Day 258 - The 2024 Video Game Year in Review Autopsy
Sam is just reviewing a different game, Sorry Skeeter, Mass Effect 1 ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Well, we made it. Another year. Sam and I have been bouncing the idea about talking about some of our favorite games this year for a while. It only took two weeks to get here. Now that the New Year hype has died down, we’d like to present to you our bonk opinions on some games we enjoyed. We’ll most likely trickle these out over the next few days.
Boy, did I play a lot of games this year. According to the Steam Year in Review I played 128 games this year, and 64 of those were new games:
64 new games, and most of those are outside of our review blog here. I’m sure there isn’t a ton of playtime in most of these, but I found that surprising.
I have picked out 4 games that really stood out to me this year. I don’t want to list or rank these games as they all brought something different to the table that I enjoyed.
Those games are Balatro, Deadlock, Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade, and Silent Hill 2: Remake.
I have a problem with remakes, man. I love them. I get to experience all these old classic games with really fun and great game design and a shiny new coat of paint. Both of the games in my top I have never played the originals for. I get to go in blind and not be disappointed by any of the changes since I won’t know they are changes in the first place! It’s awesome.
I’ve already touched a bit on Deadlock in this blog, so I most likely won’t revisit much. I played the hell out of Deadlock, but have been too afraid of dedicating myself to games as I have a puppy with the smallest bladder and don’t want to have to pause or abandon mid-match to run her outside. My gaming has shifted a bit in that regard. Long multiplayer games are just harder to commit to. But Deadlock is a blast if you love MOBAs, but also liked OG Overwatch. The best MOBA leaning character shooter I’ve played in a long time. I trust this game to be amazing one day as it’s already great in Beta.
Balatro is an anomaly made by one man and a Fiver musician and I am so happy for its success. My “brag” from this year is that I was early on that Balatro train. So much so that I stumbled across the demo on the Steam page store and was eagerly awaiting full release. That’s right, I get to play the hipster card! Negative street cred, let’s go!
I’ll get more into these over the next few days, but I wanted to shout out some games that were pretty fun that I played this year:
Content Warning - One of those “Lethal Company” type games where you go into a spooky facility and try to accomplish a goal with friends. The gimmick here is your goal is to go viral by recording a short video of you and your friends doing stupid things. You can then take that video you filmed and watch it back at the end of the expedition… granted you get the tape out.
This usually and hilariously ends with the team screaming “GET THE TAPE OUT GET THE TAPE OUT” as they are carried into the abyss by some creature as the chosen soul that has the possession of the video camera tries to find their way to the shuttle to escape. It’s great incentive.
The things you can purchase are all on-theme as well. You can get a boom mic, a scene clapper, a noise effect machine. The sound effect machine is my favorite. Nothing like a good timed slide whistle after someone falls off the edge of a cliff to their death. This ends up naturally leading into each person having their “job” or “role” in the expedition. The cameraman, the boom mic operator, the sound operator. It feels super fun trying to coordinate the best shot you can. It’s a great take on this formula and I’ve had a great time with it.
The Coin Game - This is a cute little game about having to survive on Arcade games. I think the set-up is your rich Uncle owns the island or something? I don’t really know, you won’t find a single other person. Everybody has been replaced by these strange robots. It’s just you alone on this island full of arcades and carnivals. You can earn prizes and exchange those for money which can be used for food and water. The idea is you literally have to survive off of winning arcade games. They’ve got everything from mini-golf, to claw machines, to those coin pusher machines and bumper-carts. I loved the vast variety of games and the core idea is great.
I used some of my last few dollars to ride the bus out to the cool UFO arcade on one playthrough. I realized I only had around one dollar left, and bet it all on one of the arcade machines. I won big. I was super excited about my huge new plushie I could sell at the exchange building. I then realized that I didn’t save enough money for the bus ride back. I starved trying to walk myself back to town, giant rainbow bear plushie in hand. What a great game.
Would benefit greatly with added multiplayer, but the singleplayer is a whole relaxing vibe itself.
Fallout: New Vegas - Holy fuck did you guys know that Fallout: New Vegas is a good game? Really good game! Check it out!
In all seriousness, F:NV took a good portion of my gaming time this year. I had forgotten how great that game is, and was glad to revisit. I really need to finish my playthrough, but my ultimate goal is to try to rise to power and kill and eat everyone on the map eventually. A crusade like that takes time. You can’t rush cannibalism, just ask my friend Mortimer.
Recommend: Of course, ya dip!
Replay Percentage Chance: Of course, ya dip!%
Time Played: Of course, ya dip!
Sam’s Take:
Skeeter told me he wasn’t doing a list. Then I come on and read his review, and it’s a fucking list. It’s not a ranking, but it’s a God damned list.
I shouldn’t start this so late.
Fuck it.
THE 20 GAMES I FINISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE YEAR 2024 LET’S GOOOOOOOOO
THE BAD GAMES
-20. Viewfinder
Viewfinder isn’t the only bad game I played this year, but it is the only bad game I finished, and that’s because it has promise. Viewfinder is a puzzle game where you take pictures of areas and objects then place the photo somewhere else and it becomes real. It’s a little hard to explain, but hopefully this screenshot does something:
That black area in the bottom left corner was removed when I took a polaroid of it, then I placed it (with a sick sunset filter) above the level, essentially moving that square. You can use this ability to move an exit closer to you, to create a bridge, etc. It’s a cool idea.
The problem is that this mechanic is never used in a way that gave me an “a-ha” moment. I’m not a puzzle super genius but I breezed through this game until the final world. At that point I thought “okay that was a long tutorial, but now the mechanics are finally starting to build on each other” then it ended. It’s the most lackluster puzzle game I’ve played in years, and I play hella puzzle games.
This alone wouldn’t make it last place though. I call the next tier of games “THE “YOU WERE REALLY TRYIN’ SOMETHIN’” GAMES”, and that’s where something like this would belong. The other issue is this game has dialogue. It has a plot, it has writing, and it is embarrassing.
I have too many games to go through to really rip this story a new one, so I’m just going to skip to the juicy bit. Your scientist coworker, an adult human working as a particle physicist, reacts to you solving a puzzle saying “THAT just happened”. This hyper millennial “it’s kinda my thing” quirk-speak causes a nuclear reaction in me, and the new Dragon Age can thank its lucky stars that I didn’t give it the time of day this year, otherwise we’d have two games in this tier.
THE “YOU WERE REALLY TRYIN’ SOMETHIN’” GAMES
-19. Weird West
A bunch of Arcane Austin devs joined up after the studio closed down to make this, so despite mediocre reviews, I had to give it a shot because they made Prey, which is God’s gift to earth. Despite it’s 19th ranking, I’m very glad I played Weird West because it’s putting in the fucking work. It’s an isometric choices-matter RPG shooter with immersive sim elements except that’s a lie. It’s actually 5 isometric choices-matter RPG shooters with immersive sim elements. You play as some freak that’s in a ritual where you are able to take control of other people’s bodies. For some reason, the cultists in the room with you have picked five very specific people for you to control, and the game is about solving each character’s individual plight while also trying to understand the meta-narrative of the controller.
If this already sounds beyond the scope of a new off-shoot dev team, then buckle the fuck up, because each character has a entirely new combat system, there’s a random encounter system, characters that die in one sub-story will remain dead in all other future sub stories, there’s a reputation system, procedurally generated bounty quests, and if you help someone on your journey there’s a chance they’ll show up to help you in a fight if you hit low health later in the game.
All these systems interlock also. You can recruit your old characters into your party once you’re inside a new body (they will recognize that you are being controlled the same way they were, and follow you to try and figure out what’s causing this), and if you helped someone in THEIR story, they might come to your aid as long as they are in your party. It’s fucking ape-shit. It’s not just ambitious in scope, it’s also several ideas that I’ve never seen in a videogame before. I really REALLY wish this game was higher up, but unfortunately, this is the danger of a grand experiment. While this all sounds great on paper, it unfortunately just isn’t fun.
The number of variables is so staggering, that the five stories basically have to avoid intersecting almost ever just to keep the plot possible, taking away that sense of narrative motion. The combat is so fast and brutal that you can’t really take advantage of the immersive sim elements (shoot arrow through poison into fire to make an explosion, stack crates to sneak on top of a roof, etc), because you just need to find cover and shoot ASAP. The people coming to save you happens to late, and often happens right after you just died. There are also so many characters that can show up, that I usually was like “wait, who the fuck is that?” when they came to help.
The game wants to be a series of interlocking systems, the classic imm sim dream, but ends up a pile of systems that occasionally touch, but are too scared to start making out. Wow that was a weirdly horney thing for me to say, almost like I’ve been playing sexy vampire visual novels…
-18. Vampire the Masquerade Coteries of New York
This is the part where I have embarrassingly admit that this isn’t the only one of these on the list. VTM:CONY is a visual novel in the Vampire the Masquerade universe that tries to have some gamey mechanics. You choose a vampire clan at the start, which gives you different abilities that can come up in dialogue. There’s a hidden blood meter that will cause you to do something animalistic and stupid against your will if you don’t safely feed on humans when you get chances. There are many side quests and you can only finish two or three of them, which is a branching path in a way, but the main quest won’t deviate. This is, for all intents and purposes, just a choose your own adventure book about vampires. Is the writing good? I don’t know, that’s a complicated question. The dialogue made me embarrassed more than once, but they understand the important things to the VTM lore. They know their story must lean into the dichotomy of political disempowerment that happens right when you get superpowers. You can run faster than a car, but there’s a whole group of even higher powers watching your every move, waiting to use you as a pawn in whatever higher game they’re playing. The art ranges from passable to pretty good, and there were multiple characters that I liked.
I don’t know how to recommend this, it’s my Dawson’s Creek. It’s embarrassing, but it’s better than I expected I guess? There’s a Malkavian vampire (cursed with blood that leads to many disparate personalities inhabiting the same body) that does an insane self-mutilation strip show via live stream while you have to moderate her chatroom before eventually learning that the chat participants were also her, reacting to her own show.
How did that story make you feel? Do you want more of that? Do you want way way less of that? I don’t know you. I won’t tell you how I felt about it, because I’m embarrassed by how much I enjoyed that scene. OH FUCK!
THE GOOD GAMES
-17. Sayonara Wild Hearts
Sayonara Wild Hearts looks like early 2010s Instagram. You have to accept this.
It also ends with a young adult “getting over her problems” by playing the acoustic guitar in her kitschy modern bedroom. You have to accept this.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is a playable arcade intractable music video, where you free-run your way through levels and try to get a high score. Each level has a different gimmick. There’s one where you’re on a motorcycle that’s always shooting, so you need to position yourself in front of enemies to kill them and stay alive. There’s one where you’re on a screen with a full 2D plane of motion, basically playing advanced Asteroids that’s timed to the beat. The best one is this crazy fuckin thing where you play 3 different levels layered on top of each other that swap to the beat:
The aesthetic both musically and visually hold it to a bubblegum standard, which is a shame because the constant level switch ups are impressive. Simogo basically had to make twenty or so different mini games, and the tight camera combined with simple controls, gives in a flow that successfully distracts from the sort of vacant-vapidness of the whole thing.
This is a style that I’m allergic to, but I played through this whole game twice because this shit just keeps movin’ and it unfortunately feels great. Sayonara turned me into a bubble gum queen for a few hours, and that’s a pretty rare event.
-16. MYST
Thank God, finally one I can keep short. Myst is an old very famous point and click. I was not playing games when it came out (I was one) and I have not played enough early 90s game to have the cultural context to appreciate its significance. This is all to say that I have no nostalgia, historically or literally, for Myst. The reason it’s on my good games list is that it is a puzzle game with solvable, but challenging puzzles. Myst’s strongest trait is its ability to give no instructions, and have each puzzle be solvable by just clicking on everything on a screen, seeing what it does, then experimenting to put the pieces together. Playing it really feels like fiddling with an ancient machine, learning to make it sing for you. It’s a simple functional joy that any point and clicker should try, I promise it’s not just riding on history, this is some real designer shit.
THE GREAT GAMES
-15. Antichamber
The amount of confident swagger in Antichamber is undeniable. It’s just a series of perception-bending puzzles put into a metroid-venia-style world, but its scope is more impressive than its simplistic style would imply. If Myst makes you feel like you’ve conquered an ancient machine, then Antichamber makes you feel you’ve adjusted to a new reality, where wacko physics, color mechanics, and non-euclidean space is just the norm. It’s that great feeling where something you know logically should be total nonsense, just makes perfect sense. Basically imagine if Superliminal was good (JK I HAVEN’T PLAYED SUPERLIMINAL YET IT MIGHT BE GREAT SORRY).
-14. Vampire the Masquerade Shadows of New York
LOOK I’M SORRY OKAY, I LIKE VTM LORE, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME! I BOUGHT THE NEW CORE RULEBOOK AND I CAN’T STOP FLIPPING THROUGH IT! I’VE BEEN PLAYING A PORTLAND OREGON CAMPAIGN AND DON’T EVEN HAVE ANY PLAYERS!
VTM:SONY (lol Sony) is the same game, but they took out almost all the attempts at game mechanics, but added it some new (much stronger) art, better dialogue on average, and a main character that has a personality instead of being an empty vessel to self-insert. The lows of the writing remain just as embarrassing (the scene where she tells her lover “you’re Single white femaling me” comes to mind), but the good scenes are so much stronger than the previous game, and the music is absolutely on another level (shoutout to Karolina Rec).
There’s a scene right after the protagonist gets turned into a vampire where she sits on a roof at 2am realizing that her life wasn’t going too hot before this, so having to give it away for this new life actually sounds kinda good. She sits there for a long time, appreciating the view of the city at night, how she’s never looked at it from a rooftop like this. She just loves doin’ vampire shit, and I love that there’s room in VTM for the odd character who seems to gain humanity from becoming a vampire. It can’t be the norm, but it makes sense for her, and it’s an interesting internal progression that stays consistent throughout the whole story. There are moments and scenes from this one that stuck with me. It’s just as uneven as the last one, but the highs are so much higher that if you can look past the mess, you’ll leave with some gems.
-13. Max Payne
What a gem Max Payne is. There’s an overly complicated mob/cop story involving a super-soldier program, getting revenge for your dead wife, thirty seven characters that are introduced then die (usually by your hand) at the end of a chapter. None of it matters. What matters is when you dive, time slows down. If you don’t kill everyone in a room before your dive ends, you’ll be so fucking dead. It’s basically 3D Hotline Miami; you dive in a room, die, then reload with better knowledge, dive in again and feel like a GOD as you headshot everyone in the room with one mag HOOOOOOLY SHIT.
Every location is disgusting, every person is vile, Max Payne himself is the most jaded human being on the planet. There’s a scene where you find evidence that would prove the guilt of the main villain, and he just throws it away because he’s going to kill them anyway, why should he care about the plot? All he wants is revenge for his dead wife, or maybe he just wants to die trying to get that revenge. Either way, he dives through a lot of doors saying sad one liners that made me laugh for twenty minutes. Also this:
What else could you want? A story that makes sense? Maybe a few less boring ass dream sequences? Maybe a game that loads without 30 minutes of downloading fan patches? Shut the fuck up. It’s good. Games are sick, how do we keep doing this?!
-12. Ctrl Alt Ego
Ctrl Alt Ego has a shit name, has trash music and looks like butts. You play as a formless spirit that can take over any mechanical object in a space station. You mainly control a little robot, but you can also be a light switch, a door, and if you spend a few ego points, you can control every enemy in the game.
What CAE lacks in… everything it makes up for ten-fold in being the most free and open gameplay experience I’ve maybe ever had in a game (Minecraft is the only competition I can think of off the top of my head). I decided to max out my fabrication ability, which lets you exchange EGO (the game’s currency) for a multitude of objects. I got stuck on a part where I’d bring a robot in an elevator, then a small aggressive little fuck-bot would destroy me at the top. I then realized that I didn’t need to fight this fuck, I had fabrication!
I fabricated 14 bombs, put them in the elevator with me, rode it to the top, then blew us all up before taking over a nearby vending machine, following a chain of other machines to take over before finding something that could move and continuing through the level.
There are a million ways to do anything. The developer has no plan, they don’t need one. It’s so open that they just say “go from here, to here” and put a bunch of shit in the way. Go nuts, be clever. If you are an immersive sim player, this is a must play. Every level is better than the last one, please stick with it. I have a feeling the dev made each level in chronological order, and figured it out halfway through. Good game, good job, please play.
-11. Alpha protocol
WHAT
THE
HELL
DUDE
Obsidian are fucked up for making Alpha Protocol. It’s not even good. In fact by almost every metric it’s fucking terrible. The difficulty curve is fucked, the skills are wildly unbalanced, the story is barely holding together, shooting feels sticky and gross, and there are a million boss fights, but zero good boss fights.
Alpha Protocol is great at exactly one thing, and that is proving that the world IS NOT ready for the dream “choices-matter” game. Why does every person you work with have a reputation meter that affects their dialogue and behavior? Why does every main mission have 3 sub missions where you can just skip one, forcing the devs to check “wait did you do that one mission? Did you meet that one guy”? Why does every sub-mission have dossier info you can choose to spend money on that gives information about certain characters and locations that opens up new dialogue with that character? Why are there entire main characters that you can just not meet that make the game not make sense to the player, but like do kind of logically make sense if you did those exact missions in that exact order? Why does how well you completed tutorial training missions affect mid-game dialogue? Why can you do any main mission in any order, and that order DRASTICALLY affects events and dialogue?
Anyone who has played this game knows I’m leaving so much out, this is the most moldable game I’ve ever seen in my life and it can not contain itself. The tone is complete nonsense, there are debatably zero good characters, but have you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and flipped through every ending despite the bad writing, because you’re just out here having a blast with the possibility space? I played Alpha Protocol twice in a week, and I’d play it again RIGHT NOW. I need to do a dickhead run where I pick the “suave” dialogue choice every time. I spent a month of my life not talking about anything but Alpha Protocol. Sorry wife.
-10. Dread Delusion
Besides my previous reviews, I’ll say that I finished this game and while the combat is sub-par, and the world isn’t super cohesive or sensible, this is a game so chock full of little ideas and sub-plots that if you DM a DND campaign, you basically have to play this. There are so many great moments and ideas to take out of context and put into your world. I’m absolutely taking the physical morality scale where you measure if a person is good by having them stand on one side, and the legally appointed goodest person ever stand on the other. Tell me that doesn’t rule.
-9. Max Payne 2
Max Payne 2 should not exist. No one should have made a game after Max Payne and thought “yea but what if killing everyone didn’t actually help him that much”. Max Payne 2 is a Max Payne game where there is an entire level where you just walk through an abandoned haunted house theme park ride with zero enemies. It’s a Max Panye game where Max realizes external pleasures like revenge will not help him grieve. It’s not some super smart, deeply emotional thing in a vacuum, but the fact that it’s Max Payne learning that he needs to handle his internal demons is so wild that I was glued to this game. The story is more simple, but it makes sense, the combat is slower, but feels less save-scummy. It’s a game that betrays Max Payne by loving Max Payne. Max Payne 1 is a stupid game about revenge. That makes sense. Revenge is simple stupid monkey brain behavior. Max Payne 2 is a stupid game about love, and I have no idea what that could possibly mean.
I LIKE PUZZLE GAMES! This is one of those puzzle games where the puzzles are good too! What a bonus! It’s crazy that there’s a single player puzzle game in 2024 with full on Mass-Effect style dialogue trees and Witcher 3 level graphics menu options. I don’t know how we got here, but we should absolutely enjoy the shit out of this while we have the chance, it may not happen again for a long time. Do I need every puzzle game to be this shiny? Jesus no, that’d be awful, but I’m glad there is one pure puzzle game on this scale.
I think the Philosophy in Talos Principle 1 is awkwardly handled. Not in overall message, but just that every scientist sounds like they are actually a philosophy major that is writing a videogame narrative. I don’t believe these people do science. The philosophical discussions in two aren’t “deeper”, but the framing allows for way more forgiveness. It no longer comes from long dead humans, but from robots building a new post-human society. They don’t share our biological needs and basically live in a scarcity-free world, and so the debate is less “was Socrates right?!” and more “can we gain anything from reading Socrates when we are fundamentally a different species?”. They talk about philosophical concepts at a low level, but it makes sense for a bunch of robots building a world like this. They have infinity at their fingertips, they don’t need to worry about reproducing, they don’t need to expand, all they need to do… figure out how they can and should live when everything is… fine.
It’s a soothing game that is way bigger than it needs to be. Do we need the booming orchestra every time I solve one laser puzzle? No, but I’m going to smile like a sheep every fucking time. Do the puzzles need to be a 90 second trek through the desert apart from each other? No, but check how sick looking we made the sand!
Talos Principle 2 is the puzzle game. There are puzzle games I like more, but not puzzle games that are more. Praise be.
I don’t know how I can explain the black hole that is a Fire Emblem stat table without a 60 slide Power-Point, but I will say this. There are roughly 30 first generation characters in this game. Of those, 25 can have children (almost any male and female pairing can be the parents). Based on the number of female characters that get married, you can have up to 13 second generation children that are based on the mother, but share stats/skills and hair color from their father. The number of possible pairings has to be in the hundreds, and that’s not even considering that any character can have different skills/be a different class on any given playthrough, so there are probably thousands of variations of each child.
Okay that’s all well and good, but Awakening isn’t built around single units. You can (and should) create pairs of units with a backup and a main unit (the first providing a stat bonus and follow up attack chance to the second). So each of these possible children iterations could pair up with any of these other possible children iterations, creating a fractal possibility nightmare even where we are ignoring the semi-random level ups.
The magic of Awakening is you can aim to understand this and dive in, destroy everyone. Mold the numbers like a calculus wizard and prove yourself to be the truest of all gamers. You can also play normal difficulty and just make sure the unit pairs can become friends, and that magic users use magic. The system is built to both be worked with AND be conquered depending on your desired level of engagement, and that is a crazy line to walk. Internally, Awakening hides infinity, but it doesn’t even tell you. You can just keep everyone in their default classes and use your favorite guys. Take 90% hit chance shots, don’t take 20% shots. You choose to enter the madness when you are ready, and trust me, the madness of double galeforce optimized second generation sorcerers awaits beyond the pale.
THE MIRACLES
-6. Pathologic
Since writing this, I’ll just say that I finished all 3 characters, and while the final character was for sure not finished, nothing I said about the game in this review has changed. There are games that feel better to play, but there are zero games more fun to talk about, so please play Pathologic. I just wanna talk to you about it. Forever.
-5. Balatro
Ima copy and paste a quote from our Night of Full Moon review:
To hook me away from Slay the Spire though, you gotta come in strong. Recently Balatro was able to awake me from my Spire stupor, and it did it in mostly two ways. First was hiding an absurdly complex scoring system behind game mechanics we already understand from other games (a deck has 52 cards, four suits, a flush is 5 of any one suit, a straight is better than a pair, etc). If you pretend for a second that you’ve never seen a deck of cards before, Balatro is probably one of the most confusing games I’ve ever played, but so much of that burden is taken off by just using a deck of cards.
The second way Balatro hooked me was by being so different that it’s hard to even compare to Slay the Spire. If Spire is primarily about building a deck, Balatro is about building a scoring system. Yes, you eventually want to remove/copy cards to morph your deck, but the first key to success in any Balatro run is to obtain cards that boost your score when specific cards are played. You change the parameters of the game, then build your deck to fit those parameters. Where Slay the Spire emphasizes being prepared and overcoming challenges like a chess puzzle, Balatro is an exercise not in minor optimizations, but in tearing down whole systems and saying “no, you’re playing my game now”.
This is all still true and the game over time has proven to have the same depth as a GOAT like Slay the Spire. Welcome to the club Balatro.
-4. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Yea I had a bit of a puzzle phase this year, but Lorelei is different. LATLE isn’t about looking at a puzzle and then solving it, it’s pure deduction. See a year in a note someone left? That year has to be a code to something! See if anything on the page might indicate what door it goes to. Why is there a pattern on the wall? That has to mean something. The game warns you at the start that you will have to take notes and it is NOT FUCKING AROUND:
That is all of this game. It is a slow descent into red-line-corkboard madness made specifically for people who love taking notes, and love putting two and two together. Basically, they made it for me. I don’t know what possessed Simogo to make this (maybe working on Sayanora Wild Hearts bubblegum shit for 4 years drove them into unmarketable puzzle hell?), but thank God we got this gem.
The last puzzle in this game is fucking brutal, but so earned that I can not be mad. I thought of nothing else during the period of time when this was my primary game. There’s even a surreal Twin-Peaks inspired memory story going on in the background. A coworker played this and while I seemed to be the king of solving the puzzles, she was able to figure out the big twists of the story well before the ending (which was a big twist ending for me). I love that there’s another layer of meta-puzzle to figure out, one that I didn’t see while I was lost in my notes that came so clearly to my coworker with a better ability to see the whole picture.
I’ll put one very minor spoiler here if you’re still on the fence. Early on in the game there is a puzzle involving a piano. I won’t tell you how to solve it, but if you do you’re rewarded with this scene:
Simogo display a new level of confidence with Lorelei. A ultra-specific puzzle deduction game that requires hand written notes, and then they make the reward for solving the piano puzzle a ballad about growing irrelevant and repeating the lyric so many other writers would be too embarrassed to repeat so many times:
“I’ll see it all through laser eyes, I’ll see it all through laser eyes, I’ll see it all through laser eyes, I’ll see it all through laser eyes”.
Simogo has never worried about looking stupid. It’s worked against them a few times, but finally their steadfastness has paid off. This is their masterpiece, a whole body of work leading up to a moment, and it’s a niche genre for basically just me.
-3. Mouthwashing
These reviews still reflect my current feelings. Please play it, it’s short and cheap and the devs deserve this one. Let them make games forever.
EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED GAMES
-2. Persona 3 Reload
When we finished the original Persona trilogy, I turned to my wife and said, “if they made Persona 3 in the Persona 5 engine, that might be my favorite game ever”. It’s like a dogshit movie where instead of the moral being “be careful what you wish for” it’s instead “if you wish for something and then it comes true, it actually just kicks ass”.
I will probably do a longer writeup on this game later, but to shorten what should be a 100 page essay, Persona 3 looks incredible. The Persona team have been making the best JRPG menus for coming up on a decade now, and Persona 3 Reload is their opus. The main character’s face floating in water when you press start, not only looks sick, but frames the menu in a way that draws your eyes to the proper options, and thematically sets up later themes in the game’s story. It’s insane what’s happening in this game’s start menu. I wrote a paragraph about a start menu, that’s what we’re on here.
Beyond just the menus, I believe the team that made P3R had a full understanding of what made P3 the strongest story of the modern Persona trilogy. Every added link fits in character wise and thematically. Every new song fits right in with the revamped soundtrack. The art direction is certainly a bit more saturated, but the camera angles and color choices are true to the original. Basically, besides a few remade songs that I don’t like quite as much as their OG counterparts, every time they need to be true to OG P3 they are, and almost every change or addition is somewhere between “a welcome improvement” and “I used to hate Ken and now I kind of like him”.
They didn’t touch the main story much, which is good because Persona 3’s story is precious and we need to preserve it forever. What pretends to be an edgelord fantasy turns out to be a bizarrely meditative game about coping with the inevitability of death through friendship. The limited time system in Persona 4 and 5 seemed to be copied over from 3 because it worked for pacing and gameplay choice, but its function in 3 has another layer. There is so much chaos in the world of Persona 3, our characters are just hanging on, but to prove its point about how they must rely on their friends, the world moves on uncaringly. I don’t want to spoil anything for this list, but there’s a week where you learn something world-shattering, like literal apocalypse level shit, and you just have to go back to school, and keep pretending everything is okay. Skeeter Davis asked “why does the sun go on shining”, Persona 3 has an unstoppable day night cycle. You can grieve, but you will lose time.
Persona 3 was always shooting higher than it could hit. Fully animated cutscenes for a different game might feel like sacrilege, but in Persona 3, every cutscene done with its playmobil characters always felt like a limitation rather than a choice. My favorite games are often great ideas with fatal flaws that were able to push through. Persona 3 absolutely fit here, but then they went and… finished it. Games don’t often get a second draft, and I think it’s telling that both my number 1 and number 2 games are both that rare chance. Persona 3 always deserved better, and I cried like a tiny baby at its stupid cute wonderful ending. Same words, same characters, but the intimacy of the closer camera, the more dynamic cinematography, it’s not there to say “we fixed Persona 3” it’s more respectful. It feels like it’s saying “Persona 3 was always the best one, we just needed time to show you”.
-1. Pathologic 2
The only thing ima add to this is that once this review is done, I will be dedicating my daily review time to a long form Pathologic 2 video. It might also cover Patho 1 and 3 depending on when that comes out, so expect a lot more Patho 2 in over a year from now.
Recommend: Yes, unbelievably good gaming year for me.
Replay Percentage Chance: Yup
Time Played: A LOOOOOOOOOOOT
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