Play it on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC Current goal: Get some gaming spooks in for the season
This year, Halloween fell on a Thursday, and I was so busy with work and other things that I didn’t manage to make much time for spooky gaming in the days leading up to it. I still have a hankering for some interactive scares, however, so this weekend, I hope to play one of the landmark games in the history of survival horror, officially translated into English and released in the States for the first time: Clock Tower. The new version, Clock Tower: Rewind, comes to us courtesy of WayForward and represents my first real chance to play the 1995 SNES horror classic.
I actually don’t know much about the original Clock Tower, and I’ve kept it that way on purpose, as I want to go in knowing as little as possible and figure it out for myself. It’s scarier that way. But in short, it’s a 2D, survival horror point-and-click game that tells the story of Jennifer, a teenage orphan who’s adopted by a family with a big, spooky manor, and finds herself stalked by a horrifying entity known as Scissorman. WayForward’s release lets you play an enhanced version of the game “which features numerous gameplay additions and quality-of-life refinements,” and I may check that out as well, but for starters, I’ll be playing in Original mode, and experiencing the game just like it was when it scared the socks off of so many Japanese players way back in 1995. Sure, it may be November now, but I’m gonna linger in late October for just a little bit longer if it’s all the same to you. — Carolyn Petit
Kenneth Shepard, Moises Taveras, Carolyn Petit, Ethan Gach, and John Walker
The Crimson Diamond is AVAILABLE NOW!! (Launch trailer)
Play it on: Steam Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned mystery
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I was captivated by Unavowed, a point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I’ve finished that one (it was great) just in time for a brand-new entry in the genre to come along. And while Wadjet Eye’s output is most reminiscent of ‘90s adventure games that offered full voice acting and elegant drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, The Crimson Diamondfrom designer Julia Minamata, is influenced by an earlier era of adventures, ones that ran in EGA and had you typing in what you wanted your character to do. I can’t wait to explore its mysteries.
The Crimson Diamond is perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow games which saw their plucky heroine tossed into murder mysteries during the roaring ‘20s. Itcasts you as Nancy Maple, a young woman investigating the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. It’s clear from the trailer that her investigations will find her encountering people with motives of their own, some of them sinister, and land her in no small amount of peril. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the genre’s early days that we no longer needed, but I’ve always thought of them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with their own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphics-based interface doesn’t always allow for, and in addition to digging into the plot of The Crimson Diamond, I’m eager to see how it uses this design element that so rarely gets employed in modern games. All in all, it sounds like a perfect fit for a cozy weekend. —Carolyn Petit
Austin Williams, Carolyn Petit, Moises Taveras, Kenneth Shepard, and Ethan Gach
Microsoft shutdown the Xbox 360’s marketplace this week and nearly two decades after the console first launched it feels like the final nail in the coffin for a particular era of gaming we’ll probably never see again.
The Best Reveals From The Game Awards 2023
The Xbox 360 came out a year earlier than the competition and $100 cheaper than the base PlayStation 3. It seemed to make all the right moves, using Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty to jump start online multiplayer into the soon-to-be dominant form of gaming, while investing it all back into indie curation, big exclusives, and marketing deal that made the console feel like the place everyone had to be.
In some ways it felt like the best of all worlds, and by the end of the generation you could pick up an Xbox 360 for just $100 and play dozens of the best games ever made. The culture was far from healthy, and some of the places making everything were a mess to work for. But it was also a fun time, and a weird one. Here’s what we’ll miss about it and why the Xbox 360 still feels so special to us.
Carolyn Petit: The first E3 I ever attended was in 2005, with the Xbox 360’s launch still some months out and I have to say, the games I saw on the show floor looked amazing. It’s hilarious to me now considering I haven’t even thought about this game in probably 15 years, but at that time, the game that blew me away the most was probably GRAW. Interestingly, though, despite my initial excitement about the console being rooted in its graphical power and my lust for next-gen spectacle, now, when I think back on what made the console so special to me, it’s not really about that aspect of it at all. What about you Alyssa?
Alyssa Mercante: I’ve told mine on Kotaku.com more than once, but I had borrowed my high school sweetheart’s original Xbox to play Halo 2 when he went away to college, but not long after that Halo 3 came out, which wasn’t backwards compat. So I went out during my free period in high school (we had an open campus for seniors, you could take your car and leave if you didn’t have class), and drove to a Target where I spent my summer job savings on a 360, Halo 3, and Xbox Live.
Ethan: I have zero recollection of the Xbox 360’s launch. What was I even doing at the time? 2005. Hmm. I was going into my senior year in high school, barely playing anything except for the occasional late-stage PS2 game—Shadow of the Colossus and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, followed eventually by Okami and Final Fantasy XII. My only real memory of the beginning of that console cycle is my brother getting a PS3 and me having almost no interest in it. It wasn’t until my girlfriend’s roommate’s boyfriend in college got me hooked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that I finally picked up a super cheap used Xbox 360 arcade edition for like $150. That four years after the console launched but still somehow only the mid-way point.
Carolyn: Yeah, I don’t remember exactly when I finally got one myself—I certainly couldn’t afford one at launch, and my memories of the time around release have a lot to do with playing Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (lol) at GameStop kiosks.
Moises Taveras: The first time I ever played an Xbox 360 also had to do with Call of Duty: MW2. It was all the rage with the kids in my middle school, but I was largely looking from the outside in as a) a PlayStation kid since my youth and b) someone who came from a family too poor to afford more than one console. But eventually, I made friends who had 360s and I remember us all cramming onto a couch in the smallest bedroom imaginable at our friend Howard’s house and playing local multiplayer matches till we lost our voices from shouting. I learned really quickly then that the 360 was synonymous with multiplayer and socializing with folks and it made me want one so bad. Little did I know I wouldn’t get a 360 till the very end of the console generation!
Carolyn: I think part of the Xbox 360’s dominance in that era can be attributed to the fact that it offered the best online experience for folks wanting to play Call of Duty, but it also did something incredible that totally won over people like me. I’m not saying I didn’t have an amazing time playing Gears of War co-op, I absolutely did, and huge credit to Microsoft for putting out a steady stream of banger exclusives that really made Xbox Live feel essential. But for me, when I think about the Xbox 360, what still gets me excited most is Xbox Live Arcade, and particularly amazing games like Pac-Man Championship Edition. Games like this took the arcade leaderboard competition of my childhood and absolutely exploded it. Suddenly I was staying up nights pouring everything I had into beating my friends’ high scores on online leaderboards for all the world to see. Man, it was incredible.
Moises: Supergiant Games’ Bastion absolutely blew my mind as far as what I thought games could be. It being a console exclusive to the 360 through XBLA broke my heart and kept me from the portfolio of what’d become my favorite studio, and then Xbox just kept pumping out indie titles like it. Honestly, my working definition of an indie game was largely informed by this era of XBLA games.
Xbox Dashboard Evolution 2001-2019 (Xbox Original, Xbox 360, One)
Kenneth Shepard: The Xbox 360 was the first console launch I was really tuned into the industry for. I was full-blown sicko mode for that thing as a kid, and was counting down the days. I was a huge Rare fan at the time and Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero were a huge deal to me. But broadly, I think I fell off video games for a bit because the system just didn’t speak to my tendencies. As Moises said, the 360 became the multiplayer system and I preferred gaming in solitude, and eventually pivoted to the PS3 in the final years of that generation. But I played the Mass Effect trilogy on the 360, so I ended up keeping an old 360 in my home longer than any other system. I had to replace the household 360 more times than probably any other system my family owned.
We got a launch window system that died by the time Halo 3 came out, so we had to replace it swiftly. Then I got my own 360 for Christmas 2009, just before the launch of Mass Effect 2. That sucker lasted over a decade. It gathered dust for large swaths of the time, but since I didn’t own an Xbox One, it was the only way for me to go back to my old Mass Effect trilogy saves until the Legendary Edition came out in 2021. So while I had mostly abandoned the system by the end of the generation, the 360 is still a defining system in my life because it gave me one of the most important video game experiences of my life. I’ll always be grateful for it, even if I think the Microsoft was a trailblazer for some of the industry’s worst modern tendencies with it.
Ethan: That was the other thing that I think tipped me in the direction of the Xbox 360 besides the price and walled multiplayer gardens. As someone coming from the PS1 and PS2, it just had more of the RPGs I was craving earlier or in better condition. I came to the original Mass Effect late but it blew my mind. I got to catch up on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was synonymous with retro and couch-coop indie games for me like Castle Crashers and Super Meat Boy. It really did just nail a lot of the same things that the PS4 did a generation later and which ultimately helped Sony to reverse the tide.
Moises: it’s so weird to think about now given Xbox’s current situation and catalog, but the 360 was where all the games were!
Carolyn: Another thing that was a big factor for me, I have to admit, is that I was totally cheevo-pilled. The Xbox 360 brought about the advent of achievements and I got extremely excited about pulling off absurd things like beating Call of Duty campaigns on Veteran to get all the achievements. I no longer put much stock in achievements or trophies, but to this day I greatly prefer the at-a-glance number that reflects your achievements compared to all the trophies of PlayStation’s system. And on top of that, the whole interface on Xbox just felt so much more inviting to me than that on Sony. I think avatars were really smart of them to introduce in that era. I loved signing on and seeing little cartoon versions of all my good friends online, playing games of their own. In comparison to that, the whole interface of the PS3 just felt cold and impersonal to me, and that console would end up gathering dust in my entertainment center.
Ethan: The Xbox 360 home screen definitely felt a lot more inviting and hit that sweet spot of clutter to chill. The controller was also very solid. Have any of you gone back and tried to hold a PS3 DualShock? It feels like you’re being pranked. I take it none of you ever had an issue with red-ringing or other hardware failures?
Photo: Mark Davis (Getty Images)
Moises: Nope! Correct me if I’m wrong but those issues got ironed out with later iterations of the console, so by the time one of my best friends let me indefinitely borrow his 360, it was smooth sailing for me.
Carolyn: I did have to send mine back for repairs once, and for a while there at least, it felt like everyone I knew who owned one was hitting the red ring. There was a period there, at least in my circle of friends, where there was real disbelief and anger that Microsoft had sold us all a product that was so prone to failure. I think it speaks to just how fond people were overall of the console—its library, its interface, its online features—that today, when you bring it up, you’re far more likely to get fond recollections than bitter complaints. It was so good that even the considerable irritations so many of us experienced with it are now just a footnote in our memories.
Ethan: My console ended up red-ringing in like, 2012? But then I read that you can just put it in the oven and bake it at a low temperature to loosen up the glue. Has worked like a charm ever since.
Carolyn: Wow, I never knew that!
Ethan: I think one of the reasons people look back so fondly on the Xbox 360 is that, in retrospect, it felt like the last time you could contain the entirety of what was going on, coming out, and being talked about in your head at any given time. It was still very intimate and physical, with midnight launches and stacks of controllers in the split-screen coop session. There was spectacle with E3 but also the feeling you alone were discovering these incredible hidden treasures on Xbox Live Arcade, which was like a return to finding the internet for the first time again.
Carolyn: I agree. And they just had so many games that became sensations for a time, from Braid to Geometry Wars. The curation was exceptional, and it was an era in which it still felt like the whole culture, or much of it at least, could still come together for a few weeks around some exciting new downloadable game.
Moises: Yeah. By comparison, when the PS4 really started to pivot to those smaller more intimate games early in its lifetime, it wasn’t that those games were lesser, but it did feel like they were being more haphazardly thrown on the platform to fill gaps between big exclusives. Meanwhile XBLA had these clearly thought out rollouts and events that made a big deal of Arcade titles. Also everything was less shitty. Xbox Live Gold was the original multiplayer subscription, and the only one for quite some time, but it at least seemed to provide value with great deals and a platform that produced rock solid multiplayer hits. It also wasn’t as expensive as anything is nowadays.
Carolyn: Before we wrap things up here, I think we can’t talk about what an amazing console the 360 was without saying a little more about its games. Are there any games y’all want to shout out as particular favorites that really helped make that library great or were emblematic of what the console was doing? When I think about the 360, I think about how the grittiness of Gears of War coexisted harmoniously alongside the whimsy of Viva Pinata, and I’ll never forget the dozens of hours my friends and I spent driving around doing challenges together in Burnout Paradise. It really did feel, more than a lot of other consoles, like it offered something for everyone, and like the people behind it thought deeply about how to bring people together to share in the experiences it offered.
And even though some of its games were also on PlayStation, at least everyone in my friend group, won over by the cheevos and online features of Xbox, always bought multiplatform games there, which perpetuated the console’s dominance in that generation. It’s a little wild to think how this generation it feels somewhat the opposite for me, like most people I know play most multiplatform games on PlayStation. Wild how the tables have turned. But yeah, any other 360 shoutouts?
Moises: I cannot separate the 360 from the stunning role it did in promoting so many smaller studios to the mainstream. I already invoked Bastion from Supergiant Games, but I can’t not shoutout Limbo and Playdead, which has now delivered two absolutely singular game experiences in a row. Oh and Shadow Complex does still own.
Ethan: Limbo was incredible. While the indie darling backlash was fair and warranted, it was really an incredible run of curation there for several years. The Dishwasher games were great, and really spoke to that sense of Newgrounds 2.0 animating the grungy vibe of XBLA. It’s also wild how much Microsoft tried to court Japanese RPG fans with Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. For me personally, Dungeon Defenders is still an all-time great. One of the last times I was able to rope friends into playing something for hours with me on a couch.
I was trying to think of my top five favorite 360 games, exclusive or no, and couldn’t stop listing stuff. The end of that console generation was so strong, on both 360 and PS3, maybe there’s hope that the Series X/S and PS5 pick up in their final years. But with massive budgets, long development times, and so much risk-averse consolidation, I’m not hopeful.
Carolyn: Whether it picks up to some degree or not, I think it’s safe to say that there will never be an era quite like that exemplified by the 360 again. The console was just perfectly poised to take advantage of a given moment in gaming culture and technology, employing exciting new ideas like achievements to build a sense of both community and friendly competition around games in ways that its library and online service leveraged brilliantly. Also, Sneak King was great.
Ethan: Any parting thoughts since you vanished, Alyssa?
Alyssa: LMAO. The time my 360 red ringed right before I went up for senior year of college. The day before. And I went out and bought another because not having one wasn’t an option. That or the time my mother heard me cursing out misogynists in Italian?
Ethan: Was it on the $3 phone bank operator Xbox 360 headset?
Image: Kotaku / Ubisoft / Sony / Rocksteady / Nosyrevy (Getty Images), Digital Sun, Vicky Leta / Blizzard, Nintendo, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios / Sega, Cyan Worlds Inc
This week, Ubisoft released a statement addressing what might generously be called a “controversy” about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, Shadows. Let’s be real, though. It’s just the latest salvo from a reactionary hate movement. You can read our thoughts on that, the terrific texture of Yakuza 0, the missteps of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, the amazing sound design of the Riven remake, and more, in the pages ahead.
Pokémon’s profit margins probably don’t reflect it, but the franchise had a rough year in 2023. Without a new mainline role-playing game to dominate the series’ headlines, Pikachu and friends were, instead, shrouded in controversies throughout the past 12 months. Between Pokémon Go angering swaths of its community, scalpers making a public embarrassment of the franchise to people who don’t even pay attention to it, and Scarlet and Violet’s DLC underlining the problems ingrained within the Pokémon pipeline, the screws are coming loose on the hype train. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Until very recently, I’d thought that Alan Wake 2 would reside in the #2 slot here, while Tears of the Kingdom would remain my personal game of the year. However, a chance encounter recently with writer Cole Kronman (who wrote this great piece on Xenogears and the games of Tetsuya Takahashi for us) helped me clarify my own feelings. I realized that for me, these two games are in close conversation with each other, strange mirrors of each other’s greatness, and that together, they define the best that 2023’s games had to offer in my mind. I’m not going to spoil plot points for either game, but to engage with why and how this is the case, I need to mention a crucial line of dialogue from the end of Alan Wake 2, one that mirrors the first game’s climactic mic drop of “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.” If you haven’t yet finished Alan Wake 2 and want to discover this line for yourself, turn back now.
In the final moments of Alan Wake 2 (and potentially earlier, depending on how thorough you are in exploring and absorbing Remedy’s metaphysical horror odyssey), a character says, “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.” Alan Wake 2 explores the difficulty and anguish many artists find in the creative process, the way it can sometimes feel like you’re just banging your head against the wall and not making a damn bit of progress, seeing no way out whatsoever as that blank page continues to taunt you.
And yet, sometimes at least, a way out does eventually reveal itself. Sometimes, after we’ve been spinning our wheels for what feels like forever, something in our subconscious will finally crack, a bit of light will shine through, and we will see, at long last, a path forward, knowing that we had to go through all of that internal turmoil to find our way out. What felt like a pointless, exhausting, excruciating loop was in fact a spiral all along. Before spotlighting this at the end by having a character speak the line, Alan Wake 2 hides this idea in plain sight, repeatedly putting you in environments that feel like loops that you have no choice but to run through again and again. Eventually, your persistence pays off, something suddenly changes, and a way out reveals itself. You thought you were going in circles but you were actually moving forward all along; it just took a lot of energy and grit to see that.
I don’t have any particular insight into what the struggle to get Alan Wake 2 made was like for creative director Sam Lake and the other folks at Remedy, but it’s no secret that this is a game the studio had been hoping to make for a very long time. I have to imagine that at times, the setbacks and struggles were crushing, that they felt like defeat. And yet, it’s undeniable that if Remedy had been able to make a sequel to 2010’s Alan Wake some 10 or six years ago, it would not be the game that it is today. Alan Wake 2 is extraordinary in no small part because it is a game that took 13 years to get made, and because, in its creative energy, you can feel the restless struggle, the accumulation of ideas, the desperate search for a way out. Alan Wake 2 is about many things, but perhaps none of them is more crucial to its identity than being about the struggle to make Alan Wake 2.
Starfield is officially out in Early Access for those who got one of several special editions of Bethesda’s long-awaited sci-fi RPG. Though everyone else will have to wait until September 6, several Kotaku staffers decided to shell out for the Early Access editions and spent the first night of launch zipping around space, hoarding junk in their ships, and blowing up pirates. Here’s what we had to say about our first few hours with Starfield.
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Ethan Gach: Starfield has to be the weirdest big new game experience I’ve had this year. I played five hours straight. I would have kept going but a space cowboy’s gotta sleep. At the same time there were so many things that underwhelmed or confused me. How far did everyone get and what was your most memorable moment?
Alyssa Mercante: I am currently trying to track down the VC guy with Sarah. I’m still a bumbling idiot in menus, still struggle to quickly determine how much ammo I have in my weapon, which ammo is for what, how to see the map of an interior space (can you?), and other stuff that’s almost all a mix of weird UI and my impatience.
It’s got the exact kind of grippiness in terms of gameplay loop that I’d expect from Bethesda—I don’t really care about any of this shit yet but I’m sort of lazily plodding on, and mostly enjoying it most of the time.
Levi Winslow: I’m maybe four hours in? I got to New Atlantis, met Sarah and the Constellation gang, then dipped off to Mars and Venus to hunt for Moara. I’m finding some of the systems quite cumbersome and unintuitive. Like, why do I have to bring up the weapon menu to select a different gun or whatever? It’s weird that in other Bethesda games, you can quick-swap between weapons on the fly, but you can’t in Starfield? Unless I missed something, which is totally possible. The game gives you so many tutorials for its menus and systems that a quick-swap could’ve been buried. Still, though, I’m having a blast living life as a space cowgirl. Currently, I’m on the hunt for some legendary ship.
Carolyn Petit: I admit, I only got as far as the door of Constellation’s base before calling it a night, and perhaps it’ll grow on me, but it just felt very dated to me, very much like Bethesda holding on to Bethesda design concepts that, in my opinion, it really doesn’t need to hold onto anymore. For instance, when I arrived in New Atlantis, I immediately walk past this group of people who are just dispensing exposition at each other in the clumsiest way. One character says something really disparaging and messed-up about a certain group of people, and someone else calmly replies, “That’s unfair,” before proceeding to rattle off an entire story about a positive experience he had with them, all while everyone else in the group just looks on. People just don’t talk or interact this way in my opinion, and I felt less like I was in a bustling new city and more like I was in line for a ride at Disneyland where animatronic figures are stiffly filling me in on the ride’s lore.
EG: Yea I didn’t immediately find a way to hot-swap weapons either. Between that and constantly being overloaded with enemy loot and no easy place to go to sell it all, I spent probably a third of my entire session last night just scrolling back and forth over a bunch of weapons (including to see which ones I actually still had ammo for).
My most memorable moment was talking down the initial pirates you run into outside of that first moon and then blowing them up with the literal red barrel behind them. 2010 is soooo back. I do agree Carolyn it feels very stagey in a dated sort of way. The game is constantly reminding you it’s a game, in a way I didn’t get from say, Cyberpunk 2077. It reminds me so much of The Outer Worlds in many ways, which was a much more satirical take on the whole genre.
LW: Just adding to your point about blowing up the first space pirates…
Levi shares a Reddit post showing how one person blew up the barrel behind the pirates before the cutscene could even begin.
CP: I also didn’t love that the game forces you to go do this combat mission so early on, before you even meet Constellation and really get introduced to the game’s core concept. To me, it felt a bit like Bethesda lacking faith in its own concept of this wide-open spacefaring game, as if it felt the need to reassure gamers: Don’t worry, this is still a video game-ass video game in which you get to gun down lots of dudes.
LW: I agree. I barely even listened to those dudes. Knowing what I was getting into, I skipped their dialogue and shot them up. Really, I just wanted some quick loot to sell for even quicker cash, which leads me to one of my biggest gripes with this game: There’s so much shit to collect. I know that’s very Bethesda but wow, the sheer amount of stuff to pick up and pore over in this game is staggering.
CP: That’s one Bethesda-ism I have no problem with. I find it comical and enjoyable. In that research base where you fight the pirates, I saw a little zen garden on someone’s desktop and immediately grabbed it for my own. It’ll be one of the millions of stolen items eventually decorating my ship or my space-house or whatever.
EG: Has anyone tried to do persuasion?
LW: Yeah I tried it on the dude at the bar when looking for Moara. (Jack, I think his name was. Maybe John?) I failed it, but then got Sarah to convince him to lower the price of his info, which worked.
CP: I tried to get out of killing the initial pirate boss with persuasion. I failed, and didn’t fully grasp how it worked. There was a pop-up that said something like “you can’t fail if your previous choice succeeded.” Huh? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll make sense of it in time but it was a little befuddling at first.
AM: I used one of my first skill points for speech, and tried persuasion with the bar guy as well. It worked, but I also did not fully comprehend what I was doing
EG: Yea, there’s a later mission where you are trying to convince a dad alienated from his son to hand over a map and at first it’s like, okay how are we gonna navigate 30 years of emotional baggage and then instead I said something like, you know giving him the map is what so-and-so would have wanted, and bingo. It was so goofy.
Claire Jackson and Zack Zwiezen enter the chat.
Zack Zwiezen: I’ve used persuasion a few times and it’s been helpful. Skipped the pirate boss fight, for example. I’m still learning how it works, but its nice to see Bethesda bringing back some RPG-ish systems like that. Reminds me of the weird Oblivion persuasion minigame! With the weird circle and sliding stuff around. I don’t think I ever got good at that one. This Starfield one seems a bit simpler and I think I mostly get it.
Claire Jackson: Good to know you can skip the pirate boss fight…my attempt at resolving that ended up with me bashing an ax into his face. And I was genuinely trying not to kill anyone. Period!
Maybe it’s just the nature of the game’s opening needing to hold your hand to learn all its complex systems and set you up for the quest, but I was also dismayed that I couldn’t choose to stay on the mining planet. I mean, I touched a weird thing, saw a weird thing, and now some rando is like, “Here take my ship and go talk to this space secret society or whatever, though they won’t have answers for you. Sorry. By the way, you’re a captain now!”
ZZ: It moves pretty fast and I wonder if that was a reaction to how slow Fallout 4‘s intro was and how people didn’t seem to like that.
EG: I was so relieved. No messing around.
ZZ: Agreed. It was nice to just get going. I was worried I’d have to spend four hours in the mine finding a sweet roll for someone.
CJ: I wanted to mess around lol. I wanted to just hang out and mine some stuff. The game wants me to be a hero so badly, and enough games do that for me that I kinda wanted this to unravel itself a bit more slowly.
ZZ: I will say, once you get through with that first big quest and intro stuff, the game truly goes, “Okay, do whatever you want.” At that point you can go be a space miner and never worry about the main story again.
CJ: That’s a relief. So maybe my space gal can be someone who just had one traumatic encounter with space pirates, dropped off some weird who-the-hell-knows-what to these brainiacs, and then just went about her life where she’ll unpack that PTSD-inducing episode after years and years of therapy. That’s all I want. Space therapy.
AM: Within moments of picking up my rock cutter laser I tried to kill someone in the mines, so the intrusive thoughts are already beating my ass.
ZZ: Hot tip: That laser cutter is a very good weapon early on and uses no ammo! It stunlocks people and can even blow up their packs, killing others. Handy! And fun.
EG: Starfield is definitely a resource-extraction fantasy. Mine stuff! Loot stuff! Steal stuff! Use it to do cool things. So far navigating relationships and political factions has really taken a backseat.
ZZ: It was nice to end my time with the first companion, Sarah, and not feel like she wanted to jump my bones. A break from Baldur’s Gate 3, haha. But yeah, it’s clear that certain parts of Starfield got more attention and resources than others.
EG: I found a mysterious map to a pirate hideout or something earlier this morning so that’s cool. The thing keeping me excited to come back at the moment is the fact that it still feels like there are a ton of possibilities lurking out there. Whether that’s actually the case or not, the early game is really good at making you at least feel like you’re barely scratching the surface.
LW: I agree. I’m sure the novelty of Bethesda’s systems will wear thin after a few dozen hours, but the early game has me hooked. Running up to my ship, hopping into the cockpit to blast off into the cosmos, getting into a couple of dogfights with space pirates then looting their ships, landing on a planet to sell my goods before embarking on a bounty—it’s all giving Cowboy Bebop, a fantasy I’ve longed for in video games. It’s not totally there. Some mechanics are still quite unwieldy, but Starfield is letting me live out that bounty hunter lifestyle, and I simply can’t get enough of that right now.
AM: I did get a similar feeling to one I saw Ethan mention on Twitter (X, whatever) before—I woke up excited to play this. For all the jank, for all the confusing menus, there’s enough good stuff here that I am willing to spend more time exploring, lurking, looting, and what have you. How long will this last me? I’m not sure yet. But for now, I’m not all that angry that I’m going into this long weekend with a cold—now I can just sit inside and play Starfield.
Long after the world has burned and civilization has fallen apart, the robots of Fallout continue to function. Even centuries after Earth has been nearly destroyed by nukes and humanity barely clings on, the AI-powered robots of humanity’s heyday roam the wasteland and continue to do their jobs.
Some may say they are impressively dedicated. I think it just shows how stupid and awful these robots tend to be. They can’t even tell the world has ended, they just mindlessly do what they were programmed to do. They can’t create art, invent anything, or really provide any benefit of their own to humanity because they are merely tools we created.
And in Fallout, they aren’t just idiots still trying to run diners after the nukes have fallen, but dangerous enemies, too. Their AI-powered brains—unable to understand context, history, or emotion—will attack most people on sight. Ironic, isn’t it, that robots and AI in the Fallout universe might end up killing us all and destroying all we have created when they themselves are our own creations? Anyway, grab a laser rifle and double-tap any robobrains you see in Fallout 3. They deserve it. —Zack Zwiezen
Play it on: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Windows (Steam Deck OK)
My current goal: Conquer every Stronghold
You read that right, on Steam Deck baby! The step-by-step process to get the just-released Diablo IV working on the Deck took me a little over 30 minutes and was relatively painless. However I do highly recommend using a Steam Deck dock and USB mouse, as there’s a decent amount of copy-pasting and the Deck’s touch-screen controls can be finicky.
Since installing, I’ve played nothing else. Partly because I accidentally unmounted my Steam Deck library so it no longer recognizes what I’ve already installed on there through the store (oops) and partially because Diablo IV on the Deck is simply that rad.
It’s impressive how well the Deck’s default controller scheme jells with Diablo IV. Blizzard’s action-RPG is perfect to play while listening to a podcast or catching up on the borderline dispiriting amount of quality spring anime series I have to watch.
How’s performance you may ask? Pretty good, actually. After tweaking some essential settings, and turning off Cross-Network Play (yes that really did make a difference) I consistently get 40-60FPS let’s say…80 percent of the time. However, entering or leaving a major hub (Kyovashad for example) or a hectic world event has my poor base model Deck wheezing and running at single digits. Using an ultimate spell in a large crowd of enemies will also have your audio popping off, and not in a fun way either. And as you can imagine D4 is a battery Greater Evil. I recommend playing with your AC charger plugged in for sessions longer than 30 minutes.
But like cmon, being able to tackle a Stronghold while laying on my couch? That’s objectively awesome and I look forward to parking my ass on aforementioned couch after I send Claire this blurb. Bye! — Eric Schulkin
It is May 12, 2023, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom release day, and the temperature in New York City is creeping dangerously close to 90 degrees. In Midtown, bankers are sweating through their Brooks Brothers dress shirts and slacks, while tourists have busted out the cargo shorts. As I make my way out of the subway station near Rockefeller Center, I walk smack into a massive line of people. I sneer, assuming it’s the wildly long Nintendo Store line from more than a block away that our managing editor Carolyn Petit saw earlier this morning (I hate the idea of waiting in lines), but nope, the Jonas Brothers are at Rough Trade.
Disney’s New Post-Apocalyptic Anime Proves The Mouse Has Good Taste
The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
Monday 3:53PM
Hours later, I head out to sit in the blazing sun for a bit to recharge my battery and notice the front of the Nintendo store looks conspicuously spacious. I hustle over, figuring I’ll snag a copy for someone else at Kotaku who wants to play (I do not). But as soon as I approach the front entrance to the building, which is on the corner of Rockefeller Plaza and 48th street, I realize the line is snaking down the adjacent street. It sits directly in the sun, many of the people waiting are visibly sweating.
At random intervals, a huge gap of bodies indicates the presence of a driveway, a few security guys making sure it remains open for cars passing through. Several future Tears of the Kingdom owners are hunched over playing Nintendo Switch. One woman is sitting on the sidewalk in shorts, a New York City no-no.
“Oh, fuck this,” I mumble before heading back to the dry, frigid air of the G/O Media offices. I may not be a big Zelda fan, but I don’t think there’s anything in the world that could make me wait hours on a line in Midtown Manhattan in the midst of a heatwave.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom lines feel very nostalgic
Despite my beliefs, I’m fascinated to see people waiting in lines like this across the U.S. for the Breath of the Wild sequel. It feels sort of like a bygone era of gaming has returned—the last time I went to the midnight release of a game was November 2012 for Halo 4 at a Best Buy in Long Island, New York. I was 22 years old, and I was incredibly hyped.
The need to wait in long lines for midnight game releases has disappeared over the years, as more and more gamers turn to digital storefronts and downloads in order to get a new game the moment it releases, and the need for physical media wanes. (Though the side effects of a shift to entirely digital have been felt in the loss of access to so many movies—like sci-fi thriller Strange Days, which for some time was nearly impossible to watch without a physical DVD, only just becoming available to stream this year—and will undoubtedly soon affect games.) In 2012, you couldn’t play Halo 4 in any way other than on the two discs that came in the Master Chief-adorned case, but that’s simply not the case now.
What is it about Tears of the Kingdom that’s brought lines back in such a big way? After all, the Nintendo eShop is open 24/7, you can download the game right now without having to stand up for hours at a time, shuffling every 10 or so minutes a few inches closer to the shining glass Nintendo store doors. You can play Tears of the Kingdom right this second, no long-time exposure to stagnant, exhaust-filled NYC air required. Why, people in line, are you not doing this?
For many, the promise of special swag beckons. The Nintendo store has special-edition pins (and other “surprise giveaways”), many of which will undoubtedly end up on eBay for thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, Target has a fanny pack that people are freaking out over. The allure of impossible-to-get swag will always attract gamers, a group known to be completionists and collectors through and through.
But perhaps, despite my decidedly Grinch-y attitude about waiting in long lines for a video game, people are happily queuing for Tears of the Kingdom for the vibes, y’all. They’ve waited six years for a sequel to Breath of the Wild; what’s a few, sweaty hours more, especially in the company of your fellow die-hard fans?
My life changed forever when I got a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 (losing those discs has haunted me ever since). While I enjoy much of the 2020 Remake, the original experience is irreplaceably special to me. I start a new playthrough of it at least once a year, every year. Other times, I’ll just jump into a random save file I was working my way through at some point. It must be on anything I own that can run it.
Since 2015, the remaster (not Remake) has made the experience much smoother; and it’s always fun to occasionally mess around with mods that tweak character models or apply AI upscaled backgrounds to clean up the image.
The story, the characters, the landmark soundtrack with gorgeous compositions and tear-jerking melodies surpass the limitations of the rather humdrum sounds the midi-controlled sequencer on the PSX produced, it culminates into not just one of my favorite video games of all time, it’s one of my favorite media experiences, period.
Final Fantasy VII, in its original form, is an epic story of identity, friendship, love, and struggle in the face of insurmountable odds against seemingly unstoppable foes. I delight, as I did in my youth, blissfully getting lost in it. Its world, with blocky polygonal models might seem primordial by today’s standards, but to me its graphical limitations are an abstract that paints a bigger picture in my head—one that no amount of modern, hyper powerful game engines with all the bells and whistles will ever be able to touch.
And, yeah, you were right, Aeris; it was always the only way.
I was warned of how heated Kotaku’s GOTY arguments traditionally get when I first started here in November, so I was a little nervous when I was put in charge of organizing and tabulating our list of the best games of the year.
Would everyone vote? Would they get mad at me for ranking Destiny 2: The Witch Queen too high? Would Ethan Gach actually do what he was threatening and “hobgoblin” the voting process by adding negative points to the equation?
Turns out, however, that even though organizing this entire process was a pain in the ass, the team at Kotaku is exactly as opinionated, intelligent, and professional as you might expect, offering great insight and honest takes on the top games of 2022. Though we voted on over 20 titles (including ones that narrowly missed this list like Rollerdrome and Sifu) we narrowed it down to a top 10, and have ranked them in order below.
How does Kotaku’s top 10 games of 2022 stack up with your personal GOTY lists?
10. Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Image: Monolith Soft / Nintendo
Reductively, Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s story is an amalgamation of Japanese RPGs whose emotional climax rests on the age-old theme of “war is bad.” Nevertheless, the fact that the trope has become a well-trodden cliché doesn’t dismiss how well developer Monolith Soft executes its anti-war theme throughout Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s 150 hours of playtime.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, you play as a troupe of child soldiers from warring nations locked in an endless battle where their limited lifespans fuel a giant mechanical clock once they meet their untimely demise. The kids are not alright. But despite the painful emotional journey its child soldiers must go on, which is portrayed with the emotional maturity and complexity it deserves, the game is not without some great moments of levity as well, courtesy of some lighthearted and silly sidequests. Meanwhile, Xenoblade’s more serious sidequests drip-feed players with rich character studies that flesh out each member of the party, along with the game’s expansive world and its deep cast of supporting characters.
Although Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was snubbed for the best roleplaying game and best soundtrack at Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards, it did give us an impassioned flutist performance from Pedro “Flute Guy” Eustache. This shows that even if Xenoblade loses at gaming’s glorified popularity contest, it still provides some of the best moments in gaming this year.
Isaiah Colbert, Staff Writer
9. Signalis
Image: rose-engine
Much like how I use Devil May Cry 5 as the measuring stick for how good a hack-and-slash game is, whenever I brave playing a survivor horror game I do so with the hope that its story measures up to Silent Hill 2. Big shoes to fill, I know. Signalis not only manages to fill those shoes, it damn near tore the seams off of them joints with how bloody good it was. I’d even argue that it’s better than Silent Hill 2.
Signalis has all the bells and whistles that make for a good sci-fi survival horror game. It’s got a brutal-but-fair limited inventory system, brain-teasing puzzles, and breadcrumb storytelling conveyed through codex entries scattered about its levels. However, where Signalis sings is with its gripping story about two lesbian androids desperately trying to find each other in a space hellscape.
Throughout the game, you play as an android named Elster who’s stranded on an alien planet rife with horrific monsters and derelict spaceships. Elster’s sole mission is to reunite with Anne, a fellow android unit she both literally and figuratively can’t live without. Signalis sticks its landing with the emotional climax of Elster’s perilous journey, regardless of which of the game’s multiple endings you arrive at. This feat is even more impressive considering Signalis is the first video game made by its two-person development team, rose-engine. Ay yo, 2023, can we get some more of those sapphic survivor horror vidya games, plz?
Isaiah Colbert, Staff Writer
8. Norco
Image: Raw Fury
Norco emerged this year and joined Kentucky Route Zero and a few others on the shortlist of games that speak deeply to the experience of living under late-stage capitalism in America at this precise moment in time. Like Cardboard Computer’s masterpiece, Norco also takes its cues from point-and-click adventures, using stunning pixel art to pull us into its industrialized Louisiana landscapes. And where KR0 lent its midwestern road trip a heaping helping of magical realism, Norco uses near-future sci-fi elements to cast the forces its poor, marginalized characters face in sharper relief.
But don’t let my easy comparison make you think Norco is a pale imitator of another game. It’s very much its own remarkable experience, one with its own visual identity, its own poetic voice, and its own noir-ish mystery. Everything about Norco rings painfully true, from its observant little environmental details like the electrified hum of a street light, to the much larger way that religion, cryptocurrency, and the oil industry all become woven together in the haunting texture of your character’s search for her missing brother. Norco, Louisiana is a real place. The Norco of this game is not quite that place, but it’s nevertheless one that feels very real in its own way, and that will leave you reeling from the piercing gaze it levels at the world we’ve made for ourselves.
Carolyn Petit, Managing Editor
7. Horizon Forbidden West
Image: Sony
Poor Aloy. Twice now, her adventures have been somewhat overshadowed at the time of release by other games that more dramatically captured the world’s attention. Her first outing, Horizon Zero Dawn, launched just a few days before Breath of the Wild. This year, her second quest was followed a week later by Elden Ring.
But despite repeatedly serving as the opening act for games that go on to sweep the GOTYs of a hundred gaming sites, Guerrilla Games and Aloy can be proud of what they’ve accomplished. Arguably the most visually stunning game of the year, Guerrilla’s latest takes Aloy into the ruined American west for more of the thrilling, spectacular battles with hulking metallic beasts that helped make the first game an original in a sea of samey open-world blockbusters. And although the larger narrative may fly a bit off the rails in this outing, Forbidden West wisely stays focused on Aloy’s personal journey as someone who feels the weight of the world on her shoulders and doesn’t know how to let her guard down and allow her friends to carry that burden with her. It complicates her character and trusts us as players not to turn on her the moment she behaves in ways that are arrogant, cruel, or misguided. Oh, and you get a really sweet new travel option near the end of the game, too.
Yes, when all is said and done, Aloy and her escapades can stand tall alongside the Links and the myriad Tarnished of the world.
Carolyn Petit, Managing Editor
6. Neon White
Image: Annapurna Interactive
It was about 3 in the morning. I had plans the next day. I really needed to go to bed. Yet, here I was hunched over my computer focused on shaving just one more second off a level in Neon White so I could beat a friend on my leaderboard. That’s the power of fast-paced, FPS platformer Neon White. It’s the kind of game that feels so good that you just can’t stop playing it. Once you get skilled enough to start finding shortcuts in levels, it’s over–the game has you at that point. You’ll end up going back to old levels you thought you mastered to shave off more time. And if you enjoy anime nonsense, angels, demons, and sick-ass music, too, then Neon White will dig its angelic claws deeply into you and never let go. “One more run…and then I’ll go to bed.” I didn’t get to sleep that night until nearly 4:30 am.
Zack Zwiezen, Staff Writer
5. Citizen Sleeper
Image: Jump Over The Age
The profane and sacred mingle with delicate grace in Jump Over The Age’s minimalist cyberpunk RPG about trying to earn your humanity from a world that can’t pay its debts. Every detail from the writing and art to the branching choices and tabletop-inspired dice rolls connect, overlap, and reinforce each other with precision and care so that no piece is weaker than the rest and no rough edge is left exposed. Few games manage to evoke universal feelings or personal truths, but Citizen Sleeper does both at the same time. The future never felt so hopeless and yet so comforting.
Ethan Gach, Senior Reporter
4. Marvel Snap
Image: Second Dinner / Kotaku
Going into 2022, I don’t know how many people expected a free-to-play Marvel card game designed for phones to end up being one of the best and most popular games of the year, yet, here we are. Second Dinner’s fantastic bite-sized card battler, Marvel Snap, really is one of the best digital card games out there right now thanks to its small decks, fast rounds, and random nature. Matches always feel different and even a loss doesn’t sting too bad because it’s over so fast. Sure, it’s still a free-to-play mobile game, so you can expect stuff like iffy over-priced bundles and having to grind for currency. But luckily Marvel Snap is so fun to play that it’s pretty easy to overlook those bits and enjoy one of 2022’s best games.
Zack Zwiezen, Staff Writer
3. Vampire Survivors
Image: poncle
One more run. A sentence I’ve repeated countless times in 2022 either in my head or quietly aloud to justify playing Vampire Survivors for just a little while longer. The gothic roguelike shoot ‘em up became a surprise smash hit while spawning worthy spiritual siblings like 20 Minutes Till Dawn.
Since Valve started releasing the data in August, Vampire Survivors has been tops in total hours played on Steam Deckmonth in and month out. This is the same Steam Deck that can run frickin’ Elden Ring! But people want to play Vampire Survivors instead!
All those players are onto something, Vampire Survivors has a simple yet satisfying gameplay loop: your character (I’m partial to Peppino) must survive an ever-growing horde of ghoulies while choosing between randomly generated weapons. If you make it to 30 minutes, the reaper will come calling, which lets you spend coins on power-ups for future runs. You can be strategic in choosing weapons that complement each other or you can just try shit out! These elements of discovery, relentless isometric top down action, and Vampire’s lax attitude towards player death (it has zero impact) remind me a lot of Hades, another regular on that Steam Deck most-played list, and another GOTY contender from years past.
Vampire Survivors’ developer Luca Galante/poncle has regularly been updating the game since it left early access, adding modes, quality of life improvements, and settings to tweak for extra replayability. What’s more, the game recently got its first full-fledged DLC the other week with Legacy of the Moonspell. With the base game retailing at five dollars ($4 under the current Steam sale), Vampire Survivors makes for one of the better bang-for-your-buck propositions in gaming. Go ahead and treat yourself to some floor chicken.
Eric Schulkin, Video Lead
2. God of War Ragnarök
Image: Sony
Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarök is more of everything. More abilities and weapons. More enemies and locations. More characters and plot details. Hell, even more loot. Though you could interpret this as a knock against the game, especially since more isn’t always better, Ragnarök takes the “more” and deftly applies it in tasteful ways while making room for a compelling narrative and gameplay experience that’s enjoyable and immersive. Combat is crunchy, exploration is intriguing, dialogue is captivating, and the themes are deep and engaging. But what stands out as the glisten on the diamond is the character development between daddy Kratos and adolescent Atreus, an element that sees the co-protagonists finding common understanding in the face of the end of the world. Sometimes, it takes things falling apart for empathy to be reached, and God of War Ragnarök is a glowing example of just that. It’s good shit.
Levi Winslow, Staff Writer
1. Elden Ring
Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
Are you surprised? Elden Ring easily and inevitably took the top spot during our voting process, further proving that 2022 was the year of Elden Ring. Many Kotaku staff members ranked it as their number one game of the year, and for good reason. FromSoftware’s open-world epic feels like a giant leap forward for the Souls-like franchise, offering us a beautifully deformed and dangerous Lands Between to explore, rife with opportunities to discover oddities, collect goodies, and die over and over again.
Elden Ring opened up Hidetaka Miyazaki ’s sick, twisted world for the normies who haven’t enjoyed FromSoft games before it, while also making sure to still cater to the hardened vets looking to prove their worth in incredibly tough battles. It found a perfect balance between that punishing gameplay so many long for in a game from this studio and a newfound sense of agency, of a chance toget gud without having to run into the same noxious swamp over and over again.
Elden Ring is technically impressive, visually stunning, and satisfyingly challenging. It has humor, it has sadness, it has turtle popes. It dashes your hopes up against a jagged rock only to hand you hope back bit-by-bit as you strengthen your character and your resolve. It is everything that we hope for in a video game, and then some.
Photoshop is my true Elden Ring, and I haven’t gotten gud yet.Image: FromSoftware / Kotaku
In recent years, it’s become harder and harder for me to make the kinds of in-depth, year-end personal best lists that I once prided myself on. That newfound difficulty is for one reason: I’m not playing as many games. This year, there are so many games I either didn’t play at all or didn’t spend enough time with that may have earned a place on this list if only I’d given them more of a chance. Those games include (but are not limited to) Perfect Tides, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Pentiment, Citizen Sleeper, and Norco. I’m sorry I didn’t make time for you this year. I’m sure some of you, at least, are great.
So I’m keeping this year’s list to a tight five, acknowledging that it might have looked very different if I’d played more games. Please accept it in the spirit in which it’s given, not as an exhaustive evaluation of games in 2022, but as a snapshot of some of the games I spent time with and admired throughout the year.
Honorable Mention: God of War Ragnarök
Screenshot: Sony
I dunno, man. I didn’t love it. I’ll certainly remember it, though, in all its frustrating rigidity, and it’s one of the few games I played to completion this year, so it earns a spot on this list, if not a number. God of War Ragnarök is a game in which the main character, ostensibly a god, is frequently unable to leap across tiny gaps to smash the chest or reach the path on the other side because the true gods here, the game designers whose heavy hand you feel at every turn, say he has to do it the intended way. It’s an endlessly limiting game, with Kratos as trapped as Pac-Man in his maze. It’s a game in which characters are constantly wondering and worrying about whether their fates are dictated by prophecy, which is ironic given that the game itself is so trapped by formula and expectation.
Ragnarök seems to want to deepen Kratos as a character, to question all the unbridled rage and quick-time-event sex-minigame misogyny of the original God of War games, but it can’t actually shatter the chains that bind it, because then, what would it be? What would it be if Kratos didn’t haveto be an angry killing machine? What if he could actually show more emotional growth and expression than a tiny, late-game bit of tenderness, which only feels significant because we’re so used to seeing him express no tenderness at all? What if he could cast off patriarchy altogether and find a new way forward?
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Sadly, we may never know, as the marketplace still seems to set strict limits on just what a “AAA,” prestige release can be. The one thing I really appreciate about Ragnarök is how, in the end, one character is left truly broken by grief, and the game doesn’t try to bring it to a tidy resolution. There’s nothing anyone can say to fix it, to solve it, to make it go away. It felt like a kernel of surprising emotional honesty in a game that is mostly just going through the motions of being what fate dictates it must be.
Honorable Mention: Vampire Survivors
Screenshot: poncle
Here’s one that didn’t quite make the list but that I fully appreciated, without qualm or reservation. I’m normally very suspicious of games that seem focused on letting you become a ludicrously powerful figure who can wipe out enemies by the hundreds. Vampire Survivors, however, is just so gleefully unapologetic about it, fully embracing its nature as a video-game-ass video game, that it won me over. There’s a real sense of joy and discovery here as you pursue powerful new weapon fusions which let you harvest your unending legions of Castlevania-inspired foes even more effectively and in even more dazzling ways. On a really good run, the screen can get filled with so much 8-bit weaponry and pixelated carnage that it all starts to look like a psychedelic kaleidoscope of holy vengeance. Now that’s what I call gaming.
Atari 50
Screenshot: Atari / Digital Eclipse
Now the true list begins with this, game number five in my ranking. Almost certainly the best video game compilation ever made, this 50th anniversary Atari retrospective offers both a look back at one of the most important and influential forces in early home gaming, and a look at what the future of gaming retrospectives could and should be.
What elevates Atari 50 head and shoulders above your standard collection of older games is its gorgeous, timeline-format presentation. As you make your way through various aspects of Atari’s history—early arcade games, early console games, home computers, and so on—the games and the hardware are contextualized with tons of wonderful new interviews, archival footage, and other material that helps tell the story of just why these games, and the people who made them, are so important. Here’s hoping other developers take a cue from Atari 50 and give their early games the treatment they deserve.
Artist and writer Brianna Lei’s follow-up to her 2017 visual novel may be the most deeply human game of the year. The four central characters continue to navigate things like crushing parental expectations, confusing thoughts about gender, and romantic yearning for other girls in scenes that are by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.
It’s not just the subject matter or the great sense of humor that makes Butterfly Soup 2 remarkable, though; it’s that Lei reveals to us the rich and complicated inner lives of her characters—their hopes, their insecurities, their fears—in ways that feel organic, honest, and compassionate. In video games, the explorations of character that get the most attention and praise are often those that accompany big-budget mainstream action. In my opinion, though, there’s more heart and more insight into the human condition in this two-hour game about queer Asian high-school girls than there is in most post-apocalyptic blockbusters or games about violent dads trying to be better.
I was both excited about and wary of Return to Monkey Island, series creator Ron Gilbert’s return to the helm of the comedic pirate adventure saga. The last entry he oversaw was 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, which has one of the all-time great video game endings—one so good, in fact, that for a long time I swore off later games in the series, as they both lacked Gilbert’s guiding hand and flew in the face of 2’s conclusion. Could even he, I wondered, make a game worthy of following up such a boldly uncompromising moment?
But here’s the thing. I’m a teensy bit older now than I was when Monkey Island 2 came out. I’m less wowed by raw artistic boldness and more moved by human frailty, kindness, and honesty. Ron Gilbert is older, too, and you feel a gentle reckoning with that in this game, as Guybrush goes on a kind of existential quest, one of those “what does it all mean” things that calls into question what his whole life as a pirate has really even been about. Return to Monkey Island is suffused with tenderness, above all. Sure, it’s still funny, and Guybrush is as irresistibly likable as ever, but there’s a poignant quality to him and the game itself this time around, an acceptance that things change and that life doesn’t quite play out the way you think it will. There’s beauty in that, too. Return to Monkey Island is just lovely.
Elden Ring
Screenshot: FromSoftware
When I first played Dark Souls, I felt like something in my brain was being rewired as I discovered all the intricate ways its interlocking, shortcut-filled world turned in on itself. And like many others, I found a kind of therapeutic catharsis in throwing myself against its grueling gauntlet, facing defeat again and again and again until finally, bruised and bloody, I stood victorious. It became a way of facing internal demons of doubt and fear, of enduring the world’s transphobic slings and arrows and remaining unbowed.
Elden Ring couldn’t quite match those glorious heights for me, though I appreciate that its open-world format, which makes its myriad challenges more approachable but no less uncompromising, meant that with this game, many got to experience those thrills for the first time. But even if it didn’t burrow into my very soul (no pun intended) the way Dark Souls did, the Lands Between still captivated me with their faded grandeur and their sense of true mystery—mystery of the sort that reveals, by contrast, just how embarrassingly eager so many game worlds are to force-feed you everything they have to offer.
Fortnite
Image: Epic Games
But alas, there was one world which captivated me even more. Epic’s battle-royale juggernaut continues to have, for my money, the best world in all of games—a world that is constantly changing, constantly evolving and slipping away; a world that, unlike most game worlds, actually exists in time and feels its passage. (It’s because the game is constantly reinventing itself that I have no qualms about including it on a 2022 list.)
Over the course of the game’s seasons and chapters, the world shifts in ways big and small, always in flux where so many worlds feel stagnant. Locations that come to feel as familiar to you as an old hoodie sooner or later fade, and when they’re gone, you can never, ever go back. As the world evolves, so too does the game, which is in a state of constant change—and loss. New gameplay mechanics, too, come and go with the seasons, not because the game is striving for some kind of ultimate, perfect “optimization” of mechanics and balance, but simply because things change.
The ever-evolving island is the perfect setting for this game of wild, radical contingency, a game in which the actions of players ping-pong off of each other in ways so complicated by chance and choice that there’s no room for the bullshit “meritocracy” mindset that poisons so much of gaming culture. Sure, some people are much better at the game than others, but with 99 players running around, their encounters influenced by so many factors, Fortnite is at least as much a big chaos-theory playground as it is a test of skill. Each match is home to a dozen or more stories that unfolded just so and will never, ever happen quite that way again. And as you make your way across the island, you see the evidence of them—a pile of goodies marking a player’s death near a few hastily tossed-up walls; a smoking semi-truck half-submerged in a river; a confrontation happening in the distance with players ping-ponging across the landscape, using this season’s shockwave hammers to fling themselves wildly into the air and then come crashing down on their opponents.
Of course, Fortnite constantly breaks my heart, too. In what I can only assume is an effort by Epic to make it so that all of the game’s human players win, on average, somewhat more than one out of every hundred games, it’s flooded the island with bots, beginning with the start of the game’s second chapter in October of 2019. They may seem like human players of rudimentary skill to those players who weren’t around back in the game’s pre-bot days, but their presence and simplistic behavior saps the game of much of its dynamism. I’d much rather have every confrontation be with a human adversary whose desire to survive and to win I can feel coming through in their actions, even if it means I rarely score a victory royale myself, than frequently encounter these non-human opponents who practically offer themselves up to my crosshairs.
But what can I do? The kind of life, vibrancy, comedy and tragedy that Fortnite offers remains unique in my experience in the gaming landscape, so I’ll keep leaping onto the island, always eager to see what signs of life and change I might stumble upon this time.
Try to imagine something cozier than wearing a big snuggly Christmas jumper, there’s a fire roaring, and you’re calmly and methodically placing in pieces of a lovely 1,000 piece jigsaw. It’s the holiday idyll, you can practically see the first few flakes of snow falling out the frosted windows, as a kindly aunt bustles in with a lovely mug of hot chocolate for you. And while all that might sound ridiculously unlikely this year, you can get awfully close to recreating it with Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams.
This is unlike any other jigsaw puzzle game you might have seen released on Steam. First of all, it’s all set in a 3D home that you can decorate as you wish. Secondly, it embraces physics, where every other jigsaw sim saps the concept of all its tangible life. So whether at a table, on the upstairs landing, or just sprawled out on the living room floor, you can take on any of the game’s dozens of jigsaw designs, or import any picture of your own, then click it all together. You can pick how many pieces, up to ludicrous numbers in the high thousands, and then meticulously sort the edges from the insides, pile them up or spread them out however you wish, and get to work.
It’s such an authentic recreation, but with limitless numbers of puzzles, no clutter, and no losing pieces in the couch. (Although you genuinely can have them fall off the table, given the accuracy of the physics.)—John Walker
Space Quest IV: Carolyn Petit and the Time RippersScreenshot: Sierra Entertainment
It must have been Christmas of 1991 that I found Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers under the tree, and got the gift of seeing exciting new possibilities in games.
I was a fan of adventure games, sure, having played a few games in Sierra’s King’s Quest series, not to mention Lucasfilm’s brilliant and bizarre early titles like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. But this was my first experience with Space Quest, Sierra’s comedic sci-fi series starring Roger Wilco, the hapless space-janitor who finds himself thrust into one cosmic misadventure after another.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about the quality of Space Quest IV’s puzzles. What I do remember is how varied and vibrant its universe seemed, with harsh alien worlds, moody cantinas, and glitzy space-malls. But what really knocked my socks off about the game was how meta it was. After progressing a bit through Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers itself, poor Roger finds himself flung into (the non-existent) Space Quest XII: Vohaul’s Revenge II.
Screenshot: Sierra Entertainment
Today, it’s not so uncommon for games to break the fourth wall and wink knowingly at the player about being video games, to play with conventions in ways both tired and inspired. But wow, was this exciting for me in 1991! The game also sees you venturing into Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros (an obvious riff on the 1986 Infocom adventure Leather Goddesses of Phobos) and all the way back to the original Space Quest, which already looked humorously primitive and pixelated compared to 1991’s state-of-the-art graphics, making high(er)-definition Roger Wilco all the more conspicuous.
Screenshot: Sierra Entertainment
Space Quest IV may or may not be a great game, I honestly don’t remember well enough to say. I just remember sitting there on my Christmas break, awestruck by the clever meta-ness of it all, and having my mind expanded about the possibilities of what video game storytelling and structure could do.
