Board 8 > Para's Top 50 games from 2020-2021

(+) Yeah! (+)

I should probably play CotM2, I liked CotM1 a surprising amount and a lot more than RotN (I really like Metroidvanias and don't like Classicvanias, but RotN was just. Soulless. and that isn't an AoS/DoS pun.)

Paratroopa1 posted...

The characters in this game have sluggish movements, and I like it that way; every jump is a commitment, and every attack comes at a potential cost. Of course, I've said that I don't like Dark Souls, and I'm basically describing Dark Souls, which is sort of hard to square; I guess it's because I'm not very good at 3D action games and 2D platformers are kinda my native tongue, so to speak, so I'm just more used to this kind of thing.

For me the camera's a big part of it, I'm much more willing to give good faith effort to these sorts of deliberate mechanics if I can actually see what the fuck is going on.

For the large part, CotM2 is more of the same as CotM1 with a new cast, slightly more polish and a new co-op mode and that's really about it - I stretched out my writeup to be a bit longer than that but that's really the main upshot. But I liked CotM1 a lot, so

I greatly preferred Curse 1 over the second, but that was more because I really loved Curse 1 than anything else. 2 was definitely still a lot of fun even for a retro-platformer-challenged player like myself.

I just wanted to see if anyone would take the bait on the other possible meaning of my last hint. It was a double entendre! I thought I was very clever.

#25: Ring of Pain

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/2/AAA-H0AADgAm.jpg

Ring of Pain is another one of those roguelikey things that I like to spend a lot of time on - to date, I've logged 143 hours on it, which makes it my 14th most-played Steam game of all time (only 5th out of games on this list though). I didn't play this one right away - I wasn't sure if it'd be good enough to be worth my time/money, so I earmarked it to see if it'd go on sale at a time when I could use a new roguelike to play on a rainy day. It went on sale, I was in the market for a good timewaster after I'd had my fun with SNKRX, so I ended up diving into this one.

I've been struggling with figuring out what to call these genres of games. I don't like to merely say 'roguelike' or 'roguelite', because that doesn't really narrow down the gameplay genre - a lot of roguelikes are action, but a lot of the ones I play are pure strategy, like this one. But I can't say 'strategy' because in gaming terms, that tends to imply war tactics, moving units around on a field, which this isn't. There's cards involved, but it's not a deckbuilder. It's sort of RPG-like, I guess, but it's not like it has a story or adventure, it's just numbers and swords and HP and monsters. Is that an RPG?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/3/AAA-H0AADgAn.jpg

So I guess this is a roguelike card-RPG-thingy, or something. You venture through a dungeon of 16+ floors, where each floor is a ring of cards that represent monsters you have to fight or items you can pick up. You can flip through the ring of cards either left or right to get to exit, but you have to either fight monsters on the way, or try to skip past them, risking taking an attack anyway. Killing monsters gives you souls which are money you can use to open treasure chests, which contain items that boost your stats and have helpful effects. Fairly standard stuff, but the whole ring of cards idea gives you a lot of important tactical choices for how to approach each floor; you can avoid dealing with a particularly strong enemy, but to do that you'll have to deal with whatever lies in the other direction.

Ring of Pain is a fairly unforgiving game, definitely at first, and I nearly bounced off of it originally. It really punishes you for going in unprepared; the game doesn't give you a lot of freebies and it expects you to have a good plan for how to deal with things, or you'll run out of HP pretty quickly and die. Even though the game tells you via its stats exactly how much damage you'll be looking to take, it's hard to pace yourself without knowing what's going to come up in the future. This game was fun, but I banged my head against the wall at first because I felt like making any kind of progress at all felt random.

But, I started to learn, bit by bit. Figuring out how to hit really specific stat threshholds was important, as it's hard to know when you first play what stats need to be prioritized, and how much of any stat is 'enough.' And, at first, I was taking too many common items and not putting enough priority on saving up for rare items; that was hurting me a lot. I kept trying to build around common items not really understanding that they were meant to be discarded pretty early on in favor of bigger and better things.

So after a few hours of playing the game and complaining that it was too hard, I kinda figured it out, and from there I started having a lot more fun with it. The best part of Ring of Pain for me is the sheer amount of content here; there's *tons* of items to discover and a lot of them have pretty fanciful and interesting effects that change the way you play the game, without any particular items being too overwhelmingly overpowered or underpowered, so seeing what items you get and what builds you can make each run are pretty fun. I think an important aspect of roguelikes is that you want to be able to make builds that you want to tell stories about later, and Ring of Pain passes this test. There's also a ton of items that you have to unlock by doing achievements, which gives you a lot of fun goals to work towards; I've done them all by this point, but some of them are really quite hard, such as finishing a run with low max hp or never picking up any items better than common, and devising strategies for how to do them was fun. Ring of Pain passed my "50 hour roguelike test" pretty well; after 50 hours, I was still figuring out new things I could do and continuing to test the limits of how to play the game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/4/AAA-H0AADgAo.jpg

The presentation of the game is kind of a mixed bag. The music and sound design are superb, and the visuals have a pretty striking style that's kind of fun. The writing is annoyingly pretentious, though; I feel like this game is TRYING to be very deep and philosophical with its metaphors and its darker implications, but it all comes off as really trite and silly, like edgy teen poetry. I kind of wanted to make this writeup all rhyming couplets to make fun of it, but I just went for a standard review instead. It's harmless enough, though - I'm not here to play a roguelike for the story, anyway.

That's Ring of Pain. I don't have too much to say about it - it's just a rock solid card-rpg-roguelike thingy. I'll be logging a few more hours in it yet, I think, since there's been another content update since I last played, and I don't think they're done yet, which is great. I love a roguelike that continues to have content updates which help the game stay fresh for a little while. I can never decide how to rank these things, since my interest level in all but the best of roguelikes do have a shelf life, but for what it's worth, this one had a pretty long shelf life.

Next up: You're probably not going to get this one, but it's not the most obscure game on the list, so maybe someone will know it. It's a mostly-overlooked roguelike deckbuilder from early 2020. (Yes, another one of these.)

Monster Train?

Paratroopa1 posted...

I just wanted to see if anyone would take the bait on the other possible meaning of my last hint. It was a double entendre! I thought I was very clever.

Outer Wilds crossed my mind but I figured it'd be far too early for it to show up.

I tried Curse of the Moon 1 and it's very much not for me, I'm just no good at that sort of game. Ring of Pain's thumbnail has definitely caught my eye on one of my scrolls through game pass but I assumed it was a memey game for some reason. Your description has me pretty interested in it, I think I'll pop that one on my list. The UI looks a little overwhelming from those pics but I guess you settle in to that.

Not even bothering to guess, it'll be something I've never heard of.

Ring of Pain isn't too complicated; the stats are all VERY discrete about what they do.

By the way I pull my screenshots from google image search to save time and I'm annoyed by how often it's screenshots from earlier builds of the game - the second Ring of Pain screenshot is old lol, but whatever, it doesn't really matter

andylt posted...

Ring of Pain's thumbnail has definitely caught my eye on one of my scrolls through game pass but I assumed it was a memey game for some reason. Your description has me pretty interested in it, I think I'll pop that one on my list. The UI looks a little overwhelming from those pics but I guess you settle in to that.

LMAO I was going to say almost exactly this. I've skipped over Ring of Pain without a second thought because the thumbnail made me think it was a dumb horror game. It actually sounds right up my alley, even if the screenshots make my eyes glaze over.

i'm bad at complicated things but ring of pain is actually quite intuitive, i played a couple runs and got it right away.

figuring out the actual depth of strategy will take longer though.

Surprise, I'm getting a couple of these done

#24: Iris and the Giant

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/4/AAA-H0AADgCM.jpg

I have to write about two roguelike card-game-things in a row? Why did I do this to myself? Not too much backstory about how I found this one - Dels gave me a soft recommend on it one day and I remembered it like two years later when I went to check out games in order to fill out my 2020-2021 backlog. This one ended up being a really nice discovery.

Iris and the Giant is a roguelike deckbuilder. There's a framing story of - I guess like, a sad, shy girl and her father trying to get her to open up to him? It kind of falls into that same trap as Ring of Pain where they were trying hard to make their game "mean" something, but this one comes off as very earnest and sincere; it's just a story about a sweet girl and a nice dad growing closer. That's nice! The actual game takes place in this metaphorical-I-guess fantasy land of skeletons and minotaurs that the girl has invented in a card game that I guess she created in real life or something. I don't remember the details. The visuals are very appealing and the monsters are cute. There's a giant mimic.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/5/AAA-H0AADgCN.jpg

The gameplay premise is surprisingly novel for a roguelike-deckbuilder; I expected something akin to Slay the Spire but this is not Spire at all. You have a grid of enemies, and each of your cards have different properties - swords can be chained together, axes hit a 3-wide area, daggers ignore shields, etc. You attack, then the enemies attack back, if they can, rinse and repeat until you can reach the stairs. The hook is, every card in your deck is a one-time use. You use it, it's gone forever, and if you run out of cards, it's game over just as if you ran out of health. You get booster packs as you progress which lets you add more cards to your deck, so you're always replenishing what you have, but it adds an interesting challenge, deciding what you should have in your arsenal, and deciding when best to use it.

This game is like the Elixir Problem on steroids. But it works really well, because EVERYTHING in this game is an Elixir Problem, so deciding when the best time is to use your best cards is crucial, because the best time is not never - you'll die if you take that approach. So the anxiety of using your cards is something you get over fast. You're always getting more cards, anyway, so nothing is ever *truly* lost forever, you'll probably come across more later. But it ensures that every single tactical choice in this game is interesting, because of it. Is now the best time to use your card that'll take out a huge group of enemies? Or will you need it even more later?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/6/AAA-H0AADgCO.jpg

This game is quite challenging, but not overly demanding. Some enemies can feel almost a little unfair, nearly completely cockblocking you if you don't have the right cards, but once you know that you're just going to need to hang onto a couple of axes to defeat Cerberus, it's fine. Hard mode is completely masochistic - you'll run into situations where it's fundamentally impossible to win - but on normal mode the game never quite feels like that. It's always doable, but always putting pressure on you as well. I think it walks a really fine line balancing wise. Ring of Pain is a game that's playing it a lot more fast and loose, with items that have fanciful combo potential that let you break the game - Iris and the Giant is tight like a board game, with everything planned out so that the math will just barely work out in your favor if you play perfectly.

The main downside to this game is that it's not as addicting as some of the other roguelikes - runs don't differentiate themselves from each other that much, as the list of upgrades you can get is minimal and you'll see most types of cards in a few plays. A few upgrades do change the way you play a bit, and there are some super-rare cards that you can really work your ass off to get (you have to use steal cards to get them from big enemies - stealing cards is a major mechanic in this game, and it's pretty fun). But, for the most part, every run feels a little samey, and once you've mastered the game it doesn't feel like there's too much to do. I made a 100% file on normal in about 20 hours and felt like I couldn't go much further than that - I played hard mode for a bit but it's so overwhelmingly hard that I'm not even sure it's fun. Still, for a game that only lasted me about 20 hours - a far cry from Ring of Pain's 140+ - I found this game to be the more enriching of the two overall.

Next up: If you liked The Witness, you might also like...

The Looker!

*poke*

#23: Understand

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/1/AAA-H0AADhE3.jpg

The Witness is, in my opinion, one of the greatest puzzle games ever made. Possibly the greatest. It annoys me to say that, because it can only stroke Jonathan Blow's enormous ego, and he's kind of a dick, but it's simply the truth - he made a masterpiece. Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, and Retrun of the Obra Dinn are all in that mix for me as well, but The Witness came out first, it's the one I played first, and it truly and properly blew my mind. There's a lot of things I like about it - its clever, out-of-the-box problem solving, its focus on being attentive and catching little details, the way in which you have to put everything together piece by piece to understand the game in full. But the best aspect of The Witness is the way in which it teaches the player. The puzzles have rules, but there is no explanation for the rules; the player is simply left to intuit the answers by themselves, by following the game's examples, and figuring out how the puzzles work. Many of my favorite moments in The Witness were going "aha!" at a puzzle after having figured out how it worked.

Understand takes that part of The Witness and makes an entire game out of it. Understand is not as good as The Witness; if The Witness was on this list it'd be my #2 or #3 game. Don't go into this expecting The Witness; this game is a small, simple little puzzle game with no frills. But it does have quite a bit of depth and challenge, and it does make for a really excellent companion piece - a game that's clearly taking after The Witness's mechanics and ideas and adding its own little twist to it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/2/AAA-H0AADhE4.png

I don't want to overexplain Understand. This a game, after all, about Understanding, and that should be left for you to do on your own. This game has no text, and offers no hints at all; you simply have to start playing and figure out for yourself what you need to do. So if the concept interests you, I would play it without looking up too much more about it.

If you want to know a little bit more still, then I'll explain the very basics of the game. Much like The Witness, you need to draw a single line that cannot overlap itself, on a grid that has symbols on it. There's sets of puzzles, and each set of puzzles has its own 'rules' that need to be followed. Figuring out those rules for each set of puzzles is its own new challenge of deduction - the game starts out by giving you some puzzles that help show you the solution, then requires you to figure out what's going on.

One of the things I always expected to see in The Witness that it never really does is having puzzle rules that trick you into thinking you understand them, but it turns out that you had it wrong the whole time. Understand seizes on this - some sets of puzzles make you think that you understand the rules correctly, but there'll be some twist where it was actually some other rule that you didn't know you were fulfilling correctly, and suddenly it doesn't work like it should. There's so much creative puzzle work like this in Understand and it makes it a real joy to see what each new set of puzzles is going to bring.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/3/AAA-H0AADhE5.png

I have yet to beat Understand. It's an extremely hard game; I've probably completed something like 75% of the game's puzzles, but I've gotten kind of stymied on the rest. The game really asks a lot of you - the game's 'rules' can get quite complex or difficult to figure out, more than you would expect, and devising a way to solve them takes a lot of brainpower. But it's fun as hell. I'm completely content to let this game sit uncompleted - looking up the answers to a puzzle game would sort of defeat the point. If I never complete the game, that's fine - I can always come back to it someday and try again.

Understand's not for everyone - it's a dry puzzle game with simple graphics and no music. But it is for me! It's a pretty cheap game so I'd recommend it to anyone who really liked the puzzles in The Witness. It's not as good, but nothing is. At the very least, this goes into my pantheon of cool puzzle games to check out; even if it takes a lot of ideas from The Witness, it's got its own ideas as well, and a creative puzzle game like this one isn't something that comes around all that often.

Next up: I already talked about this game's imitator, but it's got nothing on the real thing.

Obviously now it's The Looker.

#22: WarioWare: Get It Together!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/3/AAA-H0AADhKX.jpg

WarioWare is a series that has been around for nearly 20 years now, and it's always kind of just consistently good. As of writing, there are no WarioWare games in my top 100 games all time, but if you go to my next 100 after that there's like... five, including this one. It's just always a really fun time. I have like, undiagnosed ADHD, or something, and WarioWare is kind of perfect for that - always changing, giving you something completely new to look at and do. Its frenetic pace means it's never quite complex enough to be truly engrossing, but it's a really great format just for the sheer creativity of its hundreds of microgames and it's fast pace makes it fun to pick up and play for little chunks at a time.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/4/AAA-H0AADhKY.jpg

WarioWare is also a series that I basically thought was dead for a while. There was an explosion of WarioWare games in the early 00's, capping off with Smooth Moves in 2007 and the criminally underappreciated DIY in 2010 (we don't talk about Snapped). And then the series went... dormant, for a bit. Game & Wario came out for the Wii U in 2013, a highly underrated game in my opinion but questionable if it's even a 'true' WarioWare game, since it's a minigame collection and not microgames. And then... again, nothing for a bit. It probably didn't help that Snapped was a failure, DIY came too late in the DS's lifespan to really get noticed, and Game & Wario was on the Wii U, but hardly the series' fault. I actually didn't even really notice when WarioWare Gold came out in 2018, figuring that it was little more than a remake of games I'd already played, so it didn't get a chance to show up on my decade list (DIY and Game & Wario both did), but I played it recently and it's actually really worthwhile.

Get It Together is a pretty emphatic statement: WarioWare is very much an active series. The first 'true' new WarioWare game in a while, really since DIY, and really the first 'big' one since Smooth Moves. It's been about 15 years! But at the same time, the series was never really dormant to begin with - it never went more than 5 years without a quality new release. Just long enough to make me forget the series exists before delivering another quality banger.

There isn't much to say about Get It Together except that it's really, really good. In fact, I'd say it's my favorite 'pure' WarioWare experience since Twisted. I found Smooth Moves' Wii controls a little cumbersome, DIY is fun mostly for its creation engine, G&W isn't really a WarioWare game, and WarioWare Gold is a remake-of-sorts, albeit a good one. Get It Together has no annoying gimmicks, it's not a remake, it's just pure WarioWare fun.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/5/AAA-H0AADhKZ.jpg

This game's two schticks are; it's co-op, and you play the games by controlling a WarioWare character inside the games. The first innovation, co-op, is a revelation. Now that WarioWare has co-op, I'm immediately aware that WarioWare has always NEEDED co-op. Mega Party Games was a fun WarioWare party game for GC, but it was mostly taking turns playing microgames - even when there was simultaneously play it was head to head. And that's a lot of fun - the hectic mania of WarioWare is really well suited to having a group of players all get into it at once. But having it be co-op is better; having two people have to coordinate on the same series of 5-second tasks introduces so much more chaos. Two people playing this together for the first time is an absolute blast - it's great to have to react to every game with another person.

But the other gimmick, controlling WarioWare characters, is also a surprisingly good addition to the formula. At first I thought it was mostly just an awkward concession to the co-op formula; normally in a WarioWare game the controls differ from game to game, but here your controls just move your character around, and your character interacts with the game. It seemed weird at first, but it does change the way the game's played quite a bit; instead of needing to learn the controls you need to learn how your character interacts with the game, which is different. The fact that there are a bunch of different characters and they all have completely different control schemes is super interesting; it completely transforms the way some games are played, making some super easy and others very challenging, and expands the design space of the game by changing it up depending on who you're playing. It is also an important concession for co-op play, of course, since it allows two people to be controlling the game at once.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/6/AAA-H0AADhKa.jpg

This really brought me back to the first time I played WarioWare, that thrill of being thrown into all these different games and panicking (in a fun way) as I try to figure them out. They never seem to run out of new ideas for games, and the visuals and sound design in every game here are more snort-laughter inducing than ever. It's got a fair bit of content, though I still beat it in a few hours; but it's got a lot of replayability and it's great to play with a friend. It's just a great followup to the series; Nintendo has been killing it in revitalizing their slightly-sidelined series and getting back to basics, making these once inert series fully active again - not the last time on this list I'll be saying that, by the way (still RIP F-Zero though).

Of course, now that they've made an excellent WarioWare game, the WarioWare team can get back to what they really should be making... a new Rhythm Heaven game! There's a bunch of references to Rhythm Heaven in this game, so I'm hopeful!

Next up: I loudly declared that this game would be bad. Whoops!

Paratroopa1 posted...

As of writing, there are no WarioWare games in my top 100 games all time, but if you go to my next 100 after that there's like... five, including this one.

Interesting, so we're not in top 100 territory yet.

I suppose I didn't really think we would be, but I hadn't thought about it. It's pretty clear though that a good amount of entries near the top will be heavily breaching it though, I think.

I'd say #10 is where my actual top 100 material starts and #11-#17 is borderline top 100 material (it's all pretty close together. a lot of good games came out in 2021)

#21: Paper Mario: The Origami King

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/6/AAA-H0AADh8G.jpg

This is not an admission I was wrong.

After all, I like to think I'm a pretty good judge of character when it comes to games. Since I made a top 50 list and all, it might look like I must have played a ton of games, but the reality is that I probably only played 80 games or so, and I'm just really good at picking out the good ones ahead of time, based on trailers, reviews, gameplay footage, recommendations, etc. I don't know if it's because my tastes have calcified with age, or if it's because I've grown wiser and more in tune with my own preferences, but I know what I like and I know how to find it. Sometimes I can be wrong!

Paper Mario: The Origami King is not one of those times where I was wrong. It just happened that the game was the best possible version of what it could have been. These things happen.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/7/AAA-H0AADh8H.jpg

The trailer for Origami King came out in early 2020, and I believe rumors about the upcoming game were floating around since before the pandemic, possibly as early as late 2019. At the time, the rumors were making some pretty big claims - partners are back! This one's more like TTYD! It's a return to form for the series! I was skeptical, to say the least, in that I was pretty sure this was all nonsense and I was going to be let down.

I had pretty good reason to feel that way - the series has only ever been on a downward trajectory. Quite literally, in fact; my ranking of the previous PM entries is 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5. PM and TTYD are both legendary, and are really more of a 1a and 1b; Super Paper Mario was a weird experiment that succeeded in some ways, but was sort of an awkward sidestep for the franchise as a whole; Sticker Star and Color Splash were, to put it lightly, a letdown. Sticker Star's pointless combat, dull level design, and nearly completely missing charm would have been bad enough, but Color Splash was more of the same and showed a commitment to this "New Paper Mario" style; few original characters, no RPG combat, no party members, no interconnected world, no real plot to speak of, just a boring series of chores that you have to do.

For whatever reason, it seems to have been successful, and I knew that despite fan backlash, they weren't gonna change up this formula in any major way anytime soon. I don't really like to be excessively negative, and I'm too old at this point to spend a lot of time complaining about this, so whatever; I know Nintendo's not gonna make anything as off-the-wall insane as TTYD ever again, and Bug Fables exists to fill the old-Paper Mario gap in my life, so it's fine. Zombie series, these things happen, it's whatever. At least the soundtrack will be good (incredibly, I'd rank the soundtracks 5 > 4 > 3 > 2 > 1. this is an anomaly I cannot explain).

Trailer came out, and I was well rewarded for my skepticism with that little burst of dopamine that comes from knowing that I'm right. I pretty much knew what we were gonna get here. The combat system was new, but it appeared to me as though it was going to have the same problems as the Neo Paper Marios; scant rewards for combat and a lack of RPG mechanics that make every fight feel the same. No partners. There's a Bob-omb character who follows you around, but aha, he introduces himself as... Bob-omb. So no original characters, once again; all the Mario characters have to be perfectly on-model and you can't have fun with them. There's some interesting little tidbits in the trailer; the origami theme is neat, and the plot of this game looks like it might be properly off the rails. But it's not enough to interest me. I'm gonna pass on this game. Not interested. I've been through this twice. Fool me twice, shame on me and all that.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/8/AAA-H0AADh8I.jpg

I wouldn't have bought the game, so I didn't. But I do live with a family who buys pretty much every tentpole Nintendo game, so I had access regardless. And I mean, as negative as I've been, I'll obviously give it a chance if it's free. My mom said I should give it a chance - she didn't dislike Sticker Star or Color Splash, but she indicated that this one was a lot different and had some interesting moments, so... okay! Why not. Surely it can't be that bad. Maybe they've learned a few things!

First, the bad. Origami King's random battles aren't very interesting, and this was a bit of a hangup for me at first. This game has a mechanic where you have to spin a board around to line up enemies for a full-power attack, and while the puzzle mechanics of it are at least a little bit fun, most normal battles are very easy and don't require much thought, there aren't really many tactical choices to make aside from just solving the puzzle, and there isn't much reason to fight. I avoided as many battles as I could because getting into a fight was just sort of a boring waste of time. Not a threat, but not really a reward, either. So that part - well, it's an improvement over stickers (although limited-use attacks still make a return here anyway, for no reason), but it's not very compelling.

But I ranked it #21 for a reason, right? Well, it turns out that everything else about this game is actually really good, against all odds and indications otherwise. All of the magic from the original games that was lost in the last two entries; it's back. I don't know how it came back, but it's back.

First of all, this game has great characters, somehow, which is amazing because the entire game it feels like the writers are fighting back against the higher-ups' demands to not make any original characters. It almost feels like a running joke that the game is leaning on, and it's better for it. In addition to making better use of the unique members of the Mario cast, like Kamek and Bowser Jr, the game is intent on even the generic Mario baddies having a lot of personality here, and it shows. "Bob-omb" was eventually given the name "Bobby" in localization, and despite being a generic Bob-omb, he's great! They make the most of him. But the best character is the obligatory partner character, Olivia. The obligatory partner characters in the past couple of games were kind of bland, in my opinion, but Olivia's fucking adorable and I love her. The game is great every time she gets to talk, and that's most of the game, so the game is great. She's probably one of my favorite characters in anything ever.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/4/9/AAA-H0AADh8J.jpg

Origami King FINALLY ditches the stage-based world design that they've been using since Super Paper Mario, and I think this really makes the game feel more like an adventure, rather than a series of tasks. Sticker Star and Color Splash both had this terrible idea of having a Super Mario-style stage select screen, which artificially breaks up the world into chunks, and the feeling of playing 'levels' isn't something I want out of the series. This is one way in which Origami King DOES harken back to the days of PM/TTYD, instead opting for their style of having a hub town that organically connects to a bunch of different areas, with no world map. It's a subtle difference, but it matters! This makes the world a lot more interesting to traverse and explore. This contributes a lot to the plot being more interesting and the scenario-writing being a lot more entertaining as well, I think, as well as making the game's obligatory Toad-hunting a lot more fun.

The regular combat in this game is boring, but the boss fights are surprisingly fun! They're not really hard, but instead of lining up enemies, you instead have to rearrange a path of arrows for Mario to follow where he collects powerups a lot the way, and there's a lot more room for fun tactical choices here, as well as generally giving a much more open-ended puzzle to solve. The boss fights each have a lot of personality; all of the bosses being a bunch of office supplies sounds like a shitpost, and it is, but they're also somehow the funniest and most original part of the game. Go figure.

All of this adds up to a game that I... actually gave a shit about! Huh. That's an interesting feeling. I've been spinning my damn wheels with this franchise for so long that it kinda came out of left field that I enjoyed a Paper Mario game again. I don't know what it is about this one; it just has some actual animating essence behind it. The writing and characters are all hilarious, the scenarios are fun, the world's fun to explore and has a lot of really clever areas, the boss fights are actually rewarding to get to, and at the end, I felt like it was an adventure worth my time! Imagine that!

Honestly, this game's great. Sure, if it was a return to form like PM64/TTYD, it'd be like, in my top 3. But this list is really competitive and my top 20 is pretty much only games I absolutely loved. Anyway, bring on Bug Fables 2, that's gonna be the real shit if it's anything like TTYD somehow.

Oh fuck I forgot to talk about Origami King's soundtrack. It's FUCKING INSANE, in a good way. Probably my favorite soundtrack of any game on this list. Okay that's it.

Next up: This game is my only negative review on Steam!

Oh hey, a game on this list I've actually played!

I had more of a cautious optimism about Origami King, and while some of its flaws are obvious, I still had a lot of fun with it.

Only negative review, yet it trumps 30 games on the list. Must have been some specific aspect of the game that annoyed or disappointed you. Or you just spent a lot of time with it and got sick of its crap, like I did with Fallout 4.

Or it's a good console game with an awful PC port.

I tried to like Origami King (was gifted it, wouldn't have bought it for myself) and it was fine but after about 10 hours I just went "this is too slow and repetitive and I don't have time for it"

i haven't read through the whole list, but what i've read, i've enjoyed a lot

think paper mario might be the only one i've played (in fact, one of the only ones i've even heard of, along with spiritfarer)

i didn't think it was very good - the gameplay let down the writing badly, and some of the writing choices weren't all that good either

that autumn mountain music is OP though

I still haven't played a game on this list since Fall Guys

that was kind of a while ago now

#20: Storybook Brawl

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/0/9/AAA-H0AADiIB.jpg

It's amazing how some pretty good games can exist and have thousands of active players, and yet I'll just never have heard of them, because I haven't discovered it and nobody in any of my circles ever mentions it. How did everyone else stumble upon it, then? Were they all parts of other communities that did discover this game, or are they just better at finding new games to play than I am? Or is it just random chance and they stumbled upon it in a Steam queue or something? This is a problem that plagues me even now - people keep mentioning games in this topic I haven't heard of and it's like, how did I not know about this game before?

Storybook Brawl is one such game - I didn't pick it up until it became popular for a few months on one of my smaller discord servers. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have given it much of a chance if it wasn't recommended to me, because the people who played it said they were also pretty surprised by how good it was. It's got that whiff of "online free-to-play fantasy-strategy game that's trying to be the next Hearthstone or League of Legends or whatever" stench coming off of it, which kinda makes me nope out right away. Feels desperate, and I'm not really into that kind of scene - too likely to be toxic. Not my vibe.

But it IS free to play, and it WAS recommended despite it kind of looking like some boring autobattler junk, so I gave it a try, and it became my new addiction for three months.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/0/AAA-H0AADiIC.jpg

Storybook Brawl is one of those games where I have trouble categorizing the genre. It's an autobattler. Not quite a card game, since there aren't really cards; you're buying characters to put on your team, powering them up, and then they fight another person's team of characters. A game consists of 8 players, each of whom plays a main 'hero' who gives you special abilities that affect your team, and you get matched up 1v1 with other players, fighting each other, losing health if you lose a battle, getting bigger and better characters on your roster, until there's one winner.

First thing I noticed was that I wasn't giving this game's theming enough credit because it's actually pretty great. This game has a fairy-tale theme, all of its characters being drawn from old folktales or mythology in the public domain that have mostly been popularized by Disney, but the art in this game is great and gives all of the characters fun, clever twists, which make them fun to play. This game has an impressive roster of hero characters to play - again, League of Legends vibes here - but all their art is really fun and cute.

This game does have a free-to-play model, which I was highly skeptical of at first, but it's not a very scummy one, so it works out. Every game, you get four hero choices: one of the eight 'starting' heroes that everyone has, one hero from any of the other 25+ selections, and then two other heroes also from the other 25+, but you can only pick them if you own them by purchasing them with in-game currency. So even if you don't buy any heroes, you still get choices, and even if you do own a hero it doesn't mean it'll get offered in any given game, so you can't use it all the time - you'll still have to play some different heroes now and then. You can use money to get the currency you need to buy them, but you can also build it up by just playing, so there isn't really much of a need to spend money. There's actually very little reason to spend money, which might be part of the problem with their business model.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/1/AAA-H0AADiID.jpg

Anyway, despite the idea of an autobattler making it sound very un-tactical and just kind of luck-based, the strategy in this game is actually really well made. Every character has interesting and potentially very powerful abilities while still being very well balanced and team composition matters a lot. There is still a fair bit of luck of the draw involved, especially in upgrading your characters (having 3 of the same character upgrades them, powering them up and giving you an item), so that aspect can be pretty frustrating and I've gotten mad at this game for being bullshit quite a lot, but putting together good team compositions is a lot of fun. The fact that this is a competitive game really makes drafting a good team feel rewarding, because then you get to beat the crap out of some rube who didn't put together a team as good as yours (or maybe just got unluckier than you). There's enough randomness here for every game to feel different, too; there's quite a few potentially winning comps out there, although the game gets patched every month and last I played, trees were way overpowered and needed to be taken down a notch.

So I got really hooked on it. Every game takes like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, and I just get a big dopamine hit from trying to win games and watch my (stupid, completely pointless) rating go up. All the heroes play super differently so every game is new and fun and I can never resist playing just one more. I actually played so much that I managed to make the top 200 of a monthly leaderboard in rating once; I think that was mostly just luck and convenient timing, but I'm still gonna brag about it. I did the monthly tournaments for a while and never qualified in the first day, but I came pretty close at least; my abilities in this game are competitive. It's fine, I'm sure that one day, after I continue to play this game for a while and develop my skills, I'll make it out of qualifiers. I expect to enjoy this game for a nice, long while -

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/4/AAA-H0AADiIG.png

Well, that's... concerning. I wonder what happened to -

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/5/AAA-H0AADiIH.png

Oh goddamnit.

Lest you think this was just an acquisition to broaden a portfolio, the developers came out after this and said that due to the FTX acquisition, they'd be looking into introducing blockchain-related technology into the game, including NFTs. The community went properly apeshit and everything was on fire. It's all been burnt down and not much is left now, as you can see by the lack of reviews since, although the game does remain active.

I voiced my opposition to this as well, because putting a bunch of blockchain shit in a game that has no use for it did not sit well with me, either. To be clear, I don't actually think they'll ever *succeed* in introducing NFTs into this game, because they'd need to have some kind of actual plausible use case, and they simply don't have one, so any plans to try to do this are eventually going to get scuttled because they literally can't implement them. As of today, they still haven't come up with any bad ideas, let alone good ones.

But that doesn't really matter to me too much; I just don't want to be involved in a game that's voicing its active support for some crypto scam shit. The moment after this announcement came down on March 22, 2022, the SBB Discord became immediately overrun with cryptobros just looking for the next big crypto grift to hitch a ride on, hoping that this game will be the big thing that finally launches their cherished web3 gaming utopia, with not really much care for the actual game itself except for the fact that they've convinced themselves that it must be cool now because it's part of the cryptosphere. Well, great. Can't say that's a community I want to be a part of, so I left some feedback on the whole situation and noped out. I know that they need the money to continue work developing the game, so I don't wish them ill, but that really sours me on the game and it did for a lot of other players as well which is only going to make the game worse to play.

I earnestly do hope that this kind of blows over at some point - I don't truly want SBB to selfdestruct over this, because it's a really good game, and it was a lot of fun for a while. I haven't completely written off the idea of coming back to it someday, and while I know I'm trying to make a pretty compelling case for being turned off from the game right now, I'd still recommend it nontheless (since I don't think playing it for free is going to do much to promote a collapsing crypto market at this point). For now, though, I guess this is kind of where I'm at with the game. It's still getting updated; maybe I'll play it again in a few months and see what they've changed, or maybe I won't. Cutting myself free from the game did feel kind of freeing; I was probably playing it a little bit too much (at 267 hours, this is my second-most played game on the list) and having more time to focus on other games was probably healthier, anyway.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/6/AAA-H0AADiII.jpg

So RIP Storybook Brawl, a game that is not at all dead, but it is at least a little bit dead to me. It had a good run and crash and burned in the most March 2022 way possible. I'm hopeful that in the future I won't have to deal with any more of my GOTY candidates getting bought by crypto firms.

Next up: Hey remember how I talked about there actually being four time loop games on this list? This was the one I categorized wrong for no reason. It's definitely a time loop game, and it's my third-favorite time loop game of 2021! Go on, guess!

boo nfts

There were so many timeloop games last year, hmm. You haven't played Returnal, Outer Wilds is probably higher, and I'm guessing it's not Deathloop, so the answer is obviously TWELVE MINU- lol. I'll take a stab in the dark and say Overboard!.

Does Gnosia count as a time loop game? I'll guess that

#19: Gnosia

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/6/AAA-H0AADiSw.jpg

If you haven't played Gnosia yet, then I need you understand that when I say Gnosia is a Mafia simulator, I mean that excruciatingly literally.

VNs that have vaguely Mafia-like aesthetics are in vogue lately, I guess. I mean, there's Danganronpa, which people often describe as being like Mafia. This is obviously wrong, of course. Sure, there's debate and an uninformed majority trying to capture an informed minority, but it's really just one person trying to kill someone and getting away with it; it's not Mafia. I've heard that Raging Loop has a more literal Mafia-like (well, Werewolf-like I suppose) setup, but it's still just part of the plot; the game is a VN, you don't have to literally play mafia.

You do have to literally play Mafia in Gnosia. There are VN vignettes sprinkled throughout, but basically the whole game is playing randomized Mafia games against the AI. That's the game.

If you think playing mafia against the AI sounds like a really terrible idea... well okay, it pretty much is, but you have to hear me out on this one. Give me a chance to build up Gnosia as a good game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/7/AAA-H0AADiSx.jpg

Gnosia is a game that takes place on a spaceship with a cast of 15 people, including your faceless player character. The "Gnosia" are some kind of alien species that infect other players and make them try to murder everyone else. (Luckily, I already discussed Among Us, so I can just point out the obvious parallels and move on.) You are also stuck in a time loop, for story reasons. In order to defeat the Gnosia, you play mafia; voting on people to put into cold sleep, having people die one by one at night, and eventually trying to vote all of the Gnosia off. There's 'engineer' and 'guardian angel' roles that work like cop/doctor (or whatever werewolf equivalent you're more familiar with) as well as (confusingly) a 'doctor' role that can view alignments of dead players (game is flipless) and some other stuff like lost wolves (or whatever they're called in mafia) and third-party survivors. Of course, sometimes you're the Gnosia, and you need to avoid getting voted off. You're reading this on Board 8, so chances are I don't really need to re-explain Mafia to you. The rules are nearly identical.

There's rounds of debating where everyone decides who to vote for, but instead of, you know, talking it out like two actual humans, you instead have a list of actions you can perform that will influence the outcome of the voting in various ways. You gain more actions as the game progresses but you can really only start out with saying someone is suspicious, or saying someone is not suspicious. Which leads to fascinating conversations like:

"You said that A was suspicious."
B: "Hmmm... yeah, A seems pretty suspicious."
C: "I agree! A is suspicious!"
A: "What? Everyone thinks I'm suspicious?"
D: "I don't think there's anything suspicious about A."

Get used to this; this game is like 20 hours long and half of it is just this. I know, it sounds great.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/8/AAA-H0AADiSy.jpg

The thing is, after a while, you kind of stop treating this like a mafia game and you start treating it like a puzzle game. It's not a game to be won - it's a game to be solved, and with enough time, the game gives you the tools to solve it. One of the most interesting mechanics in this game is that you character has actual stats - Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Performance, Charm, and Stealth. Charisma makes your arguments more influential, Intuition gives you a random chance to spot people who are lying, Charm makes people less likely to vote for you, etc. Each stat also gradually unlocks new actions - having a high intuition allows you to have everyone "Say they're human" for example, which can let you get random checks to tell who's lying. There's a lot of ambiguity about which stats are actually the best to have, since they're all pretty useful in different ways, but eventually you can level them all up and become a mafia god.

Eventually you just start running through these games as fast as possible and that's when the game gets weirdly fun - characters start using more of their advanced actions against you, too, and each of the game's 14 characters have their own stats and playstyle, so you kind of learn what their quirks are and how to manage them over time. This game CAN be kind of logicked out, just by looking at voting patterns, seeing who's defending who, watching for who's making sort of odd moves, etc, but it's not immediately obvious that this is all possible. A lot of this game is way too opaque - there's a surprising amount of depth behind this mafia simulator that the game never tells you about and that you can beat the entire game without ever noticing. But who even needs to logic things out? With high enough stats, you can catch all the liars, strongarm the group into doing what you want, and then afterwards the Gnosia won't even kill you. It's sort of a fun power fantasy, especially for someone who's played a lot of mafia over the years.

The real draw to this game is actually the story and characters, though. The actual VN portions. This game IS still a VN, despite having a much heavier gameplay portion than most. As you loop through 100+ mafia games, each time you gradually start to piece together more about 'what's going on', as well as seeing random events that give you more details about each character's backstory, which you need to learn in order to complete the game. Where this game really shines are in its characters; they're goofy looking at first but they all turn out to be really fun and interesting in their own ways, as well as being very easy to differentiate during the mafia games themselves, which is important. I was really surprised that by the end of the game, I actually really gave a shit about these characters, and I was really interested in the broader plot of the story, which actually has some pretty interesting twists.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/9/9/AAA-H0AADiSz.jpg

I actually wish there was MORE talking in this game, which is wild. Like, all of the story-related interactions between the characters are a ton of fun, and surprisingly well written, and the game actually kind of leaves you wanting more because they're so few and far between. You have to play a LOT of somewhat-dull mafia games to get there, and I surprised myself with how much I actually WANTED to trudge through the mafia games to get to them. I almost dropped this game 20% of the way in or so, but by the time I was 50% in or so I was HOOKED. I HAD to see the rest of it, and I'm glad I did.

Gnosia is a really hard game to recommend, because it's grindy, and kind of a slog, especially if you're kind of already familiar with mafia and not newly enchanted by the concept. But I slowly grew kind of fascinated by the mafia simulator aspect, and the plot and characters are Zero Escape-y enough in their qualities to keep me invested. I'm actually really glad I played this one at the end of the day, even if I will also pretty freely talk shit about how much it sucks. I think that if you like mafia and weird mystery VNs you're sort of contractually obligated to see this one through - there's nothing really quite like it.

Next up: Oh no! I'm caught in a time loop where I have to talk about time loop games!

#18: Overboard!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/5/8/AAA-H0AADjPG.jpg

Far from being a tired cliche, in my opinion, games featuring time loops have become an established staple, a gimmick that I think should be used in the future because it has a lot of functionality. There's a lot of reasons why a game might use a time loop; it might give the player an in-game reason to have more than one attempt at a challenging task, it might allow the game to tell multiple versions of the same story, or it might provide a snapshot of one moment in time in a living, breathing world that can be explored. But I think the most intriguing way a time loop can be utilized is giving you the power to change the future with your actions by experimenting to see what works and what doesn't, and using info from previous loops to do everything perfectly.

Ever since Majora's Mask, I've been waiting for the game that really pulls off that "Groundhog Day" concept. Groundhog Day is one of my favorite films, and one of the things I find captivating about it is the idea that after experiencing this time loop so many times, Phil knows everything about this little moment in time and the people that inhabit it, and has tried everything and learned from past experiences so much, that he can engineer a perfect day where everything goes precisely to plan. Majora's Mask has a little bit of this idea, exploring Clock Town and observing what events happen at what times, and figuring out where you need to be at what time; but I think there's only so many sidequests that really utilize this mechanic, and for the most part it's just talking to someone at the right time of day. I've always felt like a game could take this idea of engineering the 'perfect day' and take it a little further into some kind of adventure game format. Overboard is not my favorite time loop game of all time, but it might be the one that best captures this idea.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/5/9/AAA-H0AADjPH.jpg

Overboard is something of a reverse murder mystery; instead of an adventure game where you try to solve a murder, you instead assume the role of a murderer trying to escape guilt. You play as Veronica Villensly, a young woman in a loveless marriage who's just thrown her husband titularly Overboard on a fancy cruise ship, and over the next day you must find a way to get away with your crime before you dock. Sounds easy enough, except you soon find that nearly everyone on the boat is rightfully suspicious of you for one reason or another, so you'll have to figure out how to get everyone off your case, or to shut up about what they saw.

This game is a farce-comedy adventure/VN where you go to different rooms of the ship and talk to people (with many dialog choices) or snoop around (with many possible actions), all taking place over an 8-hour day where the guests on the boat each have their own routines. The first time you play, well, you're probably going to get caught, because it turns out the evidence is not in Ms. Villensly's favor. But that's fine; you wake up the next day with everything reset and a helpful checklist of things to try and accomplish next in order to get one step towards freedom. The time loop here isn't a major part of the story; Veronica herself just briefly acknowledges memories of past loops, but it's mostly just for the player's sake. Playing the day again over and over, you gradually come to learn more about the other guests on the boat, uncovering their secrets and figuring out how they can be silenced, until you can combine all of your knowledge into a perfectly engineered day that gets you off the hook.

This game could have become very overwhelming, and still does at some points, but they did some things wisely to overcome that. The size of the cast and number of locations are both quite modest, so even though it feels like there's a lot of different things you could possibly do, the game isn't nearly as overwhelming as it appears at first glance. And maybe this is just a me thing, but in video games, I often struggle with making evil or just plain stupid choices, but this game's tone is so light and breezy despite all the murder that I never had a problem being a bastard, partly because Veronica is such an affable and charming protagonist, and partly because half the people on the boat are even more awful than she is. Everyone's awful! But it's a fun kind of awful, and the game's distinct style and enjoyable writing keeps the game flowing at a good pace. Going back and trying every single choice to exhaust my options never got old and there aren't so many of them that I felt bogged down.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/0/AAA-H0AADjPI.jpg

Still, as far as time loop games go, this one is pretty challenging. It's not very long - you can probably figure out how to get the game's best ending in as little as 4 hours, if you're a bit smarter than me - but it's a really worthwhile puzzle to figure out. Unlike a game like Forgotten City that uses a similar time loop premise, where all you need to do is just talk to everyone in town a few times and eventually you'll exhaust every quest line just by stumbling around, Overboard demands thought, planning, and precise action. Stumbling around the boat will eventually help you gather the information you need to succeed, but you need to actually think about how to apply it to get anything done. What's more is that there's actually multiple ways to solve every problem, and the game accounts for a lot of different possibilities, depending on what each character knows and in what way you've manipulated them.

The fact that you need to have a plan to win stymied me for a fair bit, actually, and I had to put this game down for a little bit and come back to it later. A few hours in and I just couldn't figure out what the next step I needed to take was. Taking a slightly different tack with a particular character got me there, and after that I was able to tie everything else up. Getting the game's best ending was a truly satisfying victory unlike I've had in most adventure games; it felt so satisfying to figure out how to make all of the dominos fall just right, so that every character has been played right into the palm of my hand. It actually felt like I had to figure it all out. It made me feel like a genius mastermind! That's a sort of experience that I haven't truly gotten to feel in a time loop game of this sort to date.

As I said, it's quite short, but feels really packed full of content and doesn't overstay its welcome. It's a brilliant premise with entertaining writing and a style all its own that pulls off its concept about as well as I could expect. I didn't want to talk about it in too great a detail since there's a few fun surprises here and there and all of the solutions to this murder puzzle are worth discovering on one's own. Needless to say, I recommend checking it out. (I can't stress enough how painful it is to only rank this game #18 on this list. It's great. Everything else on this list is also great.)

Next up: Uh oh. Is it time to get personal about gender-related topics?

Damn I was actually going to guess that one. Overboard is pretty fun stuff! I love all the variations you can accomplish.

Also I hope you got the kill everyone ending.

I love, for instance, that there's multiple different ways to get Clarissa to confess to the murder. Or the fact that you can either pick up the earring before Carstairs finds it, or bully him into submission by knowing his secrets. Etc etc. It's cool that it's not a completely straightforward puzzle and the conditions for solving it aren't strictly black or white. It's a really well designed game.

And no I haven't gone for the kill everyone ending yet. I meant to get back to it at some point, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it started.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Next up: Uh oh. Is it time to get personal about gender-related topics?

Fallout: New Vegas

My actual guess is Animal Crossing NH though

Safety bump

Working on it right now btw - I ended up taking a few days off because the weather's really nice and I mostly just went outside all day lol

Hi! Sorry about the total lack of updates to this list, but I'm back now. I got weirdly depressed for a few days and couldn't write, and then getting back on the wagon was really hard. This shit is always the bane of my existence when it comes to writing topics and I'm trying to get better about it. Anyway, I'm back on the wagon now.

#17: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/8/AAA-H0AADldc.jpg

There are two different versions of this writeup that I could make. In one, I speak straightforwardly about this game that pretty much everyone is already familiar with, talk about its pros and cons, maybe analyze its place in the 2020 landscape a bit, you know, the standard stuff. In the other, where I acknowledge that that's all well-worn ground that everyone's already discussed before, and what I really find pressing and noteworthy to talk about is my experience with the game and what it means personally to me, I get to talk about how this game finally cracked my damn egg. What would you rather talk about? This game's slightly disappointing quality of life features, or the fact that it's turning everyone you know transgender? Just kidding, you're obviously getting both! They're both issues very close to my heart, after all.

I have a sort of weird nostalgia for the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in March-April 2020. Not that it was a very good time, mind you, but the brain processes strange times in strange ways, I guess. We were all stuck at home and couldn't go out and do anything and everything was scary, and while that sucked, there was at least some pleasantness to the way society in general slowed down for a little while. This period of mass isolation, of course, nearly perfectly coincided with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I'm far from the first person to point this out. It couldn't have come at a better time.

I didn't actually own a Switch at the time - we had one in the family, and I played on it when I needed to (mostly for BOTW/Smash), but Animal Crossing coming out kind of changed things. Initially my mom and my younger brother (then 11) played AC:NH on a shared Switch, but quickly realized that not having their own villages sucked. And my mom absolutely demanded that I get my own copy of the game and play it on my own Switch so they could visit my village, which I was happy to oblige with. At the time, there were shortages of Switches for pretty obvious reasons (supply disruptions plus a surge in demand), so we had to wait a few weeks and preorder Switch Lites from Best Buy. Going out to pick up two Switch Lites at Best Buy is a memory that weirdly stands out for me, since it was like, probably the first time since lockdown really happened that I even left the house. It was surreal; not much traffic on the road, a lot of businesses closed, the Best Buy was only doing deliveries to cars at the time, so we drove up and they dropped the Switches off.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/9/AAA-H0AADldd.jpg

I got a yellow Switch Lite! (Pictured above. Forgive the poor screenshot quality here, but I'm using pictures I took of my actual game using my phone because the idea of using screenshots from someone else's village DISGUSTS ME.) I'm pretty pleased about the color actually. Yellow's underrated. It's cute! Maybe I'm just a primary color contrarian, I don't know. The yellow really brings me back to the PLAY IT LOUD days of the colored Game Boys. I kinda miss those days, but they're back now, kinda! Wow, I am getting SERIOUSLY off track here, sorry about that.

Anyway, I was excited to finally get to boot up the game and check it out, since this was at the height of everyone playing Animal Crossing and I was a few weeks behind, so I had some catching up to do. Beginning a new Animal Crossing game is super exciting - wondering what your particular island is going to look like, which starting villagers are going to be your destiny, all that. I got Hamlet the hamster and Dierdre the deer, which I consider a pretty above average get. (I've since let Dierdre go, but Hamlet's still here.) Getting a choice of island layouts led to an incredible amount of analysis paralysis, given that there's so many features I wouldn't be able to change later, so I must have spent literally 30 minutes thinking about it - I eventually chose an island that had more interesting features over one that was more convenient, since I thought that would make the island more interesting to design around.

There was one thing that gave me even more analysis paralysis, though, and that was my villager's name. Because I used my first name for my last character in AC:NL, and I hadn't decided on a new, more feminine first name yet.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/0/AAA-H0AADlde.jpg

I knew I wanted to play a girl in New Horizons, and I mean, obviously there's nothing wrong with that. Boys playing girls in video games is a time-honored tradition! I've told myself that for decades, of course. Very powerful transfem gamer coping mechanism. But it's a little different when it's like, Mass Effect or World of Warcraft or even Pokemon, versus when it's supposed to be something a lot closer to an avatar character that's supposed to be 'you' for the next couple hundred hours. I made my avatar character a boy in New Leaf because making them a girl felt sort of unseemingly, something weird I wasn't supposed to be doing. Well fuck that! I decided to just name myself "Para" - good nonbinary vibes - and I set out making up for lost time.

All this is to say - playing a girl in Animal Crossing for the first time completely transformed the way I felt about the whole game and made this a different experience for me. For some people, that won't make much sense, and that's fine! For me, it was a lightbulb moment. Aha! Gender euphoria! It's real!

In previous AC games, I'd never cared about my character's appearance at all. To be fair, part of that is because in AC for the GameCube you play as a WEIRD LITTLE GREMLIN rather than just a cute regular person. A stylistic choice, I suppose, and one that made me wish my horned child avatar was sacrificed by being buried alive like in Ico. But okay, aside from that, also it's because I was playing a boy. And who cares about appearances on a boy character? That's right, obviously nobody, I told myself. Don't care about buying clothes for myself, don't care about buying clothes for my character. The Able Sisters was a place that existed for completionist purposes. It was not a place that existed for personal enjoyment.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/1/AAA-H0AADldf.jpg

Obviously, of course, in New Horizons, the Able Sisters suddenly became the absolute most important place in the game. I have to go there EVERY DAY to see the CUTE CLOTHES that I can put on my CUTE NON-GREMLIN AVATAR. Most of my storage is now dresses. (I mostly take them out of a cooler I keep outside of my house. This is normal in this universe I'm sure.) In previous games, I was only focused on furniture and making money and shit, but suddenly, now aesthetic preferences had meaning! It was something I cared about! And that's how I and also probably like tens of thousands of trans girls just popped into existence overnight. Thanks Animal Crossing for advancing the trans agenda!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/2/AAA-H0AADldg.jpg

I'm sure my mom was a little surprised at how much pink I choose to make my villager wear when I come over to her town, but she knows what the deal is now. Someday I'll have to confess that I decided I liked the name Celia, based on the eagle villager of the same name who lives in my village. I wanted her in my village, and she ended up being one of the first villagers I got at random. It was destiny, so I stole her name. I am probably not the first person to take a new given name based on an Animal Crossing villager.

Okay, I told myself that I was gonna finish this review quickly tonight since I've been sitting on it for two weeks, and if I didn't I would sic people from #sports onto my lazy ass, so let's see. What else is there to talk about? Not much, really. I mean, we all know what the deal is with Animal Crossing by now. It's well-tread ground. Twenty years ago it would have been pretty revolutionary to have a sim game in which you don't do shit and there are no objectives, but now it's run of the mill shit (except they did have to go and add objectives in the form of achievements).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/3/AAA-H0AADldh.jpg

I do think I like this game the most of the series, despite its problems. Mainly because it's just so gosh darn pretty. I'm a huge sucker for islands and tropical environments in general, so having a village that's set on a tiny island is just the best. I'm kind of obsessed with tiny islands - I just love the vibe of having this like, miniature little world that's completely surrounded by water. It feels so cozy, knowing every corner of this tiny little landmass inside and out and knowing there's nothing beyond it but open ocean. It makes for a wonderful place to just kinda exist and chill out in, so all the visual upgrades to this game are a benefit on that front.

I wish the quality of life features in this game were a lot better. I think everyone does. There's quite a bit too much repetitive dialog and cumbersome menuing in this game that doesn't need to exist, and that's a shame. If some aspects of this game were better designed, and it had like... maybe a couple more things to do, especially with friends, it'd be a near perfect little village sim game. But, as it is, it's enough to capture my imagination, and it's little wonder it took off in an era where everyone was stuck at home with nothing to do.

I haven't been back to my village in a little while. I stopped by one day just to celebrate Celia's birthday - gotta support my girl - but other than that I haven't really played a whole lot. Didn't do the DLC at all. It kinda makes me sad, because I did really love this game, and I do kinda want to revisit it if I find the time and emotional energy to do so. I actually never really terraformed my island at all - I really wanted to leave it natural and enjoy how annoying it was to navigate in a weird, fucked up way. Maybe if I return to the game, I can finally say fuck it and break out the shovels and dig the whole thing up and play around with it. I'm not really very good at building stuff, but it might be fun. I never really did do much to design my house, either, which is ridiculous because that's kind of part of the whole game? I mostly just spend a lot of time in Animal Crossing trying to make money and completing my catalog and stuff.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/4/AAA-H0AADldi.jpg

So maybe I'll go back to it, but if not, it's given me a lot of fond memories for a weird, transitional time in my life that was basically just yesterday. It's weird to feel this nostalgic for 2020 but New Horizons is just kinda perfectly engineered to trigger those feelings regardless. It's far from a perfect game, but it's one I needed at the time it came out.

Next up: Unlike Animal Crossing, this next game did not cause any sort of gender identity crisis in me, because both the men and the women are already equally burly looking.

Huh, I never would've expected Animal Crossing to have such a profound impact on someone's life like that! Thanks for sharing your journey with us. ...But screw you for disparaging the iconic little goblin horns of the GC protag. That's the only version of AC I ever played, I had a blast with it but never felt a need to return to the series in later entries.

I had a fun time with Overboard!, that game simply oozes style, I just wish there was more to it. Like a 'true' ending more than we actually get or something. I'm hoping the devs' next game gets more of a budget but idk if this one made enough waves.

Burly men and women, uh... Deep Rock Galactic? I have no idea. Are there even women in that >_>

Paratroopa1 posted...

Obviously, of course, in New Horizons, the Able Sisters suddenly became the absolute most important place in the game. I have to go there EVERY DAY to see the CUTE CLOTHES that I can put on my CUTE NON-GREMLIN AVATAR.

New Horizons was definitely enlightening in a "ah. so this is how i would dress if everything fit me and money was meaningless. ...i see" sort of way. As you say, it's somehow different from even a game like Pokemon where you play an avatar but it's not like, an avatar avatar.

Dorfromantik Switch port next month just announced at Gamescom, I recognised its look from this topic!

I've been, to put it one way, thinking about gender a lot lately. Like, every day. That was a super cool write up, thanks so much for sharing that story!

lol I got covid so bear with me while writeups come slowly again

Hi! I'm not sick anymore. I also just struggled to think of shit to say about my next game. This writeup is a disaster.

#16: Valheim

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/8/6/AAA-H0AADnfa.jpg

Oh, so speaking of things that happened during the pandemic! I got 1200 dollars from the US government in May of 2020. In a sick, twisted way, the pandemic actually benefitted me a great deal - previously I had no money and didn't have enough money to buy a new computer, but this sudden infusion of 1200 dollars was exactly how much I needed.

I was desperate. I'd had my previous computer since 2010, and it was seriously showing its age. It was pretty good in 2010, but ten years of heavy use and no upgrades and it was falling apart pretty fast. I think a lot of that was thanks to a probably-dying hard drive, but it didn't have enough memory or a good enough graphics card to keep up, either. I needed a new computer. So I set out in May 2020 to build a new computer for the first time! It was a challenging experience that I never would've gotten through if not for having just the right network of friends who could carefully guide me through the process, but it ended up being incredibly rewarding - not only was it a lot cheaper to get a new computer this way, but I also feel like I learned something! Building a computer's not so bad. It's like making legos! Out of really expensive parts that might break if you touch them wrong! And they might not work for no reason! Thankfully, my new PC, the one I'm using right now as I type this, worked the first time I booted it, which is an accomplishment I'm really proud of.

It's a really good thing it worked because my old computer would have had no chance of running Valheim.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/8/4/AAA-H0AADnfY.jpg

As I alluded to in my Animal Crossing writeup, I really suck at building stuff. I don't know what it is - I have a really hard time working with 3D space in my head, so I don't do very well when it comes to making a plan and then executing when it comes to assembling something in three dimensions. It's just something I'm naturally bad at, for whatever reason. As a result, I tend to avoid the builder games. I've never touched Minecraft; the thought of actually playing Minecraft to even 1% of its potential stresses me the hell out.

So Valheim is REALLY not the type of game I would normally even think of touching, because it's got that same sort of focus on building stuff, except it's not made out of conveniently shaped and arranged blocks like in Minecraft but... like, actual building materials in semi-realistic worlds. Absolutely my worst nightmare. I mean, it SOUNDS cool in theory, obviously. I love it when OTHER people build stuff. I live in a house that someone else built!

But hey, I DID build my PC successfully, and that was a pretty complicated assembly project, so maybe I can handle it after all! I told myself that when one of my friends wanted to get me into Valheim. As nervous as I was about the idea, I was kind of into it, too - Breath of the Wild got me into the spirit of enjoying exploring open worlds, and having a friend who I can play with who can help me build is nice. I always feel a little bit guilty about never getting into online games with people; my social anxiety kind of flares up a lot and I end up preferring to do things at my own pace instead of scheduling times to do them with other people, despite the fact that I do love playing games with others. So I kinda owed it to him to give Valheim my best shot and I dove into it headfirst.

Valheim is a sort of open-world survival game where you can build rustic nordic cabins and shit. You generate a massive world filled with tons of geographical features to explore and resources to exploit, and what ensues is the typical crafting-game loop; get wood and ore, combine them to make tools that get you even better wood and ore, which you combine to make even BETTER tools, etc. You make weapons for combat, as well, since there's monsters everywhere, and sometimes they raid your carefully build villages for fun. Eventually you get strong enough gear to go and take out some bosses which give you some progression materials that you can use to make tools to get EVEN BETTER wood and ore. It's the crafting gameplay loop. You've seen it before.

In most cases, I'd be pretty tired of this gameplay loop, but Valheim kept me glued to it by making the world really pretty to look at. Valheim's a beautiful game; the textures are intentionally pretty low-res, like a very upscaled Minecraft, but you can see out to the horizon for miles and the sky lights up pretty colors all the time and it's just gorgeous to look at. Kind of like Breath of the Wild, Valheim is escapist entertainment for me; it's about playing pretend in the great outdoors, getting lost in this huge open world and just kind of taking it in and just having fun existing there.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/8/5/AAA-H0AADnfZ.jpg

I like the emergent gameplay that comes out of Valheim. You just sort of get dumped into the world and you have to figure it out; you gotta start chopping down some trees and building a camp for yourself so you don't get attacked by monsters at night. You have to decide for yourself where your expeditions take you to gather more resources; you have to decide for yourself where you want to build new things. If you get stuck somewhere at night, you have to end up putting together a new camp together in the woods to defend yourself. Dying is mostly not a terrible fate (although losing skill ranks is a very annoying mechanic) but I still kind of get a thrill out of going into dangerous places and surviving it.

I'm bad at building stuff, but's a lot of fun to do. This game does have some questionable quality of life choices, where the game has tons of different resources you need to collect but treasure chests can only hold so much stuff, so you have to have like a crazy organizational system of like 100 chests just to hold all your shit; but it's kind of fun putting together a little town area with you and a couple of buddies where you can organize all your stuff. It's very cozy to build a nice lodge where you can just kinda hang out. It's a little more satisfying to do this sort of thing than it is in Animal Crossing, where you can do whatever you want and you don't need to pay off Tom Nook to do it for you.

I played it for about 80 hours off and on with some buddies before I eventually got tired and dropped it - I actually never explored the game's final biome or beat the final boss. We made a bunch of trips up to the mountain, mining as much silver as we could before taking it down, crossing the river, and storing it back at our encampment, eventually fighting a dragon once we had all our silver armor built. It was fun! Felt like a good place to stop, I guess.

Here is around the point at which I realize I have nothing to say about Valheim. It's just a fun little open world survival game that kind of scratches a particular itch I have to wander around a big open world and get excited about finding random geological features. It's relaxing and there's something fun about playing 'pretend' with the idea of carving your own adventures out in a sandbox world. I wish I could do this game more justice in talking about it because it's just so fucking pretty to look at and I could just lose myself in it for hours. It's also got a bunch of annoyances like inventory management and awkward combat, but, I dunno, it's great in spite of all that. I'm surprised that I haven't seen Valheim get more praise.

(I used screenshots from my own game again but I didn't have as many screenshots as I thought I had, oops. I figured I had at least one of my friend's cool buildings)

Next up: A puzzle game that I think is most specifically geared to me than any other game on this list. I dunno if anyone will get this one.

#15: Petal Crash

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/5/7/AAA-H0AADoC5.jpg

The best thing about the new wave of indie gaming we've had since the early 10's is that, with a new influx of developers looking to make games on the cheap and recapture the magic of their childhood favorites, there's pastiche for just about every style of game out there. And not just the popular things to make pastiche out of, like Earthbound, or gritty low-res survival horror PS1 games. For me, the joy is in knowing that there's someone else out there who really wanted to recreate the exact look and feel of Pokemon Puzzle Challenge for the GBC.

I dunno what it is about the GBC aesthetic. It was the last bastion of bold, primary-colored pixel art and chipper 8-bit tunes, and while that look and feel echoed into the GBA and even DS eras, something about sitting down with my GBC on a long road trip was special. PPC in the summer of 2001 was probably the last game I ever really sat down with on my GBC for a long period of time and I really had no idea how much I would miss that aesthetic once it was gone. 'Falling block' puzzle games would go the way of sleek visuals and thumping beats in the future with games like Lumines and Planet Puzzle League in the near future and it never appealed to me as much as the cutesy characters and cheery vibe of these older Panel de Pon games. Obviously I'm not the only one who felt that PdP really needed to get back to its fairy-girl roots, and hence we have Petal Crash, in all of its cheesy GBC-inspired glory.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/5/8/AAA-H0AADoC6.jpg

Petal Crash is the latest heir in the Tetris lineage of block-puzzle games, and I'm really glad that someone's still making this sort of thing. In the 90's everyone used to have their own take on the 'falling block' puzzle; there's the obvious ones like Puyo Puyo and Dr. Mario and Columns, but there's a bunch of other forgotten ones out there (does anyone remember Puzz Loop?). We still got them in the late 00's with stuff like Lumines and Meteos, but since then it's kind of dropped off as of late. We still get variations on the old classics from time to time like Tetris 99 or Puyo Puyo Tetris but rarely does someone put the time and the effort into creating a brand new game in this genre. Maybe on mobile platforms they do? But they mostly seem kind of out of style.

Well, not with me. Tetris Attack is still my fucking jam and Petal Crash is, as a result, right up my alley. It's a refreshing new take in this genre; you have a grid where you can slide colored panels in one direction until they hit something, and if they collide with a same color panel, they all explode, sending any adjacent panels sliding themselves, which can create chains of exploding panels. It's a pretty familiar idea, yet it's somehow completely brand new; it's immediately intuitive as if I've played it before even though it hasn't existed until now. It feels like it always should have existed, like it's some forgotten game from 2001. Discovering this game is like meeting a family member I didn't know I have and immediately becoming fast friends with them.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/5/9/AAA-H0AADoC7.jpg

Of course, what really sells Petal Crash for me is that absolutely delicious GBC vibe it has. It's truly retro in a way that feels completely authentic to the exact time that it's trying to replicate, and I appreciate that authenticity. The soundtrack is a banger and sounds like it could come directly out of the speakers of a GBC, and the pixel art is just so colorful and appealing to look at; the panels pop right off the screen. And the character designs are so adorable! I want to main as every single one of them, although Yosoti the centaur is my go-to (nonbinary rep!)

This game has all of the usual puzzle game modes; time attack, endless, puzzle mode, but the game is primarily focused on vs play so story mode is kinda the main draw out of the single player modes. And it is quite the story mode - every character's got their long-winded backstory reason for wanting to collect a bunch of flowers and having a wish granted, which is also delightfully retro in its earnestly sincere corniness. The story mode's pretty great though - the writing's surprisingly funny and all of the characters are great (every single one of ore kid's lines are worth the game's price of admission alone, she's the best). I'm in love with this game's cast of adorable weirdos.

It's also hard as goddamn balls. This game's got difficulty modes for those of you who aren't hardened puzzle game veterans like me, but I personally cannot beat this game's Master difficulty without multiple continues. Unlike other falling block games where you need to keep your screen from hitting the top, in this game you need to play a tug-of-war with your opponent where you clear a gradually-shrinking margin more of tiles than they do, while creating chains delivers unmovable blocks to the other side to slow them down. If you slow down to create a big chain to send to your opponent, they can send you a smaller attack to disrupt you while getting a lead in tiles cleared, so you have to carefully balance creating attacks with making sure you're keeping pace in overall tiles cleared. The high-level AI doesn't fuck around, and it's really hard to keep pace with them - I just can't see quality clears fast enough.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/6/0/AAA-H0AADoC8.jpg

Steam tells me I've only played this game for like 8 hours but it feels like 50 because I keep coming back to it every now and then to nibble at it a bit more. I haven't really quite felt up to the idea of truly mastering it - maybe I'm just too old for this shit - but I really, really wish I did because there's so much depth and potential here. There is online play for this game that came out a bit after I picked it up which I haven't played yet, nobody was on the servers when I checked it out so I'd probably have to find opponents to play myself, which I kind of want to at some point, but I'm also worried I'll get my ass kicked really badly.

Even if I don't fully master it, though, it's still a lot of fun, and discovering this game - I can't even remember how I came across it at this point, I know it was popular on the Necrodancer servers a couple years ago - was a real joy. It feels like more than just stumbling upon a new game, but receiving a gift that was made with love for someone exactly like me. I don't think this game got nearly enough press - puzzle game fans should definitely check this one out.

Next up: Don't worry, after this there's only one more hyper-obscure game on my list. This is my favorite game from the Ukraine bundle, but I first discovered it in GDQ.

Gotta give Petal Crash props for being the only puzzle game with rollback netcode (though only on the PC version)

Its a little more in line with the Lumines and Meteos style, but are you familiar with CROSSNIQ+?

Nope, but I'll definitely check it out

I think I actually have seen Petal Crash. I seem to recall someone I know streaming it one time, although I can't think of who that I follow would actually play that type of game, or when it was. When I first saw it I immediately noticed how it looked closed to GBC than GBA.

I've heard of Petal Crash but I thought it was a straight Panel de Pon clone. Knowing the gameplay is different makes me want to give it a shot.

I couldn't really get into Crossniq+, but it was in one of the big itch.io bundles so you might already have it, in which case it's worth a shot.