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~ 90 Games Long ~

WOOO NEW YEARSSSSSS BITCH IM GAMING FUUUUCK
Note: these lists always get so big that the comparisons stop mattering. ordering is just for fun :):)
Having felt my genuine passion for the medium reinvigorated last year, having played so many wonderful games; this year I'm gonna go ahead and play stuff I'm genuinely interested in. Not just recommendations from my friends this time! It'll be a fun time. Hoping to play some more cool indies (I've finished a dangerously low amount of them in the last 3 years), maybe finish some of those Suda51 and Squaresoft/Enix games I hadn't gotten to.
April Update: In March, I got a new fancy computer, so my logging went from random games I was playing on my Switch to a sharp pivot of weirdo shit and indies. Wow! Year has been great for new releases so far too!! I love Ryujinx + Parsec yipee
August Note: Uhhh big period for me attempting to be a fan of things. Got around to lots of sequels, played a bunch of Sonic games and loved all of them, played a bunch of Megaman games and played all of them,
Also got into Higurashi which was a devouring experience, windowshopped through some Touhou non-1cc playthroughs, and huh I guess there was an accidental big doujin throughline to this period across those as well as Irisu Syndrome and playing a lot of 100% OJ. I like liking things
October: This was not an RPG year lmao they're usually my most consistent genre..this year I played like 2 of em. Just lots and lots of short games I played in a few sessions while streaming them to my friends. I have opinions on platformers now
Also there was like a mini rhythm game interlude somewhere in here. It was cute I played Gitaroo Man for the first time and feel like I missed a part of my childhood
December: yep this year is p much finished. no more media consumption i think. playing games that don't rly get tracked cuz they're either long (persona 3) infinite (animal crossing) or multiplayer (several fighting games) so this is p much the definitive games of the year. very good for me branching out and trying a lot of rly cool stuff. gonna try to return to consistently releasing full length writeups again next year cuz i feel like a big hoe for playing so many games and struggling to say substantial things for most of them :) but overall very nice. if u read deep enough into my account to find this know ur a true real 1 and we're best friends now

(Replays included)

Unranked ~ Vib-Ribbon The visuals are wondrously creative, the packaged-in music is an absolute riot, but I think that maybe in exchange for the at-the-time sincere innovation of an infinite content loop, we've lost a lot of chance for there to be interesting charting. I also recognize that while the devout wizardy of slapping a CD into your Playstation and getting a video game level out of it must be totally lost on me since I went through the opposite experience. Literally gave myself a virus trying to figure out how to turn an MP3 into a .bin file for this emulator LOL, we're defo re-evaluating this one whenever I find my PS3 Maybe I should rate this game higher cuz it convinced me to install an anti-virus
???. Garten of Banban dude awesome
Unranked ~ Metal Slug Window-shopped this with infinite lives in a fightcade session and it's aight. Rly nothing to say about a game like this's genuine substance in this context but I gotta say there's a whole lotta good craftsmanship over an aesthetic I could not give a shit about which results in a kinesthetic experience that's like totally neutral lmao
Unranked ~ Pizza Tower This is like the opposite of cinematic games reaching the exact same effect - creating a bunch of immediately memorable set-pieces you get to churn through at sonic speed naturally leaving everyone wowed on first playthrough. I just feel like once you get over how cool it feels to control such an out of control protagonist, there isn't that many fun ways to actually interact. with the game Still had fun, but also was oddly offput while playing to the point of removing rating that there's just like multiple racist caricatures in this. I know old cartoons are just like that sometimes but you can't do a "mr burns parody" more than once in a single game before i start being like ?!
Unranked ~ Romeo & Juliet I got this in the newsletter for Onion Games, of which I signed up for due to Chulip putting them on my mind. And I appreciate this little gift Yoshiro Kimura has bestowed on us--especially knowing his generation of 90s Auteur designers are getting older, I really appreciate him sticking around. And I'd never complain about a gift this kindhearted, but, hear me out. If this had a Hirofumi Taniguchi track playing in the background, it'd like actually be an app store billion dollar seller
Unranked ~ Hello Charlotte Ep.1: Junk Food, Gods and Teddy Bears What, you want me to have a critical opinion on Hello Charlotte? Listen. okay. I can't even really throw you the "this is too deep and personal to rate" etc etc speech I was just fucking zooted my eyes were like half closed through the second half of this playthrough This is all to say in a lot of words I have high hopes for where this trilogy will go! Not rly here for the guro RPG maker vibes--I'm kinda disassociated from that thing--but definitely appreciate the general narrative mood, and Charlotte is very sweet
Unranked ~ Ultra Fight Da Kyanta 2 I usually don't put fighting game arcade modes on this list, but I like bodily needed to put Kyanta 2 on something. I beat the Akuma guy. The sound design is immaculate. There's 489304 alternate universes in which this has the exact same cultural footprint as Touhou Project
83. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion Thought this was like a single dude making an engine test game with the fundamentally easy-to-understand strengths of Zelda gameplay, slapped some joke dialogue into it bc of that, and fucking gasped when I saw the steam price. Even more so baffling was seeing there was more than like three people in the credits. I don't hate this or anything but I felt bad to give it a higher score than some of the other games in that 1.5 score it's literally just edgy lmao. did you know you murder a human child at the end now you do .sorry This ended up as my lowest rated game of the year. Maybe a little harsh for a low effort parody game but they charge 15 dollars for this shit they think their yoshi memes are so hot
82. Sonic Forces I didn't play this when it came out, so I'm not the type of person who has reason to talk about this game like it killed their family. Rly not that opinionated on it, it's borderline inoffensive without context; I mean, it's like 2 hours long, the cutscenes suck but are funny, controls and level design are incomprehensible. Shit feels like it was made with 10 dollars, which is uhh...literally what I paid for it in a Humble Bundle with like 10 other games. Can I be that mean to that??? Not really. It was a funny afternoon, for me, and that's about it. Still couldn't rate it any higher though!
81. Arms Jump, left punch out, right punch hook, sometimes you grab. Simplest mixup game in a fighting game ever. The designers for this game really thought that customization would save this game's depth when there's this little options available at once Maybe the limpest aesthetics direction in a Nintendo game that comes to mind? The awful leitmotif sucks energy out of the whole soundtrack. Horribly garish colour palettes on top of ugly facial and texture rendering, and just like...the Arms themselves. To be a character in Arms is to have your mind and body esoterically consumed by fisher-price toys The kindest thing I can say is that this might be closer to inventing a sub-genre of value than the average arena fighter. Hopefully it'll be realized in a game that is nothing like this one
80. Gris Apologies for being a gamer but this totally sucked. I don't think I wanted to admit it totally sucked for most of its runtime, though; it's absolutely beautiful and any and all flaws should be critiqued with the asterisk that this is an up and coming studio's first project. Reminds me of those student art projects that make you think "wow i'm such a loser for not having achieved anything close to making this in my life", and then you like, forget about them. Anecdote that defines the game is it's a 5 stages of grief game where you play through 3 full levels of Denial, Anger, and Bargaining, and then it handles Depression and Acceptance in a singular cutscene at the end. When even the ugliest emotions are portrayed beautifully, what humanity can be mustered out of it? Every single moment in which the protagonist is challenged is so immediately countered with aesthetic catharsis; I'm not interested in sadless sadness.
79. Fire Emblem Engage A game that is purely and utterly for the sickos, but not my brand of sickos, so it left me disenfranchised. The worst thing I can say about this game is that it is utterly vibeless. Even Fates: Conquest was a game I got sincere enjoyment from its tight evocative combat intertwined with such a gorgeous score and UI, but this one is some of the absolute worst in modern pop fantasy anime-commercial-with-tiktok-edit-slowmo-core. For what it's worth, this arguably has a better baseline for combat and map design than some of the games that have like, positive ratings on this list. I get why this has a positive rating from even some of my friends. But the way its formatted practically requires you to find its shtick at least a little endearing, so it just ended up feeling like another game that pushed me off out of enjoying it. Bleh. Full Review
78. Needy Streamer Overload Got every ending and uh..yeah that's certainly a fuckin gameification of all the horrifying insidious parts of modern internet culture. Definitely kitschy as hell, doesn't beat the objectifying / "WataMote for gen z" allegations, generally falls a bit too hard into mindless "women be crazy" stereotypes. Ultimately didn't come out of this feeling good about it, but its best handled subject matter feels lived through in ways that at least deserve some respect. The main issue being that I don't think it is able to channel that experience to say something meaningful; the game just relies way too much on black comedy that bullies it's main girl rather than properly portraying her as a real, living person. fuck none of the words i just said makes sense to literally anyone tldr Full Review (Written Two Years Later)
77. Puyo Puyo Da! Was thinking about how hideo kojima twitter bio core i am about music and was like. Why don't I play more music games? Let's start here who cares Borderline unplayable; if you're under this it means your vibes are more undesirable than the playability of your gameplay is valuable. None of this matters because it's responsible for the greatest key art of all time. I hope everyone who worked on this is still earning royalties
76. Galaxy Cat Was gifted this by a friend on Christmas. It costs 1 dollar and has literally 0 plays on this site other than me. By my friend gifting me a random game neither of us knew the contents of, they accidentally brought me closer to a child-like blind reaction christmas; slapping a game you only knew by its boxart into your console. It's also like, a 1 dollar video game. Clearly someones first project so it kinda sucks. Was fun tho :D
75. Sonic Frontiers This game is built on a certain contrasting feeling for me; I truly do value that this game feels like the product of living human beings with ambitions. I wish AAA games felt human more often. But the way that you interact with this world - utterly removed from the tension and friction that a speed-based game should be - just doesn't work for me. Streaking through 20 second little low tension parkour tension just to stop yourself in your track to do some 1-step puzzle is so brutally pace breaking. This almost worked for me, it truly did - I actually do have a few special memories of playing this game while blasting music of my choice - but it really did feel like the AAA is crushing the soul out of this project.
74. Pocket Mirror: GoldenerTraum One of those games that has obsessive, beautiful detail to portray its characters psychology, only for said psychology's textual conclusions to be hilariously dated to the point of warranting its locking away in a cellar. And it's harder to give credit to the occasionally genuinely great scene; the good text doesn't lend itself to any greater thesis, leaving each sequence shattered. It doesn't help that this clash doesn't really give me any credence to the incredibly messily written dialogue - the repetitions of two people constantly talking over each other. And while I could still barely bring myself to dislike this game - its authors were clearly trying to convey feelings through the lens of the genre's existing tropes, and believe me when I say none of its flaws are new - it didn't help that I eventually saw what the gameplay for what it was. This game contains high density, lethal amounts of RPG maker nonsense; I can't think of another game like this that spends the first hour and a half doing puzzles with no character dialogue. ...Somehow, all of this frustration made me forget this game has an "i identify as an attack helicopter" joke in its first 2 hours
73. Solar Ash HP Lovecraft if he was into normal shit like rollerskating or girls. Mario Odyssey for people who sincerely like how razer products look. Years of painstaking aesthetic sci-fi-delic imagery passed down from fantastical shit have been optimized and compacted into a space in which it simply stops appealing to me through sheer lack of subtlety. And while I do think the overall packaging is underwhelming, I don't hate this ideologically or anything; it's pretty smooth. It is just a game where you do one cool platforming section, and then you do near-identical ones for 5 more hours - what a samsāra loop. I said "this is giving Sonic Frontiers" in a voice chat while streaming this and my friends ended up talking about that game instead for the rest of the convo - maybe telling but also my friends might just be losers
72. Super Kiwi 64 I wanted to end off 2023 with a good note, so I ended up playing one of the random Siatro games I had laying around. These are always a good time, but this one's a bit mechanically light for my taste. These always feel nice to breeze through, but it really made me realize the studio has something comparatively special on their hands with Toree. I've always gotten the impression these games are trying to evoke the creepiness and loneliness old 3D platformers ushered when you were a kid - as evident by the amount of skeletons and coffins everywhere in this game - but this game is way too easy to breeze through to create any sort of tension. But hey, its simultaneously also trying to be cute, and it is pretty cute... It's hard to feel any regret for playing a 40 minute game that ultimately feels and sounds good to play
71. Celeste Classic 2: Lani's Trek Significantly more conceptually polished than the original original Celeste, but its core mechanic is so fundamentally cumbersome that it naturally curbs its potential from the get-go. The game at least gets that what elevated Celeste (2019) beyond the precision platformer genre (in my opinion) was how fluid its momentum was, but this game's momentum mechanics are so linear, it runs out of material in like half an hour. Can't complain that much though, this was free and clearly just something Maddy made to have fun
70. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition A psychological horror game in which you maintain exposure to Radiohead music going as long as possible without hearing Thom Yorke's voice goes hard good visuals yaaay. If they made one of these for Melt-Banana I'd give it a 5
69. Ice Climber The most distinct part of this is the contradictory nature of its core mechanics and multiplayer; jumping to a higher platform moves the camera up, instantly killing any teammates on the lowest platform. Lots of platforming requires tight jumps between temporary platforms multiple vertical paths in a row. This, alongside both players having tangibility to themselves that makes them bounce away when they touch eachother results in a game where platforming on smaller blocks is impossible to be done at once, and platforming not being done at once usually kills one of the two players. This is strange, confusing, sometimes compelling, and most of all pretty funny
68. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins Nintendo put Mario in front of me so I begrudgingly put on my suit like a War Veteran. Just an absolutely abysmal take on the Mario World physics engine, but it's like...cute, or something I played it as a kid. I like it
67. Cuphead Played over a parsec connection that was just fun-sucking enough for me not to rank this confidently, but eeeehhhhqhduwfjwqf Boss fights just ain't that interesting! Parry is a good system but that's all, folks. Mimicks the vibes of old hard video games for its aesthetic, but anyone who's knowledgeable abt that sorta thing knows those games are layered with systems of back and forth; power-ups for good performance, lives and checkpoints. Cuphead's difficulty is super linear in comparison, and not in a way that resonates w/ me ALSO Why'd they cover such a beautiful hand-crafted artstyle with colour bleed that doesn't go away even at 0% and shitty movie filters you can't turn off. definitely a little racist btw lmao but hey those jazz orchestras were p good
66. Ikachan Basically what I said about Celeste Classic here, yeah that's like a test build for an engine that'd make one of the best games ever. What I can also say is that the pixel heart here is gorgeous as usual - like if Pixel wasn't a wonderful game designer, he could've totally had a perfect career at WayForward making stuff people like literally only for the pixel art
65. Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together! There is simply a tension here formed from the sticky movements of fidgeting with your partner that can only turn out deeply sensual. This must be the main reason so little get much out of this, because it captures a steamy awkwardness that feels like it'd make it impossible to play with anyone I haven't known for 3+ years; the game seems to find this very funny and only plays into it by making the characters let out giggles and hit those anime moan faces. Anyways the core concept is very silly and seems to easily bring together twitchy cooperation moments but there could be a little more puzzle variety but it's like 3 hours long it's fine I had a good time I liked it (˵¯͒〰¯͒˵) ‧⁺◟( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ ·̫ ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ )
64. Toree 3D TOREEEEE
63. Toree Jolly Jam last thing of 2023 yaaaaaaay ^_^
62. Mega Man This one is genuinely totally fine, megaman goes pew pew on a bunch of levels that wield their nonlinearity p well due to having genuinely diverse obstacle design THAT BEING SAID, it deeply aggravates me that all the rather arbitrary decisions this game made as an 80s game experimenting has never been contested; I mean, let's be honest, Mega Man bosses suck...or well, the way weaknesses work sucks. Most of the entries in these series don't teach you anything about how to use your weapons interestingly through boss weapon weaknesses! And let's not even talk about boss rushes. I'm going to kill this stupid ass game for ruining its own series for 30 years with gimmicks
61. Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix this is the most retro game. ever it surpasses "it's dangerous to go alone" indie game references, NFT games, and unreal engine tech demos. honestly dude just check this out Gonna think about Mario doing expressionless mocap dances every time someone tries to explain why uncanny valley is scary also hi black midi
60. Hollow Knight I like....totally fell off this game back when it first came out, mostly because the system mechanics are some jumbled mess of contemporary game-design-university ethos - Dark Souls, Castlevania/Metroid. Modern precision platformer influence writhing wildly without much understanding of the core strengths of any of it - stuff as simple as the estus flax ripoff feels horribly placed in a fast paced genre like a Castlevania or platformer when just healing yourself takes so much downtime. And y'know...this stuff is still true. Hollow Knight's core mechanics do still kinda suck, but I like...would find a little tunnel, and it'd break out into something else, and I'd fiight some cryptic boss, and I'd path out and out and out and out and it was cool. Felt like you could really tell the developers were ameteurs who slowly grew into understanding the strengths of their little project - labyrinthian discovery and secret - so by the end, it almost won me over. Then I beat the game, realized there were literally no more unfinished paths visible on the map, meaning that everything else in the game was a secret. This game thought I was gonna spend another 20 hours bashing against random walls to find secret areas in a map THIS BIG? It basically felt like the equivalent of getting kicked out of a party...
59. Mega Man 10 Thought I really liked this for what...an hour or two? Then by the end I realized while the level design is clean and memorable, there's just not much to engage with. I guess that's a basic ass observation...I guess I just need a toolset to slowly improve upon over the course of its runtime for me to find it engaging. Megaman's good, but these games kinda thrive on depth and difficulty!
58. Super Mario World As I progressed through my little journey of playing Mario games like my video game historicism taxes, I think i've began to gain words for why I don't really enjoy the 2D games that much. It's just that the system mechanics just feel designed to deflate my interest in them as I go? The dynamic of wins of jumping on top of enemies and deaths of accidentally jumping into the side of enemies is fine in a bubble for me. A perfectly fine application of risk and reward. But the way Mario games are so momentum based - you get big powerups that let you engage less with enemies when you win, and your powerups reset when you lose - in combination with long respawn times, my stamina for these games ends so quick when I do poorly. This is all snowballed even further by taking turns during multiplayer, although in fairness it's clear the game was simply designed around singleplayer. Not much you can do about that on experimental hardware. And most unfortunately, this one sorta felt like a downgrade in level design and system mechanics from 3, so I don't even know how much I "respect it".
57. Pokémon Scarlet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero - Part 1: The Teal Mask Reading through some of the recent Pokemon game's dialogue--I first felt this with Sword and Shield, despite its reputation--has finally realized my childhood dream of letting me play through an anime episode. It kinda makes the dialogue in the games I loved as a kid feel super plain in comparison! Despite that, I do think I had a lot less fun with this than base-game, if only because the way it's formatted doesn't seem to conduct fun as well as the whole main campaign's experience. There's no universe in which a 4 hour little storyline could've let me relive us running around trying to find our fav little guys, or cooking demonic sandwiches for the first time, so I guess it's just natural. Not a downgrade in quality, just a slice too thin cut as a standalone experience! Ogerpon is kyuuuuute
56. Rayman Legends: Definitive Edition This game's most damning sin is that it was created by devs who thought the Wii U Gamepad was cool (it was but they weren't supposed to know that) I think there's a bit of lingering disappointment on this one for me, largely the result of having sought it out for the purpose of multiplayer with a bestie. This game is entirely composed of single pathway platforming challenges, constantly standing in the exact same spot as your teammate, causing constant friendly fire-enabled deaths - not a dissimilar feeling to my experience with Ice Climber. I can't tell if the Murphy levels are a smart or stupid addendum to that; on one hand, assymetrical teamwork would probably suit a precision platformer better than traditional co-op. But I can't help but think even on the Wii U, the two thirds of the rest of the game would probably be a bit awkward. Unfortunately I won't ever get the answer to this because the Wii U no longer exists in our corporeal realm, and I'm stuck playing levels that just don't quite feel natural for this platform Anyways the game itself is good. The hyper-linear platforming and constant checkpoints kinda make the platforming feel like you're doing your taxes with how mathematical it is, but it's charming enough in other places. I liked it
55. Sonic Superstars I say as politely as possible that this is the New Super Mario Bros-ification of 2D Sonic. Very clean level design without many bumps in the road; cute gimmicks, had fun playing Amy. Most obvious thing you're gonna hear everyone complaining about is the boss fights - which are way too long, and completely break the pace of most levels. I think the biggest thing this game is fighting against is personality issues! 2D Sonic wasn't always 100% portrayed as a smiling cutie - he's a bit more dynamic than that, the adorable environmental/silent storytelling of 3K is very flat, and the music in the second half of this game is unbearable... It kinda feels like a return to Dimps era Sonic where they just put out a Game, and you'll remember it if you were around to get it for Christmas. This is definitely good, and in the past I'd be eating this up - there isn't that much good 2D sonic out there, after all. But I think the just-goodness of this game is echoing as a bit hollow for me right now; fastest game I can think of that ends up still feeling low energy. Edit: played the co-op shit is so funny what the fuck. borderline unplayable but i gotta rating boost bc it's no longer unmemorable
54. Pikmin 4 Obscenely normal video game. Felt 0 fanfare playing a game I waited 8 years for, which may have you believe that I was "disappointed" by it. I am perfectly satisfied with a sequel this normal. It's just another game I will slap on an end of year list, saying "yeah i had a pretty good time". It's existentially fulfillingly normal. That being said I have to bump this shit down, because when looking over this list, I realized this is one of the games I genuinely have 0 positive memories of playing. 0 anecdotes that could fill this list with a sense of time. I played it. I played it and I ran around. I ran on my dog and did my tasks
53. Tower of Heaven I like the music and the mysticism a lot - the way it contextualizes its rulesy-ness - a trait I enjoy in games... Revisited this for the first time in years largely inspired by the realization these guys were still around; wonder how many others went years having played both this back in the day and Katana Zero without knowing it was the same dudes..
52. Kirby's Dream Land Nintendo put Kirby into my hands, so what else am I gonna do other than play it. It's all I've ever known. It kinda feels like sacrilege to give this game such a comparatively high rating next to some of the more obviously bulked up entries, but honestly, this one's got most of what I like about Kirby already. Simply inhaling and shooting was always one of the better alternatives to jumping, it's like Yoshi's Island with 500 less steps!!!
51. Astro's Playroom Hey it's Christmas season, and I have one of these things now; and playing this game, I caught a fleeting glimpse of personality in this game console before booting back to that home screen shot me back to reality. How much you'll like this personality will prob vary from person to person; the overworld hub kinda looks like if Wal-mart published games. It's essentially a modern 3D Mario game, where the set pieces of whimsically flying through space are replaced with giving you a 3D model of a Playstation. It also doesn't leverage its references that constructively; it's moreso made for mid-30s parents and older siblings to look over the youngest kid in the family's shoulder and giggle about, than something that could convince someone to look into these older games further. But it doesn't seem like Sony is interested in these older games either, considering how Team Asobi is working in the tech demo coal mines. It's cute and nice and a little bit of a corporate nightmare.
50. Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe This one's camera is zoomed out enough that it's allowed to have level design, but none of its ideas go anywhere. Post-2000s Nintendo platformer 101 I guess It is cute though. I played it with 3 other people and we all giggled at silly Kirby moments, and I don't think we've acknowledged we even played this a single time since Then the Magolor mode has 3DS level design again for some reason. Why's everything so maximal and cubic???
49. Mega Man X Whilst playing through some classic Mega Man games, I sorta developed a little summarization of how I feel about those games in my head. Simply put: Mega Man is rlly slow, your movement has way more to do with planning than expression. As a result, rooms are boring unless they are super tightly designed. Mega Man X, however, is the Variable that can change that; flowy movement and more traditional level length give you a lot more room to chart and express yourselves that could take some leeway off the level designers. Unfortunately, they went completely cold with this one - THIS LEVEL DESIGN IS SO FUCKING FLAT I DON'T HAVE TO INTERACT WITH ANY OF IT OOPPSSSS Still like it though; it has sauce and can go hard when it wants to.
48. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line In my eyes, a series like Theatrythm has always been both a blessing and a curse, much moreso than it'd look at first glance. This is evident the moment you play through any one of the story mode's; bouncing between high strings j-rock and post-y2k pop bangers, and genuinely dull farty orchestra music. On one hand, the charts here feel weak and sloppy, often failing to capture the energy of performing any single aspect of the song. But on the other hand, playing this in local co-op with a friend where you’re constantly eb and flowing between playing off each other in solos and doing duets reminds me of playing in a band in a very cute sorta way! Lots of fun :)
47. Toree 2 Toree is my friend and I love them. We hang out and do sick flips through hoops for 30 minutes at a time :3 :3 :3
46. Echo: Route 65 My friends have been making me read Echo sporadically over the past few months, and this is a short story apart of it. I've finished 2 routes of Echo, but I think I am still playing these chronologically, since it took till like 2020 for the original to be finished. This short piece doesn't have the power or energy to either deeply empower, or cast a shadow over the original, but it's a big clean slice of personality. It's the painterly mundanity of it all that works for me. Great stuff as usual :)
45. Suika Game Irisu Syndrome's daughter <3 I will be taking her hand in bride soon and her mother will not show up to the wedding as they are too busy smoking crack
44. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Mario Wonder wins the battle against feeling like a product churned out of by a corporation, but can't win the battle against being what it literally is. It's predestine to always be defined by what it literally is - a game with 1000 level designers - but it brought me a lot of genuine smiles and good time with my friends and y'know. It's nice. I think my honeymoon phase ended the moment they started throwing me levels where the purple coins and the wonder seed are disconnected from each other; a lot of the levels in late-game are hilariously one dimensional compared to the levels that are earlier. The potential for down-the-rabbithole secret spelunking dries up after literally the first world. But it's nice! It also helped pin down some particular words in my brain that I think cohesive formatting and formula creates dissonance from the possibility of wonder, when the game's rules and sleek UI have already spelt out what I should expect after getting used to it for 30 minutes. But it's nice... I like nice things guys I promise...
43. The Exit 8 I think we all universally agreed not to talk about this in too much detail, given how the steam page for this thing tries its best to spoil you on it. Really incredibly made little locale; it uses its next-gen graphics effectively and necessarily to an extent that surprised me for such a small project. I'll say that I think everything the people giving this incredibly high praise are saying is true, I might've just been affected by it less than them or saw in it. It's a great toy to let you experience hystical paranoia for one hour straight
42. Super Mario Bros. I am veritably a fucking zoomer, and I recently had a realization that I had never seen every level in Super Mario Bros, let alone beaten it, or literally any pre snesgenesis era games at all in the last 3 years. I felt like I had to ammend my fake gamer girl crimes in some way or sort, so I set out to complete this game without using a save state or warp pipe. And after like 8 hours, I did it. I could probably give you a speech on this game's importance as a founder of games-as-self-expression - Mario's toolkit is fundamentally more fluid than any challenges the game ever throws at you, meaning that you can really forge your own paths through each level - but there's probably some college level essay on this with better nuance and prose. I told you, I'm a fake gamer girl. All I know is Animal Crossing, Farmville, Devil May Cry 3, and The Sims also world 8 is kinda weak which is bad because it's one of the mandatory ones the third act is the most important one etc etc but YEAH ITS PRETTY GOOD
41. WarioWare: Move It! It made me giggle & gaggle & laugh that Nintendo sorta just made a Wii game. in 2023. Not a single person in the world cared that they did this INCLUDING me but uhh. I don't know why I bought this actually Anyways this game made me move around and feel good so I like it. Maybe I just have poor hand-eye coordination but these are maybe the mini-games in the series with the most moving parts on average? A good thing for the entertainment factor of the campaign, and potentially a bad thing for the long-term design goals of simplistic, instantly reactable arcade score attack. Shockingly functional motion controls the whole way through, also (can't believe Gesture made it into the game, though). It's short for the absurd, clearly unsustainable price tags Nintendo puts out, but it's cute :3 :3
40. Um Jammer Lammy I feel a little mean saying this, considering how much I've always adored seeing the little multi-cultural mishmash going on in Parappa as a series, and like seeing Hip-hop show up in games, but... Guitars sure are a lot more intuitive to freestyle with than Parappa saying random words out loud! On the other hand, I think I did not appreciate enough how slightly-less-than-mystical the rules of Parappa 2 are, because this is a fake video game. Wholly and entirely none of the mechanics here are real; I watched my friend play this game competently, and the turns that were rewarded with "cool' and the ones that made you lose points looked the EXACT same. This fake video game sure is catchy though I like it
39. Mega Man 11 Apparently the director of the game told the design team to play every single Classic Mega Man back to back before making this one, and it shows. Definitely the cleanest level design I've played in this series BY FAR, very enjoyable to break through, and the collection of options at your disposal at once is very tight. I'm also glad that this is an evolution of Mega Man, rather than a throwback like 9/10--keeping all of his later classic game tools--but I think the toolkit of this game has gotten a liiiittle bit bloated. On the control scheme side, at least; having to use both the shoulder buttons, triggers, and like 3 face buttons in a game like this feels very silly... Plus the shop system is just straight up mechanical bloat this time
38. PaRappa the Rapper 2 These games operate on a mystical set of rules I've been unable to parse for pretty much my entire time playing them. I think I'd be lying if I considered that a good sign, though picking this game up and rolling through it is always a sweet time - mashing on my controller to make Parappa glitch out like a turntable and scoring 200 points for it always makes me giggle. I always thought the momentum of the adorable little story taking place here was really charming; a personal favourite being Stage 3's rising and falling visuals.
37. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! Nintendo turns Impossible Crisis into the greatest iPhone game of all time 5 years before the app store exists. Cool! This is the first one, so it's probably the one that gave me the most "I couldn't react to that" moments, but it's probably still the best WarioWare game, because none of the others can say they invented WarioWare
36. We Know the Devil My Sailor Moon Copy Is Personalized And It Whispered Into My Ear That Maybe It's Okay If I Keep Feeling Resentful To This Unfairness. nagito komaeda is credited in the special thanks for this game I think I played this in the wrong time of my life to love it but enjoyed the iphone messages prose and summer school trauma overtones. Good stuff overall even if it's subtly not really for me
35. Kero Blaster If Cave Story left us off on Running Hell, a stage where millions of enemies are coming out of every angle, Kero Blaster is a surprising non-continuation of what Pixel was building up to. This game is ultra clean, relatively slow paced, ditches the micro decision making of weapon levels for something way more compact and NES-esque...this isn't 2004 hobbyist Pixel, it's "guy who does game design lectures at universities" Pixel. And That's okay! ish. I don't like the lives system
34. Ape Out This is Chaotic good Rez. Incredibly impressed by how it captures the intensity of jazz for visceral, tense energy; the longer it goes, the more blistered the paddling gets. The pacing of how you have to build up speed to make your opponents flinch in contrast to the lack of cover for yourself gives the game such swings of momentum to each successful run. My only disappointment is the game doesn't really have variety to its level design, it very much is a lot of the same stuff with subtle increases in laps and enemy density. This would end up more of a complaint in less successful of a formula; the rush you get after every single sharp title card is pretty insurmountable. This got me talking about how Jazz is more than some exclusively laid back, "chill vibe" genre with my friends; the idea of intense soundtracks in games sure has linearly moved to metal huh
33. Irisu Syndrome Played thru all of this out of sorta minute interest after hearing it had a cool one-trick meta moment (which on paper literally doesn't appeal to me at all so I don't know why it motivated me so much), and was taken by surprise to find that I saw a lot of genuine merit in it outside of that. This game drops notepad files in the game's folder as you get high scores - all of which are diary notes written by the game's antagonists - and I found that the tone they take felt as if these characters existed to vent out the writer's emotions. Deconstructing one's own feelings through antagonizing themselves left me with a read I found emotionally provocative Also, a lot of ppl seem to get rly scared off by the high score requirements to complete this one - you really shouldn't be, it took me less than 10 hours total, to get the 100k score for the first time, the scores snowball really hard
32. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed We must defeat the Endless Now, free ourselves from the flow of time, defeat escapism and face our true selves...but first we gotta finish that 100 hour long RPG I'm not a believer this DLC is the true Xenoblade 3 or anything, but it struck me how I honestly felt that the game fit the mold of a 15-25 hour breezy RPG much more so than it ever did one of its gargantuan length. A combat system that is fundamentally hands off is probably the only way people will have the stamina to complete games of these length, but why don't we just make them actually well packaged casual games that you can finish in a week? And honestly, this was just nice & sweet :) lots of little touches of gained perspective and maturity in characters that have occupied my brain since the start of this decade, I think I spent like 70% of the time playing this thinking about old man Rex
31. Sonic Mania Encore *3 months later* yeah it was okay
30. Sonic Mania Played the entirety of this game in one session, finished in two hours like binge eating ice cream. What can I say, I like Sonic, and this is classic Sonic but if every map was immeasurably polished in its dinky little pinball machine contraptions, and this time they just happened to be 80s RnB flavoured. Really just a win in being hugely likeable more than anything, STILL HAVENT PLAYED THAT DLC THOUGH
29. Nuclear Throne Rly something to be said that I didn't relate to anyone's hyper cynical takes on roguelikes when this and Spelunky were my core viewpoint of the genre. This isn't a rogue-like in the sense that its a game where you gradually unlock stuff to make you more powerful, it's more like a 15 minute long arcade game that's personalized and hates you
28. Sonic Adventure 2 This game is too cool for the world of video games, which is probably why it doesn't work. Sonic/Shadow's stages are a joyride of 2000s-ass skateboard score attack and fast paced decision making, perfectly improving all my depth concerns with the first Adventure. Unfortunately the consequence to that is every second spent not playing as them is standing at the back of an hour long waiting line on a too-hot day in the summer. The pacing contrast of the campaign really hurts it for me compared to the order-agency of A1, but hitting the stage select and running for A ranks is some of the best Sonic I've ever played.
27. Banjo-Kazooie All the aesthetic cohesion in the world just to have the energy of a washed up uncle screaming “SCORE SOME FACKIN GOALS”. Playing this game in 1080p, and getting artifacted stock renders shoved into your retinas 24/7 feels like watching a "vector art" google images page grow legs and start walking. But we love it for that, right? Really just my favourite game in a genre I don't really like; the platformer not about platforming. Most individual facets of the game are not that complex, and its bumbling heavyweight pacing reminds me more of an adventure game than Mario 64. Yet...it wrings every one of its ideas dry, and with such confidence!!
26. Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil Decided to go backwards from PCB to this one in my journey thru this series...this game just doesn't run on my computer sometimes. And sometimes it does? Dunno why. Anyways, I'll use this game as a place to talk about my building feels towards Touhou. I just generally really like the tone of this series. The off-key off-kilter music in this entry as a result to it being incorrectly ported to a new set of MIDIs helps really characterize the bizarro world nature of the series! The dialogue sets a tone of nonchalant-ness to the encounters. Reimu managing to get along with the final bosses of each game sets a tone of ephemerality to everything; as if the issues of these worlds are natural discrepancies that we can just talk over. The best way I could put it is that Touhou feels a lot like playing a folktale or fable; with a set of Alice in Wonderland-adjacent distinctly fictional rules. I like it :)
25. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero - Part 2: The Indigo Disk While Teal Mask I struggled to find ways to have fun, I was fully prepared to get a lot out of this one. The whole DLC is built around comp-knowledgeable, synergetic double battles, so bringing even a slightly underleveled team resulted in me having to play hard against these teams. I actually made double switches and islanded some guys...woah...Pokemon... After I had my fill of stomping a bunch of NPC children in the campaign, I had some surprisingly warm moments going on a treasure hunt to find starter Pokemon scattered around the overworld with my bestie for a few hours. It cost a ridiculously grindy amount of BP (an admittedly grindy currency this DLC introduces) to make every starter spawn, so we split the costs, each of us spawning half of them, forcing us to stay close so we can both spawn everything for each other. There's something sweet and special about the way both the basegame and this DLC set you up to go on little adventures with your friends, guiding each other around. Pokemon is so cute always I love it :3 :3 :3 I love when it kinda just shows up and gives me and my close friends something to pour over
24. Venba My relatability (although I'd like to think I'm not shallow enough that relatability is my only modem of story appreciation) to this trickles down very marginally as a third generation immigrant, but it tells what it's going for excellently. Gameplay kinda reminds me of the type of games that were published in the early 2010s indie scene ala Brothers: A tale of Two Sons in that they literally just thought of one single concept for ludonarrative harmony and rolled with it. I think this one has a bit more staying power than games like this though, mostly just because the mixture of mundane autobiography and dramatic tension here is great. It is simply written better than those things. dunno. It made me hungry
23. Hi-Fi Rush Really not as tight as it should be - I could totally tear this apart if I wanted to - but there are very few times in modern history in which an AAA product could evoke such kinship. In love with itself as much as its in love with its influences; fooly cooly shades of bombast, in love with post-Y2K creativity era 6th gen games, pairing the expression of character action with love for musicianship. The fucking song choices, dude!!! Even down to the heartfelt energy of its 'disabled college kid VS megacorp' setting; it's not the game of the generation, but it's the game of my generation. Ummm umm umm ALSO I hate that like every character action game that's not God Hand has boring level design. Pretty much every fight in this game takes place in a flat circle. We still love this shit tho :3 :3
22. Touhou Eiyashou: Imperishable Night Totally sells all the chaotic energy of the finale to a long running series; I can only imagine the climactic excitement in a handful of Komiket attending teenagers picking this game up, and getting to Stage 4 for the first time. Delightfully filled with stuff that both makes casual, non-1cc playthroughs feel more interactive, and hardcore playthroughs filled with little micro-goals to work to. All of this really balances out for what feels like the most consistent game in the trio for me :) Rly like this one I like Touhouu
21. Mosa Lina Conceptually I think this game gets it; it's produced by a video essayist and I agree with their mathematically concluded thesis. Executionally it is about as good as a game of this exact format can be, it beats the tie against Suika game for my fav micro arcade 5 dollar experience of the year, but not without moments of light frustration. A frustration I ultimately respect, though - by fully admitting to its occasional impossibility it is able to overcome a hurdle of cleanliness that stains AAA game decision making by creating truly grimy scenarios with an oppressive air of futility overcast. I'm absolutely sure we'll be talking about this for a long time, no matter if I fucking hate those spikes, because of how well it writes into word Tools and Environment over doors and holes.
20. Signalis UAUUAGHHAHGHHSGHHHHHHHH alright. okay. we're good so. yeah I don't play horror games that often, and I think in that sense, due to a genre that's so psychological, it's hard for me to give this a strong critique, as I haven't been in the headspace that often. Every critique of this game are talking about how derivative this game is of stuff I haven't played yet. I dunno how to talk about that yet! And what I'm left with that's not too subjective to write about is something so lovingly crafted, so years-of-inspo-filled-brain poured down into a swirling storm. The sci-fi is genuinely good! Cosmic mechabiogayanime aesthetics feel perfectly in tune with what I'm looking for in this sorta thing, albeit where I can see the derivative aspects more obviously. Maybe one day I'll snap out of it...but for now big fan big fan Also I had some issues with pacing and thinking it was a bit too easy to route but I might've just played like a loser? Subject to rating upgrade if hard mode is more fun
19. Hello Charlotte Ep.2: Requiem Aeternam Deo These games contain so much incredibly emotionally and politically charged art crushed and compacted into as little space as possible. To be honest, I find it a bit overwhelming, trying to find where pastiche ends and personal narrative starts coiled together like a snake biting its own tail. Despite its breezy length, it made me feel more like I was reading paperback literature than any of these other story based games (except Higurashi, which is actually paperback literature). And yet, it's hard not to feel really entranced by how much obliterative entourage of deeply personal tidbits there are in this, being spun and twisted with both grace and contagious brooding. I'm hoping some more sincere nuggets of observation form in this for me, it feels like it'll definitely be worth a revisit at some point.
18. Sonic Adventure I'm pretty sure this game is just genuinely cool. If Sonic running from the cops down the side of a building isn't cool, what is??? The physics aren't even that wonky, they're just a bit abrasive and allow for creativity!!! And, honestly? The mysticism in the energy of how this plot unfolds is genuinely cute and probably my fav storytelling in the series! Sonic's cool, dude.
17. Pokémon Crystal Version Rly fond memories of this one, you can see some of them divulged in this review. This entry most sticks out to me as its when Pokemon began to support its multiplayer format even more; as in this game is specifically designed to be played for a long time. Everything about the date system just screams they developed all this stuff to simulate the feeling of finding a weird looking rare beetle under a rock in a little alcove, and bringing it in a box to show your friends at school. It's arguably the best and worst aspect of this entry; all the caveats also have to with how there are like 500 unusably bad little guys that are hard to find and don't feel rewarding. But hey, when you're 100 hours deep into something like this, you better expect a good reward, and this game's got it. Full Review
16. Streets of Rage 4 Greek philosopher-ass studied and eloquent thinkpiece on crowd control and neutral game. I'm still on the hardest difficulty grind, and every encounter I come out of unscathed makes me feel like I just tamed the storm Presentation is unbelievably gorgeous, and the soundtrack is unfortunately not as heartwarming as a Koshiro cut, but they did get Yoko Shimomura and Tee Lopes for it, that's pretty cute
15. Rhythm Heaven Fever An immeasurable amount of history - both individual cases and general floating ideas and influence - have ended up with Rhythm games having a caustic relationship with actual music. The first time someone experiences Nintendo's greatest magic trick - closing your eyes in a Rhythm Heaven game, and then doing better than how you were before - should instantaneously radicalize one into disdain and remorse at the concept of a music game in which you press the A button in time with cues set to randomly picked out instruments. Truly thoughtfully about music, about playing instruments, about groove and synchronization. The Wii game that singlehandedly gets my body moving the most and it doesn't even have motion controls. The only thing is that even though I think this series as a whole is by far the best designed Rhythm games I've ever played, the flat line art and simple music feel a little bit cultureless in a way that comparatively is usually a strongpoint of a good Rhythm game; man I really played fucking Gitaroo Man this year huh nothing will ever be that again
14. Umurangi Generation: Special Edition Mechanically light and unbothering in ways that initially made me believe it wasn't a game for me; it was a game made to confront others, and beliefs I honestly didn't need to have confronted myself. This is tied in with mechanics that are both very superfluous in interplay with the core of the game (timer kinda clashes with the ability to be expressive, but in retrospect expression suppression certainly fits the tone of the game), 0 feedback for what good photography should be, and generally unwieldly controls. On the other hand, the skill cap of photography is obv a lot higher than any traditional video game rules, and just like...I started actually tearing up at the end of the final level because it reminded me of the emotions I felt during 2020, so there's that. Time capsule ass game. Video game protagonists are so often instigators, but playing as an observer has such pretty flow with the medium. anyways i know nothing about photography i barely played with drier colour palettes or angled shots but here's my umurangi fav gallery https://imgur.com/a/ble0b40
13. Jet Set Radio Truly embodies the sensation of counterculture's interweaving with skate culture - breathe in some of the most deeply inspiring aesthetics you can find in a game, and let it encourage you to push yourself to your limit. And the second you try to regurgitate an ounce of that energy, you’re gonna fall flat on your fucking face. One of those games that felt like it was probably perfect at the conceptual level, and then you had to like, make a video game. The flow state this induces in you through genuinely hard to master movement on a time limit, set to a wave of increasing stakes that apply to the level in an order that is of your choice is executed so absurdly well. But the level design is kind of unambitious - I never felt like the way you can cat-and-mouse game the cops was that deep - and the grafiti inputs feel like an overdesign moment. I feel a bit bad complaining about something with this much kindred spirit, though; earnest Y2K optimism era works are a limited supply, you can't just make them in 2023! I have to savor every single one of these...this shit is in love with the world.
12. Gitaroo Man Prefacing this with full disclosure that there was some fuck shit going on with the sticks in this game, and the internet is an unreliable narrator for the emulation of a semi-obscure video game from the early 2000s. I think my rating here is subject to change depending on if I can ever make this game feel completely smooth; I plan to investigate in the first with the PSP port and other controllers. (December edit, I think a lot of this was also just adjusting to a tight game, since then I've beaten the game without losing once!) Anyways this is the greatest game ever made The most sensually satisfying rhythm game I've ever played by default, due how immensely good it feels to scrape out those noisy sunwashed guitar riffs. I started tearing up while Legendary Theme played; putting my entire soul into feeling the groove and rhythm...because I wanted to hear the song in its complete form that bad (one of my friends occasionally refers to this incident as a rare case of seeing someone level up on the sticks in real-time). All the initial troubles and doubts I felt getting those controls to work made doing it right all the more satisfying - The dreams I hadn't given up still shone bright.
11. Gunstar Heroes The crystaline image of a Treasure boss fight has been burnt into my brain since the very first time I laid my eyes on this game. Made out of a bunch of spheres or low-res polygons loosely connected together, always rotating and spinning out of control. Sometimes a robot with weirdly human motion, sometimes a big serpent thing, sometimes just an actual pistol, sometimes this fucking dog. If there's anything to say about this entry in the context of their legacy, being the beginning - their vision was so tight from their debut!!! Such flowy movement, so frenetic, perfect explosion effects... I've played this game in full three times this year, and every single time I did, I found like 10 new sweetspots against specific enemies requiring you to use niche moves in your complex arsenal. Absurdly cutting edge; reacts to the innovations of arcade and particularly fighting games to create something made of thousand moving parts forming each interaction.
10. Touhou Youyoumu: Perfect Cherry Blossom To play a Touhou game is to run through the same album over and over. With each listen, new emotions emerge and branch out from passages already explored, gaining new layers with each intent listen. This one's primary emotion is sadness, and its primary modus of visuals is jaw-dropping. As someone relatively unfamiliar for the series, it feels the same as talking about artists I love I haven't explored the discog of 😔but it truly is a tune I'll be spinning from now to a whole lot longer. Some vibes I'll never get enough to are the oppressive climb up and the breaching of the top of stage 4, as well as Youmu and Yuyuko's patterns of guardianship and mourning. I gotta 1cc this 1
9. Pokémon Emerald Version Hey this game like...changed my life. I think that's more important than any of the individual words I can say about it from this playthrough alone. But it's still a pretty beautiful game...a region so completely interwoven with itself that you constantly experience checkpoint moments of either accidentally returning to a much earlier path, or finding a whole new path in a familiar place. Some of the best secrets in video games; and every one of them is bolstered by how your reward is often a little creature that'll follow you around. You have to learn an alphabet to catch the legendaries. It's got its boring spots for sure, but even with some doubts, it never stopped being quite special to me :)
8. Hello Charlotte: Heaven's Gate Beyond deconstructing art is scratching at the grime that forms the glue between the bricks. Pulling the wings out of this cast's back and watching them writhe for a bit as a way to wrap a neat little bow on Childhood's End wrung as truly effective to me. C - whose description in the diary tensed me up the whole read - is just so fantastic, and Anri is such a countering voice to the author's own pretensions and insecurities. Etherane has improved very much as an author, and I am simply proud of her in the end.
7. Hello Charlotte Ep.3: Childhood's End The discussions this game is furthering are deeply relevant to anyone involved in the process of internet-distributed art and writing. Pinpointing and staring into the exact middle space between art that is expressing the self and art that exists to react to others; and how those swirl and often contradict eachother in a way that just ends up repeating the same brushstrokes as actual human conversation. This series that had sent so much time grappling with the lack of control and confusion of self-expression through body, voice, and mind, and as it begins to fail expressing itself through itself, it tries to break through. Firmly and eloquently expressing the meaning what feeling trapped within a vessel feels like
6. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles Sega really was the prototype for cool video games. Just the most refined take on this format of speeding through tight level design, rewarded with speed and new records for gluing yourself to the scariest and flashiest pathways. Striking stage transitions, even some actually good boss fights for once in this series due to secondary modes of damaging; insta-shield is one of the all time great video game parries. Base Sonic 3 strikes me as a sharper, more consistently paced product, while & Knuckles is backloaded with some wondrously creative set pieces. My childhood favourite platformer...and childhood hasn't ended yet!!!
5. Sin and Punishment Such an immensely captivating title - for an arcade game, its strange anime-pastiching narrative made me want to keep coming back to it, getting a bit more immersed into the details of its world every time. Stage 2-2 is one of the most unbelievably cool stages in any game ever, I want to keep parrying missiles into helicopters and watching them go boom forever
4. Heisei Pistol Show I feel immeasurably privileged that I can play this without knowing Japanese. VGPerson is the most important person in this video game shit Anyways, I'm like, not emotionally prepared to talk about this one. Go play it! Some of the most emotionally effective aesthetic direction you will ever see and I'm like 80% sure half of it is free assets dragged from the internet. It even has gameplay. Parun da goat 2024 EDIT: IM RLY STUPID AND IT WAS PATCHY ILLUSION TEAM WHO DID THE TRANSLATION FOR THIS, VGPERSON DID REKINDER
3. LIVE A ƎVI⅃ Pastiche but delicate, classic yet freshly empathetic. Just so obviously one of the best games ever made, and I'm really glad I got to this one, knowing that the director of Mother 3 worked on this is cool lineage. A game that's truly not willing to put up with the status quo, constantly challenging the shape and form of JRPGs in increasingly tricky ways. And I like all of its tricks! Squaresoft in this period just feel so conscious of the identity of their own games, and wanting to push further, and this game is loud not just ludonarratively, but metatextually about it (i know these are buzzwords but hear me out just play it). Middle Ages is also just one of the greatest Square plotlines ever, shit made me cry like twice, and hiring a ton of A-list Japanese voice actors in combination with this remake's delicately updated script-work brought it to life. Full review here
2. Cave Story Should not have started this year off with one of my fav games of all time, I might've gotten the #1 on this list already where's the buildup!!! Where's the drama. But also, Cave Story is like my fav platformer/action game ever and how everything perfectly synergizes, how the choices genuinely matter, the gorgeously flawed hand-made synthesizers. The way that projectiles collide with the floor and leave those cool smoke pixel smoke trails. And the way the game is able to create genuine chaos in all of its fights. Everything here really is stuck in my head forever, and it stands as a permanent golden example that anyone can just, make some shit. You can do it. Go do it
1. Higurashi When They Cry "That was the chirping of the Higurashi telling me it was evening. ...Trying to tell me something... And then I finally heard it... The wailing cries of the victims who didn't make it." Higurashi is my game of the year. As in, it is the game I played this year. All year. A group of friends and I set out to read this side by side for so many countless nights in a row that from May 31st to now (as I write this, we're literally not done, just near the end). In a time in my life in which I'm trying my best to improve my lifestyle and learn how to express myself it both offered a podiuam of expression as acting out little scenes, and also offered healing words that occasionally cut sincerely deep!! As a piece of art individually it is also a deranged mess of tangled, fermented frustration that it's occasionally able to loosen the bottle cap and scream everything on its mind. Written by someone who worked in social services; intimately familiar with systemic dilemma that bind us down, desperately yearning to save those who fell through the cracks. Ultimately its impudent childishness is both what holds it back as an artpiece worth taking seriously, and makes its rage and sadness so palpable. So many people take it seriously despite that amateurism, despite its capability to genuinely suck ass, because it sharpens those emotions to create something truly pointed in its rage. A devastated recognition of the unaccounted for linger across the whole work. "Thank you for treating me kindly even though I was like this. Thank you for teaching me love even though I was like this." you can read my thoughts on the chapters i have read of it here

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