The Games that Stuck with Me in 2023

 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.

Alea Iacta Est

 And there we have it: the third ending to Armored Core VI complete, along with the "Stargazer" achievement, which signifies that I've truly completed every mission in the game.

Spoilers ahead:

The Insane Audacity of AC VI's New Game ++

 There are two endings you can get on your first playthrough of Armored Core VI. One is grimmer, involving alien genocide and seeing your character remembered as a kind of necessary evil that ended the conflict on Rubicon by wiping the planet out (honestly, it's a bit like Leto Atredies II from God-Emperor of Dune, which is a story I think Fires of Rubicon draws a fair amount of inspiration from). The other is more hopeful, stopping the apocalyptic plan with the possibility that, with the corporations and PCA devastated, the RLF can actually secure independence and freedom for their world, and the Coral can live alongside them.

Playing a second go-round, you get the option to make different decisions than the ones you made before. Periodically (and as a new player, I definitely didn't notice these at first,) missions will be marked as "decisions," and will lock you out of the decision missions you don't pick. So, the second time you play through, you can do those missions you skipped, letting you eventually unlock every mission in the Replay Missions options.

But there are other differences. The first you'll notice is on the second playthrough. In the trivially easy "Attack the Dam Complex" or whatever it's called, when you get two superfluous Redgun allies to take on a bunch of very weak enemies (including an AC who tries to stop you but is horribly outgunned,) something changes after the first checkpoint: you get a mid-mission offer from the RLF to turn on your Redgun allies and defend the dam instead of attacking it. Now, you have to take out the Redguns there, which makes for a much more challenging mission.

Doing this (technically you can refuse this offer, which I assume will make the mission play out like it previously did) will give you a couple more missions to help the RLF. In the first of these, you rescue some RLF prisoners who were being interrogated and tortured, and you find that the spiritual/ideological leader of the RLF, Father Dolmayan, has had some kind of terrible portent of things to come. But that's about it.

However, on your third playthrough, in the mission "Survey the Uninhabited Floating City," things start off identical to how they were in the first two playthroughs: you have to deal with ECM fog that robs you of your radar and requires you to navigate through the fog. But while the version of the mission that plays out in the first two runs ends with a rematch against one of those giant attack helicopters from the introductory mission, in this version, that helicopter shows up and is immediately sundered by Dolmayan in his own AC, ranting and raving as he fights you.

I'm pretty sure that if you pick all the alternative missions you hadn't gotten before, the third playthrough will result in the third ending, and probably sees all the missions in the game unlocked, but who knows?

It's just kind of crazy. FromSoft's Soulsborne(iro-Ring?) games give you multiple endings, but as far as I know, all of them can always be attained on a single playthrough. These games have New Game +, but the difficulty goes up with each playthrough (which is why I've allowed the characters who have beaten Elden Ring to sit without starting their New Game+ until the DLC comes out and I've beaten it). ACVI doesn't officially get harder, in the sense that enemies are any tougher to take down, but some of these alternative missions will be a lot more challenging even in the early game.

And the fact that you don't just have to beat the game once to get all the missions, but twice is something I don't think I've ever encountered before. Nevertheless, I think it speaks to the quality of the gameplay that I'm still having fun two and a half ways through the game. I'm hoping I can replicate my IB-01: CEL 240 one-shot from my second playthrough, given that the first playthrough, that was the one boss that forced me to step away from the game and come back the next day.

Fires of Raven

 So, the second playthrough of Armored Core VI went a lot faster. I think a large part of this was that I had done a fair amount of farming in the first run in order to purchase lots of weapons and other AC parts, whereas this time I had more or less gotten most of what I really wanted, and so ploughed through the actual missions.

Spoilers ahead.

Armored Core VI New Game Plus Impressions

 When you beat Armored Core VI, the credits roll, and then you immediately get the dialogue that follows the introductory mission in which you secure the ID of Raven. (They don't have you replay that mission).

For a while, things look the same. You're a newcomer independent merc working for one faction in one mission and then turning on them in the next. Admittedly, the context is clearer this time around - I know, for example, how Balam, Dafeng, and the Redguns are all part of one corporate faction and how Arquebus, Schneider, and the Vespers are part of the other.

But the missions are identical, and pretty easy with all the parts you've unlocked over the course of the game. While nothing's strictly better - I think they make every weapon and AC part with a certain "budget" - you certainly feel a lot more powerful when you can build an AC with dual miniguns and Stun Needles.

In the early part of my first playthrough, "Attack the Dam Complex" was a go-to credit-farming mission. If you just blow through it and take care of the mandatory objectives, it's an utter cakewalk, especially if you just skip past the RLF AC that tries to talk you out of the mission.

And in New Game Plus, it starts off identically.

And then Walter tells you he's getting a call from the RLF. That's new. They're offering to pay you double what Balam is paying you if you turn on the two ACs you've been sent with and take them out instead of destroying the dam.

You actually get the option to refuse this offer, but naturally you're going to take the new option. And with this, well, A: you get a checkpoint, and B: you get a very different mission. And what was a cakewalk becomes a quite challenging one, as the two former allied ACs now turn on you and team up.

Following that, I got a brand-new mission: I was sent to escort an RLF helicopter sending commandos on a prison break. You wind up rescuing two (trying for three, but one is dead by the time you get there) RLF officers, including Little Ziyi, who attacks you during the equivalent mission in the first playthrough.

So, clearly, the intention here is to do multiple playthroughs. You lose absolutely nothing by doing so - every mission you've completed previously is still available in Replay Missions, and you retain every part and OS Chip. Indeed, after several missions (maybe after I beat Balteus the second time, which... boy, if you use the Weapon Bay and swap between Pulse weapons and Shotguns and use a very speedy build, it's a pretty quick and easy fight) AllMind came to me with new Arena fights, which granted way more OS chips. At this point I think I have every weapon type maxed out (except perhaps melee).

The game is certainly not easy - the Coral-powered AC at the end of the penultimate chapter is really painful - but it's not terribly long. But these oddities extend the game's life significantly. There's a lot of replayability in this, which is something I've found a lot in FromSoft games (I've beaten Elden Ring on like six or seven characters).

There's no reason to make a new save file in Armored Core VI, given that doing so erases your existing one, but also, everything can be replayed. The only reason you might do so is if you make a decision between exclusive missions that you regret, but you're probably better off just playing through and doing the other decision on New Game +. I will say that I sort of wish I'd done the ruthless mercenary choices in my first playthrough so that I could do all the heroic options on this playthrough, but honestly, given the grittiness of this setting, there's no version of the story that lets you come out feeling good (I probably shouldn't feel bad for killing Cinder Carla, given how many times she committed perfidious surrender in the mission where I met her, but I kind of like the scrappy aesthetic of the RaD folks, again, even though we find out they're not quite the "anarchist junkers" that they seem to be at first.)

There's no real narrative justification for the changes in NG+, but it is kind of fun to have these weird differences pop up. The altered mission and the new mission were much bigger challenges than the stuff I was generally doing the first go around, so it injects some late-game difficulty into the early game.

Getting Deeper into Armored Core VI

 I just killed the "Ice Worm," which is an odd mission in Armored Core VI that sees you using a prototype weapon to clear the gigantic mechanical monster (or, likely, biomechanical) of its powerful energy shield, which then sets it up to be taken down by a rail gun, and then you unload on it like it's no one's business.

The challenge of the mission is not really your typical one - yes, you have the usual challenges of dodging enemy attacks and pumping out damage when you can, but you spend most of the mission waiting for the opportunity to attack the Worm's face - you have to hit it straight on, which is very tough given that it only briefly shows its face and usually only when it's attempting to grind you into scrap metal.

While the game is still not quite what I'd call Dark Souls-level difficult, I have noticed an uptick in the difficulty of some missions - there's one that involves re-taking "The Wall," which you had previously done when fighting against the (probably good guys) Rubicon Liberation Front. Now, however, the PCA - the Planetary Closure Administration, which seems to have the weight of an actual major government behind it and thus actually manages to make the corporations look like scrappy underdogs - has taken it over. The mission has you facing off against a few not-terribly-scary MTs (minor mechs) and then a pair of tougher, faster, but not overwhelmingly so, ACs. Making your way into The Wall, you then have to fight a few minor enemies with some powerful attacks, and then face off against an elite PCA AC. The catch, though, is that there is not a single checkpoint in the level. Usually when you get to a boss, you can start over right before you fight them, probably with your AC redesigned to be a menace in single-target fights (one of the nastiest combinations is two miniguns and two Songbirds, the latter of which are basically artillery guns, which you deploy after you've overloaded the enemy with Strain using the miniguns and get bonus damage with, well, all your weapons once they're off-balance.)

This boss, on its own, would probably not rank terribly high, but it means that every flaw in executing the mission makes it that much harder for you to get past him and actually beat the mission. So, this guy is up there with Balteus and other major bosses for me in terms of difficulty.

I think one thing that gets the game to sort of click is when you get enough parts that you can make meaningful choices with the way you construct your AC. Early on, you only have a few options, so I highly recommend replaying some of those early missions to give you kind of, light weapons, medium weapons, heavy weapons, as well as shoulder weapons that are good for multi-lock and those that are good for single targets (and having some vertical-launch options is also good). There are some energy weapons (the ones that look like satellite dishes) that are good for cutting through shields (like the one on Balteus) but also, sometimes, massive damage is enough.

Hilariously, I did pick the absolute worst mission to try out the new light-weight tank "legs" I got, which involved a whole lot of jumping and fast-moving enemies, and where you basically spend most of the mission jumping down through ruined industrial infrastructure to kill a traitor to one of the questionable organizations you've fought/befriended.

The scale of the game is pretty massive, even if it's not some open world. Indeed, I saw a video from Zullie the Witch that showed that, because it uses the same game engine as FromSoft's Soulsborne games, you can actually put an Armored Core into Elden Ring, and yeah - they're really big.

Armored Core VI Difficulty Assessment

 So, as a fan of FromSoft, I'm familiar with difficulty. I do think at some point I should return to the original Dark Souls, which I stalled out on after getting totally stuck on Ornstein & Smough. I'm still not sure I can ever handle the difficulty of the Ringed City DLC in DSIII (while I managed to get up to Midir and I think could have gone to Gael if I wanted to, I got burned out before I could) but I feel pretty comfortable with my skill level having beaten Elden Ring and Bloodborne, including the latter's DLC. (Elden Ring is probably the easiest of these, due in part to the fact that you can level up significantly by just doing mini-dungeons, and I think it's also balanced to give less diminishing returns on leveling up your HP stats).

Anyway, Armored Core is not a Souls-like game. It's not built like them at all. But I was still expecting some very difficult gameplay.

And... it's got some. But basically, it's only the bosses. The levels themselves are less about how hard they are to beat as much as they are about how efficiently you can charge through them. I think I've only died two or three times to non-boss enemies, and in one case I didn't die so much as get spotted in a mission where I was supposed to get to an enemy AC without being detected (or killing any enemies that saw me before they could report my presence).

Now, the bosses are tough. I'd say they're on-par with a lot of Soulsborne bosses, in that it's very unlikely you'll take them down on the first attempt (I did manage to take out the Juggernaut on try one, but it helped that I also had seen a video and knew that vertical-firing missiles were very useful against it).

But the enemies you face between bosses are generally not going to be a major threat - indeed, I really think the key to acing the game is not just being able to beat all the enemies you come across, but knowing that, for example, a single blast from your shotgun will take out that MT, or that a spread of missiles will take down that group of drones.

The bosses, then, are largely about figuring out what strategy to use. For example, in one mission you'll face off against Balteus, an autonomous drone with an array of missile launchers around it that can be configured in different ways, and I found that the key to the fight was getting up close and personal with it, closing distance so that its missiles would have a hard time locking onto me (in retrospect, using energy weapons to burn through its shields would have made it easier) while the next level has a boss called The Cleaner, who has extremely powerful melee attacks and thus encourages you to fight it from far away.

Now, a good build won't trivialize these fights (and many parts are gated behind progress in the story, so you'll only be able to use the arsenal the game allows you to amass up to that point) and execution is important, but because the game always puts a checkpoint right before boss fights, you'll be able to totally overhaul your AC with different parts if you die (though if you need to buy new parts, you'll have to quit out of the mission).

The game strongly incentivizes replaying missions, which I believe pay out just as much on a replay as they do your first go around. Generally, I don't sell parts and instead just amass more Credits to buy the parts I want (I did sell a few earlier today to make some big purchases). But I also think you can sell your parts back for precisely what you bought them for, so there's little regret you'll have in purchasing a new part.

I do think that some of the more esoteric parts - your Generator, your FCS, for example - aren't quite as "sexy" as new weapons, whose effects you feel very clearly as soon as you start playing.

I haven't beaten the game. But so far at least, I'd consider it challenging but not truly controller-smashingly hard. I haven't had any fights I've felt the need to quit out of the game and cool off from. There's no Nameless King so far. Though, there is a fight that is actually not unlike Ornstein & Smough - in one mission, you have to fight two powerful ACs from the PCA (basically the "government" faction on Rubicon, in contrast to the various corporations, criminal factions, and revolutionaries). One blasts you from afar while the other gets up close and tries to slash you with energy weapons. As is always the case with these fights, you need to keep them separated and wear one down before going to the next.

Aesthetically, the game is, of course, a kind of grimy used future with basically zero human element. The characters we interact with are just voices over comms, and the scale of the world is such that if there were people running around, you might not notice them (periodically you'll see stairways and realize that your mech is like four stories tall).

So, you know, I'm enjoying the game, but I'm not falling in love with it the way I have other FromSoft games. It is definitely letting me scratch that sci-fi action itch (given how excited I was to play an Armorer Artificer in a D&D campaign that ultimately wound up falling apart after three or four sessions, this kind of lets me play that subclass to its logical endpoint).

It is doing its job, though, of keeping me occupied while I wait for Larian Studios to release the Mac version of BG3.

Armored Core VI First Impressions

 Well, I went ahead and got Armored Core VI. Even though I've got a purchased game that I haven't yet been able to play (BG3 - whose actual version is not yet available on the Mac) I found myself itching for the action.

ACVI is made by FromSoft, whose "Souls-like" game series has been a favorite of mine (ironically my two favorite of them I've played are not actually Dark Souls - I prefer Bloodborne and Elden Ring,) and so I came in expecting tight action and a serious challenge.

And... it's not quite what I expected. Not in a bad way, mind you.

ACVI feels in many ways like a throwback to the PS2 era and the kinds of games that were common when I was in high school (among them, some of the Armored Core series, though this is my first). While the level maps are giant, dystopian science-fiction ruins, the game is broken into discrete levels, and finishing a mission is usually pretty quick. One of the missions you get early on has only one simple objective, which is to take out an enemy AC, and while they give you a decent fight, the whole thing is over in a couple minutes.

Combat in ACVI is largely fairly easy - most foes go down in one or two hits from your various weapons, and as long as you keep on the move, you'll avoid most of their fire. However, this ease falls away entirely when you fight one of its bosses - and one of those bosses must be defeated before you can get past the intro level.

The first level of the game sees you landing on the planet Rubicon illegally, with minimal equipment and no ability to customize your mech (even when you go back and replay it). You're basically scrounging through the wreckage of other ACs to try to steal identification documents to allow you to sign into the mercenary coordinating system on the planet. The level is pretty simple - you jet around, learning how to control your mech, and fighting off foes who are not even close to matching your power. But then, after you find an ID that will sactually work for you, a gigantic attack helicopter shows up, and you have your first boss fight.

One of the things that makes the fight hard is that your most powerful weapon, a melee-only energy blade, requires you to, you know, get up close to the helicopter, which... as you can imagine, is usually flying around. It took me maybe four or five times to take down this boss, and I can see this serving as a bit of a wall that will prevent some players from progressing further in the game.

But that'd be a shame, because the subsequent missions are far, far easier. I don't think I died more than a couple times in any of them (as in, in total - most of them I beat on the first try without much fear of dying). And ACVI is also pretty generous with checkpoints - if you die, you reset to the last checkpoint, and it seems bosses will always have a checkpoint right before them. Once you get the ability to switch out your build, you can even swap builds if you die and come back to the checkpoint.

Now, getting parts for your AC is one of the big systems in the game, and the main way you can get them is by purchasing them in the Parts Shop. But here's the amazing thing: you can replay missions as many times as you want, and you get paid each time you complete them. So, it's not hard to find a quick and easy mission and just blaze through it a few times to earn the credits to buy that new set of missile launchers.

The statistics of each part vary greatly - there are a lot of ways in which they're balanced for different optimal scenarios. As such, getting new ones isn't about becoming strictly more powerful, but more about giving you new options for your situations. I haven't unlocked a ton of options yet, and still have many that I haven't bought yet, but for example, there's a pair of leg parts you can get that make you jump much higher and generally let you dodge out of the way of incoming fire much more easily that made a few missions way easier (like battling that enemy AC).

The world of AC is not a fun one - you're basically being used by a ruthless mercenary and at least in the early missions, you fight on behalf of a number of evil megacorporations, with your foes generally being other corps or the only people who seem like they might be the good guys, the Rubicon Liberation Front.

Only 7 or 8 missions in, I don't think I've got a great handle on the overall story, but I expect that our "mission control," "Handler Walter" (voiced by Travis Willingham in classic 'dark and gritty' mode) has some ulterior motives that he's in no hurry to share with us.

I think my agenda for this early stage of the game is to replay missions until I've been able to buy out the entire Part Shop (which might take a while) so that I can really experiment with my preferred weapons and AC builds.

A bit like the Souls games, the statistics of various weapons is only part of the story - the cadence of their attacks and, for your shoulder-mounted missile launchers, often the angle at which they strike, can make a theoretically more powerful weapon be trickier to use.

Trying to get a higher rank on the AC-duel mission, I put together a build that was all about staggering my foe and then having one weapon (the energy blade) that could make great use of the stagger bonus. (Some weapons will inflict a higher "impact" to stagger foes, and some weapons deal significantly more damage to staggered foes). But while heavy-hitting missiles and a bazooka in the right hand were pretty good for that fight (though given that the enemy AC has an energy blade, it might be best to build for long-distance) but I don't think it would be practical in missions with a lot of weaker enemies.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see how hard the game gets further in, and how good I get at it.