Year in Review 2023: Video Games

Best Video Games I Played in 2023

Card Shark (2022)
Synopsis: A young mute boy learns how to cheat at cards and also maybe foments just a wee bit of revolution.

It is a little rough at the edges, and if you choose to play for higher-than-default stakes you may find yourself frustrated by some of the less-polished/less-precise mechanics (e.g. some input lag, a weird floatiness when dealing over a mirror, and something that seemed like stick drift [on my brand new Pro controller?] but was only happening during a particular stage of a particular move and was causing me to repeatedly fail that lesson without knowing why, which was even more frustrating because of having to go through the same condescending dialogue over and over; finally I figured out if used the d-pad instead of the stick during the first two parts of the move it wasn’t an issue, but as I had no problem with the control stick during any other part of the game I have a hard time believing the issue was with the controller. Which is a long way of saying I was not in a great mood during the last hour or so of this game.)

Remembering all the moves also starts to get difficult, especially as many of them have the same setup but then go in a different direction. The game does let you pause to look at a description of the strategy you’re supposed to be executing, though, it’s just not always easy to remember that in the moment.

Also, for anyone familiar with either card games or sleight-of-hand the way the game simplifies things can get a little grating at times. Don’t get me wrong, that simplification is absolutely necessary, but the idea that my partner definitively won’t have a winning hand if I don’t get him (or my opponents) precisely the cards and/or info he wants just got increasingly hard to swallow. Like, ok I gave that guy a Jack instead of a Ten, your King still beats it, how’d we lose?

Still, while it is occasionally frustrating (for reasons both intentional and not) it’s definitely a worthwhile game: beautiful art, memorable characters, intriguing plot, and challenging but (mostly) fun mechanics with relatively forgiving failure states (and the ability to save scum a bit). And a fittingly anachronistic Borges reference! What’s not to love.

p.s. In case you’re wondering, I did also mostly play this between 3 and 6 am. Still haven’t figured out my sleep problem. [EDIT: This will make more sense after you read the next review. Starting to think organizing these alphabetically doesn’t really work.]

p.p.s. Weirdly met Cagliostro in the game the day after I was telling a coworker about Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.
Citizen Sleeper (2022)
Synopsis: You are a sleeper, a copy of someone’s consciousness placed into a robot body in order to work off their debt. And you just ran away.

I don’t know why exactly, but when I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, I decided the best way to spend this time was to start up Citizen Sleeper. And you know what? It kind of was. The darkness outside, the darkness of space. The chill, electronic swirls and pings of the soundtrack. The (mostly) relaxed gameplay loop, essentially a visual novel with light RPG mechanics. A game you can sink into, like a dream. Perfect for the wee hours of the morning when the world outside is still largely theoretical.

So then when I woke up at 3am the next day, I figured why not? After which point, the idea of playing it during any other time of day felt…wrong, somehow? Like the spell the game had me under would break in the sun and I’d never be able to put it back together.

Now, I can’t necessarily recommend only playing this game between the hours of 3am and 6am. But having done exactly that, I can say that if you find yourself regularly being awake during that time, Citizen Sleeper is a pretty good fit for it.

Let see, what else. Art: beautiful. Music: immaculate vibes. World: Fascinating. Characters: richly-developed. Story: all heart, no filler. And the premise is so much more interesting than what I thought it was going to be. In short, if you have any interest at all in text-driven sci-fi about defending (or, indeed, redefining) your humanity against greed and exploitation, this is the perfect game for you.

p.s. Some advice for the late game [SPOILERS]: Once you’ve dealt with the main countdown clock by either getting protection or destroying your tracker, try to avoid doing too many missions at once going forward. Several of the missions can affect what resources you have access to, and a lot of them will have timed clocks at some point, and having too many of those going at once can be incredibly stressful. And when the game says the flotilla missions are intended for late game, they really mean it. I’d suggest completing everything else before even starting those, because they require a lot of focus, and narratively will assume that you’ve completed most of the main character arcs. Believe me, I learned this the hard way.

p.p.s. I think beyond just the chill vibes and the sprinkle of pre-dawn magic, there’s something about the fact that, depending on how you play, you can go pretty much the entire game without doing any work that you don’t want to do. Whether it’s paying back the scrapper who rescued you, or tending bar for one of the first people to show you real kindness, or working the land of the commune because it feels good to take care of others and be taken care of in turn. There are very few jobs in the game that you do simply to survive. I think some of the magic of the game comes from being given the opportunity to devote all of yourself, not just a fraction, to living a meaningful life, and to have that devotion still yield the resources you need to keep living.
Cyberpunk 2077 (2020…ish)
Synopsis: After a heist gone bad you’ve got a chip in your head that’s slowly killing you—also it’s Keanu Reeves. But you can also just ignore that and go talk to a vending machine.

Another long review, but also one that’s to some extent out of date? Like, I mention that hacking is OP, but apparently that’s been nerfed now—3 years after release. Of a single-player game that doesn’t really have a post-game beyond cleaning up side quests you didn’t do or achievement hunting.

I recently wrote a rambly thread on Bluesky that ended up being about this phenomenon, so I figured I would include it here:

Other than FOMO, what is the incentive for playing a Big Game at launch? Why should I pay full-price for an unfinished game when I can wait a year or two and get it on sale and with all the patches and DLC? Like, I really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but I can wait, and I’ll probably enjoy it more.

And it’s not like I don’t have games to play. My back-catalog is I think over 100 games at this point, and there are still new releases of smaller games that I don’t have the same concern about. So why waste time dealing with bugs and game-changing patches?

On the other hand, the significance of those patches is unpredictable. I played CP 2077 nearly 2 years after launch, and yet the version I played is still completely different than what it is now. And I don’t even know which one is better (though sounds like Phantom Liberty mostly improved things?)

Player’s experience of these titles is going to become increasingly stratified based on when they played them, and the ability to preserve various canonical versions of the game will be severely limited for these giant titles compared to something like Minecraft.

In 5, 10, 20 years, when we’re talking about the history of modern games, what Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky (and who knows how many other titles) means when I say it is going to be fundamentally, semantically different than what it means when someone else says it.

Which isn’t new, exactly, what with DLC and ports and remakes and reboots, but rarely outside of MMOs has one had to specify not a year but a release version in order to adequately communicate what game they’re talking about. Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) means way less than Cyberpunk 2077 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0.

These huge evolutions are still the exception, with most games just being really buggy on release. But I think we’re going to see more games go through this, or worse, die because the studio doesn’t have the resources (or doesn’t care) to do the 3 years of major patching needed to complete the game.
In Other Waters (2020)
Synopsis: A marine biologist searching for her colleague has to rely on a mysterious sentient AI. You might be surprised at which one of these characters you are.

I wouldn’t normally have picked up a game like this, but having played (and loved) Citizen Sleeper it seemed like a safe bet that there would be more to it than met the eye.

And there is. The thrill of discovery as you enter each new area for the first time is shockingly visceral for a game rendered in monochromatic topographical maps, and the story, it turns out, is a compelling mystery with a strong (if necessarily obvious) message. And Amos Roddy’s music and sound design once again lend the whole thing the perfect ambience.

Where I stumbled was in the gameplay itself, and the larger vision the game has beyond its main storyline. The main problem is that the mechanics were clearly designed for PC, and on Switch they often felt clunky, even unresponsive (the Switch once again revealing its performance limitations). As much as I like the idea of just throwing a bunch of button prompts on screen and letting the player figure it out for themselves, once I’d done that I was mostly just annoyed at having to use a handful of buttons to cycle through menus that were clearly designed to be used with a mouse and keyboard.

Then there’s the marine biology of it all. And I just…I just don’t care that much about marine biology. So what’s supposed to be the main part of the game, learning about the various lifeforms and collecting samples, I found kind of tedious and boring. And the sidequests to find the additional samples you need to complete various taxonomy entries are especially annoying because the game only lets you access the dive map from the base, not while you’re actually in the water looking for the damn thing, so I have no way of knowing if I’ve gone too far or took a wrong turn or what.

But that’s kind of on me, right? I played a marine biology game despite not being that into marine biology, so I’m not going to punish the game for that. And like I said, the story and even some of the exploration were really compelling (to the point that when I was exploring the Bloom, the Abyss, and the abandoned Baikal facilities I sometimes even forgot I was just looking at a topographical map and felt like I was actually seeing the environment being described, which is an impressive achievement; also those Baikal facilities had big Horizon Zero Dawn energy and I mean that in the best possible way).

So it’s definitely not a bad game, and all told I’d say I mostly enjoyed it. But I went into it wanting to enjoy it, so if you’re not already invested and the marine biology of it all doesn’t interest you, you might bounce off.

p.s. I did enjoy reading A Study Of Gliese 667Cc, which kind of lets you get a lot of the science without having to do all the work, and has some beautiful illustrations. It also serves as an epilogue to the game that some might find a little more satisfying than the in-game ending, though honestly I don’t think I actually needed it, and it still doesn’t answer the main plot question I had, which is “what about the Artificers?”

p.p.s. I really can’t say why I have such a hard time getting invested in eco-fiction, but for whatever reason it generally just does not resonate with me emotionally, even though intellectually I’m totally on board. Probably I just don’t spend enough time outside?

p.p.p.s. Would be hilarious if I’m completely wrong and the mechanics were actually designed for Switch and then those limitations were abandoned for PC. I mean, I don’t think I am, because it’s not like you couldn’t replicate the effect with keyboard if you really wanted to. But it would be funny.

p.p.p.p.s. I appreciate that the game lets you roleplay a bit even though you don’t know anything about yourself or the world (to start with, anyway), it helps make the dialogue sections a little more interesting.

p.p.p.p.p.s. I definitely noticed the telltale signs of “this game was written by one person” a lot more here than in Citizen Sleeper, but I’d probably just chalk that up to this having come first. The fact that it’s less noticeable in the later game just shows Martin’s getting better at their craft. Which makes me even more excited for CS2. For which I was already quite excited.
Inscryption (2021)
Synopsis: In a dark dark wood there is a dark dark house and in the dark dark house there is a dark dark…CCG?

So this is the kind of game that you should really know as little as possible about going into. As such, my review is pretty spoiler-heavy, and I decided to have fun with that by using the spoiler-text to create a sort of erasure poem out of my review. I really like it, and there’s no way to replicate that on here, so I’m just going to link the Grouvee review. Read at your own risk.
Midnight Fight Express (2022)
Synopsis: Have you seen The Warriors? It’s like that but if the Warriors were hunting down all the other gangs and were also just one dude and a drone.

Would I pay full price for this game? Absolutely not. But it was free, I was waiting for something else to download, and I was like “I probably won’t even like it, so I’ll just play it for like 5 minutes” and then I played it for an hour because it’s fun and goofy and each level is 2-10 minutes long and introduces new enemies (i.e. new 80’s movie references) every 30 seconds. It’s absurd and funnier than it deserves to be, with a fittingly over the top story and a really very subtle Portal reference (and a really very not subtle Call of Duty reference).

My main quibble with the gameplay is that it feels like there were better options for how to pull off some of the special moves and I could never do a lot of them consistently, which makes the combat get a little repetitive, but the 3D-printed gun and the rope gun help to negate that a bit.
Rogue Legacy 2 (2022)
Synopsis: It’s basically Dead Cells but easier.

Rogue-lite gameplay, not too hard but just hard enough (once you turn off contact damage), flash game-style upgrade system—it’s basically heroin for me. That makes it hard to say for sure that it’s a good game, but it’s definitely an addictive game.

At first glance it’s also basically a Dead Cells ripoff? Except the first Rogue Legacy came out in 2013 and Dead Cells came out in 2018, so…it’s probably more like a Horizon / Legend of Zelda thing, where Dead Cells was iterating on what RL was doing and then RL2 iterated on what Dead Cells was doing.

And it did iterate, beefing up the story elements a bit and introducing a lot of QOL stuff, both in settings (various accessibility/difficulty mitigation options including the aforementioned turning off contact damage) and as optional upgrades, like locking in a randomized build (i.e. so you can always pick a randomized build) and locking in a favorite build. And being able to teleport between regions, and being able to permanently unlock those teleporters so you don’t need to find them every time. It all makes for a very low-friction experience which, again, is kind of addictive.

So yeah, if you want Dead Cells but easier then this is the game for you.
Rollerdrome (2022)
Synopsis: Like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater but on skates. And with guns.

Specifically it’s the competition levels in THPS, but without the strict time limit. And it turns out that time limit was actually a boon, because as the levels balloon in scope repeating them becomes more and more onerous. I just can’t handle trying to keep up that level of performance for 4+ minutes, let alone over and over again at increasing levels of frustration. So while I fully cleared the first 4 or 5 stages, by the end I was just trying to get a Victory, and I quit after half a dozen or so failed attempts on the first level of the “Out For Blood” secondary campaign. (Actually first I turned on all the assist features, but then I got bored.)

What I think I would be able to handle, and would kind of love to see them try even though I don’t know how it would actually fit the world, is to make a sequel with more expansive levels that encourage pockets of intense engagement but don’t require you to sustain it for long periods of time. Which is essentially what THUG and THUG2 do so well, teaching you how to master each individual part of a level, and then giving you a mission that ties it all together. It’s that chunking strategy that Rollerdrome doesn’t really do—their challenges are great for teaching you combat strategy, but nearly useless at teaching you about the level, at most giving you one or two level-specific challenges (e.g. “Air out onto the tower”, “Wallride the ski lift”) that are too disconnected from anything else to really help. And there’s no guide as to what enemies will spawn where when, and it’s not like you can really keep track of that in the middle of a firefight, so even though those things are presumably predetermined they can seem arbitrary, which contributes to a feeling of being overwhelmed if things are going badly. There’s just a lot to process when you get tossed into a room with a bunch of people shooting at you, you know?

But that’s just me, and I don’t want to imply that they failed to do what they set out to do, or that what they set out to do isn’t worth doing (somethingsomething the Dark Souls of skating games somethingsomething). And they did it with style and panache—sometimes I found myself just getting lost in the beautiful graphics and fluid controls and not really caring what I was supposed to be doing.
Sable (2021)
Synopsis: There comes that time in every young person’s life when they must set aside childish things and head out into the world to discover who they are. We can all remember getting that new set of clothes, a vehicle of our own, and a magical stone that lets us defy gravity, then setting out to explore derelict spaceships and collect beetle dung.

Sable is a game that asks you to think about what you want from life: what excites you, what brings you joy, what is your calling? It encourages you to explore only that which interests you, to stop and smell precisely as many roses as you want, and to end your journey as soon as you’re sure what you want to do with your life.

So naturally this is the 2nd game I’ve ever platinumed.

I’m not great with the whole “figure out what you want to do with your life and then dedicate yourself to that” thing. I’ve never been able to really excel at anything because the time required to do that is time I can’t spend doing other things.

Somewhat ironically this includes video games, which is part of why the only other game I’ve platinumed is a game you can beat in about an hour. (The other part is that a lot of trophies don’t require you to be good at the game or even to do anything interesting in the game but instead ask you to do incredibly pointless, tedious tasks that add nothing of value to the experience and say nothing about your abilities other than your ability to spend a lot of time doing something meaningless that you don’t enjoy in order to get a digital trophy that not one single person on the planet will care that you have. It’s like a job but worse, and it should be banned.)

But Sable doesn’t actually require you to be good at anything, and pretty much tells you exactly what to do in order to achieve greatness in every possible way. Basically, it’s what I often wish life was. Just a series of well-defined tasks the completion of which make me feel accomplished and, eventually, content. Rather than what life actually is, which is spending almost a quarter of your time (or almost a third of your waking hours) generating profit for someone else, of which you get, if you’re lucky, a fraction barely large enough to feed, clothe, and house you, often destroying your body (if not also your mind) in the process, and then hoping that you somehow have enough energy left over to do anything that will make you feel like a worthwhile human being and not just a (noticeably expanding, if we’re being honest) sack of meat with delusions of significance who seems to be having a midlife crisis despite being only 29 and if that’s midlife then shit I’d better hurry and do something with it.

…um. Don’t know where that came from. I’m fine, everything’s fine. Let’s just talk about something else.

As beautiful and compelling as Sable is, what becomes increasingly clear if you play it for as long as I did is that, at least on PS5, the game can be kind of a pain to actually play. Mechanically, the platforming is rough, with inconsistencies in when and whether you grab a wall or ledge (especially from floating), a perspective while climbing that makes it difficult to tell how close you actually are to the top of something, and a glitch when climbing moving objects that makes you just let go for seemingly no reason. Not to mention the camera is frequently a hassle to wrangle. Performance-wise, there’s a lot of frame stuttering and audio clipping that get really annoying as the game goes on. And then there are the game-breaking glitches. There were several times I had to restart the game in order to complete a quest because of some event not triggering correctly. And don’t even get me started on fishing—I had to restart at least—AT LEAST—a dozen times because fishing just broke the game (like, really broke, like the buttons stopped working broke). For comparison, I had to restart Cyberpunk maybe twice because of glitches?

Obviously a lot of allowance has to be made for how small a team this is (the credits are like 30 seconds long, if that), and if you play the game as it’s probably intended (and maybe in small doses…and don’t fish at all) it’s probably fine.

But play it long enough and you might start to hate it a little, which is a shame, because there’s a lot to love about it, from the gorgeous art to the fun characters to the intriguing little snippets of worldbuilding you can uncover. Hopefully those are the memories that will stay with me.

p.s. Some more thoughts on trophy hunting (in response to a comment on the original review):

I don’t have a problem with trophy hunting per se, I just think it should incentivize meaningful ways of engaging with the game, not arbitrary behavior that adds nothing to your experience beyond the trophy itself.

Trophies can actually be a great way to point players towards parts of the game (be it mechanics or locations) that they might not have gone looking for otherwise, but in a way that’s less obvious than a quest marker or a tooltip. Imagine a trophy that’s like “Look down on Althara from a great height,” so you go to the city of Althara and you look around and you see a mountain and now you have to figure out how to climb the mountain and maybe you need to have really mastered some traversal techniques to do it, and/or maybe you find some rare loot at the top or something, and there’s a lookout point that you can interact with and that’s what triggers the trophy so now your trophy vid is this beautiful view. That would be a trophy that I’d actually feel good about getting.

Compare that to scouring the Horizon Zero Dawn map for every single training dummy so you can hit it with your spear. That’s not incentivizing exploration, it’s incentivizing tunnel-visioned, systematic surveying, that says nothing about your skill in the game, that doesn’t have you engaging with interesting systems or environments, and your reward is just an arbitrary trophy that exists solely for the purpose of making you do this pointless thing.

And to be clear, this is more a critique of the people designing the trophies than it is of the trophy hunters. If a player finds value in the trophy system then I don’t blame them for seeking out these arbitrary trophies if that’s all that’s available to them.
Saints Row (2022)
Synopsis: Four friends decide to start a criminal empire. Hijinks ensue. And murder, lots of murder.

This one went surprisingly long, mainly because I had to play two other games just to be able to write it. Since I didn’t remember to mention this in my main review, I just want to point out the reboot does have an entire (very fun) LARPing storyline and a (incredibly frustrating) demon-hunting quest chain, as well as a murder island game show. It’s still pretty wacky, is the point.
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected (2015)
Synopsis: The Boss becomes President of the United States and then some other stuff happens.

I wrote a bit about SRIV:R-E in my review of Saints Row (2022), so to summarize what I’ve already said: fun game, loads of jank, good music, flat characters, Keith David’s great.

Now that I’ve actually finished it, I’m even more aware of how the reboot might be disappointing to some fans of the franchise. IV has the momentum of the three previous games behind it, and it goes all out in a way that only a IVth game in an already absurd series can. You can feel the confidence and passion put into this game. And it’s true that the reboot, in trying to welcome in new players, has a little less of that specific flavor. But also, it’s a reboot, and I think if Volition had been given the chance to continue the franchise they would’ve built up that momentum again, and who knows where they would’ve taken it.

I also said that I assumed there was some reason why IV couldn’t get a sequel that was The Saints taking over a whole planet. Well…turns out no. That actually would’ve worked perfectly. So while I do see the argument for a reboot given how much time had passed, I can also see why people were disappointed they didn’t keep going with what they had. And honestly I’m a little disappointed too, I think Saints Row V would’ve been fascinating if they tried to go that big, though I’m not confident they would have actually been able to pull something off on that scale.

So anyway, that’s just wrapping up my thoughts on IV vs. the reboot. I don’t know that I have much more to say about IV specifically. I don’t like that it’s always night time. I don’t like that the game constantly takes weapons away and then forgets to put them back. I do like that you can do all the tasks for the busywork missions even before those missions become available. I don’t like that the passive income limit is so low. I don’t like having to use telekinesis for anything, worst power. I like speed dashing but wish that once you got the wallrunning upgrade you could just run at the wall and not have to jump at it. I like that The Boss says they’re going to rip Zinyak’s head off and then they do. And I like that a bunch of people got to make a big action game that’s also pretty weird.

And that’s about all I have to say about that. Unless I think of something else like 5 minutes from now. Oh, wait, the They Live bit was fun. Ok now that’s it. For now.
Solar Ash (2021)
Synopsis: Fight desperately to salvage a mission to save your planet from complete destruction, using the only tool you have: jet-propelled rollerskating.

Hyper Light Drifter is a quintessential critical darling, with a mysterious narrative, a fantastical post-apocalyptic world rendered in wonderfully intricate retro pixel art, and difficult gameplay that relies more on player skill than on character abilities or stat upgrades. Basically, it’s a retro-style FromSoft game (minus the resource-drop mechanic and the math).

Solar Ash, on the other hand, is actually fun to play.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Hyper Light Drifter, even the difficult gameplay. But while that difficulty felt worth overcoming, it was only because it was an obstacle between me and what I actually liked about the game. The gameplay itself was often grindy, tedious, frustrating—but it’s what allowed me to see more of the game’s beautiful world (and beautiful cinematics) and to engage with it’s enticingly evocative story.

With Solar Ash, the world might be less intricately crafted and the story might be way more obvious, but I actually enjoy the, you know, game part of the game. Skating around and solving puzzles and bouncing of baddies and taking down bosses is really fun. It feels good to do. I didn’t even mind looking for the logs or the NPC quests, because that just meant more time traversing the world, which instead of being a chore is one of the highlights of the game.

And it’s not like the world or the story are bad. The environments are beautiful, though it’s at a much larger scale than the more detailed art of HLD. The game creates a number of lookout spots and uses them to their full advantage, presenting impressive, mind-bending vistas of gravity-defying ruins and worlds bending in on themselves. And the story, though it may be an obvious climate change metaphor with a time-loop “twist” that they’re not even really trying to hide, is well-told for what it is, with solid writing and a cast of compelling (if fairly 1-dimensional) characters, and lands its ending with a solid emotional 1-2 punch of despair and hope.

Yes, some of the platforming can be frustrating, and the collectible suits are largely pointless…but that’s about all I can think of. It is otherwise a very well-made, interesting, fun game. I also beat it in 6 hours which in this day and age is a goddamn miracle.

If you want a combination of Gravity Rush 2, Ratchet & Clank (minus the guns), Shadow of the Colossus (yes, the camera can still be annoying but at least it’s less tedious), and, narratively, Bastion, you should check it out.

Also, just a little plug for Grouvee, the site I use to log games. In a lot of gaming spaces this game would have stirred up a hornets nest of terrible people for one specific reason I’m not going to mention, but on Grouvee not a single review has even a whiff of being motivated by that reason. In general I’ve found Grouvee to be a really welcoming and chill space. Other than on my Bioshock: Infinite review, but I did come in pretty hot on that one.
SUPERHOT (2016)
Synopsis: You get introduced to this cool new game called Tree Dude and then you get bored and log off and nothing else happens.

Somehow, in the last 7 years, I never picked up on the fact that SUPERHOT actually has a plot? I thought it was just a low-poly shooter with a neat mechanical gimmick, I had no idea there was this much of a story or that it was going to creep me the hell out.

See, here’s the weird thing about SUPERHOT—or rather, about superhot.exe. Because I tend to take a very methodical approach to games, I of course had to look through the entire file system before ever launching superhot.exe. Which means I read the entire chat log from the hacker board, and pretty quickly picked up on what the game actually was. And the thing that’s weird about that is, in-universe, if I read that whole chat log before playing the game, I would never play the game. It is very obvious what’s going on, and I, a reasonable person, want no part in it. But, of course, I have to play the game…because that’s the game. Right?

Right?

So the incredibly creepy thing about this surprisingly creepy game is that if it were actually, in reality, what it claims to be within the world of the game, it would have just told me that to my face and I still would have played it. Obviously it was, in fact, just a game. Still, creepy.

As for the gameplay itself, I really thought this was going to be the kind of action-puzzle game that I flame out of as soon as it gets mildly complex, but even when it got hard it never felt impossible, which is an excellent quality in a game. And solving the puzzle is fun and satisfying, particularly when you can do it with some finesse.

Overall, I got a lot more out of it then I thought I would. I’d say it’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.

p.s. By sheer coincidence I’d just watched Empathy, Inc. a few weeks ago, a very good indie thriller from 2018 with a similar premise. Not, like, suspiciously similar, and it’s actually really interesting to see two works start with pretty much the same basic core concept and then go very different places with it, plotwise and thematically.

p.p.s. Ok, yes, I’m sure everyone else has done that bit, but honestly it is probably the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years, so.

p.p.p.s. That guy in the chat who said he got 400 in Tree Dude, that’s gotta be a lie. I got to like 150, I’m pretty sure by the time you got to 400 it would be physically impossible to process the visual information and translate that to the controller fast enough.

p.p.p.p.s. Best part of the game is the carpet generator, though, right? We’re all agreed on this?
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (2003)
Synopsis: Ummm. Wario starts a game development company? I think? And then a bunch of random people help him make games? Or something? You a play a bunch of 5-second games is the point.

The game part is definitely fun, but I think it’s the strange and inscrutable story that really sold me on it. The character intros end up being the best part of the game.
Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014)
Synopsis: An alternate universe where the Nazis won WWII using *checks notes* advanced technology they stole from the Jews? Anyway now it’s time to kill some Nazis.

[Some spoilers ahead. But they’re sort of anti-spoilers because they’re about what doesn’t happen.]

There’s a character you meet a few levels into the game that seems perfectly set up to be your classic action movie traitor. He’s grumpy, doesn’t get along with anybody, and is the key to executing the mission. And then…he executes the mission.

This is why I’m serious when I say what I like about Wolfenstein: The New Order is that it’s just a fun, wholesome game about good people killin’ Nazis. Though clearly influenced by action movie tropes, at no point do any of the characters so perfectly set up to betray you—the love interest that could so easily be a femme fatale, the former Nazi, the man who resents you for saving him, the woman who believes only in logic and order, the brilliant and cynical inventor—at no point do any of these walking, talking narrative time bombs actually betray you. There’s no twist, there’s no nuance, there’s no “morality is complicated.” They’re just good people. Killin’ evil Nazis.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for stories that complexify morality and humanize the supposed villains and whatnot. But, especially these days, it is refreshing to find a piece of media that is just so uncompromisingly anti-Nazi.

And it is specifically killing Nazis the game is in favor, not just killing generally. All of the characters are clearly affected by the violence they’re forced to commit (even Caroline and Set, though in their case it’s more about how it’s hardened them), and the game makes it very clear that in a Nazi-free world they would much prefer, you know, not killing people.

That being said, the killing Nazis part is pretty fun. All of the weapons are satisfying to play with (though, for how unrealistic the range and accuracy on the silenced pistol is, you’d think they could have been more generous with aiming the throwing knives), and there’s enough variation between run-and-gun, cover-shooting, and stealth to keep fights interesting. The action movie trappings (in particular the “this is how it’s gonna go-down” montages before each mission) really help give each level its own personality and make you feel like each one matters and isn’t just some arbitrary set dressing (which can be the feeling of some action games). And while I never really felt like the collectibles were worth it (I never completed even one of the Enigma Codes, and I have no idea what solving them even entails), there are enough other reasons to go exploring corners and cracking open crates (weapon upgrades, heath pickups when you really need them, etc.) that it didn’t feel like a waste of time to do so (especially before the final bossfight, when I geared up and then sprinted around the arena gathering all the health pickups so that I was at ~350 when I started the fight).

So, yeah, good game. Knows exactly what it’s doing and does it well. And what it’s doing is killin’ Nazis.

p.s. Also playing the classic Wolfenstein level but as BJ was delightfully goofy, and an excellent way to grind for perks.

p.p.s. Those shotgun soldiers are the absolute worst. Bullet-sponges that never stop firing and can hit around cover? I’ll take a giant mech thank you very much, at least those dudes have phases.

p.p.p.s. I just want to reiterate, for no particular reason, that the message of this game is not “Nazis are people too and this is a really complex and difficult situation, morality-wise.”

Honorable Mentions

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