AI: The Somnium Files), Minute Man (Freedom Force), Alistair (Dragon Age: Origins), Robert Foster (Beneath a Steel Sky)
Best Soundtrack
The House in Fata Morgana
The House in Fata Morgana sounds like no other video game I've ever heard, that's for sure. It actually took me a while to warm up to. Allie had been linking me music before I had even played it, and it sounded way too intense and distracting. I couldn't possibly imagine it working in a visual novel game. To my surprise, it didn't just work surprisingly well, the music also pretty much carried that game. A particular thing that stood out to me though, was that I kept thinking I stumbled on the saddest song in the game, except it kept on escalating time and again.
Though I played this game at the end of 2019 (Tobi played it in 2020 though) this has been my go-to soundtrack all year. It’s cohesive, yet tremendously varied. Atmospheric and calming yet it also goes super hard. Like Tobi says, there’s not just one, but about 5 tracks that make my feelings crumble like a jenga tower made from dehydrated ricotta cheese. The soundtrack is also pretty massive for a game of its scope, since it’s intentionally a kind of audio-visual novel experience made in collaboration with several composers. If you like Nier/Nier Automata for its heartbreaking ideas and unique neo-gothic soundtrack, you’ll probably be able to appreciate this as well. Check out the whole game, it’s on Steam!
I call this style of interior design the "I hate my Dada-ism"
This game has a lovely hand painted impressionist-y artstyle that uses lighting and depth of field blur well. It’s not quite anime and not quite Dreamworks-y, which I guess is more popular nowadays but it was somewhat ahead of the curve in that respect.
What I really think made this game stand out against all the good looking games this year though is that as well as having this nice clean stylish look, its style also pairs well with the themes in the game’s story and mechanics. Being a game about self-expression and photography it has a lot of bespoke graphics and decals covering the clothing and dorm-room walls to peruse. The game gives you time and encourages you to stop and get immersed in the setting and make careful observation of things, sometimes to progress and sometimes just for the reward of feeling immersed in the world.
Life is Strange has a nice sense of space in general. Homes and places feel lived in, with props all over the place. I have a soft spot for fictional products in games, and in this game like this you can really peruse every shelf, cupboard, closet, and counter. There's fake brands of anything you can find around the house, in various states of wear and tear. The other thing that really helps its direction is the use of useless, empty space. At various points in the game, you'll be able to just sit or lie down, and the camera slips away from your character. It instead starts facing those empty spaces that don't really serve a purpose, while music fades in. It really feels like you're taking a breather along with your protagonist, vibing out, taking everything that happened in, or just trying to prolong a calm moment. It all really compliments the mood of being a young photographer.
I don't want to be mean, but I think I've never added a game this quickly to the shortlist of this category as Else Heart.Break(). It's not just artistically ugly (even though it -very- much is exactly that), but its aesthetic choices directly fight the player. The grimy world is littered with stylised blocky objects that you can't reasonably predict what they are meant to be. Everything is draped in high contrast shadows, and only lit using faint barfy red and green glows. Everyone looks like a sad cubist clown painting. To top it all off, the camera is pulled way back, so everything is too small, which made the artists have to stylise the sizes of objects, making them even more difficult to make out what they were meant to be. Did I mention there were tons of flickering lights too? Just unpleasant on the eyes.
Yeah you really nailed it Tobs. I kind of respect the game, on every front it knows exactly what it wants to be, which is not an easy, accessible, chill game for everyone. It’s a dystopian punk bewildering special interest game for people looking to teach themselves programming. And boy it sure does look the part. It’s the perfect game for a precocious teenager to play at 3am during the summer holidays and get fixated with, but it’s pure DigitalTrash61 for the rest of us.
Runners up: Small Radios Big Televisions, Freedom Force, Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny
Best Story
Yakuza 0
When ya mahjong hand weak and some bozo declares riichi
So I knew Yakuza had a reputation for zany side stories, hyperviolent wrestling moves and extremely varied gameplay ranging from cabaret management to claw machines to drunken karaoke. But one thing nobody warned me about was how invested I’d get in the dramatic twists and turns of the core storyline! Yakuza 0 is the prequel that marked a bit of a soft reboot for the franchise, as it provided an ideal jumping in point for new fans with (relatively) more modern localisation and… well, sensibilities. The game swaps you between leading lad Kiryu Kazuma and best boy Goro Majima as you follow a convoluted intertwining plot that moves back and forth across Tokyo and Osaka. Kiryu is framed for murder and Majima is tasked with an assassination job, and it all traces back to a mysterious vacant lot that all the crime families are fighting over. It’s like… monopoly with knife fights. Yeah, nailed it!
I came in with the opposite expectations. I had dabbled in this series before, and I associated it with stuffy suits talking about hierarchies. I was fully expecting it to be more of the same, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it taking a more human, character-centric approach. Don't get me wrong, the stuffy suits talking about hierarchies and taking responsibility are definitely still present, but it takes a step back and is merely used to frame the characters, locations, and their relationships. The race for the deed of the empty lot was surprisingly compelling, because they take a lot of time showing who is involved, and what they're like. The thing that really made the story pop though, was its excellent placement of twists and cliffhangers. The game tries to pull you into a million different directions with premium trashy distractions, so it was impressive it kept me hooked the entire time through.
Runners up: AI: The Somnium Files, The House in Fata Morgana
Best Original Game Concept
Ring Fit Adventure
Girl maybe your next move should be to stop, drop and roll.
Ring Fit Adventure wasn't the first time Nintendo dipped its toes in the wellness software pool. It made waves with Wii Sports and with the balance board, both were quite well-received. In spite of that, I was pretty surprised to see how much mileage they got out of a ring attachment and a leg strap. The game they built around it is a solid RPG that leads you through a decent variety of exercises, coaxes you to keep coming back every day. For a time when everyone was expected to stay at home, I don't know if there was a better time to release the thing.
Wii Fit never really appealed to me. I didn’t particularly want a regular reminder of things I am pretty bad at, and I didn’t have space or time for that sort of thing anyway. But not only was this year different in that regard, but also the idea of a resistance device that covers shoulder exercises (i have a winged scapula wasup), and a turn-based RPG where you can go at your own pace sounded waaaaaaay up my street. And it was! It had so much more variety than I expected too. You do jogging, stretches, resistance training, squats, yoga, and there’s even a kind of budget-beat-saber rhythm dodging minigame. The UX is so polished, taking you through warmups and warm downs and integrating reminders and preparations into the game to make it as pleasant as possible. The rumble on the resistance ring also gives a really nice tactile feedback so that you can feel when you’re doing the exercises right. It really justifies all the bizarre gimmicky hardware choices of the switch. Even my mum was so impressed she wanted a copy!
Here at HYTIB we’re really about the high brow humour. Definitely not calling people a wanksponge and kicking hipsters off of cliffs. You’re thinking of someone else. Anyway Lair of the Clockwork God is a hilarious game where you play as two best buddies Ben & Dan. One of them wants to be an adventure game character and solve item puzzles and talk to people. The other wants to be a platform game hero who runs and jumps. And they ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to do mechanics outside of their genre. The humour in the game runs deep as various indie game genres are spoofed in both the surly conversations between characters and inspired fourth-wall-breaking gameplay reminiscent of games like Monkey Island and Undertale.
I have a sneaking suspicion the entire game is built around the puns and zingers they thought of. The comedy is just woven into pretty much everything facet of the design. Could have been tedious if the writing didn't hold up, but it does. The game can come off as a little mean-spirited at times, but it never punches down, and virtually always calls itself out when it skirts the line. The characters play off each other well, and their gimmicks are a good source of extra friction. The comedy writing is pushed even further through its visual novel companion game, which comes free with the Lair of the Clockwork God. Really enjoyed it.
Runners up: Paper Mario: Origami King, Bug Fables, Yakuza 0
Biggest Surprise
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
Ask not for whom the gong bongs
I still can't believe this happened. Moon is a 20+ year old game that was made by one of my favourite creators in the industry, and inspired quite the number of other people whose work I respect. I didn't think I'd ever be able to play it myself, as it was Japanese-only, and as an adventure game pretty much hinges on its text. Not only did it get a re-release in 2020, but the localisation itself was really good. Let operation "bug Allie to play this" commence.
I’ll play it someday I swear! Yeah this was one of those “long lost” japan-only games that was stuck in fan-translation hell so it wasn’t even something we could realistically check out with emulators or whatever. Tobi would tell me about it, and it definitely sounded like something we’d enjoy. So perhaps in that way it wasn’t a big surprise, but seeing a game like that get picked up for the switch sure was!
Though this year was considered a bit of a “gaming drought” year, it's been a year of unexpected old Japanese games and franchises Wising from their Gwaves. The Switch’s NES and SNES library has grown deeper. Phantasy Star Online 2 and SMT3: Nocturne got surprising new port announcements. The World Ends with You is back. SEGA released some limited edition experimental minigames, including ones based on Golden Axe and Yakuza on Steam. Mario64/Sunshine/Galaxy got switch ports. Hell might have frozen over. No Mother 3 though... 8)
Keeping my fingers crossed for 2021!
Runners up: Tomb Raider, Golf with your Friends, Bug Fables, Affordable Space Adventures
Biggest Disappointment,
Beneath a Steel Sky
In hindsight, its somewhere in the top 10.
Now this may have been a statistical anomaly but in my experience, whenever I hear this game brought up people talk about what a scifi cult classic it is and how they wish we could return to the golden age of adventure games with deep stories and witty dialogue. I’d often spot it in top 20 adventure game lists alongside games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword. It’s often described as Blade Runner-esque and Orwellian. And yeh… I mean it totally is those things. But overall it’s just such a dry game with laborious puzzles, a mashup of paperback scifi tropes and visuals, a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist with morals as grey as his personality, and pretty weird grating music. I also definitely wouldn’t call it witty dialogue, more like dated, unrelatable misanthropic snark from the peak of the edgy protagonists era. Is it still worth playing though? Eh, if you have the patience for it I’ll admit it does get pretty zany by the end. But I feel like I could name at least 20 adventure games that are better.
I expected nothing, and I still felt let down. I never heard anyone talk about it, in spite of seemingly everyone owning it. Heck, even I owned it apparently, so they must have been giving it away for free. You can kind of tell why pretty quickly though. The game can't seem to decide if it's a deadly serious space epic, or a goofy romp where everyone dispenses sarcastic quips. I stopped getting invested in the plot pretty quickly, which left us with the pixel hunt-y, talk to everyone three times in the correct order type of puzzle design. It's just kind of boring and has nothing interesting or unique to offer. Placing it firmly in the time vampire category.
Runners up: Else Heart.Break(), Cities in Motion 2, Steamworld Quest, Breath of Fire
Usual Suspects Award for Most Time Wasted
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
You like moons babe? I've got some in my basement.
Much like Ring Fit, this was another one of those perfectly timed releases. During some really stressful times when everyone was asked to self isolate and stay at home, Animal Crossing gave people a saccharine world full of cute animals who wanted nothing more than to hang. Not just that, but it allowed folks to connect to each other's islands, and make virtual visits. when it got released, my social media feed was practically nothing but Animal Crossing for a solid month, and it's where I wished quite a number of people a happy birthday in 2020. I don't know if "time wasted" is the appropriate term here, but Animal Crossing was there for the world when the world needed it most.
Yep! Even though I felt like I dropped off this game earlier than most of my friends, and not for lack of enthusiasm about it (it’s great! I just wanted to get more games played to be honest.) I *still* somehow managed to put about 175 hours into the game…
Runners up: Divinity: Original Sin, Yakuza 0, Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise, Dragon Age: Origins
GAME OF THE YEAR
Bug Fables
A bee in your bonnet is worth two in the trunk.
Every single year I *gets warlock punched in the face* OH RIGHT yeah so I played games this year. I played like, all 2 of them or whatever! We were debating whether or not this one would even qualify because teeeeechnically it came out on *some* platforms in 2019? But I sure as shield bugs didn’t hear about it back then and from what I can tell not many people gave this much of a look-in.
So! Bug Fables is a blatant spiritual successor to Paper Mario: TTYD and it’s not even going to pretend otherwise. There’s a clearly targeted art style, set of systems and mechanics (QTE turn based combat, cooking, badges, etc) but obviously they couldn’t make a Mario game so they crafted their own world, characters and story and it’s bloody marvelous. It’s so likeable. The characters are so cute and sassy and have something to say about every character and scene, the interconnected world and NPCs are well designed, the game is well balanced and the story is surprisingly solid. Perhaps it’s not as witty or full of crazy surprises as something like Undertale, but I would say it’s comparable in the way that it has such charming characters and even, outshines the already beloved game it was attempting to succeed.
Personally, I loved the obvious heavy hitter Animal Crossing: NH this year and felt it lived up to my expectations, but having played much of the series in the past, Bug Fables probably left more of an impression on me as a brand new adventure.
Yeah, I knew I would like it the moment I laid my eyes on it. Love me some Paper Mario, and that's pretty much exactly what this is. They did it really well too, and tried to push the mechanics further. One thing you'll notice as a Paper Mario fan is that those original games are typically balanced to be newcomer-friendly, and that usually means it's pretty much smooth sailing from start to finish. Bug Fables expects you to be familiar with those Paper Marios, and is not afraid to push back. This makes the game more tense, and forces you to engage a lot more with the otherwise under-utilised mechanics. I also really liked the characterisation and writing in this game. As Allie alluded, they really tried to sell the game's world as a real place by letting your party have something to say about everyone and every place. It's an absurd amount of dialogue, but it really gives everything a sense of place and history. If none of them know anything about a subject, you can see them speculate and argue. It's all really good stuff. The only real thing that doesn't sit right with me, is that the game has a paper aesthetic. The only reason it does so is because it's a Paper Mario-esque game, but unlike Paper Mario, it never does anything with it. While Paper Mario would use it to fold, slice, crumble, cut, etc its world and characters to play with the paper theme, Bug Fables does nothing of the sort. The characters are paper and it's never acknowledged. Still, as far as "if Nintendo won't do it, we'll roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves" projects go, I couldn't have asked for more. Sometimes people copy a game because it's popular and want to chase that trend, while other times folks do it because they love Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door so much, and that it's clear Nintendo will never make another game like it. Can't fault 'em in that case. Eager to see what this team does next.
Runners up: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Lair of the Clockwork God
DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released before 2010)
Tomb Raider
Modern experts now refute the popular theory that T-Rexes only had 30 polygons.
Tomb Raider is a series with quite a number of sequels, reboots and remakes, many of which I enjoy, but my experiences with the first game were extremely limited. I had dabbled in it before a long time ago, and gave up on it for being too fiddly and difficult. When Allie mentioned she was going to give it a go, fully expected it to still be that clunky mess I remembered from all those years ago. Steep learning cursed aside, the game's a lot more elegantly designed than I expected. The entire game operates on an invisible, unacknowledged grid, where objects and tiles have suspiciously similar dimensions. This lets you perfectly measure out what you can and can't do in real-time during complex platforming challenges. All the rigidity that I thought was clunky before, ended up working for the traversal and exploration that took centre-stage. The combat encounters were still pretty rough and janky though.
Yep! It’s still tricky and unpolished as hell, with lots of diagonal jumps that really rustled my late 90s style baggy gym bottoms (with matching racerback sports bra). But having the skills to pay the bills this time around (and a handy little FOV/resolution fixing patch) I finally got to see what this game had to offer. And boy. Whew! I never knew it was absolutely batshit, tits out, skin off, Metal Gear Solid levels of crazy! I didn’t even know it was about Atlantis, let alone that Atlantis was covered in monster flesh. I didn’t know I’d get electrocuted by poseidon. I didn’t know I’d have to use king Midas’s curse to solve a door puzzle. I didn’t know Tony Hawk would come skating down the pyramids to gun me down. Having Tobi there with me for this wild ride, rich in variety made it one of the more memorable experiences of the year.
Don't Slurp() that coffee! (haha zero people will get this)
Tobi will remember me describing the first several hours of this game as like a waking nightmare. It’s your first day at a new job, and you arrive in a garish labyrinthian town that’s all running on a strict in-game timer. You have to find your way around yourself by following street signs and/or asking people as they go about their day. I eventually found my way to the hotel in the evening and have to spend almost all my money on the deposit. I get the keys to check into my room. Entered my room and… uh… its a bathroom?? With no bed? I return to the landlady and she gets this janitor guy with some weird device to come and “fix my door”. And now it leads to a bedroom?? They also tell me I must follow the HOTEL REGULATIONS, and hand me a floppy disc. I find no way to read the floppy disk.I go to bed and sleep for a set amount of hours and wake up at 9:33am. Concerned about making it to my mysterious job on time, I head out and the landlady says a guy was looking for me and I just missed him. Shit! I ask around and people direct me to the cafe… or maybe the plaza… I search everywhere and can’t find the guy… and now it’s like 11pm in the game. Did I screw up? Days pass and I explore the town that’s littered with floppy disks that I don’t know how to use. I get on a tram and a woman sat at the back says something weird and cryptic to me. I miss the tram stop while she’s talking. Noo! I check my map to see where I’m going to end up. I look back around the tram and the woman is gone??
I eventually found the guy I was supposed to meet. I don’t seem to be in any trouble for being several days late. He takes me to a warehouse and says I have to sell sodas from the warehouse and make sure to log every single sale and the price I managed to sell it at. Almost nobody wants to buy my sodas as I run around town bugging people. WTF is this game? Stress me out simulator? So I looked it up. The first thing you have to do is find a “Modifier.” There’s a couple carefully hidden around the town. Once you get your hands on the modifier, that’s where the real game begins. Using the modifier, you can hack and reprogram all sorts of things in the world. Keys. Doors. Sandwiches. People. Computers. Other modifiers. The game has its own fictional set of functions, but it teaches you actual programming logic and the more you learn the closer you get to figuring out what you might be able to do to break your way into the center of the game.
"Break" is the right word for it alright. The moment you actually figure out how to engage with the game's core gimmick, you can do pretty much anything. Open up a door and make it connect to a completely different door and play a song. Make a key that opens every door and also gives you a million bucks in your bank account every time you use it. Hack your water to make you extra healthy and awake, and teleport you into the internet. Your only real limit is not knowing what stuff is called, and what stuff might be in the game. Some educated guesses can get you pretty far though. At some point we decided to teleport ourselves to the "mainframe", just because we figured there would be one because the game was about computers, and sure enough, it worked. We were in what turned out one of the final areas of the game, in front of a computer that was connected to everything. Getting to that point though, and obtaining such a Modifier was a mess though. By the time I joined in, we knew we had to find one of those things, but it still took us an eternity to get out hands on one. In our defense, part of it was because the game is structurally very messy, but also because we were expected to stalk a lady to proceed, and we didn't want to.
Runners up: AI Dungeon, Lair of the Clockwork God, Ib, Collecc 3D
Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Design Transgressions
Football Manager (Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed)
High Kicking, Low Scoring, and... Tie.
Sweet. A jolly kart racing game featuring all of SEGA's classic franchises. Who are you picking? Was the first one to come to mind "Football Manager" from the game Football Manager? No it wasn't, you liar. This is just some guy in a suit with a poorly fitted helmet on. I don't even know if there's more to say about this guy. He really is so featureless and boring. Every time he'd show up in a race, I'd be wondering if it was a new character I hadn't seen before. That's how little of an impression he made. Maybe we can extract some more information on the dullard in his Wiki page. ...oh, it just has a single sentence, which is that he's a playable character in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed. Does this mean he's not even in Football Manager itself?
Fucking hate this guy. Oh my god. Don’t get me wrong, having FOOTBALL MANAGEMENT represented in SEGA’s all-star roster brings me such malevolent glee. But every time I look at his outfit it makes me laugh. His big round football helmet. His ugly-ass cricket vest and blazer. His horrible face and weird gangly proportions. It’s already a look I don’t personally like, but it’s like objectively such a delightfully unloveable design. It’s like the only thing they knew about football when designing him is “it involves footballs”. Please never change, weird British licensed games scene.
Runners up: Chris Redfield's Zebra Suit (Resident Evil 5), Alan Wake (Alan Wake), Minute Man (Freedom Force)
Maximum Swaggage Award for Best Dressed Bae
Etsuko The Obatarian (Yakuza 0)
I'm just Osaka for pain!
POV: You’re queuing up to get the trendiest new street food before it sells out and an older lady cuts in front of you. She’s wearing an oversized sweater with a giant cheetah face on it, bright purple hair and magenta pants. Her swag is immeasurable and you are instantly defeated in your heart. She offers to come and work at your cabaret club.
You know what though. She absolutely kills it in your club too. The game pegs Etsuko as a great conversationalist with a good sense of humour, and I think that's the exact vibe she intended to send out into the world. You don't assemble such a powerful look if you don't have the confidence to back it up.
Runners up: Chemico Contra (Iconoclasts), Everyone! (Animal Crossing: New Horizons), Copernica (SteamWorld Quest), Mizuki (AI: The Somnium Files)
Peepee the Cat Award for Ultimate Creacher
Royal (Iconoclasts)
Buy me a drink first aye?
Ah, Royal. He's just a privileged rich boy who cannot change things. He wants to use his social status to help his commoner friends, only to find out status amounts to nothing if it isn't used to uphold the status quo. Since he was raised to think he was the specialist little boy, he is really overconfident about all his attempts to help, only to swiftly get slapped down time and again. His magical abilities have similar pathetic energy to them, which again, he consistently overestimates. Bless.
This was originally intended to be a category for animals and monsters but Royal just had such litle gremling energy that really captures the spirit of this new category. He even runs like a weird little goblin man. Like Tobi says, he’s a useless arrogant tryhard who follows you around helplessly. He makes a pretty good doorstop though……..
Oh no… i made myself sad… :(
Runners up: Mayumi (AI: The Somnium Files), Cedric (King's Quest V), Unsinkable Sam (Divinity: Original Sin)
Headache of the Year
Mahjong, Shogi, Koi-Koi oh my! (Yakuza 0)
Kick in the dick traditional style? Or house rules.
So Yakuza has a lot of everything, and one thing the series is known for (not unlike many open world games) is just straight up letting you play a range of classic eastern and western gambling games. I may be familiar-ish with poker, craps, blackjack etc. but I’ll be damned if I know where to start with Mahjong and Shogi! There’s no compromise and they don't fudge the odds to make you able to just win by luck anyway. But I was determined to take that opportunity to at least TRY and learn these games. I spent an embarrassing amount of time learning mahjong and even starting to enjoy it a bit! But shogi? A pure strategy chess-like game against an AI? Absolutely impossible. Made me furious.
I fell into a pretty similar hole. I was soaking in the vibes, sampling the buffet of sidestories and minigames, and having a grand old time. When I encountered the board game minigames, I just naively assumed they also had a semblance of videogame-friendly balance. Start off simple, and then ease the player into it, slowly teaching them the ropes while gradually escalating the challenge. Nah, not in these parlours. You're given a phonebook's worth of rules up front, and you're tossed in the deep end of the pool straight away. I barely understood what I was doing, and was crushed pretty swiftly. These NPC old people don't mess around.
Runners up: Made for VR cinematic experience (Small Radios Big Televisions), Indivisible's final few hours expecting you to git gud, F F F F F F F F F *insta-death* (Resident Evil 5)
Worst Trend of the Year
Record levels of gamer whinging
"What did you do to my skinnythicc Waifu Tifa!?"
This might be cheating a little bit, since we've been riding this train for as long as I can remember. It did feel worse than other years, so I think it's more than fair. We had the usual suspects who were upset that minorities existed in their entertainment. We had goons who were "concerned" over the censorship form known as sports bras for athletic characters. Worms that got upset over games being criticised too much and too little. Super geniuses who pieced together that a character was trans because they can always tell (note: the character was cisgender), and called it propaganda. Then there's the folks who presumably are CEOs and majority shareholders, because they can't help but explain the virtues of worker harassment and abuse. The colourful cast of whingers seemed almost infinite.
Yeah to be clear we are mainly talking about how much backlash there has been over increasingly contrived “controversial” topics such as female characters existing, diverse representation, deadlines having to be moved because of global pandemic, and developers daring to have opinions on things affecting them. A lot of it is admittedly a small group of bad-faith criticism spread around disproportionately by the social media machine, but a trend is a trend, and to me this one feels like it’s defined a lot of the mood in gaming discourse.
Runners up: Delayed release = more developer crunch, not less, “TBC 2020”, Blobby featureless template creatures that you can accessorise with micropurchases.
Deja Vu award for Ballsiest Ripoffs
Pretend, the imposter Among Us
Game developer seems sus.
Strong year for game trailers suspiciously resembling other games for some reason. I guess we can mark that down to the indie boom, more people than ever have access to big engines and can just go and make their favourite game using pretty similar tools… Still, I think Pretend takes the crown, not just for being one of the most OBVIOUS clones, but also there’s something so poetic about a game about suspicious imposter clones being suspiciously cloned that I honestly did wonder if this was just some sort of weird parody or marketing stunt.
Clone games typically at least put in a little effort to be legally distinct, but I'm not sure if I would have known this was a different game if I wasn't told beforehand. Aesthetics, mechanics, and even the UI seemed to be …"inspired" by Among Us. And yeah, the irony of there being an imposter version of this game is very fitting. "Pretend being sus" as the kids would say.
Runners up: Hokko Life is just straight up Animal Crossing, Space Madness is just endless Monkey Island references, Bug Fables is Paper Mario
Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment
A day in the life of Kiyru Kazuma (Yakuza 0)
If anything, pimpin' is a little TOO easy.
If there's one thing you need to know about Kiryu, it's that he is a magnet for all sorts of trouble. Sometimes it's not his fault, but often it very much is, because he's just the dumbest, most naive himbo out there, and is incapable of thinking about consequences. As a hypothetical example, a kid can walk up to him and ask if he can buy something for him from a nearby vending machine. He'll be like SURE THING, I SOLEMNLY VOW I'LL DEFINITELY DO THIS, I STAKE MY LIFE AND REPUTATION ON THIS PROMISE, and then half a minute later realise he just agreed to buy a pornomagazine for a primaryschooler. Oh, also, by "hypothetical", I mean this is actually what happens. Even worse is that time he encounters a desperate sexworker with immigration issues, and thinks her problems can be solved by treating her to a pizza, and when that doesn't work, letting her marry her pimp. He means well, but oh lord the interactions he has make me wish I was a turtle, so I can retract my head into my torso and not have to look at all these social car-crashes any more.
When we put this list together, we usually pick a moment or scenario rather than most of a game. This year we ended up with a list of about 8 separate incidents from Kiryu’s various sidequests. It was so unreasonable that we just had to combine them. Tobis described some of them, now here’s even more: a rival offers to be Kiryu’s girlfriend if he wins at slot car racing… but like, she’s about 8 years old. He agrees to it anyway. And you eventually win the blessing of his parents as well. But again, and I cannot stress this enough, she’s about 8 years old. Oh and there’s the time he won a chicken and made her an employee, the time he decided to teach BDSM to some strangers, stared at a game store employee’s crotch area for a full solid minute, met several girls through phone sex hotlines, and of course my personal favourite… that time he went to help a guy find his long lost daughter working at a cabaret club, introduced him as a client, discovered that she wasn’t actually the daughter, and ended up becoming a thirsty new regular customer to her instead. To which Kiryu concluded that there’s “More than one kind of Daddy”. Thanks now I get to carry that psychological burden with me to my grave.
Runners up: Dying from falling down 1 foot (King’s Quest V), Chloe shoots herself (Life is Strange), Insecurity (Lair of the Clockwork God)
Dumbest Premise
The Apocalypses and Matt C’s Colon cancer (Lair of the Clockwork God)
Don't be upsetti, push the resetty.
As mentioned earlier, this whole game is a meta romp about two characters who want to play a totally different genre of game within the same… game. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away because it’s part of the games comedy but it definitely is a Dumb Premise. Our protagonists have triggered not one, but ALL OF THE APOCALYPSES and they must find a way to resolve it by teaching a sentient AI all of the human emotions. Even the bad ones. By playing out ~gameplay rich simulated scenarios~ of course!
Having a dumb premise is one thing, but having a dumb premise centred around a very laboured gag is a whole other can of beans. I couldn't bring myself to be mad at it though. The game was zany enough for me to just behold it and think "...you know what. Fine. You put in the time." Not a lot to say though without giving it away.
Runners up:Aliens want to Conquer earth so they decide it would be more fun to give bad dumb humans superpowers to make the earth conquer itself but instead a rebel gives superpowers to good humans, such as a paranoid guy who hates russians. (Freedom Force), Seb takes a job in a mysterious digital island where he doesn’t seem to actually get paid but nobody cares if you steal stuff. He fancies a girl who already has a boyfriend, decides to stalk her and join her cause to HACK THE SYSTEM (Else Heart.Break() ), White people in fursuits try to westernise Japan through samurai rabbit robots and colossal sumo mechs. (Ganbare Goemon 2)
Most Tears Shed
Pauline and the Beast
I've already played 3 Danganronpa games...
We already alluded to this in the Soundtrack category, but this sure is a real downer of a game. Things start out awkward and awful, and just keep getting worse. Every now and then you get a glimmer of hope dangled in front of your face, only for it to smack you in the face. One such moment happens only a few hours into the game. We'll try not to spoil too much, but if you're interested in the game, you might as well skip on ahead to the next category. Ok, so the game is about the history of a manor, and the stories that transpire in and around it. At some point in the game, a beast moves into the mansion when it is abandoned and in shambles. The beast is trying to hide from all the violence and abuse it received, and lashes out whenever someone encroaches on its new retreated territory. Slowly but surely, you see the beast accept the role the people had given it, and becomes more angry and sadistic by the day. This changes when a frail blind person seeks refuge in the mansion, who doesn't treat the beast based on its appearances. While they have lots of ups and down (lots), she ends up teaching the beast to speak the local language, and they slowly learn to get along. As it goes on though, you start to piece together the "beast" is nothing more than a foreigner subjected to dehumanisation and racism.
Meanwhile, a charming lady called Pauline is searching for her lost lover. You get enough to get introduced to the cheery and wilful Pauline and come to root for her and her own plight as she searches alone in an inhospitable foreign town before you start to apprehensively piece together what probably ties the two stories together. I’ll leave out a lot of details just so there’s actually not that many spoilers still. ;) But suffice to say, you were warned about the whole glimmer of hope thing.
This story, the second vignette of the game, was the first to make me feel pretty bad. And boy, that was just the tip of the iceberg in this game’s absolute soul-crush-a-thon. Highly recommend it, have fun!!
Runners up: Finding Rachel Amber (Life is Strange), Bunchan's a little busted, but still worthy of love (Yakuza 0), Mayumi’s Memory (AI:The Somnium Files)
Most Terrifying Moment
Meat Centaur (Tomb Raider)
Shout out to all the 90s kids who repressed this!
So, when I was a kid I never finished any of the original Tomb Raider games because, to be frank with you, they were Rock Hard and I even found it quite a scary game. I think not getting far in due to the difficulty this was pretty common, as most people recalling the game seem to remember wolves, bears, bats, and a giant T-rex. But kid me determinedly recalls “mummies that jump out at you from around corners and explode” Tobi joined me on Discord to watch me face my ancient nemesis because I’m 33 years old now and doesn’t afraid of anything. As we got further into the game, indeed I was right! Yep those were still terrifying! But what kid me didn’t know is… It *actually* gets even weirder than that.
So you're just spelunking for ancient tombs. The usual. You see an entrance to a building with two stone statues next to it. Clearly this was the right path, so you press going for the doorway. Then BOOM. One of the statues explodes to bits, revealing that it was hiding a fleshy creature underneath. Not only did we get startled because the game hadn't been doing jumpscares up until this point. The creature itself gave us pause for a moment too. One of us said WHAT THE HECK MEAT CENTAUR?! out loud, and I still think that's the best and only way to describe these things. It was a classic centaur, a horse that had a human torso growing out of its neck, but it also lacked skin. Just tissue and bones. Oh, and for some reason it also had a Mega Man laser gun for a hand as well. The moment we killed it, it exploded into a whirlwind of fire and meaty chunks. I know lots of people who have played Tomb Raider, but no one ever talks about the meat centaur for some reason. A heads up would have been nice, folks.
Runners up: Dolls dolls dolls! (Ib), Elephant in the Room (Distraint), Engine Blowout (Affordable Space Adventures), Strawberry House-ass village (The House in Fata Morgana)
Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude
Dan & Ben (Lair of the Clockwork God)
If you don't speak English english I can translate...
It's not uncommon for P&C Adventure game heroes to have destructive tendencies, but Dan & Ben seemed to kick it up a notch. I don't know the exact amount of apocalypses that were set into motion, but I think losing count of them should say plenty. Even when we reduce the scale, their "creative" approach to problem-solving seems to wreck everything pretty much all the time.
Runners up: Luigi just absolutely lays into everything (Luigi's Mansion 3), Team Snakemouth (Bug Fables), Allie's explosive barrel funnel almost crashes the game (Divinity: Original Sin), Kiryu obviously (Yakuza 0)
So there's all our awards for this year! A lot of bangers if I do say so, almost enough to distract me from the crippling existential dread of being in a still-escalating pandemic. Happy new year everyone! Except Elro.
