by asylumrunner
Last year I, completely bafflingly, managed to succeed at my goal and see credits roll on 30 games, new and old, and in the process I found some absolute gems of games that now easily are some of my favorite games of all time. Last year I finished Death Stranding, Ape Out, Necrobarista, Earthbound, Journey, No More Heroes, and Outer Wilds, all of which were amazing, so I'm hoping to find some more gems this year.
Goal and the terms are the same for this year as they were last year: my goal is to see credits roll in 30 video games in 2021. They can be from 2021 (as quite a few might be, I have a lot of games I'm looking forward to this year), or from any point in the past, and they can be new to me, or replays, but each game only counts once in the year.
Looking forward to what kind of good stuff I'll find this year!
Showing 1-10 of 21 items
Rolled credits on Hades after a triumphant 10th clear, but I think this will remain the game I go back to whenever I have a little bit of free time left on my hands to enjoy. Honestly, with the well-deserved praise this game is getting all around right now, especially with regards to Game of the Year deliberations, there's not much I can add to the conversation other than to add my voice to the chorus (heh) saying that this game is incredible. The way it doles out narrative, the way conversations with characters react to your play, the way storylines ebb in and out of each other, the tight, snappy gameplay, the fantastic upgrades which let you play in so many wonderful, different ways, the way all of the systems slowly unfold like a lotus as you play, the fun of setting your own challenge with the Pact, it's all just so perfect.
Believe it or not, my first complete Castlevania! Managed to kill ol' pops in his stupid upside-down condo. I think the back half of this game in the Reverse Castle is dramatically inferior to the first half. You've already seen the castle's secrets and found pretty much every room to find, so it's just a matter of slogging through a bunch of old areas tracking down your dad's bits, which is kind of annoying, especially because you don't know what areas are going to be important and which areas, which were important in the regular castle, have garbage in them. Still, though! When this game is firing on all cylinders, it's easy to see how it basically singlehandedly argued for the "vania" in Metroidvania. A great game, and I'm excited to see how the rest of the series turned out!
With my return to the World of Assassination, I took it upon myself to replay the entire trilogy, ICA Training Facility to the Carpathian Mountains, tip to tail. This was my first time going through 3, obviously, but also my first time going through New York and Haven Island. This review will be discussing Hitman 3 as it exists with all previous Hitman content inside of it. Hitman 3 is one of the greatest video games ever made, bar none. It is, frankly, a sublime package in all regards. A mechanics-heavy sandbox design philosophy created in 1, evolved in 2, and finally perfected in 3 carries this entire series, making this entire game feel to me like a sort of beautiful piece of masterwork clockwork, one which I want to just stare at and fiddle with and see how all of the pieces move. The new batch of maps in 3 are probably my favorite of the series. It sort of feels like 1 set the groundwork for this sort of game structure and created some solid maps to demonstrate its ideas. 2 expanded those ideas both in scope and complexity (which was good) and by starting to toy with some non-assassination objectives to spice things up, which were a mixed success. 3 perfects this new variety, crafting missions that feel very distinct from each other and all of the other missions in the game, while still offering that freedom and mechanical complexity all the way through (unlike, say, the Sapienza lab, which feels extremely railroady). Altogether fantastic. I understand why IOI might want to stretch their legs and make new games after this, and I'll support them every step of the way, but I could play another 7 of these games.
Is this what this game is called? Damn I would have played this much faster if this was the title on Steam. Known more commonly as "Ladykiller In A Bind", this is an absolutely fantastic erotic LGBTQ+ visual novel about consent, about vulnerability, and about, well, bondage. The writing is absolutely excellent, managing to clearly surpass thin-excuse-for-pornography that other VNs of its ilk reach, and instead creating an interesting mystery, some very strong and well-developed characters, and sex scenes that actually have a narrative purpose on top of just being hot. I should play more visual novels!
Man, I was sort of expecting this thing to not hold up, having been overshadowed by the legacy of Immersive Sims that fell after it, and admittedly the Liberty Island intro is rough (put points into melee attacks, the knock-out point is at the base of the spine), but this game is a classic in all the best ways. The level design just feels really really good. Although the levels feel a little barren by modern standards, making the available options and routes stick out by merit of... existing, and not being plain grey walls, the game still does a good job of having clever workarounds and secrets available to players who are attentive. Even back in '99, this game is still creating interesting puzzle boxes to play with that put some modern immersive sims to shame. The story here, eh, it's fine. The cast of characters and the global conspiracy here feel a little flat, far surpassed by the reboot games in every regard. Special, uh, anti-credit goes to the Chinese accents which, wow, what the fuck is going on there, guys. Has that beautiful immersive sim power curve, where at the start of the game you're skulking through every vent and tunnel scrounging for parts, and at the end you're kickflipping into combat with a goddamn laser sword just murdering mechs and supersoldiers left and right. Ultimately, this game totally holds up 20 years later. Absolutely phenomenal.
So, hearing that this game was on the chopping block, and seeing that it's free with Game Pass, I decided to gaze upon 2019's biggest train wreck for myself, see the carnage. The thing is, though, parts of this game aren't bad. Parts of this game are honestly *really good*. Many people have cited the flying as being excellent, but honestly I enjoyed most of the combat. Sticking with a Storm for most of my campaign playthrough, the powers were an absolute treat to use, and my brief foray into Colossus was also quite fun, with that thing feeling weighty and like a tank. The character writing, too, is actually pretty solid. There's a decent cast of characters here that I quite enjoyed talking to, and there are some fun twists with their character arcs along the way that I was really excited to watch unfold. Aaaaaand the bad parts. Two years on, these servers are still unforgivably unstable. I was dropped from missions, almost always almost-done ones, a dozen times in about as many hours. The load times (or, I suspect more accurately, the server connection times) are abhorrent, massive stumbling blocks that absolutely ruin the flow of play. The loot is all incredibly samey, and I was never excited to find a drop. Literally every mission of the game is the same, just fly to a spot, shoot stuff, maybe do a thing, repeat. And boy, god, the bullet-spongey bosses are negative fun to fight. But, ugh, dammit, parts of this game feel so solid. There's a good idea buried in here, but a lot of the rot that would need to be yanked out to find it probably entails ripping up a lot of fragile and complex backend server code that couldn't be fixed easily. I think I'm actually pretty bummed that Anthem Next is officially dead: there's a version of Anthem that could have been absolutely phenomenal, and parts of it poke up through the surface regularly enough in the Anthem that does exist to make its faults infuriating.
This game, bizarrely, is an absolute *motherfucker* to emulate. There's a room 95% through the game that seems to hard crash a lot of emulators, so heads' up. Use mGBA if you're going to emulate this thing. Anyways, yeah, Minish Cap is one of the best Zeldas ever made. Despite some early interactions with Ezlo giving me big "uh oh, are you gonna be this game's Fi" vibes, it actually does a remarkably good job of not spoonfeeding you puzzle solutions and letting you expreriment and figure things out. The eponymous ability to turn small feels kind of more like a gimmick than anything else, but it's not a bad gimmick, and the few moments it really shines, it's great. I mean, honestly, this thing's an all-timer. Great puzzles, great dungeons, great items, great exploration. My nitpicks, beyond "please stop crashing my emulator", are relatively minor, and didn't come close to ruining what is otherwise an incredible experience.
An exquisitely cool, darkly moody adventure game, made by one guy! It's genuinely motivating to see a work this good made by one person. This game's world is deeply fascinating, feeling horrifying and unknowable but also the smallest amount friendly and familiar. The puzzles here are really satisfying to solve (except for ending 9, which kind of feels like bullshit? if you've gotten all but one ending and are out of leads, just check a guide, you're not going to guess it), and the endings feel at once meaningful, but also toned down enough so as to not drown in melodrama. This game is an exceptionally interesting vibe, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone curious.
I regret leaving this unplayed in my library so long, this is an absolute ton of fun! I was under the (wrong) assumption that the game's time limit would have put a lot of pressure on you, that it was gonna have this old-school-Dead-Rising-y push for you to get stuff done fast, but as it turns out, a minute is *such* a short time frame that it wraps all the way around and becomes super chill! Every meaningful piece of progress takes less than a minute, if you biff something it's only a minute wasted, it's super relaxed! Genuinely a delight! Lots of neat fun little puzzles and ideas in here, and absolutely nothing overstays its welcome, for obvious reasons. This is maybe the gamiest of the genre of "chill indie exploration games" I've been playing a decent amount of lately, and I think I like it a lot for it.
Slight asterisk on this one. Original Pokemon Red and Blue border on completely unplayable, between some excruciating bugs and, just, horrible QoL, so I played this with the Pokemon Red++ ROM hack applied, which fixes a lot of the bugs present in RBY, makes some lifesaving QoL improvements (in particular with movement speed), and adds in the three types added later to the series to improve balance. You can find the hack here, I highly recommend it: https://github.com/TheFakeMateo/rpp-backup Yeah, honestly, what can I say about Pokemon Red at this point? It's still really good, and a classic JRPG. The difficulty curve still, as would become grand tradition for all Pokemon games, fuckin nosedives near the end, as I ended up just actively avoiding all optional fights and still steamrolling the last 2 Gyms and the Elite Four, but it was still fun! Also, maybe it's a quirk of the translation, but a lot of this game seems mean in a way I don't normally associate with these games. Like, trainers and gym leaders are much more *malicious* than I remember? Weird! Anyways, yeah, it's Pokemon. Still Pokemon, still really good. It was a treat to go back and relive a bit of my childhood, but using the miracles of modern technology to play it how I remember it, not how it was.