I’ve more or less given up on trying to craft this “blog” into some kind of coherent whole that all hangs together and flows nicely, etc. Err… sorry? What can I say, writing is hard and time-consuming, and I think I’m just going to have to be content with blurting out a list of fairly disconnected thoughts about this game, some longer and some just quick hits. Hopefully you’ll find something interesting or surprising here nonetheless.

There will be major story spoilers in this blog, but don’t worry, I’ll put that stuff in spoiler tags.

Critic review scores

Currently this game is sitting at a Metacritic 85, which honestly is higher than I thought it would be.

But I'm not looking to talk about the actual scores here. I just wanted to meditate for a second on the fact that there’s been a discussion in recent years over the usefulness of having a review score at all, with some publications moving away from them entirely, arguing that they detract from the review by simply derailing the critical discussion into one about fetishizing raw numbers, a Metacritic dick-measuring contest. Others argue that review scores still have a place and still remain a useful shorthand metric, problematic as they can sometimes be.

However, regardless of how you feel about review scores in general, can we all agree that they’re more useful for some games than others? If the latest Assassin’s Creed game is sitting at a Metacritic [whatever], you probably have a pretty good idea of what that game is. But Dragon’s Dogma 2? Not so much. It’s a game that was always going to appeal to a very specific audience who appreciates its particular brand of nonsense, and be detested by most others, and so a bare review score—particularly an aggregate one—was always going to be pretty useless.

The review bombing and MTXs

As got brought up in the discussion thread, the microtransactions for this game and the review bombing it experienced were a bit of a story for a while there. Which is dumb for a couple of different reasons.

The first is that I really think this was all reported in a misleading, one-dimensional, and inaccurate way. The story from everyone was basically: “Capcom added these post-launch MTXs, and as a result users are all review bombing it!” It seemed like one game news site wrote it that way, and this just became the narrative, accepted as fact. And sure, there’s some truth to it, but it also seemed that a large part of the review bombing was a result of many players simply not understanding what this game was, getting something that they fundamentally didn’t expect.

E.g., I peaked into the threads on GameFAQs and Steam (*shudder*) long enough to see lots of people pontificating on how (paraphrasing) “This game should have learned from Skyrim’s fast travel!” Etc etc etc. In short, a lot of people showed no awareness that the first game did this exact same stuff, and that this was part of what people had liked about it, and also made no real effort to acclimate themselves to the game’s design rather than expect it to conform to the design sensibilities of every other open-world action RPG of the last decade. This is, of course, thoroughly unsurprising in retrospect. If memory serves, “metabombing” really wasn’t a thing back when the first game came out in 2012. But if that first game came out today, I’m sure the same thing would have happened to it.

Two quick points about the MTXs themselves.

First, they’re simply not that bad in the big scheme of things. I mean, yes, of course they’re gross. But c’mon, people. We lost this battle a long time ago. The horse armor had the last laugh. These types of MTXs are here to stay. The new most important criteria of what makes an MTX unacceptably detestable is whether the game itself was fundamentally designed from the ground up to support it. And DD2 pretty clearly was not. E.g., the first game’s fast travel was just as stingy as this one’s (probably more), very much by design. They didn’t make it this way to sell you Ferrystones or Portcrystals. I have a feeling that Itsuno and the rest of DD2’s designers were just as upset (or more) with the MTXs that Capcom’s goons added to it as its players were. Capcom does seem to love adding this crap.

Second, however, I will say that, for people who have no experience with that first game, the design of this one is so goddam contrary to the conventional wisdom for modern open world game design that I can’t really blame them too much for thinking that DD2 had been designed around these MTXs. It’s a lazy assumption that gets dispelled with just a few minutes’ research, but I suppose one can’t really expect the average gamer to actually research anything before self-righteously review-bombing the game on Metacritic. Right?

…right?

The relative lack of easy fast travel

There are a lot of things about DD2’s design that are backasswards in comparison to the vast majority of modern open-world games, but the centerpiece has got to be the fast travel. And the first thing I’ll say about it is that it honestly took me a while to get into the right headspace to appreciate that the design team really stuck to their guns on this one.

The phrase “it’s about the journey, not the destination” is one of the most groan-worthy, eye-rollingly insipid and clichéd lines in the English language, but it also very much applies here. It would be hard to overemphasize the degree to which DD2’s relative lack of easy fast travel is core to what its developers seem to have been trying to evoke.

We have been trained as players for more than ten years to be efficient, to consume all of a game’s unique, scripted content before moving on. Do all the main quests, do all the side-quests, collect all the thingies, get all the trophies… then move on to the next game. DD2 very pointedly wants to forcefully jar players out of this mentality, make them slow down and smell that delicious live-action steak. And it took me a while. I’m guessing I’d been playing the game for fifteen or twenty hours before my lizard brain just accepted that I didn’t actually need to complete all those quests right now, that ultimately, ticking the checkboxes in my quest log wasn’t actually that important in the scheme of things. And indeed, from reading some of the coverage from critics, I saw more than one saying something to the effect of “Normally I’m OCD about doing everything perfectly in these type of games, but for this one I’m just sort of letting go.” Yeah. That’s definitely what they were going for.

Hell, one of the pawn lines throws a major wink in this direction. If you’re on a quest but approaching the location of a different quest’s objective, one of your pawns will point it out, in the event that you want to check it off your list while you happen to be close by. But usually, another of your pawns will say this in response: “Efficiency isn’t the only consideration!” Yeah, that’s pretty much this game’s motto.

It should also be acknowledged that fast travel just isn’t as restrictive as it first appears to be. For one, oxcarts travel between four of the game’s major locations, and these will get you within a few minutes’ travel to pretty much any location in the game (particularly if you’re willing to just run past a lot of enemies, which is a perfectly viable thing to do most of the time, especially when you’ve leveled up a bit). All they cost is truly tiny amount of gold that you’ll get back from enemies in about two seconds. And yes, the carts can be raided and destroyed, leaving you stranded somewhere along their route, but generally this isn’t actually all that bad (though I’ll have a bit more to say about the oxcarts later).

As for Ferrystones, I’ll say this. I ended up playing through this game twice, up to the point in NG+ just before the endgame events kick off, and I now have over 90 Ferrystones in my inventory. I’m pretty sure they cap at 99, like most other items, so if I get any more I won’t even have a place to store them. The point is that the game is more generous in handing this things out than some people fear it is. I’m definitely one of those people who will play through an entire JRPG and never use a consumable because what will I do if I REALLY need it?, but there was really no need to conserve the things as much as I did.

Finally, one last thought on this topic. This may seem very obvious, but is worth saying explicitly: game worlds seem a lot larger and go a lot father when you cannot simply warp from one end to the other at the drop of a hat. The world of the original DD1, for instance, was distinctly smaller than Skyrim’s, but it sure did feel larger. I’ve actually been meaning for some time to write a blog on the various ways, or “tricks” if you want, that game designers can pull to make their virtual worlds feel larger, because there are a number of interesting ones I can think of.

But that’s for another time.

Curatives, item burden, and functional immortality

I was not a fan of item burden in the first game. I mean, item burden pretty much always sucks because it usually serves no useful purpose. It felt particularly annoying in DD1 because you actually had to spend time shifting items around between four different characters’ inventories to try to balance it all out. It did serve at least one purpose in that first game, though: without item burden, you could theoretically carry an infinite number of healing items, and since these could be instantly used in your inventory, with no requisite animation (you could literally be flying through the air from an ogre hit and instantly quaff a dozen healing potions), a bottomless inventory would mean that you were functionally immortal. This all seemed deeply weird to me at the time, and I remembering hoping that in a prospective sequel they would fundamentally redesign all this. E.g., go for an Estus Flask-like system with recharging, limited uses that also require an actual animation to consume.

DD2 changed… nothing at all about any of this. Huh.

In fact, they made it even more ridiculous in a way that I’m not sure a lot of people realize. Did you know that in DD2 you can use a healing item from your inventory after your HP has hit zero to avoid death? Yep, that is a thing you can do in this game. You can be dead and still instantly heal yourself from a menu, as there tends to be a generous window of a few seconds before the game prompts you to use a wakestone to revive yourself from death. As long as you heal yourself for at least 1 HP before then, a wakestone is actually totally unnecessary.

Is this an intentional design choice? I really, honestly can’t tell. It sure does seem to undercut the use case for wakestones as a valuable commodity. But this insanity is also sort of the natural extension of the weird system of consumable healing items from the first game. And I also feel like I can hear the faint sound of Itsuno cackling in the background, amused at how few players are probably ever going to realize that this is even a thing. Maybe it’ll get patched! We’ll see!

Suffice it to say, I still think this design for item burden and curatives is pretty goofy. But one measure of its success in the larger design might be an answer to the question: “If you could mod out item burden, would you?” Now, I played it on PS5, so I can’t mod it out… but even if I could, I wouldn’t. This is another aspect that is so core to the design—preparing your packs before heading out to adventure, and managing the loot you collect—that modding it out would feel like sucking out a lot of the game’s personality. (Though, man, the item management UI could really use some work.)

I’ll also say this in conclusion to the fast travel and item burden discussion. I was second-screening Jeff Gerstmann playing this game for over three hours, and somewhere in there (I am too lazy to scrub through three hours of video to find the right time code, do tell me if you know it so I can edit the post!) he said something to the effect of: “This game sure has a lot of bullshit in it. But maybe that’s actually what games like this need: more bullshit.” Which gets into a deeper discussion about whether games should primarily aim to be “fun,” or rather something more anomalous and less easily defined, like “fulfilling” or “satisfying.” But I think we all know what he means. And at least in this case, I agree. DD2 does, indeed, have a lot of bullshit in it. And the bullshit is the source of both its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses. It’s what makes it so intriguing in the first place.

About the story, and why I think the first game’s ending was better

First, let’s get one thing out of the way: I think that the stories of DD1 and DD2 mostly suck. In the case of DD1 in particular, it had a compelling opening—what with the big dragon ripping your beating heart out while you somehow mysteriously remained alive—and a very compelling ending… but almost everything else in the middle mostly just felt like subpar filler. My take on DD2 is that it’s somewhat flattened the curve: all the middle filler is probably a little better than what DD1 dished out, but the opening and ending just aren’t as compelling.

Second, I remain firmly undecided about the desirability of “ye olde medieval speake” in both of these games. Boy, it sure is a choice to have every character say “aught” every two seconds. And I just haven’t been able to come down firmly on the side of it being charming and immersive versus ridiculous and distracting. I suppose it’s both. It sure does seem polarizing. I’ve seen some people praising the acting/vocal performances, and others saying they’re some of the worst they’ve seen in a long time, and I suspect a lot of that comes down to the style of speech. It is what it is.

Anyway, I’ve heard multiple people saying something to the effect that DD2 seems more like a re-do of the first game than a true sequel. Which, eh. Yes and no.

Part of the overarching story of both games is that all this stuff is cyclical, so it makes perfect sense that the sequel would still be stuck in the same never-ending cycle of misery. In that sense I don’t think they could have made a sequel to the first game and not ended up with something very like this, without fundamentally losing its identity.

That said, after playing through the entirety of the game’s story and ending(s), they certainly did not only preserve a lot of the same beats to the game’s narrative, but also try to re-manufacture the biggest aspect, the part that made the first game’s ending so mind-blowing: the player’s organic realization of a decidedly shocking and unintuitive action.

The rest of this will have to be in spoiler tags. Be aware that I’m also very much spoiling the first game. Can’t have this discussion without doing so.

The whole dragonsplague thing

I’m going to put this in spoiler tags as well, though I feel like this has been pretty widely spoiled/discussed in the media and social media already. But just in case!

Quick(er) hits

Pawn chatter

I mostly didn’t mind the incessant pawn chatter, but seriously, Capcom, you needed to record more random ambient dialogue. Yes, I get that I played the game for north of a hundred hours and of course there was going to end up being a lot of repetition in said dialogue. But it didn’t take nearly that many hours before I’d already heard the same lines many, many times. They simply did not record enough lines, period.

That one Sphinx riddle

I suppose I could spoiler tag this, but really, this feels like a public service announcement/warning for prospective players anyway? Skip to the next section if you're super sensitive about such things.

At one point you meet a Sphinx who poses you a number of riddles, and one of them is particularly diabolical. There are 240 “Seeker’s Tokens” hidden in the game world, which are just like every other open world game collectible. Well, one of the Sphinx’s riddles is to remember the first one of these things you picked up and return to the spot, where she’s placed a “Finder’s Token” that you need to return to her, on a time limit.

The funny (and horrifying) thing about this is that most people won’t be able to remember this; you meet the Sphinx late enough in the game that you’ve likely collected dozens of these things and played the game for at least tens of hours. Moreover, if you don’t get it, it locks you out of an achievement/trophy, for failing to solve all the Sphinx’s riddles. You can imagine the anguish of people on Reddit and GameFAQs, etc, who just couldn’t for the life of them find this thing, because these things are so well-hidden that there really isn’t a “usual” first one picked up among players. You just have to remember for yourself, and hence there’s no way to simply look up a solution.

In my case, even though I really wasn’t sure where my first one had been (I’d picked up about fifty at that point), I ended up finding that Finder’s Token in the very first place I looked. Maybe my memory is better than I thought it was? In any case, if you’re planning to play this game: you might want to write down where you pick up your first Seeker’s Token. Just saying.

Fabrication weirdness

You know, I had completely forgotten that the first game had that whole item-copying (forgery) system, but it makes a return in this game, and boy is it funny and weird at times, especially in the ways it lets you kind of break the game a little.

There are at least three quests I can think of that require you to make fake copies of stuff to complete fully. In a couple of cases, you need to create copies in order to give stuff to different NPCs who want the same object(s). In another, giving an NPC the “real” thing actually leads to badness. Those are the clearly intended uses of the Fabricator.

But there are other, less obvious uses.

E.g., at one point you are loaned a “Gaol key” for quest purposes, and at the end of the quest the NPC wants it back. The thing is, this is a valuable item because it’s literally an infinite-use get-out-of-gaol-free card where normally (if you break the law and get arrested) you either have to bribe a guard or use an expensive one-time use “Makeshift Gaol Key.” But instead you can just copy the key before returning it to said NPC, and never have to worry about getting thrown in prison again.

(Side note: Before playing this game I had always pronounced the word “gaol” in my head with a hard “g.” In my defense, it’s not a word I’d encountered all that often before. But it took playing this game for me to realize that it’s just an alternate, old-timey spelling for “jail,” and is pronounced the same way. Oh. Derp. Minor “Phoenix Down” moment, I guess?)

Also, you know that “Finder’s Token” I just mentioned for the Sphinx riddle? Well, you can copy that, too, before giving it to her. I presume that you’ll then be able to hand one of these copies to her on a NG+ cycle rather than actually have to go out and find the thing again.

Finally, I find it intensely amusing that this guy can apparently fabricate raw materials. That is, there are all sorts of mats you pick up from monsters throughout the game that are needed to upgrade your weapons and armor. But how the heck is this dude copying that stuff? Is he a fucking alchemist? Can he turn lead into gold? And wouldn’t it be great if, after upgrading a weapon fabricated materials, your weapon breaks, and the smith who did the upgrade said something like, “Mayhap was that not a REAL dwarven steel thou gave me, Arisen? No wonder thine weapon shattered, for the materials were shite!”

NG+ loot… and fakes

Speaking of forgeries, I was very surprised to discover upon entering NG+ that not only were some (but not all) chests that I’d opened in NG now empty (I haven’t been able to discern a pattern as to which remain empty and which refill), but in some cases the rewards I got were actually fake copies of the kind you could get from the Fabricator guy. E.g., one of the rewards for a Sphinx Riddle was a Portcrystal, but upon answering the riddle on NG+, she instead gave me a fake one that doesn’t actually work. Seriously? Truly these devs have an odd sense of humor. Same thing also happened with a Golden Beetle reward.

The final Seeker’s Token reward seems like a weird joke

And speaking of weird humor, the final Seeker’s Token reward, given for finding 220 out of the 240, is a ring that increases your Discipline gain, which is a currency used to unlock vocations and abilities. The thing about this is that by the time you find 220 of these things, you will almost certainly have more than enough Discipline to max everything anyway, which makes it a distinctly strange thing to give as a final reward. The only sensible thing to do with it, really, is to gift it to a low-level player who could actually get some benefit out of it. Which, man. What a weird and wild design decision that is. Which of course is very in keeping with the weirdness of this game in general.

One more thing about Seeker’s Tokens

By default, I think these things are one of the more annoying hidden collectibles to find in open-world games like this. There’s a ton, and the world is huge, and they’re just plain small and hard to see.

However, there’s a passive augment you can get that makes it so these things not only start flashing, but emit a sound that gets louder and more frequent as you get nearer. Dare I say it, after I had unlocked this ability, I actually found it fun to collect these things. I wish that this was the default behavior for the game, or at least that you could unlock this ability earlier. I ended up collecting north of 180, which earned me a staff that auto-revives the pawn using it upon death. Nice!

Also, not for nothing, some of them seem impossible to get with equipping a staff or archistaff, which allow you float in the air for a while. This is a lot less burdensome when you unlock the “Warfarer” vocation and can then switch to any weapon at will, otherwise you’re sort of stuck to Mage or Sorcerer when aiming to collect these things.

A few stray thoughts on vocations

I’ve gone through this whole blog and so far made no mention of what I thought of the various vocations. So, some quick thoughts and observations.

First, almost every class feels a bit underpowered and useless until you hit vocation level 5 or 6, which seems to be where a lot of the really good abilities start unlocking. An exception is the Thief, who does seem kind of brokenly powerful in the early going, especially with the “ultimate” ability that essentially gives you auto-dodge invincibility in exchange for a small stamina drain. But I didn’t find this a particularly fun playstyle, actually.

I instead gravitated toward the ranged characters. I had a surprising amount of fun with the Sorcerer, even though I remember being very bored with the casting classes in the first game; not sure if that’s due to design changes or my tastes have just changed, it’s been too long for me to remember the details of playing casters in DD1.

Anyway, I did max every class, had a fair amount of fun with the Warrior (much improved this time around) and hated the Trickster (cool concept, not fun to play), but eventually settled into the Magick Archer. In the first game, I remember actually preferring the standard bow because it was higher DPS if you were aiming well, while in comparison the homing arrows of the magick bow “locked” more slowly. But in DD2, there’s now a way to switch the magick bow’s “mode” from a larger to a smaller circle, and the latter locks faster (frankly, I’m not sure what the point of the “large” mode is). Pretty sure I’m doing better damage with it than I would be trying to hit weak spots with the regular bow. Also, the Magick Archer has some really fun abilities. One lets you shield you allies in bubbles that explode outwards when enemies hit them, and another creates arrows that will ricochet all over cave walls and absolutely shred enemies in seconds; in a tight space, it’s truly OP, gloriously so.

As far as my party setup went, I ended up going heavily ranged. Besides being a Magick Archer myself, I also took a Mage for healing (which honestly feels required; this ended up being my Main Pawn at the end, after I’d earned the auto-reviving staff), a Sorcerer for nuking stuff, and a Fighter just to drawn aggro from everyone else. After a certain point there wasn’t much that was threatening anymore. I live in hope that there will eventually be an endgame expansion like there was for the first game that reinvigorates the challenge.

But all in all, the combat is pretty solid and enjoyable in general, and your pawns mostly seem to make fairly sensible decisions as far as using abilities, etc. And it sure is a good thing the combat's enjoyable, since there seem to be groups of enemies approximately every five steps.

Those paper mâché oxcarts

The thing I actually found most annoying about the destructible oxcarts is that the likelihood of them being destroyed rests in large part of the vocations of you and your pawns. Because here’s the thing: while there is no “friendly fire” in this game, inanimate objects—like oxcarts—always take damage from everything. That meant that if, like me, you favored having a Sorcerer in your party, then that oxcart was pretty well boned a lot of the time, because said Sorcerer would cast AoE spells that instantly shred it as collateral damage. Ugh. That… did not feel good.

Also, @nodima, you said that “It also seems like as long as you doze off in an oxcart, you’ll get a 50/50 shot or better that the caravan will make it unscathed.” Boy howdy, not in my experience. I got raided at least 75% of the time. I swear to you that I am not exaggerating. Either you’re very lucky or I’m very unlucky.

Inclusiveness through laziness?

I remember being amused that in the first game there was a girl who was supposed to be your love interest from your little backwater starting village… and it was a girl regardless of whether you had created a male or female character. And the same thing seems to have been done for this game, in which you can “romance” a couple of ladies, regardless of you gender. But honestly, to me this reads to me more like Capcom being lazy and ending up with a more inclusive, LGBTQ-friendly game as a happy side-effect. Which, hey, I guess I’ll take it?

Also, inclusiveness through… skanky armor?

There is a long history of RPGs in general and JRPGs in particular creating really revealing costumes for the women, but usually not for the men. Well, I have to say, I find it amusing the degree to which DD2 is equal opportunity on this front. Because, boy, there sure is some skanky armor in this game, and the guys can wear all of it (there is no gender-exclusive armor), including tops that are basically just a bra and some sleeves (also, note that the armor appearance doesn’t change between male and female… if you put it on a dude, he’s still wearing a bra).

I’ll admit that, as a gay man, this definitely made me smile. There just aren't that many AAA games that let you sexually objectify the dudes. So I did spend a fair number of hours running around with my male main pawn looking, as @nodima put it, like a “Hentai Fever Dream,” and then sending him out to the cloud in the hopes of making some fascist, homophobic dudebro intensely uncomfortable for a few seconds. Take that, heteronormative patriarchy! Or something like that!

Also, here’s an idea for what I think might be a new wiki category: armor that, when you put it on, makes you look more naked than if you just removed all your clothes. E.g., taking off all your armor leaves you in what looks like a pair of boxer briefs, but you can instead put on “leg armor” that is basically just a thong, and is way more revealing than the boxer briefs.

Video games, am I right?

The latest title card to a game ever?

Again, I suppose I could spoiler tag this, but it’s so minor. I’ve heard multiple people comment about the weirdness of the game’s title screen simply reading “Dragon’s Dogma,” without the “2.” But in fact, the “2” gets added once you enter the endgame… which may actually make this the latest title card to a video game ever, depending on how you calculate it? Of course play time will vary hugely; I spent about 100 hours on my first play, and then cleared NG+ in about 30—both because I then knew all the quest solutions and because I was terribly overpowered. Anyway, maybe there’s a later “true” title card in some other game, but if so, I certainly can’t think of it.

Did you know that there’s a clock in this game?

It’s in the pause menu at the top of the screen. Here’s a Kotaku article about it. I was into my second playthrough before I realized it. Like many other aspects of this game’s design, I am both amused and annoyed, because said “clock” blends so well with the world map that I’d be surprised if more than about a quarter of players ever noticed it at all.

I’m posting my GOTY list unfashionably early this year because, looking ahead at the upcoming releases, there’s nothing else this year that I’m looking to buy at launch. As usual, if time and money were no objects, there are other games I would have liked to try, like the Dead Space remake or the recently released Alan Wake II. But any other tentpole 2023 releases are things for which I’m probably going to wait for a 2024 sale.

Anyway, this will be my second year making an end-of-year favorites list. Like last year’s list, I don’t quite have ten games from this year that I feel strongly enough about including—not that these things necessarily need to contain ten games, but hey, tradition, amirite? The seven games I’ve got is pretty close, and I’ve decided to fill out the remaining three spots with games from prior years that I did full replays of in 2023.

Favorite game I played a second time in 2023: God of War Ragnarök

This was my #3 on my list last year, behind only Rogue Legacy 2 and Elden Ring. I replayed it in 2023 for a very specific reason: they patched in NG+ (in early April). I never did the NG+ for the 2018 game, but I wanted to try it for this one.

On the one hand, the new stuff they added for the second playthrough isn’t all that interesting. You can upgrade your equipment more, plus they added a new armor set or two and some new arena battle stuff, but nothing I actually cared about much. On the other hand, I think in some ways I enjoyed the game even more the second time than I did the first, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, having played it once and knowing the high (and low) points of the story, I was mentally prepared for the more frustrating or tiresome bits from my first play. E.g., I never much enjoyed the playable Atreus sections; they’re fine for story, but I just don’t find his combat nearly as satisfying as Kratos’. Also, that Ironwood section really dragged on the first play. But for this second play, I knew exactly how long Ironwood was going to last and when I would get to control Kratos again, so it didn’t feel so interminable.

The second reason is that the game was just easier. Some small portion of that was me being more familiar with the combat, but you also have access to more of Kratos’ kit earlier, and additionally it was apparent that they’d balanced the game for people who had never fully maxed their equipment from NG, and so the early portions were a relative cakewalk. They also allowed you to upgrade your equipment to the NG+ max fairly early if you had the mats, so for a large portion of the game I felt fairly OP. This was a nice change since I had played NG on the highest difficulty—“Give Me God of War”—mostly because it was the only difficulty setting that you couldn’t switch to mid-game, so I decided to try it and ended up sticking with it. I wouldn’t say I regret that decision, but there’s something to be said for the game being a little less viciously difficult, especially for a second go-around.

Minor quibbles aside—I still think the lock-on camera has its problems in crowds, etc.—the combat in this game remains great, and the world and characters and writing are sublime. I’m the kind of person who, even for a game I’ve never played before, will often skip past vocal performances of lines if I’m reading them faster in the subtitles, etc… which is to say, I’m just generally much more interested in gameplay than in story. But the acting and mo-cap and cinematography in this game are all so top-of-the-line that I wouldn’t want to skip any of it (even if I could… the whole single-shot thing doesn’t actually allow for the kind of granular dialogue skipping that most other games do). I frequently found myself waiting to disembark from a boat or sled just to hear Mimir finish one of his stories, and that’s just not the sort of thing I typically do. God of War Ragnarök remains a tremendous experience, one that I can easily see myself returning to yet again.

Favorite game I played a third time in 2023: Persona 5 Royal

When I first played Persona 5 around launch in 2016, I did quite enjoy it. There were a lot of clear gameplay upgrades from previous entries, and yet it didn’t hit me quite as hard as Persona 3 (I started with FES and later played the Fem MC in Portable), whose characters, setting, and story I found more interesting.

Then, about two years ago, I played Persona 5 Royal for the first time, and I enjoyed it more than I had the OG. Part of that, as I’ve just discussed with God of War Ragnarök, was that I’d made peace with the game’s shortcomings and frustrating bits. But it also just added so much to that base game that made the whole thing so much more engaging—new characters, new locations, showtime attacks, fusion alarms, the grappling hook, the stamp system in Mementos. They added so much that it made the original release seem positively barren by comparison. About the only bit I didn’t like so much was the extra month tacked onto the end, mostly for the way it retconned the original ending and made an already very long game even longer. But on balance, all the stuff they added turned what was already a great game into an all-timer.

Which is how I ended up playing Royal for a second time earlier this year, or my third time playing Persona 5 overall. This seems especially significant for me because JRPGs just aren’t usually the type of games that I find myself replaying often… I am generally much more likely to do that with more action-oriented games like RE4 or the Souls games or Monster Hunter. It was my first time going through a NG+, so I got to do the extra fights against the Twins and Lavenza, etc. And, again like my recent replay of God of War Ragnarök, I found it both easier (of course, with my OP persona compendium) and even more enjoyable still (I really don’t need difficulty from this game). At this point, I think it’s safe to say that it’s surpassed Persona 3 in my eyes… though I’m now extremely interested to see how Persona 3 Reload turns out. If they can tell the Persona 3 story without screwing it up while also adding all the improvements that Persona 5 brought, then boy, that’s really going to be something.

Favorite ongoing game: Crusader Kings III

CK3 was never covered by any GB staff. The closest we got was Rorie trying it and bouncing off, and the Nextlander guys doing one video of it for a Patron’s choice stream. There are also a few forum threads on the site, one of which I started, but that’s it.

So, in case you haven’t noticed: CK3 is really friggin’ good. I’m generally not much for grand strategy games, but Crusader Kings is the exception. I put 800+ hours into CK2 back in the day, and now I’ve put 800+ hours into CK3. There were worries early on that it couldn’t possibly live up to its predecessor at launch, since CK2 got a metric ton of expansions over the years that added a lot to the game (in fact, they added so much that was—taken together—so expensive that they began offering players the ability to pay a $5 monthly fee to access all DLC rather than be faced with shelling out $300 for it). It turns out that those concerns were mostly unfounded, as it was a better game from the start than CK2 had been at its own release.

What really sets the Crusader Kings games apart as grand strategy games is that, for all their complexity and depth, they’re actually social sims in disguise. There are no “win states” or real goals in the game beyond the ones that players set for themselves. I mean, sure, there is an implied goal of taking over the entire map, but there is nothing preventing you from pursuing other things that have little or nothing to do with conquest, even just watching the years go by to see what unfolds without ever fielding a single army in a single battle.

CK3 makes some incredibly smart design decisions that really make it head-and-shoulders better as a social sim than its predecessor. Perhaps the most important one is the stress system. In CK2, characters could have tons of personality traits that did little other than provide stat buffs or debuffs. In CK3, each character generally has only three personality traits, and although they do alter stats a bit, their larger importance is that they give players a gameplay reason to roleplay those traits: making decisions that go against your character’s personality will increase stress, while making decisions that conform to that personality will lower stress. Getting stressed enough will lead to “mental breaks” that force you into developing some sort of coping mechanism… including the classic one of becoming a drunkard! In extreme cases, you can even die from stress.

So, for instance, in CK2 I always liked to have a “Just” character, because that trait gave a boost in vassal opinion. But in CK3, a “Just” character will gain stress if they try to murder people… and I like me some intrigue and skullduggery, so now this is a trait I avoid like the plague (on the other hand, the “Sadistic” trait lets you lose stress for murdering people!). It’s a really elegant way of making the personalities of characters matter.

Beyond that, CK3 is of course more visually appealing than its predecessor, with a nicer-looking, more detailed map, and fully 3D animated characters rather than static 2D portraits. It also removed some of the easy exploits and excesses of CK2, and feels overall more balanced and less easy to cheese—though there’s still some exploits there, if you really look for them. It’s also considerably better tutorialized and has better tooltips, and is overall a bit less obtuse (though, to be fair, I put so much time into the prior game that there’s a lot of knowledge I probably take too much for granted).

Anyway, CK3 recently celebrated its 3^rd anniversary, and also put out a big free patch alongside a DLC that added some really robust new elements surrounding traveling and regencies that just add even more depth to both the strategic and social sim elements of the game. While other games come and go, this is one that I just keep coming back to, and once you’ve started a fresh play, it really can be quite hard to put down.

7. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

And now we get to the first of the 2023 games on my list. It’s another Team Ninja joint, very much in the mould of Nioh, Nioh 2, and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. If Nioh was Team Ninja’s answer to Dark Souls, then Wo Long is their answer to Sekiro, with a similar focus on parrying.

It is perhaps worth noting that my first GB blog concerned the somewhat bizarre loot system of Nioh. I would contend that the loot systems in all of these games have always been bad, and have always fundamentally misunderstood key elements of what makes a good loot system. Wo Long really isn’t any better than its predecessors in this regard, and in a lot of ways I think it would have been a better game if randomized loot simply wasn’t a part of it (I say this as someone who is typically a sucker for randomized loot systems).

The especially weird part of Wo Long in regards to loot is that there is no longer any level associated with it—meaning that you could pick up a good weapon or piece of armor very near the beginning of the game and not need to change it ever again. And yet the game still throws so much gear at you that you’re frequently forced to deal with it lest your inventory fill up—including checking each piece for good transferrable properties that can be stripped off and added to other pieces of gear. In other words, it’s still needlessly fiddly and time-consuming and just plain unsatisfying.

Beyond that, some of the systems just seem really half-baked. E.g., the “morale” system acts as a sort of in-game character level that appears designed to prevent players from simply running through everything to get to the boss. In practice, it can be gamed by farming a few early-stage enemies and ROFL-stomping the rest of the level, and, more significantly for me, it means that you can make a first attempt at a tough boss, lose, and then be less powerful for your second attempt because your morale has gone down… a thing that can only be remedied by farming before trying again. And who the hell wants to do that?

My feelings about the game overall can best be summed up by this fact. Every one of these Team Ninja Souls-likes—that is, Nioh, Nioh 2, Stranger of Paradise, and Wo Long—has come with three DLC expansions (spaced several months apart) that add stages and also a whole new difficulty tier. For both the Nioh games, I played all of those DLCs at release. For Stranger of Paradise, I only played one before quitting in disgust. For Wo Long, despite the fact that I overall liked it better than Stranger of Paradise, I have not felt moved to play any of the DLC at all even though I paid for the season pass. It just feels like too much grind.

Which is to say, after Nioh and Nioh 2, Team Ninja had become one of those studios for which I basically bought their games on faith. But after a more tepid experience with these last two games, I am going to be more cautious in future. Certainly I will not be purchasing any season passes before I’m sure it’s content I’ll actually want to play. And I suspect I may wait until a sale for Rise of the Rōnin, depending on what it’s looking like closer to release.

Anyway, I realize the above all sounds pretty negative, but really, on balance, I still enjoyed my time with Wo Long. It’s my kind of nonsense, the core combat is good, and it was also neat to see a different take on the Three Kingdoms characters than the Koei Tecmo one, since I’ve been known to like me some Dynasty Warriors now and again. I was happy to play it once, but I feel no pressing need to make a return.

6. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

I am what you might call an OG From Software fan. I was in love with their games from the time I first played King’s Field 2, the first game they released in the US. In fact, the King’s Field games remain some of my favorite titles ever, to which I return on a nearly annual basis—which, incidentally, led to the delightful situation this year of me helping the Remap Radio guys (Patrick Klepek specifically) to navigate King’s Field 4 on Twitch. I DM'ed Patrick some advice and he ended up basically reading my entire message at the top of the stream, and then I was doing a bit of backseat driving for the rest of it (and the next stream three weeks later).

All of which is to say that I played Armored Core from the very first game (1997), and really enjoyed the hell out of it. It can be easy to forget that this was the series that From was known for prior to the Souls games. But it would also be safe to say that I generally became less and less interested in the series as it went on. It’s not clear to me how much of that was the games actually getting worse, versus me just being tired of the formula, or not seeing it advance/change as much as I was looking for. In the end, while For Answer (2008) did rekindle my interest a bit by doing some genuinely cool new things, it was safe to say that when the series stopped seeing new entries, I wasn’t exactly shedding a lot of tears. I’d had my fun with the giant robots, but was ready to move on.

Still, I was as intrigued as everyone else when it was announced that Armored Core was being resurrected, and was keen to see what kind of changes might be made after a decade of the series laying fallow. My verdict? Boy, it sure is one of those. It felt even more similar to the previous entries than I expected it too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and they did modernize the controls, but I suppose I was hoping that they would make more of a reach with it.

It even carries forward what seemed to be the same balance issue from a lot of the previous games: the heavy tank builds are really, really powerful. Almost disappointingly so. Once I settled into tank treads with dual gatling guns and dual “Songbird” grenade cannons, I pretty much just steamrolled everything. Any other build felt like I was unnecessarily handicapping myself, and I never really ran into any enemy for which that build didn’t seem like the answer... with the possible exception of the late-game boss IB-01: CEL 240, who seems hard regardless of what your build is. But even for that fight I kept things mostly the same, only switching out my songbirds for stun needle launchers, which it turns out are even better than the songbirds for single targets.

In the end, I accomplished everything that could be accomplished in the game except S-ranking all missions in about five days, and it left me feeling... a little cold? I enjoyed the game well enough, but S-ranking everything just sounds like a slog, nor do I feel any need to keep playing through the story. And I’m not much for competitive multiplayer in games like this. So I’m… probably done with it for good? Not every game needs to be replayed ad nauseam, and it’s very well-crafted, but nonetheless I found myself wanting something more out of it than what From Software provided, even if I can’t really tell you what the “something more” could be.

5. Diablo IV

The Diablo games seem to me like the Platonic form of “podcast games,” something easy and simple and endless that you can log hours into while doing something else and only half paying attention. I didn’t follow too much of the coverage for Diablo IV until the open beta hit in March, at which point I tried it and enjoyed myself, leading me to hope that this was another one I could log hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours into, hitting loot piñatas and watching all the shiny loot fall out.

And, well, I have played a lot of it so far. In fact, I was curious about just how much I’ve played it, so I used some third-party tools to check my hour count, since it seems the game no longer surfaces it for you like D3 did. It turns out that I’ve logged 145 hours with my Druid—the only character I’ve maxed at level 100—another 172 hours between the four other classes—a lv 79 Wizard, lv 56 Necromancer, lv 43 Rogue, and lvl 34 Barbarian. I also played another Druid for Season 1, which I played long enough to complete the Battle Pass and then deleted, so I can’t check my hour count for it. I would guess it was another 40 or 50 hours.

So, what’s the verdict after about 350 hours? Well, I wouldn’t have played it for that long if I didn’t like it, but as seems to be the usual thing for these games, it had its frustrations at release, and overall I have to rate it as an “incomplete.” On the one hand, it isn’t quite the “podcast game” I wanted in the sense that I haven’t found myself firing it up throughout the year, but rather played it intensely in a relatively short period, got fairly burned out on it, and haven’t felt any great urge to go back.

On the other hand, I don’t want to downplay that I did have fun with it. Combat feels satisfying, it looks good (albeit a little drab for my taste), the whole “aspect” system seems fairly well thought-out, and it even had a cinematic or two that were truly epic. Also, D4 launched in probably the best state that any of these games has started at, lest we forget the D3 auction house, a “torment” difficulty that was well-nigh impossible to complete, and disappointing loot. D4 already had better loot and better endgame than launch-D3 did, but it had its own set of unexpected disappointments, the biggest of which for me was just how long it takes to max a character… which in past entries was when the “real game” began. I’d planned going in to play every class to 100, but I had no notion that doing so would take around 150 hours apiece, which is too much even for an obsessive sumbitch like me.

Already Blizzard has set about making some good changes. The mid-October patch that coincided with the start of Season 2 has shortened the time needed to reach level 100 by about 40%, provided more stash space where there used to be quite a squeeze, added more endgame content, and made a number of good QoL changes. I remind myself that D3 really wasn’t much good until it hit “2.0,” and that D4 has plenty of time to get there. Regardless, it will probably be a little while before I pop my head back in to see if it’s been transformed into the game I really want it to be, one I’ll feel like playing for a casual hour or two while listening to a pod or streaming a TV show. Still, it makes it to #5 on my list for the enjoyment that I’ve so far wrung out of it, and for the potential to become something even more compelling in future.

4. Lords of the Fallen

I wrote a fairly lengthy blog on this game only a few weeks before writing this list, so if you want my fuller thoughts, you should read that.

The short version is that Lords of the Fallen looks and feels more like a Dark Souls game than anything any developer outside of From Software has yet managed, which is equal parts compliment and criticism.

The best parts of it are its ingenious dual world design and its interlocking structure—the way that it keeps looping back on itself even more than any of the games it was imitating. Crucially, combat also feels good—emphasizing speed and aggression a bit more than its most obvious inspiration, i.e., a little more Bloodborne than Dark Souls.

On the other hand, in other ways Lords of the Fallen can’t seem to fully free itself from that lineage, carrying forward some fairly baroque design decisions seemingly only because that’s the way From Software has always done it, and some of those decisions feel like it’s holding the game back. Despite being a die-hard fan of From Software, I found myself wishing that this game had done more to evolve the formula—including dispensing with the type of easily fail-able NPC questlines that you could never reasonably figure out without consulting a guide.

Still, this feels like a big swing for a studio that was newly formed to develop this reboot of the 2014 original, and there is certainly evidence of boldness there—not just from that dual world design, the one layered onto the other—but from the ballsy decision to remove bonfires from consecutive plays almost completely, forcing players to rely on their knowledge of the shortcut-rich world to navigate it. I hope that Hexworks will get a chance to make another game like this and go even further in a bold new direction of their own.

3. Resident Evil 4

Push comes to shove, the original RE4 (2005) might very well be my favorite game ever. If it’s not, it’s very close, certainly in my eternal top five. It’s a game I find myself playing again every year or so, despite its age, and despite scores of newer, completely untried games I could be playing instead. So it’s no great wonder that in February 2022, I wrote with enthusiasm about the completion of a fan-made HD remaster that was eight years in the making.

About four months later, the RE4 remake was officially announced. It’s probably natural that I was a little suspicious of a remake of a game that I held in such high esteem; I just wasn’t convinced that the dev team would fully grasp all the elements that made the original such a classic. As more gameplay was shown, I wrote a blog about my objection to the introduction of knife durability as a gameplay mechanic.

Finally the Remake was released in late March, and despite my misgivings, I was determined to give it a fair shake. Upon completion, I wrote a lengthy blog comparing the gameplay of the two RE4s in great detail—which I think came out rather well as a piece of game criticism, and which others seemed to appreciate. If you’ve played the original game—or even if you haven’t, and just want to better understand why it’s not so outdated compared to this remake as you might think—then I’d recommend reading it.

The short version is that, while in my eyes this 2023 remake can never surpass the 2005 original, both are excellent games indeed. My biggest gripes were with its sluggish-feeling movement and the inconsistency of enemy reactions to Leon’s gunplay. But outside of those two big gripes, my other criticisms are ultimately fairly minor, and the remake also made some genuinely good improvements and adaptations, both small and large, including better weapon balance and a much more meaningful and interesting NG+.

Do I see myself playing this remake every year or two for the next eighteen years, the way I did for the 2005 game? Probably not. But I did enjoy my time with it this year about as much as anything else I played, and I can, in fact, see myself at least starting another play sometime in 2024, just to see how it feels after I’ve given it some time to breathe. If Persona 5 Royal and God of War Ragnarök are any indication (see above), my opinion of it may improve!

One other thing I should note. I did end up buying the “Separate Ways” DLC, released in late September for $10. And I have to say, this was a great DLC, especially for the price. For the amount of content and hours of enjoyment on offer, they could have easily charged $20. It’s more fully featured than the original “Separate Ways” ever was, and almost half the length of the main campaign. They even added back some content—and at least one boss—that fans of the original were sad to see cut from Leon’s story. I have no hesitation in recommending it.

2. Remnant 2

I played the ever-loving heck out of Remnant: From the Ashes four years ago, sinking hundreds of hours into multiple characters, co-op and solo, earning the platinum trophy and collecting and fully upgrading every piece of gear there was to find. It was occasionally a mess, particularly with regard to bugs—some of which were not fixed for months and months after release—but the gameplay and exploration were deeply compelling for me.

When Remnant 2 was announced, I was pretty sure I was going to love it… because a sequel with just a little more polish and budget sounded like exactly the kind of nonsense I was looking for. And thankfully, Remnant 2 delivered. It’s about the most unqualified success of a video game I’ve played this year; I honestly can’t think of any major negatives that actually bothered me enough to even bring up. (And incidentally, if you follow the Nextlander guys, then you’ve probably noticed that they’ve been playing it every Monday for the past twelve weeks. They seem to like it, too!)

In truth, Remnant 2 doesn’t do a whole lot that’s drastically different from its predecessor. It’s gotten a new coat of paint, a new dual class system, and more granular procedurally generated map tiles, but the core gameplay and the emphasis on puzzle-solving to find cool unique loot remains the same. Which is fine by me; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, etc. If you like the idea of Dark Souls with guns and three-player co-op, you’re probably going to like this.

What it could most use at this point is another biome or two, along with some sort of survival or endless mode, both of which are things that seem likely to come along eventually with the three planned major DLCs. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Gunfire Games still has in store for us, since they’ve pretty much hit it out of the park so far.

1. Hitman: World of Assassination

My #1 game of the year arguably didn’t come out this year at all. In one sense, it was merely a re-branding that took place on January 26: Hitman 3 became Hitman: World of Assassination. But to me, this was more significant than just a re-brand. To the contrary, I think this is exactly the right time to acknowledge Hitman: World of Assassination as not just a great game, but a friggin’ all-timer.

After the disappointment of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution—which was a decent game on a purely technical level, but missed the essence of the Hitman formula completely—I was really excited to see what IO would do with the 2016 reboot. Even so, I never imagined that it would be as good as it turned out to be, easily surpassing the previous best entry in the series—Hitman: Blood Money (2006)—and winning Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year.

It's no great surprise that Hitman 2 and Hitman 3 received less attention than that first entry, in large part because they amounted to level packs, since you could import stages from previous games into them. But if that first game was worthy of being Game of the Year—and I very much believe it was—then Hitman 3 is all the more worthy, since it’s ultimately the same game, but with some QoL improvements and triple the stages to play. Even if nothing else had been added, that ability to have all those stages available “under the same roof” would have been awesome enough.

But IO didn’t stop there. Coinciding with the re-brand, they added Freelancer mode, and it was exactly what the game needed. For all the hours of enjoyment I’d derived from Hitman’s absurd and wonderful world, there are only so many ways to kill the same targets. I don’t want to take anything away from IO’s work here, because those bespoke targets and all the hilarious ways to off them are truly something. But if you’d maxed your level mastery on every stage like I had, then you were probably looking for something new.

When Freelancer hit, the main campaign instantly felt like a very extended tutorial before taking on the main event. While Freelancer is difficult and can be punishing, time spent on the campaign serves you very well—particularly your knowledge of how to best get around all those stages. It strips the game down to its purest form, sans the more complex and involved “mission stories” associated with the bespoke targets, and adds real stakes and consequences—not unlike the “elusive targets.” Add the ability to upgrade Agent 47’s incredibly nifty safehouse and the constantly shifting optional objectives to keep you on your toes, and you’ve got something really special. It really does feel like a whole new game.

It may be a cliché, but there really is nothing out there quite like Hitman. And it’s not just the brilliant gameplay, but also the tone and writing. Even beyond all the ambient dialogue that’s actually made me laugh out loud, I have never in my life played a game that managed to be both so self-serious and so over-the-top ridiculous at the exact same time. It is a bloody miracle of tone, and I’m still not quite sure how they managed it. Agent 47 is the world’s funniest straight man against all the nonsense going on around him, including exiting levels by alien abduction or floating away on an umbrella like Mary Poppins.

It's not always easy to predict which games will stand the test of time and which ones will mostly fall by the wayside a year or two after their initial release. But I feel pretty confident that Hitman: World of Assassination is a game that I’ll be returning to for a long time. Freelancer mode proved to be the crown jewel of an already near-perfect game, and now this is quite simply one of the greatest video games ever made.

Lords of the Fallen was released on October 13, a sequel of sorts to the 2014 game of same name. Like its predecessor, it wears its influence on its sleeve—it makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s aping the formula of From Software’s Soulsborne titles. In fact, it looks and feels more like a Soulsborne game than any other pretender to the crown to date. Whether that’s a good thing or not largely depends on where your tastes lie.

Lords of the Fallen does do some genuinely new and interesting things, and those divergences and tweaks from From Software’s established formula are some of its greatest strengths. However, it also carries over a fair number of design decisions seemingly just because that’s the way From Software has always done it, things that might have better been left by the wayside or made more user-friendly. Then, too, it has its own share of totally original shortcomings.

Development history

The original 2014 Lords of the Fallen was developed by the Frankfurt-based Deck13 as the first true triple-A attempt at producing a Dark Souls clone. It did not go very well. It came out to tepid reviews, and was a game that I was never much interested in playing, given the footage I saw. Eventually it did get released as a free PS+ game, at which point I downloaded and fired it up out of sheer morbid curiosity, only to find that the gameplay felt as clunky as it had looked in videos. It didn’t even feature an omni-directional roll; instead, players were confined to rolling forward, backward, or straight to the sides. It just didn’t feel good to play at all.

Deck13 did seem to learn from the experience, though, because they went on to develop The Surge (2017) and The Surge 2 (2019), which were much better games that were less clunky gameplay-wise and had more of their own distinctive feel. They’re some of the better examples of the genre.

Until only a few weeks before release, I assumed (very reasonably, I think!) that Deck13 was also developing this new game. In fact, the game’s publisher, CI Games, had announced a sequel in 2014 (to be released in 2017) and confirmed in 2015 that Deck13 would not be involved. It then spent a few years in development hell and switched devs at least once before CI Games founded a new studio in 2020 specifically to develop the Lords sequel: Hexworks, based in Barcelona and Bucharest. This is their first release.

It does feel somewhat strange that CI games decided to reboot the series rather than just establish a new IP and wipe the slate clean. The original 2014 game doesn’t exactly have great name recognition or a stellar reputation. Maintaining the IP made more sense when it was set to be a 2017 sequel, and I suspect that sheer momentum and administrative nonsense kept it from being a clean break.

Worlds apart

The biggest star of the show is Lords of the Fallen’s dual world. It is divided into the world of the living ("Axiom") and the world of the dead ("Umbral"), both of which exist at the same time and in the same space. The player is equipped with an “umbral lamp” that, when held up, reveals the umbral realm by its eerie blue light. The two realms are the same, but different: a lake in the living world might be drained in the umbral realm, allowing you to walk along the bottom; a bridge may exist in the umbral realm in a place that is otherwise blocked. This mechanic not only creates opportunities for interesting puzzles that require shifting between realms, but is also a clever new way of hiding loot. Overall, it makes exploration a lot more interesting.

The umbral realm also serves the dual purpose of being a second chance at survival. If you die while living, you are sent to the realm of the dead (providing a second shot at a boss, for instance). But it’s not a place you want to be for long. It contains enemies that do not exist in the living world, which you have to fight in addition to other enemies rather than instead of. There’s also a circular meter around an eyeball on the upper-right of the screen that, as it fills, increases the danger by spawning more and more undead enemies, culminating in a powerful reaper-like enemy after five minutes or so. You have to find specific markers to return from the umbral realm, though you can always elect to transition to umbral anywhere and at any time.

A particularly nice touch is that merely holding up your umbral lamp makes the things it reveals interactable, even without a full transition to umbral. This can work for or against you. On the one hand, you can sometimes simply hold up your lamp to walk across an umbral bridge, or past a gate that exists in the real world but not in umbral.

On the other hand, your lamp also opens you up to possible attack from umbral enemies. If your lamp reveals an enemy, it is then able to strike you, pulling you immediately into the umbral realm. This and other umbral realm mechanics really make it feel like a place that is properly spooky and terrifying: even taking a peak can literally be worth as much as your life.

The umbral lamp also has some other interesting uses. It can “soulflay” a target, temporarily ripping its soul out of its body and allowing you sneak in some free hits for a few seconds. And, since after a soulflay the target's body will teleport to the location of its soul, you can actually yank enemy souls off cliffs and watch them plummet to their deaths a few seconds later. At times, it is also the key to defeating enemies that are otherwise invincible in the living world by destroying umbral parasites that lend them an unnatural vitality.

All of this stuff just really works. I’ll admit that when I first saw a preview of the mechanic, I worried that I might hate it: checking every corner with my lamp did not sound like a fun time, and I worried that traversing the world might feel needlessly convoluted, rather than interesting. But after I got used to things a bit, those concerns largely fell away. Exploring the world is the game’s best feature.

If there’s one criticism I have of the mechanic, it’s that everything Hexworks has done to make the umbral realm inhospitable has contributed toward a tendency for the player to simply run through areas and past enemies in a mad dash for the next rest point—because when you’re in umbral, the ticking meter means that your usual priority—especially in a new, unexplored zone—is to return to the living world as soon as possible. That’s too bad, because there’s so much cool detail to take in.

To a certain extent, that tension between the umbral realm’s distinctive feel of dread and the need to sometimes just run away was probably unavoidable. But where it gets a little more frustrating from a design perspective is that there are certain ghostly story scenes/memories that can only be triggered and watched while in the umbral realm. Watching the entirety of these scenes, which can range anywhere from a few seconds to about a minute, will reward you with some special currency for buying boss equipment. But while you’re watching them, enemies can still be attacking you, and it’s hard to pay attention or care much about story when you’re fending off hoards of undead. It seems like they could have done players the courtesy of putting some sort of protective dome around them or something while they’re trying to watch these things.

“Actually going someplace”

Hexworks made another fairly bold move in the structure of its checkpoints that doesn’t fully reveal itself until a second play.

As with other games following the Soulsborne formula, Lords of the Fallen peppers various rest points—called “vestiges”—throughout the world where you can regain your health and healing items, level up, warp around to other rest points, and repawn if you happen to die. The difference is that in this game, these vestiges are relatively few and far between. To compensate, there are a goodly number of set places in the world—"umbral flowerbeds”—at which you can plant a “vestige seed” that becomes your own custom vestige, at which you can do all the things you can do at a normal vestige, including leveling up and warping to and from it.

However, you can only have one of these “temporary” vestiges active; placing a new one will overwrite the old one, and the vestige seeds you need to create them aren’t the easiest thing to come by: they drop from bosses, or from other powerful enemies, or can be bought at a merchant for 2,500 vigor (which is the “souls” of this game… for reference, an early character level costs about 1,000 vigor, so this is not nothing). You can also only hold five vestige seeds at a time.

This system takes some getting used to. My first instinct was to avoid using my vestige seeds as much as possible, until I felt I really needed one. But the developers are clearly trying to train you out of that way of thinking through the course of the game; e.g., it is not unusual for there to be no nearby vestige immediately following a boss. You could be out of healing heading into a new area, carrying a lot of vigor from the boss you just beat, and if you’re too cheap to create a temporary vestige, that’s on you. I did in fact lose a large amount of vigor this way (though I managed to retrieve it… lesson learned).

But here’s where the real twist comes: when you enter a NG+ cycle, the vestiges that you rested at in your first play no longer function. That is to say, all your “bonfires” are just gone. The only one that still works is in the world’s hub area, Skyrest Bridge—the game’s Firelink Shrine equivalent. In order to rest, you must rely 100% upon your own planted vestiges… and recall that you can only have one active at a time. This also means that there is no more warping around to old locations, only between your planted vestige seed and the hub area. That’s it.

When I first discovered this, I was moderately horrified. This did not sound like a good time. But as I entered NG+ to give it a try, more and more I grew to appreciate the chutzpah of this design decision, and the way they implemented it, and all the things they had to do to support it.

First, this wouldn’t have been a feasible thing to ask of players if the world wasn’t designed from the ground up to support it, and this is just what Hexworks has done, because Lords of the Fallen might be the new reigning champ amongst Souls-likes for sheer number of shortcuts to unlock. You can imagine your progress route through the game as being something like travelling along the outer edge of a wagon wheel, with fairly frequent opportunities to travel back along one of the “spokes” to the game’s hub area, Skyrest Bridge, and then continue on your way. In this sense, old areas are never actually as far away as you might think they’d be: there’s always a series of shortcuts you’ll have unlocked in the course of play that will get you back there fairly quickly.

Second, it bears pointing out that this mechanic is by definition not for first-time players. Most will likely bow out after beating the game once, or well before, and so never have to deal with a lack of fast travel at all. And for those who do, well, they’ve already been through the game once, and hence naturally have a much better idea of where they’d like to plant their vestige seeds as they move through the game again. It feels like this is the experience that Hexworks was aiming for all along, but that they (wisely, I think) decided to only foist upon its more dedicated—or, less charitably, masochistic—players.

Nor is this the first Souls or Souls-like game without fast travel, or very limited fast travel. Deck13’s The Surge games, for instance, do not have any form of fast travel. And it can be easy to forget that the first Dark Souls didn’t allow fast travel until halfway through the game, after you acquire the Lordvessel… the difference is that Dark Souls withholds the ability before granting it to you, while Lords of the Fallen grants you fast travel for a first play before taking it away. It’s the “taking away” part that really feels bad. But once you get past that psychological hangup, you realize that the game has given you all the tools you need to succeed.

I am also reminded of some lines from what has got to be my favorite written video game review ever, Tom Chick’s satirical review of Dragon’s Dogma, in which an imaginary EA executive and an EA usability tester named Jared criticize the game for its various design decisions, including this bit:

Jared wants to know why there isn’t any easy fast travel. He got all the way out to that place once, so why can’t he just teleport back out there whenever he wants to come back? What’s he supposed to do, actually go someplace every time he wants to go there?

A lack of fast travel sure is inconvenient at times, but sometimes there’s no substitute for making players hoof it. Speaking to Dragon’s Dogma, I remember thinking at the time that its world felt larger than Skyrim’s—even through the latter’s was objectively larger—simply because you were forced to actually travel it, rather than warp around from anywhere to anywhere.

Can I copy your homework?

If you think this has all sounded way too glowing so far, well, worry not. Because while there are places where Hexworks has made some bold and cool design decisions, in many other places it seems to have simply defaulted to doing things the way From Software has done them for no particularly good reason.

To give one really minor example that pretty well sums this up: it’s usual in the Souls games for “boss weapons” to only have half the number of upgrade levels, say ten instead of twenty, while making each of those upgrades twice as efficacious (this was the case in the first Dark Souls). And the exact same thing is true in Lords of the Fallen, in which boss weapons can be upgraded five times instead of ten. Why did they do this? I have no earthly idea. I’m not sure they do, either. Suffice it to say that if there is some baroque mechanic that has been perpetuated by From Software over the years upon the unsuspecting public, there’s a very good chance that it’s also in Lords of the Fallen, whether it makes much sense or not.

The burden of knowledge

For me, the most frustrating aspect that Hexworks has lifted from the Souls titles is its NPC quests, which are as opaque and convoluted as they’ve ever been in a game like this. There are all sorts of fail states for these things that players have no way of knowing about without resorting to a guide beforehand.

As one example, there’s a boss named “Lightreaper” who is supposed to kill you in a scripted death twice throughout the game before you finally confront and beat him near the end for real… and there are a couple of questlines that require calling NPCs to fight with you during this third, final encounter. But if you happen to actually beat him during one of those first two encounters—which is possible, though very difficult—you’ve actually screwed yourself out of finishing a quest. In that case, the player is punished for being too skillful.

In other cases, in order to advance a questline you’ll need to track down an NPC in different places throughout the world in a particular order… often without knowing even the general region they’ve gone to, or that you’re supposed to be looking for them at all.

Look, I get that quests like this which are more emergent and organic can theoretically be more impactful than just following objective markers and a quest journal. But sometimes what sounds good on paper doesn’t always work that well in practice. In fact, I’d argue that in some ways the prevalence of online guides has ruined this sort of thing for its more dedicated players.

For instance, I think of Demon’s Souls’ world tendency mechanic, which at first seemed neat, but that I eventually grew to hate. When you don’t know how it works, it seems like this cool dynamic system in which occasionally things change for inexplicable reasons (corresponding to pure white or pure black world tendency opening a locked door or spawning a new enemy), making the world seem alive. But as soon as you understand exactly how the system works, and the ways in which it can be manipulated, it becomes another awkward thing to manage and worry about, which includes doing things like killing yourself before you enter the world to save the world tendency from swinging toward black, etc.

All of that is to say: if I couldn’t just jump online and look this stuff up, I wouldn’t be burdened with the knowledge of all the stuff I’d missed, and hence wouldn’t know enough to care. But in a world in which I can jump on an online wiki, look at a list of equipment, and realize that I’d missed a cool weapon or spell I would’ve liked to use because I’d triggered some unknowable fail state in an NPC quest is… aggravating. So, yes, I and other players like me are partly doing this to ourselves. But that doesn’t actually mean that these quests need to be as obscure as they are, or be as easily fail-able as they are.

Other shortcomings

It should also be no surprise to people familiar with From Software’s games that even though Lords of the Fallen can be played offline, even then, you cannot pause the game. I mean, who would want a pause feature, right? You filthy casuals. Though, also like some From Software games, there's a sort of hack-y way to pause: enter the game’s photo mode. That will pause it! Somehow this seems to make the lack of a “legit” pause button even more galling, because it’s clearly not a hard thing to implement.

Meanwhile, enemy variety, while not the worst I’ve seen in a game like this, is far from stellar. More than once the game pulls the trick of having an early-game boss that becomes a standard enemy type later on (at least four times I can think of off the top of my head, and there are probably more I’m forgetting). And there are a lot of enemy types that just keep popping up in different zones throughout the game, the only difference being that they now deal more damage and can take more hits. They don’t even bother doing a palette swap.

The game also seems to fall into the trap, especially in the latter half, of increasing difficulty by simply throwing hordes of enemies at you at the same time, probably my least favorite form of difficulty in games like this. This is further exacerbated by the lock-on camera feeling just plain bad. Way too often I couldn’t get it to lock onto an enemy at all at first, and when this happens, clicking the R3 button instead has the effect of centering the camera in the direction my avatar is facing… which is often not looking directly at said enemy, so I end up losing track of them.

Finally, the UI feels rudimentary, clumsy, and lacks a lot of customization features. E.g., I was particularly annoyed that there was no option to stop the game from automatically equipping new consumable items to my hotbar, leading to me more than once using a newly acquired item when I had meant to quaff a healing potion. I also didn’t see any colorblind options, or other accessibility options.

Further quick-hit observations that I’m too lazy to organize better

• I don’t think I’ve played a game like this that had more i-frames on its dodge animations. Those i-frames seem to go on for days. Generally speaking, I approve. I don’t have the best twitch reflexes out there, and a little more lenience on this front feels good.

• Shields exist, but make the interesting compromise of (in most cases) not blocking anywhere near 100% of damage (more like 40% or 50%). Instead, the damage your shield lets through “withers” your health (i.e., turns it grey), which can then be leeched back fairly quickly from enemies… but if you’re hit once for real, all that “withered” health instantly disappears. Seems like a pretty decent system; it somewhat discourages the turtling method, incentivizing you to stay aggressive, but doesn’t actually preclude such defensive measures.

• I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about either the visuals or the audio. The game looks good, and sounds fine. I thought some of the voice acting was particularly good; there was one NPC speech at the end of a questline in which the guy basically went rapturously insane, and it was… quite compelling. (I wish I’d though to capture it so I could share, because it’s really something, but I didn’t, and haven’t been able to find an online video of that moment just yet. C’est la vie.)

• I hated the intro movie. It looked pretty enough, but came off as being the most bog-standard dark fantasy fare known to man. That’s too bad, because once you get into the game, the writing and characters get better. But the intro movie mostly just made me roll my eyes and sigh. It truly seemed like a case where they would have been better off explaining less at the start so as not to highlight how generic the overarching plot actually is (which is From Software’s true trick in their own stories, of course: relative incomprehensibility hides a multitude of other writing sins).

• Speaking of this intro cinematic, skipping it requires holding a button. Every. Time. And generally speaking, it feels like they make you hold a button in unnecessary places, then switch to a single press where you might reasonably want a hold. E.g., loading your game from the title screen also requires holding the button—when there are no real stakes. But when buying an item from a shop? Just a quick press, no hold or confirmation prompt there when you’re actually spending currency.

• A neat thing about creating a character build is that you’re not required to spread out your stat points nearly as much as in the typical Souls game. While all classes will want Vitality and Endurance for HP and stamina, all your other points can be concentrated in a single attack stat, if desired. E.g., there are weapons that require no stat except Radiance (i.e., “holy”)… no Strength or Agility needed. Finally, Hexworks takes this to a fairly crazy extreme by eventually granting you a rune that can be socketed into a weapon or shield in order to make it weigh nothing and require no stats. In my case, I turned the heaviest shield in the game, which normally weighs 50 pounds and requires 40 strength, into a shield that weighs zero pounds and requires zero strength. I love it. Feels like an overpowered Steam Workshop mod/hack, and yet this crazy thing is just built into the game.

All things considered, Lords of the Fallen is an entirely decent “one of those” that should please people who go in for that sort of thing, but it seems very unlikely to make converts of less masochistic players. Still, as From Software’s design sensibilities—both good and bad—continue to infect the rest of the world’s game developers like some sort of inexorable pandemic, this seems like another step along the road to a possible future in which some other studio makes “one of those” that is just as good or better than what From Software has done, and then might, just might, start to address some of its longstanding shortcomings and excesses.

The RE4 Remake has been out for about two weeks as I write this. I’ve had the time to play it through three times—twice on Standard and once on Professional with the Infinite Rocket Launcher in order to unlock some goodies (on the other side, I played the original RE4 around a half-dozen times near its release in 2005, and about once every one or two years ever since).

And so now seems like a good time to do a debrief/comparison of the original 2005 RE4 (hereafter “the OG”) and the new 2023 RE4 (hereafter “the Remake”).

This blog seems almost impossible to organize well, given that there are not only a bunch of individual elements I want to discuss, but that those elements interact in such important ways: I might like the design of an individual gameplay element on its own, but dislike how it affects the combined gameplay loop, or vice-versa. C’est la vie.

But because it will probably be easiest to digest, I’ve opted to go mostly with a simple listing of elements (with ensuing discussion for each) divided into categories: things I liked better in the Remake, things I liked better in the OG, and other “neutral” significant changes which I’m either ambivalent about, or whose implications are too multi-faceted for me to easily sort into simple “good” or “bad” buckets. After getting through all the individual changes, I’ll end with some concluding thoughts.

I’ll be going into excruciating detail about the mechanics, but this should be pretty light on spoilers. I’m not really interested in the story, graphics, specific encounters, etc., as I am in the general gameplay.

Improvements in the Remake

Weapon balance

Weapons need not always be well-balanced in a single-player game—there is a certain charm in progressing to clearly superior weapons partway through. That said, and especially given the sell-back economy of the original (see next section), in this instance I prefer having weapon options that offer genuinely different playstyles, as opposed to the OG’s clearly defined “winners” in each category.

In the OG, if you ended up with anything besides the Red9, the Striker, and the Semi-Auto Rifle—and the Broken Butterfly over the Killer7, if you bothered using a magnum—you were definitely an outlier. The biggest “real” choice was probably whether to opt in to the TMP or ignore it completely; ignoring it would save on upgrade costs and free up attaché case space.

In the Remake, there are interesting trade-offs to be had in pretty much every weapon category.

A lot of this has been achieved through a more complex system of aiming your weapons. The OG employed a laser sight for all guns except the rifles, with precision varying only in the amount that Leon’s hands shook. In the Remake, your aiming reticle dynamically changes depending on whether Leon is moving, and whether he’s actively shifting his aim. Standing still long enough, and aiming at the same place long enough, will lead to more precise shots.

So, for the pistols, the Red9 and Blacktail have so far still tended to be considered the best, ending at power ratings of 4.05 and 3.6, respectively—but even then, the Blacktail maintains better aim while moving and takes up less inventory space, while (with its stock) the Red9’s aim will recover more quickly when standing still and has a slight edge in power. Meanwhile, though, three of the other pistol options only have about half the power of these two, but can be fitted with a laser sight in the style of the OG that makes them perfectly accurate—a not inconsiderable advantage. The Punisher can also penetrate multiple enemies, while the default pistol and the Sentinel Nine get better crit chance.

Shotguns have arguably been even further differentiated than pistols by their precision rating. The early favorite shotgun in the Remake appears to be the Riot Gun, which has almost no spread and hence excels at targeting specific elite enemies, but is useless at knocking down groups. The Striker still offers the widest spread and hence the best ability for crowd control—along with its ridiculously huge drum magazine (48 shells) to save inventory space, since it obviates the need to actually carry any extra shells around—while the Skull Shaker has a tiny inventory footprint of only five spaces (compared to the Striker’s ten and the Riot Gun’s sixteen).

It should also be noted that the Remake allows for full upgrading of weapons much earlier than the OG ever did, including the “exclusive” upgrades, which further adds to the viability of certain weapons for fresh runs. E.g., in the OG the (bolt-action) Rifle’s exclusive upgrade changed its power from 12 to 30, easily eclipsing the Semi-Auto Rifle’s 15. But since this could only be done very late in the game, the Rifle ended up being a clearly inferior option.

Sell-back economy

In the Remake, any upgrades you make to a weapon (barring the exclusive upgrade) increase its sale price to the merchant by 95% of the upgrade cost. In the OG, upgrades only increased the sell price of guns by 50% of their cost. In short, the merchant was a lot stingier in the OG.

I never much liked this aspect of the OG. Among other things, in a typical play I wouldn’t buy the Rifle at all and would instead wait until the Semi-Auto Rifle was available, and (most egregiously) would not upgrade my shotgun until I was able to buy the Striker, just before fighting Verdugo—all because I didn’t want to burn money on upgrades for guns that I knew I wasn’t keeping.

It’s undeniably nice in the Remake to not have to worry that you’re flushing money down the toilet by upgrading your weapons of the moment.

Plagas differentiation

Both games share three plagas types: Guadaña (bladed tentacles), Mandíbula (big mouth), and Araña (spiders, undoubtedly inspired by the Alien films).

In the OG, they simply weren’t all that different. The tentacle types swung at you, the latter two types could both spit acid, and the spiders would detach upon the host’s death to continue attacking you—though these spiders by themselves simply weren’t all that threatening.

In the Remake, the differences are way more noticeable. The tentacle types are pretty much the same, and the mouth type still spits acid—but you also need to aim for its open mouth for it to be considered a weak point. Most notably, the spider types have been completely re-designed. Now instead of randomly bursting from ganados’ heads, they attach themselves to ganados’ backs, turning them ultra-aggressive and more resistant to stuns—and you’re incentivized to kill them quickly lest they keep chaining to a new host every time you down one. I appreciate the new dynamic, since the OG’s plagas types never felt different enough to justify their existence.

NG+

It's more or less indisputable that the OG never had a NG+ that was worth a damn. Carrying forward your upgraded weapons always sounded like a good time theoretically, but in practice enemy health had been balanced to account for your upgraded damage output throughout the game, so that going through the game again led to laughably easy encounters, including killing village ganados with a single Red9 bullet. Capcom apparently never thought of adjusting early-game enemy health in NG+ to account for the player’s newly overpowered equipment, and it led to new cycles being mostly a bore. (Frankly, I’m surprised that no one has ever created a mod that addresses this problem.)

The Remake still doesn’t adjust early-game enemy health to account for more powerful guns, but on the other hand, (1) fully upgraded weapons don’t feel as powerful in the Remake as they did in the OG, and (2) new cycles can be started on a higher difficulty setting, which is something that the original didn’t allow. So a player can start on Standard and then move to either Hardcore or Professional with all their equipment and items, allowing for a more appropriately balanced experience on a second cycle.

There are also enough weapons to buy and upgrade that completionist players will have a reason to play through the game multiple times, just to earn enough money to max them all. Worth noting that this is likewise only possible because the Remake allows the storing of unused weapons, whereas the original had no “item box” to keep unused equipment.

Ashley no longer needs healing

One could argue that Ashley having a health bar that needed to be replenished added to the stakes and tension, but the reality is that it was never fun to have to spend healing items on her—and particularly those yellow herbs. I'm good with health-bar-less Ashley.

No more disappearing drops

In the OG, any money, ammo, or health that was dropped by enemies would only remain on the ground for about a minute, at which point it would start flashing and soon disappear. In the Remake, all items dropped by enemies remain indefinitely, and even get added to your map. It's a nice quality-of-life feature—I really don't miss dropped items disappearing.

Things the OG did better

Consistency of staggers

If the Remake has a cardinal sin, to me it is undoubtedly its inconsistency when it comes to staggering enemies with headshots or foot/leg shots.

In the OG, a shot to the head or shin of a ganado would always put them in a melee-able state. In the Remake, a shot to the head will sometimes produce no noticeable reaction. Defenders of the Remake might argue that this randomness adds more challenge and realism, but these are not arguments that go very far with me. If I wanted realism in my games, my avatars would need to periodically use the restroom! In this instance I want consistency, so that I know that when I perform an action, I get a predictable result.

This stings all the more considering how core the headshot --> melee --> knife-them-while-they’re-down combo was in the OG... and still is in the Remake, for the most part, though the knife’s role in this loop has changed. But it definitely feels terrible when you just barely manage to get a headshot to a ganado just before he’s about to hit you... and then he powers through it and hits you anyway. Nothing about that feels good.

Leon’s movement/reload animations

The OG definitely didn’t have “realistic” movement. Leon could either walk or run, but either way there wasn’t any appreciable animation start-up time; he was either moving full-speed or he wasn’t. As such, it felt quite “snappy.” The Remake’s movement, by comparison, feels sluggish. It takes Leon quite a while to accelerate into a run, and the run button can feel unresponsive. @cikame compared this to Geralt’s movement from Witcher 3, and while I would contend that it ain’t quite that bad, the comparison is apt: specifically, the devs for the remake have abandoned movement that looks stiff but feels good for movement that looks good but feels unresponsive.

This is particularly noticeable given the continued importance of staggering ganados to set them up for melee attacks, because you want to quickly run forward to close the gap and do the kick animation. Further, this sluggishness and the aforementioned inconsistency with staggers end up feeding into each other: the slower movement leads you to want to accelerate toward your enemy as soon as a shot lands, which can lead to you beginning to run before being sure that your target is actually staggered, and contrary-wise, stopping to check whether an enemy is really staggered can lose you the extra second you need to successfully close the gap.

Similar to the lack of responsiveness of the run is a lack of responsiveness in reload animations. In the OG, Leon always had his equipped weapon held up and ready. In the Remake, he’ll sometimes put his weapons away, and/or randomly pull out his equipped weapon and seem to check it. The thing is, if you hit the reload button when a weapon is away, or when Leon is in one of his “checking” animations, it will often seem to lead to him just fully readying the gun without actually reloading it, meaning I find myself jamming on the reload button until it actually reloads, rather than just tapping it once. By comparison with the movement, this feels like a minor problem, but it’s more responsiveness lost to added cosmetic animations.

Ashley’s commands

In the OG, you could either tell Ashley to “follow,” or “wait,” both of which were pretty self-explanatory: she was either following very close behind you, or she remained exactly in the spot you left her.

In the Remake, there are still two commands for Ashley, but both of them have her following you. They’re “Tight” and “Loose.” In theory, “loose” seems to be the one that will keep Ashley further back behind you, away from danger. In practice, it seems to just make her movement more unpredictable, as she will still often end up near or in front of you, especially if you begin moving backwards. Overall, it feels like you have much less control of Ashley than you did in the OG. Couldn’t they have added “wait” as a third command, by, say, holding the “command” button?

Defenders of the Remake will want to point out that Ashley also doesn’t need healing items anymore (noted above), which is true enough. But I would argue that if she was as good a follower with the better control of the OG, such a concession wouldn’t have been necessary. For all that everyone and their mother professes to hate escort missions in games, Ashley in the OG always felt like one of the least burdensome followers in the history of video games. The new one feels like she gets into more trouble that’s beyond your control because you can no longer place her exactly where you want her, and because even in "tight" formation, she can end up lagging behind you more than she ever would in the OG.

Weapon role differentiation

This one is pretty subjective (I mean, most of this blog is, but this part especially so), but for me the OG’s weapon categories had very defined roles, which I liked, because I always knew which weapon I should be using for any given situation. In the Remake, however, there are some weapons that have been tweaked in functionality so that I’m not sure what they’re really for anymore, and/or I simply dislike the adjustment that’s been made. Admittedly some of this is counterbalanced by the fact that the Remake includes additional weapons with some special properties that offer alternative playstyles (see "Weapon balance," above), but not completely.

To quickly recap the OG: (1) Handguns were for headshots to set up melee staggers, (2) shotguns were for knocking down groups, (3) rifles were for long-range damage, (4) magnums were for pure DPS (usually for bosses), and (5) the TMP was the “designated” jack-of-all-trades gun, able to fill all these roles to a degree, but arguably unable to do any of them as well as its counterparts.

(There was also the Mine Thrower, but did anyone really use the Mine Thrower?)

I have two main beefs with the Remake: shotguns and rifles. But especially the shotguns.

I already mentioned above that the early fan favorite shotgun seems to be the Riot Gun, which effectively highlights the shotgun’s identity crisis, since it used to be all about knocking down groups, and here’s a shotgun with basically no spread, meant to pour damage into a single enemy. It basically ends up being a poor man’s magnum.

But I can’t really blame the community for preferring the Riot Gun this time around, since shotguns in the Remake have lost an important property from the OG: they used to shoot right through enemies and easily knock down whole groups. Now, even using the shotgun with the widest spread—the Striker—you’ll at best only knock down enemies directly in its line of site; if there are enemies behind the ones you’re shooting, even if they’re closely bunched, they won’t be affected. Add to this that there are more elites this time around who won’t be knocked down by a shotgun blast, like the chainsaw maniac (Dr. Salvador). All this means that using the wider-spread shotguns feels like a fool’s errand since they can’t even CC properly; better to just pour on the damage in a specific area, and hence the popularity of the Riot Gun.

In the OG, every shotgun shell represented a powerful ability to clear the space in front of you and give you some breathing room. In this game, if that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re going to need explosives, usually grenades. The shotgun seems to have lost most of its raison d'être and is now reserved for simply pouring damage into elites or popping close-range plagas heads.

Meanwhile, the rifles. In the Remake they do 3x damage on critical areas—or, more accurately, they do one-third of the damage they should do in non-critical areas—and so for all but the exclusive-upgraded bolt-action rifle, a shot to a non-critical area of an enemy will only do about as much damage as a Red9 bullet. So essentially you need to be hitting headshots with rifles, or you’re wasting your ammo.

While this is an effort at making the rifles’ role more defined... I’m just not a big fan of how they did it. The enemies are so much faster to rush you in this game anyway that the rifles become difficult to use except at quite long ranges, so I don’t think it would have hurt anything to allow them to do better damage everywhere, regardless of whether you land a head-shot or not. I also just don’t like the weird arbitrariness of it, or that critical areas aren’t always well-communicated (Mendez comes to mind, as do the mouth-type plagas), which can lead to you unknowingly wasting ammo.

The one bit of weapon role differentiation I like in the Remake is the already-mentioned changes in aiming/accuracy (see above under “Weapon balance”). E.g., in the original the TMP could be as accurate for headshots as the pistol, but now the spread is crap enough that it’s found its niche as a mid-range body-shot gun, rather than just an automatic-firing pistol replacement with lower damage and a bigger clip.

Toss-up changes

Difficulty options

The OG famously featured a dynamically adjusting difficulty for both Easy and Normal modes, which shouldn’t be underestimated when talking about its mainstream success. This dynamic difficulty seems to have been tuned just right, so that basically everyone playing it felt like it was the right amount of difficulty for them. Meanwhile, playing on Professional difficulty essentially just turned all the dials from Normal up to their peak levels, keeping the challenge static no matter how well or poorly a player was performing.

The Remake, by contrast, appears to have jettisoned the whole dynamic difficulty mechanic. Instead, it has settled for four static difficulty settings, and on balance they’re harder than the OG was.

I would hold that new players benefit hugely from the OG’s perfectly tuned invisible dynamic settings for a first play; it was part of the OG’s magic. But for someone like me who has played the OG somewhere between a dozen and two dozen times—and always played on Professional when available—that dynamic difficulty is a lot less interesting for repeat plays.

Shooting Range expansion/Charm system

The shooting range in the OG was kind of a throw-away thing. It was quite easy to get the maximum scores needed for the rewards—which were some cosmetic “bottle caps” and cash. In the Remake, the shooting range is more elaborate and is your primary source of gold and silver tokens, which can be used to acquire charms—which grant various positive effects when attached to your attache case (you can have up to three equipped at once, and they can only be switched out at typewriters). Anyway, the shooting range was fine to do once, but I don’t love the need to keep repeating it on subsequent plays; it ain’t that fun.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about charms, both in how you get them and how they function.

Let’s start with acquisition. You acquire charms by putting three tokens into what resembles a gumball machine in the shooting gallery. It spits out a random charm, one of about thirty in the game. But when I say “random,” I mean “based on a seed number,” which I kind of hate. Those who have been playing Monster Hunter since Tri and know what “charm tables” are in that game know what I’m talking about, and that Capcom for some reason loves pulling this crap.

Basically, you get to choose any combination of three gold or silver tokens to put in the machine, meaning there are exactly four combinations: all silver, all gold, one silver-two gold, or two-silver one-gold. Together these constitute four separate “tracks” predetermined by a seed number that’s generated when you start your run. It means that if you put in three gold tokens five times in a row and get charms A, B, C, D, E, then reloading the game and trying again will always give you the exact same results... at least until you switch difficulties and get a new seed. As a result, I’ve played through the game through three cycles on one file, and I still haven’t acquired all charms, even after saving, reloading, and checking the results of all four “tracks” (I have a spreadsheet with the results on it!). Nor is there any way to guarantee yourself an important one on a fresh file.

It would have been nice—if Capcom is going to be so insistent about employing this type of randomness in their games—if they had also created a system that allowed you to trade duplicate charms for others that you don’t already have. That would have at least guaranteed that you could be working toward something worthwhile, rather than be stuck with a crappy seed that’s not giving you anything you want. God forbid you’re not doing what I’m doing and gaming the system as much as possible, or you’d really never get anything good.

Beyond acquisition, actually using some of the charms feels needlessly fiddly, for a number of reasons.

The chief one is that a majority of charms are used either to craft greater amounts of ammo or grant you cheaper prices at the merchant (or better sale prices to the merchant). Frankly, I don’t see why they make you go through the rigamarole of equipping and unequipping these things at all. The merchant by definition is always next to a typewriter, and so you always have the ability to switch charms out before interacting with him. So why do I need to actually switch my charm to the one that makes ammo sell for 40% more? Can’t he just see that I have it? This type of switching has more than once led me to accidentally heading off and not realizing until later that I had forgotten to switch my active charms back on (like increased movement speed, higher melee crit chance, 50% more healing from green herbs).

I also wish that all the ammo crafting charms simply gave you small, guaranteed increases to crafted ammo, rather than being a percentage-based chance to give you good-sized amount. The latter, rather than make me grateful when I get the bonus, just leaves me feeling screwed when I don’t. It can also be gamed by simply saving before you do it, and reloading until you get the result you want. Rather than that, why not change these things to a smaller, set increase?

Knife durability

I wrote a whole blog pre-release about how much I objected to knife durability on principle, given how core the knife was to the OG’s high-level combat loop. After playing the Remake a fair bit, all of the knife changes are too complex to write off as simply bad; it’s just very different. You can parry with it, you can instant finish with it, you can stealth kill, you can craft bolts with disposable knives, none of which were things in the OG.

I mentioned above, in the section "Consistency of staggers," that the knife's role in the combat loop has fundamentally changed. In the OG, it was headshot --> melee --> slash-at-them-while-they’re-down... that last step being a thing largely because the knife wasn't a finite resource like your guns' ammo. It didn't cost anything, and RE4 is nothing if not a game about trying to conserve your ammunition.

But in the Remake, there's no longer any "free lunch" to be had: using the knife costs durability that will need to be repaired. In general, it seems like that durability is best spent on doing instant kill animations—stealth kills or stopping plagas heads from popping when a ganado starts writhing on the ground—or parrying/escaping from grabs. Randomly slashing with it is pretty much the least useful thing your knife does in the Remake. And the knife's changed function(s) has implications all the way up and down the combat loop. In truth, ganados are so much faster and more aggressive in this game that even with an infinite durability knife, it's hard to do follow-up slashes on downed opponents in the same way as the OG without getting constantly grabbed by other enemies rushing toward you.

Anyway, it would be fair to say that I still find knives as a disposable resource kind of annoying, and the idea of carrying around three different kitchen knives a little ridiculous. I also mostly avoided using my primary knife on my first play because I objected to the idea of spending money to repair it—probably more of a “me” problem there, but that’s how I felt, I wanted the maximum amount of money going toward upgrades. Now that I have the infinite-durability knife available, I’ve more or less opted out of the mechanic, and don’t feel the least bit bad about it.

I do wish that the instant-finishers when a ganado is writhing on the ground, about to pop a plagas head, were a little more generous with the area of the prompt. If you’re not standing in the right place and looking at them at the right angle, you’ll end up just swiping down at them. I’ve missed a lot of finishers over my three plays due to that—it can be harder to manage than you’d think with the aforementioned sluggish movement and overall faster and more aggressive enemies surrounding you.

Parrying

Parrying is of course entirely new, and very powerful. Arguably it was needed as a way to balance a game that’s faster-paced in general and that has otherwise decreased Leon’s ability to manage groups (see the discussion of the shotgun above, under "Weapon role differentiation"). It’s not a cure-all, since some attacks need to be dodged rather than countered, and it does use some durability. But it’s rather easy to do on all difficulty settings except the highest, which has much tighter parry timing (I never really got that timing down, but admittedly I didn’t get much practice since I was running through it with the Infinite Rocket Launcher). I guess I don’t mind it as a new way to fend off enemies, and to add depth and a new skill dimension to the gameplay... but I’d trade it away in a second if I could have the OG’s shotguns back.

Ammo crafting

I’d said in an earlier thread that I liked the idea of ammo crafting in principle. In practice, I’m a little more middling about it. I don’t love that it takes two elements—resources and gunpowder—and that you almost by definition will always have more of one than you have of the other. Further, these crafting elements together take up more space than the ammo they produce, which if you’re hoarding them becomes awkward... a thing you might want to do particularly if you’re looking to first get charms to take better advantage of the system. So, yeah, more flexible, sure, but there’s a part of me that wishes they’d just stuck to plain ammo drops just to make it all less fiddly.

Stealth

So, uh, there’s stealth in the Remake. I suppose. In reality there are only two or three sections in the whole game where stealth seems to matter much, since without it you get alarms and a bigger crowd scene than you’d have otherwise. But RE4 was always an action game primarily, and I can’t say that the stealth actually feels that good, particularly since Leon’s crouch walk feels very slow. It’s pretty half-assed and I’d really rather just shoot things anyway. At least I can mostly ignore it.

Ganados vs other/elite balance

It’s pretty undeniable that the Remake’s ganados—which are most of the enemies you fight—are much more difficult and capable opponents than they ever were in the OG. They’re faster, more aggressive, and move more unpredictably. It’s way easier for them to overwhelm you, not to mention that it’s also way easier to miss those all-important headshots as they barrel towards you.

What surprised me a little bit about the Remake is that a lot of the non-ganado enemies actually seemed easier than they were in the OG. The dogs, for instance, can now be handled by a few shots with Red9 or Blacktail bullets (at least until they pop a plagas), and the same for the flying insects, whereas before pistol bullets wouldn’t even faze either one, and you’d usually want a shotgun. The main exception as far as elites being generally easier—or at least not much harder—is the regeneradors (see below).

But it’s worth noting that—largely due to the difficulty of the ganados, your most frequent opponents—the Remake is simply harder than the OG, even on Standard difficulty. And while I’m generally a fan of hard games—the Souls and Monster Hunter games are some of my all-time favorites—harder isn’t always better. The line between a game being engagingly challenging versus feeling like a bit of a slog can be a thin one, and there was a definite appeal to the OG's slower, more predictable ganados.

Regeneradors

Boy are these things harder now. The main thing about them in the OG was that they never came at you any more quickly than a slow walk. Now they can run about as fast as Leon can, and sometimes will slide to the ground and slither toward you, making their parasites almost impossible to hit. I mean, they’re definitely way more terrifying, but arguably just annoyingly so, especially since the hitboxes on those parasites feel even less generous than before on top of the increased movement speed of their hosts.

Requests

The Remake has added a whole “request” system to earn spinels, which are now a currency used to trade for some things that can’t be bought with money. I don’t mind it as a concept, but in execution it leaves something to be desired. The (three?) “strong threat” missions are interesting challenges against tough opponents, but the others all consist of killing rats, or shooting medallions, or selling collectibles, which all feel like useless videogame busywork.

Concluding thoughts

Oh, wow, you’re still here. Good on you for reading about 5,000 words of excruciatingly specific RE4 gameplay analysis. Hopefully you actually got something worthwhile out of it, even if only to help clarify your own opinions.

A lot of the discourse surrounding the game leading up to the release concerned whether a remake was really necessary. Spoiler: it wasn’t. It’s undeniable that not only was this Remake much less of a departure from the original than the other RE remakes have been, but that the OG RE4 remains a compelling game experience even eighteen years later, as evidenced by its re-release on practically every platform in existence, even recently in VR! It didn’t need a remake. But Capcom was pretty sure that it would make a lot of money, and it sure seems to be doing that.

I can’t say that I’m hugely surprised to see what appears to be a majority of people saying that the Remake is superior to the original, or even that there’s now no reason to play the OG aside from “historical value.” I very much disagree, but I’m not surprised. For those who have enough distance from the original, or who dip into it for only a few minutes for quick comparison purposes and notice the tank controls and clearly inferior technical graphics, etc., the OG might seem fairly easy to write off. The truth is that the Remake and the OG are very different experiences, despite all the surface-level similarities—which is hopefully something that’s come across in this blog. That difference is a good thing, since we really didn’t need a carbon copy of the OG RE4... we’ve already got the fan HD remaster for that.

But the question that keeps coming to my mind in thinking about these two games is this: the original RE4 was released eighteen years ago, and I—and a fair number of other RE4 devotees—am still playing it today (hell, I played it through yet again in preparation for the Remake just a month or so ago). Will the Remake still be played to any appreciable degree in eighteen years?

In a sense, this is a ridiculously unfair question for the Remake, because while I have difficulty imagining that it will still be receiving any appreciable attention two decades from now in the same way that the OG has, this actually has little to do with the Remake’s merits. The problem is that the OG had a huge impact and influence on the gaming world, spawning such third-person action games as Gears of War and Dead Space, and influencing countless others.

By comparison, the Remake does nothing drastically new, and it was never supposed to. It’s a very polished big-budget video game that has reviewed and sold very well, and will probably also do well come this year’s awards season... and then I suspect we shall all move on to the next thing, because ultimately this is another one of those. We’ve seen this before, and not just because it’s a remake, but because it exists in the wake of eighteen years of the original’s influence... not to mention that Capcom is likely to continue to make more like it.

All of this means that the OG will almost certainly end up being more enduring, and it’s self-evidently more “important” in the history of video games than the Remake will ever be... but that doesn’t actually help us decide which one is a more compelling gameplay experience.

Does it?

Maybe I just have Stockholm syndrome. There are rose-tinted glasses, and then there are rose-tinted glasses. There are the kind that you peer through to a fond experience from eighteen years ago, and they make the heart grow fonder, or at least dull the memory of the imperfections. And then there are the kind that you peer through to an experience that you’ve never stopped having, so that you know every peak and valley like the back of your hand, until they’ve all become old and dear friends.

I am wearing the latter pair of glasses. They’re fused to my face and I can’t take them off. I’ve never really stopped playing RE4 since it first came out, and as a result, it’s impossible for me to be all that objective about it—though true objectivity when it comes to the experience of an entertainment product is, of course, sheer illusion. Nonetheless, the fact that RE4 is one of only three games to which I continue to return with some frequency after two decades says something.

I continue to believe, fully cognizant of my bias, that the original has a magic that the Remake didn’t quite manage to replicate, great as it may be in itself. Part of that is the context, as described above, but not all. The original was a once-in-a-generation type of game whose gameplay was almost unfathomably well-tuned, some of the pieces imperfect on their own, but combining to create a near-perfect whole. Given its troubled development history, and that even Shinji Mikami hasn't been able to replicate it since, I chalk a lot of that up to a very happy accident.

The thing I will always remember about first playing RE4 is that I bought it at release despite not even owning a Gamecube. I was in college at the time and living in the dorms. I knew a guy who had a Gamecube and would be gone for the weekend. And so that first day, I sat down to play, with a few other guys just sitting there watching. I ended up playing for eleven straight hours without stopping to eat... and my audience seemed almost as enraptured as I was. At the time, there truly was nothing else like it. It was the video game equivalent of seeing God.

I’ve only had a handful of experiences with games that were that intense, and in every instance I can think of, it was an experience of something genuinely new that inspired genuine awe—like the first time my cousin showed my brother and I his new Playstation, or the first time I played Demon’s Souls. In that sense, I knew right from the word “go” that the RE4 Remake could never give me that same feeling that the original gave me, and that I still see echoes of through those rose-tinted glasses of mine.

The Remake never really stood a chance.

The free new mode is out for Hitman 3 (now renamed to Hitman: World of Assassination), and I'd been looking forward to it since it was announced early last year as something that might help reinvigorate my interest in the game. I love Hitman, but at some point you've done everything there is to do.

I've spent a few hours playing it today and have some thoughts.

For the most part, I think the mode does work, and definitely does drive me forward in a way that the previous story missions didn't really do.

I mean, the story mode is great, but with the mastery system, the game was pushing you to replay each mission over and over again in order to get all the different little in-mission achievements so that your mastery would go up. At the same time, most of your equipment unlocks in the old story started to become irrelevant pretty quickly, because there were a lot of copies, and a lot of items that just weren't that useful (e.g., assault rifles and shotguns in a game that doesn't really want you to go loud in the first place)... the useful unlocks you were earning were tied to the missions themselves, such as starting disguises or dead drop locations.

In Freelancer, with each mission you're both earning XP to level up your safehouse, and earning a currency ("merces") to buy equipment (merces can only be spent with vendors in-mission, as far as I can tell there is no way to buy stuff at your safehouse). Both currencies provide you a long-term goal and make you feel like you are actually building Agent 47's career, rather than being swept along by the story.

As far as I can tell, the safehouse unlocks are all cosmetic. At the beginning most rooms are locked, but as you progress you get to enter a dressing room to check out your suits, go upstairs (you start in your basement), and even walk around outside (and go fishing!). At first most of the house is filled with cardboard boxes and the like, which as you level up can be replaced with actual furniture. That part is kind of neat... it's like doing these missions is helping Agent 47 to move in.

There's also an elusive-target-like tension, because the stakes are high. Failing a mission will halve your current merces, and you'll also lose all your assassination tools. There's no re-trying in this mode, so it encourages more careful play than the base game, which could be save-scummed to oblivion. It's nice that skilled play and patience actually matter here; I suspect it will make me a better player.

But I don't think it's a perfect mode. There are definitely things I'd like to see added or done differently.

Probably my biggest beef has to do with the importance of the nominally optional "objectives." Each mission will have a number of different things you can do that will earn you extra merces; this can be somewhat controlled by which syndicate you decide to attack, as each one will pull from a different pool of objectives. One might be poison-themed, another sniper-themed, another one suit-only-themed. The thing is, though, that these objectives are worth massively more than you'll get for simply completing the mission. E.g., you'll have three objectives that each reward 1,000 merces... while the amount you get for completing the mission is only 200.

They've also made some decisions about equipment that tie back into some of my problems with the big focus on doing the objectives. In order to make the items you can buy from on-mission vendors more valuable, much of the equipment that you could previously acquire on-site has been removed from the stages, like poisons. Moreover, items like poisons are one-time use; if you assassinate someone with a lethal poison vial or a syringe, then that vial/syringe is gone and can't be used for the next mission. Well, all of this together creates situations where one of the mission objectives might be to kill a target with lethal poison... and yet you don't have any lethal poison and have no means to get any. Maybe the in-mission vendor will have it in their inventory, but very likely not.

Getting equipment you want can definitely be an issue. A specific problem I had at the beginning was that you start with no lockpick, which in the base game was a tool I was basically never without, and I felt seriously handicapped until it finally showed up in the vendor's inventory. And there simply seems like there's no way to target a particular piece of equipment you really want to have... including my beloved Krugermeier pistol.

Finally, and somewhat bizarrely, Freelancer mode seems to have dispensed altogether with the dead drops and starting locations mechanics from the base game, when it seems like something they should instead be leaning into. In Freelancer, when you start a mission, you always start in your suit, and your starting location is random... and you can end up in some pretty strange places, considering. E.g., I played a mission on Dartmoor in which I started on the third-floor balcony... even though people who aren't mansion staff aren't allowed up on that floor at all. Instead of starting you in random locations, why not allow you to pick starting locations, or purchase them for merces? And why can't you build a closet of disguises to start with just like you can build an arsenal of weapons and tools?

All of that said, and while I've focused a lot on the negatives, Freelancer mode is still an awfully nice addition to Hitman that feels like it fits the core conceit like a glove. I've always liked rogue-lites, and it's nice to feel that your hard work assassinating people has a more tangible benefit by rewarding you with better tools, better weapons, a swankier pad, and... money (is it just me, or is it weird that that there wasn't money in this game before now? What was Agent 47 killing people for previously, anyway?). It leaves you feeling that there's always more to be accomplished, while the punishment for failure keeps the whole thing tense.

So, if you'd gotten bored with Hitman over the years, like I had (that first game was released in 2016, remember, and the formula hadn't really changed at all until now), then you might consider giving it another shot, seeing as it's a free update and all. I only hope that at some point they make a few adjustments in line with some of my complaints, though maybe some of my thinking on these issues will evolve as I keep playing. We shall see, on both counts.

I’ve always voted in the GB Community GOTY poll, but have never actually posted my own list. Partly that’s because I’ve rarely had ten games that I’ve felt that good about in a single year (not that these things actually need to have exactly ten games), and I’ve also usually felt like I had little to add to the discussion, and that there were too many things I had never gotten around to playing.

But for whatever reason, I feel like there was a critical mass of interesting games this year about which I have Things To Say (though technically, not everything on this list was released this year; I’ll get to that). Some of these have already been topics of blogs of mine, or other long forum posts. Yeah, there are still plenty of games I’d probably like that I just didn’t get around to, like Signalis and Pentiment. But I don’t actually cover games for a living, so I’m going to give myself a pass and just post about the games of this year that I liked best, or that most occupied my brain.

Without further preamble, here are my top ten games of 2022 (or, uh... sort of 2022 in some cases!)

10/The (Dis?)Honorable Mention. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

OK, look, I know I just said this was a top ten list, but in truth I’m so conflicted about Stranger of Paradise that I considered just leaving it off and making this a top nine, or else slotting in Dying Light 2, which was pretty much the definition of “meh.” But I decided to include it here as an interesting train wreck.

I was initially pretty high on this game based on a demo released around E3 2021, especially since I’m a big Nioh fan and this basically looked like Nioh by way of Final Fantasy. Then the game got an early release demo that left me a lot more skeptical. The story seemed cringe bad, the graphics were terrible, and even the gameplay felt like it had taken a step back from the earlier demo.

I later picked the game up on a sale, played until I saw credits, and even finished the first post-game DLC. The core combat remains pretty darned enjoyable, which is its only real saving grace. Literally everything else about the game feels like a trash fire.

Though the final portions of the game’s story did explain why the first three-quarters of it felt so weird and stilted, it didn’t actually make those earlier portions good. The graphics and environments both on a technical and artistic side left a lot to be desired. The gear churn was a pain to manage and was never well-explained... e.g., I was into the post-game before I realized that gear level mattered way more than job affinities. And the game did this maddening thing where it would tank your max MP when you died (which you used for all your non-basic attacks), which was fine except that it meant that if you died to a boss, you were at a disadvantage for every subsequent attempt. Also, the post-game grind was... way too grindy. A second post-game DLC was released in late October that I have no real desire to play.

All that said, I did sink a lot of hours into it, and the combat remained good. You just have to be ready to ignore pretty much every other aspect of it. I live in hope that Wo Long and Rise of the Ronin (the two known upcoming Team Ninja joints) will be better. Maybe the problem was catering to the FF license and Square’s involvement. One can hope.

9. Salt & Sacrifice

I wrote a blog/review of this game back when it came out, so if you want my extended thoughts on it, you can check that out.

The short version is that it’s the latest game from indie developer genius James Silva, and there are aspects of it that I really like. Silva still really knows how to do 2D action combat well. It also looks pretty good. But a lot of the other elements come off as pretty half-baked.

For instance, the skill tree system discourages weapon experimentation by forcing you to spend XP to unlock the ability to even use other weapons. The Monster Hunter-like system of hunting mages and making funny hats out of their skin was stymied by the lack of a good way to target the mage you wanted to hunt. And some of the game’s UI and other systems were very, very poor.

I did platinum the game and spent some fifty hours on it, and if you’re a fan of Silva’s previous efforts, you’ll probably still like this. It’s a 7/10 sort of game that will still hit for the crowd it’s catering to (it’s a “Jason game”), but it could have been so much better than it turned out to be.

8. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

Enter the first game of this list that only sort of came out this year (and the next three also have this problem, but this is my list, so I can cheat all I want). Basically a big expansion pack on the game that was first release in 2013 (itself a stand-alone version of a Half-Life 2 mod released in 2011), my biggest worry about this new version was that the added material would lean too heavily on a meta-narrative that was external to the game itself, e.g., discourse surrounding the game that a neophyte couldn’t possibly get without outside reading.

The reason I worried about this is that The Stanley Parable is one of those very few games that I feel inclined to show to people who wouldn’t normally play games at all. Especially so since at the time I had entered a philosophy-adjacent PhD program (I’ve since earned the degree!) and had lots of people around me who would be interested in this type of navel-gazey meta-narrative about the nature of narrative in games. But if the new version did nothing other than refer to a cultural conversation from a decade ago that a new player couldn’t access, it would’ve dampened the appeal.

For the most part, this didn’t prove to be a big problem. Yeah, there’s that section of “New Content” that looks at Steam reviews, but that’s not actually any worse than the bits when it loads you into Portal or Minecraft. There were always going to be a few things in there that not everyone will get. But it’s pretty much as delightful a thing as it was before. I definitely laughed a few times about the damned bucket. What a stupid but wonderfully played recurring gag. All in all, still a game worth experiencing, and if you’ve never played it before, no reason not to start with this newer version, it’s just more of a game that was already a classic.

7. Deep Rock Galactic

Yeah, I know, Deep Rock Galactic didn’t really come out this year, it got released in mid-2020 after being in early access for a few years. But it came to Playstation consoles in early 2022 as a free PS+ game, and that’s where I ended up getting it, so for me it was released in 2022. So there!

Funnily enough, I have a friend group that I usually play such clearly multiplayer-focused titles with, but I couldn’t really get them interested in it. I played a little with one other buddy, but for the most part I played it by myself... on easy.

I know that this game is going to be best with a full squad and set on a difficulty level that actually requires some team coordination, but it says something about how good it is that I’ve actually found it to be quite a delightful, chill solo experience on the lowest difficulty setting, which basically allows you to ignore the combat altogether. I just put a TV show on a second screen and go out and mine stuff. Very satisfying.

I’ve ended up playing it enough that I’ve promoted all four classes at least twice, and for now I’m still going. And I still haven’t spent a cent and don’t feel at all like I need to. Pretty good for no money spent. I should probably buy one of their cosmetic DLCs at some point just to support the devs, they deserve it.

6. Resident Evil 4 HD Project

Sure, if RE4 was a human, it would now have at least its provisional driver’s license and have reached the age of consent in some states/countries (just in case you’ve ever wanted to legally fuck RE4—I mean, I wouldn’t blame you, it’s devastatingly handsome). Anyway, it is most definitely not a 2022 game. However, the 2022 fan-made graphical overhaul was released this year, so I’m including it on my list based on that.

I did a blog about the mod upon its release, so check that out if you’re interested, I included lots of screenshots with it. The really amazing thing about it is how true it stays to the original game. It’s the most impressive fan remaster of a game I’ve ever seen, and it couldn’t have been done for a more worthy title. It’s easily one of my all-time favorites, one I replay regularly even seventeen years later.

Also, there’s probably never been a better time to play this gem if for some reason you’ve never experienced it, because the remake is coming out in March next year, and you may as well play the original and be ready for the ensuing conversation when that happens (you’d need to pay for the Steam version of the game, but the mod itself is free). I wrote another blog about a particular aspect of this upcoming remake that I don’t like (knife durability), which should tell you something about how deeply in love I am with the original.

5. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

And here’s the final entry on my list that was only sort of released this year. The original game was a 2021 joint, and Sunbreak is the obligatory G-rank expansion that came out this June. I’ve played every North American release of the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP and it’s one of my favorite series of games ever, so it’s no great surprise that it’s on my list. That said, I had some problems with this game that kept it from being any higher.

This expansion did add some interesting new things that have never been in the series before, most notably a system that allowed you to modify the stats and skills of individual armor pieces, which really helps create interest for the end-game grind. But my big problem with it is that they’ve artificially inflated that end-game grind in a way that the series mostly hadn’t done before.

In all MH games prior to World, you were limited in what hunts you could attempt only by completion of a few key/urgent quests and your own skill and equipment. World was the first game to start restricting a lot of content behind your Hunter Rank, and when its own G-rank expansion hit (Iceborne), it added a whole other meter, Master Rank, which essentially reset everyone’s progress to zero, even if you’d already sunk over 500 hours into the base game. Suddenly you had to fill up this arbitrary meter in order to do all the content you wanted to do, which could take many, many hours of playing content you’d already mastered.

Sunbreak amps this problem up to eleven. They not only did the same BS Master Rank thing, but the subsequent title updates have added a third stupid meter (the “Anomaly Investigation Rank” meter) that again needs to be filled in order to access fights and materials that you need to make the new stuff. The most recent third title update raised the cap on this meter from 120 to 200, and some materials can’t be accessed until you hit level 181. Well, to go from 120 to 181 is going to take you at least 30 hours, probably a lot longer.

Seriously, fuck that. It’s so unnecessary. Here they’ve already added an armor randomization system that acts as a sufficient carrot for end-game play, and yet they still feel the need to do this BS grind padding nonsense as if they’re trying to stop you from playing any other video game. Dudes, I have other things to be doing. This is just making me burned out on your game. Fucking stop it.

All of that said, it’s still Monster Hunter, and I’m still a series devotee. It just means that next time I’ll likely end up buying any new entries on PC and seeing if I can cheat my way past some of the arbitrary gate-keepy meter nonsense.

4. Vampire Survivors

And now we’re on to the games of 2022 that I feel the most strongly about, and that, aside from the fact that Vampire Survivors and Rogue Legacy 2 came out in early access in prior years, everyone can pretty much agree actually came out in 2022.

I first heard about Vampire Survivors in early March from my brother. The $3 price point made me figure, “why not?” Soon I was as hooked as a lot of people seemed to be, and started the first GB forum thread on it. It’s a little hard to explain why it seems so compelling. The throwback Castlevania-like pixel art and the sound design and the easy mowing-down of hordes of enemies seem to all be surgically aimed at releasing endorphins from players’ addled brains. Maybe if this had been around in 1991 it could have supplied the graphics for that one mind-control game in Star Trek: TNG.

The reason this one doesn’t go any higher than fourth on my list is that I haven’t felt particularly compelled to keep playing it after finishing all the content. It’s still an enjoyable time-waster, but I did the thing most people did during early access, which was to earn all the new achievements being added every week or two and then waiting for the next update. Now that it’s content complete, I have other things to be playing (although there’s a $2 DLC coming... looking forward to that, actually!). And as others have pointed out, this feels like a game that will be spawning plenty of clones (it already has), and eventually we’ll probably end up with something similar that we can all agree is even better. Looking forward to that as well.

3. God of War: Ragnarök

I really liked that 2018 game, so it seemed pretty certain that I’d really like this sequel as well. And I sure did. My fuller thoughts can be found in a long forum post here, including lots of (marked) story spoilers.

The short version is that I did have a few problems with it. Gameplay-wise, I found the camera and the lock-on system to be a real mess. As for the story, it really dragged in some portions, particularly the early Atreus sections (the second one especially).

But for the most part, I really loved this thing. Camera aside, the combat was great and some moments of the story were genuinely affecting, and it certainly featured some great acting and interesting characters (Thor and Odin were definite stand-outs). It was good enough that after I finished it, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself for the next day or so. As big a game as it was (took me about 70 hours to platinum the thing on the highest difficulty), I was left wanting even more, it just got stuck in my brain for a bit. Hoping they’ll patch in a NG+ eventually like they did for the last game, because I’d definitely be up for another go-around.

2. Rogue Legacy 2

In a lot of other years this would have been my GOTY. I’ve currently sunk 240 hours into it, and I don’t think I’m done playing it. I’ve even created a second profile to start from scratch since I began in early access and wanted to see what the early game felt like on the 1.0 release.

Here again I wrote a blog for the release, and I’d encourage you to read that if you want my fuller thoughts. The short version is that it massively improves on the original in literally every way, so much so that the first game may as well be thrown upon the ash heap of history and never played by anyone ever again. The new classes and mechanics add so much variety that was never there before, the controls feel tight and responsive, it’s got lots of accessibility options to customize the experience, and lots of upgrades to play for. It’s just a joy to play. I really can’t say enough good things about it. If you enjoy stuff like Hades, you owe it to yourself to give this one a shot.

One bit of trivia worth noting for GB specifically. The Quick Look of Rogue Legacy 2 ended up being Jeff Gerstmann’s last for the site. At least he ended up going out on a good one.

1. Elden Ring

I’m not really sure what there is to be said about Elden Ring that hasn’t been said already. As I’d noted previously, there’s just no way that 2022 is going to be remembered in the popular consciousness as anything other than the year of Elden Ring, a sentiment seemingly cemented yesterday when it won GOTY at TGA. It came out and just massively outperformed all of From Software’s previous efforts, sales-wise.

The real question with Elden Ring prior to release wasn’t whether it would be a good game. We already knew it would be, FS is simply not a developer that fumbles these things. The question was how good their “open world” would be and how well it would mesh with the established Soulsborne formula. And the broad consensus ended up being: pretty damn well. The most oft-repeated sentiment was that it helped alleviate the “walls” of previous Souls-like games, because if you ran into something you couldn’t beat, then you could just run off in another direction and do something else for a while. Or you could take this to an extreme and “break” the game for yourself. Either way, it felt like a game that, more than any of FS’s other recent efforts, let you approach it the way you wanted to.

I know that some people felt it was a little too long. But for my part, I relished every moment. It was only in the second half of a second playthrough I was doing with a friend that I started feeling a little fatigue. Even so, I’m looking forward to playing what I assume is an inevitable paid DLC (all the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne had paid DLC, only Demon’s and Sekiro didn’t, and this game sold too many copies for them not to do something). I’ve resisted entering NG+ specifically so I don’t miss out on playing new content on the first cycle.

It'll be interesting to see where Elden Ring ultimately lands on various all-time best games lists in the coming years. The original Dark Souls has topped a lot of those lists in recent times, and yet there is a definite argument to be made that Elden Ring is FS’s best effort in this genre (which is not to say there aren’t strong arguments for other entries as well). It seems too early for such a coronation; it needs to simmer a little longer in the collective consciousness. That said, it’s not every year that a game comes out that looks like a serious contender for that crown. And speaking only for myself—as someone who’s been a From Software fan since their mid-90s King’s Field games and bought a PS3 specifically to play Demon’s Souls—Elden Ring was always going to claim this top spot of 2022 for me in the end.

(I do feel a little bad for Rogue Legacy 2 and some of the other games that got done dirty by releasing near the Elden Ring release window. I certainly wish RL2 all the success in the world, and hope that it’ll get some good attention during the award season, even if it sadly didn’t get any at TGA... big oversight there.)

In two words: knife durability.

I already didn’t this mechanic in the RE2 remake, but bringing it into RE4 is manifestly more egregious because it fundamentally clashes with the gameplay loop and mechanics in a way that it didn’t in RE2. My aim here is to explain why that’s the case.

But first let’s look at how knives worked in the other RE games and the changes in the design that happened.

Early RE

The design intent of the knife in the early RE games was very straightforward: it was a weapon of last resort. It assured that you always had some offensive potential even if you’d used up all your ammo, though it was generally an extraordinarily weak/bad option. And it was often dangerous to use for ammo conservation even on downed enemies (remember those RE1 zombies biting your feet after you’d shot them?).

Then something interesting happened. The first RE Remake—the 2002 one on the Gamecube—introduced daggers, which had a distinct function from the knife. While the knife was still your unbreakable option of last resort, the daggers basically functioned as one-time get-out-of-jail-free cards. They were defense items that could be used to stab and escape from an enemy that grabbed you.

Which was, well, fine. These type of defensive daggers had never been a thing in the RE games, but they didn’t really affect the core gameplay aside from making things a little more lenient on the player.

The RE4 revolution

RE4 was released three years later (2005) and fundamentally changed a lot of elements of RE’s design. It was no longer a horror game with some action sprinkled in, but rather fundamentally an action game with horror themes. Where before enemies had solely been obstacles—there was no real benefit to killing them, and so simply avoiding/running past them was a perfectly fine option—they now dropped loot in the form of ammo or money, which could be spent with the famed RE4 merchant to upgrade your weapons. It was a game about killing zombies rather than one about just surviving them.

This being the case, the meta-game of RE4 became all about killing as many enemies as you could as ammo-efficiently as possible, and it gave you great tools to do that, of which the knife was a big part. The dagger idea from the RE1 remake had been abandoned, but on the other hand, the knife had never been more useful/viable.

Shooting or knifing an enemy in the head or lower legs would lead to a stagger that allowed you to unleash powerful kicking or grabbing animations, during which you were invincible to enemy attacks. Rather than gunning an enemy to death, you could often kill them by firing a single bullet to the head, round-house kicking them, and then slashing them with the knife on the ground until they were dead. Bullets used: one. Extra ammo could be saved for especially hairy encounters or sold to the merchant for faster upgrading of your weapons.

You could even control crowds this way, to an extent. A single staggered zombie would allow you to unleash that invincible kick animation on a large group in front of you and down them all. It wasn’t always feasible to knife them all in situations like this; sometimes a grenade was a better follow-up, or there were simply too many enemies to possibly down all at once. But the combat fundamentally revolved around trying to control your space, grouping enemies up so you could damage multiple at a time, and dispatching them all as efficiently as you could.

The knife’s big change

There were a lot of RE games released between RE4 and the end of the 2010’s, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll skip ahead to key entry for the point I’m trying to make.

The RE2 remake (2019), released seventeen years after the RE1 remake and fourteen years after RE4, essentially combined the knife and dagger from the RE1 remake into a single item. It could be used as a melee weapon or as a defensive escape-from-a-grab item, but either way it had a durability meter, and that meter just didn’t last very long.

While I never liked the idea that the knife could no longer be used as an ammo conservation method, or that you could theoretically be stuck with too little ammo to kill one of the game’s bosses, the (somewhat) saving grace of the knife now being a breakable/finite combat item was that the RE2 remake had made something of a return to a focus on survival rather than action. Enemies did not drop loot, and while there were gun upgrades, these were found in the world rather than bought from a merchant. In short, the best way to conserve ammo was simply to avoid enemies altogether.

This design intent was epitomized by the imposing Mr. X. In an action game, something like Mr. X just comes of as unfair and annoying. But for a horror game, he makes perfect sense: you’re not supposed to engage in combat with him, you’re supposed to just run.

Regardless, since killing enemies wasn’t actually incentivized, beyond making it less annoying to retrace your steps—something you did often in RE2—the fact that you had no indestructible knife as a weapon of last resort and ammo conservation tool didn’t matter too much.

The next major entries in the series—the RE3 remake and RE8—returned to an infinite-durability knife, and RE8 even introduced the powerful Karambit knife to make melee-only runs more viable. Still, in neither game was the knife as core to the gameplay as it had been in RE4, since they didn’t contain the same easy stagger animations with invincible follow-up kicks that created prime opportunities to employ your knife.

Knife durability in the RE4 remake

Of course it’s important to say that the RE4 remake isn’t out yet and won’t be for another five months, and things could still change. But hands-on preview coverage confirms that knives function as they did in the RE2 remake—they break rather quickly and aren’t intended to function as they did in the original game. No longer is the core combat loop centered around staggering a zombie, kicking him down (possibly along with the group surrounding him), and following with knife strikes.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but if the intent is to capture the spirit of the original, I’d argue that adding durability to the knife is a fundamental misstep. Frequent use of the knife was so core to RE4’s combat that taking it away feels very, very wrong. I always killed every enemy I could in my many RE4 playthroughs because the loot gained from doing so always outweighed the resources spent killing them if you could doing it efficiently, particularly with the unbreakable knife.

In the remake it seems apparent that there is no longer any “free lunch” to be had even with skilled play: one way or another, you’re going to need to spend X amount of finite ammo—whether it’s bullets or some of your knife’s durability—to down any opponent, because you have no attack that doesn’t consume something, aside from those kicks, which themselves can only be initiated by a resource-spending attack.

Taking away your one unlimited attack option fundamentally changes the game feel, because adding knife durability has a domino effect that reverberates through the entire combat loop. E.g., if you can’t knife them while they’re down, then those invincible melee kicks become less useful by proxy: since the kicks will tend to disperse/de-bunch large groups, you’ll likely be better off with a shotgun blast or grenade after grouping them rather than a roundhouse kick.

Might anything mitigate this change?

There are a few potential saving graces to this situation.

First, as already mentioned, the game isn’t out yet and there’s always the possibility that they’ll reverse themselves and remove knife durability as a concept—though it seems unlikely this late in development, especially since the knife has been given powerful new abilities to compensate for being breakable, such as parrying chainsaw attacks and instant finishes of downed zombies. They would have to reverse a lot of work to make the change.

Another, stronger possibility is that the game will contain an unlockable infinite-durability knife. That’s because the RE2 remake did this exact thing: an infinite-durability knife could be obtained by finding and destroying all the Mr. Racoon toys found throughout the game. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this game did something similar. Again, though, the new more powerful knife will function very differently than the original RE4 knife did.

The other thing is simply that the original RE4 remains one of the greatest video games ever made, and has aged better than any other entry in the series. So if the RE4 remake’s combat ends up being unsatisfactory in this way or any other way, well, you can always simply return to the original, because it remains a great game, and the recently completed fan HD remaster of the PC version means it now looks better than it ever has. This fact alone makes the addition of the knife durability mechanic sting less.

Closing thoughts

All of that said, I still can’t help but be disappointed. There were always going to be changes in the remake’s gameplay, and from the beginning I was doubtful that the remake team would fully grasp everything that made the original such a classic, because so much of RE4’s magic was in the interplay of some fairly specific gameplay design elements. And while the remake team seems—from the early footage and hands-on-impression articles—to have done most of the other stuff pretty well, adding knife durability feels a bit like removing that one crucial gear that brings the rest of the machine grinding to a halt. It may still be a good game considered in isolation, but with this one core change it feels like the remake is abandoning a crucial part of what made the original what it was, and that the development team has, indeed, failed to fully grasp the game they are remaking.

Recently released for PS4, PS5, and PC (Epic), the “2D Souls-like” Salt and Sacrifice is a game I really wanted to like. And for the most part, I do like it. I’ve logged a little over 44 hours on it so far, and mostly enjoyed myself. But there’s no denying that the game has problems. Its tight and well-executed core gameplay is marred by some bizarre design decisions, and by a bunch of minor UI annoyances that in aggregate become a major gripe.

Background

Ska Studios was founded in 2007 by James Silva, who is basically a one-man video game-developing machine, and absolutely one of my favorite indie devs.

His games first came to my attention when I was visiting my brother and tried a bit of The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile (2011). It was a 2D action game with tight controls and great-feeling combat that I immediately fell in love with.

And besides the wonderful core combat, one other thing that I remember really impressing me about that game was how it handled difficulty: rather than just scaling up enemy health and damage, increasing the difficulty level would completely change your encounters, e.g., replacing the standard enemies with baddies that would normally only appear later in the game. Most devs simply don’t go to the effort of really customizing their difficulty settings that way. It showed me that the game was really full of a lot of thought and care.

After releasing Charlie Murder in 2013, Silva began work in earnest on Salt and Sanctuary. It had started as something of an experiment or even a joke: what would a 2D Souls-like with Dishwasher combat look like? Silva futzed around with the idea and circulated the results around to his friends. Everyone liked it so much that he decided to actually go ahead and make a full game out of it.

Salt and Sanctuary benefited from enormously fortunate release timing. It came out on March 15, 2016... just nine days before Dark Souls 3. Since it was billed specifically as a 2D Souls-like, it immediately found a large audience of Souls fans who were frothing at the mouth waiting for the next entry in From Software’s venerable series and needed something to tide themselves over.

The other thing you have to realize is that at the time there just weren’t that many Souls-likes out there, or at least not good ones. Deck13 had taken a swing with Lords of the Fallen in 2014, which was honestly pretty terrible (their follow-up, The Surge, was much better, but wouldn’t be released for another year). Nioh was still a year away. So was Hollow Knight.

Between those two factors, Salt and Sanctuary was a critical and commercial success. Minor gripes aside, Silva had built a Souls-like that was actually good, something that arguably no one else had managed yet.

But though Ska Studios had been releasing a game almost every year since 2009, it took six years for the follow-up to Salt and Sanctuary to appear. It found a very different sort of market filled to the brim with games aping the Souls formula, not to mention tepid release timing (at best). New releases are arguably still being consumed by the monster that is Elden Ring, which has held on to the top of sales charts with an iron grip since its release in late February.

The Good...

The first way in which Salt and Sacrifice succeeds is that James Silva remains really fucking good at designing and executing compelling 2D combat. If you’ve played any of his previous games, there’s not really much more I need to say about it. The controls are fast and responsive, with a high skill ceiling and some stylish flair here and there. Speaking to this last, attacking in mid-air with a melee weapon will keep you suspended there for the duration of your combo—something which occasionally still throws me off, but shows the game’s roots in the high-flying, wire-fu inspired combat of Dishwasher.

There’s also about a dozen weapon types to try out, though the game’s systems don’t really encourage you to do so (more on this later). And even beyond weapon types, Silva has ripped another page out of the Dark Souls playbook and added weapon arts, so that most of them have some sort of magic spell attached, further differentiating things (some weapons have as many as three different spells on them, executed by holding L2 and hitting either the square, triangle, or circle button).

Another place where the game shines is level design. Rather than one large interconnected world, there are instead five fairly large zones to warp to, not unlike the archstones of Demon’s Souls. Each one is interesting to explore, with lots of shortcuts to unlock and secrets to find. The game does employ some Metroidvania-like elements to keep you locked out of little pieces of levels. E.g., a grappling hook will allow you to reach some previously unreachable areas, and likewise with a glider that will let you ride wind currents/updrafts.

For the most part the platforming aspects feel pretty good, though one thing I could never get over is that running before you leap does not increase the distance jumped at all, which just seems wrong. You get exactly the same horizontal distance jumped from a walk as you do out of a run, so the latter ends up feeling like the jump is inexplicably killing your momentum.

Probably the most unexpected aspect of the core gameplay in Salt and Sacrifice in relation to its predecessor is just how much Monster Hunter DNA it has. Though there are a few stand-alone, single-fight bosses, most of the “boss” encounters in Salt and Sacrifice are “mages,” which can be continually re-hunted. This is, in fact, basically the game’s central story conceit, that you have committed some crime and have been sentenced to hunt mages for the remainder of your days. And just like Monster Hunter, you can keep hunting mages in order to gain crafting materials, so that you can then make a funny hat out of their skin (or weapons, or rings or amulets, or other armor, etc).

It's in the context of these mage hunts that the game being split into discreet zones makes more sense. Hunting a mage consists of finding it, doing enough damage to it to make it run away, and then following it throughout the level to finally deliver the finishing blow. If you’re “tracking” a particular mage, an ethereal sort of trail will point the direction you need to go. But there will usually be other mages on the level, any of which you can follow and kill, though all but your target you’ll have to find without the benefit of tracking.

A neat aspect of the game is that the mages are hostile to one another, and to any other random mobs on the level. I’ve seen as many as four mages on-screen at once. It’s fun to sit back and watch them pound on each other (not unlike Monster Hunter’s “turf wars”), with any luck dispatching each other’s summoned minions for you. After they’ve beat each other up a bit, you can swoop in and finish the job.

There’s also full online multiplayer support this time around. Salt and Sanctuary only had local couch coop, but this one has the full shebang of online connectivity. But I can’t really tell you much about that because I’ve played the entire game on my own, offline. All I can say from looking at some reviews is that it seems to work fine and can be pretty fun to play through with a friend.

...the Inexplicable...

But for all that its core gameplay remains compelling and fun, there are some core design decisions in Salt and Sacrifice that just don’t make much sense, garnering little benefit while actively hurting the player experience.

The first of these is one I’ve already alluded to: the skill tree. Unlike its explicit inspiration—From Software’s Souls games—Salt and Sacrifice employs a skill tree to level up (think Path of Exile, though not that ridiculously large). The key thing to realize here is that the skill tree is not only the source of random stat nodes (e.g., a node might give you a point in strength or dex), but also the source of unlocking the ability to use a weapon type at all.

Each weapon within a type is ranked from class 0 to class 5. Any character can use a class 0 weapon, but for ranks 1–5, you need to unlock the appropriate node on the skill tree in order to use the weapon. The effect of this is that experimenting with different weapons is actively discouraged.

E.g., I started out with a Sage character, who uses staves by default. I was interested in at least trying spears and glaives, but I would have had to sink levels into unlocking the right nodes to do so (and in fact, there are no class 0 glaives in the game!). Those were levels I needed not only to get staves to class 5, but also to get my light armor to class 5 (yes, you also need skill nodes to wear armor) and to boost core stats, like health and mana. The end result was that I never experimented with other weapon types, even though I wanted to. I find it hard to justify this as a design decision.

Another frankly bizarre design choice, given how much the game leans on a Monster Hunter-like concept of re-hunting mages over and over, is that there’s very little scope for actually targeting a mage you want to hunt. Each mage gets two missions in which you’re targeting them (a “named” and “nameless” version, in the game’s parlance), complete with the previously described tracking mechanism. But once you complete those two hunts, you can’t do them again. That means that if you need materials from some particular mage, you either have to head out into the world and simply hope to run into the right one (there are about 20 of them), or await the daily reset of randomized mage hunts that happens at midnight GMT... and in that case, even if you do get an instance of the one you’re looking for, it can once again only be done once.

I really don’t get this. Imagine a Monster Hunter game in which you can’t pick which monster you’re fighting. It’s just... bizarre.

Lastly, here’s one everyone hates: your health and mana potions are not bottomless. Like Bloodborne or Demon’s Souls, you have to gather or buy these sort of restorative consumables, putting you in a position where you can run out over many attempts fighting a difficult boss/mage. Even From Software stopped doing this, because literally no one enjoys sitting around farming for potions. It made me use them less than I wanted to, simply because I didn’t want to be put in a position of needing to waste time farming the damned things.

...and the Lazy.

And then there are all the little UI annoyances that simply seem to reflect a lack of any careful thought or simple laziness, like Silva put something together early on that worked, but was not ideal, and never bothered to go back and refine it in any way.

One simple example is that at the title screen, the top and always default option is “New Game,” while “Continue” is the second option, despite the fact that 95% of the time you’ll be continuing your game rather than starting a brand new one. I can’t tell you the number of times that I hit “New Game” by accident on startup. It’s a small thing, but it’s emblematic of the lack of thought that was put into this kind of thing throughout the game.

Another thing is the display for the skill tree. Check out the screenshot below.

Why exactly are you forced to view this giant skill tree through a tiny, claustrophobic little box that takes up less than a quarter of your screen’s real estate? I have no idea! And while the “zoom” option will zoom out, it won’t increase the amount of area on the screen that the skill tree is covering, just make all the icons so tiny that you can’t actually read them.

And then there’s the fact that there is no way at all to sort your items and equipment. The stuff in your inventory is not organized alphabetically, or by order of discovery, or by weapon type, or by any other criteria that I can discern. I can only surmise that it’s sorted by some sort of hidden item number.

Even the equipment box is little help in keeping your equipment organized. Because I knew that I was somewhat locked into staves due to the game’s skill tree system, I started putting weapons of all other weapon types in my stash, which at least made it easier to hide the irrelevant options when equipping things. But when you go to the screen to upgrade equipment, all the stuff you’ve stored away in your box shows up again anyway, so that it’s hard to get a handle on the ones you care about in a sea of stuff you’re trying to ignore.

I’ll mention one other thing that grinds my gears. Not only is there “salt” in this game, which is used exclusively to level up, but also “silver,” which is used to buy consumables and some armor and weapons from various NPCs. Salt behaves just likes souls do in the Souls games: die and you’ll have to reach your bloodstain to reclaim it. But silver is different: it is halved every time you die, and there is no recovering it... meaning that you can go from 1,600 silver to 100 in just four deaths.

Now, there is in fact a way around this. One NPC will sell “bags of silver” at a 20% markup. E.g., you can buy a bag of 1,000 silver for 1,200. These “bags” behave like portable souls in the Souls games: you keep them even when you die. For this reason, after every hunt you should really be spending all your silver, either on items you want, or “banking” it with these slightly marked-up bags... but the game doesn’t tell you that. I literally played about twenty hours of the game before I realized this was happening, and hence had lost basically all my silver through the first half of my playtime. Not only does this seem like an unnecessarily cruel sort of system, but the importance of this buying bags of silver mechanic just isn’t made nearly as plain to the player as it should be. Given how quickly and easily you can end up losing all your money, it isn't a mechanic the game should allow you to miss.

Conclusion

Salt and Sacrifice is an enjoyable game to play, but in 2022, it is no longer a novelty: Souls-likes have become a cottage industry, and it takes a lot more these days to stand out from the crowd. Salt and Sacrifice, I’m sorry to say, simply doesn’t stand out. I mean, it’s fine. It’s a 7/10 sort of game. For twenty bucks, you could do a lot worse. If you enjoy Souls-like games generally, and James Silva’s previous efforts specifically, you’ll probably still dig it.

But where The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile left me impressed with the care and thought that was put into its design, Salt and Sacrifice at times left me feeling like there was little thought involved at all, that old systems had inexplicably been carried forward without any awareness of how the genre has evolved or any careful examination as to how it all fit together, like an early access title that had “version 1.0” slapped on it before it was really done. And that feeling of being plagued by poor design decisions and design oversights is what makes Salt and Sacrifice merely a good game, rather than a great one.

Rogue Legacy 2 has just hit version 1.0, and I knew I wanted to post something about it for the release. I’m not sure I would call what follows a “review,” if only because I love this game so much that I find it hard to be all that objective about it (for the record: I’ve logged 174 hours on the early access version of the game). But hopefully someone out there will find it informative and be encouraged to give it a shot.

Background: RL1 and RL2 early access

In the lead-up to RL2’s 1.0 release, I noticed some people claiming that the first Rogue Legacy actually *invented* the Roguelite genre when it was released in 2013. Strictly speaking, I don’t think this is actually true, as the “lite” elements of Roguelites had been around for some time, even if in a somewhat embryonic and diffuse form compared to the fairly distinct genre we see today. However, it appears that Cellar Door Games may, in fact, have been the first game developer to coin the term.

Regardless, what is not in dispute is that the original Rogue Legacy helped to define and popularize the “lite” elements in Roguelites. By putting a heavy focus on upgrading your character between runs, it injected an element of character-building power fantasy into the more established Roguelike genre, which eschewed permanent upgrades in favor of a uniform starting point for each run.

I liked RL1 a lot. I logged 40.7 hours on it on Steam, maxing out the upgrades and clearing multiple NG+ cycles, and also bought the game on Playstation. In 2013, it really was something new. Games like Dead Cells and Hades were not yet a thought. I just knew that I really enjoyed the idea of continuing to power up my character on the way to finally clearing the game. It was fun to keep starting new runs knowing that I was not only getting better at playing the game myself, but was also entering with a continually more capable character.

Fast-forward to August 2020, when Cellar Door Games released an early build of Rogue Legacy 2 on Steam Early Access. The global pandemic had properly begun about five months earlier; weird to think that the game’s entire front-facing development cycle took place during COVID. Anyway, GB did an “Unfinished” and other games press did their own coverage.

Though the core gameplay felt pretty good even at this early stage, the game at this point was, quite honestly, very content-light and thin. It had only one “biome,” a small and uninteresting bunch of upgrades, few classes, and (to the best of my recollection) no completed bosses to fight. There are some early access games that are first released at a point where they’re already worth their asking price; RL2 was not one of them. At the initial early access price of $15.99 (which has since increased to reflect a more complete product—it’s now $24.99), you were investing on the promise of the game rather than what was actually there. I think I’d go so far as to say that Cellar Door Games probably made a mistake by releasing it as early as they did; the game might have earned better word of mouth if they had waited a few more months.

But as time went by and regular large content updates happened, the game rather quickly surpassed its predecessor in virtually every way imaginable. Let’s talk about how, shall we?

Character classes

In RL1, classes seemed like a big part of the game, but in retrospect, they just weren’t all that well-differentiated. All carried the same basic sword melee weapon, and while each had a special ability, the differences were mainly in the stats; some had more HP but less mana, others had a high chance to critically strike but had low base attack power, etc. After a while a few classes seemed to simply surpass others, and runs could start to feel pretty same-y.

The big thing that RL2 does to improve on the class system is that it gives each class an entirely unique starting weapon, along with other special properties and abilities unique to that class. Sure, there’s still the basic knight with the same sword from RL1. But now there’s also:

• Valkyries (my personal favorite), whose spears can be aimed up or down in addition to forward, and can be quickly twirled to reflect incoming projectiles;
• Barbarians, who use huge axes for massive damage and can also yell to temporarily freeze enemies in place;
• Rangers, who use a bow that can be aimed in any direction, and can create platforms (on a short cooldown) to fire from wherever they wish;
• Bards, who play lutes that send out musical notes a short distance away that float in place, dealing periodic damage to enemies in range;
• Boxers, who build combos with quick punches that increase in damage with every hit.

And that’s just five of the fifteen classes. Each one has a unique playstyle, rather than simply being a different balance of core stats. The effect is, of course, that RL2 is much, much more replayable than RL1 ever was, simply due to the sheer variety of gameplay styles on offer.

Emphasis on the “lite”

RL2 is also just a much bigger game than its predecessor in just about every way you can conceive of. In addition to having more classes that are more meaningful in their differences, it has six “biomes,” each with its own boss, next to the original’s four, more weapons and armor to buy and upgrade, more “runes” to unlock that do things like add lifesteal to your attacks or give you more dashes or jumps (you can eventually jump some ridiculous number of times, something like twelve(!) before hitting the ground), more permanent “castle” upgrades to buy, and even a special currency that will allow you to keep upgrading your stats beyond their normal limits.

The fact that this game just has so many friggin’ permanent upgrades to buy is why, as I noted at the outset, I put 174 hours into the early access version of the game and reached the pre-release cap of NG+30. Yes, you read that correctly. NG+30. And I still have stuff to upgrade. Moreover, in late November I did some calculations that suggest to me that the 1.0 release may allow you to go all the way to NG+100 if you’d like (obviously I can’t confirm this at the moment, ask me again in a few months XD). Considering each run will usually take multiple hours to complete, that is an awful lot of game.

Maybe that simply sounds exhausting to you, and you’d prefer to just clear the game once or twice and move on. Which is fine! But if you’re the kind of person who likes to keep seeing the numbers go up, then I don’t think you need to worry that you’re going to eventually run out of upgrades to buy. The vast majority of players will have moved on to another game long before they’re in danger of maxing everything out. Hence one of the other problems I ran into with RL1—that I had bought all the upgrades and had achieved basically all there was to achieve in forty hours—really isn’t an issue with the sequel.

Play it your way (especially with regard to difficulty)

I could tell you that RL2 has no formal difficult settings, and while that would technically be true, it’s also grossly disingenuous. The truth is that RL2 has all sorts of granular settings that let you play the game the way you want to play it, to get the experience you want to have.

The most obvious of these is the “House Rules.” These are settings that will let you:

• Increase (up to 200%) or decrease (down to 50%) enemy health;
• Increase (up to 200%) or decrease (down to 50%) enemy damage;
• Slow down time while aiming projectiles (like spells, arrows, or bullets);
• Enable flight;
• Disable enemy contact damage.

Enabling any or all of these options will not disable achievements or progression. In fact, there’s even an achievement for altering the House Rules for the first time. So if you’re someone who worries that the game’s difficulty is going to be a little too brutal for you, well, worry not. You can make it as easy (or as difficult) as you’d like.

And these are far from the only options that alter the difficulty and experience of a run.

• You can add “burdens” that do things like increase enemy projectile speed, or give enemies life steal, or make the world bigger, or make hazards/spikes deal more damage.
• You can toggle on “Prime” versions of bosses that have new tricks up their sleeves; the first boss, for instance, goes from firing straight-shot projectiles to projectiles that home in on you.
• Character “traits,” randomized upon picking a new character/heir after dying (another returning feature from RL1), will do all sorts of wacky things, with the more negative ones balanced by giving you a gold bonus—stuff like turning the screen upside down, or making the screen temporarily go black every time you take damage, or turning you into a “pacifist” that cannot directly attack enemies at all.

And there are other game mechanics that I haven’t even mentioned yet, there’s just too much to talk about with this game, and I don’t have all day to write this thing. One other important mechanic: the relic/resolve system, which allows you to pick up powerful relics each run (they are lost upon death) at the cost of maximum health, depending on how high your “resolve” is. These do things like add a fire damage-over-time to your attacks, to changing your one big jump into three smaller ones, to adding more time to your invincibility window after taking damage, and even more esoteric things.

What a sequel should be

All in all, RL2 basically just completely blows RL1 out of the water. The amazing thing is that this really isn’t a knock on the first game so much as it is a glowing endorsement of the sequel, which truly seems to have surpassed and enlarged upon its predecessor in every way that matters. Hell, I didn’t even talk at all about the overhauled “2.5D” art style, which is pretty gorgeous. Nor did I really spend any time spelling out the simple fact that the controls and movement/core gameplay feel tight and precise and just plain good all-around. Better than merely good, really. And though I’m not going to talk any more about that, it’s only because such things are so hard to define and describe, anyway. You’ll just have to give it a whirl and test out the game feel for yourself (and meanwhile we’ll all leave Jeff G to test the mouth feel).

I saw in a recent article that one of RL1’s original two developers has said that he no longer bothers playing the first game at all anymore, and it’s easy to see why. Once you start playing RL2, it’s hard to go back. The Roguelite genre has really exploded and gone some places in nine years, and Cellar Door Games has risen to the task of creating a game that can compete with the best examples of the genre. I only hope the game finds the audience it deserves.

The game’s on sale for 20% off ($19.99) on Steam through May 9. If you’ve ever liked a Roguelite before, I think I can pretty safely say that this one is going to be money well-spent.

Possibly the most impressive fan remaster of a video game to date?

Way back in February 2014, two RE4 superfans—Albert Marin and Cris Morales—officially began work on their ambitious RE4 re-texture project, making their first blog post about their intentions. It was originally meant to be purely an HD texture pack.

But in the course of eight years—in which Albert and Cris toiled away for more than 13,000 hours on the project and spent around $15,000 of their own money (this was later made up by around $16,000 worth of donations) for hardware, software, textures, programming support, and travel—the visual overhaul came to include not only textures, but 3D edits, lighting, UI, collision detection, cinematics, and fixes for long-standing bugs introduced into the game’s many ports. The final result is a stunning remaster of a classic game that touches every aspect of its visuals. If there is a more impressive fan-made remaster of a video game, I do not know it. Below is the official release trailer.

One thing that stood out about this project immediately was that Albert was determined to locate as many of the original source locations for the game’s textures as possible. He began doing research as early as 2008 into where Capcom had done their source photography. Luckily, about half of these locations ended up being in his home country of Spain (which is where the game itself is set), while most of the rest were in Wales. He would spend about $1,200 travelling to eight source locations in Europe.

But how he located all this stuff, I have no idea. He even found a random chunk of rock in Segovia that was used for one of the game’s mine sections:

Further, a lot of RE4’s textures actually came from multiple sources, such as this door, which borrowed elements from Seville, London, and Rome:

Or how about these doors from Seville and Toledo?

After Albert located all this source material and took his own photographs, it was time to start doing the actual modding. This included, of course, re-creating a lot of textures from scratch, in cases where the original was unknown or destroyed (Albert recalls seeing the destruction of a random wall used in the game in his home town of Barcelona).

Their first release came fairly quickly (less than a year later), on Christmas day 2014. It included a re-texturing of only the “Village” portions of the game, i.e., chapters 1 and 2. Even this early release was a massive improvement:

Little did these two intrepid modders know at the time that they would end up returning to this section years later and make it look even better!

Their next release of the “Castle” section (chapters 3 and 4) would not happen for more than two years, in late March 2017. Unlike the original Village release, this one included 3D, lighting, and effects enhancements, things that Albert had learned to do along the way. In an email exchange I had with him, Albert was keen to credit the help of some outside programmers:

I got the help of some programmers who created tools based on info I discovered when hex editing certain files. Without these tools I wouldn’t have been able to edit lights, effects and other files so easily. The programmers also found out how to edit some other files that I had no idea how to even locate (collision data, for example).

All of this led to an even more impressive visual upgrade than the previous one:

It was around this time that Cris was forced to stop active work on the project due to family and work commitments, though he remained administrator of the project’s website. Albert continued on alone.

About a year later, in July 2018, the project’s penultimate release was posted, which not only included the final “Island” section of the game (chapter 5), but further 3D and lighting tweaks to earlier releases (especially the early “Village” release), and also work on the “Separate Ways,” “Assignment Ada,” and “Mercenaries” modes of the game.

This release touched almost every visual aspect of the game, and for someone who is less of perfectionist than Albert is, this might have served quite well as the project’s final release after more than four long years of work. Albert, however, was not content. He knew he could make it look even better with things like edits to enemies and NPCs, further refinements to weapons and items, and fixes to bugs in the PC port.

And so over the next three-and-a-half years, Albert did another complete pass through the game, using everything he had learned during his previous years of work to make it all look as good as he possibly could while staying faithful to the feel of the original... including even remastering the 512×336 cinematics. And besides this, he hired other programmers to do things like fix a bug that removed transparency from the item pickup screen:

...restore depth-of-field effects that had appeared in the Gamecube and Wii versions, but had been removed from the other ports:

...and add support for ultrawide resolutions (I'm sure he was thinking of @rorie):

...plus many more improvements and fixes than is practical to list here.

And now the whole thing is out, and wow, let me tell you, it is pretty friggin’ great!

The thing I particularly appreciate about the work done on this project is that Albert and Cris tried very hard to stay faithful to the feel of the original game with their upgrades. As Albert said previously in interviews:

One of the main goals of this project is to be faithful to the original. And here is where subjectivity plays an important role: Low resolution textures leave a lot to the imagination, and you know... every person’s imagination is different! Sometimes we receive complaints even when we use the exact same texture, but in HD resolutions, because the low-res textures looked like they were dirtier or muddy or something like that. But the HD re-creation looked too clean in comparison, depending on what the person interpreted when looking at the low-res surface. ... [So] we use our aesthetic judgment and try to avoid making anything stand out too much. We try to avoid evoking reactions of “Hey! This is new!”

As a result, playing this remaster makes me feel a bit like I’ve been transported back in time to 2005. I mean, I know in my head that the game has never looked this good. But in my heart, and through the rose-tinted glasses of my memory, I remember RE4 looking amazing back when it first released. And it did! But it was “amazing” for a letterboxed Gamecube game in 2005. This remaster retains all of the original’s feel while creating a whole new level of fidelity.

Thankfully, this project hasn’t run into the legal problems and cease-and-desist orders that some fan remasters experience. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that it isn’t a stand-alone product; you need to buy the Steam version of the game for it to work, so ultimately it’s just a massive mod, released for free. Given this, Capcom has given the project their official blessing, probably because they know that it can only help the game’s sales.

Maybe the one pity about this whole project is that it sounds unlikely that Capcom will integrate all these upgrades to future ports of the game. In an email exchange I had with Albert, he cited copyright issues as a major hurdle:

I’m afraid Capcom can’t integrate it because they’d need to be sure each and every texture source image has no copyright problems and this is almost impossible to track for them.

But even if I won’t ever be able to play this remastered version on my Playstation, having it on Steam is pretty good, especially considering that the upcoming Steam Deck should allow for a portable option (pending a compatibility check).

In the meantime, there continue to be persistent rumors about an official RE4 remake in the style of the recent, successful RE2 and RE3 remakes, though it remains unannounced. But Albert isn’t worried that a possible remake would steal the HD project’s thunder:

The remakes are really different games. Even now, the original Resident Evil 2 & 3 receive their own mods and visual improvements (Resident Evil 2 and 3 HD Seamless Project). They are different and complementary experiences. Just think about any Hollywood remake. Most of them don’t hurt the original movie, and they are alternative visions of the older title.

He’s right about that. The long-rumored remake may end up being a good game, but the original isn’t going anywhere. It is remembered too fondly by too many people, myself very much among them. In fact, I would be very surprised indeed if a remake could fully recapture the magic of the original. Some games are greater than the sum of their parts, and this game is surely one of them.

Resident Evil 4 has long held a special place in my heart. Playing it for the first time in 2005, when I was still in college, was practically a religious experience for me. It is easily one of my top five favorite games ever, and it still holds up: it’s one of the very few titles more than fifteen years old that I still go back and play regularly. As such, I’ve been anticipating playing the final version of this lovingly crafted remaster about as much as a brand spanking new triple-A title.

So far, it hasn’t disappointed.

With many thanks to Albert and Cris for their many years of hard work, there’s never been a better time to play Resident Evil 4. Download the completed mod here:

https://www.re4hd.com/?page_id=9303

Note: All images are courtesy of Albert Marin. My sources were the official project website, a 2018 interview with TooFarGone, a 2021 interview with The Verge, and personal email correspondence with Albert.

P.S. Given all his years of work on this, I’ll forgive Albert for preferring the Blacktail to the Red9, even though the Red9 is objectively the better gun. :-P

EDIT: See the 18th post in this thread for a tour through the new easter egg secret area that the modders added toward the end of the Village section!