Category: Games

Damn. What a year for gaming. And it’d be impossible to crown a game of the year if Elden Ring hadn’t come out. So without further ado, here’s some tips from me, a gaming expert, to you, an internet rando.

Wanna play, without hyperbole, a true masterpiece? Elden Ring

Had you asked me a year ago, Elden Ring was not on my radar. But this roleplaying game from the people behind the excruciatingly difficult Dark Souls series is really a masterclass in game design. It’s boasting a complete open world that just works by the way it’s laid out. There’s little to no hand-holding, no endless poorly written dialogue – you just boot the game and get going. It’s the best game since Breath of the Wild back in 2017 and it might even be better than that.

The defining moment for me: about 10 hours in, I’m starting to get my bearings, but everything in this huge, huge, huuuuuge world is super dangerous. Like these two huge bears in this weird misty forest, for instance. I sneak past them, and suddenly find a little unassuming temple a bit behind them. I go inside the temple, find an elevator, and activate it. We go down… and down… and down… for what feels like 3 minutes straight. Then, suddenly, the tunnel through which I was descending opens up and I and up in am underground forest that’s so huge the stones on the fucking ceiling feel like a starry night sky. That’s when I realized: there was a fucking second world underneath the first one.

I’m never finishing this game. But every month, I return to it, and lose myself for five more hours. It’s amazing.

Wanna play the first decent 3D Sonic game in two decades? Sonic Frontiers!

Man, Sonic’s had a rough go. It was so bad that the best Sonic the Hedgehog game in the last ten years was Sonic Mania – and that was made by a sega-hired team of romhackers. So cue my surprise that Sonic Frontiers, Sonic’s latest 3D game, is quite good! It’s set in an open world filled with springs and rails and while it makes no sense, it’s fun to run around in. Also, the battles are bonkers:

I’m fully convinced this game just became good by accident, because honestly, nothing in it feels tuned, tested or thought-out at all, but this game feels like a Whopper when I’m hung-over: terrible, but lovely at the same time.

The game for everyone – and yes that includes you, non-gaming cool person and/or grandparent: Curse of the Golden Idol

I’m a bit torn on puzzle games: the ones I love, I friggin love, but those are few and far between. So I’m quite happy to like Curse of the Golden Idol quite a bit. The premise is best explained with an example: You get a painting of one dude pushing another dude off a cliff. Certain things are clickable and give you more information (the contents of the victim’s pockets show he’s carrying a syringe, for instance). Then the game asks a couple of questions and you have to answer them. Who killed who? And why?

The game is rather short, with 11 of these paintings that get more complex as they go along. And the kicker: the paintings build on on each other, telling you a story featuring mysterious statues, cults and spontaneous combustion. It’s an amazing game and you, yes you, should play it.

Wanna mix anchovies with nutella and actually LOVE IT? Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Some genres should not be mixed, but the person who figured a Persona-Style “friendship simulator” in which you befriend 11 marvel characters (Wolverine! Iron Man! Niko… Nomura…?) would mix well with a card-based tactics battler is a genius.

By all accounts, this game should not work. But that’s what they said about the Avengers movie back before it came out. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is amazing, and while it is not the best game of 2022, it is MY best game. No game has had more staying power this year, I’ve been eating pop-corn with Captain Marvel and then using her to punch Hydra bad guys for almost a month now and I feel like I could keep playing this for many months more.

(Full disclosure, this might come off as if this game being good was a complete coincidence, but it was made by Firaxis, the people behind Xcom 2, a game I have poured 300+ hours in over the years honestly the game I would take with me to an abandoned island. So yeah, I knew I would fall for this one HARD).

Wanna mindfuck your toddlers? Play Kirby: The Forgotten Land

2022 was also the year in which my kids began to participate in the hobby that’s actively destroying my back. We played basically all the Mario games, but none of those made their little brains explode like Kirby did.

So Kirby starts out innocently enough: a pink little puffball has a platformer adventure. A second player can play as what my kids affectionately called Banana Waddle Dee, a Waddle Dee with a Bandana, and not a banana, but whatever. And then this happens:

Yep. It’s body horror for toddlers. As soon as this scene played, my kids were hooked. They wanted to defeat the big bad Leon – an evil lion. We fought for weeks and then, we finally defeated him. Only – GASP! – he wasn’t the bad guy at all, he was being controlled by an evil alien!

So yeah, a lot of narrative firsts for my kids in this one. First piece of genre media? Check. First bait and switch? Check. First close encounters? Check!

This is the game that made me enjoy playing with my children instead of just next to them. It was great, and even months later, they still ask me about Leon.

Wanna feel smart? Play Signalis, Disco Elysium or Immortality

These games will totally make you the life of the party – but only if the party is specifically:

• A third-semester lit student party: Disco Elysium. This very, very verbose role playing game is a literature student’s wet dream. You can roleplay anything, from a decent cop to a rapey communist. On my playthrough, I was suddenly known as “regular cop”, which kind of says a lot about me. The story – essentially a murder mystery in a world that feels semi-based on clockwork orange – is a written work of art and one of the best things I’ll probably read in my life. Also, it was way too smart for me (and itself).
• A first-semester film school party: Immortality. This game has you essentially scrubbing hours of footage from three movies to find out what happened to its main actress. The movies are from the 60s, 70s and 90s and are recreated perfectly, which is no small feat considering this game was made by a game studio. The illusion of analysing found footage works perfectly, and when the supernational elements started trickling through, I got chills so bad I had to turn off my PC. (You can play this on your tablet/phone/whatever if you have an active Netflix subscription, so there’s no reason for not trying this out)
• A 2002 LAN party: Signalis. This retro horror game tells a story that feels like a mixture of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the first Metal Gear Solid. Like Elden Ring, it knows that less is more, and doesn’t beat you around the head with endless explanations or walls of text. Let’s be honest: The sparsity of prompts like “Jump into the meat grinder? YES / NO” are what really makes them work.

Do you play way too many games, but do you also want to play many, many more? Get a SteamDeck!

2022 was the year of the Steamdeck, essentially a portable Linux handheld built for gaming. I preordered one in 2021 because I had a feeling I would like it (and I have a thing for handhelds), but this ended up changing my life. All the games on this list, I played on this device. I invested in a Dock that connects it to my TV. I even dabbled in Linux to get the most out of it. It’s not a cheap device, but it’s been the best bang for my buck in years.

Honourable mentions

• Do you like unfinished games that still draw you in? Try Pokémon scarlet of violet, the buggiest pieces of shit I can’t help but love.
• Do you yearn for your days in college? Try Two Point Campus, a university simulation game in which you train cooks, clowns, spies and wizards. Because why not.
• Do you like to feel like an idiot? Play Starcraft 2 competitively and feel bad when you squander your entire army to another fucking marine push.
• Do you wanna finally play the game the kids are playing, but are you scared that the kids are too good? Play Fortnite Zero Build – the most popular game in the world, minus the building. You know, the part the old geezers (like myself) are bad at.

Man, 2022 was an amazing year for games. I probably forgot at least five I completely devoured the last year.

Like any selfrespecting author, there are plenty of things I absolutely hate about myself. But nothing is more annoying than my inability to deal with the horror genre. Yes, I’m a scaredy-cat – and never has this been more annoying than during my time with the PS4 horror game “Until Dawn”.

Because god damn, that game is good.

The premise is deviously simple: Until Dawn is a choose-your-own-adventure-style horror game, an interactive movie in which you alternate between eight teenage cliches as they try to survive a particularly gruesome night. So far, there’s been ghosts, werewolves, clowns, and – because the game keeps asking what I find scariest of all – a whole lot of scarecrows. God damn I hate scarecrows.

So how does this work? It’s quite easy: you play “scenes” from what is essentially an eight hour horror epic and sometimes, the game will ask you to make mistakes. Do you want Ashley to crush Chris superhard or do you want to give him the cold shoulder? Do you want to shoot a squirrel for fun? Watch out, that squirrel might just give you a bloody wound which a particularly scary clown murderer can smell five hours later.

You win the game if, at dawn, all characters survive. But it’s also impossible to know what will kill them or not. And that’s where the fun is: Wondering what the repercussions of your micro-decisions will be. The characters are all perfectly tailor-made to kind of *want* to kill them, but they’re also kind of endearing in their own right – because their dialogues are incredibly witty. It makes role-playing as “the cool jock with abandonment issues” all the more fun – and it’s amazing to see him hung from a meat hook later on.

RIP Matt, we hardly knew ye.

So yeah, I love this game. But I play it five minutes at a time with cozy music in the background. And if one more ghost suddenly jumps on the screen, I will lose my shit and hurly my controller at the TV.

I can’t wait for the sunrise to come and release me. Fuck this game. Fuck this amazing game.

I’ve been replaying a lot of Final Fantasies lately. It started with 12 (the zodiac age!), a japanese star wars; then I switched to 7 (the remake!), the edgiest of the bunch barring 8, and then I landed on nine. And man, I love Final Fantasy IX.

When it came out in 2000 (a few years before I had a PlayStation and could actually play the damn thing at full-speed and not emulated on a PC without a dedicated GPU), Final Fantasy IX was supposed to be a victory lap of what was arguably one of the most successful video game series of the 90s. It had all the tropes and then some. And man, teenage me looooved me some tropes.

Now that I’m older, I enjoy Final Fantasy IX differently. I enjoy its incredibly rich world. Its amazing characters, who, like no other Final Fantasy, can carry both the comedy and the tragedy embedded in the wonderful script. And man, that music… it’s something else.

Unfortunately, it looks like a playstation game. Because it is. It’s got the crude models, the blocky backgrounds, that weird floaty polygon effect that happened because 3D graphics were just out of the Playstation’s reach. And because I always played it on a Playstation console (or a vita), I could do squat about it.

But now, for the first time in ages, I have a PC. And I can mod it.

Enter the Moguri Mod, a modification bigger than the game itself that, with a few clicks, transforms the game in widescreen and wonderful HD. Suddenly, those blocky backgrounds look the way they were intended, like wonderful paintings of beautiful locales; the music sounds amazing, and the character models… them polygons don’t float, man.

Just click the link and look at the trailer and tell me that ain’t the most precious thing ever!

Final Fantasy IX is my happy place. And now it’s a happy place that doesn’t look like shit.

PS Quina is the absolute best character ever and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

There’s this theory in gaming that the reason people like video games is because, when everything comes together, inputs become automatic, like clockwork. You lose track of your surroundings and see nothing but the screen. You’re completely in the flow.

Now, I like video games, but I rarely get this. Usually, after half an hour, I get antsy and feel the need to get up and do something useful. Games have to really click to consume me.

Then I played Hades!

Hades is a roguelike – a game in which you keep on repeating an arduous and difficult “run” through a semi-randomized set of levels. In Hades, you play as Zagreus, the titular god’s son, and the run is escaping the underworld. The semi-randomized part is a meticulously crafted set of variables: Not only do enemies change, but your uncles and aunts on Mount Olympus give you certain boons to help you in your escape attempt. For instance, Poseidon might imbue my attacks with tidal waves, whereas Zeus has the power of lightning. Every ability interacts, making sure that no two runs are alike.

I think roguelikes are okay. I’m not a huge fan of the time investment involved in mastering and finishing one – often times, I get bored by the second or third run. But Hades has a hook: Every time you die, you end up with your father, and the story continues. This game is filled to the brim with beautifully recorded dialogue and superb characters, making sure you go for one more run, just so you know how the story unfolds.

This narrative is a brilliant idea, no surprise coming from Supergiant, the makers of Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, who’ve always been strong storytellers. Bastion and Transistor exist on pretty much every computer, tablet or smart fridge, you should try them out, if only for the art style and the story. Or better yet:

Hades. It’s on switch, so you can play it on the toilet.

If you know me, you know I love to gripe about video game stories. More often than not, the emotions they try to convey fall flat, as if they feel forced and faked for some reason. Video game characters just don’t feel like real people, and most of the games I’ve played this year suffer from this. Control. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Even The Last of Us II seems to miss the mark, be it by design: This game constantly veers away from humanity on purpose.

Then why is it that a loot-based, mindless games as a service superhero brawler is the one to pull it off?

For those not in the know: Avengers is a newly released videogame banking on the success of the Marvel universe. It’s basically got six superheroes that can punch, kick and shoot their way through wastelands filled with robots. As they do this, they level up and get stronger. Over time, more superheroes will join the cast, which can also be leveled up endlessly.

These games are usually quite complex, so they need a sort of tutorial, usually in the form of a single player campaign. And funnily enough, this campaign is one of the most humane video game experiences I’ve played the last months. You are Kamala, a teenager given superpowers by a freak accident which caused the Avengers to split up. As she gets the crew back together, she grows into a superhero of her own. She’s also an insecure teen, an overexcited fangirl and a Pakistani-American Muslim.

Kamala is one of the better realized characters in video game fiction. She is human through and through, and never gets lost in the wildly escalating videogame plot. Whenever something crazy happens (and crazy things happen, this is the Avengers after all), there’s an important emotional question to back it up. It comes as no surprise that this story stems from Crystal Dynamics, who succeeded in humanizing Lara Croft in their Tomb Raider reboot. But it’s a breath of fresh air nonetheless.

Now if anyone wants to do some mindless superhero brawlin’, let me know!

Remember how I wrote about Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and how somehow I keep playing those games? Yeah me neither so here’s a link.

Suffice it to say after Syndicate, I did quit playing these repetitive map games. I did not play Origins, nor did I ever want to – even if it was advertised as “new and improved”. I had had my fill of the franchise, didn’t care about Egypt – and especially with Breath of the Wild revolutionising the 3rd person adventure genre, it just didn’t interest me.

Then came Odyssey. An Assassin’s Creed game set in ancient Greece? Count me in?

And boy, is it a doozie. This game has just about everything. A gargantuan map spanning all of Greece. A boat. A leveling system. A skill tree. Mercenaries. A (very cool) cult for you to hunt and destroy. Dialogue trees. Player choice. A female protagonist – Kassandra! And: No minimap!!

At first, I dove right in there. I wondered why I ever fell out of love with the franchise in the first place. It was like a second honeymoon, and I had a lot of fun destroying barbarian camps and the like.

About thirty hours in, I had probably killed about a million barbarians, and had uncovered about a third of the map. Boy, this is a marathon, I thought, and made Kassandra visit Marathon. I was still feeling it, thinking this journey would lead somewhere.

Then, about fifty hours in, I started growing weary. A couple of really promising plotlines started heading in a direction that was an immense disappointment for a fifty hour investment. And lo an behold, an hour later, the plot had completely derailed (without spoiling anything, let me just say “Pythagoras” – those who played the game will know what I mean).

Boy, do I feel kind of burned. Yes, riding across Greece is a thrilling experience, and the vistas are as beautiful as ever. But somehow, I can’t enjoy them anymore, knowing the story has completely derailed. It just killed my genuine investment in Kassandra – and thus, in the entire game.

Sometimes, things come together nicely. Case in point: Pre-ordering a Switch – Nintendo’s console-handheld-hybrid – and having it come out three days after my brain surgery (more on that soon). I was hospitalised for three weeks with nothing to do but to practice closing my eyelid, smiling and walking in a straight line, and the Switch and Zelda gave me something to look forward to.

And boy, was this something. Breath of the Wild does away with ninety percent of the core Zelda tropes, strips it of the baggage the series has dragged along over the course of thirty years, and just delivers a breathtaking open-world experience that’s all about exploration – and all that without even needing a minimap.

It’s amazing. After two hours of a very open-ended tutorial, you have all the skills you need and one quest in your log: Kill Ganon. You can just storm Hyrule castle and have a go at him. But that’s not where the fun is at – it’s in discovering the world, looking for shrines (this game’s version of miniature dungeons) and using whatever means the game’s environment gives you to defeat the baddies and grow stronger.

And while there is a lot of that, it never gets old. There is a seemingly endless stream of content to explore, from lava-filled lands to scorching deserts and jungles and plains. I couldn’t stop myself from discovering every nook and cranny and even after 40+ hours of playtime, I still felt surprised at all the creative situations the game threw me in.

And then, when I finally stormed the castle, armed to the teeth with the finest armor and the best weapons, it felt like catharsis.

I don’t know if the Switch will be worth it in the end – the console feels very bare-boned as it is – but Breath of the Wild is a true classic. This might just be the best Zelda ever made. And it’s certainly going to be the one I come back to most often.

I seriously couldn’t wish for any other game at a time like this.

Post-scriptum: I had this post prepared for ages, but somehow I never posted it. Seeing how this game is available for free on Playstation Plus in November, now’s as good a time as any to recommend this wonderful little game!

I’ve said it time and again: We haven’t reached the bottom of the Jacques Cousteau-ian underwater world that is videogame storytelling. Sure, we are building increasingly more complex devices that allow us to dive deeper and deeper, but the true essence lying on the bottom of the barrel? Not yet.

I’m not going to say Everybody’s gone to the rapture by the wonderful people at Chinese Room (well, I guess they’re wonderful because I believe in the good in people) is a revolution. It’s not. But it’s a wonderful storydriven game fueled by something most developers seem to forget: Genuine human emotion.

Everybody’s gone to the rapture takes place in an abandoned village. Somehow, everyone’s just gone up in smoke – and it’s your job to find out what happened.

Actually, calling it a job is saying a bit much. All you do it walk around and discover story tidbits that allow you to piece together the game’s bigger narrative. Angry internet nerds, of which there are quite a few, mockingly call this game a “walking simulator” – a game in which you walk around until things happen. You can’t die, you can’t lose – nothing gameplay-related is at stake, just the elements of the story.

And when I say “elements”, I mean that in the most literal way possible. Everybody’s gone to the rapture doesn’t tell a linear, coherent story. Instead, it opts to feed you bits and pieces, breadcrums relating to a handful of characters, and lets you piece it together on its own. And like a lot of games, the pieces are a lot more colourful and interesting than the finished puzzle.

If you’re playing this expecting a cathartic endgame, you’re going to end up disappointed. If you’re just enjoying the sights and taking the emotions in the way they come at you? You’re in for a treat.

Everybody’s gone to the rapture is short – as is almost always the case with these games. But personally, I think it’s got precisely the length it should have. It doesn’t drag, doesn’t overtell its own story, and knows precisely when to call it quits. And frankly, if you’re fond of exploring, you can get way more mileage out of it than I have.

In a world of endless collectibles and other doodads that trigger a sense of OCD I never knew I had, this game is a godsent, ideally enjoyed with or after a glass of good scotch.

 

Me and gaming, we’ve fallen on hard times. Things used to be different: We would have fun together, play all sorts of stuff until the middle of the night… Nowadays, we just look at each other and shrug. It’s like we lost all our old love, like we don’t know how to push each other’s buttons or find our graphics undesirable. What has happened?

In all earnesty: I’ve been working a lot. Like, a lot a lot. So usually, when I come home from work, my brain is so mushy I can’t really focus on doing anything. I tried playing Final Fantasy XIV, found there to be too much reading. I tried DOOM, which was great, but there was too much looking at the map. Lord knows I’ve played The Last of Us – but even there, there was too much going on and I couldn’t take any of it in.

So I ended up playing Puzzle Quest and Tropico – and as far as the latter was concerned, just the first few missions over and over on a loop. I’ve gotten so good at that game, if you ever need a colonial-era dictator to run your banana republic, I’m in.

And then I bought Overwatch. On a whim, because the thought of an online competitive shooter was enough to make my eyes roll out the back of my head. I’m not competitive, and playing against other people for fun should have been the last thing I’d want to do. I like games because they’re a series of a meticulously designed challenges waiting to be conquered – not because I wanna be teabagged by a random stranger.

Overwatch, however, seems to scratch current my gaming itch perfectly. It’s easy to pick up – a handful of heroes, a few maps and three rotating game modes – but with enough tactical depth to keep me coming back. The maps are small enough that playing them a few times is enough to get a good read on them. And the game’s entire atmosphere is more about having fun than winning (you can be lose the game and still be the match’s MVP, for instance).

So if you’re on PS4 and looking for someone to play with – hit up Kuudelka! Together, we can conquer the world.

I haven’t been gaming a lot lately. It’s not due to a lack of games – I’ve found myself trying out many of the various AAA titles I’ve missed in the past few years, but nothing really stuck. Either I missed them for a reason, or I’ve just had so much to do I don’t really have the energy to delve into deep games.

Enter: Rayman Legends! A delightful 2D platformer, beautifully animated, with simply gameplay that’s still varied enough to keep me hooked. Save vikings, beat dragons, jump on pillows – and look stilish while doing so! It’s the perfect game to turn off your brain.

And that’s all the energy I have to write this post. The game’s dirt cheap and available on every current console. Try it out!