In prior years, I’ve split my video game thoughts for the year in two. Not so for 2022. I don’t know exactly what happened, but there just weren’t many thoughts coming to mind in the first half of this cycle of time, even for things I did play in that duration; on top of that, I’d played less new games than average during those winter and spring months than I did in the waning period of 2022. The second half of the year did pick up speed, but not so much as to overfill anything, and thus we kind of settle at a usual parity. The executive dysfunction probably didn’t hurt with that decision either, of course, but still. I think I’ve also come to terms with the fact that my thoughts are not always of similar length from game to game, and not even necessarily the same train of logic regarding what seems prudent to frame discussion with. That’s me, and if that’s terrible, ah well.

Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen; September 2019 for PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch, September 2020 for Mac/Linux)

In a market as crowded as 2D games emulating IGA era Castlevanias, it takes something extra to stand out, be it aesthetic, narrative, or mechanical. Luckily for Blasphemous, it pulls through to have become noticed in this ocean. Drawing from material within its own country’s history, the Game Kitchen has adorned the forlorn world of Cvstodia with the iconography of Spanish Catholicism, from the protagonist’s nature as a capirote-helmed peninent with a vow of silence to the game’s enemy roster being populated primarily by twisted mockeries of religious iconography. This artistic scheme plays in a space between the beautiful and the macabre, your pilgrimage one that traverses scenic vistas and majestic architecture marred by gore and grotesques. Aesthetic ‘something extra’? Check, check, and check. But what about those other two categories?

Narratively speaking, you can see the influence of Soulsborne design on the DNA of Blasphemous. Yes, forgive me for the most overused comparison in video games, but it fits in this case. Your knowledge of Cvstodia and the enigmatic ‘Grievous Miracle’ are filtered through item descriptions, scattered NPCs, brief and usually wordless cutscenes, and interpretation of area design. As for the game’s mechanics, they are serviceable and fun enough, certainly. Are they where the game shines in uniqueness? No. But hey, if we’re being honest, it’s very rare for a game to be entirely novel, and it’s not even necessary to be a good piece of media. It’s arguably more important to know how the wheel works best than trying to reinvent it. And that’s exactly what Blasphemous does: its combat leans heavily into dodges and parries as some of your best tools, and creates situations to facilitate doing exactly that.

Hypnospace Outlaw (Tendershoot; March 2019 for PC and August 2020 for PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch)

Not only is this game on point in its mirror-askew version of the Geocities era of the Internet, it also looks back with a ‘warts and all’ approach rather than blind nostalgia. Hypnospace Outlaw makes a statement that the early online experience is no more pure or benighted than the one we have today: the eccentric personal web pages and amusingly odd niche groups are part and parcel with the harassment campaigns, scam artists, and single-minded techbros. The result is a messy trip down memory lane in a world that technically never was but is so close to what has been and continues to be, both comic and tragic in equal measure. And the music? Wonderful. An absolutely on-point mess of corporate jingles, self-made artists, scene kid tunes, and the glory that is Chowderman. Hypnospace Outlaw is also a very quick jaunt: even taking in the sights, I finished the game’s story in around two hours.

After a tumultuous 2020, this year feels like a far more sedate gaming experience for me. It feels like I’m writing here about far less games than I did in either half of 2021, even though I can look and see that this is objectively incorrect. I guess that’s just the fallibility of our own human perception at play.

Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment; January 2018 for PC, December 2018 for PlayStation 4/Xbox One, and May 2021 for PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X and S/Nintendo Switch) and Subnautica: Below Zero (Unknown Worlds Entertainment; May 2021 for PC/PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X and S/Nintendo Switch)

That thing where I claim I’m not into a game genre and then find an exception that proves me wrong is going to keep happening, isn’t it? It happened with character action games via Nioh, the Monster Hunter series with World, roguelikes with Hades, deck builders with Dicey Dungeons, and now survival games with Subnautica and its sequel. Moreso the original, as Subnautica: Below Zero is the weaker of the duology in my opinion. While Below Zero has a number of quality of life improvements, including the supreme vehicle that is the SeaTruck, there are also several places where it falls short of its predecessor. The greatest problem is that the world of the second game feels so much smaller. This is literal in a sense, with the actual world map of Subnautica is larger than Below Zero’s, but just as much true figuratively. Narrative decisions made for Below Zero dilute the atmosphere of quiet isolation in an extreme survival situation. Does this mean Subnautica: Below Zero is bad? Nah, not really, it’s just not as engaging as its predecessor.

Two Point Hospital (Two Point Studios; August 2018 for PC and February 2020 for PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch)

Back in 1997, Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions produced a game by the name of Theme Hospital. This business sim sought to make a light and enjoyable game out of the grim reality that was shackling health care to a capitalistic system. Somehow, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, making a game that was popular enough that it still has a non-small nostalgic contingent in its corner. This is relevant because Two Point Hospital is effectively Theme Hospital 2 in all but name and company, right down to being developed by two of the Bullfrog staff members that spearheaded its 1997 spiritual predecessor. As with Theme Hospital, your goal is to accommodate and treat – and subsequently profit off of – patients with a number of farcical ailments. In the world of Two Point Hospital, suffering from pandemic merely means you have kitchenware implausibly stuck to your body, lightheadness manifests as having a lightbulb for a head, and turns of phrase such as ‘potty mouth’ or ‘verbal diarrhea’ are actually names for real diseases. While it obviously won’t hit everyone the same way, I imagine for at least some folks this kind of ribbing distance could be a helpful bit of coping in a year where we have engaged ourselves with very real medical dread.

Holy shit, what a year it’s been so far. There’s nothing I could really do to appropriately summarize it, be it on a personal or global level. That’s not exactly the greatest intro to a blog post in history, but I’d rather be honest than try to draw it out, so let’s just move into talking about some games I’ve played in the first half of 2020.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies; December 2018 for PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One and July 2019 for Nintendo Switch)

The 2010s were a surprisingly good decade for not just tactical video games in general, but also far more specifically tactical video games based on tabletop roleplaying games. It was the decade where we got great tactical video game adaptations of Shadowrun (thrice!), Battletech, and this post-apocalyptic title to top things off. While not its only selling point, one of the big upfront innovations to the formula presented by Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is splitting things up into free roaming pre-combat planning in addition to the standard turn-based tactical grid. While a typical COM or COM-like that remains on the tactical grid throughout the battle assumes that alerting one pod of enemies alerts all pods, Road to Eden actually weaves a system of sound and sight that allows you to stealthily pick off a lone enemy or two before they could become a problem as part of a larger pod. It’s hard to overstate how satisfying having this extra layer of enemy mitigation feels. I really need to get around to beating this game and experiencing its DLC, as for some reason other titles inevitably distract me from ever getting around to finishing it up.

Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo; June 2019 for Nintendo Switch)

Super Mario Maker 2 feels like a game that is caught in a bit of ‘two steps forward, one step back’. The fun of pouring over these brand name building blocks and putting them together in a way you see fit, then sharing that experience with others and vice versa, is still a lot of fun. New building blocks like sloping terrain, night stages with extra mechanics, and water/lava on specific tilesets are all undeniable improvements, as is the new rotary design item selection that allows for theoretically limitless additions. Furthermore, story mode is both an easy way to play well-designed levels and get ideas of your own. Both of the new Super Mario Bros. 1 exclusive power ups – the Mario Land-inspired Superball and Link’s very own Master Sword – are both brimming with charm and creative potential. So, if all that’s the steps forward, where does the step back come in?

The ability to set a stage requirement other than getting to the goal is an interesting idea that ends up being hindered by blocking the ability to place level checkpoints. It’s obvious why the two elements are exclusive, but it does mean the inevitable long collectathon levels you encounter online can be tedious to a fault. And then there’s the multiplayer. To be frank? It’s kind of a mess. While you’d think having explicit stage tags for co-op and competitive multiplayer would factor into filtering for what the game pulls when you enter these modes, but no such filtering actually occurs. Combine this with the most egregious latency I’ve seen in any Nintendo game (yes, even moreso than Smash), and you have a recipe for some rough times ahead. There’s also a lesser bit of sadness in that the quirky Mystery Mushroom and Thin Mario have been axed from the game, even if their replacements seem hard to deny as mechanically superior. As SMM2 is a game that is actively continuing to be updated at a sporadic rate, these issues may end up being addressed in the future.

It’s hard to believe that 2019’s already halfway over, but it’s the truth nonetheless. So far, I’ve been playing more new games – or, at the very least, games that are new to me – and expansions than I tend to in most years, and as a result I decided I’d give my thoughts on most of the batch I’ve engaged with other the first half of the year rather than save all of them for the year-end post. As with my Some Games I Played in 2018 post, there’s a few ground rules I’m going to be following with what I’ve picked, albeit with different criteria than I had decided on at that point. To wit, a game I’ve played this year won’t be in this article if:

• The game hasn’t had a new release from 2017 onward. This precludes a majority of retro games I may have dabbled in, for instance.
• The game is a replay for me, rather than a first play. Exceptions are made for re-releases with added content or expansions to existing games.
• I haven’t played enough of the game to feel I can form a cohesive opinion on it. Sorry, Mutant Year Zero, I’ll finish you some day.
• A game with added content doesn’t have quite enough content added for me to consider going over it again. Cities: Skylines and Planet Coaster had their day in the sun, and their smaller content packs this year haven’t rocketed them back into the spotlight in the way a major expansion would.
• I just wasn’t able to think about anything to write concerning the game/expansion before the deadline I gave myself for this post. This is kind of a ‘catch-all’ for things like the year so far’s major expansions and DLC for Civilization 6 and Jurassic World Evolution. These will probably show up in the end of the year game roundup, since I’ll have several more months’ worth of thinking time and may end up having to add further content to those games’ entries.

If release dates vary between regions, the one listed will always be the international or American release for reasons of…well, that’s where I am.

Note: This post was originally planned to go up at the very end of June, but life sometimes doesn’t go the way you plan. Sorry about that!

2018’s almost over. It’s been a temporally strange twelve months; while there’s that sensation of “the year’s over already?”, there’s also a feeling of “it’s been how long?!” whenever I remember things that came out in the first half of 2018. Things on both a personal and worldwide level haven’t felt amazing, either, but I guess we at least had some good games come out. And wouldn’t you know it, games of the year just so happen to be the topic of this blog post.

While it may be kind of a cliche writing subject at this point, sometimes you just want to sit down and blog about some of the video games you’ve played in a year, so that’s just what I’m going to do. The list is made up of some, not all, of the video games that either came out this year, I’d never played before this year, or had an expansion this year. I intentionally avoided covering anything I quit out of lack of desire to continue such as The Lost Child, games I just haven’t progressed far enough into to give an honest opinion about such as Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, or games I like but simply couldn’t formulate my thoughts on at the moment such as Civilization 6 or Stellaris. Compilations of pre-2010 games like the Mega Man X Legacy Collection or Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night + Rondo of Blood were also omitted from this post. There were also a few games I had planned on putting on here, but it turned out that I had actually only played last year rather than this year, such as Persona 5 and Nioh. What is time anymore, even?

Cities: Skylines (Colossal Order; March 2015 for PC, April 2017 for Xbox One, August 2017 for PlayStation 4, and September 2018 for Nintendo Switch)

Like the thriving metropoli it allows you to emulate, Colossal Order’s rightful heir to the SimCity throne has continued to update and expand. The game received two more expansions this year, Parklife and Industries, both of which seek to expand on a somewhat minor part of the base game. With Parklife, your city’s parks go from a placeable building asset to actually customizable entities you decide the size, shape, and contents of. Industries similarly turns industrial zones into more customizable spaces, allowing you to pollute and strip mine the planet to your heart’s content in a weird sort of reversal of the previous year’s Green Cities expansion. Cities: Skylines isn’t necessarily a game I play daily, but it’s definitely one that’s great to pull out on a rainy day in order to just see what sort of sprawling population center gets made this time.