What I've been playing
(Or watching others play.) Continuing the series! All from the past few years. Instead of links I’ll do screenshots for a few, thanks to Daniel for the suggestion.
Baldur’s Gate 3 — The Dark Urge and the entire evil part of the game is obviously by far the most interesting and fun.
Burial at Sea (BioShock Infinite) — Just a bit late on this! It’s probably the peak of BioShock both in gameplay and the combined style, just the sense of mystery is missing?
Chicory: A Colorful Tale — This was Giant Bomb’s 2021 game of the year, which is how I discovered it and thus blindly bought. I don’t think it should have been their game of the year. But anyone that makes and releases anything with thought and a mission should be appreciated!
Corrypt — Truly clever, sadly I’m too dumb and don’t have enough patience for sokoban games, but Corrypt and Stephen’s Sausage Roll have shown it’s possible to make them more engaging for normies like me, and the hope is that Jonathan Blow will uncover the secret of how to make a sokoban game fun the whole way through.
Dark Souls 1, 2, 3 — Single-handedly convince you that boss battles can be infinitely interesting, and that the work of developing bosses and boss battles is unlike any other kind of creative work.
Dear Esther (Landmark Edition) — Yeah, cool location. I was able to picture myself being 8 or 10 or 14 or something and playing it and being excited for the games of the future.
Desperados III — I think there is a space for a truly wonderful real-time tactics game, with one core of it exactly as this developer makes their games. (See Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun too.)
Giving the player intriguing options to progress that they discover themselves — never pointed out to you by the game — is relentlessly engaging gameplay, if the developer thought deeply and cares about you. And it would have to have tremendous music — some mix of Civilization, XCOM and GTA soundtracks, and orgánica and downtempo.
Desperados III is not it for a bunch of reasons, but you can see what’s possible. I don’t know what theme should the incredible version of this game have, but I think it could be one of the great games of a decade.
Disco Elysium — What can you say? Probably still the best writing ever in a game, at least along a few dimensions. The reveal in the reeds is spectacular. And the gameplay is terrible. I do not want to look at my inventory 700 times for 40 seconds each to equip a different thing that now has the +1 or +2 stat I need. Only Disco Elysium gets away with this.
Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 — I think a version of these games in 2045 might be too good to skip, but the problem in 2015-2025 is that the games consistently have worlds that seem so alive and exciting, and you scratch a bit and see that no one is living, and the cities are not living, and like, whatever.
But Divinity + The Sims, with 2045 ideas and computing, might be insane.Door Kickers 2 — Knows exactly what it wants to do, does it. Trains something in your brain that feels useful. It’s nice to engage with a game that’s fully comfortable with itself.
Enigmash — My friend just discussed Enigmash too. I just shake my head in wonder. Changing worlds and properties is one thing — Super Mario Odyssey is glorious in this way — but having everything connect to each other, at such core logic and math-y structures, is so nice to see. I can’t solve almost all of it, obviously.
Europa Universalis IV — I have no idea what’s going on, but that type of province map we need everywhere, as one of the default map options.
