It has felt like another terrible year for the games industry, with more studio closures, project cancellations and layoffs. Including me! I spent most of the year interviewing for live game systems & economy design roles – I would often go in talking about the importance of a good data pipeline, using spreadsheets to balance the game, and having a plan for post-launch updates, and often being rejected for reasons like insufficient interest in golf. Each interview offers a window into how other studios are run – or at least, how their leads think – and I am sometimes very surprised by their priorities.
In other news, the Switch 2 finally launched. I bought one and I think it’s perfectly fine – personally, my complaints are:
- They’ve chosen a cartridge format which is so expensive to produce that it incentivises publishers to favour digital distribution, which I (generally) don’t like. Now that we’ve had some time to get used to the idea, I think the game key cards (which basically seem to work as a sort of physical licence key to let you play downloaded games) are an interesting and worthwhile feature within the digital distribution market, but I generally prefer my games to be on the cartridge. There are already a few Switch 2 games I would have bought if they had a proper physical release – eg. Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening: Complete Edition – but having to rely on a download is very off-putting to me. I’m definitely an outlier on this issue, and I can sympathise with publishers not wanting to waste money on excessively large cartridge capacity, and I can understand the argument that even a smaller capacity capacity cartridge would still be expensive, but… I’m just saying, the result of these decisions is a complex situation that puts me off buying games.
- I wish they would bring back Streetpass.
It did feel quite expensive, but it reflects Nintendo’s attitude to pricing (not wanting to sell hardware at a loss) and the impact of inflation and rising trade tariffs. I’ve seen a lot of random internet people commenting that Nintendo haven’t released any of their major franchises on it yet, which seems to miss the point that Mario Kart was one of the biggest-selling games for the Switch – despite being a rerelease of a Wii U game – and Mario Kart World was bundled in at launch. I assume people are glossing over this fact because they were disappointing with World but… well, I’ve written about it below, but in short I thought it was good. I think similar arguments could be made for Donkey Kong Bananza and Metroid Prime 4 – both of which sound like they ought to be major titles, but haven’t been received as positively as might be expected. (Also – rather obviously, I would think – if Nintendo came straight out of the gates at launch with hot new sequels to all their classic game series, most people would only be able to afford one or two, and the other games would quickly start to feel old and lose their lustre. It’s extremely normal for Nintendo to drip-feed a major new game every 3 or 4 months!)
The other obvious point is that the Switch has sold over 150 million units, while the Switch 2 has sold just over 10 million. If you were a publisher looking to sell a game, would you spend a little more money to make a high fidelity game with a potential audience of 10 million Switch 2 owners… or spend a little less money to make a lower fidelity game with a potential audience of 150 million Switch owners and 10 million Switch 2 owners? I think there’s some definite rewards to be claimed by releasing a great game at the launch of a new system – you could end up being one of the best games available at the time, pick up a lot of extra sales from people who are desperate for something to play on their new shiny box, and your game may end up going down in popular consciousness as part of that system’s canon. However, this might not translate to much in the way of money, and I imagine that’s where the priorities lie for most publishers.
As for myself, I still have a large pile of Switch games I haven’t played. I don’t mind treating my Switch 2 as an upgrade on my Switch (now almost 10 years old) – even if the games aren’t new, they feel new to me. Also I’m happy that they are releasing those Switch 2 upgrade packs – I might play through Tears of the Kingdom again, to see how it feels with more power behind it. I feel like there are a lot of Switch games with choppy performance that would benefit from it, but I don’t know much about what is involved in making one.
EA is in the process of being bought for an eye-popping $55 billion by some sort of private equity consortium including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, in a leveraged buyout. If I’m understanding this correctly, it means the new owners borrowed a lot of money to pay for it, and will be passing that debt on to EA itself to pay off – a process that always makes me think of Toys ‘R’ Us. I think the financially optimistic outlook is that EA will now be selling Ultimate Team card packs from now until the end of time to pay off the debt that someone else used to buy them? Sadly, I think it’s more likely that we’re going to see the less-positive version of this story – consolidating around the high-earning parts of the business (FC, Madden, Battlefield, etc) and shutting down everything else. This is to say nothing of how the new owners might feel about the content of their games – especially those that feature very progressive gender politics like The Sims, Dragon Age, or Mass Effect.
It also brings to mind a recent news story about Bobby Kotick, who is currently fighting a lawsuit over his sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft in 2023. There was a quote from him suggesting that the (current) falling sales of their games was expected even back then, and that the agreed price represented a high point to cash out on before the business shrank. It’s difficult to judge how true that is (or whether it’s just a narrative he’s built to fit the events after the sale) but it creates the impression that the big industry leaders are feeling bearish about the future, and they’re looking to cash out. Even if you aren’t interested in big-budget AAA games, it feels like an ominous portent.
Without wanting to get even more depressing, I also want to mark two recent deaths:
Rebecca Heineman was a self-taught teenage programming wiz, winner of the 1980 US Space Invaders championship, co-founder of Interplay, and more. I think I first became aware of her while watching a documentary about Space Invaders a few years ago, in which she discussed her childhood love of the game. I thought her story was so interesting that I went to look her up online and was immediately floored by the breadth and width of her career, and her endless passion and enthusiasm for gaming. I don’t feel qualified to write an adequate obituary for someone I was only aware of for such a short time, but I think she was cool and we are lessened without her.
Tomonobu Itagaki was the former head of Team Ninja and director of the Dead or Alive and (3D era) Ninja Gaiden games. I’ve always thought of him as an interesting figure because he seemed to straddle a venn diagram in making chauvinist, pulp action games while also having an uncompromising artistic vision. To paraphrase one of my old Midnight Resistance articles: He was a guy who made games about his passions, and his passions were ninjas, sexy ladies, and Aerosmith. The Dead or Alive series is famous for its pioneering developments in the realm of breast physics, and it’s easy to look at a game like Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball and dismiss it as a creepy voyeurism simulator, but I think when you strap in and play his games Itagaki’s obsession with tight controls and balanced gameplay shines through.
As a designer, one of the most memorable lessons I’ve taken from his games comes in the way they don’t begin with a nice, gentle difficult curve to ease you into the game – when you sit down to play Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive it can feel like you’ve been thrown in at the deep end and enemies are coming at you with full force. As a result they are considered notoriously difficult, but it means… once you understand how to play… you can start a new game and enjoy an immediate challenge, without wasting any time on training levels. It feels like a satisfying approach – one based on understanding what your players want, and giving it to them. It’s this kind of authenticity and clarity of vision that I will remember him for.
Well, anyway. Let’s get on with looking at what I played this year.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
(I’m still planning to write a more focused post about Remake and Rebirth, but so far I haven’t gotten around to it so I’ll share a few opinions here for now)
I enjoyed it. I enjoyed romping around with my pals and following the path of destruction that Sephiroth and Shinra have carved across the world. It’s a very sad story on the whole, but there’s something heartening about this group of people with their own problems coming together to try and save the world. It was interesting to see which parts of the game had been changed – like how Gongaga now features much more prominently.
It never really opens out into the kind of big, open world that people associate Final Fantasy VII with, although I do feel like it tries to capture the same general experience – the world map has been broken up into a sequence of large areas in Rebirth, but that’s basically how the world maps of all the old Final Fantasy games were structured, until you unlocked an airship. I think people are frustrated by the slower pace of the story – in a sense, we’re now two discs into the remake series, and we’re still only just reaching the end of the original Disc 1 – but we’ll see what happens when the final part comes out. I have a feeling it might diverge from the original game quite a lot from this point – there’s just too much stuff left to fit into a single game, at this rate.
The most common complaint about Rebirth seems to be the sidequests and minigames. Personally I’d say the minigames are fine, but most of the regular sidequests feel like dull MMO filler material – go to this area, kill 10 enemies of a specific type, then come back here. It’s a bit deflating, in a prestige title like this – the main story path of the game is great, but if you take the bait and talk to the Chocobo famer with a sidequest icon over his head the quality immediately drops. I feel like it would be better served with fewer sidequests built to a higher standard (like a unique miniboss fight or an interesting bit of storytelling).
In their defence, I always felt the sidequests were clearly optional – even though I did do most of them (although I’ll admit that I tapped out of Gilgamesh’s final combat trials). I think the issue is that the game surfaces a lot of things that would have been a ‘secret’ in the original game – like you’re looking at the same sort of content, but Rebirth really points it out to you, and players these days have been trained to compulsively tick of every box in the UI. It makes the game feel a lot longer and more boring than it strictly is – perhaps a little lesson in how different approaches to design can clash unexpectedly? If you don’t tell the player when something is there then they might walk right past and miss it; but if you point it out to them they might fixate onto it, find it too hard and stop playing the game altogether.
Cait Sith was somehow even more confusing than he used to be. He’s an unusual character at face value – a fortune-telling cat who rides around on a giant animatronic moogle – but as the story unfolds his ‘true’ identity shifts back and forth a lot. He was one of my favourite characters in the original game, and I’ve always felt like he was particularly mishandled in the script translation (he only features in a few key moments of the story, so there are few opportunities to really make sense of what his whole deal is – every ambiguous line of dialogue ends up being a huge missed opportunity). But even now, when I already have a good understanding of who he is, I played through Rebirth and still found it his story confusing. I expected some moment to come towards the end of the game where he lays out who he really-really-really is, but… well, I don’t remember it ever happening.
Spider-Man 2
I’m a little shocked by how much this game cost to make – $300m compared to $100m for the original game. It feels like a sign of where the industry is at (or was at, a few years ago) that I don’t see much difference in how they look and feel. The good (?) news is that this means both games are enjoyable cinematic superhero action games.
This second game is mostly about battling Kraven the Hunter, passing through a ‘black suit’ story arc (a pivotal moment in Spider-Man lore) and then takes a left-turn into a final showdown against Venom. In some ways it feels smaller in scope than the previous game? I think making this second game about Venom was probably the right decision – the whole story of Spider-Man drifting off the rails until he learns to question himself and make clear decisions about who he wants to be feels very central to him being a metaphor for growing into adulthood – but the cast of villains feels a lot more limited here. You do have some boss fights against other big names, such as the excellent opening scene where you swing around the city battling the Sandman (it looks great, which helps distract you from the fact that it’s really quite a simple tutorial to teach you about movement and basic combat moves) but they feel like minor appearances just to break up the story.
Maybe I just don’t like Kraven? There’s something very silly about him shipping in a private army of thousands of musclebound goons for this elite hunting event he is staging in the first half of the game. I couldn’t tell you how many of these guys I left webbed to the side of buildings in the end. Where do they go? The city must be building whole new prisons to contain this ceaseless tide of criminality. It feels adjacent to this idea of modern military shooters having to invent private mercenary armies that are both very experienced and armed with the latest gear and yet also seem to pop up out of nowhere, to create an enemy that poses a major threat while having no particular anchor connecting it to the world – a sort of ‘Schrödinger’s PMC’.
Anyway.
I enjoyed myself. It feels like a great example of this kind of game. You can have a lot of fun just swinging around the city, trying to find all the hidden production costs.
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
This was a lot shorter than expected! It’s a nice little showcase of what Yakuza games are like – there are lots of minigames, a number of nice areas to explore, not too long a story, and it includes some sort of demo of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth – although the story feels like a terrible entry point for newcomers to the series. Set in the period between Yakuza 6 and Like a Dragon, we follow a man who looks a lot like Kazuma Kiryu (but is definitely, absolutely, 100% not Kazuma Kiryu – got it?) as he is initiated into an obscure branch of the Japanese intelligence service and functions as a sort of James Bond of organised crime-busting – going undercover, beating up gangsters, and using gnarly secret gadgets.
I’m genuinely a bit sad that Kiryu hasn’t been allowed to settle into a quieter life? Yakuza 6 gave us a nice ending to his story, and having him quietly resurface in the ‘main’ ongoing story like this undermines the image of him living a nice retirement as a grandfather in Onomichi. He spends the whole of this game telling people that he is not Kiryu, in spite of all the obvious evidence to the contrary, and the best possible twist ending would be if he had been telling the truth all along and he really was just some random guy who happened to look just like him (and shared his ability to bulldoze through armies of thugs).
It feels like a game that exists only to pass the ‘main character’ baton from Kiyru to Ichiban – a bit of fanservice for series completionists. It was fun, but felt very skippable.
God of War: Ragnarok
I remember this getting a mixed reception when it came out, but I suspect the main ‘problems’ were that there’s a black woman in the game, and Kratos has a little ‘mental health champion’ moment towards the end. I do agree that the NPCs are much too quick to give you updates on things – everyone complains about how they tell you the solutions to puzzles before you’ve had much time to think – but I also notice it when you complete an objective and it triggers a state change somewhere else in the world and Mimir immediately tells you about it. I think it would be better if they made it an option, like talking to Navi in Ocarina of Time – or at least introduce some sort of delayed trigger system, so the information bubbles up at a more organic moment.
I feel like I’ve forgotten much of the previous game, but I do feel sure that I preferred this one. I felt like it has a more linear structure, so I wasn’t backtracking through the same areas all the time, except when I chose to stick around and do side-quests. Richard Schiff as Odin is a little strange on the ears – I think it was on Remap’s podcast where they said it was hard not to be reminded of Toby from The West Wing (especially as he becomes more forceful in the later seasons).
The best part of the game was the way that the ambient conversations always seem to last exactly the right sort of length as you travel throughout the world, and whoever was responsible for designing that system deserves tremendous success and fortune.
Monster Hunter Wilds
I haven’t played much Monster Hunter since finishing Rise a few years ago, and I haven’t played World since 2018, so in some ways I felt a little out of practice? At the same time, my hands still seem to know what to do. It reminds me of Monster Hunter 4 in the way that you go on a little journey and visit different villages, connected to each of the different hunting environments.
I’ve seen some people complaining that High Rank is much better and more interesting than Low Rank, and they’re basically right, but if you ask me Low Rank has always been the tutorial for the real, long-tailed game – I don’t think it’s a problem, it’s just that they’re not appreciating that Low Rank tells a story and then ends, while High Rank is about doing endless gameplay loops to hone your equipment. Having said that… in Wilds, High Rank is also very short and just suddenly ends?? I like the game as a whole, but since most of my Monster Hunter history comes playing the various Ultimate games on the 3DS – each padded out with the extra G-Rank content – it feels like a bit of a let-down when I can properly finish a Monster Hunter game in less than one month.
Another thing: I see a lot of people complain about the UI, and apparently there’s a popular PC mod to add health bars onto monsters, and I keep forgetting that I deliberately turn off a lot of the modern UI features – like damage numbers, and the quest tracker. Also: Despite playing on a PS5 Pro in the maximum graphics / minimum framerate mode, I still get low quality textures all over the place? I’ll be fighting a monster and it will flicker between high definition textures and a horrible blurry low detail texture, when it’s right in the middle of my screen. I have no real understanding of how these systems prioritise what to spend resources on, but I feel like it’s making some bad choices right now.
They’ve streamlined even more of the old friction out, which makes it super quick and easy to progress and skip the grind:
- This game retains all the convenient features they had in World and Rise re: drop-in multiplayer matchmaking
- Optional Assignments are fenced right off in a different part of the quest list, so it’s easy to focus on the story ones
- You can search SOS Flare quests for hunts with rare drop rewards (like plates & gems) to guarantee getting them
Put it all together, and it’s not so unusual to join a high level hunt in progress, only for the monster to be captured 10 seconds later and for you to be showered with rewards. This might sound great compared to the old experience of grinding the same hunt dozens of times and still not getting the rare drop you need, but I think it’s hugely damaging for the long-term life of the game. I finished the game after one week of not-very-intense play; I still had a lot of optional quests left to do, and gear to collect and upgrade, but I already had a top-tier weapon and armour set, so there was very little challenge left.
One small detail I liked: I haven’t seen any Blast weapons in the game, except for the Artian weapons that you can custom build using relic components. I still have a great fondness for my old Bracydios axe from MH3U, and I took great pleasure in collecting up Blast-element components to make an exploding chainsaw-axe and speccing my decorations to wreck monster parts as violently as possible.
Balatro
I never felt the kind of obsession that other people seem to get from this, although I did go a little on tilt while trying to beat my first gold stakes run – a week or two of dying and restarting over and over again, until I got just the right combination of Jokers to carry me through to the end.
Balatro reminds me of Dicey Dungeons in some, fairly obvious, ways – the core game is easy to get to grips with, but beating all the challenges and high-difficulty runs requires a certain amount of luck. I’m capable of seeing when something is out of my control, and I’m not completely uninterested in playing that kind of game, but I find them quite easy to walk away from. There’s a fine balance to strike between player skill and random chance, and… well, I guess I’m saying the sweet spot for me lies somewhere in the middle difficulties here – around the point where you have Jokers you cannot get rid of and Jokers that self-destruct after a few rounds – where you need to make some smart choices, but still have enough slack to experiment with weird build ideas.
Blue Prince
The internet erupted with chatter about this game when it came out in April, and when I noticed I already had access through a subscription I downloaded it and dived right in. It’s a sort of roguelike tile-placement puzzle game where you explore a mysterious mansion, adding a room onto the map every time you open a new door.
I enjoyed it! Once you peel away the outer layers – getting to know the different rooms and items that are available, and developing strategies to help you push further into the mansion – the game teases out a lot of metagame puzzles that change the way you play the game. Many of these require a particular combination of rooms and items, and unlock permanent benefits that will give you a leg-up on future runs, so it’s worth keeping a checklist of required components and opportunistically pivoting to solve these puzzles when the conditions arise. I liked this a lot – the feeling that you can start out a run with a plan to reach the final room, but under certain circumstances you might toss this in the bin and focus on carefully laying out ju-u-u-ust the right combination of rooms to reconstruct a complex bit of machinery which unlocks a shortcut, and reveals some interesting nuggets of backstory about the mansion. I wouldn’t say it keeps you on your toes – the game doesn’t push you to figure things out – but it does reward you for keeping all these different threads in mind while you play, and that’s something I enjoy.
Much like The Witness, Fez, Tunic, and others, it’s the sort of game that benefits from being played with a notepad beside you. I feel like I’ve solved many of the big mechanical puzzles – ones where you need to build a particular layout and run around the house pushing buttons in the right order – but I’m still uncovering the top layer of the more abstract secrets (to give you an idea what I mean… one of my goals right now is to save up and buy new books to add to the library, and check each of those books out – which requires one run via the library to request a book, and another to read it once it arrives – and then read through the books to learn about the political history of the region, and build up my own personal knowledge of symbolism and heraldry so I can recognise and decode hidden clues in portraits and the like, which will probably point me towards some kind of True Ending). You don’t really need to do all this stuff – I rolled credits in a day and a half, so there are some achievable off-ramps for people who have better things to do with their life – but I am enjoying it.
(NB. Since writing this originally, I have solved this big heraldry puzzle and unlocked… more puzzles)
I think the key to this game lies in the way it plays around with its procedural systems. Your core objective is to get all the way across the mansion and reach the final room, and over your first dozen-or-so runs you build up some foundational knowledge and learn to how to manipulate the system, but then… it starts to introduce different objectives, and offers optional changes to the way rooms are generated, so you have to rethink your usual habits and strategies to adapt. For example, there’s a thing you can do that temporarily adds a stack of schoolrooms to your deck of room-cards, and suddenly instead of getting all the way across the mansion your goal is to place all of the schoolrooms before you run out of space – which requires all the same kind of knowledge and systemic logic, but applied towards reaching a different end. It strikes a good balance with this sort of thing – meaningfully changing how the game is played, without invalidating what you already know.
Indika
Fun little narrative adventure game about an outcast nun who seeks to restore her relationship with God by going on a pilgrimage of sorts. I felt like the opening levels were setting me up for a plot twist in which I – the player – was supposed to represent The Devil, as a sort of chaotic puppetmaster who was steering her away from the righteous path of an undisturbed NPC, but by the end of the game… I felt like it was supposed to be a more literal reading about her communicating with a spindly-legged demon, or that her mental health had been shattered following a traumatic experience as a teenager.
Most of the game is a straightforward adventure where you push boxes, move ladders, solve elevator puzzles and so on – a bit like Ico or The Last Guardian, but without the combat. The thing I found most interesting was the setting – a sort of alternative-history version of late 19th-Century Russia. The locations are few in number but you spend a lot of time burrowing your way through them, and there’s something very compelling about the way ramshackle villages, sprawling factories, and towering cathedrals all fit together. Times are tough, and everyone you meet is trying to do their best under miserable conditions, but at the same time they live next door to a giant mechanical ziggurat which was built – at inconceivable expense – to produce hot tub-sized cans of caviar. It’s interesting to see a team of Russian developers express (what I assume are) their take on the excesses and hypocrisies of this kind of imperialist monument-building.
Citizen Sleeper
Short RPG about a sort of digitally cloned human persona inhabiting the body of a robotic labourer, struggling to earn a living on a grimy space dock and trying to escape the daily grind. The basic mechanics are quite simple – you roll a pool of dice at the start of each day, and then spend those dice to perform actions around the station (with higher-rolling dice tending to give you higher-quality outcomes) – but it stacks systems up on top of each other in a way that I thought was very efficient design.
For example, many of the more meaningful actions come with a pair of progress wheels – one that advances when you make a successful roll, and another that advances when you make an unsuccessful roll – which either unlock or permanently lock a branch of the story. It’s very simple and straightforward to just throw your dice down, perform the action and enjoy the immediate effects (eg. you get paid, salvage some random scrap, maybe lose some health, etc) but the progress wheels serve as a kind of longer-term reputation system, which make you think a little harder about whether to attempt the action in the first place.
If you’re planning to take a job seriously and progress deeper into its story branch, then you need to invest your ‘good’ dice in it, or else risk showing up and fumbling your rolls each day and alienating your coworkers; at the same time you will want to convert your ‘bad’ dice into useful resources somehow, so there’s a reason to string a few supporting jobs along that you either don’t mind being fired from, or are so low-risk that nothing really bad can come of them.
F-Zero GX
I played on a friend’s copy back in the day and found it all a bit too much to take in, in a short space of time. More recently – partly because I’ve been filling out my GameCube collection recently, partly because I’ve been thinking about Nintendo franchises that haven’t been updated in a while, and partly because it had that interesting thing of sharing save data with the arcade game (F-Zero AX) – I’ve been thinking more and more about getting into it. It’s supposed to be very fast and good-looking, and I’m a little curious about how the customisation system works and what the metagame is like.
My most memorable experience from this game was that, in order to unlock new chapters of the story, you have to grind a bunch of races to earn money, go into the Vehicle Customization menu, then visit the parts shop, then go to ‘Items’, and then buy the next chapter of the story, quit back out to the main menu, and dive back into Story mode. F-Zero GX? F***! Zero UX, more like!
One thing on my mind is that this game feels much more like a rocket-propelled Super Monkey Ball than how I remember F-Zero, sometimes. Maybe it’s the way that the camera locks in place and tracks your vehicle as is tumbles off the track into oblivion, just like when your balled monkey falls off the edge of a level.
So far, I think my brain is comparing this game to the F-Zero themed tracks from Mario Kart 8, and this game is looking a lot rougher by comparison. I’m thinking a lot about the way you could take your memory card to an arcade to play F-Zero AX – maybe I’ll track down a working cabinet and see if I can unlock anything? – and it’s a very weird and interesting use of the technology.
Lost Judgement (+ The Kaito Files DLC)
In this sequel to Judgement – a spin-off series of the Yakuza games – you return to the role of private investigator Takayuki Yagami and go undercover in a high school, while investigating a series of deaths in Yokohama. In the first game we were learning all about dementia treatment and Japan’s demographic crisis, and in this game we’re learning about the school system, bullying, and teen suicide.
Aside from the usual Yakuza style chapter structure, much of the game is focused on Tak joining different after-school clubs as a mentor – the dance club, the robotics club, the eSports club, the photography club, etc – and they all have their own associated minigame and a little side-story to work through. In that sense, it reminded me of Bully – the sense that there are these tight social bubbles within the school, and you need to slink around between them like a chameleon to wring the whole story out of the game.
This is not as big a spoiler as it sounds, but: I found it absolutely astounding that none of the detectives in this game – not one – noticed that Reiko Kusumoto’s name bore the same initials as the RK gang, but then it got me thinking about Japanese syllabaries and whether ‘RK’ would register as a completely different thing compared to ‘ReKu’ or something.
The Kaito Files felt like a demo chapter to introduce people to the series – I almost think they should release it for free, to give people a taste of what these games are like. It’s very short, and has far fewer side activities to do than the main game. The best thing it adds to the series is the idea that Kaito is such a primal, animalistic guy that he has heightened senses of smell and hearing, which was very funny at times.
Mario Kart World
If you ask me, the one big thing wrong with this game is that they didn’t include a ‘Classic GP’ mode. They’ve made a big open world, and they want players to engage with it…. and there’s nothing particularly wrong with the new cross-country GP and knockout tour modes… but a lot of players expect to be able to play a regular old game of Mario Kart like they’ve had in every previous game – a series of races where you do laps around each course, so you can get familiar with their particular layout and character. The series is over 30 years old now, and the developers seem to have chosen to remove the primary game mode. It feels like a very strange decision to me.
If you poke around in the multiplayer options you can set up a four-round VS Mode game that functions just like a standard GP, so in that sense nothing has really been lost – which is my main line for defending this game. But when you look at the backlash Mario Kart World has received… to my eyes, all of that negativity stems from this UX change. Instead of having a simple, dedicated flow to start a normal GP mode, you have to navigate some new options and configure it manually.
Putting that one issue aside, I liked this! I like the open world stuff, although it might be good to have some feedback on what your completion percentages are like in each region. The new knockout tour mode is actually very good, I think – and justifies all of the new work they put into the open world map – but it’s specifically very good as a ‘solo queue multiplayer’ experience. It’s quick and intense, and has that Battle Royale touch of kicking you out of the running as soon as you fall behind, so you’re never left trailing along in an unwinnable position.
The problem is that – in our house, at least… – Mario Kart is primarily a local multiplayer game. The classic 4-player GP mode has been a staple of our family gatherings for years, and it feels like the developers have overlooked this and focused on creating a more modern online mode. And okay, I don’t mind digging around to set up a 4-round VS mode game to get around this problem, but clearly a lot of people don’t have the patience for that. Even for us, it’s still a coin toss whether we will play World or dip back into 8 Deluxe.
A lot of people online seem to have expected this to have a much meatier kind of open-world adventure – something a bit like the Adventure Mode from Smash Bros perhaps, where you go from place to place and beat different challenges to unlock stuff. It reminds me more of things like Wii Fit – how you can go for a run around Wuhu Island and there are some little hidden gameplay challenges to discover, but the focus is on being a playful space.
Also, I think it might be good if there were some non-racing challenges wedged into Rally mode – some kind of Fall Guys style minigame where you do a 1 minute balloon battle in the countryside, for example. Also I agree with the lesser complaint that all the characters deserve some costume changes, even if it’s just colour swaps.
Despite the negativity, there’s a perfectly good Mario Kart game in here. Even the parts of this game that people complain about are actually quite good! People seem to blame the new features for pushing some essential old features out of the game, but in reality the old features are still there – it’s more accurate to say that they’re buried underneath the new features, and need to be manually dug out.
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
One of the last things I did before leaving my previous job was to braindump a load of thoughts and ideas onto a Miro board, and one of them was to create a ‘museum mode’ within your game so players can walk around and look at concept art and stuff, or step into unfinished prototype areas to see how an idea was developed – a sort of return to the days of DVD directors commentary, showing off how the content was created but also (maybe) demystifying some of the game development process.
I think this app touches on a lot of similar ideas – at first it felt a bit gimmicky, but once I climbed inside a Joy-Con and started walking around on its circuit boards, I realised it probably wasn’t going far enough – for example, the Stamp Rally feature highlights all the buttons and major points of human interface, but tells you very little about the internal components of the hardware. Why NOT tell us where the memory is, or the graphics processor, and include little explainers on what they do and how they are made? The focus is on features that have changed from the original Switch, but it could go a lot further into explaining basic concepts of how computers work. The more I think about it… I start to wish every hardware manufacturer would do stuff like this.
I enjoyed this, but I also bought it knowing more-or-less what to expect. I’m a little surprised at how negative the reaction to it has been, but the common thread seems to be that people wanted a more focused minigame collection, rather than an interactive owner’s handbook. It is long and quite slow-paced, and I’m not surprised that few people are into it, but personally I had a nice time. My favourite exhibit was the camera minigame where you have to pull faces to match the face displayed on-screen.
I agree with Reggie Fils-Aime that this should have been included on the console for free. As I understand it, Nintendo doesn’t want to damage the perceived value of their software by giving it away? But I think bundling it in with an expensive bit of hardware would mask that effect, and it would persuade many more people to try the Welcome Tour out and have some nice tech demos to show their friends and families. If this had been handled a little differently, it could have served a purpose similar to Wii Sports – something to help drive viral sales.
Total War: Warhammer III – Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs (DLC)
That is a roundabout way of saying I did a Realm of Chaos campaign as Drazoath the Ashen, and led my big hat boys to victory.
I love Total War, but I think the ‘grand strategy’ side of the game makes for a messy experience. The real-time battles are great, but the level of balance swings tremendously depending on choices made on the campaign map. It’s also got a lot of systems to handle quests and RPG-like storytelling, but they’re never allowed to rise above the core campaign gameplay in terms of importance. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what a Total War game could be like if you threw out the grand strategy stuff and focused on being more of an RPG – maybe something a bit like Fire Emblem but with real-time battles, or Shadow of the Horned Rat with a more interesting narrative design.
It’s hard to balance army composition generally, in strategy games? I’ve been going to my local wargames club and playing a bit more Warhammer lately, and thinking about how to set some guardrails on unit choices – finding a balance that allows players to create an army that suits their taste, while avoiding situations where it’s easy to lose the game before you reach the table. I feel like it’s a concept you see a lot of in Total War games, in the way the minor NPC generals will sometimes build really structurally flawed armies while the major leaders will be given a big stack of elite units for free to make up for how ineffectively they be commanded in battle. It reminds me of the team composition assistance you used to get in Overwatch – picture some kind of army summary panel that highlights whether your strength lies in elite troops, hordes, ranged or melee, etc.
Death Stranding (Director’s Cut)
I went in with the vague expectation that this wouldn’t be for me, but I actually liked it a lot! It plays out like a sort of hiking simulator, with occasional tense stealth/combat moments. Most of the time you spend playing is really quite relaxing – like some sort of freelance deliveryman you accept assignments, load up your backpack and panniers with items to be delivered, and schlep the packages over hill and vale to their destinations – although there are also some hazardous areas marked on your map where you have to deal with armed bandits trying to steal your stuff, or (to cut a long story short) angry ghosts which are immune to conventional weapons.
Oftentimes you’re on foot – in which case you need to pay close attention to the lay of the ground under your feet, and the weight distribution of your packages, so that you don’t slip and fall over – but at other times you might be driving around on a little motorbike, or in a truck, or perhaps zooming around on a network of zipwires.
The zipwires point us to (in my opinion) the most important part of the game – the ambient social mechanics. As you scuttle around and delivery packages, you earn resources that can be used to build infrastructure items on the map – like the zipwires, but also bridges, stash boxes, roads, healing bubbles, and other things. If you play the game while connected to the internet, other players’ infrastructure will be seeded into your game. The relevance of all this relates to the theme of ‘connection’ – the sense that all the players are working together to reconnect settlements across America, following a… well, I’ll get to the story later, but for now let’s just say it’s a spooky supernatural event that has made it dangerous for people to stick together in dense concentrations.
When I read about all this prior to playing, I got the impression that when I eventually got round to playing my game would be immediately full of other people’s junk. As it turns out, there’s are some smart structures in place to prevent this – most importantly, for every new region you enter there is an authored single-player experience that you must complete in order to unlock the network features. After that – once the bridges and ziplines and roads start showing up – the story is already pushing you on towards the next region. You can stick around and play in the multiplayer sandbox space if you want to unlock more gear or make numbers go up, or you can crack on with the next objective and push the story forward, depending on what kind of mood you’re in.
In case you’re curious, I will attempt to summarise the initial narrative conceit: At the centre of it all is some supernatural sci-fi stuff about how something happened and now people’s souls can no longer pass on after death; when people die their souls now remain in the world as ghosts which wander round and try to return to their bodies, but if they ever reach their body it causes something like a small nuclear explosion – destroying a large area around them and potentially killing a lot more people, which creates more ghosts, and so on. The effect of all this is that most cities have been destroyed by viral cascades of explosions, the survivors are usually living separate from each other in underground bunkers, and whenever someone dies it is vitally important to cremate the body. If that all makes sense so far, it’s because I’m leaving a lot of the extended details out.
I generally enjoyed the basket of weird supporting characters. particularly Heartman. That said, the major female characters seem drawn through a particular lens for which Kojima has developed a reputation – something that feels inspired by 80’s and 90’s action movies. They aren’t always sexy, vulnerable pin-up ladies who need a strong man to protect them, but they always feels defined by their relationship to men in some way – either as an object of desire, or a mother, daughter or sister. I feel like there’s a connection between Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V and Fragile from Death Stranding. There’s something about the way that Quiet was specifically designed as a character who only wears revealing clothes, while Fragile is a character who never exposes her body, which makes me think Fragile is a kind of response to the criticism Quiet’s design received. At the same time, they’re both sexy ladies who have been through some sort of violent trauma which has robbed them of some level of control over how they dress – their names directly relating to the damage that has been rendered unto them – and the strong, brooding, male protagonist in each of their games comes along to support them while they process and rehabilitate and so on. I feel like Kojima’s writing has grown more sophisticated over time – and that includes the way that the stories and characters have become increasingly weird and fantastical – but he never strays from the classic action movie template of positioning female characters in orbit around the hero (while male characters have more freedom to be defined independently).
I really started to dig the ‘survival hiking’ element of the game – the feeling when you plot out a route to a new location, and have to carefully balance how many packages to deliver against things like medical kits, food and water, and equipment like ropes and ladders. It taps into the satisfaction of a well-packed suitcase, and makes you pay close attention to the geography of the world – peering through the treeline to look for lurking bandits, or checking out the depth of riverbeds to find a shallow spot to wade across. There’s a much more tangible, tactile connection to your surroundings than in most games – maybe I’d compare it to going hunting in Red Dead Redemption 2, where you have to carefully survey the environment for risks and opportunities as you sneak up on your prey.
I have read that the original (ie. non-Director’s Cut) version of the game was a lot more frustrating? Mostly in terms of when certain bits of equipment are unlocked – apparently the Director’s Cut makes life easier by giving you access to more tools earlier. So if you’re reading this and feel like trying the game yourself, please consider this information.
Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp
I feel like I circle back to Advance Wars every time I write one of these roundups. I don’t have a lot of new insights to add this year – just that I went back to finish the original campaign. I thought I had done all the secret objectives to unlock Eagle, but apparently I did not.
I was hoping that we might get a new Advance Wars game out of WayForward following this game, but it’s not looking hopeful huh? I looked online to see what public opinion looked like and saw a lot of people complaining that the AI opponents make all the same silly decisions that they would in the original game, which personally I think was exactly the right approach for this kind of remake.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun
A retro-styled ‘boomer shooter’ that reminds me of Quake 2 (aside from the visual similarities, both games start with you being drop-podded onto a hostile planet to fight your way into an enemy-occupied fortification). At the risk of sounding like a business lizard, I think Warhammer 40,000 is a great IP match for this kind of game – the reveal trailer and marking felt laser-targeted at nerds of a certain age (*cough*) although there’s something a little weird about the emergent narrative of a lone space marine who spends hours trying to parkour his way around an empty factory in search of secret rooms.
The game itself is pretty much exactly what you would expect – fast, loud, and violent. I have been dipping in and out between playing other games and have yet to complete it, but the first chapter has been fun. There’s a certain amount of modern fiddliness to the control (aside from your basic moving and shooting you also need to deal with buttons for grenades, sprinting and jumping, melee attacks, special abilities, and yelling Imperial dogma at your enemies) and my 90’s gamer brain is sensitive to the little tricks and shortcuts being used to ape the look of old FPS games (eg. the particular mix of 3D and 2D objects) but in general it feels quite authentic.
I am wondering what the sequel will be like, mostly in the sense of what you will be fighting against – they’ve so far revealed a few daemons of Khorne, but I’m hoping there’s more variety being kept under wraps. Also a multiplayer mode would be nice – on the one hand, adding multiplayer can mean a lot of additional work and from a game development standpoint I respect the decision to not include it; on the other hand, multiplayer was sort of the key feature of seminal 90’s shooters like Doom and Quake, so leaving it out sort of undermines the ‘boomer shooter’ concept…? I suppose there’s a risk that a co-op mode might make the game a bit too much like Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and lead to some sort of legal issues.
Metaphor ReFantazio
An off-brand Persona-style RPG from the team who make Persona.
I enjoyed most of this game, although I feel like most of the writing fell into the kind of bland fantasy anime hole that often puts me off games like Fire Emblem. It’s absolutely dripping with style – I loved the Heironymus Bosch inspired monsters, and all the weird ‘Royal Magic’ stuff – but at it’s core you’ve got a villain who had a traumatic childhood and wants to destroy the world in response, and a hero whose philosophy is that everyone should just be nice to each other. The core message of the game is that stories are powerful because they can inspire people to change the world, but the story presented feels like a very childlike perspective on life. I would guess it’s trying to be broadly agreeable, but it ends up barely saying anything at all.
I enjoy all the Persona-like life simulation stuff – how you must choose how to spend your time each day, and build up different skills and relationships and stuff depending on what you do – but at the same time, maximising all the important stats by the end of the game felt a bit too easy and obvious. Like you’re presented with choices, yes, but I never felt much pressure to choose between different outcomes – it felt clear that if I just worked through things methodically, I could reach 100% completion without breaking a sweat. But I think it does a great job of making your character feel like a real person… or to put it more specifically, makes it feel like they exist in a specific point in time and space (although this is undermined a little once you start teleporting around the world map). They have (semi-)realistic limits to what they can do within a given time. It means impending crises become more meaningful – compare it to games like Final Fantasy VII or Mass Effect 3 where you keep being told that the world is about to end, but at the same time you’re allowed to spend as long as you like doing sidequests and playing finishing minigames.
Slay the Spire
I blew through this surprisingly quickly, considering what people say about it – from start to end in under two months. I did get a little manic about beating the final boss, but apart from that I never really found it as addicting as people would have you think. Maybe I got a lot of that out of my system back when I was playing Dicey Dungeons?
My final winning run was a Watcher build that required a lot of sheer luck in assembling the right relics and cards to counter the unique quirks of the final boss – a tungsten rod and medical kit, using a duplicate potion with Panacea+ to give myself 4 stacks of debuff immunity right at the start, Deva Form to help boost my energy up followed a few turns later by Conjure Blade to create a 1-energy attack that does tons of damage. Throw in a couple of Talk to the Hands, add some card draw so I could get all the stance change cards I needed each turn, remove all the basic Strikes and Defends, and I was set. It played out as a few delicate opening turns while I cleared the initial hurdles and set up Deva Form, and then soon snowballed into me doing about 300 damage per turn.
I have mixed feelings about the amount of effort it took. The final boss has a few unique properties that rewrite the basic rules of the game a little… it’s possible to reach the boss just by taking things as they come and building up some card synergies as you progress, but in order to beat them it seems like you need to have spent the whole run tailoring your deck specifically for that final battle. In my case, I focused on nullifying those unique properties as best as possible – trying to force the fight back onto level ground, where I know what I’m doing. If you think of the final boss as a sort of secret ultimate challenge then I suppose it’s like adding a fun extra strategic layer over the rest of the game? But if you think of it simply as the end of the game – something you MUST overcome in order to feel like you’ve beaten it – it feels like a sucker punch to have to throw out most of what you’ve learned so far.
Mother 3
I bought a physical copy of the fan translation and played it on my GBA SP, in preparation for Get Played’s we-play-you-play episode this summer. This game has been on my radar for about 18 years, but I had been putting it off for various reasons – for a long time I wanted to wait until I had finished Earthbound (AKA Mother 2), and I came very close in 2014, but then some things happened and I lost my save file and couldn’t be bothered to start again. But anyway, the prospect of having an hour-long podcast discussion to listen to after I beat Mother 3 prompted me to get on with it.
I’ll start with my biggest complaint about Mother games: the combat. I like the odometer-style hit point trackers – the way that, when you take damage, your health slowly ticks down 1 point at a time until it reaches the new total. I love the moments when you suffer a massive, fatal blow, but still have around 10 seconds of time to act before your character officially dies, during which you can quickly use a healing item and prevent them from dying. When it works, that stuff feels great! The thing that drives me crazy is that you usually don’t have time to react in any meaningful way. I can quickly tap through menus to queue up some healing, only to watch an enemy sink into some long, drawn-out animation (which sometimes amounts to them doing nothing) while my main damage-dealer bleeds out. When you engage with this game as a ‘normal’ videogame it can be infuriating sometimes.
The trick to all this is that it’s not trying to be a ‘normal’ videogame – it’s a deliberately weird, artsy subversion of typical game design. And in that spirit, I enjoyed it a lot! I’d say it’s a game about loss and decay, and how people struggle to live with it. It takes place in a very whimsical world where everyone is happy and life is good – something like the archetypical ‘cozy’ game, now that I think about it – but then outside forces start to seep in and corrupt the people who live there. I don’t want to spoil the story, but it’s not a typical kind of heroic tale where you beat up all the bad guys and restore the world to rights… it’s more of a lesson in accepting change, and learning to live with loss. It’s messy and complicated and sometimes very sad! But also has moments of hope and love and growth. Life is hard sometimes.
Very good. Strong recommend.
Final Fantasy XVI
This was developed by the Final Fantasy XIV team and boy does it show. Lots of similarities to the Heavensward arc in the setting, lots of similar structure to gameplay and mission design, minibosses who seem to be specific FFXIV classes, similar music, similar attack patterns in boss fights, etc. I’ve read that the team were heavily inspired by Game of Thrones, and the comparisons also feel hard to ignore.
You play as the gruff, brooding heir to a fallen kingdom which was annexed by its neighbour; your story begins with you being conscripted into an order of anonymous soldiers with the thankless task of defending the kingdom from supernatural foes; you eventually leave your unit and start rambling around the world with a big direwolf at your side, seeking revenge for your family and growing a cool beard – ie. you’re basically Jon Snow. Your younger brother was a frail child, but inherited a rare magical talent which gives him supernatural abilities; he is assumed to be dead but (mild spoilers?) turns out to be very much alive, and the two of you meet up and combine forces to fight back against your enemies – ie. he’s basically Bran Stark.
I’m not saying it’s outright copying Game of Thrones – that would oversimplify it, and ignores all the Final Fantasy elements it adds into the mix – but just that there’s a lot of little stylistic and thematic points where the inspiration feels very obvious… and it means some of the dreariness of Game of Thrones starts to bleed into my feelings about this game. Everything is grey and gloomy, and the only characters who aren’t miserable are violent sociopaths. I think that’s what has been bothering me the most about this game – there’s so little joy in the world. I keep comparing it to FFXV and FFVII Remake – two recent alternatives, which are aiming to be the same kind of game, broadly speaking – and there’s so much more fun to be found going on a roadtrip with your buddies, or mooching around in the slums below Midgar. I gather that the team were told to target western audiences – particularly using Game of Thrones as a guide (it was incredibly popular, until it suddenly wasn’t) – so my impression would be that the team did a great job of following their brief, but the brief was a bit misguided.
I’ve seen people on the internet complain that the game is too linear and limited in scope to be a mainline Final Fantasy game (eg. you only really control one character) but in many ways it all lines up with how FFXIV works (eg. obviously it’s a multiplayer game, but each player only controls one character). I don’t quite agree with their argument, but I can also understand what they’re getting at – it feels further away from being an RPG and towards being an action game than any other Final Fantasy game I’ve played (although I’m speaking as someone who has not yet played Crisis Core, Stranger in Paradise and many other spin-offs). I’ve read that the concept is to be a sort of ‘action game’ take on Final Fantasy V – giving you a lot of freedom to customise your character – but there isn’t a huge amount of functional difference between the different abilities you unlock, so the customisation system as a whole feels a bit pointless. It feels much less significant than the loadout options in Bayonetta for example, where the different weapons require different strategies, movement tech, and combo timing and stuff.
Also, the surround sound mix was super weird for me. I had a lot of scenes where two characters were standing next to each other and talking, and different lines of dialogue were coming out of different speakers around me, for no obvious reason – like the camera and the characters were not moving at all, but Clive’s voice would randomly jump around the room from line to line. Very odd.
I struggled to pay attention to the plot at times, although I did like the general concept. It takes a traditional sort of Final Fantasy setup – there are 6 huge magic crystals scattered around the world, each one connected to a different magical element, and you have to visit them all – but then layers in some more modern political themes where the use of magic is slowly destroying the environment, and the crystals represent a sort of fossil fuel that an increasingly magic-based society has become reliant on. You end up operating as a sort of eco-revolutionary (which feels like another callback – this time to Final Fantasy VII) who is trying to sever the link and put an end to the use of magic, in order to safeguard the future of the planet.
I think overall I’d say there’s a lot to like in this game, but it doesn’t hit the mark the way most other Final Fantasy games do. It’s trying to be something different, and it succeeds… in a bad way.
UFO 50
Before UFO 50 came out I knew I wanted to play it on my Switch, and after about a year of waiting the port was finally released. In case you’re not familiar, it’s basically a bundle 50 complete, self-contained games for a fictional 8-bit console – a bit like playing a retro game collection, except the games have never been released before. There is (I am told) some interesting meta-narrative around how the games evolved during the fictional console’s lifespan – like there are elements of ‘responding to market forces’ or ‘making more sophisticated use of the hardware’ that influence some of the later games in the collection’s timeline.
Honestly? I haven’t played enough of this to really give it a fair write-up. I’ve been trying to dig into each game one by one, but because they’re all like full-length NES games that can take hours of trial-and-error learning, and they’re often completely different from each other. I love it! But I feel like it would take me 6 months or more to pull it all apart, and I’ve got too many other things to play, so I’m planning to just nibble away at this over a period of years.
One small, final thought: I think it very funny that the most intuitive entry point to the collection is to start a game of Barbuta, walk to the right, and immediately die.
Civilization VII
I surprised myself a little by buying this so soon, and even more so by buying the Switch version rather than PC. But I found a good combination of deals to get the Switch game on cartridge and the Switch 2 digital upgrade, and I do like the idea of being able to take it away with me when I’m travelling.
It seems much as I was expecting – it’s okay, but a little unpolished at times. It’s similar in many ways to Civ VI – which I liked – but with a few major changes that make it feel distinct. The overall arc of the game is broken up into three distinct ‘ages’, which limits how far ahead one player can be over other, and provides a couple of break points where the developmental horserace is reset, and I think it’s a nice change. Much like Total War: Warhammer 3’s Realm of Chaos campaign, I think the designers are trying to create a balanced multiplayer experience that can keep ‘losing’ players engaged throughout the whole length of a game… but the community don’t like it because they expect to play it as a singleplayer game where they can race out ahead of their opponents and dominate the whole map. The mini-reset that occurs at the end of each age seems designed to help losing players catch up, but from the perspective of solo power-gamers it seems to punish them for being successful.
I like the new feature where you ‘change Civilization’ between ages. I do agree that it’s a big philosophical change from simply playing as France for 6,000 years, but I think it’s a more realistic telling of history to explore how societies change and evolve over time. One little element which (I think) is underexplored is the impact of moving your capital city – why it happens, what the effects are, and so on. Another might be what it means to incorporate a large swathe of captured territory – the transition from being a small, powerful state with a lot of occupied territories, to becoming a single, large, unified cultural entity. There are features in the game that touch on these concepts, but there isn’t a lot of significance attached to them.
From a gameplay perspective, I think there’s something good in being able to change character (…sort of…) during the game. I like the ‘legacy’ system, whereby meeting certain conditions during an age unlocks particular boons you can take into the next age – eg. if you do a lot of fighting and meet all the Domination legacy objectives in the Age of Antiquity then you can start the next age with some free military units, or a bonus to war weariness, and stuff like that. It sets objectives and dishes out rewards throughout the game, instead of just pointing at final victory conditions which could be hundreds of turns away. One big controversy is that the final age seems to end around the World War 2 era – there’s a distinct lack of what you might call the ‘Modern Age’, with computers and robots and globalised culture and stuff. I think everyone’s assumption is that this would be added in a future expansion, but I have to wonder whether that’s true – looking at the way the game is now, it would mean the game is suddenly 33% longer and they have to pick a dozen new Civilizations to represent the modern world. They could always make more changes to adapt around that of course, but my point is just that it doesn’t seem as simple as adding more content.
The Switch 2 version looks good on TV, and a bit worse in handheld mode – the UI is resized to different proportions, and everything feels a bit squashed. I haven’t noticed a lot of true UI bugs, but there’s a lot of small incidents where it just looks a little rushed or sloppy – often involving automatically-rescaling text boxes and flowchart arrows. I think I’ve found a repeatable crash bug when putting the game to sleep in docked mode, then resuming it in handheld mode. Like a lot of people have said, I think it would benefit from a few months of polish and testing – normally with a Civ game, you would hope that it all gets ironed out by the time the first expansion arrives, but looking at the way things are right now, I’m a little concerned that they might not make one.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II
I wanted to replay the original game before I got into this, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll go back and play it again after this? The only thing I really remember from the first game was getting a little button-mashing prompt to pummel the final boss in the face repeatedly at the end of the fight, which is a very satisfying way to end that kind of game.
I have some quibbles about how well this holds up as a videogame – eg. it’s a game that puts a lot of emphasis on melee combat with hordes of enemies, but your attacks feel very slow and clunky so it doesn’t feel very reactive. But at the same time, I think it’s an appropriate representation of the Warhammer 40,000 universe – space marines should be a bit slow and clunky; their general schtick is to chew through enemies at their own pace, relying on their armour and religious zeal to keep them alive while they methodically eradicate any opposition.
The plot felt extremely predictable for anyone familiar with the lore – anyone who isn’t blindly fanatical to the Emperor is obviously doomed to fall to ruin; and anyone who is a untainted true believer is usually doomed to die defending some irrelevant moon somewhere. I’ve read about Warhammer newcomers playing the game and coming away with some weird ideas about the overall setting – viewing it more like a game like Halo and assuming that the humans are the good guys, when it’s really more of a satirical joke that there are no good guys and everyone is fighting to the death because they think it’s their only hope at survival. It’s a miserable place! It’s not supposed to be a wellspring of hope and fun – the whole universe is calibrated to give justification for an infinite number of tabletop battles, and it does a great job of that.
I’d like a more fast-paced, nimble kind of game – something more a Platinum game, where your character can cancel out of their attacks to dodge or parry. I think what I’m saying is I’d like a sequel where you play as an Autarch – a lithe space-elf who can mix and match between heavy and light weapons, melee or ranged, and lots of interesting wargear options.
Final Fantasy X
I went away on holiday for a week in September and took my Vita with me, so I could while away the little hours with a nice, traditional fantasy RPG. It was great. I’ve never played Final Fantasy X before, but I did play through the whole of FFX-2 about 14 years ago, and I am already aware of the major weird plot twists; nevertheless, I enjoyed the transition from the gruff, grim action-game stylings of FFXVI to the weird, bubbly JRPG orthodoxy of FFX. It feels deeply connected to all the golden age PS1 Final Fantasy games, and also strange and innovative (eg. in the way you can switch characters during battle, or how your equipment seems to confer no stat bonuses and only a few status effects).
Because of a few very particular features – like the time in which it was made, and the decision to have voice acting for lots of incidental NPC chatter – this game feels oddly reminiscent of Shenmue, in the way that characters move and speak. Compare this scene from FFX with this scene from Shenmue – something about the quality of the character models, their stiff movements, the way the camera is constantly moving around or doing slow zooms in and out while they talk, and the way the voice acting sounds… I feel like they’re reflecting a very particular period in game development, where technology suddenly jumped forward but developers were still figuring out how to use it well.
I’ve only been playing on-and-off while travelling, so I’m still only a little ways into the game (if memory serves, I’m somewhere around Djose Temple) but if I’m honest I think half of my interest in playing this game was just to learn to play Blitzball. I wouldn’t say I enjoy Blitzball, but I enjoyed digesting it – the process of taking it apart, figuring out how to play it successfully, and thinking about what changes could be made to improve it. It’s much less complicated than it looks, and I liked that it distils the flow of a soccer/polo match into a series of simple stand-off encounters – those moments where you decide when to break, and whether to pass or shoot, feel reminiscent of the way enemies line up and wait for you to attack during the main game battles. Is this what the Captain Tsubasa games are like? Maybe I should try one of those next year.
Psychonauts 2
Good stuff. I played through Psychonauts about 12 years ago and my memories are a little dim by now, but I got back up to speed quickly. The story is focused on the original founding members of the Psychonauts, and largely plays out through the process of tracking them down and dipping into each of their minds, The group broke up after a particularly challenging mission, and it falls to Raz to sift through the team’s memories and unresolved traumas to piece together what happened and prevent something similar from happening again.
It feels like a late 90’s kind of platform game – the recent reboot of Bubsy the Bobcat comes to mind, in the sense that these games have become rare over time. It’s clever and inventive and funny in the way that you would expect from a Tim Schafer game (both Psychonauts games are great examples of how to tell stories through level design – since every level is the manifestation of a character’s mind, there’s a lot of subtle background details that hints at how the characters see themselves).
I particularly like the way that you’re visiting the minds of this group of friends, and exploring their memories of the same events. It has this Rashomon-like quality of exploring how different people remember different elements of an event, how they characterise their relationships, and what they think their friends really think of them. Nice.
Hollow Knight
When Silksong came out I started to wonder why I had barely given Hollow Knight much thought before – What was I doing, around the time with it came out? I suspect the answer was “getting laid off”. I poked around and found it among the pile of old monthly subscription games on PS+, and finally gave it a shot.
It has been okay. I’m still only a few hours into the game (trying to figure out what I should be doing in the Fungal Wastes) but it’s hit just the right level of difficulty that I was hoping for. I do keep finding myself falling off it and going to play other games though – as if the map has grown enough now that I can’t keep track of which areas I need to go back to. Every time I load the game I end up scurrying around in circles and feeling lost, and after a while I just… stop.
Eternal Strands
I think I missed the initial announcement and stumbled onto this out of the blue in the summer of 2024 – a new game by Mike Laidlaw (and others) blending elements of Shadow of the Colossus and Monster Hunter? Sounds great! I was really looking forward to it, but it wasn’t until quite late in the year that I got round to playing it.
I liked it, generally. There are around 12 giant monsters in the game, and they all have some sort of unique combat challenge built into their design for you to figure out and exploit. For example – if you don’t mind a mild spoiler – the big guy with the burning brazier on his head (see screenshot) requires you to climb around all over him and smash all of his glowing red gems, in order to extinguish the fire and reveal a magical glowing weak spot on top of his head. Similar to Shadow of the Colossus, a big part of the challenge lies in figuring out these little tricks while the giant monster is trying to kill you.
Combat in general feels a little repetitive – it’s too easy to fall back on a handful of familiar tricks, especially when dealing with small enemies – but I feel like it was heading in the right direction with all the different magic powers and customisable loadouts. Maybe I could even draw a comparison to Mass Effect 2 here, in the sense that the combat feels a little too cleanly designed? There’s not a great deal of texture to play with – not much feeling that your loadout or choice of target will really change the way you play – so once you figure out a little combat algorithm it’s easy to get stuck in a loop. I think it would benefit from being a bit more Monster Hunter-like in that regard? Like designing the enemies so that different weapons might nudge you towards fighting in a different area of the map, and using different tactics.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I enjoyed this, mostly! I liked the character customisation system and the dreamlike setting, and was particularly impressed with the visual design – I think the stylised characters and environments will age much better than many more ‘realistic’ looking games. My biggest complaint was that the dodge and parry system made combat feel a little flat and repetitive – once you get good at it (*cough*) the game is basically asking you to make smart decisions when attacking, but rely on twitchy reactions for defence. It means every fight starts to feel very similar, and leads to other issues – like if you generally aren’t taking damage at all, there’s nothing to stop you fighting over-levelled opponents to scoop up tons of XP and powerful loot.
I don’t really see why people think this will herald the return of turn-based battles. I think Bravely Default probably does more to innovate on the turn-based battle format, and there’s probably many more JRPG-style indie games being made out there – although of course, not with this kind of marketing and visual polish. I’m more hopeful for the idea that this will help channel more money towards AA games in general – I think it would be good for the health of the industry to see more money being spread across mid-market projects.
My other remaining opinion here is that I felt like the final act of the game lasted too long. It’s all optional, but… somehow that makes it feel worse? The fact that I know that I’m choosing to do all these new dungeons opens up more opportunities for me to regret my actions. I wonder if this part was inspired by Final Fantasy VI?
Two Point Museum
I don’t want to get into the business of awarding a ‘Game of the Year’ title – I try to play a mixed vintage of games each year and finish most of the games I play, so I just don’t have time to play enough ‘new’ games to cast a fair judgement. But out of all the ‘new’ games I played in 2025, I think Two Point Museum would be my favourite. I think it’s the best in the Two Point series so far (following Hospital and Campus) and has left me more enthusiastic than usual to see what they move onto next.
The big innovation that elevates the game for me is the expedition maps. In the previous games, each level came with a linear series of goals which unlocked different star ratings – a bit like Angry Birds, or countless other mobile games. In Museum, each level is associated with a 2D map featuring a network of nodes (see screenshot above). These nodes represent different places outside of your museum where you can send your researchers to look for artefacts – to go digging for fossils, or go looking for exotic fish, etc – and some of the nodes have particular unlock requirements which tie back in to how you’ve trained your staff, or what kind of specialist equipment you have built. The star ratings do still exist, but they usually require some specific progress on the expedition map, so… well, the overall impact is that the levels have a much stronger narrative design. Previously you were just assembling a kind of machine and then scaling it up to process bigger numbers – a more efficient patient throughput, or pumping up the grades of your students – but in Museum each level feels like you’re going on a little adventure, with its own self-contained story and (subtly different) gameplay mechanics. It’s delightful!
The other major change – which I was less fond of, but I think it’s the right direction for them to be exploring – is that you’re basically forced to jump back and forth between museums now. In previous games you had the option of moving around between levels, but it was never strictly required (and in case it’s not obvious, I’m the sort of person who would crunch my way to 3 stars on each level, one at a time). Two Point Museum uses your total number of stars (across the whole game) to gate your potential progress within each level – perhaps three or four times. I hit a dead-end on a level I was enjoying and had to go away and earn more stars somewhere else in order to continue. I think it sells the idea of returning to earlier levels better than the previous games did, but I just didn’t enjoy feeling forced to do it. Perhaps all I’m saying is they should find a more positive, constructive way to message this to the player, where it doesn’t feel like such an artificial restriction?
Also: I read through some patch notes and and saw that they’ve been experimenting with pseudo-random logic in the reward crates – a system that adjusts the probabilities of finding different items, based on which items you’ve already found. Speaking as a person who has delved quite deep into loot box design, and has a particular sensitivity to seeing the word “random” in a design document, I loved spotting this in the wild. Players hate true randomness! It’s a common blind spot for designers who aren’t very maths-y, but what players really want is some carefully controlled babyproofing that matches their expectation of randomness, which actually requires a lot of smoke and mirrors and subtle logic to achieve.
Strong recommend. I had a great time.
Demonschool
As a regular Insert Credit listener, I dutifully pre-ordered Demonschool just to push some numbers up and support Brandon’s ongoing work at Necrosoft. The good news is: I also enjoyed the game.
I’ve seen a few reviewers calling it a Persona-like, but aside from a few similar motifs (high school kids hanging out and bonding while investigating an otherworldly threat) they really have little in common. The core combat system is different, the overall structure of the game is different, and there are no hard trade-offs to make when deciding what to do with your time – you always have one key activity to push the story forward, and some optional activities that you can do or ignore at your pleasure. Different!
I liked how the combat and character progression system was built around not having experience points and character levels. There’s a broader sense of party progression that comes from unlocking equippable perks – overall the effect is that you get more options as you progress through the story, complete side-quests, or simply click on the right things while exploring the world. Very few perks are strictly better than the others, but they open up new options for character builds and make your party configuration a little deeper and more complex as the game goes on.
If I was to raise one complaint, it’s that the writing feels… monotonal. According to the (fabulous) staff credits, Brandon wrote all of the dialogue himself; I’ve been listening to him talk on Insert Credit for a few years now, and his sense of humour and personality are stamped right through the game, but it feels too evenly applied across the characters. I think how I want to describe it is that the game as a whole is written in one voice – a bit like if one person was sitting opposite you and trying to paraphrase the dialogue of a whole game. The end result is that it feels like a videogame that knows it’s a videogame and doesn’t try to hide it, whereas a different script with more distinct character voices might have more success at pulling the player into its world.
It Takes Two
I put this on over Christmas while I was visiting family, and mostly watched my brother and our niece play through it together. I’m very interested in Hazelight’s co-op adventures – the fact that they’re designed for split-screen co-op means they tap on my nostalgia for co-op games in the 90’s. It was nice to watch them work together to solve puzzles and complete interesting battle scenes – I particularly enjoyed the bits where one of them had a sort of grenade launcher that fired globs of explosive honey, and the other had a rifle that fired burning matches, so they had to co-ordinate their attacks to blow things up.
The story was a bit darker than the visual design led me to expect (the conclusion of the castle stage in particular gave me flashbacks to the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3) but I think we all enjoyed it. The core of it is about a husband and wife who have decided to divorce, and then their daughter somehow magically transforms them into a pair of small puppets who have to go on a magical adventure around the house while they talk about their relationship (mixing vague flavours of Honey I Shrunk The Kids and The Parent Trap). I spent a lot of time wondering how this was all going to resolve – the supposed arc of the story felt like a child’s understanding of relationships, but perhaps that will turn out to be because the whole game is taking place in the imagination of their daughter, caught in the middle of all this?
Sadly we didn’t quite reach the end to find out, but it’s high on my list of priorities for the next time I visit. I just have to wonder what we could move onto next Christmas – A Way Out seems a little too gritty and adult, so I think I need to vet Split Fiction to see if it takes any unexpectedly distressing turns.
Looking Ahead to 2026
Firstly, things from my backlog I intend to play next year include Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (feels like a classic January game – something to distract from how cold and miserable it looks outside), Elden Ring (I’m not a big Souls guy, but too many people are saying this is their favourite game of all time – I need to at least try it out) and Donkey Kong Bananza (this fell into a similar trap as Super Mario Wonder – I decided to hold onto it and play it with my niece and nephew over Christmas, and then it just never came up, and now it’s just sitting here not being played).
I might play Death Stranding 2 in the summer – once it gets warm enough to really get in sync with the Australian outback – and I’m looking forward to playing 007: First Light eventually, but I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to buy it at launch. Also, it’s an interesting time to be a Lionhead fan – Masters of Albion (Molyneux’s new game) launches in April, and the Fable reboot is due out by the end of the year. I’m very curious to see how Masters of Albion will work out – the trailer focuses on familiar elements from his classic PC games at Bullfrog and Lionhead, but his work at 22Cans has always been very focused on mobile and tablet markets (which, I would say, was sort of the root of the complaints around Godus – originally pitched as a PC game in the style of Populous, but as time went on the PC version came to feel like a playtesting program to aid in development of the tablet release). I hope it goes well – especially if this does in fact turn out to be his final game – but it’s hard not to imagine a throng of reactionary influencers looking for things to over-react to.
There’s a whole bunch of strategy games coming out. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave could be good – the series has come to feel like a bit of a coin flip to me, but the early signs seem positive. Tiny Metal 2 looks very Advance Wars-like (and has a co-op campaign), and there are two indie RTS games that caught my eye: Strategos and Winter Falling: Battle Tactics. And then of course there’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 and Total War: Warhammer 40,000. I’m not sure what my expectations are exactly, but it seems inevitable that they’re going to be compared to each other. I suspect Dawn of War is more likely to come across as a satisfying campaign experience, but Total War will probably feature larger, more climactic battles. And I assume they’ll both have co-op campaigns too?? Delightful!
I think the Warhammer 40,000 setting poses some particular challenges for a 4X game like Total War in particular – basically, two of the playable factions in this first game are quite numerous but the other two are quite few in number, so they should not be able to quickly train units and raise new armies as players may be used to. Also, similar to the Warhammer Fantasy setting, there are limits to how far any faction can expand its territory before the narrative starts to fray. Finally… it’s just a more bitty game, with more fiddly customisation and small details to it – even in the tabletop games, I’ve always felt like Fantasy was a more streamlined experience. Even just the idea of making a Total War game with strong focus on ranged combat sounds like a big departure from how the games are normally played (although I think they faced this kind of problem before in Empire: Total War). But I have friends working on this game, and judging from what I’ve read in publicly-available interviews it sounds like they’re considering all these issues, so I’m just going to look forward to it coming out and hope that it all goes well.
I’m really looking forward to Big Walk, and I think I might try to round up some friends to play Peak as well. I don’t care much for the whole notion of ‘friendslop’ but I’ve been saying for 20+ years that any game can be fun if you’re playing with friends – the way I see it, there’s a certain rational explanation for simple co-op games becoming popular, just because they’re piggybacking off the emotional experience of goofing around with friends. I think games publishers are rethinking their attitude towards ‘social’ games in the shadow of Roblox. I get the impression that there are quite a lot of wannabe-game platforms in development that are trying to provide a Roblox-like play experience with AAA quality – Everywhere by Build A Rocket Boy has been announced, but I think they face a number of rivals with exactly the same idea. Even Fortnite has been reaching in this direction, with its UEFN powered custom games.
Finally: Like many other people I am looking forward to Grand Theft Auto VI, and perhaps we’ll get to play it this year? But I’m also getting a bit anxious about what will happen after it comes out. Over the last few years – during this post-Covid slump – there’s been a common idea that GTA VI will come out and trigger a huge upswing in consumer spending (eg. people who aren’t as invested in gaming generally might go out and buy a PS5 or Series X to play it on, and once they’ve done that then they’ll buy a few more games for those systems and more money will start flowing around generally).
However: I’m starting to think it might mark the end of an era for the games industry? There’s a version of this story where GTA VI comes out and it does okay, but perhaps not as well as GTA V did… and the sinking of this unsinkable ship triggers a downward confidence spiral that has the opposite effect, and scares investors away. Perhaps we’ll look back in the future and identify a particular era of games that ran from around 2006 to 2026 – a period marked by online services, digital distribution, and microtransactions, which eventually capsized once investors found it was more profitable to use the hardware and design patterns of videogames to make AI porn bots, or monetise child labour.
New hardware is becoming unaffordable, because the components are being bought up in bulk for use in AI datacentres. Kids aren’t growing up with videogames the way they used to – they’re playing on specific closed platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, and they are not so well informed about games outside of their bubble. Are there many young adults who are chomping at the bit for a new GTA, or is it mostly just legacy gamers in their 30’s and 40’s? Assuming that the new game comes with a new edition of GTA Online – which I would assume will mean everyone starting from scratch again – will Rockstar manage the difficult process of migrating their old players over? I suspect a lot of the big spenders will not be interested in the nuance of live game economy design, and feel cheated – what if they decide to simply move on?
I have this theory that wealth inequality has driven us towards a rentier economy, which is repackaging goods and activities of all kinds as investment assets to simply own and collect ‘passive income’ from. I’m worried that we’re heading towards a crunch point where the whole industry is driven off the side of a cliff by an investor class who are very impressed by our numbers, but have no appreciation of why people play games, or how it feels to play a good game – and so, to put it in terms they might understand, are becoming increasing disconnected from their own products and cannot tell when it is bad.
At present we seem cursed to have more and more disruptors and entrepreneurs trying to use generative AI to produce low-cost videogame-like content; it feels to me like a fully-automated expression of the worst kind of analytics usage – using data to replace creativity – vaguely reminiscent of those weird YouTube kids videos from about 10 years ago. I worry that this road leads to a second great videogame crash. I suppose people will still be making and buying games, but… maybe the kind of future I worry about is one where nobody is making games consoles, mainstream gaming atrophies into AI-generated interactive TV shows that use all your internet data to present exactly the kind of characters and situations you can’t stop engaging with, and portals like Steam and itch.io become underground refuges for a weird, outdated pastime?
For years I’ve been telling people that they should vote with their wallets – if a game comes out that embodies the kind of games they want to see in future, they should buy it at full price (if possible) and not just wait for a big sale. If a game comes out that embodies something they do not want to see in future, then don’t buy it. This has always felt like the main lever consumers have to support the developers they like and influence future projects, but… these days I feel like the whole game industry (at least as far as self-contained, paid-for games go) has a more fundamentally uncertain future.
There’s a powerful social network effect that retains kids on free-to-play platforms – they want to play on these things because that’s where their friends are at – and because that’s where their attention is focused, they don’t really know or care so much about what we might call ‘traditional’ videogames; if you want to push back on that, I don’t think it’s enough to just lecture your own kids about the impact of monetisation systems on game design, or to buy them some good, old-fashioned games. I think maybe it requires building your own network-based strategy? I keep picturing a scenario where a group of parents get together and collude to buy each their kids a particular console (I would think something inexpensive with a broad library of age-appropriate games, like a second-hand Xbox One) and a few common games, and encourage the kids to get together and play – so they’ve all got access to the same things, and have a sort of viable alternative gaming culture to socialise around – but I dare say that’s an unrealistic idea. I mean it’s probably pointless and stupid to try and recreate your own childhood experiences for the next generation, right?
(For better quality advice on raising kids around videogames, consider reading Patrick Klepek’s Crossplay blog)
Personally, I spend a lot of time contemplating the moment when my nephew and his friends all get their own Steam accounts, and whether I should put together a sort of starter pack of good, cheap, mostly-multiplayer games to gift to the whole crew, just to steer them towards playing some good games with minimal friction – Portal, Civilization, maybe a Total War, Neverwinter Nights and so on. It feels like a pretty fraught move (“Oh, this? My friend’s weird uncle gifted it to me.”) but there are a lot of social forces out there on the internet trying to drag them towards bad games and toxic communities. Games journalism is a shrinking industry (and good games journalism increasingly feels like a sort of artisanal, worker-owned indulgence for millennial nerds) and kids – either directly, or second-hand through schoolyard chatter – are getting more and more of their cultural cues from shrieking over-reactors on social media.
Outside of games, what I would like to see in 2026 is less social media, more socialising within local communities, and a wealth tax.
