Nodima

Yeah, based on everything in the REmake canon to this point, it'd be foolish to expect RE4 to play up its silliness when the original leaned so hard in the other direction. RE2 was a little silly but its silliness felt rooted in a very different sensibility, less doing the best with what they've got and unintentionally digging up some comedy, more knowingly not using all the best takes or even striving for perfection as long as they got something fun/entertaining.

Can't help but be curious how they handle a certain tiny lord on a second pass, though. At a base, instinctual level a remake of RE4 feels like a Dr. J slam dunk but there are some things very core to that game that if taken too seriously - or, maybe, not seriously enough - that could be really difficult to recover from. It feels kinda silly to write this next sentence, but from a certain perspective remaking a game like Resident Evil 4 in the same fashion as the other REmakes is a pretty bold choice. It'll be the first time they're taking on a game that's only obvious flaws are as much victims of time and evolving gameplay conventions as actual issues with its design.

Can't wait to see/hear more, if only because I've got this weird feeling that this project is gonna be harder to pull off that it seems!

@voidburger, you should recruit someone to stream Chrono Cross as a pseudo-Endurance Run after you finish(?) Chrono Trigger if you wind up liking it a lot. Even moreso, that's a game that rejects grinding and loot tables in favor of, well... @zombiepie might tell you I'm being an asshole for saying this, but experiencing the story in favor of grinding materials and upgrades. There are slight bonuses for using characters during boss battles, but otherwise every character you could choose from levels after each boss battle and the bosses are pretty much the only thing that upgrades your characters, though there is some great magic, armor and weaponry that you've gotta specifically pursue.

As a site that used to thrive on bonkers storytelling, and already has a longplay of Chrono Trigger hosted, I think that'd be a fun nod to the history of gaming, history of Giant Bomb, enthusiasm of Ben Hansen for his childhood hangups, history of RPGs, the weirdness of game design in the late-2000s compared to now and one of the most fun Giant Bomb blogs of all time! I think at the very least you, Jess, would enjoy the implied psychological horror of what it means to embed your experiences onto the megabytes of a memory card via the ethereal hieroglyphs of warring island nations...

It's such a shame this is releasing so close to Forbidden West. I can't wait to explore this world and was having a ton of fun with Demon's Souls PS5 prior to Forbidden West coming out, but I just don't think I can finish Forbidden West and then leap right into this. I'm also not sure I'll be finishing Forbidden West in the next, oh, 40 hours of gameplay after already clocking 40?

It's just so hard to watch Jan fighting some of these bigger enemies with the same old "hack their knees and cheeks until they evaporate" I've done over and over in Bloodborne and now Demon's Souls when I've been having this epic battles with complex, multi-facted enemies like Tremortusks and Thunderjaws. It just looks so dry by comparison, even though I know in practice it's quite exhilarating in its own way.

And yes, I realize the irony in the fact that probably 80% of the enthusiast gaming public is writing the exact same thing with everything reversed (ie. I say combat, you say exploration).

I'm so happy that all these critics who've played 30 or more games like this thanks to their need to cover Ubisoft are saying everything I, who's only played 9 or 10, want to hear. You're telling me that this game is of a similar quality in both production value and gameplay to perhaps the 2010s' game of the decade while the two things that were roughest about that first go, the traversal and the side quests, have been markedly improved? And you're bored by it just because you have no choice but to encounter this type of game design over and over again whereas I give it to myself once, maybe twice a year?

Sounds like a fuckin' win, guy!

@deadactionjones: Yeah, plenty of comments pointed out what segment it was during and what the context was. My point is that I got to that segment and began really anticipating this huge blowout argument that would clearly cause a rift between otherwise good friends. I work in bars and restaurants, I have seen a lot of those arguments. Hell, I've been fired by good friends of mine and done the same.

What went down in this UPF barely felt like a "you could use a little less salt in your sauce" argument to me. Jeff shit on this game for about two minutes because it was shoehorning story elements into a Warioware-like, Jess said that it was cute in her opinion but she expected that he'd feel that way so she wasn't lingering on it too much, and then it all went back to normal. The segment even ended with Jeff recommending the minigames-only version of the game, saying it looked pretty cool for what it was anyway, etc.

If that segment amounts to an awkward conversation for some people - and I've often felt this way about Game of the Year segments that blow up into 100+ comment debates over whether the website's staff is on good terms with each other as well - I really question how much their day-to-day life involves two different people with vastly different life experiences having a conversation about their opinions.

Reading this comment thread about tension between you and Jeff and then actually watching the video took me back to playing The Last of Us Part II where I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the Big Thing that was going to anger me so much I'd drop the game and shun Naughty Dog forever...only to eventually find out that Big Thing happened in the first three hours of the game once I'd finished and went back to read the spoilers.

I'm not even sure I noticed an actual argument occurring during this video at all. I feel like the Giant Bomb audience is really primed to see any disagreement with even a hint of personal investment as a rift between the crew, it's a bizarre dynamic I've noticed for years and years. I wouldn't worry too much about it if I were you, I remember at one point this audience went a full year or more speculating that Rorie actually hated Dan and vice versa because of the way they interacted during UPFs despite Dan and Jason having the exact same relationship.

Re: Returnal - yup. Just had an Act 3 run that made me feel like I was going to be invincible - had like 250% health, a rippin' Hollowseeker, really cool damage boosts, everything was comin' up Nodima. But then I decided that meant I really was invincible, and tried to take down a room I'd always sprinted through and most definitely sprinted through on my way to finally beating the Nemesis for the first time. It whittled all that health down to a sliver, and despite having a revive item on me as well I failed. Back to the beginning. It was so deflating and sad. And yet I wasn't deflated or sad at all, I just nodded and thought, "yup, you shouldn't have messed with that dumb ass room."

The only reason I didn't immediately start playing again was I saw today's guest lists were posted. And now - back to it!

All the Playboy talk at the beginning reminded me, somewhat randomly, of how cool all the Playboy articles were in Mafia III. Super hi-res scans of really broad celebrity and business profiles, like The Beatles, an eccentric oil tycoon, Truman Capote and Stanley Kubrick talking about their work.

It was always a joke by the '90s/'00s that "dad reads Playboy for the articles" but that game made me realize just how much truth there probably was to that statement at one time. Sure, breasts sold the magazine, but the people who worked for that magazine were awesome writers (and photographers).

Thanks to @wintermute, @allthedinos, @heelbill and @jeremyf for the kind words! I wanted to follow up on my No. 4 game on this list, Returnal, if only because I'm increasingly unsure why it doesn't deserve being No. 1. Ultimately I can't really turn my back on all the warm fuzzies Kena made me feel even if I still can't quite articulate it, nor can I ignore how fresh and pleasant Psychonauts 2 was, but Returnal...

Let's Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Rouge-Lite/Likes

Returnal is not a nice game. If you've read anything about this game you know this. I think it's also important to note in a way some people forget that Housemarque does not make nice games. It's sort of funny to me that, despite a first-party stable that has generally been aimed at as wide a consumer base as possible, Sony has opened three consoles in a row with a Housemarque game centered around bullet hell and a small amount of levels wrapped around both your mastery of their static mechanics as well as your adaptability to their randomized elements. Returnal feels unique because games that look like this never - almost never, or truly never? - play like this but it is definitely in direct lineage with the rest of Housemarque's catalog.

But I think that unique feel for a bullet hell is significant because it's a unique feel for a bullet hell - but it is not in any way a roguelike. Or else we've neglected to recognize that this is the most comprehensive genre of all time. When you play a Contra or a Gradius or whatever, you Press Start and buckle up for whatever the game is about to throw at you. You might want the spread shotgun or the homing missile or whatever - same as you certainly never want the laser rifle, no matter what game you're playing - but you don't know it's coming. What you do know are coming is a certain pattern of ships a certain amount of minutes into a level as well as a Big Bad at the end of the level that essentially tests you on everything you'd learned during that level.

These are the sorts of games Housemarque has been making for almost 30 years now and they didn't shy away from that here. We just got distracted by the lack of a level select.

Returnal is a fearsome example of how games release these days

If you're the level of dweeb that regularly logs on to Giant Bomb Dot Com while paying them a yearly fee to avoid Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed on their wonky little webpages, but cuts over to the forums rather than the video pages to see what's what in gaming, you know most of what I'm about to say. I don't know exactly how this game presented itself in the summer of 2021, but from the various reviews I've read and vague remembrances of podcasts I've listened to, I get the impression that not only was the PS5 (or perhaps the game itself) a less stable device/software situation at that time but Returnal had no interest in offering players a peace offering.

A take I've come across over and over again - at least, should the person opining has made it this far into the game - is that Act 1 can range wildly from far too unforgiving to far too easy, only to lead into an Act 2 (for those who might've read this far without playing the game or wanting to know much specific about its progression - that's all I'll say! For this whole post! Swear!) that can border on the abusive. Again, I can only speak to my experience with this portion of the game (and, importantly, couldn't speak to this second act at all when I already considered this the 3rd or 4th best game of 2021) but I don't find that to be the case at all.

I love to brag about how bad I am at most games about as much as I love to point out the rare times I enjoy one on its hardest difficulty, and I certainly haven't had a turbulence-free ride with Returnal. But this is not a game that crashes (nor a console that crashes, for what that might be worth) and more importantly this is a game I suspect learned just how few of its players were making it past the third level (or the second, or the first...) and re-calibrated its expectations of the general population. That's not to say that it's more forgiving - and why should it be, when S-tier gamesmen like Kirk Hamilton can complete this game in seven deaths or less? - only that it seems to thank you for persevering, with a second act that pairs a gauntlet-like, Grecian myth level of suffering with a huge, almost overwhelming smattering of quite helpful items, neat weapons with neater upgrades and about as much health items and upgrades as you can imagine early adopters begging for.

How does one square that when rating a game? I'm not sure people will ever answer that question. I am sure those who primarily game on PC and wade in the waters of mods every day of their lives ultimately don't consider it much, but even half a decade in to a life dowsed in patches and broken launches it still feels weird to wonder: am I playing, in some ways, a very different game than the people who dove right in? Am I playing the baby version?

I Think This Game Is a Bit of a Magic Trick

So why does this game get confused for a third-person action RPG roguelike exploration game with walking simulator elements? Well, because you could get that verbose with it! Again, this game's been out long enough now that if you want to know why that information is out there, but in wrapping around the the original point: I think if you suck at the very first level (and I really think you're a weird and talented fuck if you don't) it's easy to get caught in that reminder of early Rogue Legacy, early Dead Cells, hell early Hades. But think of all the first levels in games that are hard, including Housemarque's own: I certainly hope I'm not alone in this, but I probably put 20 hours into Super Stardust HD and never unlocked the third planet.

Returnal has a live. die. repeat. aspect to it, but at every milestone it provides some kind of checkpoint akin to the old Game Genie password systems. A common criticism of this design is that, while Returnal offers those olive branches (and, more crucially, moreso in the first act than the second) it doesn't incentivize them at all because you're going to want to re-roll your weapons, your item drops and your maximum health on every run. Of my nearly 60 runs in Returnal - and I'll say here less than 10 have been in Act 2 - I'd wager at least a fifth of them really sucked, and perhaps a tenth of them had me feeling like I was invincible until I reached that one room that really fucked me up.

But, if I can reach back to Kirk Hamilton's experience with this game (again, seven deaths for him - sixty for me) the trick here is that Returnal is fast. It runs pretty much exclusively at 60 frames per second and the bullets come constantly. The dash is smooth as fuck (especially given Bloodborne is one of the few truly hard games I've played) and the jump feels incredible. Pretty quickly this ingrains in you this sense that you need to constantly be doing stuff but that's not really true - this is a game about assessing rooms, managing adds and wondering what the fuck is going on. In other words, you need to go full Neo and see the game for what it is, at which point it's mostly a visual spectacle obscuring a design hoping you'll spend as much if not more time navigating the environment and kiting enemies around as you are actually aiming and shooting at them.

And yet you always want to be dodging towards enemies. You always want to be firing at them. It's a fool's errand to hesitate.

In Summary, Returnal Is Rad

This game has cool lore. It has amazing particle effects. It has some truly player-favoring, enemy-fucking upgrades. And you'll have to play it a lot to get anywhere. But I think it's self-obfuscating in a way that doesn't really clue players in to what it wants out of them. That's the actual puzzle you're supposed to solve. Watch any of this game's bosses on Youtube, or even it's more unforgiving challenge rooms, and when viewed passively you almost immediately have this feeling that you could improve on whoever you're watching play the game's strategy or execution. It's in holding the controller that you realize Returnal doesn't want to hurt you, it just doesn't have any other choice. It's a Housemarque game, after all.

Returnal really wants to see its players succeed, it just waits forever to reveal any of that. Once it reveals that desire, or perhaps hope is more accurate, it's new trick is to give you 45 minutes of confidence followed by 5 minutes of absolute misery. Even more than that, it hits a much more concrete loop than its early levels, simultaneously widening the scope of the player's possibilities while tightening the variety of what the game will throw at you. It becomes less about why the fuck am I failing as it is how the fuck can I stop failing, and that's a hell of a feeling to get from a game. You get got, but you always feel got by the getting you didn't give, if that makes any sense. That's probably a shit sentence.

In any case, this has been a lot of writing for what ostensibly serves as an addendum to a game I still haven't beaten and likely still wouldn't consider the best game of the year had I done so. But I'm fully convinced it's really not as unfair, mean, rude or however you'd like to describe it based on the reviews that came out at launch or from those who (again, like me!) really struggled with the early biomes. Once you crack into the back half, not only do the new weapons unlock fully new options for fun but the old weapons gain access to some truly game-breaking buffs that feel like mainlining Ethiopian coffee bean espresso, four shots all at once. And again, it becomes more about this dance you do with the various yet predictable rooms and the enemies within them than slamming your head against them as quickly as you can in the hopes of seeing some new bit of story or finally encountering a new boss. It becomes an old school bullet hole game; the likeness of it's rogue-ness is quite beside the point.

And I won't even get into how its outward similarities to standard third person action games, particularly from Sony first party studios, can be an even sicker trick than the previous segment. You look at this game visually and can't help but think it's one way the same as you would mechanically, which Returnal almost continually delights in subverting.

Lastly, The Game Sounds Sick

Like truly, disgustingly sick. The sounds coming out of the DualSense are awesome, the 3D audio sampling is conveyed even through a simple 2.1 bookshelf system and the music, especially in the 4th level and leading up to its boss is just a wonderful example of how self-improvement and level progression is such a specific joy that only video games can provide. Like Death Stranding, I've often found myself so frustrated by the previous 10 or 20 minutes of gameplay only to finally arrive at my goal and then go back to collect leftover items or at the very least my new bounty and feel a stupendous crush of excellent sound effects. I love the sound design of this game and I wish I had better verbs and nouns for why.

Just one last thing: I did buy this game for $40, and I get that $70 feels like a huge ask for a game whose approachability is relatively impossible to measure without putting one's hands on it. But I wanted to end with the sound design because this really is important: Returnal looks, feels, sounds and acts like a step forward for video game production. It doesn't always actually look, feel, sound or act like that's true, but in the aggregate there is so much to praise here. Sometimes it's as simple as turning off your AC/heat, all the lights, throwing on some headphones and getting fucked up by some random fodder enemy you thought you had fully solved. Just listen to all the different sounds extracted from Selene's feet as she traverses the various surfaces of this game.

Oh, I almost forgot: fuck the purple bats.

Fundamental differences between this list and my super thorough and fun to read 2021 Game of the Year blog I wrote about a week ago: I shifted MLB The Show down from first place to ninth place, owing to the fact it would be a waste of a first place vote given this community's voting / gaming tendencies and had to remove Hades from fourth place due to it not technically being a 2021 game even if it did debut on XBox and PS4 this calendar year. Between that shift upwards of one slot for ranks 1 and 2 plus a double rank up for 3-8, I was left without a tenth game to nominate this year.

I could've chose NBA 2K22 but I would feel morally ambiguous at best about that vote. I could've chosen Deathloop, but I haven't touched that game since writing my GotY blog and I think being in that position after 7 hours played and reading so many gushing end of the year testimonials says enough about why including Deathloop on my list would be silly. Likewise, I played well into the third act of Scarlet Nexus and despite maybe my favorite narrative beat of the year I couldn't be bothered to say anything about it during the blog. That's how hard an exit I took from that game when the time for rejection came.

I played The Last Stop and Jett: The Far Shore as well...no thoughts really. The Last Stop is a marked improvement from Virginia, but it's also far less interesting. There.

So I nominated Lost Judgement for tenth place on this list, an RGG studio franchise which I may not have played yet, but having put over 70 hours into the Yakuza franchise in just this the year of our lord 2021 alone I think I can safely say this would have made a placement on my list somewhere.