So we arrive at the third and final part of my 2023 in gaming. Another classic year for my gaming habit, an even more classic year for compiling lists of games played that year. Indeed as I've come to the end of this year and reflect upon my gaming in general I feel like I am in some way on top of it for the first time in ages.
Oh I'm sure there are still games from the last decade I've been meaning to get around to for ages but they are definitely becoming a rarer sight in my various game libraries. Heck I even played a game on the fabled 'Day 1' I hear so much about this past autumn, imagine that? So hip, so cutting edge, any further ahead of the curve and this may become the first blog to travel in time. So what about those games eh?
The Shapeshifting Detective (2019)
One of the more memorable games I played in 2022 was The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker by D'Avekki Studios. An endearing and committed effort to capture the promise of FMV-centric games from decades past. This game came after that and continues in very much the same offbeat and sinister vein. Now you might say the game itself is very minimal, confined to selecting a number of options and watching a lot of video clips as potential murder suspects answer your questions as the eponymous Shapeshifting Detective. It's hard for me not to enjoy it though as the plotting and writing are pulled straight out of guilty pleasure paperbacks. The acting is pretty much in the same vein too, some of it understayed some of it just right and some of it as hammy as heck. It's one of those experiences where everyone knows exactly what's needed for this audience and it's provided in abundance. Four shady tarot readings out of five!
Assassin's Creed: Origins (2017)
Continuing another ongoing thread from 2022 as I try to bring myself remotely up to date with the Assassin's Creed series. This time it's apparently the origins of the whole drawn out affair as we go back to ancient Egypt and the roots of ue conflict between the Assassins and the Templars and I'm already finding it hard to care even as I type this sentence put. Despite Ubisoft's efforts to make the plot matter, it probably matters the least in these games now. They still try to tie the whole thing together with a modern day storyline that feels like it accomplishes a whole lot of nothing. The main event is still the incredible renditions of places and people scattered throughout history. Ancient Egypt here looks incredible and is the highlight of the game. The gameplay itself feels like it took a step back though. This was Assassin's Creed's first foray into a more RPG like experience and for me it didn't make for a fun game. Half the enjoyment you get on these games is from slipping into a crowd to approach your target, slipping a knife between their ribs for the kill and then slipping away. It takes some progression to get to that point here and most encounters become more drawn out and tiresome battles that are more a test of patience than skill. Oh and some of that DLC was ridiculously difficult too. Two origin stories that aren't really origin stories out of five!
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (2018)
More of the same as I creep ever closer to the most recent release in the Assassin's Creed series. This time it's ancient Greece and Troy as the whole 'origins' part of Assassin's Creed: Origins soon feels rather redundant. Again the depiction of the ancient world here is incredible and to its credit the gameplay feels a bit more polished and a little less of a slog. Unfortunately the modern day story segments still feel like a waste of time. I assume they are there to anchor the whole thing in something relatable for the modern audience but truthfully they needn't worry there. The core game feels refined and a better experience than Origins. Unfortunately the game feels bloated to the utmost as well with this game being a real poster boy for how the modern videogame industry fails to contend with portion control. It all gets thrown into this game and so much of it feels less than necessary. Still it's a step in a better direction but I'm leaving it until 2024 before tackling Valhalla. Three Trojan horses out of five!
Stories Untold (2020)
Came across this game and the next one via all the recent Silent Hill announcements as developer No Code is involved with one of them. This was pretty impressive all said, a series of what initially appear to be unrelated tales concerning an old house, an absent family and a tragedy that you may have had more of a role in than you'd care to admit. Memory and escapism intertwine as you try to make sense of what exactly happened and to whom. The first level in particular grabbed me as you approach an old empty house and venture inward to find a facsimile of the old Spectrum and Amstrad machines that I myself had as a child. On it you load up an old text adventure game that describes someone approaching and entering a very familiar old house, all while you start hearing some very concerning sounds downstairs. The following episodes go in equally interesting directions and the finale feels well earned once you get there. A pretty solid experience that I cannot fault, I really enjoyed his one. Five cassette based games out of five!
Observation (2019)
The second half of my No Code double bill and another rather excellent masterclass in building unsettling mood and tension. Observation tells the tale of an astronaut on a space station who finds herself rather isolated after a sudden and unexplained outage on-board. The game is largely told from the perspective of the ship's AI who can navigate between security cameras and drones in a bid to fix the stations various systems and figure out what exactly went wrong to begin with. Along the way you are haunted by the kind of sinister and abstract weirdness that I very much enjoy. The guys who founded No Code were part of the team that developed the excellent Alien: Isolation and I really could feel some of that experience in this game. This is a mechanically simpler game but no less impressive for it. After playing these games, I'm very much looking forward to what they are going to do with Silent Hill Townfall. Five attacks of sinister geometry out of five!
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)
Changing gears a touch, I played a LEGO game. Largely because I'm a bit OCD and someone else started the game and logged a few trophies on my PlayStation profile but yes I played a LEGO game based on all nine of the mainline Star Wars movies. This is a fine game for it's intended audience, the younger crowd and by that I mean those in the age range of single digits. You explore, navigate, collect and unlock in a more comedy based self-aware take on the Star Wars universe. Great for kids, for adults it's... err great for kids! Which is to say I don't think there's a lot here to get stuck into. It's basic, it's repetitive, not without a little charm but not enough to sustain my interest much beyond the first hour or so. One thing is for sure The Rise of Skywalker still sucks on LEGO form as well, I will however remain a staunch advocate for The Last Jedi despite some notable missteps. Oh yes the game, let's say two trilogies out of five!
Doom Eternal (2021)
Here's the business, a death metal album cover brought to life in furious, blood-soaked murder mania. You once again become The Doom Slayer and make everyone in hell cancel their long term plans for a happy and prosperous existence. I loved Doom 2016, a genuine surprise that played like a dream and did much to evoke happy memories of the frag-fests of the late 90's and early noughties whilst still evolving the formula itself to something new and different. Doom Eternal carries on in the same vein whilst simultaneously smashing it into many pieces. A notably more difficult experience but at the same time I rarely felt frustrated with it. It's a marathon race of carnage and destruction, the legions of hell die violently by your hand and let me tell you, they don't die well at all. There is a more sustained attempt to tell a story this time around but I'm not really convinced that it was required. There's a greater variety of detours and side-challenges but again I never really felt myself wanting for a challenge. About the only thing I really took issue with here was the lack of your usual multiplayer options, confined as they are to a single asymmetrical multiplayer mode that didn't quite scratch the same itch. Again Doom 2016 just captured a certain something here that it's sequel missed out on. It's multiplayer modes weren't breaking the mold but in capturing the feel of multiplayer games from times past like your Doom's or Quake's or Unreal Tournament's, it provided something no other modern shooter provides. Shame they decided to forego it this time around. Anyhow it's still five disemboweled demon hordes out of five!
Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition (2020)
A dreamy, supernatural road trip delivered with a beautiful art style and a trippy surrealism. Down home country weirdness as a man tries to make a delivery and goes on a detour into the unknown, meeting up with a whole band of idiosyncractic characters along the way and arriving at an altogether different place entirely. This game is quite the piece of work but I felt the core narrative wandered a little too much. Now of course that may have entirely been the point but as a game experience, I don't think it lands as well as it might. I'm all down for weirdness, I love the films of David Lynch, Twin Peaks might be the greatest thing ever to grace the screen but that weirdness does need a counter-balance, a structure of you will. If it all just kind of free-forms and floats off into the void without anything solid to grab onto, then it kinda loses me. That said, there is a lot to appreciate here and it's not a game that out stays it's welcome. Three supernatural TV sets out of five!
Mortal Kombat 1 (2023)
Day 1 baby! Day 1! I played a game on the day it came out for once and not years later oh yeah and... yes what did I think about it? In short it was pretty good but with some disclaimers that bring it down a notch or two. At some point on the blog I'm going to do a dedicated piece on the great revival of Mortal Kombat as a franchise over the last decade plus. Starting with 2011's Mortal Kombat, NetherRealm Studios embarked on a quest to make Mortal Kombat meaningful in a way that it perhaps hadn't been before. Now I'm a fan of the original trilogy but I don't think anyone would accuse it of being especially deep, meaningful or polished. With the most recent trilogy of games, starting with the 2011 game, continuing with Mortal Kombat X and concluding with Mortal Kombat 11, they gave this story and its characters the polished AAA blockbuster treatment and I was very much on-board with it. All the slaughter and violence is still there but contextualised in a better way. Characters have depth, have arcs, have better formed seasons to be doing what they are doing within better stories. This tradition very much continues with what is essentially the second time they have done an in-contonuity reboot (the 2011 game being he first) and it looks and plays like a dream on modern hardware. The story, which is what I'm here for mainly is great but it very much centres around the concept of the multiverse and here is the main issue with it. It's not a fault with Mortal Kombat 1 as such but in wider popular culture there is a sense of multiverse fatigue. Mainly due to its use and abuse In the MCU, there is a feeling that it is a little overdoneor that it makes meaningful things meaningless by its very premise. This game uses the concept just fine, it's just that the concept itself feels a little much now and could use a break. Anyhow, four fatalities out of five!
Asteroids: Recharged (2021)
Changing gears again with another one of those retro arcade classics getting a modern upgrade. You navigate your spaceship on a screen, you blast at rocks that's break up into smaller rocks and then you blast them as well. Power-ups and UFO's join the fray and it's all very bright and neon coloured as the challenge increases with every moment. It's a classic formula, respectfully upgraded for a modern experience. Going back to such games as Pac-Man Championship Edition DX or Space Invaders Infinity Gene I have always had great appreciation for those games which adapt retro classics and bring them up to spec with modern tastes. Games which update the original design while still attesting to just how solid that original design was. This is a quality game and a focused experience that rewards skill and timing. Four screen clearing superweapons out of five!
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021)
A murder mystery set in a port town in a vaguely dystopian future setting where tensions with the local union are reaching their apex and hostilities may break out at any moment. Into this volatile powder keg steps one of the most dysfunctional player protagonists I have ever encountered. A barely functioning alcoholic wreck of a human being who also happens to be the guy tasked with figuring out this whole mess without it killing everyone. A top down RPG where most of the meaningful interaction is carried out through narration and conversation. Where the various voices in your head are given a surprising amount of personality and you free to craft a pretty versatile set of skills and qualities. It's probably the kind of game you could play through many times and get a markedly different journey on each go-around. I don't have the time for that so this is what I thought: it's good, not great but good. The central mystery plot is engaging and the central characters journey is compelling. However at the same time the writing that that slightly clunky quality of devolving into a TED talk on the game's back story every so often. Someone clearly devoted a lot of time to that back story and wanted it all in there no matter how inelegantly it gets shoved in. The end result is a somewhat uneven experience as a result. The big moments all hit the ground running but the moments in-between not so much. Four fully-voicrd manifestations of the subconscious mind out of five!
Dark Nights with Poe and Munro (2021)
Returning to the world of The Shapeshifting Detective, it's another game from D'Avekki Studios. This time it's an episodic series of misfortunes visited upon the late night radio hosting duo of Poe and Munro. Forgoing the shapeshifting of the earlier title, this is a more straightorward experience in the make a choice and watch the video genre. Your dysfunctional duo make for an oddly endearing pair of protagonists as their night job involves them in the increasingly weird and sinister goings-on of their local parish. Moreao than the other titles produced by this team, this game felt like it was straining a little within the constraints of the production. Whereas the other games had these same constraints it felt like they worked around them or disguised them more effectively. Here it does feel like a somewhat stripped bare production that struggles to obscure the fact. Nonetheless it was a fun if over a little too soon. Three late night phone-ins out of five!
Arcade Spirits (2020)
Visual novels, I'm not saying they make for underwhelming games but I'm still waiting for one to blow my mind. Such remains the case with Arcade Spirits, a brightly coloured ode to videogame and geek culture where you try to find love, happiness and fulfillment whilst helping to run your local arcade. Along the way you select your responses to the various text based prompts that come your way and you navigate your way to success or disaster as the plot dictates. It's heart was in the right place I think but I really found this game to be a chore that couldn't translate the joys of said geek culture into an actual joyful game experience. There's just too much of a sense of going through the motions for any real investment to take place in this game. Not a fan I'm afraid. One cat-based cosplay out of five!
Outlast (2014)
I tried this game not long after it came out and at the time it proved a little too intense for me. A first person horror experience where you play someone navigating an asylum with nothing but your video camera and it's night mode to protect you from the deranged predatory residents within. Many years on and I still found it to be a pretty unrelenting experience. The sense of unease and tension in the atmosphere is impeccable. The graphics hit that right note of unspectacular mundanity. That sense of the ordinary and the dull disarms you a little and helps make the horror all the more palpable when it arrives. Whether you are creeping around with your fist on your mouth or running in blind panic through the labyrinthine hallways in search of the exit, this game gives you precious little breathing room to compose yourself before the next ordeal commences. Easily one of the best horror games I've ever played and I played the original Silent Hill in the early hours whilst living in fear of that blasted radio static. I very much doubt I'll ever play this game again but I can gladly recommend it to you. Five surgically enhanced lunatics out of five!
Axiom Verge (2015)
It's Metroidvania time again and this go around it feels like the game is circling ever closer to the roots of the genre. A sci-fi platforming adventure with hefty amounts of exploration, progression and combat. There was a plot here of some kind, of a scientist carrying out an experiment only to wake up in a strange alien environment and I soon found myself not really invested in that plot so much. Luckily the core gameplay is solid, some of the routes to further progression were a little on the obtuse side but overall it's a solid game. Fun boss fights too in the over-sized and ridiculously proportioned style of yesteryear. The aesthetics are great all round in fact with a pixelart style that really hits the spot. Really liked the soundtrack too which is always a big plus from me. I just couldn't summon much enthusiasm for the story which supposedly ties it all together despite allusions to some interesting ideas. Four massive mechanical heads out of five!
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (2022)
Yes I have played this one before in it's much lauded original release on Steam. A case study in how to be self-aware and fourth wall-breaking without diminishing investment in the core experience. A player avatar sets off on an adventure through their deserted office with only an omnipresent narrator for support and soon finds that their notions of free will and personal agency are nothing but an illusion. Decided to give it a go again with this spruced up edition mainly for the new content which again delivers the goods. Happy to report that said new content sits very happily alongside the old with some great gags around the all-new all-different Stanley Parable 2 and well, to say any more would be too much. This game, remains as ever, a key moment for auteur driven game development. A unique voice with a lot of personality and a game well worth your time if by some chance you haven't partaken already. Five office cubicles out of five!
Among Us (2021)
One of the few multiplayer games I got stuck into this year, a top-down exercise in subterfuge and detection as you play a member of a sci-fi crew going about your business but someone among you is not who they appear to be. Over multiple rounds players get offers and survivors vote on who they think is the enemy in their midst. It's a simple but effective piece of game design that really worked for me. Some neat art design and a tongue-in-cheek approach to the premise helps to seal the deal as well. You're not so much playing the game as much as you are playing those around you and this ensured the game never felt too samey from playthrough to playthrough. Four adorable space people out of five!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Anniversary Edition (2021)
I may be the last person in the game playing world who was playing games in 2011 but still hadn't played a full game of Skyrim as of 2023. Oh I'd started at least one previous attempt at it when the Special Edition came out a few years ago but never ventured too far into it. Having now played through an entire game plus DLC, what's there to say that hasn't already been opined upon? It's a vast epic with impressive direction and design presented at its best. There is a sense of adventure and wonder to the game that still stands strong after all this time. On the other hand it is still a product of it's time. The combat is a little too repetitive as are a great deal of the side quests and outside of the main story I found myself getting bored or frustrated a little too often. It does get a bit samey as an experience. As with Disco Elysium up above, there is also that sense that a lot of time and effort has been sunk into the back story and lore only for it to get dumped wholesale into the game in a rather blunt way. Thankfully characters don't sidetrack into huge monologues on the history of Skyrim very often but when a game wants you to stop and read books for a while I feel like something is not quite working well in the core game itself, like if a book kept prompting you to watch the film version instead. Four shouting matches out of five!
Back 4 Blood (2021)
This is it, the last game I'm going to count as 'played' in 2023, at least officially anyway (more on that below). On a random aside I felt like some online co-op zombie shooting and so I got Back 4 Blood. Now to be sure I got what I came for, an experience in the vein of Left 4 Dead where oodles of zombies and zombie variants come at you whilst you and fellow survivors try to go about the arduous task of living. At its best it does indeed channel that earlier game but the experience very much fluctuates depending on who you're playing with. Even with a good team, it can become repetitive a little too quickly despite the efforts they've made at mixing up the threat from the carnivorous masses. The story feels a little too perfunctory and the whole thing just lacks that certain sense of finesse that Left 4 Dead had. It's a worthy substitute but it's a substitution all the same. As of writing this I haven't finished it but a few acts in and I feel like I've more than seen what this game has to offer. Three worm-infested zombie sieges out of five!
There you go, done, done and done. Well not really done but that is far as I'm going to go this New Years Eve. After finishing the above games I've spent most of December playing Rocket League but that's true most years. God help me but I've also started playing Fortnite Battle Royal as well. Haven't spent much time with it so that'll probably be filed under my games played in 2024 list now.
I will say that it does seem to be one of the better battle royale experiences I've played in some time. Nice aesthetic, everything feels responsive and tactile. Combat engagements have a nice sense of back and forth to them and being surprised by someone doesn't mean you are instantly dead. Also played The Finals, again not much time spent with it but between the general presentation and the destructability this one looks very promising for next year. Oh and I did technically start the Halo: Master Chief Collection this year but have only replayed th first game of it so again, another one for next year's list.
But apart from all that, yes I'm done.
Happy New Year 2024!
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