With 2024 just around the corner, I thought I'd do a little retrospective on the past year, which by most peoples' measure, was a fantastic year for gaming, even if we saw some real nastiness on the industry side of things.
Addressing that, I think as I've gotten older and perhaps even a bit wiser, is that we continually see how the shortsighted, everything-to-raise-stock-price late capitalist world is making things really rough for talented and creative people who want to make beautiful things. The shift required to take us out of this downward spiral is a lot bigger than just the games industry, so the best we can do as fans of games is to reward creativity and cleverness and support a ground-up movement for the people making these games to demand and receive the respect and security that they so richly deserve.
But, being outside that industry, and just being one dude with a blog, right now I'm going to focus on my own personal experience and talk about the games that have meant a lot to me this year.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon:
I'm a newbie to the Armored Core franchise. Like a lot of people who got on board the FromSoft love train with the Soulsborne games (ironically, I've generally liked the non-Dark Souls games of theirs I've played better) but in a weird way, ACVI was a throwback to an older style of game that I didn't realize I was nostalgic for.
Remember levels? See, for those of you Zoomers or even Gen Alpha folks who were born after 2000, video games used to nearly all be divided into discrete mission environments we called levels. A level would start, and you'd play through it, and once you had beaten it, things would kind of reset to a status quo.
These days, "open world" games have become far more ubiquitous, which emphasize a kind of continuity between areas of the world. Designers have gotten good at nevertheless making paths through those worlds that can set up elaborately-staged setpieces, but there is a certain lack of punctuation. Often, victory in some big event will spur you on to the next big event.
Levels, however, create natural moments in a game's pacing to pause and even potentially take a break.
Armored Core VI has, of course, a lot more to recommend it beyond levels, but as someone who was playing Gamecube and PS2 games in high school and college, ACVI hits a note of nostalgia. The PS2 had a crapton of games, and a lot of them were forgettable, but it was also an era in which I felt I could be more free to try something unlike what I had played before and still enjoy myself. ACVI recaptured that feeling and was, on top of it, made for really satisfying gameplay. Even as someone who usually leaves it to online sources to optimize builds, ACVI feels built to reward understanding all those weird statistics on each of your parts and to really get into specializing a build for the challenge ahead.
It's also the most audacious use of New Game Plus modes I've ever seen - not only are there two different endings to go for that you can play through one after the other, but an entirely new ending and mission line emerges after you've already beaten the game twice.
And somehow, even though it's not going to take you all that much time to beat the game the second time, it never feels like the reason it's so fast is that the game doesn't have enough content.
Also, I had been somewhat turned off by its announcement trailer, which portrayed, with its muted colors and synth score, a depressingly bleak world for a game. It's not that that portrayal is wrong, but somehow, despite its characters appearing purely as emblems and voice over, there are some real personalities and dramatic arcs - I mean, who didn't fall in love with V.IV. Rusty? (I maintain the third ending is the canonical best one if only because Rusty might survive it).
Baldur's Gate 3:
I'll throw a caveat in here: I never beat Baldur's Gate 3. I got to the cusp of the city and found that my drive to finish the game had kind of dried up. There's something a bit overwhelming and intimidating to the sheer volume of possibilities that can happen in that game.
But this is something I feel is more my issue than the game's. The fact is that this thing is an utterly mindblowing achievement. BG3 takes the framework of D&D's 5th edition rules and adapts them very faithfully to a digital medium, while arguably making a lot of improvements that the TTRPG should consider implementing as well.
BG3 is filled with a cast of well-written party members and side characters, with some real dramatic stakes and interesting fantasy ideas.
This might be more of a song of praise to my computer, but I was also overjoyed that an enormous game like this was running smoothly on my not-particulalry-a-gaming-computer M1 Macbook Air.
Control:
So, this is a bit funny: Control came out in 2019, but I didn't check it out until this year. However, upon getting into the game, I have become a zealous convert to the cult of Remedy Entertainment. This was a game that helped me find a term to identify the style/genre of writing I've been doing since I was 17, and juiced a lot of my own creative impulses, which spurred a huge spurt of my own writing earlier this year.
Control left such a huge impact on me that, in writing this, I could have sworn I played the game last year - the idea that I've only been familiar with it for about 9 months seems far too short.
The game's action combat is extremely fun and satisfying - after finishing the game I spent a good amount of time wandering around the Oldest House looking for Hiss to fight just for the fun of it - but far more is its incredible world-building and mixed approach to storytelling. It's fascinating to me that my favorite character in the game is one who only ever appears as a live-action actor in various film strips.
Alan Wake II:
So, it should come as no surprise that, upon discovering Remedy's games in the first of their releases to push for this idea of a connected universe, I decided to finally go back and check out Alan Wake, which has sounded intriguing back in 2010 but which I never got around to.
I liked Alan Wake a lot, but it definitely also showed its age, even in its Remastered Edition. Still, it was enough to pump me up for October's release of the long, long anticipated Alan Wake II.
And by God is that an incredible game.
I will say that purely in terms of personal tastes, I think I like Control better overall, but in terms of stunning achievement, Alan Wake II sets a new bar for artistic ambition within the medium of games.
I mean, holy crap. Holy crap, guys. This game feels like you're playing through a top-shelf season of prestige television while also reading a mind-bending novel. The game is so rich in thematic meaning as well as engrossing mystery. It's funny. It's beautiful. It's terrifying (but never in a cheap way, unless you count the occasional jump scare). It's fascinating. It's exciting. It's just... dear lord.
This movie has a fifteen-minute avant-garde art film that you might even miss if you don't stick around to let it play!
I'll confess that the survival-horror gameplay, as someone who has never played such a game before, took me some time to adjust to - my initial fight against Robert Nightingale (which I realized on my second playthrough is literally the fourth enemy you'll face) was brutal because I had to spend most of it scrounging for two more bullets to fire at the guy, and I think the genre evokes more of a frustrated grumble than a shriek of fear, but on a second playthrough I found myself much better-adjusted to the rhythms and cadences of the gameplay.
Still, this is the sort of game where whatever flaws or points where my taste varies from their choice of direction is kind of moot because of what a profound achievement it is.
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