I could write a whole bunch about the year that was, and my feelings on year-end lists, and guesstimates on where we’re going next. But let’s keep it simple: As I said last year, I liked these, and maybe you will too.
(Interested in any of the games? Check out THIS DOC with links, platforms, and prices here, put together by my kind and incredible friend, Lauren.)
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds is the sort of game that makes me write, and rewrite, over and over, something that I hope will reach out and digitally shake you by the shoulders, saying — half to myself, and half to you — “oh jeez. OH JEEZ.” I have already made an attempt, not once, but TWICE, to work through why this game has so firmly lodged itself in my craw. And I’m not the only one. Outer Wilds was listed as Polygon’s Game of the Year. It was Austin Walker’s #1 game at Waypoint. It made it to the final round of discussion for the Besties GOTY.
Listen: It’s a good game.
But when I try to explain it to people, I end up making little crab-claw grabby-hands, literally trying to pluck words from the air. But my difficulty is the game’s virtue: it’s about mystery and the unknown. By nature, it should ought to be difficult to describe without giving the whole thing away.
So, let’s say this: Outer Wilds is game about space exploration. You are a member of a nascent space team from the planet Timber Hearth. Your spaceship looks like it was strapped together with rope and wires. You know nothing about what’s waiting for you in your solar system, and are given no direction besides, “Go out there, kiddo.” Oh, and after your first 22 minutes, you learn that you are stuck in a 22-minute time loop (natch), at the end of which the sun always goes supernova, and which no one else seems to know is happening except you.
That’s all the game gives you at the start, and it does very little hand-holding from there. What a bracing breath of fresh air it is, in our contemporary world that loves nothing more than to load you down with exposition — with every quest needing a clearly articulated reason, and every superhero movie needing a MacGuffin — to give you so little, and to instead ask you to hear what’s being implicitly (vs. explicitly) communicated.
And what a communicator Outer Wilds is.
It is sometimes unrelenting. I would work hard on a puzzle, only to lose all my progress when I was accidentally sucked into a black hole at the center of the planet I was exploring, or crushed by falling sand on Ember Twin, or sucked up by a cyclone on Giant’s Deep, or instantly frozen by ghost matter, or autopiloted into the sun, or any number of equally horrible fates, only to be re-set to the start of the loop.
It is sometimes frustrating. There’s no autosave function, which led me to realize how much I use autosave as a safety blanket: something to clutch to before doing something risky. Here, I was left to make bad decisions dozens of times over, but those bad decisions were necessary to learn how the solar system worked. In fact, in exploring, you stumble across old messages from an ancient civilization, and half of them were along the lines of, “I thought this thing would work, but it didn’t, and here’s what I learned…”
It is sometimes boring. I would sometimes wander for loops without learning anything new, retracing old steps and wondering what on Earth (or Timber Hearth, as it were) I was missing. It wouldn’t be until loops and loops later, when I had just a little bit more information, that I would realize why that rock kept attracting my attention, and would know what to do with it.
Other times, Outer Wilds is terrifying. Certain sequences caused my hands to break out into a sweat, and when I listen back to the (truly beautiful) soundtrack, I still feel my heart race when End Times comes on.
All of these sound like negatives on paper, but they led to one of the most affecting storytelling experiences I’ve had in a long time. These moments of boredom, frustration, and terror are carefully constructed. They are their own puzzle pieces in this puzzle of a game. They fit together so that, when you do figure out the riddle, or the pattern, or the tiny missing piece of the larger story, you are rewarded with a feeling of genuine elation and, above all else, wonder. And it’s made all the more powerful because it manages to make you feel like you stumbled across it — with a little bit of work and a lotta bit of luck — all on your own.
It’s beautifully built, and entirely special, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
Now, please go play it so we can make little crab-claw grabby-hands together.
Untitled Goose Game
Ah, the game that launched a thousand memes. I’ve been seeing Untitled Goose Game excluded from a number of year-end lists, and I kind of get it. It’s been so meme’d out that it’s hard not to think of it as a joke. Oh, right, the game where you’re a goose, terrifying a quiet village. You flap. You honk. You’re terrible. A good goof, but a better goof than a game.
But here’s the thing: comedy in video games is difficult. What’s even more difficult is physical comedy, which usually hinges on a finely-honed sense of timing. How, then, is one supposed to make a comedic video game that is entirely reliant on physical comedy? When the player can choose when they execute an action, that would seem to throw out any ability for the developer to hone the beats of the game in order to make it genuinely funny.
But what UGG does well is not only that it uses physical comedy to great effect, but that it teaches the player how to have a better sense of comedic timing. It’s built right into the gameplay. When you’re given the direction to steal the gardener’s keys, you could just grab them off his belt and run, but that doesn’t have as high a success rate as being sneaky. So instead you waddle up to him, realllllll slow…. reaaaaaaallllllllllllllll slow……. and then just GRAB THOSE KEYS and run off into the distance as fast as your terrible webbed feet will carry you.
Now that’s comedy. Honk honk.
Disco Elysium
There are so many things computers can do well, but having realistic conversations is not one of them. Think of the Turing Test, a contest used to evaluate how well an AI emulates human speech (success is fooling a human into thinking they’re talking with another human). It’s a contest because it’s hard to do well. Conversations are just so full of delightful human foibles, and they’re not usually results of direct inputs and outputs. They’re full of meanderings, dancing around topics, innuendos, distractions, hesitations, and interjections. Conversations are also full of constant self-evaluating; you might be talking with someone, but you’re also constantly processing what they’re saying, or what they’re trying to say, or the weird shocks of non-verbal conversation that are continually flowing from one person to the other and back.
In short, having a conversation with a person is an incredible feat of near-instantaneous alchemy, moment after moment of self-realization and re-definition.
Video games, with their increasing complexity, have gotten better at simulating conversations, but generally continue to fall short. There are lots of efforts to make it seem like your conversations have real-life weight, but I’ve always found them lacking. I’ll never forget how genuinely angry I was at The Wolf Among Us, where it ultimately didn’t matter if I played my Big Bad Wolf sheriff as a do-gooder or sociopath. No matter how many times I was prompted that a character would “remember that you said this,” the ending cutscene was the same regardless of how I treated folks along the way. My character was set in stone, even if the game pretended that it wasn’t. It wasn’t a conversation. It was a lecture.
Enter Disco Elysium. It’s a role-playing game that comes in a familiar, dour-looking package. You play as a cop in a dystopian world still reeling from a war between communists and capitalists. You’re just waking up from a multi-day drug and alcohol bender that got so out of control that you not only trashed your room and distressed the local townsfolks, but you’ve forgotten where you are, what you’re doing there, or even what year it is. Quickly, you find out you are in this town, Revachol, to investigate a murder (a hanging, which you, on your bender, have left in the back courtyard for over a week). But other than that? Your mind is blank. You don’t even know your name… not to mention what happened to your missing cop badge… or your gun.
Sure, sure. Ho hum. Just your regular ol’ mystery-solving adventure in a dystopian nightmare. However, besides being a bit of a Trojan Horse for radical political theory, genuinely well-written, and surprisingly funny, Disco Elysium also features an intricately-built dialogue system.
Part of this intricacy is based on how central dialogue is to the game: there is no physical combat to clutter up the action. Instead, 95% of the game is simply talking to other people. Not only that but, as it is in our own crowded minds, conversations with people in Disco Elysium aren’t a one-on-one affair. Rather, your interactions feature interjections from your own brain. AUTHORITY fires up when someone questions your standing. EMPATHY is there to wheedle out the words behind the words. ELECTROCHEMISTRY is, honestly, just here to party. Twenty-four distinct personality aspects roll around in the main character’s brain and, as you gain experience points and feed them into aspects of your personality, certain voices become relatively louder.
Additionally, the game introduces an element of chance through occasional skill-checks via randomized die rolls. Need to convince someone of something? Roll a die, add your SUGGESTION ability, and see if you pass or fail the check. As I made certain aspects of my character’s personality stronger, I could see how it affected how others interacted with me: being super-authoritative would mean I could more easily pass certain checks to crush folks under my heel; being hyper-logical meant I could usually reason my way out of most any pickle. At the same time, I had a finite number of experience points, so, in order to build up certain aspects, I would have to forgo other parts of my personality. If I filtered points into EMPATHY, I could manipulate folks emotionally, but I couldn’t bust down a door to save my life. Avenues open. Avenues close.
And here is where it feels like a true conversation. More than just being skillfully-written, Disco Elysium simulates the real-life and real-time reflection of oneself through the lens of conversation with another person. In having the player constantly consider what’s going on in their character’s brain and how others respond to it, Disco Elysium creates one of the most satisfying role-playing experiences I’ve had in a long time. Normally, I’m pretty quick to abandon any sort of serious commitment to role-playing in games but, here, I couldn’t escape it. I was constantly asked to consider my reactions. I was literally building up this character from scratch and deciding, moment by moment, how he was going to interact with his world, and I found a great joy in fleshing out who this amnesiac fuck-up of a person was.
The game is definitely about solving a mystery — in that there’s a dead body and up to you to figure out what’s up with it — but the game itself is more about figuring who you are going to make yourself into when you have nothing else to hold onto.
What The Golf?
Ah, beautiful, dumb What The Golf? My sweet, sweet, secretly ingenious child.
What The Golf? came to me late in the game. After years of clinging to my iPhone 5 as it wheezed through its final death rattles, I bit the bullet and got myself a new phone. To be completely transparent, one of the things I was interested in getting was Apple Arcade, a subscription service for mobile games that my old refused-to-update-in-over-a-year phone couldn’t handle.
I had my doubts about yet ANOTHER bottomless money pit of subscription services, until I heard an argument that posited that, currently, mobile games are heavily reliant on a “free to play” system. These “FTP” games can be downloaded for exactly $0, but build their profit model on offering in-app purchasing options to make gameplay easier. For example, Two Dots sure does allow you to play for free, but when you get to a level that’s especially difficult, suddenly there are a number of nudges to spend your real-life human money on power-ups to complete said level. You can truck by on paying nothing, but it’s in the game’s interest to make it eventually hard enough to require you to purchase something.
If games weren’t FTP, then they usually had a regular-ol’ price tag for downloading. For games I didn’t know much about and wasn’t invested in, I am not often inclined to spend upwards of $5 per game to give it a try. With a subscription model, all the games listed in Apple Arcade are indeed free once you opt in. With no in-app purchases, games are no longer incentivized to escalate difficulty disproportionate to their levels. With no up-front individual costs, players have a lower barrier to entry to try out games that sound interesting, but were not so interested in as to willingly pay to purchase just that game. (This latter point was addressed by the makers of Outer Wilds, who said that the game’s inclusion on Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service led folks to download the game out of curiosity.)
In other words, via a subscription model, games have greater license be weird, or short, or experiential.
This is a long way of saying that I did indeed download Apple Arcade on my new phone and am happily paying the monthly subscription price. I’ve been thoroughly charmed by games like Sayonara Wild Hearts (“dreamy arcade game about riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords, and breaking hearts at 200 mph”); Grindstone (an addictive and well-animated puzzler); Assemble With Care (a game where you fix small objects for local townspeople, with a story that I found both over saccharine yet also moving?); and Card of Darkness (another lil puzzler, but animated by Penn Ward of Adventure Time fame, with the humor to match).
But What the Golf? is the one that surprised me the most, in part because it was an impulse download, and in part because (as such) it was a total surprise.
WTG? is styled like your typical golf game: there’s a ball. To propel it forward you press your finger to the screen, pull back, aim, and release, hopefully driving it towards the hole. At least, that’s how the first level goes. In the second, there are suddenly cats in the way. And then, instead of the ball, the person hitting the ball is flung, rag-dolling forward when you release from the pull. And then the hole moves when you try to drive towards it? Then you’re a house?? And then you’re, like, 100 golfballs, all moving at once???
It’s pure, dumb fun. Each level pulls the rug out from under you, every single time. I found myself joyously cackling as joke built upon joke upon joke in a ridiculous joke layer-cake. It’s a sink-hole of light-hearted inanity, both too smart and too silly for its own good. After finishing the game, I find myself handing it off to people and giggling maniacally as they realize that things are quickly going off the rails. And, as we trudge into 2020, when we’re all just feeling a little… worn out… that moment of surprised delight feels rare and special.
A Short Hike
Today, as I was tooling around Facebook, I came across a Tumblr thread, posted by a friend. It was a back-and-forth discussion started by user margotkim about how tired they were with contemporary re-vamps of fairy tales that used added violence, “gritty realism,” and a lack of happy endings to assert that this is how the real world is.
In the thread, a user posted a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
This is a whole heap of expectation to ask A Short Hike to shoulder, but the beauty of the game is that it celebrates little moments of happiness with such soaring ease that it feels like a magic trick.
In the game, you play a bobble-headed anthropomorphic bird (think: Animal Crossing aesthetics). Your task is simple: you’re spending the summer is a park with your aunt, and you have to make a phone call. The only place you have reception to make said phone call is at the top of the local mountain, which is a bit of a hike away.
That’s the whole game: getting to the top of the mountain. It’s not especially difficult. There is no hard left turn to a dark story or a seedy underbelly. The music is sweet and lilting. The townspeople are kind and have small tasks for you. There are corners to explore. The mountain will wait for you when you’re ready to climb it. It’s just nice.
Listen, the world is full of horrors. It always has been, and it looks like it will continue to be. The easy thing these days is to make media that reflects or amplifies that horror. I get the impulse: you want to bring attention to it so that people don’t look away (see: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a notoriously difficult-to-watch play that moves from [and finds links between] domestic violence to war crimes. Or, see the DCU). But in this load roar and crush of noise and terror, it’s easy to shut down. Dissociation is an excellent way to keep yourself emotionally safe when it’s all just too much.
The antidote to this, as I see it, is to take moments of quiet. Separate from the churn and roil, you can take a moment to breathe and to observe closely the world around you. It’s a hike through the woods, where you start to notice the way the sun dapples the ground, or the specific bird calls that come through the trees, or you ask yourself, “Hey, what flower is that?” as you lean in to something small and delicate and easily trampled underfoot.
This is what A Short Hike feels like. This isn’t an escape from the “real world”; the real world has horror, but it also has moments of quiet happiness that might give you the re-focus you need to face the world’s harsher elements with a fresh eye and warmed heart.
A Few Other Worthy Mentions
OK, I was going to try to keep this all pretty short, but there are lots of games that, though they might not have stuck with me as much, were still experiences and stories I will remember. So, here’s a short lightning round:
Mutaztione
Mutazione is one of the most distinctly beautiful games I’ve played. It’s mossy and earthy palate feels distinctly its own, and there were a couple of moments that were jaw-droppingly illustrated.
It’s the perfect framing for a magical realist game about finding your home among a group of outsiders, trying their best fo hold each other close despite their foibles.
It’s easy to see Mutazione’s soap operatic influence, but that part of the story didn’t mean as much to me as its distinct gardening mechanic. As the protagonist, Kai, I enjoyed the task of planting gardens around the island of Mutazione, watching the plants grow and flourish and bring comfort to the islands mutant inhabitants and their all-too-human problems.
Later Alligator
I will champion literally anything Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera put out. I’ve tried (and failed) to have my partner watch their strangely affecting and also, yes, wonderfully twee and weird Baman Piderman Youtube series (“THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS,” I shout, to no one), and I’ve enjoyed watching their distinct animation style crop up in crowd favorites like Adventure Time.
So, I was distinctly tickled to see they were trying their hand at video games, starting with Later Alligator.
You play an alligator private investigator in Alligator New York, hired by Pat (the Alligator) to figure out what his shady (alligator) family is up to. They keep talking about “an event”? Is it a threat? Are they gonna off him?
Obviously not. But along the way to convincing Pat of that fact, you get to meet the various equally odd members of his family, cajoling them into giving you info by playing their mini-games (keep the ghosts away from the baby! swat the flies away from the hippie so he can reach nirvana! beat grandma at go fish!).
It’s charming in all the ways you want it to be, and goofily-well-written in the ways it needs to. Long live Alligator New York: greatest alligator city in the world.
Islanders
I love a city-building sim. I was raised on Age of Empires and still find a deep-set comfort in lining up the houses just-so.
But I’m terrible at acting under pressure, and city-builders are usually all about pressure: getting your city the biggest and the strongest before your foes come and raze it to the ground.
In Islanders, there is no time limit. Instead, the challenge of the game is economy of space: you gain points by placing certain complementary units close to each other (houses like to be near the circus; farms like to be close to fields) and lose points if certain overlapping buildings are too close (shamans like to be alone; so two shaman huts next to each other will give you negative points). Every time you hit a point milestone, a new pack of buildings is unlocked. Don’t get enough points by the time you run out of buildings in your current pack? The game ends.
With no time limit, I could twirl and move my buildings until they were perfectly wedged together, watching cityscapes unfold in gently-rendered seaside landscapes.
Dead Cells
“But wasn’t this on your list last year?? It’s it a game from 2018??” It was! And it is! But the good folks over at Motion Twin just keep updating this thing! Every time I turn around, there’s a new update, bringing in new content and making subtle little tweaks to keep the gameplay new and interesting. There have been so many updates that they just released a Legacy mode, where you can play the version of the game that you like the most.
Dead Cells remains a thoroughly enjoyable hack and slash, and I find the same level of meditative enjoyment running through its many, ever-changing levels that I do with quiet games like Islanders.
I put on a podcast, read the patch notes for the newest update, and jump back in, ready to dodge and roll my way through whatever Motion Twin joyously and ceaselessly throws my way.
Dicey Dungeons
In Dicey Dungeons, you’re a person who has been turned into a die as part of some elaborate game show. In order to get your “heart’s desire,” you have to beat all the denizens of the dungeon. Too bad the game is rigged.
That’s the story of the game, but the gameplay itself is what I found both puzzling and satisfying. It’s a deck-building game, where you collect cards that represent certain moves. In order to execute these moves, you have o roll a pre-set number of dice and see if any can be used to trigger your attacks. Want to hit ‘em with a dagger? Better hope you rolled a 3 or below. Want to unlock a special move? Pray for a 6.
There are six playable die characters, and each have a slightly different rule-set. So, despite the repetition of enemies, each character will have to use a different method to try and beat them: the Warrior can brute-force his way through hard enemies, but the Rogue (with his lower-power moves) will have to be trickier.
Even when I was frustrated with sudden bouts of bad die-rolling luck, the art style, clever writing, and promise of eventual success had me re-entering the dungeon, fingers crossed.