*Ordered by most recently played.
Showing 1-10 of 25 items
I don't have anymore time to write thoughts on the rest of these games. I need to fill out this list so I can make my top ten for the community voting. I would say I could come back to this and finish my thoughts, but I probably won't. Although, I did make a resolution to stay current with my 2020 list. New year, fresh list to start with!
The decade has come to a close and all the game sites are talking about their games of the decade (GotD?). I think Fallout: New Vegas is my GotD. In anticipation of a certain Obsidian game (more on that later), I wanted to fully mod and finally complete New Vegas. One of my favorites of all time that I’ve played over 500 hours of yet never finished! My goal was to do an “ultimate” playthrough of sorts, doing as much content as I could (including dlc) with an idealized character of myself - a true social justice warrior if you will. Without going into detail on that playthrough, my takeaway from this game and why it’s my GotD is that it’s my warmest blanket. Austin Walker wrote about these types of games being warm blankets for him. For me this decade, it wasn’t just these types of games - it was this game that was my warm blanket. It’s a game I played at the beginning of the decade and kept coming back to throughout - always excited to start a new character with different skills; to follow the intended path or carve my own; to fall in with different factions or none at all. Ironically, this is something I’ve tried to do in life to a lesser extent, looking to start fresh and hoping to find purpose, yet failing. New Vegas allowed me that fantasy risk free. I’ll possibly mention other reasons that make this game great when I write about The Outer Worlds later on.
You know how they say something is a sum of its parts. Well Void Bastards is the negative(?) of its parts… It’s a rogue-like shooter. I am so done with rogue-likes that for them to strike any kind of cord with me they have to do something special with their design beside proc-gen levels and a few random modifiers. However, what caused me to definitely put this game down was the original Doom-esque shooting that never evolves. People were making comparisons to System Shock, but I did not find anything here resembling what defines and makes those games great (you can pick up a lot of junk off drawers?). If you want a game that plays like original Doom with modern visuals and rogue-like-lite elements then this game is for you I guess. To me it felt outdated in many ways and the loop got old quickly. A couple of positives were the fun, bawdry incidental dialogue voiced by Cara Ellison (shout out), and the sharp-looking, comic book panel visual design.
