Lurker > Paratroopa1

Might as well keep this going to 500 lol

I ended up playing Paradise Killer and Kentucky Route Zero this week and I'm relieved to say that neither of them would have made my top 50

One more save from oblivion

Let's save this one more time

I almost let this purge but I actually haven't archived all of it, whoops! I need to remember to do that.

Saving this for as long as I can

Oh damn, that's unfortunate. Fortunately in the meantime FTX died lol

save

Bump

save

I should probably archive this at some point! I have the writeups in another document though

Those are video games from the 80's

I'm only going to officially give up on this when AGDQ begins lol

Saving this for a bit longer

Saving for posterity for just a little longer

I'm going to save this one more time

Bumping this, not ready to lose it yet, haven't archived it lol (I have the writeups saved elsewhere though)

I think at this point I'd like to jump ahead and watch the runs I actually really want to watch. I lost momentum in this project because I couldn't do it at the same time as my games list, which I wanted to focus on, and now that I've been out of it for months I can't get invested again, especially not during a game block that doesn't interest me. I tried to watch a couple runs and I just wasn't feeling it.

I'm in an awkward spot where I WAS going to try to do an update to this but then I forgot but I do kinda have to bump this before it dies just in case I do want to keep giving it a shot

I feel guilty lol

Bringing this up just to make sure people realize I finished the list lol

1. Chicory: A Colorful Tale
2. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
3. Monster Train
4. The Jackbox Party Pack 8
5. New Pokemon Snap
6. Slice & Dice
7. Unsighted
8. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
9. Hades
10. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
11. Phantasy Star Universe (Clementine)
12. Deltarune Chapter 2
13. Mario Party Superstars
14. Ynglet
15. Petal Crash
16. Valheim
17. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
18. Overboard!
19. Gnosia
20. Storybook Brawl
21. Paper Mario: The Origami King
22. WarioWare: Get It Together!
23. Understand
24. Iris and the Giant
25. Ring of Pain
26. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2
27. Spiritfarer
28. Among Us
29. The Jackbox Party Pack 7
30. Inscryption
31. SNKRX
32. Death's Door
33. Astalon: Tears of the Earth
34. The Forgotten City
35. Spookware
36. 30XX
37. Bean and Nothingness
38. Dum-Dum
39. One Step From Eden
40. Mario Golf: Super Rush
41. Pawnbarian
42. RITE
43. The Pedestrian
44. BPM: Bullets Per Minute
45. Murder By Numbers
46. Fall Guys
47. Luck Be a Landlord
48. Webbed
49. Dorfromantik
50. The Legend of Doom

Oh hey, when I went to get screenshots from this game by the way (I elected to use them from my actual save file because it felt personal - I couldn't deal with the idea of using someone else's screenshots of the game featuring art I didn't make), I ended up getting one last secret I nearly missed; the game congratulating me on a 100% completed game!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/9/AAA-H0AAD4Ff.jpg

I got to read all the dev comments which said a lot of the same stuff I wanted to about this game. Now I feel all sad and wistful again. I love this game.

It seems really fitting that I had this event trigger when I went to finally do the writeup for this game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/7/AAA-H0AAD4Fd.jpg

I don't know, there's a lot else I could say about this game. The soundtrack is gorgeous, but I think I'm going to make a little bonus list talking about my favorite soundtracks on this list because I didn't really talk about music enough. Aside from the coloring book aspects, the visual style of this game is just brilliant, as good as conveying the coloring book style as it possibly could be. There's so many little things I could talk about with the story and its characters and how the ending was perfect and made me cry a lot. I can't remember everything I wanted to say at this point, really. I just loved this game to death. That's all I've got.

I think I've done enough here. Have I done enough? Is there more I needed to say? I feel like there's a much better essay about this game I could have written, but maybe not. Maybe I don't need to. Less probably would have been more here. I went off the fucking rails writing this thing. But you know what, yeah, that's good enough. Look, Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game so good that I convinced myself I HAD to write some brilliant fucking essay to convey my feelings about it. I think that says a lot more about the game than anything I could actually say about it. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is one of the best games I've ever played. It's the reason I wanted to make this list; it's the reason I play games. This is what I was looking for when I decided to play a bunch of games. I'll be thinking about this game for years. It's been almost a year now and I'm already desperate to return to this game; it's one of those games for me that I lament that I could only play for the first time once.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/8/AAA-H0AAD4Fe.jpg

That's my list! Thanks for reading. I know that last writeup was a lot. This whole list is a lot! But people seem to enjoy it, and that means a lot to me; I really like writing about my thoughts on stuff and it helps a lot that there's people willing to hear them.

Next up: Well, I'm going to need to take a break before I do my REAL magnum opus: my top 100 games from 1980-2009, a list I've wanted to do for years and years. I'll have to try to exorcise the procrastination demon one more time for that one; hopefully it won't take me as long as this one took, since it's twice as many games. I won't start that one for a while.

I do have one other thing I'm gonna do though. I'm gonna rank all the games on this list by their soundtrack. I'm really committed to just doing this 'for fun', so I'm not gonna spend ages on this. I'll put it in a new topic because I ran out of room in this one. I just kinda wanted to talk about music a little more!

It's a week later now. I'm not kidding. See? I have a fucking problem, and it got me again. Okay, what was I talking about? Right, I was stumbling through finding the words to convey a deeply sentimental obsession with a game about a dog that tries to paint.

Just kidding, I had a power outage for three days first.

Seriously, I've been sitting on this writeup for a month now and I don't even know where to begin. I know I'm taking this thing too damn seriously at this point. Chicory is sitting on my shoulder, and she's growing even more upset with me. I have failed to learn anything. I am supposed to just *paint* and I still don't know how. I have, at least, closed the Slice & Dice window.

You know, I've always wanted to learn how to draw, but I know it's not my calling. People who can draw always say that the key to learning how to draw is just learning by doing; you have to practice or you'll never be good at drawing. I never believe them. I feel like I lack the natural skill for it; my hand is too clumsy, my brain can't hold images very easily, and something gets lost in the translation between what I want to draw in my head and what actually gets produced by the movement of my wrist. I feel like if there was a time for me to learn how to do it better, it was sometime in the past; my non-malleable adult brain, 20+ years removed from being a proper child, is in no position to really cope with the demands of developing a skill like this. But I don't know if there was ever a time I could have done it. I have skills in music, in writing, in game design; it's too greedy to ask that I also have a knack for the visual arts, even though I desperately wish I did.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/4/AAA-H0AAD4Fa.jpg

That's certainly part of why Chicory: A Colorful Tale resonated with me; it's an invitation for me, the artistically challenged, to engage in the hobby a little bit anyway. It's okay that I can't draw; Fries can't either! (I named my main character Fries, by the way. Her default name is Pizza, but I named her Fries. Also I think her gender's supposed to be ambiguous but I interpreted her as a girl so I'm just going with it.) I suppose that if you're actually good at drawing, then it turns out your main character CAN draw, but my main character is Fries, and her drawing ability is exactly equal to mine. Coincidentally, she feels about as self-conscious about it as I do! This is a role I was born to play. I roleplayed the hell out of this game.

But despite the fact that I can't draw, all of the nice people in this world are thankful for my efforts in coloring in the world anyway! Normally I don't really connect with the idea of being a hero and saving the world; that's not really a fantasy that I have any interest in living out. But becoming a great artist from humble beginnings? I actually found myself really getting into the story and playing the character, and going through the trials to become a true Wielder of this magical paintbrush felt personal, somehow, in a way that other games' hero's journeys don't feel personal. They feel like I'm directing someone else's adventure. This one made me feel excited about my own accomplishments.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/5/AAA-H0AAD4Fb.jpg

It helps that the denizens of the world are all actually reactive to what you're doing; they know you're the new Wielder and they react appropriately, and that makes for a fun little NPC quest. Remember when I talked about NPC Quests way back when, which are games where the main point of the game is mostly just talking to cute and useless NPCs? Chicory has a lot of this! Lots of walking around and chatting with folks, but this game does it really well; the characters are unique and fun to talk to. My only complaint about the game in total is that some of them run out of things to talk to a little too quickly, and then never talk to you again.

But there's a lot more to the game than just being an NPC Quest - it's a complete package. The gameplay's fun and varied; it's mostly little puzzles that you have to solve with your various paintbrush powers, coloring stuff on the screen and moving around Splatoon-style in the paint you draw. It's mostly simple, but the game always keeps it moving at a new pace - it introduces new gimmicks and never has you doing them for too long. It mixes exploration with puzzles and action and the occasional boss fight thrown in and each element of the game is just kind of fun. The world is about as large as any Zelda game and as rich with secrets to find, even though all of the secrets are increasingly fancy hats instead of powerups and the like. It makes it no less gratifying to scour each screen for hidden things.

But for me, the most gratifying part of the game was the coloring. When I got to that point where I was falling in love with the game and I didn't want it to end, I just decided to slow it allllll the way down and just... color. My favorite game of 2021 is a glorified coloring book! Go figure. Yeah, like 30% of all the coloring in this game is just coloring in trees, but there's something that's just so relaxing about it. It's strangely novel. Coloring books are nice enough; making an entire playable Zelda-like game that is itself a functioning coloring book is a stroke of genius. It doesn't serve any purpose; coloring everything in doesn't get you anything. It's just something to do for fun! I don't know why this gameplay mechanic of all things is so fascinating to me, but the way it invited me to just slow down and appreciate every little spot on the map was a joy. Ironically, although I'm known for speedrunning, I've always loved taking a game I really love slowly, and Chicory's invitation to take this game slowly was just what I needed.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/6/AAA-H0AAD4Fc.jpg

The art classes were a lot of fun, too. Again, this game's literally about making art, and you can just go take art classes in which the game gives you a prompt for something to draw. It doesn't judge you or anything; it's not really able to, of course. It's just for fun. But it is fun! I really gave it my best attempt, and at the end of the day, I think I did become just a little bit better at drawing. I never really got good at using the tools in this game - I still feel like the paintbrush is a little too wide to draw thin lines with, and I have no idea how people who are really good at drawing manage to make crazy good-looking art in this game. But what I did was good enough for me, and I managed to make stuff that I was kind of proud of. The more I played Chicory, the better I got at actually drawing, and because I got better at drawing, Fries got better at drawing, too. There's a meta-element to the storytelling there that's great.

I don't know why this is. Is it some kind of undiagnosed ADD? I don't know. Maybe? I know people with ADD, and I share some things in common, but not others. Or maybe I just have some kind of mysterious procrastination disease, fuck if I know! Like there's some kind of problem in my brain that stops me from doing productive work for no particular reason. Or, maybe it's just part of how my creative process works. I'm as introverted as introverted gets, and I spend most of the day inside of my own brain; inventing, creating, refining ideas. Before I can really start making something, I feel like I have to go through a long editing process inside my own head, getting everything in order exactly how I want it before I can even begin; how would I know where or how to begin until I have everything in order? I know that most artists would probably consider this a toxic thought process, as the editing process should really come after the first draft of a work, but foolish kid I was, I always considered the idea of a first draft sort of beneath me. Whatever I was going to write, it was going to be perfect on the first try, because I felt I was capable of making a mistake-free work in one attempt, and that flawed process has continued for me until now. It has its benefits; often, when I finally begin work on something, whatever I create really IS good the first try, because I've spent so long in my own head contemplating it, sharpening my ideas to a fine point before making them manifest. I'm capable of creating good works, and I'm capable of doing a lot of that legwork inside my own brain. But of course, it doesn't matter if the first few strokes of the pen, or the brush, or the... uhhh, fuck, what's the musical equivalent? A violin bow? Sure, the first few strokes of the violin bow - none of it matters if these never come to fruition in the first place.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/2/AAA-H0AAD4FY.jpg

In some probably futile sense, I hope that writing a list like this can serve as some sort of therapy to help me with my procrastination, to help me try to work through and diagnose my problems, to see if I can't try to fix myself merely through trying to write. As you can see, it's had... mixed results. I always start out pretty good, getting out the first few writeups in short order, while my energy is at its peak and the stakes are at their lowest. But something always comes up - a vacation, an illness, a random period of depression and insomnia that I can't make sense of, whatever - and the excuses start to pile up. To make matters worse, the list gets harder as I go along, because my energy starts to lag, and the list gets harder to write as I go along. If you followed my Mega Man music ranking, you saw it, and you're seeing it here, too. The first few entries on a list are easy. If the list is comprehensive, and includes bad things at the bottom, then I can easily waltz through a few lines of shitpost about each one and move on - I don't care about the subject matter, so I care less about the quality of my writing. If it's a list like this, where the bottom of the list is merely good, it's still mostly the same deal; a 3-4 paragraphs summarizing the main points of why I enjoyed the game are enough, and I can move on. But as I climb the list, the merely good becomes great, the great becomes excellent, the excellent becomes profound. And the more meaningful something is, the more pressure I put on myself to think of something better and more interesting to say about it. I can't write something merely good about an excellent work; I must write something great. And I can't just stop at great when writing about a profound work; I have to write something beautiful, something that touches on the divine. Yeah, that's an eye-rollingly lofty standard to hold myself up to for whatever dumb bullshit I'm writing here, I know, but listen; there is no lofty standard that a perfectionist brain won't hold itself up to. And maybe that's why I relate to Chicory so much.

Unfortunately, this demon still resides in my brain, alive and well, and he's calmly ignoring my eviction notice. But at least, now that I've confronted him in my writing, I know that I can't go back to procrastinating on this writeup; clicking on that open Slice & Dice tab would be a hilarious admission of defeat after probing my own thought process so openly. I can still send the other demon, the ranking demon, packing. So let's talk about Chicory, and let's try to unpack why Chicory means so much to me, and then we can close this particular ranking chapter.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a quaint, vaguely Zelda-ish game about a dog with a paintbrush. The gimmick is that the whole world is like a coloring book, everything drawn in white with black outlines; you can use your paintbrush to color in anything and everything on the screen as you please. You go on a quest to master the paintbrush while solving everyone's color-related problems, gaining new abilities that let you progress through the world, talking to NPCs, all that stuff. It's more puzzle-oriented than combat; outside of a few boss battles there's nothing to fight, so it's just a chill time coloring in some stuff. And there's an emotional gutpunch of a story that made me cry a lot and completely re-evaluate my life. You know the drill. Who among us hasn't played one of these by now?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/3/AAA-H0AAD4FZ.jpg

It's hard for me to even figure out where to start talking about this game, because there's simultaneously a lot of things I could say about it, but also, only one really important feeling I need to convey. To say that this game resonated deeply with me is an understatement. When I first played this game, I played for about four hours nonstop with no intention of taking a break, which is rare for me with an adventure game like this, when the realization hit me like a train; I had already fallen in love with this game. Not just that, but I recognized an old-but-familiar feeling, the feeling that I was having a formative experience right then and there. I'm 34 years old; having new formative experiences become rarer and rarer with each passing year of my life. Yeah, I know this sounds like a lot to say about a video game, but being excessively masturbatory about how this game made me feel is really the only way I can get across how profoundly it got me.

Fuck, I clicked on the Slice & Dice tab. Hang on a sec. Okay I lost. Let's keep going.

#1: Chicory: A Colorful Tale

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/4/9/AAA-H0AAD4FV.jpg

Hey, mind if I ramble for a bit?

The crushing irony is not lost on me that I've had to restart this writeup multiple times because I wasn't happy with how it was turning out. Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game about a lot of things; overcoming imposter syndrome, the acquisition of prestige and the burden of expectations, the vicious cycle of burnout and depression and the way they feed into each other. But it's also a game that's very literally, and not just metaphorically, about making art. And I know there's a little Chicory sitting on my shoulder, going, "No! You're not supposed to do this! I warned you of the perils of perfectionism and feeling like your work doesn't live up to your own standards! You just need to write!"

If only it were that easy, Chicory. Since I'm trying to write blurbs about these games that do them actual justice, I guess I can think of this as something of an attempt at art, even if it's for a small audience, and probably mostly only for myself, and so it's fitting that this would be the last game I talk about, and also the most challenging one to talk about. I really want to get this one right; it's genuinely important to me that whatever I write here properly conveys the profound impact this game has had on me. So here I am on my third attempt, and I've pivoted to making it about the writing process itself this time. Much like Chicory itself, it's a long and winding journey and I'm not really sure where I'll end up at the end of it; I don't even know if this will be the attempt I'm happy with. If you're reading it now, I guess it was a success. If not, knowing me, attempt 4 is likely to be a rambling shitpost.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/0/AAA-H0AAD4FW.jpg

See, I didn't even really want to write this list at all until Chicory happened to me. I was gonna do like, maybe a little quickie top 10 list of 2021 or something, which at the time would've been like... all ten games I played that year or so. You know, it's just something everyone kinda does, and I've got to mix my own dumbass opinions into the dumbass opinion slurry we're making. But I did have a couple of games I knew I wanted to knock off right away before I did that, and that was this game, and Inscryption. I actually wanted to play Inscryption first, because I expected it to be more up my alley; it was good! Not great, but good. Probably would have made the list. Then I played Chicory, the game I had slightly fewer expectations for, and now here I am. The ENTIRETY of this list is basically one big shrine built in dedication to putting Chicory: A Colorful Tale at the very top of it. I NEEDED to talk about this game, and for one reason or another, I NEEDED for it to matter. So I played a bunch more games, I added 2020 into the mix, and I wrote this list.

There's two major reasons why I want to write a list like this; or put more accurately, there's two major demons I am trying to exorcise in doing so. The first demon is my obsession with rankings and lists. If I told you how much I ACTUALLY obsessed over this particular ranking, and how much I think about the other rankings I've done over the years, you'd probably be a little bit worried about me, but let's just say that thinking about it occupies a lot of the empty parts of the day. Putting the list to paper and actually committing to writing all the things I want to say about the items in the ranking puts this part of my brain at ease; I'll be able to stop thinking about this particular ranking and the games within it, my task completed, and the demon will stop bothering me for a little bit. At least, of course, until there's another ranking to be done, and there certainly will be (there already is; I've neglected my SGDQ list in order to focus on finishing this one). Once I've finished this writeup to my satisfaction, I will be able to close this chapter.

The other demon, the far more persistent and difficult to vanquish, is the demon that makes it hard for me to write. I've enjoyed writing since I was a kid; I've always had a firm command of the english language and a whole lot of shit I wanted to use it to say. I don't really fancy myself a 'writer' in the Hollywood sense of it; I'm not a starving artist who's trying to finally write that damn novel and I just need a 90-minute romcom plot to achieve self-actualization. I just like writing, as a side thing. Not necessarily stories; most of it's stuff like this, although the big project I'm trying to push out of my head right now is a pen-and-paper rpg that I want to create, which I know is both ambitious but also entirely within my wheelhouse to do if I can get started on it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/1/AAA-H0AAD4FX.jpg

The problem with writing, something that's haunted me since childhood, is that I find it so difficult to just... do. I'm good at it, but it doesn't come naturally. Ever since I was a kid, any time I needed to write an essay, I'd spend hours staring at a blank word document and get absolutely nowhere, struck with paralysis; the moment I'd try to type even a single word my brain would beg and plead with me to do something, anything else, to think about anything else, just not this, please, I don't want to write, I want to do anything but that. And even now as I'm writing this paragraph, I'm struggling with that battle, and once again the weight of irony is bearing down on my shoulders. There's ten other tabs open on my PC right now, and it would be really easy for me to take that mouse pointer and click on another one of them and push the task of finishing this writeup to future me, some mythical future me with better ideas and more motivation. Future me can never bear the weight of the expectations placed by past me, of course, and she desperately resents past me for not having taken care of it earlier, which leads to her kicking the can down the road to another future me who's even more annoyed and resentful than before. It feels like there's never a good time to start, never a good time to continue, and certainly never a good time to finish what I started, if I even managed to start it in the first place.

Well, I have my power back after a 3 day outage lol. so now I can finish this

Lol my power has been out for two days now, don't know when I'll get it back

Just saving this for now, I've been focused on trying to finish my other list while also having a rough week - will revisit what to do with this, watching every run with commentary on everything might have been too much and I might just pick off the runs I really wanted to watch, or maybe i'll be able to get back into the rhythm once I don't have the other list to finish off

It's coming, I wanted to do this writeup some degree of justice

andylt posted...

Also glancing at your 2010s list I guess I should check out whatever SpyParty is, as we share a lot of other favs (unless it's a Jackbox kinda thing).

SpyParty is a game where one player has to pretend to be an AI-controlled guest at a fancy party while the other person has to try to find them; the 'spy' has to sneakily complete a list of objectives while blending in with the AI guests, while the other player watches from afar with a sniper rifle and gets one shot to kill them. It's incredibly brilliantly designed, but it's also kind of hard to get into, especially since it's strictly a 1v1 competitive game with no real single player, so it's the sort of thing you have to be really into to play.

You know, I guess I never DID do a list recap, and I should have, so here's the list so far:

1. ???
2. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
3. Monster Train
4. The Jackbox Party Pack 8
5. New Pokemon Snap
6. Slice & Dice
7. Unsighted
8. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
9. Hades
10. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
11. Phantasy Star Universe (Clementine)
12. Deltarune Chapter 2
13. Mario Party Superstars
14. Ynglet
15. Petal Crash
16. Valheim
17. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
18. Overboard!
19. Gnosia
20. Storybook Brawl
21. Paper Mario: The Origami King
22. WarioWare: Get It Together!
23. Understand
24. Iris and the Giant
25. Ring of Pain
26. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2
27. Spiritfarer
28. Among Us
29. The Jackbox Party Pack 7
30. Inscryption
31. SNKRX
32. Death's Door
33. Astalon: Tears of the Earth
34. The Forgotten City
35. Spookware
36. 30XX
37. Bean and Nothingness
38. Dum-Dum
39. One Step From Eden
40. Mario Golf: Super Rush
41. Pawnbarian
42. RITE
43. The Pedestrian
44. BPM: Bullets Per Minute
45. Murder By Numbers
46. Fall Guys
47. Luck Be a Landlord
48. Webbed
49. Dorfromantik
50. The Legend of Doom

That Outer Wilds spoiler is like, the first thing I'd tell someone to try to hook them into the game if I thought they needed more of a hook than my recommendation alone. It's not a terrible spoiler, but I'm still not going to say it just in case.

I feel attacked

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/6/AAA-H0AADykK.jpg

More Echoes of the Eye spoilers. Please don't read unless you've beaten the game, I'm begging you to not read them

The second half of Echoes of the Eye, venturing into the 'dark world' and avoiding the spooky elk, is understandably a really divisive part of the game, and I get it. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first. For starters, it's REALLY SCARY with reduced frights off. I struggled with it at times; it's crazy anxiety-inducing and heartrate-increasing in a way nothing else in this game is, even the anglerfish. I still committed to leaving reduced frights off, though, because I WANTED the full-bore experience - I actually think turning reduced frights on is okay, it's still spooky enough, though I think it also renders the game a bit too easy. I liked actually having to solve the stealth sections in this portion; I think they were fun.

The other problem is that I ended up getting lost a lot of the time; it's so dark that it's really hard to actually get a feel for what the areas are like, and how you can avoid the elk. I ended up wandering lost for quite a while in a lot of the areas and this ended up getting frustrating when I couldn't figure out how to get around some of the guys. This isn't helped by the fact that some of the stealth sections are just really hard, and while one of the major ones can actually be bypassed with a really clever trick, the other one can't, so you just have to keep trying it, but I kept falling in the water on accident because I couldn't see the floor, oops. I did actually start to get a little frustrated with the game at some point, which wasn't the best of feelings. I don't want to be frustrated at Outer Wilds.

But man, the payoff was so worth it. First of all, the environments in the 'dark world' in particular are just dumbfoundingly beautiful and haunting at the same time; you can see why the elk are content to just hang out there forever, it's so cozy! And wandering about these areas is just so damn spooky. I'm not really a fan of atmospheric horror games all that much, mainly because I'm just not a huge fan of the vibe of like, grotesque monsters and horrible murder and generally bleak environments and situations, but Outer Wilds isn't doing ANY of that, it's JUST sticking to a eerie-but-awe-inspiring vibe which is awesome, which made this a horror experience I could really get behind.

And figuring out the 'puzzles' for what you have to do is so damn satisfying; learning the way all of the rules of the world work is mindblowing. I actually figured out the trick of leaving the lantern behind and walking away on accident, just through experimentation. I guess it wasn't really accidental, because I did try it on purpose to see what would happen if I walked away from it, but I was surprised that it did something; I figured I'd just get lost. And putting it all together and being able to meet the Prisoner at the end was absolutely breathtaking; arguably a better and more satisfying ending to the game. It's not the only time I cried in Outer Wilds, but it's probably the time I cried the most.

I think most of what I could say about the expansion is self-evident to everyone who's played it. The scary bits definitely turn some people off more than others, but I really felt the payoff was so worth it. It's just brilliant. I can't think of anything more to say.

Long story short, Outer Wilds might be my favorite game of all time, and Echoes of the Eye firmly solidifies that; if not for a few nostalgic favorites from the late 80's/early 90's that are so unimpeachably special to me, this would rank #1 all-time. It's my favorite game ever made since 1994, and that's kind of insane for me to think about.

But I did feel like it would be KINDA lame to have Echoes of the Eye at #1 - it feels a little too obvious, being that it's an expansion DLC to my favorite game of the 10's, and it's not a full game.

Fortunately, I did play one game this past year that spoke directly to my heart even more profoundly than Outer Wilds did, somehow, so that game took the #1 spot instead.

Next up: My 2021 GOTY, and one of my favorite games of all time.

It's like, the only game of interest to me that I've not mentioned or implied in this entire thread, so its absence should make it guessable!

Now come the spoilers. Please, for the love of god, look away if you haven't beaten Echoes of the Eye. It's just for me and the people who have played it. I can't not talk about my experience with the game.

I think that everything I already said about the game feeling like a crucial part of the core experience now will probably ring true for anyone who has played Echoes of the Eye. The setting and the story of The Stranger are fascinating, and answers a key question that I didn't realize the original story left hanging - why did the Nomai only pick up the Eye of the Universe's signal when they did? But even more importantly, I think the thematic exploration here - the fear of oblivion, and keeping your eyes open and unafraid to the painful truths lying within the unknowns of a vast and indifferent cosmos - are a beautiful and poignant rumination, a poetic appendix to the story already told in Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is breath-taking, awe-inspiring, and often scary to behold and even scarier tothink about, but Echoes of the Eye really takes that theme of 'fear' and does something with it.

The game can't help but have the jig be up from the start by warning the player that this game is not for the faint of heart, and offering an option for 'reduced frights.' This was immediately a bit alarming, giving that Dark Bramble was already intense enough as it was, and the anglerfish somehow DIDN'T warrant a 'reduced frights' option; but something in the expansion did? So I knew whatever the hell was gonna happen, it was gonna be freaky as shit. I'm not someone who handles scary stuff poorly in general, but I don't deal well with jumpscares specifically, as I get easily startled and it's kinda bad for my heart. Being scared can be fun; being startled isn't. I ended up deciding to go with "Reduced Frights" off. I wanted to face this game with my eyes open, unafraid. I wanted to play this game as intended.

Once you figure out the initial puzzle of where you're even supposed to go, which took an embarrassing amount of time sitting around in space and wondering if I was doing it right, Echoes starts off with a bang as you arrive on the Stranger. I was, of course, already preparing myself for scares, and it starts out pretty creepy, landing on a dark, derelict spaceship floating in the middle of nowhere. Going into a nearly pitch-black room, ominous music drawing me forward to a single lit button. Knowing that the only way forward is to press it, expecting the absolute worst. Pressing it, and... it's beautiful. I was so dumbfounded by the first drop into the raft ride that I gasped out loud, said "what the fuck?" and started laughing. I'm not normally a very vocal video game player. I don't gasp and say what the fuck a lot. But that got me good. It was one of the most memorable moments in the game right from the start.

Exploring the Stranger - the first half of the expansion, essentially - is wonderful. Of the two 'halves' of the expansion, it's the one that feels more familiar to the core Outer Wilds experience; exploring abandoned dwellings, finding remnants of past civilizations and clues that help add together the mystery of what this spaceship is doing here, and what happened to the people on it. I think it's cool that they still found a lot of ways to make it fresh and new; the environment with the ring-shaped world with a river flowing through it is novel, and the use of pictures instead of text makes for a different experience. It seems a bit contrived at times that there's a bunch of really convenient picture-reels everywhere, but I like that you have to derive what happened or understand information based on the implications of what they're showing you rather than text spelling it out for you. Exploring this area is really cool, and figuring out the first huge revelation - going to sleep by the fire with the soul-lantern-thing - is a great brain teaser that makes you feel like a genius for solving it.

#2: Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/1/AAA-H0AADykF.jpg

(Note: I'm not going to spoil ANYTHING in the plain text, or in the screenshots. I never include what I think are major spoilers in the screenshots of any of these writeups, but I'm being ESPECIALLY cagey about this one, because... well, you know why. If you've played the game, you know what I'm not showing and why.)

They made a sequel! Sort of. It's actually an expansion, but I played the original Outer Wilds for 25 hours and this 'expansion' for 18 hours. It's as close to a sequel as I ever expect to get to this game. It's one more hike up the trail for the Outer Wilds expedition; one last adventure in this masterpiece of a game. It was more than I could have ever asked for.

I was initially rather hesitant about the announcement that they were making an expansion to Outer Wilds. I had played the game by the time the news came out, and I was immediately skeptical. I don't think I can stress enough that I consider Outer Wilds to be basically a perfect game. There's virtually nothing major about it that I would change, and nothing that I felt could have been added or more fleshed out that would have improved the game's experience at all. It is basically exactly how it should be. The notion of an expansion to the game coming in and upsetting the incredibly delicate balance that the game already had was really strange and hard to wrap my head around. The only reason I decided to be optimistic about it was that I trusted the dev team. They already made Outer Wilds, after all, and I trusted that they wouldn't be making an expansion to the game if they didn't have a really good idea of what to do, and how to make it fit. I trusted that if they were doing it, then they definitely had a story they still wanted to tell.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/2/AAA-H0AADykG.jpg

I needn't have been worried - in fact, now that I've played Echoes of the Eye, I can't imagine the game without it anymore. The part of the game that the expansion goes into now feels entirely necessary, a core part of the experience, a chapter in the story that absolutely needed to be told, its themes required for a full understanding of what Outer Wilds is about. Even though I trusted the dev team, I wasn't really sure if they would be able to pull this off, but they did. If Echoes of the Eye falls short of the greatness of Outer Wilds at all, it is by the teensiest of margins; a 9.75/10 game versus a 10/10 game, if even that. It is really hard to match the experience that Outer Wilds delivers, but Echoes of the Eye manages to live up to its own hype, while at the same time delivering a surprising, new experience all of its own.

Again, like I said about Outer Wilds, I don't really want to talk about what Echoes of the Eye is. Even if you've already played Outer Wilds, I don't want to talk about it; if you're confused about what this 'expansion' even is, you're going to have to find out for yourself, because I'm not gonna talk about it here; not without spoiler bars. I actually haven't really decided what I'm going to talk about yet; much like Outer Wilds itself, this review is a sort of long, winding journey where I don't know where I'll end up at the end of it. I didn't want to do spoiler bars for any of these writeups, but I think it might be necessary here. I've said about as much as I can about Echoes of the Eye without getting into spoiler territory, and I consider spoiler territory to be "talking about any aspect of the game basically at all."

So there's your non-spoiler review of Echoes of the Eye. It's a worthy followup to the game that everyone who played Outer Wilds has to play. It's something that I thought I didn't need, but I foolishly realized afterwards that was completely necessary. It was one more chance to revisit this game and truly appreciate how great it is; a sort of celebratory afterparty for me where I get to have a victory lap and also feel like I can properly say goodbye to the game, but also just a brilliant game in its own right. (In case it's not obvious, I had to be clear about my definition of what counts as a 'game of the year' here to include expansions, since Echoes of the Eye is an expansion. But by all rights it deserves to be in the 2021 GOTY conversation.)

I'd like to preface my next writeup by taking another look at my list from last decade. I recapped the top 25 of my list from 2010-2019 at the beginning of the topic, like such:

1. Crypt of the NecroDancer
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
3. Undertale
4. The Witness
5. SpyParty
6. CrossCode
7. Mega Man 10
8. Darkest Dungeon
9. FTL: Faster Than Light
10. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
11. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
12. Night in the Woods
13. Rhythm Heaven Fever
14. Slay The Spire
15. Baba Is You
16. Virtue's Last Reward
17. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
18. Super Mario Maker
19. Jackbox Party Packs 1-6
20. Cadence of Hyrule
21. Portal 2
22. Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
23. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
24. Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - Prosecutor's Path
25. Mass Effect 2

I decided, for the purpose of illustration, to re-do this list based on my opinions in 2022:

1. Outer Wilds (New)
2. Crypt of the NecroDancer (Down 1)
3. SpyParty (Up 2)
4. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Down 2)
5. Undertale (Down 2)
6. The Witness (Down 2)
7. Return of the Obra Dinn (New)
8. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice (Up 2)
9. Baba Is You (Up 6)
10. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Up 1)
11. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (Up 12)
12. Darkest Dungeon (Down 4)
13. Slay the Spire (Up 1)
14. CrossCode (Down 8)
15. Rhythm Heaven Fever (Down 2)
16. Virtue's Last Reward (-)
17. Mega Man 10 (Down 10)
18. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (Down 1)
19. FTL: Faster Than Light (Down 10)
20. Jackbox Party Pack 1-6 (Down 1)
21. Super Mario Maker (Down 3)
22. Night in the Woods (Down 10)
23. Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - Prosecutor's Path (Up 1)
24. Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling (Down 2)
25. Grim Dawn (NR)

For the most part, things haven't changed too drastically. A few games fell a few slots - this should not be read as an indictment of CrossCode, MM10, FTL, or NitW, I just feel that I had them a bit too high and shuffled a few things ahead based on giving things a couple more years to digest, but they're still fantastic and I stand by everything I said about them. Overall, my favorite games remain pretty steady. This is a killer list, by the way. I mean of course, this is over 10 years instead of just 2, but Hades and Guardians of the Galaxy probably don't make this list. I love these games.

But there are two new entrants to the list; they are both games that I unfortunately played JUST after finishing my decade list - like, weeks after. So I unfortunately wasn't able to include them.

The first is Return of the Obra Dinn, a game that I still can't stop thinking about or watching people play two years later. A brilliant detective mystery where you investigate a series of strange deaths on a cargo ship by going back in time to the moment they died, Return of the Obra Dinn is really one of those games you can only play once, but there's nothing else like it. I really enjoyed how it made me feel like it was actually ME solving the mystery; the game gives you no direct hints or feedback, it simply lays the scene out and asks you to interpret it. I fell in love with the game's style and story as well as the smart gameplay mechanics, and it's a game I'll always remember playing for the first time fondly for its emergent style of puzzle solving.

The other, as you'll notice, is at the very top - Outer Wilds. I'm almost sort of mad that I didn't play Outer Wilds earlier, because it ended up retroactively being my favorite game of the decade, and it wasn't really all that close. I bring these two games up because, along with The Witness, Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds form a sort of trilogy of late-10's games that I always end up recommending in similar ways. All three games are completely different, but all of them share a similar sensibility about having the player solve a big mystery by giving indirect clues and having you make logical conclusions about what's going on based on them. None of these games tell you what to do or what's going on outright; they simply put a bunch of stuff in front of you and ask the player to make sense of it themselves.

Outer Wilds, though, is just the best. I don't even want to talk about what Outer Wilds is too much, as merely the experience of finding out anything about what's going on in the game is something I think people should find out for themselves. But, in short, it's a space exploration game where you travel to different planets in search of the answer of a grand, cosmic mystery. While The Witness is all about puzzles, and Obra Dinn is about murder mystery-solving, Outer Wilds is more lore-heavy, with more text to read and comprehend, and it's more about figuring out what's going on in a general sense and experimenting with the world in order to figure out what you're able to do about it. That's about the most I really want to be specific about the game. Unraveling the game's mysteries is one of the most mindblowing experiences I've ever had in a video game, and much like Obra Dinn, it's an unraveling that you can really only do once; after that, it's unraveled, and it can only truly be enjoyed again vicariously through other people unraveling it themselves.

It is no exaggeration that I think Outer Wilds is the most finely-crafted, carefully-curated mystery experiences in any video game I've played, and I don't know if I'll ever play anything like it again. I'm gonna be thinking about this game until I die, from its geniusly designed 'puzzles' to the incredible environments and atmosphere to the way it's genuinely changed my outlook on life. It's truly a shame that I can only play it once; if I could forget a game and play it over again, I'd pick Outer Wilds in a heartbeat. But I've played it once, and sadly, I'll never play anything like it again. Nobody will ever make another game like Outer Wilds.

...Wait.

Wait. They made a sequel?

They made a motherfucking sequel???

andylt posted...

I assume the second Spire here is supposed to say Train? I had to read it a few times to make sense of it lol.

yeah oops, I was comparing both games so often that I wrote the wrong one, I didn't proofread very carefully

azuarc posted...

Thank you for not just writing a single sentence about each of these games and calling it a day.

Glad you appreciate it! It just wouldn't be engaging to me to make this topic if I wasn't giving my thoughts about the game, that's what I really want to do.

I didn't mention it but Monster Train has a really nice soundtrack; I usually mute Spire when I play but I don't mute Train, I think it's got music worth listening to

I'm actually gonna do a ranking of all these entries by soundtrack just because I didn't talk about music a lot lol

Just did some analysis and realized I've written about 70,000 words for this project so far, which is like, a 230-page book or something

if you read this topic, you read a fucking book, congrats

There's a couple of things that really set this apart from Slay the Spire. First of all, the tower defense setup is interesting and really changes the game. I know the words 'tower defense' don't really inspire a lot of confidence that this isn't the sort of boring moba knockoff that this game's art style is trying to make it look like, but I think whereas Slay the Spire fights can go on indefinitely if you don't ask, Monster Train's monsters are constantly advancing and MUST be dealt with ASAP, and that adds a lot of urgency to the game; you have a strictly limited amount of turns with which to make the biggest impact possible. This also adds another dynamic layer to the game in which you need to 'build' your units, adding upgrades to them over time, in addition to cultivating your deck; you can win by getting one really powerful unit, or you can win with having a lot of good spell cards, etc. Lots of different ways to improve your deck beyond just adding and removing cards.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/7/AAA-H0AADxb_.jpg

The other thing is the sheer variety of playstyles here. Slay the Spire has four different characters, each of whom has their own starting deck and library of cards to draft from. Monster Train takes this a step further; in addition to having five possible clans, six with DLC, all of whom have their own starting deck, units, and spells, you pick TWO and mix and match them, making a starting deck of both their cards and having both of their libraries to draft from. This exponentially increases the number of different ways to play the game; there's 21 different clan combinations, not to mention all of the starting champion heroes you can pick from, and the alternate starting cards for each.

This really opens the game up. Each combination of two different clans means tons of unique combo potential for each; every clan has their own gimmick but they're all designed to be able to play in concert with one another, and each clan has particular units or spells that combo in really cool ways with stuff from a different clan. Each combination plays uniquely, and every combination of two clans + starting champion is tracked on your results page for 72 different starting configurations. For a completionist like me, the replay value here is insane. Four classes in Spire is one thing but no two runs of Monster Train feel alike at all.

Quite simply, I think it's the most polished of all the deckbuilding roguelikes out there. Slay the Spire has a few things that annoy me; the random boss items varying wildly in quality, which is fixed in Monster Train by simply giving you a +1 energy/+1 draw/+1 space option every time, which is still an interesting choice in its own right; all are good and none are obviously correct. And the events which can range from game-breaking to game-losing completely at random in Spire are toned down a lot here, which is good, I think; events are still sometimes game-breaking in Spire but they're always at least positive, and you get a bunch of rewards all at once too which is nice; the choice of WHICH batch of rewards to take, again, is much nicer than just praying to get somtehing good in Spire. I've said this before, but I don't like the 'slot machine' approach in this type of roguelike, where sometimes you get something good and sometimes you get something bad; Monster Train rewards are ALWAYS good, but the matter of choosing which will help you MOST, now that's a major challenge.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/8/AAA-H0AADxcA.jpg

The game is overall probably a little easier than Slay the Spire I think, which isn't a bad thing; it's still pretty challenging, especially at its peak difficulty (it uses an "ascension" style difficulty mode like Spire - everything in this game is basically like Spire). Unlike Spire, I can kinda winstreak this, but it's still pretty hard. Unlike Spire, where it feels like fights require you just barely squeeze out every little resource you have, it feels like Monster Train is built more around strategy than tactics; you basically HAVE to completely break the game to win, but there's a lot of broken combos of cards you can make, and the game EXPECTS you to do it. This is kind of a fun feeling; you'll feel like you made something really overpowered, but then it'll turn out that it was actually just enough to get by. The game just has so many different, emergent ways to create a powerful build, though, that the idea of breaking the game isn't really as intimidating as it sounds. I'd say pretty much a solid 95+% of the cards in the game are really solid; there's a lot you can do here.

I've been trying to evangelize this game a lot to people who enjoy Slay the Spire, and a lot of people haven't gotten around to taking my recommendation, and I completely get it. I recommend Slay the Spire for most people first, since it's the more popular game, and for most people, Slay the Spire is plenty. You can get tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours out of Spire and be completely satisfied; picking up another game just like it probably isn't that appealing if you're not addicted to the genre like I am. A lot of people picked up Spire in 2019, or 2020, or later, and aren't even really done with it yet, or it hasn't been long enough to warrant giving Monster Train a try. But for me, it was the defining game of 2020, and the defining game of the early months of the pandemic. And I picked it up all over again in 2021 too, when the expansion came out that added a new class and a lot of powerful and fun new features that made the game fresh again. If you ever do end up getting tired of Spire, but you're feeling the itch for an addictive roguelike in the same vein, Monster Train is absolutely the way to go. I can't say enough good things about this one; it's a masterclass in taking what was good about Slay the Spire and building on it to create a deckbuilder I consider nearly perfect.

Next up: I wanna preface this by saying that the top two games on this list are GOAT-tier for me; they're both in my top 10 games of all time and could be higher. Anyway, this next one - it's finally a chance for me to correct a huge error in my "game of the 10's" list.

#3: Monster Train

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/4/AAA-H0AADxb8.jpg

Back in late 2017, Slay the Spire was released. Now, some people will tell you that Slay the Spire was really released in 2019, but don't listen to them; that's just when it came out of early access. For you normies who don't have nearly 1500 hours in Slay the Spire, sure, maybe that suffices. But I got into Spire in 2017, and it almost completely dominated my life for the entirety of 2018. I had kind of a rough year, and Slay the Spire ended up being my biggest comfort game; I played it whenever I needed to relax and clear my head, which was basically all the time. Too much of the time, probably.

I started playing it before the Defect was even part of the game; I played it through the Defect's early release, beta art and all, and I played through plenty of balance changes and minor upgrades. By the time the game was fully released in 2019, I was actually pretty played out of it. Sure, I came back for the Watcher, the fourth character, who ended up being really cool and sucking me back in for a couple hundred hours. But while most people were still discovering this game in 2019 and 2020, and even to this day, I was played out of this one by 2020. I occasionally go back to it, but I got what I wanted out of it for the most part. I needed a new fix. Enter Monster Train, which would eventually pull off an unbelievable trick - it would get me to play what is basically a Slay the Spire variant and get sucked into it for over 1000 hours all over again.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/5/AAA-H0AADxb9.jpg

Monster Train is initially pretty unassuming, and I nearly passed on it originally. It'd be hard to blame you if the game looks like some kinda wannabe mobile game; something about the logo and the visuals give off an annoying vibe that at best, sells Hearthstone, and at worst sells Clash of Clans or something. The game's visuals aren't actually that bad, really, but the game's first impression is weak, and combined with a name that is very direct but not very attention-grabbing, I could see a lot of people completely overlooking this game. Slay the Spire pounced and landed in an absolutely dominant niche, setting an entirely new trend for indie games by successfully replicating a Dominion-like deckbuilder game in a video game format; there was nothing like it on the market, and it demanded attention. Monster Train looks like a cheap knockoff, at best.

But make no mistake; Monster Train is no cheap knockoff. It IS a knockoff, yes; the devs admitted as such, and seem to have felt so guilty about it that they actually offered a sale for anyone who already owns Spire, which is cool. It makes sense, as people who own Spire are more likely to be interested in Monster Train, while... already having Spire to play. But the foundations of Monster Train are absolutely rock solid; as much as the mechanics seem to borrow from Slay the Spire almost 1 to 1 at times, it really takes these and put its own twist on them, while also in a lot of ways actually smoothing out some of the things I don't like about Spire. This game demands every bit as much attention as Spire gets.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/6/AAA-H0AADxb-.jpg

If you're familiar with the Slay the Spire format then Monster Train will be easy to understand, but I'll recap. Slay the Spire is a sort of deckbuilding roguelike RPG; you fight through a series of monster battles using a deck of cards, which starts out weak and shitty but grows more powerful over time as you add more cards to it, while also collecting helpful items. Monsters fight you by showing what attacks they will perform, and you can respond by playing cards up to your energy level to attack them or block their attacks, until you reduce them to 0 hp. Any hp you lose is carried over to the next fight as you travel down a branching map of various risks and rewards, and chances to recover your hp can be few and far between. Eventually, you fight bosses, and eventually you either win, or you die and start all over.

Okay, so that's also exactly how Monster Train works, except it's a game where you summon creatures, and they fight monsters sort of like a tower defense game. You're on a train that's travelling to a destination, and you must outlive timed waves of enemies as it arrives. There are three floors to your train, all of which you can summon creatures to to try to stop your enemies' assault; with each turn the enemies survive, they climb up a floor of the train until they reach the pyre, the glowing hot core that powers the train, which serves as your hp for the run. You want to let as few monsters get by you, zero if possible, on your way to eventually fighting the final boss. As you go along, you add more creature cards to your deck, as well as spell cards which can be played directly onto your creatures or theirs for various effects, as well as gaining items that improve your abilities, and you go through a map of branching paths that lead to different rewards. Again, it's Slay the Spire, but with monsters, on a train.

Has it really been that long? Just protecting this topic for now, sorry, going through some shit

Dels posted...

That sounds like a really fun game. I like "pick funny answers" games but not when you have to come up with your own entirely, i'm just not clever enough. madlibs-style sounds great

I think you would enjoy Job Job, basically how it works is everyone writes a couple of paragraphs about random topics, and then the words that everyone used get given to other people and then you have to use only the words given to you to respond to prompts, so it's got that sort of constraining factor that makes it funnier because people can only use what they have given to them

Kenri posted...

My group's favorite Jackbox game is Trivia Murder Party 2 but Job Job has definitely made a running for #2. The wheel on the other hand was a complete whiff, I don't think any of us liked the non-trivia parts and just personally I prefer Murder Party's style of trivia too.

Job Job definitely not an ally though after trying to out me as trans to my whole friend group by hitting me with a "if you went back in time, what's the one thing you'd tell your younger self?" prompt

As far as my own Job Job answers go I'm not sure anything will top me answering "How can your co-workers tell you apart from the evil version of you?" by answering "Evil Para is straight" (yes my name actually showed up in a prompt, what a gift)

but this is news to absolutely nobody

Oh god it's showing my topic as the hot topic. Please no

thank god, I didn't have a screenshot of the cut ted penis one

#2 - Poll Mine

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/9/AAA-H0AADwpF.jpg

Poll Mine is incredible, and in almost any other pack it probably would have been my favorite game; Poll Mine is seriously a top 5 game for me. In this one, you get a question with 8 choices, which can range from anything from fairly straightforward like "what's the best bird?" to crazier shit like "which of these gross objects found on the sidewalk would you actually use?" or "which of these presentations would be the worst to give to a kindergarten class?" Then everyone in the group ranks their top 3 (or 4, or 5) favorites, and it's up to two competing groups to debate where each one of them ranks. It's a VERY board 8 game - arguably even more board 8 than bracketeering, in my opinion, since it involves a lot of debating the strength level of each options and how likely each person was to vote for them. Most of the poll questions are REALLY good and fun to answer honestly, and then debating the right answer can be challenging and really fun to do as a group. Some people love this game, others are a bit more lukewarm on it, but I'm firmly within the 'love' camp - I want to play this one every time we play Jackbox because I love trying to guess the ranking of each poll question. It's like a better Guesspionage, really, which is somehow the second time I'm mentioning that game. Poll Mine is great, and it's absolutely part of the reason I ranked this game so high - for me, it's a must-have in the Jackbox pantheon.

But then there's Job Job.

#1 - Job Job

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/0/AAA-H0AADwpG.jpg

The act of laughing so hard and uncontrollably that you almost can't breathe can be incredibly cathartic, and it's a feeling rarely experienced - only occasionally is something so surprisingly and profoundly funny that it snaps the wiring in the brain just right to break it momentarily. Job Job, for my money, has been the most reliable generator of this specific emotion in the past year, and it's really hard to put a price on that. This simple game of answering job interview questions basically using magnetic poetry words randomly dealt to you by other players' batshit ramblings is an absolute masterpiece of found comedy, and it so reliably has me in tears that it has immediately usurped any other Jackbox game as the GOAT Jackbox game, without a doubt. I feel like nearly every person who plays Job Job has it as one of their favorites, and even the most Job Job skeptics still tend to enjoy it. Every single time we do a Jackbox session, from now until god knows when, I will always need at least one Job Job. It's supplanted Fibbage and Quiplash as the easiest go-to. Every single session of Job Job has made me, at minimum, smile, and it's so goddamn fun to make prompts for it - it really walks the line nicely between creative participation without feeling required to generate a full joke from your own brain like Quiplash. There's just nothing like it - it's one of the most fun multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had, and how is that not worth serious GOTY consideration? Job Job and Poll Mine, along with three other decent games, combine to make Jackbox Party Pack 8 the best Jackbox ever, in my opinion, and one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time. It absolutely belongs here.

Next up: My 2020 GOTY, and currently my #2 game in Steam playtime at 1,270 hours.