Every Survivors-like is to some degree a scary game, overwhelming you with foes that ends up making you tense by the end of a run. Some of them, like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, even use a spooky aesthetic to make it scarier. But I don't think I've played one until now that could be a considered a horror game. Every minute of Snake Farm gets under your skin on some level, feeling equal parts jovial and threatening, from the droning synth to the overwhelming GIANT SNAKES AND YOU WEREN'T LYING WHEN YOU CALLED IT A GIANT WORM.

It's cute, but extremely hampered by the jank of being a DOS point and click. Lots of sound system problems. But the art is fairly cute and it feels like a direct-to-vhs don bluth knockoff, which is with a positive or negative depending where your proclivities lie.

The really surprising part is that it has quick time events and they actually work pretty well? Which is cool for a western game. It suffers a lot from the setting, which is a very Hollywood western locale. But it's pretty surprising the quality of cute saturday morning furry art on display

This is probably my favorite recent imperfect game.

I think it's really cool that there's like, a very granular infrastructure focused game like this. It does a lot of good adventure gamey stuff while also avoiding doing weird inventory puzzles. It's also definitely a eurojank game, full of eastern europe cultural artifacts and odd design decisions which might seem weird and counterintuitive. It's like the machine fixing puzzles of Myst mixed with the "carry this object" puzzles of Amnesia and the environmental design of a walking sim. There's no enemies, this is an adventure game through and through!

The only thing weird about it is how it gets better designed as it goes. There's this awful horrible raft ride in act one which is the WORST part of the game, it's so awful i couldn't blame anybody for dropping the game there. I had to noclip to get myself out of some spots in act 2. But then in the last act of the game there's a REALLY good boat scene, and the contrast is kinda jarring! But also, kind of inspiring! You get to see developers hone their craft while you're playing the same game!

It's honestly really cool that a game can be this big and epic and expansive and never really veer into science fiction or fantasy too hard. The most unreal aspect of the game setting is these radioactive mushrooms growing in places, but beyond that everything is very real and grounded. And i think that's pretty impressive to me since video games are usually a medium so based in fantasy!

This game is as big as Half-Life 2, and in the same engine and has:
- No combat
- No enemies
- No scince fiction
- No aliens

And still works really well! And that's really impressive.

The only recommendation I would make is going into the settings and modifying the flashlight and camera batteries to just make them never run out. That mechanic feels wholly unnecessary to the flavour of the game, often more frustrating than interesting, and removing the tension of trying to find batteries really lets the walking sim parts shine. The developers seem to have realized this over its long development history, as in the final act you're given an upgraded flashlight which doesn't have the same battery drain issues.

If it weren't for the weird quirks, the awful Act 1 design problems, and the battery mechanics, this would easily be five stars. But it's already basically an instant recommend. Mark Infra goes down in my brain as one of my favorite scrimblos. Good job folks, this game is a winner.

The best folk outsider art fps ever made. No game LOOKS like this, plays like this, or feels like this. It's wonderful

I recommend watching this video about his dev process because it's honestly very inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIjt1mKWn4o

This dude put all his hobbies into a game and it whips. It feels so personal and intimate with both its interests and the folklore it is inspired by, whisking you away on a fantasy journey unlike any other. We need more folk games, games steeped in history and personhood and the stories your grandmother told you about as a child.

Oates has been developing a fascinating little series of RPGMaker horror games with an incredibly heartwarming edge of sincerity to them. Using a consistent stack of plugins and gorgeous consistent artwork (often re-used between games, to excellent effect), a small world of surreal melancholy is slowly built out, with supernatural monsters projecting the insecurities and struggles of modern life.

Sorry We're Open is the gutpunch game released this year, a game about being a faceless manager of a retail store, carrying your crew through day after day of absurd confrontations with mundane customers and supernatural poltergeists. You gotta keep the store clean, you gotta keep your crew alive, all the while the real evil of Corporate Management hangs over you like an eldritch vampire.

The only winning move is to realize the horrors of capitalism and leave. The game uses its multiple endings in short succession to deliver its true payoff, and is absolutely worth playing through to 100%.

Its thesis is worn directly on its sleeve: Even the manager of a store has far more solidarity with the workers under them than the capitalist monsters running the show. And if you don't realize that, you will die a husk drained entirely of life.

I've written about Infra before, and I still stand by everything I said there, but I wanted to go more into depth about why in particular this really impacted me out of everything I played this year.

I played a lot of extremely video-gamey games this year. I ground through Vampire Survivors, I relearned how much I fucking love pinball, I attempted to catch up on Destiny 2 and eventually gave up when PlayStation fucked them, and I played a bunch of AAA and point and click games with my girlfriends.

But Infra is the game which really captured my brain in a way that fundamentally changed my opinion of what I want out of games. Infra made me feel comfortable cheating through Alan Wake's sloggish combat. It reminded me how much I fucking love adventure games. It reminded me how my least favorite part of Amnesia games was the fucking monsters. And it showed me a type of game I never thought could be played straight: The infrastructure thriller.

Anybody familiar with the late-00s era of gaming is probably familiar with Viscera Cleanup Detail, and infrastructure thrillers have been sort of caught in a twee physics-comedy era ever since. Infrastructure, something that is vitally important to real spaces and generally only scenery in video games, is usually treated as an avenue for comedy in games. Space is never given a sense of vibrancy, reality, and depth, for the sake of life. It's all for fun gags about physics objects bouncing around, or to add tension to guys shooting at you, or to make two sweaty men look even grosser as they climb out of a dumpster.

But Infra is so confident, so made with love, and dedicated to putting you squarely in the shoes of a site inspector for a city architecture firm. You certainly go above and beyond the call of duty, eventually scrambling through a dam, a bunker, and a nuclear plant, but none of this is with the tension of guns or aliens or "enemies" beyond incompetent politicians and corrupt business mogals. And it's a deeply funny game at times. There's reasons I've been caught shitchosting about Infra multiple times here.

And most of all, this is perhaps the only true liminal game I've played. Backrooms content has exploded in popularity lately as an extension of analog horror, and all of it is basically mediocre at best. The best Backrooms game of 2023 was My House (.wad), and literally not a single "Backrooms" game I played featuring the titular title was any good at all. (I also played Anemoiapolis this year, and it was quite good, but not as good as Infra.) But the best liminal game I've played is Infra.

"Liminal" does not mean "scary empty place". Liminal refers to spaces whose purpose is transient - people are meant to travel through them, but not stay in them. You're not meant to pay attention to them. And Infra makes you not only look at these spaces, and pay attention to them - it requires you to care about them. It wants you to look at the wounds on the walls, see where the bones are cracking, listen to where the ventilation wheezes. It understands that liminal is not inherently scary - it's definitely alien, but it's also a part of life. It's quiet, and a little lonely, and a little beautiful in its own way.

And yeah, the first two acts of the game have some bad gameplay. Please, please, endure the raft ride if you generally like video games. I promise it gets better. The computers we've built can make spaces like this feel real. They can make you think about the cities we live in as breathing, real places, with all the guts and back rooms as actual places. I need more games like this. I crave it.