Category: Video Games

Here’s another research project I did on a lark and decided may as well be a blog post: How can you rewrite the characters from Twisted Metal to be good? Some of them require no edits, others require extensive overhauls, and some of them just need to be cut. Mostly the ones from Twisted Metal 4.

Since Twisted Metal is slightly obscure, I’ll explain upfront that it’s a game where you drive around cars armed with missiles and machine guns, with the story being that it’s a death race/derby put on by a supernatural entity who grants the winner a single wish. The game has a schlock horror movie aesthetic, with a lot of its drivers having a slasher villain kind of vibe to them, but they’re all driving cars with machine guns mounted on them so it’s not like the game’s going for genuine dread or anything.

Not listed here are any characters from Twisted Metal 4, because that was the point when 989 Studios clearly didn’t want to be making Twisted Metal games anymore. Almost every driver and vehicle is new and almost all of them suck. Special mention to Goggle Eyes and Trash Man, who might’ve worked with more polish, but as they are everything down to their name screams out that Twisted Metal 4 is full of unedited first draft filler material pushed out because nobody cared anymore.

Auger is a drill car construction vehicle of some sort, driven by someone who wants revenge on Twisted Metal contestants for destroying the neighborhoods and roads he builds. I don’t know what this guy’s issue with stable employment is. He’s a cheap Mr. Slam knock-off and the game doesn’t need two of him (and indeed, he only appears in games without Mr. Slam). I like Mr. Slam better. Cut this guy completely.

Axel is a man who is attached to a pair of giant tires. His wish is to be released from the giant tires. Some versions of the game have a doctor giving him prosthetics that allow him to leave the tires, but demands he enter the Twisted Metal competition and give his wish to the doctor in exchange. Axel’s design is weird and unique but also kind of dumb (surely he’s going to die very quickly with all the bullets flying around, and how does he steer?), but it’s not like Twisted Metal is a super grounded game, so whatever. Rather than being trapped in giant tires, though (what?), he was in a horrible car crash that crippled him for life. A mad doctor offered to give him cyborg prostheses in exchange for piloting a giant tire contraption in Twisted Metal and giving the doctor a wish, and Axel accepted. He can unplug himself from the tires and walk around and grasp things with his cyborg prostheses whenever he wants, so Axel got what he wanted, he just has to get the doctor his wish and then he has his life back.

Brimstone is a pickup truck with stained glass windows adorned with crucifixes, driven by Preacher, a preacher who became a serial killer after being possessed by a demon, and who wants to win the Twisted Metal competition to wish the demon away. Straightforward slasher villain kind of character, works fine as is.

Club Kid is a microcar whose driver is also named Club Kid. Twisted Metal III was really phoning it in. The gimmick with this guy is that he likes to party, wants to wish for an endless party, and his car is like a tiny rave. This aesthetic is otherwise unrepresented in the Twisted Metal roster and makes for a decent filler character, but obviously this should be a party bus, not a microcar. It’s not even a mechanics thing, Club Kid isn’t even close to being the fastest, lightest car in Twisted Metal III.

Crazy-8 is a bug driven by No-Face, a boxer who lost a fight so badly his face got mashed up pretty bad. A facial reconstruction surgeon was a fan of his and offered to rebuild his face for free, but he’d lost $20,000 betting on No-Face in that fight, so instead of rebuilding his face, the doctor cut out his eyes and tongue and then sewed his eyelids and lips shut, which is why No-Face is now called No-Face. No damn clue how this guy drives a car with no eyes, but his wish is to restore his face. He killed six people while seeking revenge on the doctor, which punts him firmly into slasher villain territory, but he could also work as a good-aligned character if you removed that part and just had him be the victim of maiming by a petty, vindictive surgeon.

Crimson Fury is a cool spy car being driven by an FBI agent who plans to use his wish to end the Twisted Metal competition once and for all and arrest all the participants. Cool car, perfectly good motivation for a good-aligned character, no notes.

Darkside is a big rig truck driven originally by Mr. Ash and later by Dollface. Mr. Ash is some kind of devil figure, but he’s not particularly prominent in the Twisted Metal competition. This kind of horror movie occultism doesn’t necessarily require Satan to be the biggest of bads, but he definitely isn’t subordinate to guys like Calypso, who runs the Twisted Metal competition, so what the Hell (no pun intended) is a supernatural force this powerful doing slumming it here?

Darkside’s other driver is Dollface, who has two unrelated backstories. In one, she has a guilt complex relating to her mother’s death while working for a crazy mask maker, who at one point seals her inside a doll mask in a bout of pique, and joins the Twisted Metal competition to get out of the mask. By the end of the competition, though, Calypso, who runs the competition, gives her the key to her mask as part of a Saw trap that will kill the mask maker. Dollface takes the key to kill the mask maker and then throws it away to keep the mask. This is a cool arc, going from a timid abuse victim joining the competition in a desperate bid to escape to a vengeful survivor more concerned with revenge. It is kind of thematically detached from the doll aesthetic she’s named after, though.

Dollface’s other backstory is that she’s a supermodel whose face suffers mild scarring after a car accident and gets a spooky occult mask locked on for six days to try and make her face perfect, only to discover the shop has vanished and she’s stuck in the mask forever. She enters Twisted Metal hoping to be free of the mask but, like in her original backstory, if you win with her, she changes her mind, decides she likes the mask, and instead wishes to get dropped straight back into her modeling career. This backstory gives Dollface an excuse to wear cool high fashion outfits and having her occult doll mask be tied to her vanity rather than unrelated trauma is good, but also it makes Dollface a straightforward villain not that much different from Needles Kane. Also, she drives a giant bigrig truck, so it’s not like this backstory even resolves all the problems with her aesthetic incoherence.

I’d go with Dollface’s original backstory, but instead of being vaguely guilty about her mother’s death and then getting an unrelated job with an evil mask maker, Dollface gets a job with a mask maker after fleeing an abusive home and, out of financial desperation, gets drawn into helping the mask maker victimize several people by locking them in creepy, cursed masks. When Dollface finally works up the courage to quit or object or something, the mask maker does it to her, but she is able to steal the truck he used to make bulk mask deliveries (don’t worry about why) and join the Twisted Metal competition.

Firestarter is a hot rod with a flamethrower driven by Damien Cole, a pyromaniac. Perfectly acceptable as a filler character, even if being such an ancient car suggests it’s probably a joke character.

Flower Power is a love bug driven by Amber Rose, an environmentalist who wants to put a stop to the Twisted Metal competition to stop it from ruining the environment. This is a terrible motivation – this one annual murder derby has a negligible impact on the environment – and walks right past a much more obvious one, to wish the world into a sustainable state somehow. She makes for a decent good-aligned side character.

Grasshopper is a sort-of jeep/buggy thing that’s supposed to fill the same basic niche as the Pit Viper, although they are separate vehicles. Its driver is Krista Sparks, who has some kind of connection to Calypso that I aggressively do not care about because Calypso is best off being unattached to any of the characters. The interesting thing about Krista Sparks is that she died in a car crash and joined the Twisted Metal competition in an attempt to come back to life. There’s a couple of other ghost drivers in the games, but they’re fighting for cars with other drivers who also have interesting concepts behind them. Grasshopper’s only driver is Krista Sparks, so she can be our ghost.

Hammerhead is a monster truck with a different driver in every game. They’re pretty much always played for comedy. Like, Twisted Metal games don’t usually take themselves very seriously, but Hammerhead is usually an actual joke. Dave, Mike, and Stu, paired up as Dave & Mike and Mike & Stu, are Bill and Ted-style comedy protagonists who stumbled into the Twisted Metal competition and don’t seem to grasp the concept of death, Granny Dread is seeking revenge on Twisted Metal contestants because last year’s competition destroyed her quiet neighborhood, and her whole joke is that a little old lady is driving a monster truck in a murder derby. Catfish is less of a straight joke, a redneck hunter who joins Twisted Metal to hunt the deadliest game, which makes him more of a slasher villain like Needles Kane, Mr. Grimm, or Dollface. Granny Dread is probably the best joke Hammerhead’s ever had, and Catfish is a perfectly good replacement if you don’t want any outright comedy characters in the game.

Junkyard Dog is a tow truck driven by Billy Ray Stillwell, a farmer who was nearly killed by a crop duster pilot as part of a scheme between the pilot and Billy Ray’s wife to kill him for life insurance money and then get married. This is all a little convoluted. Billy Ray can just be an extremely divorced man who wants revenge on the man his ex-wife remarried.

Mr. Grimm is a skeleton on a motorcycle. He’s supposed to be the Grim Reaper, having devoured a soul instead of guiding them to their final destination, and having subsequently gotten addicted. I like the idea that the Grim Reaper has entered the competition, but the motivation is dumb. He should obviously be here to shut the competition down because he’s tired of people winning the Twisted Metal competition and wishing the dead back to life. Being here to shut down the competition lets him lean into how much he outranks a guy like Calypso in the hierarchy of horror occult monsters, he can be exasperated that he even has to show up for this.

Mr. Slam is a construction machine of some kind, driven by Simon Whittlebone, the ghost of an architect who threw himself off of his own incomplete building for unclear reasons. In his first appearance he is a living guy who wants to build the tower, but in his second appearance he has thrown himself off the tower and never really explain why. It’s pretty clear that they thought a construction engine would be a cool Twisted Metal car and they half-assed the motivation of the driver. I say we do the Killdozer: A guy is disgruntled with being screwed over by the bosses and turns construction equipment into a siege weapon, but then instead of demolishing the houses of the people who wronged him, he enters the Twisted Metal competition in hopes of getting either a giant pile of money or else getting some horrible revenge upon the bosses who screwed him over.

Outlaw is a cop car being driven by a non-rogue cop in good standing with the police department. I don’t know why it’s called Outlaw. There are two different drivers but they’re both cops trying to put an end to the Twisted Metal competition. The problem is that this is the exact same motivation as Crimson Fury. Since Outlaw is called Outlaw I am letting Crimson Fury be the “it turns out murder derbies are illegal” character and instead Outlaw is driven by a pair of dirty cops who want to wish to have their crimes covered up.

Pit Viper is a dune buggy driven by Angela Fortin, who is an assassin hired to kill Calypso, the guy who runs the competition. Her plan is to win and then wish Calypso dead. It’s not clear who hired her, and both she and Pit Viper are only in the first game, so there’s never really any elaboratin. I guess this is fine? But she seems like a fighting game character who wandered into Twisted Metal by mistake, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the schlock horror aesthetic that the rest of the game has. I’d lean more into the snake theme, make her some kind of reptile mutant from the sewers, and have her motivation be a compound out in the desert somewhere to serve as gathering place for a snake cult. I’m completely freestyling here and I feel like this is still easily one of the weakest characters, but it’s better than what we started with so I’m calling it a win and moving on.

Roadkill is a car assembled from scraps and piloted originally by Captain Spears, a veteran seeking to resurrect men he lost in a jungle ambush (in…the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, I guess? Captain Spears doesn’t look nearly old enough to be a Vietnam vet, not even in 1995, the year of release of the first Twisted Metal). Later games give it to Marcus Kane, who is some kind of alternate personality to Needles Kane or something, I don’t care about the details, it’s an effort to center Needles Kane beyond his being the one most gung-ho about the concept of Twisted Metal itself, which is completely unnecessary. Roadkill’s last driver is John Doe, an amnesiac who wants his memory back. The problem here is that if that’s John Doe’s wish, then he basically has no backstory until the ending cut scene. None of these are good, but Captain Spears might actually be the best. You’d want to update it to a desert ambush, but other than that, he works as a loosely good-aligned character.

Shadow is a hearse with two different drivers. The first, Mortimer, is a dead man brought back to life and who wants to return to the grave. Presumably just blowing himself up with one of the many explosive weapons in the arenas won’t work, he needs a magic wish to pull it off. The other, Raven, is a goth girl whose friend Kelly was killed in a prank gone wrong and seeks horrible revenge on the bullies responsible. Raven’s backstory hasn’t kept very well – the whole big titty goth gf meme suggests the days of goth girls getting picked on are pretty over. We’ve also got other drivers seeking revenge. And it’s weird that Raven prioritizes revenge over resurrecting Kelly, when the Twisted Metal wish definitely has that power. Kelly’s dying wish was for Raven to get revenge on the bullies, but, come on, she presumably wouldn’t have gone that way if she knew reanimation was on the table. If Raven were Shadow’s only driver I’d be happy to play with the idea that she oscillates between revenge and resurrection, but Mortimer being a revenant who wants to re-die is more original. It’s a terrible motivation for a major character, but as someone to fill out the roster, it’s unique in a way that Raven’s is not, and we have no shortage of major characters.

Spectre is a 60s sports car with a different driver in every Twisted Metal game. Scott Campbell is a ghost who wants to be brought back to life, Ken Masters and Lance Wilder both want some kind of fame, Bloody Mary is a nun-themed driver who wants love, and Chuckie Floop won the car in a radio giveaway contest and didn’t realize that by entering the contest he’d also agreed to join the Twisted Metal competition if he got the car. Bloody Mary is kind of like Dollface, a cool aesthetic combined with a cool but unrelated backstory shoved into a returning vehicle while bearing no relation to the original driver or the vehicle’s aesthetic. I’d like to rescue her like Dollface, but unlike Dollface’s competition in Mr. Ash, the other drivers of Spectre can make a much better argument for being retained over Bloody Mary. Chuckie Floop’s name and delivery are a bit too flippant to match the tone of Twisted Metal, but the concept is great: Someone enters a free giveaway contest because hey, why not, wins, and then gets thrust into Twisted Metal because he didn’t read the fine print. This is the kind of setup you’d expect a protagonist in a schlock horror movie to have, and is probably the main viewpoint character early on.

Sweet Tooth is an ice cream truck driven by the evil clown Needles Kane. His wish varies from game to game but consistently he is an evil clown serial killer who participates in Twisted Metal for the fun of it and usually wants some kind of starring role in the production or else has some kind of trivial wish that makes it obvious that he put no thought into what he would wish for until the moment he won. This is a perfectly fine character concept, my only note is to stop trying to create a greater plotline around Needles. He’s a straightforward villain with a cool aesthetic, and a prominent position in the game’s branding is justified because he’s the one in it for the competition itself, which means he can serve as the symbol of the carnival of death and is the guy that good-aligned characters face as the final obstacle to shutting the competition down once and for all.

Thumper is a low-rider driven by a variety of different characters. Most commonly by Bruce Cochrane, who is from inner city LA and wants to win to free his neighborhood from the gang wars that plague it. This is a motivation that made sense in the 90s, although you could switch it to being ambiguously “his home town” and it would work. Later Thumper’s driver is Vinnie and Bruce, who want the “phattest sound system,” and then later Angel, who thinks cars are cool and wants to have the coolest car.

Vinnie and Bruce are dumb, especially for how Bruce’s character gets maimed by the implication that this is the same Bruce who originally drove Thumper, but either original!Bruce or Angel work as drivers. Bruce is a good-aligned character, which can be hard to justify in the “murder a bunch of other drivers for a wish from what may or may not be the Devil” competition, but Angel takes advantage of the fact that anyone who is already good with cars or guns can have an uncomplicatedly selfish motivation to join Twisted Metal, because she has enough relevant skills to plausibly consider herself a favorite to win. I wouldn’t personally put money on a mechanic to win a murder derby, but I’m willing to believe Angel thinks she’s the favorite to win. If I had to settle on one, I think I’d go with Angel because she feels less dated, but ask me tomorrow and I might change my mind, because Bruce has the more interesting motivation.

Twister is a stock race car driven originally by Miranda Watts and later by her sister Amanda. Amanda’s motivation is to find out what became of her sister Miranda, but, like, is the answer to that not that she was killed in Twisted Metal? Having discovered the existence of Twisted Metal, it seems like you’re done, there was no need to enter. Anyway, Twister is one of those cars that implies a high degree of ability in relevant skills to the competition, so the motive for entering can just be a colossal amount of money.

Warthog is a humvee which has had a couple of different drivers. Its big problem is that they keep being assigned to pretty high ranking officers who are on assignment from the army to do something like acquire an ultimate weapon. If the army is entering contestants into Twisted Metal, how come they don’t enter, like, twenty of them, totally flood the roster and have them work together to eliminate the other contestants? Especially since defeat is not necessarily fatal, so it’s not like you’re automatically sacrificing all but one of your entrants. You just have to disable their car, and the army entrants could all agree to stick with methods of doing so that probably won’t kill the enemy driver once it’s just them leftover. At the very least they could send a Bradley or a tank instead of a humvee.

The whole conceit works much better if Warthog is being driven by a rogue NCO who’s taken the humvee he is specifically in charge of to the Twisted Metal competition in hopes of making a wish that will swing whatever war is currently most topical in the direction he wants it swung. It doesn’t have to be super specific about what weapon for which war, it’s fine if the wish is for “the ultimate weapon” still, but it being one guy going rogue matches the tone of the rest of the game and doesn’t raise questions about why one humvee is the best the entire US Army can do.

Yellow Jacket is a taxi cab driven by a relation of Needles Kane, originally his father, later his brother or son. Mechanically, Yellow Jacket is a balanced Mario-style car good for beginners. It’s good to have a role for something like this, and a taxi cab isn’t a terrible choice for it. The problem is that Yellow Jacket keeps getting tied to Needles Kane somehow. There’s three different versions of the character but I won’t bother going into detail on them because they all have that same one-line flaw. Replace the driver with a regular guy whose wish is to bring back his son. If you must have a connection to Needles Kane, it should be that Needles killed his son, not that Needles is his son. But also this can just be a regular working class man driven to desperate action by grief.

So if we’re making a Twisted Metal game, our key eight cast are:

-Crimson Fury
-Darkside
-Grasshopper
-Hammerhead
-Mr. Grimm
-Shadow
-Spectre
-Sweet Tooth

Why these eight specifically? It gives us series mascot Sweet Tooth along with Mr. Grimm as straightforward bad guys, sympathetic characters in Crimson Fury, Grasshopper, and Spectre, and some cool-looking other contestants of varyingly sympathetic motivation in Darkside, Hammerhead, and Shadow.

Eight is a minimum for this kind of game. Twelve is more standard, and the next four I’d recommend are Axel, Brimstone, Outlaw, and Yellow Jacket. That picks up Axel, who is probably the dumbest looking of all Twisted Metal’s iconic designs but it is an iconic design, while maintaining a pretty good blend of slasher villains to sympathetic characters.

If you want more than that, you start asking yourself mainly what vehicles look cool and distinct. Mr. Slam, Twister, and Warthog are immediately recognizable and fit the aesthetic pretty well. Flower Power is immediately recognizable and very aggressively does not fit the aesthetic, which is part of the point.

Thumper feels like a transplant from the 90s, Club Kid, Crazy-8, and Firestarter are reasonably interesting filler villains to help flesh out the roster of bad guys but don’t have super interesting vehicles, and Roadkill, Junkyard Dog, and Pit Viper are all just super boring looking. Pit Viper especially suffers from having been aesthetically almost completely replaced by Grasshopper. They don’t actively detract from the game so you may as well throw them in if you have infinite resources, but realistically speaking, there’s not much reason for any Twisted Metal game to have any of them – and yes, that includes Roadkill, even though it’s been in nearly every game. If you wanted to salvage Roadkill just for legacy’s sake, you’d have to give it a brand new driver made from scratch. It would hardly be the first time Roadkill got a new driver, but that would take effort, so I’m not bothering for a free blog post.

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.

Duskers is a game where you command a team of drones to salvage dead space ships. Drones can be equipped with different modules, like Gather which gathers up resources, Tow which can tow disabled drones, ship upgrades, or other large, valuable things, and Motion, which is a motion detector so you can see whether or not there’s some kind of space monster on the other side of that door.

The basic mechanic of a salvage job is fun and the aesthetic of remotely piloting drones using a combination of console commands and clunky inputs works really well. It takes the low graphics and mediocre gamefeel and makes it part of the immersion – the graphics suck because you’ve got a bad signal from a bad camera. The gamefeel is mediocre because you’re remotely piloting a drone built to be just good enough and not any better. It doesn’t feel like I’m fighting against poor game controls, but like I’m fighting against diegetic poor drone controls because my drone team is whatever I was able to salvage from whatever derelicts were within range, which means none of them were really built to be salvage drones. I’ve jury-rigged them into that role and they’re doing the best they can.

But Duskers is ultimately killed by two problems. First of all, there’s not really any story to speak of. There are five different explanations for how everyone died, ranging from super-pandemic to killer AI to a vague “cosmic event,” some kind of natural disaster that kills everyone at once. The problem with this choose-your-own-apocalypse approach is that we have no means of interacting with the apocalyptic event at all. There’s nothing to do except sift through wrecks filled with totally unrelated hazards looking for text logs explaining which apocalypse has randomly been selected to be responsible for the end of human civilization this time. Salvaging individual wrecks is fun, but I know I won’t be satisfied when I’m done because it never adds up to anything.

The second problem is that it’s a stealth Roguelike. Losing drones means they’re permanently lost, and if you end up with a team unable to gather resources, you just have to start over. The drone modules you start with are randomized and the drones you come across in wrecked ships is also randomized. I could keep playing until I get all five hypothetical apocalypses and there’s achievements for doing so, but starting over and over, hoping for a good set of drones, trying to make a bad set work, just doesn’t feel engaging when I know it’s not really going anywhere. Everyone’s already dead and the mechanism of their death isn’t woven into the game world at all, literally the only difference between the super-pandemic and the AI apocalypse is what logs get left behind. When I discover what happened, I don’t gain a greater understanding of the leaping alien monsters or the hostile security drones left behind. I’m not exploring. I don’t even really feel like I’m salvaging, since it’s not really possible to meaningfully upgrade past what I start with, or at least, not in the first few hours of the game, and if that was going to be the hook, it needed to be up and running by then. All I’m doing is surviving, trying to hold onto what I’ve already got. And that’s boring.

Impire is a dungeon keeper game set in Ardania, the setting of the Majesty series. How does Impire compared to Dungeons 3 and the old Dungeon Keeper games? Mostly poorly, which is too bad, since neither of those were all that great. Dungeon Keeper (and DK2) had promise and Dungeons 3 is mechanically solid but has poor writing and won’t shut up. Impire, by contrast, is slightly more boring mechanically while being just as bad in writing, although they don’t spend as much time on the cut scenes, at least.

In Impire, you play as Baal, a demon king summoned to help the warlock Oscar get petty revenge on everyone who wronged him. Oscar is petulant, entitled, and stupid, and on the one hand that’s a realistic depiction of typical human evil, but on the other hand it’s not super fun to be taking orders from this guy. Baal does at least threaten to skin Oscar alive any time he gets too uppity, but we still spend all our time pursuing this guy’s petty dreams of wealth, power, and lust. You do get a chance at the end to choose between Oscar and Velvet the Phantom King, an ancient ghost you release at the end of Act III (of IV) but who turns out to be good. I went Phantom King because sure, it’s pretty out-of-theme to save the world instead of conquering it, but I was beyond sick of Oscar.

It seems like this was originally supposed to be more of a thing, as a medusa queen and a noble king both make the same offer to Baal at different parts of the story, but he rejects both of them without the player choosing anything. Maybe you were originally supposed to be able to choose between four different factions, the default one for Oscar and then you’d have a chance to swap out for a new one periodically. The last act of the game has two completely different sets of cut scenes (maybe even completely different stages, I haven’t checked what Oscar’s route looks like, but the Phantom King’s route is clearly not recycling cut scenes from Oscar’s because Oscar is dead and the cut scenes feature the Phantom King heavily), so this would require more and more divergent cut scenes the more different versions of each mission there were.

Mechanically, every mission is the same, at least on normal difficulty. First you build up a dungeon, then you send your maxed out army to conquer everything. You’re almost never under any pressure to build quickly, so you can use the exact same army build every time. You have to change dungeon layout a little to deal with different underground terrain, but there’s always enough room for everything you want, so it changes very little.

It’s not unplayably bad, but I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t want to play the dungeon keeper genre thoroughly for academic reasons. The only game in the genre I haven’t played (that I know of – indies are hard to keep track of) is War for the Overworld and the recently released Dungeons 4. For the latter, it seems pretty similar to Dungeons 3, so I feel like I gave that series a chance and it’s the best the genre has to offer so far, but its new installment won’t fix its flaws. I don’t know how War for the Overworld will go, we’ll see if its plot is any better.

You know 2D Soulslike Metroidvania’s? Grime is one of them. It does have a very interesting setting and aesthetic. It’s rooted in the idea of creatures being shaped from clay or soil, like the way Genesis says man was created from the earth. So there’s NPCs with vaguely humanoid bodies and misshapen, boulderous heads, and they make a pilgrimage alongside you towards a place where sculptors (also made from stone) chisel them into more slender, evenly proportioned, human-looking forms. Also, you play as a black hole. I’m not really sure what the significance of that is, if anything, but your head is a black hole and your XP is mass that you get from defeated enemies and you get more powerful as you gain mass. The rest of your body is a sculpted stone humanoid body, and a bunch of NPCs get angry at you because you didn’t have to do all the usual groveling before the cult of the sculptors to get yours, it just kinda happened, but also you have a black hole for a head.

This is a cool theme, but it’s hard to find anything to say about the game besides that it is indeed another Metroidvania and it’s got a cool vibe about stone being sculpted into flesh and also something about black holes whose relation I’m not entirely sure of. Definitely I feel like this game gambled on having a community that cared enough to piece the lore together and lost. There’s definitely some discussions of it lying around, but there sure ain’t no Mossbag videos tying it all together. Still, like most of these games, you can get a rough idea what’s going on just by paying attention at all, even if there’s no obessive lore deciphering looking over every nook and cranny to make sure we got everything.

Granted, it probably doesn’t help that the controls inexplicably broke halfway through the game (the right analog stick is no longer working, which is critical to gameplay – it works fine in other games, so it probably isn’t that the controller is broken), and it doesn’t say great things about it that I didn’t care enough to put much effort into fixing it. Into Regrets because it’s literally unplayable. I’ve definitely played and enjoyed worse Metroidvanias, but Grime isn’t doing enough new things for me to try to fix it for more than 30 minutes.

I don’t generally do the question-as-title thing, because I’d rather be straightforward with my opinions. If I think Cook Serve Delicious 3 is good, my title will be Cook Serve Deliciosu 3 Is Good, if it’s bad, the title will be Cook Serve Delicious 3 Is Bad. I make this title a question because I’m not sure. I liked Cook Serve Delicious 3, but I had a lot of trouble with it the first time I played.

That was before I was trying to actually finish games, and by the time I’d circled back around to it, a different bundle had gotten me the entire series, not just the third installment, and I wanted to play it from the beginning not just because I like seeing a series evolve over multiple installments, but also because I was hoping that CSD3 might be more playable if I already knew some of the recipes from the first two games. I was mostly correct: Significant gameplay overhauls between CSD1 and CSD2 means that a lot of the recipes from the first game were altered, so it turns out I could’ve skipped that one (it was still fun, though, so whatever), but CSD2 has pretty similar mechanics to CSD3, similar enough that the recipes are the same, so my cooking skills from CSD2 translated to CSD3 without issue.

And from the starting point of already having the muscle memory for a lot of these recipes, getting into CSD3 was easy. I think it improves on CSD2’s mechanics by replacing side dishes with holding station food. While side dishes extend a customer’s patience for how long it takes you to prepare a main dish, holding station food is prepared in batches. Some customers order a holding station food, others get a special order. Each special order has to be created individually, but a batch of 10 (or however many) holding station orders can serve 10 customers. Whereas in CSD2, harder menus were ones with very few or no side dishes so you couldn’t extend the timer on your main orders, in CSD3, harder menus have lots of both holding station orders and special orders. I like this better, it’s more satisfying to nail a menu with more foods. The addition of cut scenes with Whisk and Cleaver, your robot helpers, make it more compelling to get through the game. Everything is at least a little bit better in CSD3.

But is CSD3 a better game, or is it an expansion pack masquerading as a sequel? Is the audience for CSD3 people who want a good CSD3 game, or is it people who beat CSD2 and want more? I found CSD3 hard to get into before I’d played CSD2. That was before I was trying very hard to finish games at all, so maybe it was just a problem of mindset, but I seriously doubt I found CSD2’s initial learning curve to be to its detriment. I wrote at the time about how it would’ve been better off if it’d had CSD1’s unlocking recipes, where you unlock recipes for a specific type of food (for example, different combinations of toppings on a hamburger) one or two at a time instead of all at once, allowing you to learn the recipes piecemeal. I did, eventually, after two full games, start memorizing several of the CSD2/3 recipes, but it came much more naturally in CSD1.

So on the one hand, Cook Serve Delicious 3 was a lot of fun for me, because I experienced its worst feature back in CSD2, and because that worst feature was a learning curve, that means it didn’t exist for me in CSD3. But I don’t know if I would recommend CSD3 to a friend, because it has that mountain to climb at the beginning, and it’s not actually any fun to climb that mountain. Intentionally failing to make a good difficulty curve does not mean your game has more depth. It means you’re bad at game design.