hippochippies

Author: Zach Davis

  • Games of the Month – February 2020

    Games of the Month – February 2020

    So uh, the last month has been… a lot! Between the plague and the politics, it’s not looking great out there folks. But instead of turning into absolute despair hour (for that, check my Twitter), what if we talked about some video games for a second?

    Doom Eternal is mere hours away at this point (UPDATE: it’s out! I have it! I lived!). Animal Crossing’s tonight. It’s time to put February to bed.

     

    1. Scourgebringer

    Is it time to call our Game of the Year yet? Because right now, it’s Scourgebringer by a country mile.

    Without Flying Oak Games’ instant , February would have been a relatively unmemorable month. There’s still good stuff to find, sure, but this one’s in a league of its own. Scourgebringer is still only in Early Access, but wow what a showing. I know now the game’s been in alpha for a year. I wish I had known! The game’s Steam release has blown me away. Action as tight as Doom 2016’s with as many variables and options but on a 2D plane? What a weird, wonderful idea.

    ScourgeBringer is fast. Like, blink while you’re watching someone play and you’ll miss them clearing a room, fast. And for me? The faster the roguelike the better. You enter a room full of enemies, figure out the most efficient way to obliterate them in five seconds, and move on to do it again. It’s not the most original idea, but the execution is done so well it’s been hard to tear myself away. And when I’m not playing, I’m wondering what next week’s content update might bring. It’s real, real good.

    Go play Scourgebringer for yourself it looks or sounds remotely interesting to you. It’s quite difficult to convey just how good the game feels in your hands until you’re dashing and slicing and blasting through the hordes for yourself. Combine that with the game’s combo system and skill tree, and you’ve got yourself a game to return to again and again.

    For a game that seems roughly halfway content complete, a bunch of full games have a lot to compete with already. Expect to be hearing about this one for a while. That’s assuming we survive the next handful of months, of course.

    2. WORLD OF HORROR

    What if the world was a terrible hellscape and only your wildest imaginations could predict what awful thing would happen next? Also, did you hear about this spooky new Junji Ito inspired game? It’s good too!

    WORLD OF HORROR is a solo effort from @panstasz about surviving an onslaught demons and monsters that have been unleashed. While I haven’t put as much time into this one as I plan to, early signs are good. I participated in an eldritch ritual. I fought a demon. I got my face permanently sliced open by an evil scissor lady and lived… for a while. It’s cool! The one thing I don’t have a great grasp on so far is the combat. As an adventure game it’s all menu based, and the combat is turn-based from said menu. But there’s a bit of complexity there involving what order to take certain moves, when to defend or attack or whatever. It’s all gone over my head a bit, and I’m playing mostly to see ghosts and non-euclidean monstrosities, not to learn a light combat programming language. But, like I said, the good parts are super good.

    3. Mission Zigloton

    A weird platformer that I found had launched on itch.io to little fanfare: Mission Zigloton by Ben Lega! Have you been looking for a pretty simple way to kill an hour or two? Ben’s got ya.

    Mission Zigloton rarely pretends to be more than just a solid platforming adventure. You’ll collect doodads to open up areas which you’ll then run and jump through to collect other doodads. Towards the later half of the game, you’re introduced to a couple of boss fights and stealth sequences that feel a bit out of place but aren’t unwelcome.  It’s neat!

    Again, this was a super light month in terms of releases, but this was just the kind of appetizer I was looking for before the big big big stuff starts hitting and doesn’t stop. It’s also completely free!

    Honorable Mentions

    Escape Vauban

    vauban

    A very good, very quick escape room game.

    Balavour

    b1

    A sad short horror story about a girl, a dog, and a flower.

    The Convenience Store

    cs1

    Decent on its own, but pales in comparison to its clear inspiration – Puppet Combo’s opus, Night Shift.

  • Games of the Month – January 2020

    Games of the Month – January 2020

    It’s back! I’ve been looking forward to hopping back on this wagon for a while. First things first: I haven’t played the final episode of Kentucky Route Zero yet. I’ve been playing the game on and off with chapter releases since 2013, but I’m due for a full replay before hopping into the ending. I’m super excited to do it, but this month wasn’t it. Kentucky Route Zero is a game that I’ve cared a lot about since I played Act I seven years ago(!!!), and I don’t want to do it the disservice of rushing through. I expect it to be good, so there’s that. On to the show!

     

    #1. Lenna’s Inception

    Another month, another good Zelda-like. Though I don’t think it’s as strong of an offshoot as, say, Ittle Dew 2, Lenna’s Inception is a solid action RPG with enough of its own identity to give it a recommendation. Read my full thoughts on it here.

    #2. TemTem

    In the two or three hours I’ve spent with TemTem so far, I’m glad to say it’s a super confident Pokemon thing. Even after spending (and continuing to spend) dozens of hours in Pokemon Shield, CremaGames love for that series shines through and keeps pushing me forward. If you’re remotely interested in Pokemon or have wondered where the series could go if built by a different set of hands, TemTem is the real deal. The monster designs are a bit hit or miss, learning a brand new batch of odd type matchups has been difficult but not unwelcomed, and the early access state the game is in has me wanting to hold off just a bit until there’s more polish. But even as early as the game is (the full release isn’t expected until next year) there’s already a lot here to like.

    #3. Journey to the Savage Planet

    Did you like Metroid Prime? Did you like Borderlands 2? Welp, doesn’t matter if you do, Typhoon Studios sure did. You’ll go through the motions of exploring an alien planet and grabbing double jumps and grappling hook upgrades all while your AI partner quips relentlessly in your ear. Yes, it’s kind of a weird mashup… but surprisingly one that works! I think the writing here is significantly wittier that a lot of what’s on offer in the Borderlands games (i.e. it’s actually funny on occasion) and I’ve enjoyed just roaming around this weird, colorful space world. There’s some good 3D platforming and exploration here with some shallow but infrequent FPS combat tossed in for good measure. Sure, the comedy writing on display leans toward throwing spaghetti at a wall, but the funny jokes are legitimately well-delivered and memorable. I did run into a game-breaking bug in the first two hours that required a fresh save, but I’ve been told that specific issue has been fixed and shouldn’t happen anymore. I guess if the fact that I lost two hours of progress and willingly redid all of it doesn’t speak for itself, not a whole lot else will.

    Honorable Mentions

     

    The Pedestrian

    I’ve been pumped for this after hearing about it years ago and… uh, it isn’t quite what I expected it to be! I enjoyed what I played quite a bit, but of no fault of the devs I expected a pure 2D platformer instead of a puzzle platformer. It’s a good one of those, though, if you’re in the mood for one!

    Lightmatter

    A decent first-person puzzler with a desperate desire to be the next BioShock. Some of the writing is terrible, but the occasional good bit of dialogue and the puzzles themselves were fun enough to warrant a light recommend.

  • Lenna’s Inception is 2020’s First Good Zelda

    Lenna’s Inception is 2020’s First Good Zelda

    Being a Zelda-like in 2020 means that you’re facing a ton of comparisons to other games right out the gate. The actual Zelda games, pseudo-Zelda games like Anodyne and 3D Dot Game Heroes, and departures that still retain a lot of Zelda DNA like Hyper Light Drifter. Do I think Lenna’s Inception stands up to any of these? Not really, but it’s a good, breezy way to start off a slow-starting year. The soundtrack is… pretty good! The procedural map generation is… good enough that you usually won’t notice that the world isn’t hand-crafted! The writing is… actually kind of great on occasion, but that’s balanced out by scenes like the one in the opening with a dead old man in a cave who smeared “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE” with his own blood.

    l2
    I had to add this picture so you would believe me about just how dumb it is. Good on him for remembering the apostrophe.

    Edgy. Thankfully those moments are few and far between, and instead we get a pun loving librarian (“ISBN missin’ you!” got me pretty good) and an evil sorceress trying to convince one boss to stop opening his mouth because his weak spot’s in there.

    If you’re familiar with Link’s Awakening, a form of the shell upgrade system is back. In Lenna’s, every overworld screen with enemies will drop a reward for defeating them, usually a limited-use material that can be used to upgrade any of your many items. Items like bombs, arrows, and swords. You get it. My biggest complaint with the game is that this progress isn’t tracked anywhere. This leads to you needing just one more meteorite to upgrade your bow, and you’re forced to wander the map aimlessly massacring every screen of enemies hoping that maybe this is the one you hadn’t cleared before. The weirdest part is that there IS a map and every screen has its own square you can hover over. Please, please just plop a checkmark somewhere on there if I’ve already cleared it and save us all the trouble.

    Oh, also, you can swap between two completely different graphical styles at any point. Want it to look like a weirdo NES The Legend of Zelda? They got ya. Prefer a vastly superior art style that seems like what the game intends you to choose? Do what I did and slap those SNES graphics on and never look back.

    If you’ve noticed by now a lack of mention of puzzles, it’s because there really aren’t many to speak of. Lenna’s Inception gates progress by whether or not you have the next item, but doesn’t require a ton of thinking beyond that. Shoot arrows at the targets, bomb the rocks, etc. This is an action game where you occasionally push a block to the right spot to open a door. Don’t go in expecting a wild variety of dungeon puzzles like in A Link Between Worlds. This isn’t that. Go in expecting to see a cool map and fight some rad looking boss monsters to get better armor and swords.

    If you’re ready to save this odd world, check out Lenna’s Inception on Bytten Studio’s itch.io or Steam page.

  • Baba is Not You in Tip of the Icebug’s Silly Sokoban

    Baba is Not You in Tip of the Icebug’s Silly Sokoban

    bit1

    This was the first video game I finished in 2020 because it was only ten minutes long! More people make ten minute games please.

    If you played Baba is You, this is like that but without the programming languages rearing their indecipherable heads. Developer Jon Topielski sticks you in a big Sokoban grid and has you maneuver yourself to the exit while both utilizing and avoiding the obstacles along the way. It’s certainly not as unique a concept as Baba, but if we’re grading on that curve our expectations might need some readjusting. No, this time instead of moving the literal, tangible phrase BLOCK = BAD around a maze in some interesting way, we’re simply heaving that bad block out of the way ourselves.

    bit2

    The Baba is You influence is readily apparent, but the What the Golf? nod had me intrigued. Turns out, yeah there’s a bit of that DNA here as well! If this were ever to be fleshed out into something larger, the silly surprises of What the Golf? would add a lot of identity to an otherwise pretty simple Sokoban riff. Just in the first handful of levels (I think there’s only six or seven total), the silly surprise of taking control of a random stage object instead of the main character still hasn’t lost the charm since What the Golf perfected the concept last year.

    The visuals are just enough not-Baba to get the job done. The elevator / carnival-lite music is also pretty chill while not doing anything to stand out. For what it’s worth, the one looping track works just fine as background music to walk around the house and eventually write this post to. The central concept is good and the ancillary stuff just works! I hope we get to see Topielski experiment further with blending puzzle genres, because after my ten minutes was up I was ready for more. Also, adding a dash of What the Golf’s manic brilliance into every genre should be industry standard going forward.

    Go enjoy your ten minutes of puzzling on the game’s itch.io page!

     

  • 2019 Reflections and 2020 GOTY Predictions

    2019 Reflections and 2020 GOTY Predictions

    2020 Collage

    Another year, another list where I predict Super Meat Boy Forever will be in my top ten and it doesn’t even come out. We’ll see this time I guess.

    January of last year was when I called 2019 “staaaaacked” with good games. Turns out it was! Maybe a year without one real crowd-pleaser like a God of War or a Witcher, but a lot lot lot of smaller things came out to make up for it. If there’s a genre you love, 2019 had at least a couple of entries that were worth your while.

    For record keeping’s sake, here’s my predictions from the beginning of last year. The addendums in parenthesis are some quick thoughts so we can put that year behind us and talk about those sweet 2020 releases and make more bad guesses.

    Game of the Year 2019 Early Predictions:

    Devil May Cry V – (Good not great! I don’t like playing as V.)

    Super Meat Boy Forever – (still not out!!)

    Animal Crossing Switch – (March 20, babyyyy)

    The Outer Worlds – (like a bunch of these, I didn’t put much time in. Seems cool so far, though.)

    The Last of Us: Part 2 (not out)

    Doom Eternal (also not out, but I have some THOUGHTS about this one)

    Resident Evil 2 (I’m a scared baby and also didn’t give this the time it deserved yet)

    Judge Eyes (ugh, I own it put have only played it for an hour. It was a very good hour.)

    Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (I’ve made my peace with this thing, check out my 2019 GOTY list)

     

    Honorable Mentions:

    Rhythm Doctor (not out)
    Trials Rising (good but weirdly flawed)
    Ooblets (not out but gimme!!!!!!!!!)
    Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (made the list, was about as good as it could have been)
    Manifold Garden (didn’t grab me like I expected it to. not a huge collection of neat puzzles to solve like antichamber like i wanted)
    Tunic (still coming and still looks great!)
    Knuckle Sandwich (2020 don’t let me down)
    Anodyne 2 (good and weird, not as good and weird as the first game)
    Yoshi’s Crafted World (super solid, not a goty game)
    Dreams (kind of sort of out, I had a ridiculous time with this thing and I’m excited for a more official release)

     

    So what about 2020? There are, as always, too many games coming out. Hopefully I get to play some of them.

     

    Game of the Year 2020 Predictions:

     

    #1. Elden Ring – A Fromsoft game hot off the heels of their latest and worst (but not terrible), Sekiro? I was a bit put off just on the recency bias, but after reading some developer interviews I’m becoming pretty hopeful. A larger scale Dark Souls with more customization than ever? The PR seems to be pushing “more” and “bigger” as the key adjectives this time around, and a new generation of Dark Souls with those in mind could lead to many a dream come true.

    #2. Doom Eternal – Doom 2016 is a rare example of what I believe to be a near perfect video game. The combat is fluid and balanced in a way that makes you feel incredible after every single fight. The unexpected but never unwelcomed 3D platforming is super tight. And the Doom Slayer is just cool as hell. Rip and tear, baby.

    #3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Unless you’re part of The Initiated, you have no idea how pumped I am to get my hands on another one of these. How in the world was New Leaf nearly 7 years ago?? Let’s hope for a true upgrade to online this time, and not like Sword and Shield where the online stuff somehow got worse.

    #4. The Binding of Isaac: Repentance – I will probably continue to play The Binding of Isaac until I die, expansions or not. This will hopefully just make those hours even better.

    #5. Cyberpunk 2077 – One day I’ll play The Witcher 3. If I don’t before September, maybe this will show me a bit of what I’ve been missing. I’m also more apt to drop hours into an first-person than a third-person one. Weird, I know, but true.

    #6. Super Meat Boy Forever – After Team Meat Split, Edmund made The End is Nigh with Tyler Glaiel. It’s a superior game to Super Meat Boy, so let’s hope this alternate timeline of a second sequel from Tommy Refenes has just as much game to back it up.

    #7. The Last of Us Part II – I haven’t replayed The Last of Us since mid-2013, and I remember less and less of it every day. I do remember, though, thinking it was a fantastic third-person shooter with a story other games of this budget rarely care to match. I’m due for a redo, but if I end up without the time hopefully Part II will do its duty and remind me what makes these games tick.

    #8. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 – The first one is an RPG classic, and they’ve been saying and doing enough things right to tell me this one should be, too.

    #9. Knuckle Sandwich – This weird and varied old-school RPG looks better the more I see of it. As long as the turn-based stuff has enough wrinkles to keep me mildly engaged, I’ll be happy to engage with it just to get to the next incredible bit of dialogue, game show appearence, dream sequence, cannibalism, rhythm game, etc, etc, etc.

    #10. Hollow Knight: Silksong – I will follow Team Cherry wherever they end up going. If, for now, they plan on serving up a sequel to the best Metroidvania game of all time? That’s alright with me.

    Honorable Mentions:

    The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 – I have some real doubts this one is coming in 2020, but if it does I’ll be the happiest a person can be. So don’t expect it.

    Hades – I’ve yet to play the Early Access version, but the Supergiant pedigree and the wild amount of buzz around it lands it squarely on my radar.

    No More Heroes III – I like the cutscenes and watching dumbass action setpieces more than I actually enjoy playing either of the first two games. Either way, this will be a game with bad combat and great cutscenes, or good combat and great cutscenes. I’ll honestly take it either way. That’s what YouTube’s for.

    Tunic – I’m a sucker for a Zelda fan making a Zelda game. I play a ton of them every year, though, and they tend to blend together after a while. Tunic seems like one that may end up sticking out from the rest.

  • HippoChippies’ Game of the Year 2019

    HippoChippies’ Game of the Year 2019

    And now it’s time for the preamble.

    I haven’t gone back to read any of the old GOTY posts, but I’m sure they all start with something similar: 2019 was a long year. Between life and school and whatever else, I will not remember 2019 with much fondness. I managed to write the least amount on this site that I’d ever written, leading to a deserved plummet in visitors. It was a rough one!

    But 2019 is gone, and uh, something something hindsight 2020. It’s time to course correct. On the positive side, school’s pretty much dunzo for me, so there’s a lot of stress off my back and more free time on the keyboard. I started my first major foray into writing horror fiction, and have lots of plans for that going forward into this year. And, like, there’s a bunch of cool video games coming this year to be excited about! New consoles! Potentially a sequel to the best video game ever made! Stuff is happening! Which is why stuff is going to be happening to HippoChippies as well.

    First off, Games of the Month is coming back. Once I feel that I’m comfortable in having scoped out every sweet game that came out the month prior, expect an in-depth look at my favorite handful of stuff that popped up over the last thirty-ish days. This has always been one of my favorite features on the site, and having it fall by the wayside for the last couple of years has felt capital B Bad. Also, expect at minimum one post every two weeks, starting with this post. 2020 is the year of maintaining consistency and less about slipping into laissez-faire bummer mode for weeks on end. Also also, if you weren’t aware, I run another site called indiegamecurator.com. Expect a major update to that site in the upcoming weeks once the schedule of the rest of this nonsense has been sorted.

    But you’re not here to care about that. You want to know what the best games of last year were, right? Thanks for reading the above if you did, and if you didn’t, just know that if you’re interested in finding cool new games this website will be a better place to hear about them going forward. I’ve always cared about video games and the people who make them, and this decade is the one where I do right by that passion. Stay tuned! Enjoy reading about these musty old 2019 games now.

     

    Honorable Mentions:

    Luigi’s Mansion 3

    A tour-de-force by Next Level Games, you’re a lost cause if this doesn’t make you very excited for what they work on next. By effortlessly tossing “genius puzzle design” into the Luigi’s Mansion formula along with Nintendo’s signature polish, this is the game Luigi’s Mansion was always just shy of being. I’m also on the fence on whether this should have replaced Sekiro as #10.

    Trials Rising

    Though the world map is an absolute disaster and the challenge design is several steps back from Trials Fusion, I still loved almost all 60 hours I dropped into this game. Trials is one of the most interesting 2D platformer series going, and this one was no exception. Just, like, fix the world map, it’s unusable.

    What the Golf?

    Imagine WarioWare, but on your phone, but also not that pirated copy of WarioWare Twisted you’re running through the GBA emulator. What the Golf? is about everything in the world, and occasionally there’s golf involved. I can’t picture anyone not enjoying it.

    Old School RuneScape

    For roughly 20 years, RuneScape has remained both a terrible, grindy timesink and also one of my favorite video games to ever exist. They keep updating it with neat little things and are somehow still finding quality of life improvements to implement that should have been made during the Bush administration. I still play it a lot. I’m awful.

    The List!

     

     

    10. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

    Sekiro making it on this list is something I’ve gone back and forth on for a year. On one hand, its the most consistently disappointing and frustrating video game I played in 2019. I didn’t finish it, and I don’t have any plans to. On the other hand… God, nobody makes a game like From Software.

    A more freeform game than From’s ever done before, Sekiro strips away the chains and lets you sprint, wall climb, wall jump, and otherwise ninja your way around in ways that make this feel like the most distinctive Fromsoft game even if it isn’t close to their best. My love/hate relationship with this game stems from just what kind of quality the rest of their games meet, and how this game fails to be exactly what I’ve bought into their series for in the past. This does explain why some people who have never enjoyed a Souls game before are calling this From’s best work, but I’m someone who thinks From games getting sequentially harder over the last decade is only to their detriment. The difficulty isn’t the only issue here, locations become repetitive and many end up being smaller than you expect. The bosses suffer from a complaint I disagree with about Dark Souls 2 but is more on display than ever here, in that, ‘its just a bunch of swordfights.’ But it’s still… pretty Soulsy! I still loved exploring the areas even though there was less to see than ever. I loved the individual combat encounters with non-boss enemies, so much so that I think it may be the most exciting combat system From has ever produced. It’s a good game! But I don’t love Fromsoft because they make good games, I love them because they make masterpieces. And, in my opinion, this is far from being one.

    I could go on about why seeing these talented people steer away from making games I love bums me out, but I am glad they were able to stretch their wings and give something outside of their proven formula a shot. I just hope Elden Ring isn’t built with the wrong lessons in mind.

    9. Apex Legends

    I haven’t considered played Apex Legends in six months, and it still brings back memories good enough to be one of my favorites of last year. That’s how good Apex Legends is.

    Though I do miss the realism and sim-ish nature that comes with quietly skulking around looking for dudes and vehicle patrols, Apex Legend is its own delightful beast. The battle royale craze of the last couple of years has had a near 100% hit-rate with me, with one big exception of Fortnite. I just can’t get used to building stuff while being shot at!! But, like PUBG and Call of Duty’s Blackout, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.

    Apex Legends does right by the genre by introducing a mandatory squad system with excellent communication options. Being able to hold a button to bring up a massive list of options to non-verbally communicate with random teammates is a blessing, even though sometimes I would prefer to be able to queue into a solo match. The map is one of the best in the genre, and the mixing of hero shooter and battle royale makes each team combination play differently. Respawn continues to be one of the most consistently talented devs in the business. I did fall off the Apex train before the first season pass even came out, so as for the staying power of non-Fortnite games in this genre I can’t say for sure. But if you’re up for having an extremely solid multiplayer month with friends, you could do much, much worse.

    8. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

    Coming up with a pseudo-sequel to one of the most beloved video games of all time seems like a fool’s errand. And for the miniature fiasco that the Switch version of Bloodstained is, it seems like it nearly was. As for the other versions of the game, though? Uh, wow, they actually nailed it. If you’ve played a modern 2D Castlevania, you know almost exactly what you’re in for here. You explore a giant castle getting new abilities, maybe turn the building upside down once or twice, and smoke some vampires. And that’s about all anybody asked for. Where Bloodstained steps up a bit is in the many ancillary systems it manages to deftly balance. There’s an NPC who gives you loot from seeking out certain monsters who also drop lots of loot when killed, which then can be used in the multifaceted crafting system to make and upgrade your dozens of special powers and recipes you discover by uncovering more of the castle. Kill monsters, find loot, make new recipes, experiment with spells and weapons, take on side quests to craft specific items to get more loot, repeat. I know, I know, everybody is pretty sick of crafting systems, but trust me when I say this one’s pretty good(!), if you even have a tolerance for the handful of goods ones left.

    Long story short- it’s a good-ass sequel to Symphony of the Night that brings everything you wanted back from that game, down to the tiny details of your friends being like, “hey, did you know if you sit in this specific chair with this specific familiar equipped… a special cutscene happens!” and it’s awesome every time. Symphony of the Night rules, Bloodstained rules, and there’s a new Hollow Knight game coming this year. Metroidvanias are doing A-OK.

    7. Shovel Knight: King of Cards

    In what was otherwise an oddly weak year in 2D platforming, Yacht Club Games closed down the decade with a veritable banger. As of a month ago, the original Shovel Knight game is done. After nearly a decade of cramming as much platforming goodness they could into what is essentially now five games, Yacht Club are done with the obligations of their 2013 Kickstarter, leaving us with the best deal in platforming history. Shovel Knight, its three expansions, and its multiplayer game are all in one package. But about that fourth and final single player experience; was it worth the wait?

    King of Cards is a display of a near-decade of working on one game and understanding what makes it tick, inside and out. Not only is Shovel Knight: King of Cards the best Shovel Knight game to date, it’s one of the best and most interesting entries to the genre in a while. As I worked my through King of Cards’ campaign, I found myself getting genuinely frustrated that a team so talented can make something this good so frequently, and other studios struggle to put even one of these with any kind of regularity. A new and better world map is here, along with shorter levels spicing up play quicker and more often. There’s an abundance of the series’ signature special items which can change anything from how you attack, how you jump, and more, with each and every one of these utilities given an entire stage of its own to cleverly experiment with.

    On top of how good the platforming is, there’s an entire Final Fantasy style optional card game! And it’s great! If you ever had any fun with Triple Triad or Tetra Master, boy has the next great one come along. I spent my first couple of matches put off by how little strategy there seemed to be, and yikes I’ll admit to being wrong on that one. I went from skipping the card game entirely for the first handful of hours to doing nothing but playing every match I could find, scoping out the best cards in the shop and from opponents, and then looking up a physical version to print out online. It’s like, really good.

    Now that the original Shovel Knight saga has ended, I couldn’t be more pumped to see what that team comes up with next. With recent news of the team hiring some 3D developers, is the long teased Shovel Knight 64 finally going to be more than a punchline? Here’s hoping!

    6. Pokemon Shield

    Pokemon Sword and Shield are my favorite main series Pokemon games ever made. They’re no Pokemon Snap, but, come on now, who of us is?

    Reigniting a love for Pokemon I’ve had inside me since 1998, playing through Shield has felt like the biggest breath of life this series has gotten. I read a Tweet (that I can’t find now) that said something to the effect of “Pokemon Sword and Shield made me feel like a kid in the 90s getting my Charmander for the first time,” and I held that Tweet in high suspicion until I actually had my hands on the game. It really does bring back that kind of wonder. I really enjoyed my time with X and Y, but that was mostly for the novelty of being my first Pokemon game with a really good online system that lent itself well to playing with friends. Shield, to me, made Pokemon feel like you imagine it should feel for the first time. The wide open plains to ride your bike through, the huge stadiums of cheering onlookers, and the wide cast of monsters and people you meet over your dozens and dozens of hours to spend adventuring. And with the recent announcement of the expansions coming for Sword and Shield, it’s easy to say that if you’ve ever been curious about hopping into these games, this is the best time and place to do so.

    5. Outer Wilds

    I still haven’t made the time to finish Outer Wilds, and I hear that if I had this may have been bumped a little higher on the list. As it stands, Outer Wilds goes all in on something I value so, so much in video games: exploration. I love exploring a cool new area and figuring out what makes it unique. That’s a huge reason why I love Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild. You never know what you’re going to see next, and then after that you’ll probably uncover something equally as cool.

    Outer Wilds presents you with an entire Solar System made up of a handful of planets and sets you free. What you see is all on you. There’s not a map pointing you to your next objective, it’s just a wide open world that’s willing to give back as much as you’ll put in. If you’re looking for a lighter adventure, maybe you’ll fly across the tornado planet and get a vague understanding of how the physics of this world behave. You’ll probably end up hanging out with a friend on the moon, and then you’ll fly directly into the sun on accident. Then you’ll probably do that last part a couple dozen more times.

    If you dig a little deeper, though, you’ll see what really makes Outer Wilds shine. You’ll discover the secrets of a long lost(?) people. You’ll not only stare in awe at the Twins, two planets who trade their surface material in a visually incredible way, you’ll figure out just exactly why that’s happening and what it means.

    If you’re just looking for adventure, there wasn’t a better place to find it in 2019 than in Outer Wilds.

    4. Super Mario Maker 2

    Mario is my favorite video game series. Anything that lets me run and jump with the little guy is gonna be my jam, that’s just how things are. But letting me figure out where and how he jumps? Turns out that’s still cool, too!

    I felt like an honest-to-god game designer playing Super Mario Maker 2, and you know what? I guess I kinda was one! Having all of the tools in front of me to make a new entry in my favorite series felt like opening a present every time I loaded this thing up. Yes, I had an excellent time playing user-created levels, even moreso than with the last game, but the creation tools on display here are the best in the business. Puzzling out how to make an exciting escape room or simply stringing together a nightmare challenge of platforming was some of the most fun I had with any game all year long. Where the first Super Mario Maker was a game that I spent more hours watching than I did playing, taking matters into my own hands for the sequel was absolutely the right way to go. Even the completely busted multiplayer was better than 90% of other games I played this year, just because of how stupid and novel it is to compete through Mario levels with strangers. The greatest comedy of 2019? Watching four strangers screw each other over to reach the finish line first. The garbage these people will pull to bounce you to your death or throw you off a cliff into the abyss just as you’re landing for victory? Hilarious. Also there’s a huge single player mode with like a hundred levels and they’re all super good. Man, Mario just rules, you guys.

    3. Supraland

    Where did this thing come from?? I was never aware of the cancelled Kickstarter campaign from the beginning of 2018. Halfway through 2019 I was bored and scrolling through Steam250.com (a super useful resource!) looking for well-reviewed releases of the year and stumbled across it. If you check out that first Kickstarter page, you’ll see a, well, lofty description: “Supraland is a First-Person Metroidvania game. It is sort of like a mix between Super Mario, Portal, Metroid and Zelda.” Sounds like a bunch of garbage, huh? Well, in literally any other case you’d be right.

    Supraland feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does. Somehow, some way, it all blends together into a huge delightful mess. You’ll run around a world collecting coins to spend on upgrades which help you solve new puzzles in more inventive ways. It’s a great 3D platformer with a tons of secrets and doodads to collect. It’s a great puzzle game with solutions that seem require as much outside the box thinking as I’ve seen in any game. The biggest flaw is that the combat is kind of weak, and even it gets a chance to shine during the LIGHT SPOILER: surprise tower defense segment!

    Like I said, Supraland doesn’t seem like it should work and it’s hard to categorize because of that. There are ways to sequence break in this game that I’ve never seen before, and it remains as fun regardless of how quickly you catch on how to slip through the cracks… and even when you feel like you’ve broken well past anything the developer could have imagined… you’ll stumble across a winking nod of a treasure chest at the end of the path. If you’ve ever enjoyed a first-person puzzle/exploration/platformy-thing, Supraland has earned its place among the best of the best.

    2. New Super Lucky’s Tale

    In a whole bunch of ways, New Super Lucky’s Tale feels like a spiritual successor to my favorite game in my favorite genre, Super Mario 3D World. That game is a masterwork of variety in stages and stage-design, and New Super Lucky’s Tale feels like its right on that game’s heels. All I knew about the Lucky games prior was that Playful released Lucky’s Tale in 2016 to middling reviews, and that was the last I had paid any attention. Flash to late-2019 when I had just rediscovered my love non-Mario 3D platforming in Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time, and I was pretty stoked to give this new Lucky thing a try. Once I popped that Lucky’s Tale cartridge in though? I’ve been ruined and haven’t been able to go back to either.

    Like Hollow Knight and Symphony of the Night are the genre standards for metroidvanias, New Super Lucky’s Tale should sit among Super Mario Galaxy 2 for judging 3D platformers. Each world has a hub to explore, and from there you’ll enter a series of levels that might be 2D, might be 3D, might be about solving a chess puzzle, might be a boss rush… they can be a lot of things! I plowed through this game and reached 100% over the course of about 3 days, and not for a second was I waiting for the cool part to happen; the whole thing is the cool part. The only other platforming series that’s been able to do that is Mario itself. That’s good company.

    1. Control

    Control is a game that began to turn 2019 around for me. After existing in essentially a fugue-state of half-paying attention to any current release, I decided to see what Remedy’s new thing was all about. I had seen a handful of seconds of the initial trailer, and forgot the game existed until the day it came out. Then I popped that bad boy into my PS4 and wowey zowie what a thing. The game opens with a black screen, and you hear protagonist, Jesse Faden, say, “This is gonna be weirder than usual.” Then all kinds of shit pops off. Going into this about as blind as I’ve ever been going into a video game led to a very interesting next hour. The first document I came across had some heavy SCP Foundation vibes, and I thought, “Surely if there was a huge budget SCP-inspired game I would have known about it, right?” And I was super duper wrong. Turns out… Control is a huge weird fiction adventure through an X-Files, SCP, Magnus Archives-ish story! Dreams do come true!

    Sure, the combat scenarios aren’t why you’re here, though some of them can be surprisingly thrilling in spite of themselves. The boss fights are generally awful, and the way the marketing has thrown around the word “Metroidvania” you’d think its a sequel to Symphony of the Night. What you’re here for is to read page after page of the most well-crafted fiction 2019 had to offer, and meet one of my favorite casts of characters in any medium. The nights I stayed up looking up fan theories rival the time I spent obsessed with uncovering every mystery UnderTale had hidden below the surface. The acting on display is phenomenal and raises the bar for storytelling in games. The biggest knock against Control is that it probably would have worked equally as well as a tv mini-series, but after that Quantum Break show Remedy has made it pretty clear that games are where their talents lie. I’ve been a fan of weird fiction since I discovered it was a thing that existed. Got some weird alien monstrosities? Oh I’m already there. You make it about a bunch of office weirdos categorizing and understanding said monstrosities? Hoo boy.

    Control is a game about bureaucracy invading the world of the paranormal, and I love it so, so much. For a year that was so jam-packed with niche-releases without a crowd-pleaser like Breath of the Wild, The Witcher, or The Last of Us, Control meant the most to me. Now bring on those two expansions so it can continue to be my favorite game of 2020, too.