This might be the most conflicted I've felt about a 2023 release.

Like what a lot of people have already said, the mechanics are tough to wrap your head around with the mixture of Trials/Excitebike traversal and 2D twin-stick shooter combat with one-hit kills. It's incredibly thrilling and satisfying to pull off some of the motorbike bullet-time acrobatics, but this game also gave me two of the most frustrating combat sequences I've had all year. There are unnecessarily difficult mechanics that make some sections just tedious and aggravating.

Still, I admire the boldness in the direction that really clicks when you get into a weird stop-and-start flow state a la Hotline Miami. Closest thing that plays like it is Rollerdrome, which I ultimately prefer on a mechanical level, especially with its decision to not punish the player for not landing on your feet. While there's a practical reason for the growing homogeneity of video game control schemes, I can't help but respect a game that bucks that trend and comes up with its own set of controls to create unique moment-to-moment gameplay.

It's up there with Alan Wake 2, Hi-Fi Rush, and Season: A Letter to the Future for delivering the best aesthetic experiences in 2023 video games. Just a fantastic cartoony visual style reflected in the memorable character designs, striking background art, and the bombed-out brown and bloody red color palette.

The soundtrack is appropriately somber yet has this driving undercurrent of pent-up emotion brought to life by the beautiful breathy reverb-heavy feminine vocals, soft and sometimes relentless percussions, clean plucky melodic guitars, and melancholic keys.

It's a fuckin' mood biking through the desert wasteland of your war-torn home country devastated by avian colonizers with evocative place names like "Where the Doom Fell", "Where the Waves Die", and "Where Iron Caresses the Sky".

The narrative goes to some real dark places that aren't in any way softened by the cartoon animal characters. It's a game about dealing with the burdens of motherhood and the different ways of surviving and resisting under the brutal cruelty of imperialist forces. The cast goes about dealing with these challenges in very human ways, some of which are selfless and self-serving, all of which are written to be understandable if not relatable. The dialogue in particular is cutting in its raw honesty. It's not without moments of levity, but by and large it tells stories of suffering with a sense of poignancy.

All in all, it really is a special kind of game that I have a hard time recommending to just anyone. It's uncompromising in its vision, both in its mechanics and in its narrative. You need to have a ton of patience for its difficulty, and you need to have a strong stomach for its storytelling turns.

It's pretty much Breath of the Wild but better in every single way.

The new set of abilities and the addition of the Sky Islands+Depths are so transformative with how you engage with the world on all levels, whether it's through exploration, traversal, puzzle-solving, and combat, to the degree that my enjoyment for all four aspects has significantly increased compared to BOTW.

I only really enjoyed exploring and some of the moment-to-moment traversal mechanics in BOTW, while I thought the puzzles were too rudimentary and gimmicky, and the combat I actively avoided because it was either boring or frustrating.

In TOTK, the exploration and traversal are best-in-class for open world games, the puzzles are a lot more interesting to solve (although there are still some annoying shrines that feel too gimmicky with the cartoon physics bullshit), and I can now tolerate doing some combat. I also think the temples are a clear step up from the Divine Beasts because of the implementation of the new abilities.

Thought the story would be more substantial this time around, but even though there were some cool scenes here and there, it's still nothing to write home about like BOTW's story. Voice acting still sucks like it sucked back then! I guess Ganondorf sounds appropriately evil in that intimidating way.

I have some nitpicks like how finicky manipulating stuff and ordering the sages can be, how clunky some of the controls are, and how it's still very much an open world game that falls into patterns of content types that eventually saps the sense of wonder from the experience. I can be quite the completionist with big games, but I didn't get that itch with TOTK. In the end though, it's all minor stuff that doesn't take away from the largely good time I had.

Had a pretty good time with Tunic! The more straightforward action adventure stuff is alright, but it's the extra layer of discovering the game's secrets that makes the experience for me. I managed to solve 99% of the puzzles without looking up answers too. It was just this one last thing that basically required the ability to read the in-game language that stumped me, and I was too lazy for that lol. Did that already once with Fez and that was enough!

I do think that with how much Tunic was influenced by Fez, Tunic didn't quite reach the same revelatory high that I got from playing Fez. Tunic may also not have been directly influenced by The Witness, but there's enough similarity to the approach in puzzle-solving between the two, so that also contributed to the blunting of that feeling of wonder and satisfaction that comes from figuring out how Tunic's world works.

Don't wanna discount Tunic's creativity though! Lots of cool puzzles in there that test your perception and pattern-recognition skills, a handful of which I had to rack my brain to solve.

Another easy comparison to make is between this game and Death's Door, but at least with this one, it's actually favorable to Tunic. While I enjoyed my time with Death's Door, the tone of the storytelling was very off-putting, so I very much prefer Tunic, even in just the more conventional isometric action adventure comparison. Tunic's trust in my ability to get through the game and understand its narrative made for a vastly more engaging playthrough compared to Death's Door's overly cutesy and cheeky humor which just made me roll my eyes. I also like how Tunic's boss fights were much more challenging than the bosses in Death's Door. The difficulty felt just right for me.

The manual is a delight. I didn't actually grow up with game manuals, as I was too young to remember much from the Famicom days when we barely had any games, and the rest of my childhood gaming life I relied on pirated/bootleg copies of Genesis/PSX/PS2 games. Also, the only Zelda game I've ever played is BOTW, so nostalgia wasn't at all a factor.

Much like the contrast between the surface-level gameplay and the deeper layer of mechanics, I'm glad Tunic gets bolder with its aesthetic the more you play it. Some really cool-looking levels and visually arresting use of light and colors in there. The music is beautiful, and there are a couple of tracks that are instantly memorable. Love the Shopkeeper's theme in particular! Dynamic soundtracks aren't all that novel these days, but I still appreciate how some of the themes transition smoothly from area to area and what actions you do, with certain instruments coming in and out while sustaining these catchy core melodies.

What a remarkable achievement in homage for synthesizing all the works it references into its own work of art that ultimately feels singular and uncompromising in its vision.

Signalis is founded on the mechanics of Resident Evil and the aesthetics/thematics of Silent Hill (with a sprinkling of Metal Gear Solid 1 on both ends), which together already make for a solid PSX-inspired classic survival horror experience. Making strategic decisions on what items to bring, which enemies to engage and avoid, and what routes to take while exploring a creepy vibes-soaked world rendered so faithfully in the style of 32-bit consoles with modern flourishes is a great time! It takes the undisputed crown for best UI in a 2022 game I've played, hands down. Its use of the radio mechanic for different situations is so smart. And I don't give a fuck what anyone says about the inventory limit; that shit worked perfectly for me!

But then Signalis is layered with the visual language of anime, doing shot-for-shot recreations of iconic scenes in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost in the Shell, two symbolist paintings in Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and Eugen Bracht's The Shore of Oblivion, haunting renditions of classical music pieces such as Chopin's Raindrop Prelude and Schubert's Ständchen, and cosmic horror literature with direct quotes from Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow and HP Lovecraft's The Festival.

Also, mathematical objects that are infinitely recursive with the Penrose and Sierpinski triangles that appear all over the game, the cryptic Three Note Oddity originally broadcasted from some Hungarian numbers station, and a standard long-term nuclear waste warning message with multiple passages obfuscated!

There are much more adept, more well-read, and more driven people that have gone deep into studying these references and shared their perspectives, illuminating and interpreting the patterns that thread together these kaleidoscopic multimedia-spanning connections into something that I've found helpful in understanding the narratives of Signalis. Absolutely hats off to those folks who can discern more concrete throughlines in the game's dream logic.

But the magic of Signalis is that it doesn't require someone to be versed in all of these forms of media to recognize the raw power of impeccably evocative audio-visual storytelling and be moved by the universal human drama of pushing past all obstacles, external and internal, out of love doomed or out of guilt from a promise unfulfilled.

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly more to appreciate from Signalis by catching the references and looking into how they're used and recontextualized to fit what the game is saying. It rewards that literacy and curiosity of things beyond the surface, whether it's in the clever, thematically appropriate puzzles that are oh-so satisfying to solve with clues based on the world the game builds with a deft touch, or in the narrative echoes, reflections, and cycles that the characters suffer through like some hellish inescapable ouroboros of holes that lead to more holes that wrap back around to the same holes that lead to more holes that wrap back around to the same holes...

It's a richly textured video game in a way that I think more video games should be when looking to other media for inspiration. Instead of clumsily lifting storytelling techniques and aesthetics from other media only to close themselves off with navel-gazing lore and self-important plots that purport to do something that "could only be done through the unique medium of video games!", games could do more to influence players' enthusiasm over their narratives to dig into other works of art.

I'm not saying just go full-on ARG-mode to satiate puzzle box lovers and only puzzle box lovers where the thrill is in finding answers to a mystery and only in finding answers to a mystery, as if art is something to be "solved", but to consider widening the horizons of their audiences by inviting players to explore more than just video games, finding instead excitement in the possibility of resonating with perspectives outside what they're comfortable with.

Ultimately though, Signalis makes sure the player never loses sight or sound of its goal, even with all the digital artifacting and harsh feedback degrading sensory perceptions as the game's reality is undone. Even with all its literary, musical, aesthetic, and video game beacons receiving, transmitting, and overlapping complex meanings, Signalis triangulates and dials it all in to a fine-tuned familiar frequency so achingly loud and clear that could make any human heart break.

Citizen Sleeper is the only other 2022 game besides Elden Ring to have truly enraptured me in its world in such a way that left me staying up long past my bedtime.

The key difference is that in Citizen Sleeper, it's the characters of its world that kept me going. It's these characters and their cyberpunk stories that still feel way too real in their struggles with family, identity, the gig economy, labor politics, surveillance, and day-to-day survival under the relentless, rickety wheels of interplanetary capitalism and all the moral and chronological quandaries this system forces people into.

While Citizen Sleeper certainly has an appropriately understated sci-fi aesthetic, it doesn't fall into the trap of making its cyberpunk world ~cool~ where you get to live out a power fantasy of taking over some neon-lit metropolis with hoverbikes, hydraulic cyborg limbs, and hacking skillzzzorzzzrzrzrz.

Well, you do some hacking as this being who can directly interface with the network of this big space station you're in called the Eye, but you aren't shutting down megacorps or inciting revolutions with it. You mainly do it to collect data to trade in for a little money to stay afloat, or maybe establish a deeper connection with the station's inner workings.

In fact, your identity as a "Sleeper" brings with it certain disadvantages. You still need sustenance like a human to provide you energy to do things, but shit ain't free, so you need money, but as a Sleeper, you're only trusted with low-paying jobs that are never guaranteed, and you can fuck up, and you will get exploited for your time and labor without pay.

On top of all that, your body is slowly but constantly degrading over time as inherent to a Sleeper's ~planned obsolescence~, so you need a constant supply of stabilizers to refresh that body, and it's very expensive to get one, whether it's costing you money, time, or effort, mostly a combination of all three. It can be exhausting.

This would've felt like just a straight-up misery simulator, if not for the genuine warmth and wonder that I felt from the characters I've built bonds with and the events I witnessed with those characters, whether it's in hearing the sigh of relief and gratitude from a fellow shipyard worker thanking me for babysitting his daughter while he gets his hours in, helping a hacker friend expose a conniving administrator through following a digital paper trail, tending to a mushroom farm, or discovering what's between the threads of the virtual world that binds the space station Eye together. And since this is mostly a text-heavy table top RPG-inspired game, you only have static portraits to help you visualize these characters. The writing does all of the heavy lifting.

Thankfully, the writing is the best I've read all year, right up there with Norco, another 2022 narrative banger. There's an economy to Citizen Sleeper's prose and dialogue that sets it apart from Norco, which leans more toward the poetic. Both approaches worked for me, as both games read like a compelling page-turner.

While I do think the core of Norco's narrative resonates more with me, thanks in part to its more focused storytelling compared to Citizen Sleeper spreading out over an ensemble cast, some of which you can completely miss or simply choose not to engage with, I have to give it up for Citizen Sleeper's structure and mechanics providing a more immediately engaging play experience.

Just about everything in Citizen Sleeper revolves around cycles and dice rolls. You're always butting up against fixed timers and chance. There are ways to manage these restrictions and mitigate the risks, but there's no eliminating them completely. So you have to make do with what you have to survive and maybe help others along the way.

It is inspired by TTRPGs, so you do have a build with a handful of stat points and a simple skill tree to work with that influences what actions you have a better chance of succeeding in. Along with the structural constraints and the stellar immersive writing, it encouraged me to get into my character and roleplay.

So I was a machinist who was always curious about how things worked and wasn't afraid to get my hands dirty, but that curiosity would clash with my inability to tackle things head-on and be direct with people. I gravitated toward jobs and narrative goals that allowed me to work my engineering skills while avoiding confrontations.

The setting being what it is where you're trying to survive a capitalist hellscape while also trying to make and maintain personal connections, you're naturally going to be put into tough situations where you're desperately spinning a lot of plates. It's in that tension where the Game truly shines, manifesting the Narrative's message with brutal elegance of how much this system grinds you down but you keep getting back up anyway to be there for the people you care for.

This reached its apex for me near the end of my first 7-hour session (yeah i played it almost non-stop when i started it), where I was so stretched thin trying to help two friends in a bind with their quest clocks ticking down while also dealing with existential threats internally and externally. It was the most stressed I've ever been in a game all year, and I fucking loved it.

I did reach credits not long after, and it was a bittersweet thing, having been relieved of all the struggles while also having that gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that I had left people that trusted me hanging.

Part of me was content with leaving it there... but the goddamn Gamer™ in me had to boot the game back up to see what would happen if I loaded up my save file.

So I did.

And I kept playing for another 6 hours.

I appreciated being able to eventually fall into a more relaxed rhythm with the rest of the game, as I had leveled up enough to get most of my skills up and secured enough connections that there were way fewer barriers to my success, survival, and curiosity. I was able to check out some of the other areas that led to more good stories! However, I did miss the dramatic tension that was so well built up in those first 7 hours.

At least I did get some of that tension back when I started the two DLC quests. I've read enough criticism from people who I assume played the game before the DLCs dropped that the game eventually loses steam if you keep pushing and you want to be a completionist about seeing all the Content®, since it's surprisingly very forgiving in that aspect. However, even with all the skills and stat upgrades that I had by the time I started the first DLC, I actually still had a relatively tough time seeing it through. To be fair, I was also still juggling some other base game quests that I started late! But yeah, I think it's something worth noting for players who only played the base game back when it first came out and for players just picking up the game now with all the new story and characters.

Cult of the Lamb is carried by its cute 2d cut-out aesthetic and zany, happy tree friends-esque parodic take on cults, management sims, and rogue-lites. To be fair, the game excels in those elements.

It was the art direction that caught my attention, and it was the primary motivating factor for me to see it all the way through. "Charming" I feel like gets a bit overused to describe games with a cartoony style, but it's very apt in this case.

From the silly gibberish voice lines to the adorable animations for all the creepy cult-shit you get your followers to do to the grotesque Lovecraftian boss monster designs to the catchy tunes that play in your home base, it all makes for such a cohesive look, sound, and feel that pulls you into the experience.

Too bad the actual systems in place aren't all that deep to justify the playtime. the loop of improving your cult to help you out in your dungeon crawling to get resources to improve your cult was very satisfying to learn for about half of my total hours played.

Afterward, I was kind of over it, because I had already optimized everything at home base where I was no longer having much trouble keeping it up, and the combat didn't get any more complicated or interesting.

Didn't make any emotional connection with my followers, so I wasn't super inclined to roleplay, and I feel like the silliness of it all kept me at that distance. I was mostly all in with treating my cultists either as playthings or simply as resources to manage to progress through the game!

I regret playing the whole game on hard, as the difficulty didn't quite materialize into any truly meaningful interactions or decision-making on both ends.

The sole exception was the third boss, which dialed up the bullet hell aspects to a frustrating extreme. I've never been that good with that genre! At least the fourth and final attempt had a thrilling end to it. I realized that I could abuse the 2-second invincibility from using this particular curse while getting tons of fervor with each hit to refill the curse gauge, and I beat the boss with half a heart left.

That was the only time where I actually took stock of the situation and my abilities. I hadn't faced any real opposition until then, and everything after that boss was also pretty much done on the first try. The back half of the game was just going through the motions and grinding things out to unlock the final boss.

I feel like I could have had mostly the same experience on normal with much less tedium and a shorter playtime, which may have left me feeling more positive about the game. Still had some fun building up my cult and blasting through the earlier dungeons, and it bears repeating that the art direction is killer.

The core gameplay loop is still as fun and satisfying as the 2018 game, and I like the expansion of some of the environment, combat, and RPG elements for more build variety and skill expression. There's a particular section that I think is a sort of preview for what the studio might do for its next game, and it's cool to navigate and thread as one closed-off cohesive experience. There's also just ~a lot more game~ compared to GOW 2018, which I still like because I just enjoy the act of playing in Ragnarok!

Like with the previous game, the best parts of Ragnarok are exploring the beautifully rendered environments to find loot and get bits of character development and world-building while slaying a menagerie of beasts and bad guys with increasingly sick moves. The enemy variety and bosses are a clear step-up from how lacking GOW 2018 was in that department, with the sole exception of the secret super boss not being as challenging and rewarding to beat as their 2018 analog. Ultimately though, Ragnarok doesn't have the same mechanical freshness that its predecessor had.

The much bigger scale of the narrative both helps and hurts the storytelling. There are more side characters, so more people for Kratos and Atreus to bounce off of, with more side quests to explore more interesting perspectives to reflect on. There's a bunch of amazing visual set pieces and good small character moments. The performances are mostly good, with the main villain as the standout. The only one I didn't care for is Atreus, which is a bad thing unfortunately because he's a major character lol.

The pacing is kinda all over the place, the plot gets muddled, and there's a good deal of character development that doesn't feel earned, most of which is in the final act, so there are scenes that are supposed to be cathartic but didn't land at all for me.

I put some blame on the storytelling stumbles on the studio's stubbornness to stick with the flimsy "one continuous shot" direction that I've always found hacky even back in GOW 2018. Because the game has to keep the camera on Kratos and Atreus the entire time, it feels like a couple of the side characters had their development off-screen and then came back on screen already changed.

Some of the blame I just put on underdeveloped writing. There are conclusions the story wants to reach with certain characters that the game doesn't put in the work to make believable, so they feel forced. The flip-flopping of some characters didn't feel like internal struggles I could relate to, but just came off as loose and indecisive storytelling from the writers. Plot points are introduced with intrigue, but they're either resolved unceremoniously or don't have any tension because you see their resolutions coming a mile away.

Also, there's the adherence to AAA blockbuster video game structure which undermines some of the game's themes. It's trying to be this world-spanning epic about mythological figures performing mythological feats while also trying to be an intimate personal drama about family, and in trying to juggle those two things, the game fumbles on both ends.

GOW 2018 made more of an impact on me. Ragnarok is more of the same in terms of gameplay, which is good but not all that exciting, and I'm mixed on the narrative elements. There's character stuff that hits harder in Ragnarok, but there's also more story stuff that falls flat compared to how there's really only one big story thing in GOW 2018 that I didn't like.

OlliOlli World is the 2D Sonic game I never knew I wanted. It’s fast, it’s colorful, it’s got cool jams, it’s got cute and chic fits, it’s got a whole bunch of clever and challenging levels with a lot of reasons to replay them, and it gets me into that good, good flow state so so smoothly in a way that all the Sonic games I’ve played only make me wish they could.

The only thing that holds it back for me is that the last couple of areas demand such a mastery of maintaining momentum that I don’t think the game actually teaches you how to accomplish. I figured that you have to trick off of ramps and grinds at the right moment, but I could just never get the timing down consistently with the increasingly tight and complex layouts. I did just about every challenge and beat every high score in the first three areas, but I hit my limit with the default high scores in the fourth area, and the fifth area’s high scores were basically impossible for me. I couldn’t ever reliably maintain the necessary speed to clear the difficult jumps in those levels to keep your combo going, which you basically have to clear in one single combo if you want to get even a whiff of those levels’ high scores.

Still had a real good time with it! I also just adore the combination of the bubblegum cartoon Adventure Time aesthetic with the perfectly curated licensed chill-hop/jazztronica soundtrack for the ~vibes~ that made it easier for me to retry runs for hours. Highly recommend it to anyone who wants an arcade-style runner/platformer disguised as a skating game.

NORCO is bizarre and beautiful. I was actually taken aback at how its final sequences shook me, almost to the point of tears. I have such a weakness for stories about families and the distance we put between ourselves and family for all sorts of reasons, intentionally or not. The game’s layering of religion on top of that core conflict, swinging wildly from its maximally absurd and blasphemous grotesque representation to a light touch with how the more grounded characters treat it, made it all hit a little harder for me, a lapsed Christian from a deeply religious Christian family.

Don’t have it in me to unpack those themes or the other heavy topics the game tackles that are very much about that specific space in New Orleans, but they certainly made me feel some type of way! The off-beat humor also certainly made it all go down a little smoother, and its disarming presence reminds me why I was also so taken by Disco Elysium.

It also deserves a lot of praise for its music. The synth soundtrack is brooding, melancholic, sinister, and at times surprisingly chipper, setting the mood perfectly for every scene. It does so much to elevate the storytelling, and I hope more people appreciate it as being just as important as the striking pixel art and excellent writing.

I'm not even going to bother trying to be fancy about what I think and feel about The Witness. It does the job on its own pretty well. Its solid watercolor visuals look artistic. It has audio logs of quotes by renowned scientists, artists, and philosophers. Its puzzles work every level of your audio-visual pattern recognition capabilities. It's a very smart game made by very smart people.

I love it for two reasons.

It's one of the rare games that is flawless in synthesizing every element to deliver a focused and potent message. From its aesthetics to its gameplay, it constantly reinforces the power of perception and how it defines our ideas of truth and reality.

It also knows awe as a genuine emotion that can only truly come not just by discovering but by coming to an understanding of something on your own, and that this feeling in and of itself is so powerful that experiencing it is its own reward.

oh and yes secret third reason the witness also knows how fucking hard it is to be a frail human being filled with insecurities and irrational thoughts and feelings in the face of a cold, uncaring world, and that this strange, unpredictable humanity leads to monumental works and also madness

but also jonathan blow sucks fuck that guy