2018 Video Games

I played quite a few video games this year and honestly was a bit surprised by quite a few of the. I never though I might call myself a point 'n' click adventure game fan and I'm still not sure I'd call myself that but I at least can tolerate those games enough to play them to completion (sometimes). So, here's a handful of the games I enjoyed enough to have thoughts to share on them, in the order I played them in this year. Please enjoy.

Horizon Zero Dawn
	Horizon is just another open world adventure sort of game, but it is an exquisite execution of that style of game. It feels good to play, the weapons are all fun to use, and it does a great job of incentivizing you to mix up how you play against particular enemy types. I think the real part of this that stands above other games in the genre is the writing. It's a very unique and intriguing world with a fantastic main story to uncover. The DLC is also one of the best expansions to a game I've played the in the last several years. It's pretty much more of the same but it a much tighter and more focused package.

SOMA
	SOMA had added in a new option to essentially turn off the enemies. They were still present in the world but they wouldn't ever actively try to hurt you. This helped solved one of the major complaints people originally had about the game where the part where you play it wasn't all that fun to do. Unfortunately, I am a massive wuss so the game was still too scary and creepy for me to get through even though I knew the enemies wouldn't hurt me. I enjoyed what I played of it but at one point I felt anxious to the point of my chest hurting so I drew the line at actual physical discomfort and quit playing. I should probably look up a playthrough to get the rest of the story because it seemed really great.

Undertale
	I finally tried to play Undertale. The way such large swathes of the internet screamed about it when it came out was off-putting enough that I didn't bother trying it for a long time. That, as well as seeing what the combat was and knowing I wouldn't like that. And hey guess what, I disliked the combat mechanics even more than I expected to. Dodging your little heart around a box to dodge projectiles just isn't fun to me. Especially when it feels like you have to just trial-and-error your way through options if you don't want to fight something so you have to end up doing the awful heart-dodging even more. Despite enjoying the bits of story I saw and the characers I met, the combat was un-fun enough that I quit somewhere in a snowy area after meeting the two silly skeletons.

Primordia
	This was one of the first of several Point 'n' Click games I played this year and it turned out to be a pretty good one. While the story isn't particularly ground-breaking and I think it's a little rough at times, it was good enough to keep me going through the whole game. The main thing about this game, though, is that they weren't afraid to modernize the genre is some ways and smooth over the rough edges that a lot of older adventure games suffer from. The puzzles are more logical, there are no punishments for going too far or not going far enough, and there aren't a bunch of arbitrary deaths. All this, plus a pretty and sensible UI helps make this a good point and click game for people who think they don't like point and click games.

Void & Meddler
	I wish I could recommend this game to people. The story seems cool, the characters are fun, the puzzles aren't too bad, and it looks great. But it isn't finished yet. The third (and final) episode isn't out yet after being delayed for nearly two years. Every few months a developer will post on the Steam forum saying that they're still working on it and they'll have more to say soon but after a year and a half of vague posts I've given up on hoping this game will ever be finished.

Dragon Age: Inquisition
	As with every other BioWare game I've played this game had a pretty mediocre main story with some absolutely fantastic characters and side quests. It's almost impressive how consistent you can apply that exact criticism to almost all of their games from the past decade. Something that really stood out to me in this game, moreso than any of their other games, was how restricted you were in terms of queer romances. I had made a woman Inquisitor and she was quite taken with Cassandra but then after nearly fifty hours Cassandra pulled her aside and admitted that while she was flattered, she just didn't swing that way. That of course lead me to wikis and I discovered that if you want to play as a gay man it is even more restrictive on your options. On one hand, I understand wanting to have these specific characters be who they are and not just have everyone be hero-sexual but on the other hand the game gives you so much choice and freedom in who you talk to and how you talk to them that to have such restrictions on queer relationships feels so out of place. That's not even to mention that, as far as I'm aware, there's almost no restrictions if you want to have a straight relationship. The rest of that game is totally fine, you inquisit some dragons or whatever and save the world or something, who cares.

The Longest Journey
	Another point and click game! And an old one this time! The world they build is really fascinating and fun to explore. The characters are a lot of fun and the story it tells is pretty great. The old adventure game-ness of it isn't even all that bad! The puzzles mostly make sense, I never felt too lost as to where to go next, and it never felt like the mechanics or UI were working against me. It's a really solid game that I really enjoyed. This ended up being the point in the year where I decided to play more point and click games. I still haven't gotten around to playing the other two games in this trilogy but from what I've heard, it doesn't end in a satisfying way.

Final Fantasy X
	A lot of people really like Final Fantasy X. I am not one of those people. I have a small personal goal to eventually play all (or at least most of) the Final Fantasy games so I had to get around to this one eventually. There are parts of this game that I can look at and, in context to when it released, I know that were really revolutionary and pushed the genre forward at the time. Fully 3D everything! Pretty cutscenes! Voiced characters! I get why people like this game. But wow does it just not hold up. The genre has evolved and refined all the things that this game did and so many games just execute it better than this one. Eventually my actual desire to finish the game reached a point low enough to where I fired up Cheat Engine and gave myself infinite health to just cruise through the end of it.

Final Fantasy X-2
	Which brings me to the sequel. I had always heard that this game was an absolute dumpster fire so that, of course, made me very interested in seeing it for myself. So with my expectations set sufficiently low, I ended up being pretty surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It's certainly flawed and it's far from the best in the series but it's not the terrible bullshit people make it out to be. My main criticism is that the main story would have been so much better if it really had just stuck to the main group going on treasure hunting adventures and just travelling across the world, but instead they had to turn it in to some ancient evil and the fate of the world generic boring garbage. I think the other thing is that this seems to be the game where the franchise starts to expect you to do multiple playthroughs in order to see the "real" ending. X-2 has so much absolute nonsense that contributes to the percentage and you only get the "true" ending if you 100% the game, but the stuff you need to see/do to get that percentage is absolutely ridiculous. Look through this orb and wait through a full minute of nothing in order for a few lines of dialogue to suddenly happen and then you get an extra 0.2%! Anyway... this game is fine. It's not as bad as people say it is and it's more fun to play than X.

Syberia
	More pointing! More clicking! More adventure! Syberia is a really solid game. Once again, modernized design and mechanics help smooth over a lot of issues old adventure games have. In the second half of the game though, it all starts to feel very rushed. While the areas are just as large, they end having fewer things in them so a lot of it ends up being just big empty areas. In addition to that, the story really accelerates and things end up wrapping up much faster than you expect and it throws off the whole flow of the story. Overall it was enjoyable but it seems like with a bit more time this could've been a really fantastic game.

Syberia II
	Of course I fired up the sequel immediately after that and was incredibly surprised at just how different the game was. It's a direct sequel that picks up right after the first game ends but the quality and style of the story is just completely different. The mechanics are the same but the design of the puzzles throws out a lot of modernizations and ends up feeling older than what there was in the first game. It goes back to the old days of "click on literally everything, use every item on everything, and combine everything with everything, because none of the solutions will make much sense." It even has a permanently missable but absolutely required item! Two-thirds of the way through you can miss an item, not be able to progress without it, and not be able to backtrack to get it. The game did have some nice moments and some fun characters but a lot of that builds off of what the first game had set up.

Bullet Witch
	If nothing else, this game wins the "Most Surprising PC Port" award for this year. It is about as good as you'd expect a 2007 third person action B-game to be. It was a fine way to spend a couple hours. The fact that it's on Steam is just mind boggling though. Who decided this? Why did this happen? We may never know.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
	I like this sort of mostly-sneaking-but-maybe-also-shooty game. It was another fun one of those. All the anti-aug stuff is maybe a little heavy handed in the beginning but then they back off of it a fair bit and end up not having much to actually say about it so the story in the game ends up just being about average.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst
	This game is fine, y'all are just mean. Although my opinion of this game is probably better than most since I didn't really enjoy the first game. Catalyst feels really good once you get the flow of movement down and learn the areas a bit. I don't think the open world-ness of it was really the issue the game had, despite what a lot of people may have said. The open world idea is fine on its own, I just think that the level design ends up feeling a bit uneven so having even a couple rough spots makes the whole thing feel a bit soured. However, when it gets to the areas that are all pretty good it really does genuinely feel great. They should've cut the combat completely though because it just doesn't feel like it fits the game at all.

Still Life
	The core concept of this game, where you are following two different investigations that take place decades apart at the same time, is really great. It's well executed and makes the story take some interesting turns. The soundtrack of the game really fits the darker tone of it all really well. The ending of the game is a bit of a disappointment because it ends on a major cliffhanger and barely answers any of the questions it sets up throughout the story.

Still Life 2
	But that's what sequels are for, right? Fix the problems of the first game, answer anything that needs answering, and satisfy your desire to know how that cliffhanger ends? Well too bad, this game is going to do absolutely none of that. In the first few minutes they reference the fact that you between the games you solved the cliffhanger of the first game but it just doesn't tell you what happened. It immediately throws away almost all of what the first game built in favor of coming up with their own thing. Not everything though, because they did end up keeping the dual-protagonist mechanic from the first game. It works relatively well but I think it was a much cooler thing in the first game. The main problem I encountered with this game though, was the technical issues. Between the game soft-locking on its own and a couple of crashes, I gave up after a third attempt to get through an intensely dull crime scene investigation section. It's really unfortunate because that first game was very cool and had some fun ideas in it and the sequel just throws it all away in favor of trash instead.

Mass Effect Andromeda
	Speaking of trash. I played the original trilogy last year so I picked this up for $5 because really, how bad could it be? I may never know because when you get in the drop ship to go down to a planet for the first time the game got caught up in an infinite load screen and I took that as a sign to give up before I could be disappointed. Thank you, video game, for this merciful gesture.

Tormentum - Dark Sorrow
	The art in this game is absolutely wild and is honestly probably the main draw of it. You could take pretty much any screenshot from this game, slap some generic metal band name over it, and you could fool me into thinking it was some actual album art. Of all the point and click games on this list it's probably mechanically the best because so much of it is so simplified. The puzzle design can get a little tired and repeated by the end but it never gets too bad. My main hangup with this game is that it has some specific thoughts about suicide and it makes some broad statements about a very complex issue that I feel the game didn't need to, and probably shouldn't have, gotten into at all.

Gravity Rush Remastered
	The traversal in this game might be some of the best feeling stuff that of any game I've ever played. The game has an immense amount of charm with some fun characters, a nice story, and a very imaginative world. The great music and fun aesthetic help contribute to a wonderful style that makes the game a joy to play. The actual missions that you have to do end up being not very great and occasionally the exact opposite of fun. I had a lot of fun going all around the sections of the city and finding all the gem currency things and just exploring but when it came down to doing the main story missions I got frustrated and lost interest because while that story is nice, it's not quite nice enough to make me want to push through that frustration.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions
	I dug out my WiiU with the intention of beating all the games I had for it and decided to start with this game. It has such a fun concept, cute characters, and great music that the game ends up just oozing with charm. The game isn't without its drawbacks but none of them really end up souring the experience enough to make the game not worth it. This game is going to end up going down in history as an underrated gem because it's only on a platform that upwards of two dozen people bought. (I made a longer post after playing this about all the problems I had with it and I would link it here but I posted it to Pillowfort which is currently dead so whoops. If you want to read that let me know and I think I can throw it up on a pastebin as well).

Bayonetta 1 & 2
	I'm nearly done writing this up and my fingers are getting tired from typing so I'll just say that Bayonetta 1 is good but Bayonetta 2 is significantly better and that it's a tragedy that 2 will probably not get ported anywhere (except maybe Switch) because it's a really good game. I don't play many character action games like this and 2 is when I started to really wrap my head around the genre and start doing particular deliberate combos and not just mashing my way through on the easiest difficulty.

Yakuza 0
	Yakuza 0 is a hell of a game, Kiryu is extremely pure, and Majima is the goodest boy and anyone who disagrees can fight me. I'm very excited to get into the franchise and plan on picking up Kiwami sometime in the near future.

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise
	The first 2018-released game on this list! It wasn't the first I played this year but it was the first noteworthy one. It's really too bad that it's only  noteworthy because of how big a disappointment it is. A Yakuza-style game with a Fist of the North Star coat of paint? That sounds like it should be a slam dunk, but they somehow manage to bungle it at nearly every step. I'm by no means an expert in the Yakuza franchise but this certainly seems, mechanically, like a mediocre entry. So for the Yakuza fans, there probably isn't much there besides a bit more of stuff they already know (and also some truly awful driving, which I'm fairly certain hasn't been in the other games). I am more familiar with Fist of the North Star and can say with some certainty that it's disappointing on that front. Recognizable characters and scenes are haphazardly thrown into the game at an attempt to achieve the most basic level of fan service (Look! A polygonal rendering of that thing you like! Wow!) and not much more past that. Then on top of that, the things they created just for the game just don't fit the style or tone of the Fist of the North Star world and stick out in a way that is really jarring. This game was such a disappointment that I put something like 90 hours into because dammit making thugs' heads explode is fun.

Return of the Obra Dinn
	This is easily one of the best games I played all year. It's murder mystery sudoku and it's really fantastic. A great style, wonderful music, puzzle difficulty that's just right... it really is just such a finely tuned and well made thing. The way you uncover the story makes even the most mundane parts intriguing and leave you wanting to see what happens next (or what happened before, in some cases). If you haven't played Obra Dinn, then go play Obra Dinn. I can't heap enough praise onto this game. It's not perfect but honestly the issues I have with it are pretty minor and not really even worth mentioning here. It's an amazing game.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey
	I ended up enjoying this way more than I thought I would. I originally got it mostly as one of those 'checklist games' where I'd just focus on doing all the things and collecting all the things just as a way to relax and de-stress but it ended up being a good bit more fun than that. The writing is a little all over the place at times but it has some solid characters and some good moments sprinkled throughout. Even after 110 hours and having completed everything, I still find myself logging in every day to do whatever simple daily quest they have that day because I'm just itching to play it a little bit more. Their post-release support has been great so far too, they've added some nice features are have plans for a lot more quests to be added. I think I might do another bigger, longer post about my thoughts on this game because gosh I sure do have a lot of them.

GRIP: Combat Racing
	I really liked Rollcage: Stage II. When I was a kid, it was my go-to racing game. So when I heard that some of the developers were making a spiritual successor to it, I was instantly interested in it. It's been in Early Access for a while now but I had held off on playing it until the full release in order to avoid burning before the game was feature-complete or anything. And well, there's no way to avoid saying this, but this game has been a pretty major disappointment. It's still a cool concept for a racing game and I think the aesethic is rad. The problems I'm having with it are that it feels like maybe they stuck a little too close to the old PS1 games and at times it can even feel like a step back. There's a campaign but it's just a series of races with no connecting threads or narrative. There's not even a basic "I'm a rookie racer and I want to be the champion" sort of thing going on. While that isn't really a make-or-break point for the game, it makes it hard to want to progress through the campaign at all. As far as I can tell, all the campaign does for you is earn experience and unlock cosmetics for your car. Which then raises the question, why bother with a progression at all if it's just different tread styles for my tires or rims for the car? It's so thin that I don't really feel compelled to try and level up, it feels like it was added in because modern games have progression systems. But campaign and progression aside, the game just doesn't feel very fun to play. The car handling feels better on a d-pad than on an analog stick (which was true for the old games but I think feels strange nowadays). The biggest problem I have is that it feels like there is some very intense rubber band AI going on. If I can race well enough to pull away from the other racers, then the game should just let me do that. But I found that, pretty regularly, the last half of the final lap would end up with me being swamped by the other cars, blasted with rockets, and go from first to dead last in the last few seconds of the race and that just isn't fun. I wish I liked this game more because Rollcage was incredibly fun.