Month: March 2024

The Best of 2023 post was fun and kind of interesting, and I never did one for 2022, the first year that I started making an effort to play new games to completion rather than gravitating back towards old favorites and replaying them into the dirt. So what were the games I recommend from 2022?

The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy are getting grouped together because they are both PS1 mascot platformer classics getting a rerelease. These two have always been loosely associated with one another, so I’m associating them here, too. These games have updated graphics and a couple of bonus features tossed in, like playable Coco in Crash 3 and the hidden level in Crash 1 being accessible as an optional level rather than requiring Game Genie codes to drop yourself into, but for the most part they are as they were in the 90s. They’re some of the best video games of the 90s and I recommend them to anyone who wishes Sonic had more than like three good video games, because they have a lot of that 90s cartoon energy while being actually fun to play.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of several indie games that I really liked but never finished and had lying around in my backlog when the project began. The unique rhythm-based dungeon crawling combined with a killer soundtrack makes this game a delight to play.

Going Under is a game about working for a tech start-up in Silicon Valley during the early-to-mid decline era, back when everyone was still living off of venture capital but there hadn’t been a new invention on the scale of the smart phone in a decade. You work at a startup that’s gone corporate, nobody here really believes in the idea except the founder-CEO, and that guy’s completely out of touch with reality. Everyone else is just hoping for a paycheck and an impressive looking resume credit. You’ve gotta hold things together long enough to pick up venture capital or else you’re going under – which is also a literal thing that you do by going into a dungeon to beat up the monster-themed employees of previous startups who occupied the same building, failed, and went under. It’s funny, it’s a fun dungeon crawler, and the game’s art style is hideous Corporate Memphis but that’s the joke and it works.

I wasn’t actually doing the new plan when I finished Graveyard Keeper, I just loved its goth Stardew Valley vibe and played through it and all its DLCs. In Graveyard Keeper, you have been teleported to a fantasy world where you have inherited a graveyard. People pay you to dispose of corpses properly, which you do by embalming the corpse, digging a hole, burying the coffin, and sticking a grave marker on it. Fancier grave markers and better embalming gives you various resources, and you can also do some farming on the side to take the heat off of food costs, maintain a church and write sermons to get people to give you more tithing, and go dungeoncrawling to help a cultist with a dark ritual. Ultimately there are six different people with six different projects in need of completion, from the cultist’s dungeoncrawling to the bishop’s church restoration/sermonizing to the merchant who wants a big pile of money, and when you finish them all, you open a portal back home.

The isekai elements are basically just an excuse for why you need to advance these six plotlines to completion and why you have no idea how anything works when you arrive, as nobody ever comments or cares about your mysterious origins. It’s Stardew Valley in a demon-haunted world, full of mysterious occult forces that you don’t really understand and can’t combat, just have to work around, and the gothic vibe means that what would otherwise be transparent “because gameplay, fuck you” systems instead come across as the acts of an unconscious, inchoate divinity that is neither just nor at all within your capability to challenge, so you’ll just have to deal.

Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 2 fought over the direction of the series. Far Cry 3 is a murder vacation focused on how much fun all the carnage is. It takes that seriously, drawing attention to how twisted by the violent delights the protagonist becomes, but its emphasis is still on the fact that, as fucked up as it is, the protagonist is having fun. Far Cry 2, on the other hand, emphasizes that you have come to a terrible place and can only make things worse by remaining here. Future Far Cry games want to have Far Cry 2’s plot, but they deliver it with Far Cry 3’s gameplay focus on open world fun. Far Cry 2’s open world isn’t set up to help you. Fast travel points are widely spaced and inconvenient to use. Outposts respawn rapidly, and are never under the control of a friendly faction. Nobody here likes you, and the only one who survives longer than half a dozen missions is the guy you were sent here to kill. And your mercenary buddies from the first act, who turn out to be not dead in the second act – but they want revenge on you for reasons that may or may not make any sense, depending on whether you chose to abandon them.

Far Cry 2 shows the scars of a branching narrative that got pruned down to one linear path, which means choices you make to leave that path don’t actually get you off of it, just make the game’s one path make less sense. It’s also kind of absurd with how densely packed it is with people trying to kill you – there’s not really any civilians and it’s impossible to make even temporary alliances with anyone except a small handful of fellow mercenaries, who turn on you in the end. Sure, the climax hinges on everyone in the country trying to kill you, but 99% of the country is trying to kill you so early on that it barely feels like anything has changed. Even so, Far Cry 2 tries and mostly succeeds at delivering an experience of coming to a terrible situation where you can’t help. Future Far Cry games, especially 4 and 5, wrote their plots as though they had made games like this, but then they let you liberate the outposts, so really what’s happening is not that you can’t help, rather, you totally can help and even single-handedly turn the tide of a war, but the hand of the author will reach down to erase all your accomplishments in the ending cut scene.

2022 is the year I finally finished Hollow Knight 112% including all DLC. I did cheat the last couple of Godhome bosses because I wasn’t having fun with it anymore. I love Hollow Knight for its exploration of a ruined world and its combat that makes me feel like a tiny, nimble warrior using skill and precision to keep up with enemies in a much heavier weight class than me, and the Godhome boss rushes have the latter but not the former. It’s still my favorite video game of all time, and I am still excited for Silksong, even if it is nervous-making that it’s six years and counting in development.

Journey is an absolutely delightful two-hour playable animated movie. I don’t mean that it’s an animated movie with some vestigial gameplay bolted on because nobody Kickstarts animations. I mean that it feels like an animated movie but it has actual, legit gameplay that is foundational to achieving that feeling. My experience with it was pretty singular and probably not repeatable – I played through the early single-player portions picking through the ruins of a civilization that my character had some ancestral connection to, and that felt very appropriate. I had heard about Journey when it came out, but my computer was such a cheap wreck held together with duct tape and chickenwire that I never even tried to run Journey on it, because even an indie game might’ve been too much. Then I lost track of it for a decade and came back to it while assembling my backlog on How Long To Beat, and here was a very short game that I liked the idea of but didn’t get to experience because I’d been forced out of it by near-poverty. So here I was, arriving at the ruins of a culture I was technically a part of long after everyone had left and the pillars had crumbled.

I was so surprised to see another player that for the first few seconds I thought it was some recording. I was so sure I was the last one. But people still play Journey. One of them took the journey with me.

Knights of the Old Republic has a better legacy than the game itself, but that’s praising with faint damnation. While it’s kind of annoying that you can’t actually pursue the Grey Jedi path of Darth Revan that KotOR II and TOR canonized, the game is full of genuine roleplaying choices, it captures the Star Wars vibe very well, and its gameplay mechanics are sufficient to get out of the way and let the game be fun. The graphics have aged miserably, it’s on the wrong side of the Half-Life gap despite being a contemporary of Half-Life 2, but that’s a minor drawback on what’s otherwise still a very good game even today.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete* Saga is where I first stumbled upon the completionist backlog idea. While playing out a May the Fourth Star Wars sale haul, I decided I’d get 100% on Lego Star Wars, since I’d never done that before. It was a lot of fun and very satisfying, but I found that doing that to all of the Star Wars games I’d picked up didn’t seem nearly as appealing, and decided that I should probably assemble a list of games I wanted to finish, rather than trying to find some specific genre, setting, or other theme that would tend to put a lot of garbage in my path. Lego Star Wars is a game of pretty much pure exploration, it’s full of charming and funny secrets to discover across well-crafted levels. Well-crafted should not be taken to mean “challenging,” though. You’d have to be 8 years old to find this game difficult (and even then, it’s perfectly manageable), which I imagine was the point. The pacing of the levels is solid and they’re full of things that are fun to find, though, so I didn’t mind crawling over every inch of it. Honestly, while I haven’t given the Lego series a full examination, my biggest concern for it is that it’s become too focused on being actual Star Wars/super hero/whatever games. If I want a real Star Wars game played straight, I’ll play Knights of the Old Republic. Stick to being a delight to explore! You’re better at that than anyone else!

Necromunda: Hired Gun puts the jank in Eurojank for sure, but it’s such a good representation of a Warhammer 40k hive city that I don’t care. Everywhere you go everything is impractically massive and hive gangs fight for dominance with grimdark zealotry in the enormous gaps left behind by the enormous machinations of the Imperium of Man. The Imperium is not a flag you rally around, it’s so much bigger than you that the grinding gears of its war machine don’t even notice you as you fight your local wars in its underbelly.

I’m coming to Okami so late that I don’t know what else to add to it, but it’s an amazing game that I finally played to completion in 2022, and it’s one of the early triumphs of my new backlog-focused system drawing my attention to finishing games instead of picking at them and then losing interest when something new and shiny comes along.

Ori and the Blind Forest was the vanguard of the indie Metroidvania revival. Hollow Knight stomped all over it a few years later with a much more open world design, but although Ori’s main path is quite linear, it does a good job of rewarding you for revisiting locations to discover new secrets with new powers. Its cutesy design does seem a little stock-indie, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is Ori copying others versus others copying Ori.

Project Wingman is the best Ace Combat game, in the same way that Stardew Valley is the best Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game. A fan loved the series so much that when they made their own, it exceeded the source material. Story, gameplay, and soundtrack are all basically flawless. I love this game.

Transistor is a marvelously creative cyber-art deco action RPG game by Supergiant, the guys who made Bastion and Hades. Transistor is the middle child (along with their one basketball thing I never played), between their breakout Bastion and their masterpiece Hades, and while it definitely compares unfavorably to those two, it’s still a marvelous game. The narration is different from but just as good as Bastion’s, the smooth noir voice of your giant cyber-sword commenting on unfolding events rather than the deep Bastion narrator recollecting them. A beautiful civilization is torn apart around you as you struggle, at first, to escape the assassination attempt of a sinister conspiracy, and then to prevent the apocalypse they unleashed and then lost control of. It’s bittersweet and beautiful.

Yoku’s Island Express is a Metroidvania pinball game about a beetle tied to a pinball who navigates around a tropical island by getting the pinball smacked so hard it flies three miles above the canopy, and uses this method of transport to deliver the mail. This game is the foundation of my theory that all video games would be better if they were Metroidvanias in addition to being whatever genre they already are.

There were more games in my Best of 2022* list than Best of 2023*, and while this isn’t as straightforwardly measured, I feel like there was a lot more unreserved gushing in this one. I think this was in large part because I was picking up lots of games I’d been meaning to finish for years but hadn’t gotten around to, a supply that was largely exhausted going into 2023. 2023’s games weren’t in the first wave for some reason or another, and that reason was usually either that I wasn’t as confident I would enjoy them and was sometimes correct or else that they were longer, which means I couldn’t fit as many of them into a single year.

I haven’t had a really good Humble Choice since July of last year. The kind that makes me go “holy shit, I would’ve paid $12 for any one of these games and there’s two of them plus extras.” July 2023 brought me the Outer Worlds and Yakuza 4 Remastered, plus Merchant of the Skies and Ozymandias. And not for nothing it also had Shotgun King, although I already owned that one, and Roadwarden, which I can find no fault in except that I just couldn’t have any fun with it for no reason I can articulate. On the other hand, December brought me Midnight Fight Express, the Gunk, and Elex II. I liked Midnight Fight Express and the Gunk was okay, but I wouldn’t pay $12 for Midnight Fight Express by itself and I wouldn’t pay more than, like, a dollar for the Gunk, so whether or not that one proves worthwhile in retrospect is going to depend a lot on how much I turn out to like the Elex series. January? I liked Red Lantern and Two Point Campus, but probably only to the tune of about $5 each. November? Legend of Tianding was worth at least $10, maybe $12, all by itself, and while I haven’t tried Hardspace: Shipbreakers and Souldiers, Tianding is a pretty good start. October? Total bust, though admittedly only because I already had Rebel Inc. September? Basically a total bust – Autonauts vs Piratebots was okay, I guess. August? Tin Can was worth $5, but that’s it.

Man, what a rough track record, I was thinking to myself as March dawned. I’ve had a couple of good games out of this, but I’ve had a lot of total dud or near-dud months lately.

Apparently whoever was running Humble Choice was listening, because March was a really good month.

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin – Ultimate Edition already had colon cancer even before they tried to wriggle out of it by em-dashing the ultimate edition. I don’t like the Age of Sigmar setting. I hear it’s gotten much better than its initial release, but ultimately it’s still an epic confrontation between good and evil, and I have lots of other, better options than Warhammer for that. If you’re doing epic fantasy, you immediately stand in the shadow of Lord of the Rings – good fucking luck getting out from under that.

But then we get to the good stuff with Nioh 2. Nioh as a series kind of lost its reason to exist when Sekiro came out, with FromSoftware themselves making a medieval Japanese Soulslike game, but FromSoftware doesn’t make games fast enough to be my entire gaming diet, so Nioh still gets to slip in on the grounds that eventually I am going to get around to beating Sekiro and I will probably still want to be a ninja-samurai-onmyoji Soulslike protagonist when that happens.

Back to a dud with Saints Row, which is not a PC release of the original Saints Row, a GTA knock-off with decent comedy dialogue but mostly only academically interesting for the series it was setting up. It’s the reboot version, which is just a sad shadow of its former self from a company that can’t live up to their old glory nor can they, apparently, bring themselves to move on to new projects.

Citizen Sleeper is a TTRPG-inspired RPG about dystopian space capitalism. If it were a full 20+ hours, I would be nervous about sinking that much time into a game whose ultimate criticism of capitalism runs high odds of being incoherent and stupid, repeating bits of arguments that other, smarter media have made without understanding them. How Long To Beat clocks it in at less than 10 hours, though, so I’ll give it a shot.

Black Skylands is an open-world sandbox topdown shooter in a steampunk setting. This sounds like a ton of fun but also like it might be way too ambitious for a small studio to pull off. How Long To Beat says it’s about 17 hours long, which suggests they’ve kept the scope under control, and is also short enough that I’ll take a chance on it despite some mild misgivings.

Soulstice is an action game with a dark tone and a vaguely anime-esque setting, although not a particularly anime art style: Two sisters are bonded into a chimera, one sacrificing her body to become a ghost to give the other tremendous physical strength. They use this power to fight an army of occult-themed monsters called wraiths. It seems like it’s leaning on atmosphere and exploration, the art direction looks decent, but I am nervous that this is one of those projects that has one or two cool ideas and nowhere to go from there. How Long To Beat says it’s also about 17 hours long, which is pushing it, but I’ll add it to the backlog with a note to ditch it as soon as it starts to wear out its welcome. That’s the condition I put on Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel, and I fucking loved that game.

I get a very similar vibe from Afterimage. This is a fantasy game with a more overtly anime (though not extremely so) art style and while Soulstice’s emphasis on exploration implies it might be a Metroidvania, Afterimage is more direct about it. They don’t use the word, but they do list exploring a non-linear world and deep RPG mechanics in a sidescroller action combat system as some of their key features, so it seems pretty clear this is the progeny of Symphony of the Night. At over 25 hours long on How Long To Beat, this is past the usual “take a risk” threshold for me, but I’ve been able to enjoy Metroidvanias whose execution was pretty amateur in the past, so I’m picking up Afterimage on the assumption that this will be like that.

Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter is a game about protecting Allied convoys from German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic during WW2. It leans heavily on realism and simulation, which means how much I’ll enjoy it depends heavily on how long it is. At 5 hours, absolutely. At 10, pushing it, but worth the risk. At 20, no way I’m reaching the end. But does it even have an end, or just escalating difficulty? Hard to tell, and How Long To Beat has no data on this. I’ve done a deeper scan of internet reviews to try and make up for it, but they’re all pretty old, so it’s hard to say how many of the flaws have been patched out in the meantime. The flaws they mention are pretty damning, though: Not enough content, emphasis on realism means there’s not much drama, just a lot of screen babysitting. I’m picking it up anyway, but with the expectation that it will either be marked “complete” in 5 hours or less because there’s no real stopping point so I can mark it complete any time I want, or else that I’ll have to make a new category for it, “technically not a regret but only because I had academic curiosity about the game mechanics that was satisfied even though I have no interest in finishing the game.”

EDIT: And after 50 minutes with Destroyer I can confirm that yes, it is an interesting simulation, but it is not actually particularly fun to play. This is certainly in part because allied ships glow bright red, like extremely bright red, to the point where they blot out everything else if you’re anywhere remotely near them. You spend a lot of the game looking at instruments so you can get pretty far without noticing, but sooner or later you will need to do something on the bridge while close enough to allies that their light blots out important displays. There might be an option or something somewhere to fix this, but a quick scan revealed nothing obvious and I’m not having enough fun to bother sinking even five minutes of troubleshooting into this.

The six pickups this month brings me up to 154 153. None of them are particularly short, either, except sort of Destroyer, which I’m going to play for a short time regardless of how long the campaign technically is. Even so, if I focus entirely on unloading games acquired in March before the April Humble Choice, it’s unlikely I’d get through them all. This is the first time in, like, a year that my backlog has unambiguously grown. On the one hand, if my backlog grows more often than not, that means there are games I want to play that I’ll never get around to. But I’m always worried that I’ll start getting too focused on the number of games in the backlog, and end up refusing to admit new games into the backlog in order to stay ahead. It’s good to see that, yes, while it does make me slightly sad to see the backlog number launched so firmly back above 150 when I’d just gotten down below, I am ultimately still letting in games that seem like they’ll be good. Of course, the real test is to look at how many of these games turn out to actually be good, but that’ll take a while.

Coming out in March because I didn’t think of it in January, and with an asterisk because this is actually the best games I happened to finish in 2023. I play way behind the current trends, getting most of my games from Humble Choice and Humble Bundles, so this isn’t really “who was the best in a specific year” as it is a treasure chest of recommendations for people who, like me, like to wait until the dust has settled and pick up only the games that are well-regarded in the aftermath. That means this list is limited to games with a completion date in 2023, as logged on my How Long To Beat profile. I don’t like trying to figure out exact rankings, so these are in alphabetical order.

Borderlands 3 is the best in its series by a hair, and I’m pretty confident the only reason most people disagree with me is because Borderlands 3 released in a world where nobody wanted Borderlands games anymore. When Borderlands 2 came out, people were desperate for shooters that didn’t take themselves so seriously, so the jokes being hit or miss was fine. By the time Borderlands 3 came out, everyone was sick of quips and action-comedy, so it was really grating when half of Borderlands’ quips weren’t even good. But Borderlands 2’s ultimate powers were things like levitating a bad guy with psychic powers or turning invisible or summoning a robot buddy. Cool, but not as cool as piloting a twelve-foot tall mech suit bristling gatling guns and grenade launchers.

Depending on how you looter-shoot, you may also find Borderlands 3’s completely broken item rarity system to be annoying. Good weapons drop with about the same frequency as in Borderlands 2, but you can’t trust the item rarity at all. Your mainstay assault rifle for the next 5-10 levels may well be a white common rarity while you walk right past gold, allegedly legendary weapons of the same level. Borderlands 2 introduced a lot more environmental variety to the series, but I still like Borderlands 3’s maps better, especially for the inclusion of a wartorn city. I get why Borderlands 2 avoided this, it succeeded because it was a breath of fresh air and every other shooter had a wartorn city in 2014, but I ignore the trash to play the highlights, so I was never playing every shooter.

The Case of the Golden Idol is an amazing mystery solving game that makes solving mysteries actually feel like solving mysteries. Examining a scene for clues and putting things together rather than the adventure game thing where you rub every object against every other object until the plot progresses. I absolutely adore this game, it’d probably be my game of the year if I were doing that.

Far Cry 3 is actually good. Much like Assassin’s Creed IV, just the name of this series causes people to reflexively spit these days, and since the problem is stagnation, that means that going back to older games probably won’t remind you why you loved the series ten years ago. Far Cry 6’s problem (so I’ve heard, haven’t played it yet) isn’t that it’s a worse version of Far Cry 3, but that it’s basically the same as Far Cry 3. But I didn’t have a decent PC or current gen console when Far Cry 3 came out, and when I went back and played it, I still liked it alright, even though I couldn’t get the PC version working right and had to resort to console controls. In fact, my favorite of the series is actually Far Cry 4, even though that’s Far Cry 3 but again, because that one works fine on modern computers so I could play with a keyboard and mouse. I’m still giving this spot to Far Cry 3 because, in terms of recommendations, this is the one that made people like the series. I’d recommend Far Cry 2 separately, because it is a very different experience, but I completed that one in 2022.

Fobia, St. Dinfna Hotel is an odd duck, in that it’s probably at its strongest in the middle. It definitely feels like it was built in order and the early game got most of the later-stage love. Early on it pours the atmosphere on heavy, leaving you unarmed in a ruined, haunted hotel full of monsters. Once the stage is set and before the ghost train gets old, it hands you a pistol and tells you to get to work, exploring the hotel to uncover its horrible secrets. This section of exploration in the middle does a fantastic job combining survival horror resource pressure with masterfully executed atmosphere. The problem is that eventually you get downstairs into the secret biolab in the basement. It doesn’t look as interesting, the plot takes a turn for the pretentious, and the gameplay can’t find anything new to do. The ending isn’t terrible, but it is pretty average, which sticks out compared to the incredible quality of the middle. Ultimately, I think the game would benefit from a major overhaul that focuses on a relatively simple story. Silent Hill’s lore is hard to piece together, but it is not a convoluted story of time travel and predestination. The town is just haunted.

Hades doesn’t really need any introduction. Much like Supergiant’s Bastion back in 2011, the only thing to say is that yes, it really is that good.

Just Cause 3 is the only good Just Cause game. That’s being a little bit harsh on the others, but Just Cause 1 was definitely in the “good for its time” category and Just Cause 2 is just frustrating with how they did all the work to make all the assets to make a good game and then failed to make the UI functional. Just Cause games are a carnival of gunfire and explosives, I don’t want to go on a frustrating scavenger hunt for the last destructible object in an enemy base so I can clear it, just put a big glowing icon on my map and give me the satisfaction of the base being 100% destroyed. This isn’t Morrowind, I’m not going to be more immersed if you give me diegetic directions to follow.

Just Cause 3 understands this. If you pass within 20 yards of something you can blow up or hack or whatever, the game will stick a marker on your map to let you know. Taking over enemy bases and liberating enemy controlled villages is an expected part of gameplay, not something for rabid completionists picking over every inch of the enormous map. Just Cause 3 doesn’t just scoot over the edge into being good enough, it finally takes the disparate elements present in Just Cause 2 but unconnected to each other and plugs them together to create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Legend of Tianding is a sidescrolling beat ’em up game about Taiwanese Robin Hood resisting the Imperial Japanese occupation in 1909. It’s got a fantastic art style, it’s fun to play, and its plot and characters are lots of fun. I don’t know how many of them are based on existing legends (Liao Tianding himself was a real guy, but the game is definitely following his life very loosely), but either way they make a good story with cool boss fights. It’s easily the best win from the Humble Choice for the whole year (although worth noting that Case of the Golden Idol and Hades were both recommended by friends, so they’re not in the running for this very specific category – but the vast majority of new games I got in 2023 were through the Humble Choice, so not many games are excluded).

Honorable mention to Majesty, I beat this game a bazillion times but there’s some stone age DLC from 2001 I never got around to and finally completed, and I decided to call that the date of completion. It’s a fantasy RPG setting except you play as the king in a throne room giving quests, using bounty flags to direct heroes and building up a town full of blacksmiths and marketplaces where they can buy upgrades and such. A fantastic strategy game with unique mechanics, very good at pulling off a wry tone that nevertheless takes itself seriously.

Midnight Fight Express is a topdown brawler game in which every criminal in the city is participating in an attempted coup and you have to punch all of them in the face. It has a gonzo tone of rat monsters and stripper assassins, it’s fun to play, and its plot and character arcs are simple but endearing. I was glad the two main characters got to have a happy moment together at the end, and sad by the unresolved ambiguity as to whether or not one of them was bleeding to death during it.

Spiritfarer is a sail-y around-y game, although it largely ditches the usual trading mechanics to instead have you gathering resources to build a big ol’ boat that allows you to build houses for all the departed spirits you are ushering in to the next life. Also it turns out that you’re dying in a hospital bed the whole time. I’m spoiling the twist because it’s dumb. The game presents itself as being about dealing with loss and it’s good at that, but it ends by pretending it’s about coming to terms with your own death, and it’s bad at that, because the cozy nature of the game means there’s no countdown and certainly no Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. You choose when you die. In terms of dealing with the loss of others, the game is great at portraying how senility kills every recognizable part of someone until the body left behind is barely recognizable even if it’s technically alive, at making you miss your best friend because she’s the one who showed you how to do the early game mechanics that stay relevant the whole way through and now you’re doing them alone, at showing someone’s struggle with cancer and the slowly dawning realization that she’s not going to win, at the sudden shock when the jovial uncle whose jovial excitement was so infectious just being gone, totally without warning or any chance to say goodbye.

You can tell I was frustrated by my business flops in autumn of 2023 and relying a lot more on video games that I knew would be fun to play to make up the difference, because StarCraft is also something I finally beat that year. I’d beaten the core game in high school, but never got far into Brood War against the much cleverer AI. I’m cleverer too, but I hate defiler micro, so I still wound up cheating my way through two of the last Kerrigan missions. Still calling it complete, though, the point of my completion list is not that I’m great for beating these video games, it’s that these games are good enough to hold my attention long enough to beat them, and if they only get there with cheat codes, that still counts.

This War of Mine is one that you’ve probably heard of and which I actually completed much earlier, but didn’t realize it. This is because This War of Mine’s bad endings feel just as canonical as the good ones. You’re civilians trapped in a warzone, and you might survive or you might not, and both of those feel entirely plausible. The game is much more forgiving than you might think given its premise, doing things like sending a lone survivor a randomly selected ally so that you’re never counting down the days to inevitable death, and seeding the map with locations like the home of an elderly couple who are completely helpless to prevent you from robbing them blind of their significant stores of food. You ideally don’t want to do that last one, but the game trusts you to figure that out for yourself. “Steal the food” isn’t an option in red text, it’s just a thing you can do while the helpless old man begs you to leave him and his wife in peace.

And if you get really good at the game, these things become completely unnecessary. It is totally possible, with enough game knowledge and mastery of the controls, to rapidly arm yourself and go through the city’s criminal element like a scythe, then pick over the remains for a fortune in food and materials. But while that’s possible, realistically speaking what you are actually going to do is give the crims a wide berth unless you are absolutely desperate and focus on surviving, or else you won’t do that and you will not survive. And this is what makes This War of Mine work. Being a survivalist badass isn’t a hardcoded impossibility, but it is completely impractical without significant game knowledge. Just like in the real world, yes, there is someone out there with the skillset to not just survive but thrive in a warzone, but you, specifically, are probably fucked.

I honestly don’t know if Zeus: Master of Olympus is actually good or not. It’s definitely not terrible, but it was a game I played when I was eight and which, on replays, gives me the satisfaction of being much, much smarter than an eight-year old. Babby Chamomile struggled through even early adventures. Adult Chamomile found that even the Trojan War wasn’t particularly difficult (on Mortal difficulty, which is the default but also only 2/5 difficulty, but I’m not particularly interested in becoming the all-time greatest player of a 25-year old city builder game that nobody cares about anymore).

Deep Rock Galactic is a game where you are a space dwarf who must descend below the surface of Hoxxes IV to mine morkite while fending off swarms of space bugs. It’s a 4-player multiplayer shooter with the defining gameplay mechanic being 3D traversal. You can mine out almost any wall like it’s Minecraft except slower and the grid is way less obvious and blocky, and each of the four classes of dwarf miner have various tricks to help make getting around the caves easier: The driller can mine through walls very quickly, the engineer can place new platforms, the scout has a grappling hook that basically lets him fly, and the gunner technically has a zipline but for the most part that is the all-in-on-combat class. Any class can dig through walls at the default glacial pace and sometimes it’s even beneficial to cut a tunnel directly between two important locations if the natural caves connecting them are circuitous and long but the distance between the two chambers is fairly short.

So you and up to three others get dropped into a natural cave system, told to find and mine a certain quota of morkite (or given some other objective related to morkite mining, like finding and salvaging destroyed mining equipment or hooking up a refinery to some extractors to process liquid morkite, or whatever), and if you succeed you get money and other resources to buy upgrades with. To the extent that the game has a main plot, it’s that it has “assignments,” a series of connected missions, but the individual missions aren’t specific missions with some kind of voice acted cut scenes connecting them, but rather certain types of missions. The first mission of the first assignment, for example, is to complete a standard morkite-harvesting mission. The second one is to complete an alien egg hunt mission. The third is to complete an on-site refinery mission. No special voice acting or plot beats, just a checklist of mission types that the game unlocks for you one by one to introduce you to the game.

There’s a progression from here to several assignments that unlock new weapons for your chosen class (you can switch classes at any time, but your level resets, so if your goal is to reach the end of the game, such that it is, you’re better off picking one and sticking to it), and once you max out your level on a class (which does not require unlocking all the new gear, but you may as well), you do a special promotion assignment, and once you’ve done that you can do an assignment for “breaching the core” which rewards you with a special matrix core that can be used to unlock endgame cosmetics. You can then grind that indefinitely to unlock more cosmetics. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic structure. It’s the framework of an MMORPG (albeit with the importance of leveling de-emphasized, as leveling up does not make you more powerful, only unlocks weapon options that make you more flexible but no stronger) with basically no story. It’s got great atmosphere and vibes, there’s tons of personality in the miners and mission control, but for some reason they never bring it together into an actual plot.

But Deep Rock Galactic has an ace up its sleeve: A single round of the game is, I would estimate, 10-15 minutes long. This is pretty perfect for breaking up chunks of work, and since each mission is individually fun, I’ll probably end up playing a lot of it.