The days are getting shorter and darker again, so that can mean only one thing… Spoogy month, baby. It's time to play cold, dank, feel-bad games. This year's pick was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
Should have called it... BayouHazard
We've both played a handful of games in the series, so we roughly knew what to expect. We made a little bingo card to bolster our bravery and cockiness, and jumped right in. Unfortunately I had to jump out, as this entry made me queasy almost instantaneously. Resident Evil 7 changed to a first person perspective, which wasn't very compatible with my stomach. After messing with the settings for a while, I gave up and just mooched off Allie's playthrough.
It’s up to the girl with the iron stomach and itchy trigger finger again. Also my toes are cold, better get my blanket. OK first of all, this game's really realistic looking. Damn. I’m already quite ascare and I don’t want to get chased by a stinky guy.
Revenge of the soyjack pointing meme!?
I’m being chased by a stinky guy!!! I knew it, I bloody knew this would happen!
We're playing as "Ethan", a guy coming to look for his wife in some rural looking area in Louisiana. I wish I could tell you more about Ethan, but he doesn't really give you much to work with. He rarely speaks, and when he does, he says stuff like "You don't understand! You're not listening to me!", then continues not explaining things.
"You might be involved" well yes mate... im trapped in the house.
Yeah it’s funny that he’s even made it to the house alive, because he damn near got himself shot by a cop coming to rescue him. At least he’s decently quick on his feet when it comes to snatching up power tools and going 1 v 1 in a frankly pretty tense and brilliant first boss fight.
So the main structure of the game is that you go to a part of this family's land, and each area is being watched over by a member of the Baker family. They're all pretty rustic, in the sense that they use rusty knives to settle family arguments. The first one is the aforementioned smelly guy. I think his whole deal was that he's immortal, because he kept showing off. It mostly seemed to illustrate that Ethan was pretty ineffective at doing anything to him.
Look who's finally out of his room!
I do gotta say, I kinda feel like I'm just kind of swinging my knife at things and going “is this… anything?” The interactions can feel quite vague at first, though once I got a gun in my hands I have to admit I was pretty good at stoppin’ and poppin’.
That you were. Unfortunately for more than half of the game, there wasn't a whole lot of that. It was just sneaking and skulking, avoiding traps and finding items, and a whole lot of looking around. Every time we got used to an area's gimmick though, it was time to move on to the next one, and repeat the cycle all over again… Usually anyway. In typical Resident Evil fashion, they kind of lose steam after a while and put you in an action game where it really is about shootin' dudes.
Trust no bitch.
Yeah I do think the sections themed around each boss character had very strong gimmicks. The second character, featuring wasp nests and centipedes was very NOT HEHE for me. They would also randomly insert these playable bonus flashbacks via VHS tapes. What did you think of the third guy, ACME’s second biggest client after Wile E. Coyote?
I thought it was pretty cool. It starts out as a VHS tape of a Saw-esque Escape Room a previous person who wandered onto the estate was subjected to. There's no combat or nothing. Just a series of small rooms with stuff in it, and your goal is to light some birthday cake's candles. There was a very ominous clockwork clown scribe in the room that you have to return to a few times, which I was very excited about since "creepy clown" was on our Bingo card. Cool section though.
Looks like hes about to sign the declaration of inde-pain-dence
Shortly after this, you’re eased into the rather anticlimactic twist of the game. On top of it having the usual resident evil style secret military science zombie gone wrong type projects in a hidden underground bunker, the reveal of the source kind of… brought it in line with an awful lot of other horror games. And I dunno, I mean, I guess I don’t respect the genre of “redneck cannibals” either, but this is even more cliché to me actually. Speaking of cliches, upon the reveal of a second spunky female character besides the woman you came to rescue, I was dreading the likely opportunity for the game to “make you choose” between which damsel to rescue, leaving the other to a cruddy fate. Wow that’s so poignant. Like a harem dating sim.
Once we enter the lore-dump phase of the game, the game kind of takes a nose-dive in general for me. A lot of mystery and horror stories start crumbling once you start explaining, and it's no different here. Unfortunately combined with the pivot to a shooty game, it felt like they simply didn't really know how to make it all come together and have a dramatic climax. People started shouting more, I guess? Ethan called a child a "bitch" a bunch, which really felt unnecessary.
Drawer full of shoes. This is the most depraved thing i've seen so far.
Man yeah, Ethan kind of gave me these weird vibes I can only describe as “deadbeat frat house boyfriend”. I didn’t hate the pacing of the game, and the final boss was a fun spectacle… but yeah. I came away feeling the game overall was well executed but lacking in that extra spark I look for in a horror game. It had jump scares, and it even had a brilliant sense of dread and suspense. But it wasn’t haunting like Amnesia, it didn’t make me agonize over my lack of agency like Danganronpa. It didn’t have bizarre and unexpected moments like NightCry.
I see it as a haunted house experience in the end, kind of cool, but also a little basic. So yeah, I'm in a similar boat as you it seems. Speaking of which… This will contain some light spoilers, but here's our Bingo card. Unfortunately we didn't hit a single bingo. Things were looking so great for a while, and a fan boat would have been the key to it all. We were so stoked when they were leading up to escaping over the swamp by boat, but unfortunately it was just a stinky lil regular motorboat.
Wait… his wife was called Mia… was she called Mia because she was M.I.A.?? OHHHHH I JUST GOT THAT
brb gotta fax this banger sentiment to the motivational poster dept
This time already, huh? Feels like we only just did one of these. Here's a little behind the scenes information for y'all. Other years we play between 70-80 different games between the two of us, and this year, it was "only" 50 of them. Hard to say if games are just becoming longer, if we're starting to slack. In spite of this, our list of nominations in the categories seemed longer than usual. Either way, let's get this thing going.
Best Character
Herlock Sholmes (Great Ace Attorney)
Deduced Bigalow: Courtroom Gigolo
Yes, you read that right. The Ace Attorney depiction of Great Detective Herlock “don't sue” Sholmes is a giant loud man made out of 20% leather and 80% hubris. The formula works thusly: the arrogant brit guy meddles and proposes some smooth brain filibuster, our underdoguish relatable heroes step in and say the smart things, and Herlock takes credit because he is tall and white. And THAT, my friends, is my theory as to why Sholmes has appeared on this year’s worst character award! Huh, Tobi, did you have something to say…?
While Sholmes thoroughly sucks and is designed to be annoying from start to finish, I had a sneaking suspicion he'd be earning Allie's maximum amount of points in the vote pretty quickly. Ace Attorney games typically excel at serving endearing himbo investigator characters whose worth is questionable, and this time around they just maxed out all the sliders. His whole shtick is that he's supposedly so intelligent, observant and starved for excitement, that he looks past the most straight-forward answers, and will latch on the most outlandish conclusions instead. A little one-note, but never fails to entertain. As a little aside, his bootleg name really bothers me, but I'm fairly certain he'd enjoy hearing that.
Any guy can be a babydoll but it takes a man to be a muppet.
It Takes Two is a pretty dope game about two parents being cursed by their depressed daughter, because she's tired of them bickering all the time. And you know what, she's not wrong. Cody and May are passive aggressive narcissists who hold an infinite amount of quiet grudges and only seem to communicate in sarcasm and whataboutisms. Cody is a lazy stay-at-home dad who is only interested in being "the fun parent" because all that other stuff is too much pressure, and longs for some time to himself. May is a perpetually stressed and overworked career woman who takes home all her baggage from work and resents her husband for being able to enjoy some family life. It Takes Two sends them on a journey to figure out what's wrong and how they can fix things, but somehow every solution their end on is "if only we didn't have a child."
I’ve seen some tedious bickering couples in video games. Too many, really. But Cody and May somehow take it to the next level. They’re both the type to be sore losers and even sorer winners, which makes it a hilariously awkward game to play with your friend/partner. But there’s also something so bafflingly sinister about their knee jerk solutions to things. They’re so single-minded and wrathful, ignoring any potential to just fix things with love and culminating in one horrifying decision involving an elephant that had me gasping in disbelief. Dr Hakim may have hope for this couple, but I sure don’t!
Runners up: Shun Akiyama (Yakuza 4), John & Joan Garrideb (The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures), Madison Paige (Heavy Rain)
Best Soundtrack
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
In the last few years there’s usually been a kind of clear winner for me in terms of game soundtrack, because I get obsessed with something and listen to it while at work. But this has been a weird year for me in a bunch of ways and that just didn’t happen yet. Still, a bunch of games had really great soundtracks that stood out to me while playing and it's hard to compete with the absolute musical juggernaut that is the entire Xenoblade Series.
Xenoblade soundtracks are usually pretty beefy, with a ton of variety to boot. This one's no different, but actually incorporates music into its plot on top of all that. The main characters are "Offseers", folks who play a little dirge on their flutes to pay respects to those that have passed away. Flutes have a very strong presence in this OST as a result. You got your usual EDM, sad vocals, acid jazz lounge music, choirs, and copious amounts of butt rock from having their moments in the spotlight though.
Runners up: The Great Ace Attorney, Chicory
Best Art Direction
It Takes Two
May admiring the view while Cody falls off a beautifully textured cliff.
One thing that becomes abundantly clear very quickly is that It Takes Two is an art heavy experience. The entire game is just lovingly crafted, unique props from start to finish. Since the main characters got cursed, they shrunk down to the size of little puppets, and so every object in the game is colossal and all the surface textures have to be detailed as hell. I'm a sucker for Borrower-sized perspectives, and this game delivers on this in spades. The range of different types of locals in which you can be tiny is fantastic, and all the individual parts are put together so nicely.
We were a little late to the party to this game that rolled up by surprise and swept 2021’s GOTYs for many major publications. But when we picked it up, we quickly felt its accolades were well deserved. It’s a bombastic, breath-taking type of game with an agreeable handmade hyper colourful hyper detailed art style. What really sealed the deal is the sheer range in environments the game offers as well. Toy boxes, gardens, winter wonderlands, clock towers and intense, abstract roller coasters. All very cinematic, and all running smoothly on a split screen!
Runners up: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, The Great Ace Attorney, Inscryption
Ugliest Art Direction
Cruelty Squad
This is not glitched out, this is me going up a staircase.
Sometimes you get a game that was just made for one of these quirky awards. This year there was no contest. Cruelty Squad is the ugliest game I've ever seen. It is military-grade MSPaint Shitpostcore. The developers were searching to find a way to make game art so dementedly obstructive that it triples the difficulty of the actual gameplay. There’s shades of green in there that violate the Geneva convention. Though I suppose all the cannibalism does too.
It's almost impressive in a way. It's a game that starts out looking gross and hard to look at, and every time you buy an upgrade, you roll the dice to see if they will make the game even uglier. I remember Allie meticulously preparing for a mission with a particular load-out. After a solid 10 minutes of reading equipment descriptions and deliberations on what would be good combinations, we started the mission, only to be greeted by a screen with only two colours. Pure black and one single shade of bright red, and then the thickest, fleshiest looking border around the screen that basically obscured half of the already unplayable looking mess.
Runners up: A Story About My Uncle, Deep Rock Galactic
Best Story
The Great Ace Attorney
Me when i decrab and beetle off hut-wise
Ace Attorney usually delivers on this front, so I already expected to enjoy what Great Ace Attorney was about to serve up. The gimmick of this game is that it takes place in the late 19th century, a time when Japan and England were making cultural exchanges to try and strengthen their bonds. Cases are drenched in charming historic trivia and cultural references, which are nicely integrated in the mysteries that the game is focused around. Since the game deals with foreigners dealing with white people, the story doesn't shy away from deeply uncomfortable instances of discrimination, which just add to the texture of the writing.
This game has the nice advantage of being refined from many games before it, while also serving as a good jump-in point for players who never tried or fell behind on the series (hint hint). The overarching plot is really solid but where it shines is in the details: all the theming and clever original ideas for the mysteries that weave brilliantly into Sherlock references, the period politics, characterization and stuff. I also think it’s the funniest and spiciest game to date.
I had played Pony Island by this developer before so I knew to expect a tightly designed and well executed game system with a satanic twist that wouldn’t overstay its welcome. (I was pretty on the money) Plus it was a card game, that's cool I like those. What I didn’t expect was MULTIPLE original card game designs, all very much my jam and brilliantly designed with intense stakes and moreish unpredictability. If anything, this game under-stayed its welcome… come back, game! Come back and play with me more!
Yeah, it's difficult enough to design a single card game with bespoke mechanics and gimmicks, but somehow Inscryption made like four of them. They were abandoned as quickly as they were introduced, so I was certainly left wanting more. I'm a huge fan of the Pokémon Trading Card Game on the original Game Boy, so I was pretty stoked to see this game take many cues from it.
Runners up: Chicory, It Takes Two, Frostpunk
Funniest Dialogue
The Great Ace Attorney
maybe that opium habit for starters
Ace Attorney has gotten very adept at straight man helpless observer style comedy. You're a reasonably normal person in an endless sea of extremities. This is most apparent during the Dance Of Deduction sections, in which Herlock Sholmes will point out the most minute details he noticed of a scene, and then form the most outlandish conclusions out of them, and you have to drag him back into the realm of normalcy. Whenever I heard the Dance of Deduction music, I knew I was about to be exposed to the new dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. The man will see a Japanese person sleeping on his sofa, and somehow will reason his way into thinking the emperor of Germany has come to his house to serenade him.
The comedy really shines through the smartly dressed yet completely demented cast of perfectly written characters in this series. With the clown king Herlock, his brutally honest assistant Iris, passive aggressive Ryunosuke, unflappable and subtle Susato, drama lord Van Zieks, manic poet Soseki, and a whole load of other unhinged weirdos, the ratchet level in the courtroom is always dialled up to 11.
I would say this year was a year of games that I expected to be good and remarkable, and turned out to be phenomenal. I had heard DQB1 was a decent Minecraft-like but I never got around to it, and I had heard DQB2 was an all round better iteration with robust improvements. What I didn’t know is that this game is absolutely insane. There’s a full-on dramatic narrative that ties it to the mainline game (Dragon Quest 2) over the top of this extravagant builder system. You have to break out of prison, befriend a giant worm, rescue monsters, rebuild a castle, make your NPCs shit, mourn the dead, build a hot spring, betray your friends, defy the gods… But the one thing you don’t have to do is build roofs on the houses (because it's like a top down RPG.)
A lot of Minecraft's lasting appeal is how freeform and open it is, where you can just play with your virtual LEGOs and build what you want and make your own fun. That's great and all, but if you're looking for a more guided and structured experience, that can be pretty lacking. Dragon Quest Builders tries to solve this by giving you pre-build worlds loosely based on the now ancient Dragon Quest 2, and gives you a bunch of missions to mess around in these worlds. It honestly works quite well, and consistently goes that little step further than you'd expect. Really leaves you thinking that for as big as Minecraft is, there's soooo much more it could be doing.
Runners up: It Takes Two, Inscryption
Biggest Disappointment
Neverwinter Nights
More like... Neverinteresting.. Fights... yeah gottem.
I didn't really know much about this one. I figured it was another one of those by the books Baldur's Gate-likes. I was a little bit shocked to see how limited it was time and again. You can get party members, but they don't seem to matter or be integrated in the story. It's a game with a finite amount of gold, but an infinite amount of expenses. It's a game that's stingy with experience points, but very steep difficulty curves. A game filled with barrels, chests and loot bags, and the meagrest rewards that just don't really add up to anything. These little nothings get put in your very limited inventory space with weight limits. If you wanna make room in your inventory, you can sell them to vendors for an eighth of their worth. A game of many words, and nothing to say. A game where important story characters can share the exact same character model as the least important generic NPC, and a portrait that doesn't even come close to matching their model. The only things it is more than underwhelming, is long and repetitive.
I wasn’t expecting that much from this game, but when it started out I thought I was pleasantly surprised. It was a straightforward, more linear and combat-driven DnD game compared to Baldur's Gate, which in contrast might have been more in the spirit of roleplay but it has you reloading your save if you accidentally enter the wrong hut and get obliterated by some level 60 squatter. But then there was just more and more game… with more and more samey basic dungeons. And then there would eventually be some obnoxiously difficult, non-optional bosses that I was apparently underleveled for in spite of doing all the side quests I found along the journey. Salty. >:(
Runners up: Yakuza 4, Hexen
Usual Suspects Award for Most Time Wasted
Dragon Quest Builders 2
Is this a mixed hot spring? Well there's a chimera in it.
I was never as hardcore into Minecraft and Terraria as Tobi, though I did always enjoy and play for hours. But somehow the adventure focus and arbitrary limitations of DQB2 really spoke to me especially and I found myself hella lost in the sauce of gilding my parapets, petting my regular pets, furnishing the perfect bedroom for my farmers and suchlike.
Indeed. Whenever we played builder games like Minecraft, I could tell Allie had a "what should I do?" kind of mentality in it. Some might argue it's the series' biggest strength, but it can easily work against it. DQB2 lets you do what you want, but always makes sure you know what you can work towards. Even when you're done, it's still holding your hand, making suggestions if you want it to. Even if you're just doing nothing but mainline story quests, there's so much more game there than you'd expect, and it's good.
Runners up: Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Fire Emblem: Warriors
GAME OF THE YEAR
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Noah's Snark
I have such a strange relationship with Xenoblade games. Whenever a new one's announced, I look at those trailers and think "I don't know about this one. I'm not really feeling it." Then when I get around to them, that feeling turns to "oh right, I love these games". Xenoblade 3 has a strong story concept, which reverberates across its entire story. Its characters and sci-fi writing is engaging and the quality doesn't let up in spite of the sheer scope of the game. I was pretty surprised at how often and for how long it kept introducing new mechanics and characters, and how it didn't stop developing all the earlier established elements. It borrows and builds a lot on the previous entries, but I'm fairly certain it can stand on its own, and you don't need to know anything of the previous entries. I sometimes struggle with sticking with a 5 hour game, but I devoured this 100+ hour one with ease.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 styled itself on my favourite parts of most of the previous games. A tight main cast with tons of emotional exposition and friendship moments like the first game, a cool military mecha space opera inspired style like XBCX, and the big quality of life and animation upgrades from XBC2. XBC3 is absolutely rammed with cinematic sequences, its trademark huge continents to explore, and a story that (thus far!) feels like they actually got to sit down and make everything that they wanted to make. This comes at the cost of inventing any particularly crazy new combat or upgrade systems and most of the enemy designs seem to be recycled from previous games. But was it worth it to go all in on story and characters and worldbuilding? Hell ya.
Runners up: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Splatoon 3
DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released before 2012)
King's Quest VI
When alls been said, I'm just a clam in a bed.
I played a handful of retro classics this year that I didn’t super get into. And then I played a couple ratchet looking adventure games and they were glorious. KQVI was the most ambitious in the series yet, and the most batshit crazy which was quite a feat. Drawing inspo from Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin and Greek mythology, this game has you dangling participles, bamboozling genies and entering death’s domain still wearing your flesh.
Old Sierra adventure games are already a little unhinged and cursed by default, but KQ6 finally seemed to fully embrace it and dialled everything to 11. For something that presents itself as simple and straightforward, you will have no idea of predicting what's lurking around the next screen. This game had beefing sticks and logs, druidic human sacrifice rituals, "old lamps for new" guy, getting drunk off mints, sleepy clams, and deeply awkward poetry. Very entertaining though.
Runners up: Mega Man X, Suikoden III, Toonstruck!
Craziest Amateur Game
Inscryption
But it's just not in the cards, right?
We already mentioned Inscryption was four games in one, but did we mention it's also an Escape Room? The game takes place in a cabin where a guy is making you play card games, and you can walk around the cabin and there's little puzzles around the place. Oh right, and the guy's a lil underlit lightmare boy who won't let you leave and makes you cut off your fingies and uses human teeth as tokens, so it's also a horror game.
I’ll try not to spoil Inscryption but yeah this game goes places. You’re not just playing a card game, you’re a prisoner trying to escape a card game. Each time you lose and restart the roguelike adventure things change. The cards start talking to you, you can find objects around the place… mysterious codes you’re not meant to see, evidence of corrupt data and video footage… While it's ultimately a bit camp and silly and there’s an ARG that doesn’t amount to much, it's still an extremely cool and intense game to experience that I hhhhhhiiiiiiiiiighly reccommend.
Runners up: Cruelty Squad, Sludge Life, A Story About My Uncle
Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Design Transgressions
Roy Earle and his hotdog suit (LA Noire)
Do I smell bacon?
I enjoyed openly detesting every character in LA Noire, but especially this guy. His tweed suit with fleshy wiener sleeves, pill themed tie (because he's narcotics division) all round ugly colour scheme. He walks around like he thinks he dresses well too. Hate this era, hate these guys, love getting in the car and driving off without him.
Roy Earle sucks so much that it's tempting to turn this into a bonus round of our Worst Character award. Luckily for him, his stupid hot dog suit. I honestly didn't even catch that he had a stupid pill-themed tie. That just makes it worse, given how much he whines about how the entire field of medicine is bad. Much like Allie, I don't care for this whole aesthetic, ugly patterns and colours or not. At least he has the decency to leave the glizzy at home when he attends funerals.
Runners up: Crazy Frog Civilization (A Story About My Uncle), Camilla (Fire Emblem Warriors), Roly & Patricia Beats (The Great Ace Attorney)
Maximum Swaggage Award for Best Dressed Bae
Enoch Drebber (The Great Ace Attorney)
Enoch Drip-er
A lanky disgraced chaotic Tumblr sexyman with 'tude? In my Ace Attorney? It's more likely than you think. While Drebber shared a name of an existing Sherlock Holmes character, this one's pretty much got nothing to do with the inspiration. This Drebber's a mad scientist who pretends to be a robot, lives in an upside-down room and crawls into vaults. His design is very clockwork-inspired, as are his movements. The latter just makes him a joy to watch.
Great Ace Attorney absolutely slays with its brilliant character design and inspired over-the-top animations. It goes really hard on theming its characters for no reason other than to delight the players stuck cross-examining them for what feels like an eternity. You might be wondering what kind of evil steampunk supersoldier cyborg this guy is, but he’s literally just some goth nerd and you just got to admit his outfit slaps. I also love his little nintendo switch plus and minus buttons.
There were so many good nominees for this year, but I could fill an entire second list of blessed critters just from this game. Wrigley was chosen in the end because I think he embodies the spirit of this game the best. You arrive on the island with a bunch of distraught ex-farmers no longer able to grow crops on some poisoned soil, you venture out to find some kind of solution and I gotta admit I didn’t expect a giant worm in a straw hat with a somerset accent whos immediately eager to help to be that solution. Then he happily follows you on your adventure for the rest of the game, able to terraform anything into grassy land and talk about how he loves it. As far as I know he’s unique to this game. A good ecological lesson and the positive worm representation we all needed.
Allie was so smug, claiming she'd know when this game would click for me, and she can double that smugness now, because I admit she was correct. Wrigley was immediately endearing to me. Just a giant gross lil worm with a hat who's so friendly and helps me rebuild a broken world. The latter is already a type of game progression I'm a sucker for, so tying it to a creach instantly ensures I wouldn't be able to resist its charm.
This one's been a long time coming. I think Square Enix as a whole is pretty terrible at minigames, yet for whatever reason, they can't seem to resist adding them in many of their titles. Kingdom Hearts inexplicably decided to dedicate an entire world to these minigames, the 100 Acre Woods from Winnie the Pooh. We start off with Hunny Hunt, a game where Pooh is trying to raid some beehives with a balloon. You have to jump from branch to branch, to try and hit bees enough so they leave Pooh-bear alone. Jumping and platforming in general is pretty terrible in Kingdom Hearts, so minigames that make you do this on a timer can be maddening. The second minigame is Tigger wanting to stomp on Rabbit's carrot garden. Your task is to rush underneath him and volleyball him out of the way for as long as you can. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it made me realise all these minigames were optional, and I haven't touched a single one since.
This year I finished my first Kingdom Hearts game. A game especially beloved by a lot of people I know. And I can see why they have a lot of nostalgia for it. It’s got an amazing cinematic style for its time and it goes super hard on being cosy and whimsical in a really memorable way. I just don’t understand how all these people actually got through the game?? You’d think the twee little Winnie the Pooh side-world would be the place you come to relax from the obnoxiously hard boss battles, but no, it's a gruelling slog through barely-functioning minigames that rival only FFX’s chocobo challenges in my abject misery.
Runners up: Platforming traps (Hexen), Most of (Cruelty Squad) really.
Worst Trend of the Year
NFT gaming
Bet you forgot this nonce island feverdream was last year.
Ah, NFTs. It seems so long ago now that nobody would shut up about them, before they all packed up and moved on to the next techbro scam (AI Art generators). One of the most fascinating aspects for me was seeing the insane takes on what the future of gaming could look like. What if… you paid money for a unique asset in ~a game~ that nobody else could ever obtain? What if that asset could exist in all games, presumably hand crafted by a collective of infinite game artists and programmers? Like a weed smoking blue hyena furry in the next Tomb Raider game? What even is a video game if not a static gallery for rich people with no taste? Think of the potential! And think of how much money game developers could make if they created a micro-economy in their own videogames and sold you assets through microtransactions! What… they already do that? OK yes but what if they could do it and have to sacrifice a significant portion of that income to some cryptocurrency group? What if they could make it even more like gambling!? Do words have meaning any more? Can I sell you that?
It feels good to see a trainwreck die quickly within the same year as they made their push to promote them. NFT Gaming sounded completely unrealistic if you think about how it would work for 5 seconds, but then I suppose it wasn't meant to actually work. It was just a ploy to get people to invest early in things that could potentially maybe someday perhaps kick off out of FOMO, and all it actually does is promote the crypto currencies that power them. Some big companies that really ought to know better tried to get a slice of this pie with awkward metaverse plans, where they hoped to create their own Ready Player One dystopia. Unsurprisingly, they struggled actually making this dreamed up copyright infringement slop lacking in any sort of game design. The best we always seem to get from them is "what if you could do virtual meetings and buy T-shirts with real money to show off during said meetings?" …cool.
Runners up: AI Art Discourse, Everything is superpowers
Dumbest Premise
'I am going to marry the princess to usurp the throne and then kill her after the wedding, but also I don’t actually need the princess there because I was going to get my magic genie who can grant ANY WISH to impersonate her for the fake wedding.' (King’s Quest VI)
When she's got stars in her eyes, nice, when she's got cruficixes... run?
Hey, Alhazred, my boy. I've got some notes here for your scheme. So I get the regicide and kidnap the princess parts. Not sure why you're leaving her alive in a tower, when you're just going to get rid of her after the wedding. I was fully under the impression that she was being kept alive because she needed to be part of the wedding ceremony, but to my big surprise, she wasn't. He got a genie to impersonate her during the wedding, while she was still chilling in her room. I think we can streamline this evil master plan a little. He clearly has no qualms with offing people, since he took out the king and queen.
Big Al, my man, my dude… is there a reason you couldn’t have just asked the genie to like, grant you buckets of power and money in the first place? Maybe you should have wished for a lil’ bit of that common sense.
Runners up: Prove you're worthy of a loan by becoming a sex worker. (Yakuza 4), "The Puzzle Knight? You're the one behind this Puzzle Dungeon?!" (Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon)
Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment
The butter machine (Toonstruck!)
Wheel of the worst thing ive ever witnessed in a videogame.
This game was top to bottom one of the most cursed things I have ever played. It’s like if Cool World, Animaniacs and Ren and Stimpy had a clown together. If you’re not sure what you’re looking at here, it's an evil BDSM barn where a sheep with a torpedo bra whips a leather mommy cow causing a machine to make butter while Christopher Lloyd watches. Despite how much this wretched 90s cartoon fetish game makes my skin crawl, it was actually laugh out loud funny, plays to its medium surprisingly well and I ended up having a weirdly good time. I suppose that means the masochist police cow was me all along.
You might also be wondering what the "glue" machine thing is about in the screenshot. I'd like to direct your attention to the right, where you'll see the word "Elmer". Elmer was a super old horse who used to exist in this barn next to the cow and sheep. You can probably put two and two together. What an incredibly cursed game, made worse by Christopher Lloyd being weirdly chill about everything.
Runners up: "Eh, just go through the mist door, there won’t be another boss. We JUST fought one. We can spend all these souls in a little bit." (Dark Souls II), Regicide for the greater good (It Takes Two), There's a cat with two buttholes and there's two poops in its litter box (Sludge Life)
Most Tears Shed
Sporting Handshakes (Inscryption)
Yes I've known realistic mole since highschool.
When you boil it down to its essence, Inscryption is mainly a collection of cool card games. Some get spotlighted, and they're great. Others only get explored a little bit. When you beat the game however, the game gives you the opportunity to sample more fleshed out versions of those underutilised card games. You get a short little game session, shake hands, and move on to the next one.
In your journey to try and escape you start to learn more about the structure of the game and the adversaries you play against. By the end of the game the once terrifying faces in the dark feel like old friends, the creepy cabin becomes the place you played a fun little game, and you get excited to see more of these games... And that's when it's ripped from you by the necessary oblivion. As a clock ticks down you get a glimpse of more potential content as you play some final games with your old “enemies” and they approach you to shake hands and omg it's so sad I do a lil cry.
Runners up: Prison 2.0 (Xenoblade 3), Building coffins for your comrades (Dragon Quest Builders 2)
Most Terrifying Moment
Haha he can’t get through the door (Dark Souls II)
The rest of the Mr. Men fell out of touch with Mr. Tickle.
There were a decent amount of scares in Dark Souls 2. Thought I'd bring up this funny example though. So there’s these long grabby bois in the wharf area that hide in dark corners and jump out trying to grab you… But as you can see, they’re kind of wide set. After avoiding several of these, I got to this area where there was a narrow doorway, big enough to fit me but not this jerkass, so I took the time to stop and smugly laugh at him. Then he broke down the stone walls and chased me. F
That was just super mean. They don't set it off immediately. They give you a moment to feel comfortable and cocky. Only when you feel nice and secure, and ready to devise some cheap strategies to hit the thing from a safe distance, the thing kicks off. Proper jump scare. A rare earned one though.
Runners up: Gottem with the ol’ falling through the floor trick (Cruelty Squad), Gottem with the ol’ falling through the floor trick (Layers of Fear), The knife and pliers (Inscryption), Oh there’s bosses (Chicory)
Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude
Malroth (Dragon Quest Builders 2)
........................in bed
It was a pretty easy pick for this one. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a game about building stuff, as the clever folks in the audience might have deduced. You're "the builder", and building stuff is what you do well. On the flip side though, you also have Malroth, who is the god of destruction and main antagonist of Dragon Quest 2. You'd think the two of you wouldn't get along, but somehow you're besties.
Malroth is a natural at fucking shit up, and it actually plays a really big role in the game’s narrative. Sometimes he gets envious of the builder’s ability to create, and wants to try that for himself but he just sucks so bad at it and it's such a tearjerk moment when he tries his best. ;_; He’s not just a theoretical badass though, he’s your number one clobberin’ guy who bodyguards you with a unique set of club weapons way beyond any NPCs and your own stats and he, uh, well let’s just say he can scale it up a bit. He’s also got a spicy attitude and loves to high five.
Runners up: 12FT PAUL BLART MALL COP (Cruelty Squad), Zelda oneshots bosses (Zelda: Wand of Gamelon), Kaiju tub (Bayonetta 3)
There! Now that we've obliterated 2022 and high fived, I'm looking forward to building a better 2023 and playing more silly games.
Is it time to do another one of these already? Boy, time sure flies when you're …err in all of this *gestures at all
of 2021*. Did we play any games during this time? You bet your sweet bippy we did. Some new, some old, some precious, others
not as much. Strap in your clockwork orange chair, and be ready to consume our recap of the things we got around to playing in
2021.
Best Character
Queen (Deltarune Chapter 2)
^ Queen ^
Deltarune's back? Deltarune's back. What are you doing back here? Oh, another chapter
dropped! And honestly it’s even better than the first one. It introduced some new layers, new mechanics, and a baller new
character. Queen is the personification of “Welcome to the Internet” by Bo Burnham, she's got her whole modems
operandi based on flawed data collection methods and she doesn’t take (close application window) for an answer! This game
had a ton of laugh out loud moments and most of them came from this character.
Yeah, Queen's easily the star of the chapter. She's got quite a number of gimmicks
strengthening her character. Her face is an LCD display, which she uses to communicate all sorts of things in the middle of
her lines. She's really pushy, judgemental, and involved in the majority of the game's set pieces. It's hard not
to be endeared by a character that does the over the top cartoony noblewoman laugh.
Runners up:Herlock Sholmes (The Great Ace Attorney), Adelle (Bravely Default 2), Linus (Stardew Valley), Linhardt (Fire Emblem: 3
Houses)
Worst Character
Michael Thorton (Alpha Protocol)
2001 called, the said they want their *NSYNC member kidnapped by the CIA back.
Michael Thorton is one of -those- protagonists. The type that tries to recapture the essence of
coolness from 50+ year old movies, but since those movies were problematic in pretty much every conceivable way, they tried
to modernise him a little bit. I've seen many try to attempt this, but it never works. The game pretends that you have a
choice on how your Michael Thorton's personality is shaped, by letting you pick how to respond to any given situation:
Suave, Aggressive, Professional and Impatient (aka end the cutscene). No matter what you do, he's always some cocky
asshole who thinks he's better than everyone, and he snarks his way through conversations like some bootleg Homestuck
chatlog.
Thornton is a real white dude’s white dude. He’s like Archer from Archer, unironically. His
customisation options are like: goatee, other goatee, soul patch, trucker hat, backwards trucker hat, ski glasses. However
you try to play the game: polite and respectful, sincere, actually responsible and not leaving a trail of bodies and
exploding factories in your wake (y'know like some kind of actual spy…) You’ll be sure that the narrative will
course-correct you back into the dudebro zone by embellishing your interactions with some snarky comments about your
co-workers arse or bombing an archaeological research site while popping a wheelie into the sunset.
Runners up: Sylvain (Fire Emblem: 3 Houses), Shounosuke Nanase (Chase: Cold Case Investigations), Apollo (Cross Code),
Cuno (Disco Elysium)
Best Soundtrack
Deltarune Chapter 2
Are you ready to CYBER? No wait that came out wrong. There were a lot of strong contenders this
year, but I always give it up for whatever soundtrack I keep shamelessly coming back to throughout the year. Deltarune’s
music is immediately catchy and has this manic nausea-inducing fanfare quality that's just the appropriate vibe for
2021.
While I think there were overall stronger soundtracks this year, it's hard to deny that the
standouts in this were the stand-outs of the year. The biggest downside to this soundtrack to me is that it has a bunch of
music from the previous chapter, but I suppose that's more an issue of how this game's been published, and not so
much with the score itself. Of course there would be repetition between chapters of the same game. Either way, Cyber World
was my favourite track all year, and I love it. It's got big Mega Man Battle Network vibes, and I'm here for
it.
Runners up:Bravely Default 2, Cross Code, The Great Ace Attorney, Freedom Planet, Fire Emblem: 3 Houses
Best Art Direction
Ever Oasis
Possible we used too much chlorine in the water feature.
Just look at this. Really colourful, playful round shapes, adorable lil boys and girls, and
draped everything in a desert nomad theme. It features several cute species of friendly characters that honestly aren't
that common in games. You have the little chubby birds, the scorpions, the lizards, etc. You populate your adorable little
oasis with adorable little settlements and shops, all themed around plant life. It's just a really pleasant looking
game.
I’ll be honest, I'm a bit of a sucker for art in 3DS games specifically, having worked on
several myself. The soft hand-painted art style reminds me of some of the best of Level 5 games and Skyward Sword and such.
The chunky character designs and movesets allow the limitations of the game’s scale not to bother you so much. And the
worldbuilding that fuses North African fashion with natural plant-based fantasy architecture is masterful. I sure hope Grezzo
have another original project in the works.
Runners up:Ape Out, Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Control, The Great Ace Attorney, Eastward
Ugliest Art Direction
Paradise Killer
IDK, needs more iridescent purple skulls.
Miamiwave cosmic blood cult murder mystery Paradise Killer was probably not accidentally
hideous, which makes me feel a little better about giving them this. The aesthetic is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure meets Trump
Tower meets Danganronpa meets Unreal Engine mockup thrown together in 2 days. It’s all gold statues and spangly goat skulls
crying blood. It doesn’t help that the game itself begins obnoxiously cryptic in what it expects you to do (pro tip: just
run around the place interacting with everything and talking to everyone, no really, that's the game) . But if you’re
the sort of person who might enjoy it I probably already had you at cosmic blood cult.
I saw a weird CG trailer for a scam where they tried to sell the idea of a private island full
of crypto currency to gullible idiots, and to my surprise the incredibly tacky and artless aesthetic was almost identical.
Now for Paradise Killer, the kitschiness was by design, because it was some kind of lavish cult's idea of cool. Actually
now that I'm typing this out, I guess it's the same for the cult that Cryptoland targets, so I guess there's no
difference. More bleeding marble goat heads in this one though, I suppose.
Runners up:Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Stardew Valley, Red Faction: Armageddon, Freedom Planet
Best Story
Tacoma
At least every night is Taco nigh-ah wait damn I read that wrong.
When you start Tacoma, you'll probably have a lot of assumptions on what this story is
like, and for the most part, you wouldn't really be wrong. An accident happened on a remote spaceship, someone is tasked
to investigate the incident, and that someone is you. The story then revolves around you going around rooms of the ship,
playing back the events that took place in the area before the event, and piece together what went down. You get a mixture of
people living their normal lives on the ship, being confronted with the issue, and then slowly preparing for their demise.
It's got big Majora's Mask vibes in that respect I suppose.
Tacoma goes full tilt into pure “environmental storytelling”. It’s just a game of junk to
carefully observe and take from it what you will. But it’s masterful in its depth, you can learn each character's
backstory and hang ups and motivations and underlying political foreshadowing all in various bits and pieces to peep at
around the place. The more you get to know everyone the more uneasy you feel that you’re ultimately about to discover their
fate. And of course, it surprised me with a lot of the events in such a short story in a short game, and made me do a little
cry at the end. :’x
Runners up:The Swapper, Paradise Killer, Cross Code, Chicory: A Colorful Tale, The Great Ace Attorney
Best Original Game Concept
Say No! More
A game by Shia LaBeouf's acting coach.
Clue is in the title, you just say “NO!” A bunch. It’s like a rail shooter for self
esteem. Sometimes you don’t say “NO!”. Seemed like a novelty premise, and I mean, it is, but the idea is pushed as far
as possible and it has a surprisingly engaging narrative in this bonkers linear nope-em-up.
Yeah, I think they explored this concept pretty well. While the game is mostly about saying no,
it also teaches sometimes to withhold them. It also starts the game with letting you choose from a giant list of
"no"s in different languages, so you can really personalise your inner No. As you progress through the game, you
learn different types of No's, like patronising No, dismissive No, quirky No, etc. And it all does this to deliver a
story about both self esteem and unionisation.
Runners up:Unrailed!, Half Minute Hero, Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Funniest Dialogue
Deltarune Chapter 2
A real teat for the eyes
People often accuse Toby Fox games to be meme games, and that's kind of true, but only in
the sense that it spawns memes, and it is able to do that because it's just funny. The guy's got a good grasp on
expectations and interpretations, and subverting it. The two main stars of the chapter are the main villain, Queen, and
Birdly. Queen's just a hoot full of sight gags, observations, and snappy burns. Birdly made a very brief appearance in
chapter 1, where his character was mostly established as an aggressively overly confident dweeb. It pretty much just builds
from there, with some incel-i-ness sprinkled on top. Amusing characters from the first chapter are still great in this
though.
Like Undertale and Deltarune Part 1, this game absolutely excels in weaving the humour and
gameplay together, making it more than just zany text. But also the text? So zany. As referenced earlier, it’s got
bangin’ new characters, a bonkers new setting, detachable hands, and the ability to build on ideas and reference jokes from
the previous game plays right into its troll-y sense of humour. I’d remind you to watch out for dogs on the road, but you
probably won’t remember.
Runners up:Half Minute Hero, The Great Ace Attorney, Say No! More
Biggest Surprise
Ever Oasis
Name a better basis for a system of government than this. I'll wait.
From the trailer this game looked like a potentially somewhat limited Zelda-like
action-adventure. It was on the little boy console with a sonic heroes style swapping mechanic and no multiplayer. Looked
really polished and cute though. Turns out it's REALLY polished, nicely balanced, beautiful and just a fun time. Though
it's much more accessible and basic, there are signs the combat is heavily inspired by Monster Hunter. And yeah you crawl
dungeons, gather resources, stock shops, craft weapons, level up your party. The Egyptian-inspired furries are really cool,
it’ll be a bit of a shame if the universe of Ever Oasis never comes back in any form.
I initially stopped paying attention to the game when I heard it didn't have any
multiplayer at all. It seemed like it would have been a perfect fit. The style of game seemed like it was building on what
the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles games on the DS were doing, but impressions from others made it sound limited and a
little dull. When a friend was playing it though, they made it sound a lot more interesting, and once I bit the bullet and
picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I guess the lesson here is, don't listen to the recommendations of strangers
over friends who have a better grasp on what your tastes are.
Runners up:Everhood, Gnosia, Freedom Planet, The Evil Within
Biggest Disappointment
Grand Theft Auto 3
Handsome Handyman? More like Handsy Handsyman.
I fully recognise that this game was important and one of the most influential titles of the
past few decades, and probably was really impressive back in the day. Unfortunately that was then, and we played it now in
the cyber year of Luigi 2021, and it was r o u g h from top to bottom. Looks terrible, acting is a blend of cringe and
racist, controls require prayers for things to reliably work, missions that are both half-baked and probably weren't QA
tested enough, a city layout that is a pain to navigate, and just tons of weird glitches in every single session. Whenever a
mission was unclear, buggy, or just stupidly hard, we'd look some help online, and without fail we'd see a forum
thread talking about how this mission is the worst mission in the game. They can't all be the worst one, ok?
This was definitely my most masochistic endeavour of the year. I expected it to be a little
rough and have some frustrating sidequests, but WHEW. This game was a TEST. Like Paul Atriedes and the pain box kind of test.
It was funny seeing a lot of the comments about the disastrous remaster release at the latter end of this year, because
several of the bugs mentioned (outside of the texture upscaling blunders obviously) were actually in the original PC version,
or at least the version with a patch I needed to get it working. Such as the recurring NPC car pileups outside the base of
the second chapter, where you walk out your home base and immediately everything is exploding around you, before you even did
anything! I don’t know if I would have gotten through this game without having Tobi there to help me furiously navigate the
rotating minimap, and laugh off the 30th time I get randomly detonated during a precisely timed escort mission.
Runners up:Borderlands 1 DLC, Orcs Must Die! 2, Metroid Prime 2
Usual Suspects Award for Most Time Wasted
Fire Emblem: 3 Houses
Dimitri takes plate armour horse gymnastics very seriously.
Yeah, so I did like 3 playthroughs in one year. And this game is already probably the longest
Fire Emblem to date, since they decided to extend their gameplay with a harry potter-esque magic school simulator that you
can waste hours on. I spent almost 300 hours on this game in total. Just like, sipping tea, handing out lost handkerchiefs,
and 360° no scope horseback manoeuvres.
While I didn't do the full three runs like Allie did, I still did two and a half of them,
which is a lot of game. The reason why is because the game is like medieval anime Hogwarts, and at the start you can choose
one of three houses. Since all the students are precious, there's a big allure to starting over and trying out the other
houses, see what their deal is, and follow their side of the story. Very cool, but it can be exhausting.
Runners up:Stardew Valley, Monster Hunter Rise, Gnosia
GAME OF THE YEAR
Monster Hunter Rise
Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. Red touch black, 1hit KO tail attack.
Here we are again, greeting our old friend Monster Hunter in the GotY category. We've
pretty much got matching shirts and secret handshakes at this point. So what is it about Rise that makes it deserve this
spot, besides just being another entry in a series we like? It starts off by having one of the more visually distinct
settings in the franchise, and strongly themes everything around it. Then it gives you a dog who is a ninja, and you can ride
like a tiny little horse. It gives you a zippy line that lets you Spider Man across the map. It allows you to scale every
wall in the levels. You can ride monsters now. There's a tower defence mode. There's just a lot of stuff, ok? Things
that I honestly think I can't go without any more, and consider to be mandatory from every subsequent entry.
Perhaps it helped some that we’ve skipped over Monster Hunter World, though by the sounds of
it that game changed the formula so much that we wouldn’t have been able to just co-op it in the way that we normally do.
Still, it took all the best lessons from every previous game in the franchise to give the biggest upgrade yet for fans of the
WiiU/3DS era. As usual I didn’t jump into a whole lot of new games this year even compared to Tobi, so thrillingly original
newcomers were at a bit of a disadvantage again. Still, MHR is a worthy GOTY, being the best of one of my all-time favourite
franchises. And it might be the easiest one yet, as we played the whole thing up to the end of the first Elder dragons
DLC!
Runners up:Chicory: A Colorful Tale, The Great Ace Attorney, Metroid Dread, Mario Party Superstars, Say No! More
DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released before 2011)
Minish Cap
Is the hat wearing him? He screams for he does not know.
Minish Cap and the Oracle games, ah heck, pretty much all of the handheld Zelda games are
largely neglected in discussions and forgotten. And they’re almost all like, must-play top quality games of their
respective platforms and generations for what it’s worth. In Minish Cap, you have a race of little tiny fluffy boys who are
adorable and you can shrink down to fit in little holes and ride lily pads. It has a sprawling castle town with a bunch of
somewhat tedious quests and a lot of back tracking. I guess it might not thrill everyone to go back to, but it’s a solid
entry full of charm and fresh ideas and has that kinda weird paper mario era sense of humour and whimsy.
People who know me, know that one of my favourite settings and aesthetics is being shrunken
down to being smaller than a lil mouse. Tiny creacher in a big world, like a Smurf or Borrower. Minish Cap's pretty much
that, but also a Zelda game. It has cool new items, fun dungeons, gorgeous pixel art, and fun characters. The only real marks
against it are that it's on the short side, and that the difficulty ramps up a little steeply as a result. Still dope
though.
Runners up:Xenogears, Balls of Steel, Ys
Craziest Amateur Game
Say No! More
Perhaps I shouldn't have said No! to parachutes.
If you've read what we said earlier in the original concept section, this winner
shouldn't come as a surprise. An on-rails game about standing up for yourself and unionising using the power of saying
"no" is bonkers. Bonkers and low-key adorable. You gain your powers to listen to a secret banned cassette tape,
because saying "no" is banned in general.
And from there you’re off on a rebellious office space odyssey. On rails, open plan,
mandatory overtime and in hot pursuit of a lunch box. Say No! to set personal boundaries, woosh enemies, counter negativity
and also there’s a wizard? It’s blessed and extremely funny. Say No! to… NOT playing this game haha gotcha.
Runners up: Paradise Killer, Stardew Valley, Everhood, The Good Life
Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Design Transgressions
Dr. Doom Jazz (Paradise Killer)
4 Skulls would push it into business-casual attire.
Admittedly, everyone in Paradise Killer looks like they’re dressed for their first cocaine
and swingers party. But I extra hate on Dr Doom Jazz because his torso is longer than the Justice League Snyder Cut. His open
lab coat and personality both scream liability grade fuckboy and his robot arms have a sticker saying “Child Labour” on
them. There’s probably some context for that but I just wanted to point that out idk. Ugly bitch too many skulls.
When you're looking for a doctor, the last one you'd probably speak to is the topless
one that has a sticker with the word "pain" on himself. He's perpetually stuck in what I can only describe as a
pelvic thrusting pose, has a sticker of a plaster on his metal robot arms because he's quirky I guess. The thing that
bugs me most though, is that someone clearly drew a very crude stethoscope on his design after the fact.
I think the Palamute's many looks speak for themselves. They have style, they have grace, they
wield weapons with their face. Palamutes are icons with the freshest drip.
Horse armour was so 2006. Armour for a dog that you can ride like a horse? That’s the future
baybee!! What really impresses me besides the obvious swagger is the brilliant range they’ve managed to come up with for
all the Palamute outfits in this game. Knight dog? Check. Unicorn Dog? Check. Librarian? Gilly suit? Snowy poodle? Halloween
Jack o Lantern? Night Mare? Skeleton Cerberus? Ch-ch-ch-check!
Runners up:Alex (Full Metal Furies), Otome (Gnosia), Tethu (Ever Oasis), MC Mode (New Style Boutique)
Peepee the Cat Award for Ultimate Creacher
Noots (Ever Oasis)
Birds of a Falafel
In Ever Oasis you build up a marketplace and sell luxury goods to the various species living
across the desert. Seedlings, Serkah, Lagora and Drauk are all recruitable adventurers, but then there’s the Noots. They
are mysterious little round rich birds who don’t fight or farm, they just show up and buy buy buy! They are very polite omg
they’re so cute I'm gonna cry. Sometimes you can have a festival and the sultan of Noots shows up!!! He has a lil’
wee crown. ;o;
Our friend called them Peep 'n Bows, because every time you did something for them, they
would do a little squeaky noise, and bow in gratitude. They are so precious.
Runners up:Chomps the Cat (Stardew Valley), Pizza (Chicory: A Colorful Tale), Wagahai (The Great Ace Attorney), Pocket Lancer
(Deltarune)
Headache of the Year
Countersniping Darcy (Alpha Protocol)
Terminate Mr. Darcy with extreme pride and prejudice.
I had the most miserable time with this fight. To set the scene, you enter an area with a bunch
of crates, sandbags, fuel tanks, parked trucks, and two small towers. In the tower on the very end of the map resides Darcy
with a sniper rifle. He's tucked in there pretty well, so you can't really shoot him back. The intended goal is for
you to slowly make it over to the other tower and use the sniper rifle there to shoot him back. Unfortunately for the player,
the sniper rifle there is bugged, and your cursor won't land on him, and while you're trying, he does successfully
shoot you. It felt so simple, but because you die so quickly, it takes many many tries to figure out it is utterly busted,
and the frustration builds with each attempt. When Allie got to this fight, I had an almost nostalgic feeling for it,
thinking "Ah, right. This encounter really stuck with me. Easily the most memorable section of the game for me."
That feeling faded pretty fast though, as Allie started to boil and I got reminded just how maddening it was.
I also had.. A very bad time. It already took me an age to figure out what the game intended me
to do, since you expect your usual tricks to work… but then when we got up there, it just… it tricks you into thinking
you missed by your own hand. So you try again. And again. So close! I just keep near-missing… every… single… what the
fuck… I think we managed to beat it in the end by using a cheese strat of rushing right up to the sniper tower and chipping
away at a corner of his arm. It’s not the first time the game seemed to be really wonky with its difficulty. It had some
cool ideas and I don't hate the principle of turning a shooter into a tactical RPG but… sometimes it
wasn't strategy, it was just a broken boss battle you had to find a tedious way around. Game bad.
Runners up:Kingdom Come, aka parking lot full of cackling, exploding crackheads (GTA 3), Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Stone
Tablet puzzles being the most obscure shit (Full Metal Furies), Blinding can't-see-shit-o-vision in kaleidoscope mode
(Everhood)
Worst Trend of the Year
MeTooTwo
You may thank me for not using photos of "The Cosby Suite"
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Big name guy at big name game developer gets called out
for running their working environment like a sloppy frat dungeon. Pearls are clutched. Creepy DMs are leaked. Women’s lived
experiences are debated. If you’re thinking “yeah that was 2019 thanks for the reminder” then well congrats on not
being in denial I guess but also WELCOME TO THE SEQUEL: ITS BIGGER, COWARDLIER, AND GUEST STARRING DISTURBING REFERENCES TO
BILL COSBY! This year Activision-Blizzard is getting sued by the state of California in the biggest case of sexist misconduct
in video games… so far. Which rules and all that they’re getting justice. But it’s not just them. Ubisoft, Riot Games,
Insomniac and others I've lost track of have also been outed for protecting the jobs of absolute creeps within their
ranks. It’s equal parts vindicating and exhausting to read story after story of behaviour that I personally already knew
was kinda what the industry was like.. but seeing people pick it apart and try to weigh up their performative outrage with
their desire to continue supporting a brand whose games they like…? ugh… Anyway, the main point is, can we just take a
few centuries off from sexually harassing our co-workers? It’s cheugy bruh.
You can easily argue this wasn't a trend this year, but an on-going one for every year
before and unfortunately after. Let's just say that the trend is dipshits being exposed and everyone is forcibly
confronted with it, rather than just the people who are on the receiving end of it. A special shout-out to
Activision-Blizzard though, who were being sued by the state for gender discrimination, and to save face they hired a woman
in an executive position… only to not give her equal pay. She left the company by now for obvious reasons of course.
What's there to say other than acknowledging that it sucks, but that it's good that our noses are being pressed on
this mess. It's the only way we can clean house.
Runners up:"IP crossovers that just don’t fit the brand or narrative at all", "Rumours that become expectations that
become disappointments", "NFTs and the looming threat of Play-To-Earn cryptogames"
Deja Vu award for Ballsiest Ripoffs
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl *and* MultiVersus are tacky smash bros-likes with all your favourite unrelated characters from various IPs owned by MEDIA CORPORATION
Nigel Thornberry got into Smash Bros before Waluigi, suck on that.
Now that Smash Brothers Ultimate is fully finished, there's a void in the video game
landscape. I don't even play Smash Brothers, but I can appreciate what an event every announcement of it is. Luckily
other companies were ready to capitalize on Smash's final update, and are here with clones of their own. We have the
Nickelodeon one and the WB one. There's not really much to say about these other than that they're just doing, and
unfortunately they're doing it worse, using less interesting rosters.
I certainly don’t think taking the all-star push-em-off-platform brawler mechanics from smash
bros is inherently a rip-off and not a valid genre of its own. But these games feel particularly noteworthy because they both
got announced this year and they were just such a strange coincidence(!?) Plus, not unlike the PlayStation game PSASBR, they
did just straight up lift a bunch of their moves and animation ideas from smash.
Runners up:Super Fighter M is quite the Mario Bootleg, RAWMEN is Splatoon, Do a barrel roll in ExZodiac.
Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment
"Tobi correctly predicts dinosaur extinction event, didn’t realise it would be him" (Minecraft: Eternal)
(Excessively dramatic reconstruction.)
So during the pandemic we’ve been teaming up with 2 other friends to play various 4-player
games throughout the year. We decided to take an ill-advised deep dive into a Minecraft mod that was near enough ALL THE
MINECRAFT MODS. Tobi and Gronkwena were getting mad into the fossils-to-dinosaurs modpack and had created their own massive
dinosaur park with hundreds of newly reborn species next to our base. At the start of our fateful session Tobi joked that
this week might feature an extinction event like the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs. Meanwhile, I was out on my
adventures to defeat the Ender Dragon (the final boss of vanilla Minecraft, if you care) for precious dragony resources. But
I came across a problem. The mod compilation had a bug in it, which meant the ender dragon would never die. I pestered Tobi
to fix it for me, and he found a kill command. He came to The End dimension and applied the command and it worked! The Ender
Dragon died. Unfortunately, it worked too well. We did not consider that this kill command would work across all dimensions,
and it wiped out every single NPC across every dimension in the game. The villagers, the enemy mobs, and of course… the
entire dinosaur park.
Me and my big mouth. The moment I pressed enter on the command, we were slowly watching the
dragon explode, when the other players were asking who all these names were. Names? I looked in the chat, and the entire
screen was filled with the names of all the dinosaurs. The lil critters I named by hand. They were all gone. Every single
one. I felt so bad, and then folks reminded me that I called it, making me feel even worse. So thanks, forum guy who posted
the solution to the bugged Ender Dragon. RIP Mable.
Runners up: "Invincibility bug on our incapacitated target, so we had to kick him into the sea" (GTA 3),
"Scarecrow, DC's gassiest lad, instantly dying from gas, while Joker passes through without a hitch" (LEGO
Batman), "Death by Airdrop" (Helldivers)
Dumbest Premise
"We have an annual festival each year and the competition winner gets to touch the sword that seals a pandora’s box
of horrors that should never be opened. Just a little touchy, no take!" (LoZ: Minish Cap)
GEE WHIZ
So let me get this straight. You have a sacred chest that contains all the evil in the world,
and instead of hiding it away where no one can ever touch it, you bring it out every year to let your strongest warrior touch
it. The kind of person you wouldn't be able to stop if they tried to do anything shady with the chest you don't want
anyone to open. Sorry to spoil the opening of the game for you all, but the champion opened the chest and all hell broke
loose. Who could have ever foreseen this possibility?
I had to ask Tobi several times if I actually had this right. So… you’ve got a
Pandora's box… you’ve got a yearly competition… and the prize is… you get to touch the box of evil… the seal of
the evil box… it doesn't give you super powers or anything… you just get the power trip of touching the thing… that
if you tried to move it would ruin everything… but nobody would ever do that because uh… it's illegal i
guess…?
That’s politics, baybie!!!?!
Runners up:"Someone controlling Dr Wily invited all the most powerful robots to a robot fighting tournament… but then turned
them evil! Also spoiler, the man behind Dr Wily was actually Dr Wily himself." (Megaman 6), "Eggman made another
Sonic clone who can create more clones of other Sonic clones by using the crystal that turns virtual reality into
reality." (Sonic Forces), "The dying queen of America wants a near-mute package delivery person to connect
everyone's PCs in a pandemic, so everyone can look at everyone's files, and crown the new American apocalypse
princess." (Death Stranding)
Most Tears Shed
SCOUT gets PTSD and wipes his memories (Murder by Numbers)
Time to commit Sudoku
SCOUT is your lil’ scanner robot drone buddy in the wonderful story-driven picross puzzler
Murder by Numbers. He just kinda showed up one day and wanted to help you solve murder mysteries, and has no memory of where
he came from and why he was made. So you agree to help each other, he helps you find clues and you help him get his memory
data back. SCOUT contextualises a lot of the gameplay by turning the puzzles into visual decompression/decoding processes so
I think he succeeds in being very endearing.
SCOUT pretty much won me over immediately. He's so inquisitive and excited about
everything, and so hungry to absorb information. Unfortunately as you can tell by the title, he didn't lose his memory
without a reason. As he is slowly amassing his knowledge back, he starts piecing back together his memory, and he doesn't
like what he found. Turns out SCOUT was the one who wiped his own memory, to forget about the trauma he was subjected to.
When I started playing a puzzle game about making little pictures of staplers and flags, I didn't know I was signing up
for punches in the soul.
Runners up:The Extraction (Tacoma), Chicory: A Colorful Tale, The Great Ace Attorney 2, Do a lil cry (Freedom Planet)
Most Terrifying Moment
Victoriano’s Fun Mansion (The Evil Within)
Blood syringe vaults, is that classical gothic or gothic revival?
We kind of touched on this in our Halloween post, but I guess we're revisiting it for a
little bit. The Victoriano manor is basically the part of Evil Within where things become a little bit more like a
traditional spooky game. Fancy looking Resident Evil-y place with little puzzles, tight corridors, unkillable enemies that
chase you, and jump scare ambushes. The place also has a number of weird pocket dimensions and gross experiment rooms if
you're into that sort of thing.
Evil Within more than made up for a lack of other scary moments in games I played throughout
this year. And it had so many distinct ideas. Some games have one horror idea, like oh there's zombies/mr long limbs and
they’ll pop out at you periodically throughout the game. But The Evil Within has a hearty supply of little bastard traps
and new things you suddenly have to deal with throughout. I had to really put a lot of thought into what section of the game
really frayed my nerves the most, and I think it was probably the good old fashioned haunted mansion section. Not only do you
have to deal with the usual zombies and explosive traps, but now sometimes Ghost Ruvik just shows up and chases you down
while you’re trying to solve HORRIBLE puzzles. There was also a zombie standing behind a piece of laundry that for some
reason I couldn't for the life of me get a clean kill on. Tobi found that very amusing. Oh and yeah, and watch out for
the random meat grinder??? Eh, you’ll probably forget. Good luck with that though.
Runners up:The Lord of Dragons trial (Bravely Default 2), Fridge Duty (Control), Invisible zombies (The Evil Within), The Lamp Lady
(The Evil Within DLC)
Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude
Intern (Say No! More)
Say No Door
Saying “no” to stuff is hard. It takes courage. You never know how people will react. But
that’s also why it's so… so powerful. In Say No! More the intern (spoiler: dats u) gets the power to full on
Fus-Ro-Dah people with a well timed "no". Who knows what kind of doors, windows or glass ceilings this will open up
for you? Just don’t let it all go to your big rectangular head.
The power of "no" is very versatile. You can wield it to both inspire and resist
change. You use it to stand up for yourself, and for others. You can use it to break and build someone's self-esteem. No
responsibly, kids.
Runners up:Chu-chu's stand in Shevat. (Xenogears), Magnamalo can pull flying Raths out of sky and suplex them (Monster Hunter
Rise), Ash Tray Maze (Control), The Syndicate (Paradise Killer)
That's it. Another year in the can. Let's seal it in its tomb with all its construction workers and architects, and
never speak of it again. Here's hoping it doesn't end up cursing anyone couple centuries from now.
