2017's Thoroughly Played Games List

1. Virginia

There's fun weird, like the first season or two of lost and Twin Peaks. Then there's pretentious weird, often incomprehensible and too up its own ass to be interesting or fun. Unfortunately, Virginia's more of the latter than the former. First, I don't understand a thing that's going on, and that's not just because of the deliberate obtuseness of the plot, but because the graphics don't lend themselves to understanding the minutia you're supposed to be seeing. It's aggravating to not be able to make out what the hell small details are or why they should matter. Second, the game doesn't know when to end. There's a certain point at which two endings are teased at, the latter of which would have made for a poignant end to an otherwise terrible experience. Unfortunately, the game instead goes for option C, a crackhead's bizarre pipedream of an ending that's far too weird for its own good. If there's one saving grace for the game, it's the music, which is astoundingly good, and probably got robbed of score of the year, if I had such an award. At times, it reminds me a bit of the thrillers of the early nineties - The Fugitive, etc., while still very much its own thing. It's haunting and more than a little beautiful, and well worth a listen on its own.

2. Far Cry: Primal

I had a lot of fun with Far Cry Primal. Like Mad Max and AC: The One What Had British Twis Wot Wot, it's an entirely solid open-worlder that, unfortuately, never really does much to stand out from the crowd. Story's pretty good, though.

3. Dishonored 2

I'm not Dishonored 2's target audience. I'm playing it on easy, not worrying about stealth, and I'm still getting murdered every other minute. I want to like this series. I do. But in a lot of ways, it reminds me of Lost Odyssey in that its best parts - its lore - are hidden away by texts you find in game. The story of the game itself is a bit of a yawn-fest, with characters I just don't care about doing things that don't matter to me one bit. I don't care about the new Empress. She's given one minute of villainy (almost literally), and then you're on the run. I don't care about Corvo, who you see for precisely two minutes. I don't care about the plethora of colorful side-characters because all their best stories are hidden away in books rather than developed through the game. Come to think of it, that's maybe my biggest problem with this series as a whole. Dishonored 2 should be a book, not a game, at least until Bethesda can hire a decent in-game writer to make me give a flying fart about any of this.