What I've been playing
I’ll do a few of these and limit it to the last three years or so, and for many of them I watched playthroughs instead of playing, and sometimes saw the best parts but not everything. It’s games I’ve been catching up on, so they’re from many different eras.
80 Days — Still one of the great mobile games, and that’s due just to the act of playing it on a smartphone, because it does not utilize any smartphone capabilities. The joy is in seeing the travel options and cities in front of you, and the stories you read. Taking the North Pole route is a magnificent adventure by itself. Games about travel feel the best on a smartphone, the device that you travel with.
Animal Well — Very well made, with real love, and playing this at night, lights off, up close to a nice large monitor, is probably wonderful. The secrets are more interesting and clever than in many other games of this kind.
But it is really hard to actually successfully integrate a hunt for secrets, because you cannot have the secrets be the end-point, i.e. mean nothing. You may have to completely connect them to the “main game”, and mean real progress and change, and become a second main game itself. But that is a lot of effort. Glittermitten Grove and Frog Fractions do this the best.Astro Bot — Watched it, and you know, unironically, it’s cool that we have such nice controllers now, with so many vibration possibilities, that watching normal console games is such a second-rate experience.
Babbdi (perfect trailer, 1:12 long) — Architecturally super smartly designed, a believable story of the order in which the buildings were built. Feels like the developers know where you’re going to explore next even before you do. And knowingly gives you lots of insular-focused-quiet walking, which is maybe the ultimate thing that video games are for.
Babble Royale — Battle royale Scrabble (!!!), up to 16 players per game, real-time, profound tension. A beautiful concept, but today you cannot find enough other players. I don’t know if battle royale and Scrabble are too disparate to successfully combine, or if, with enough attempts, you can make a worldwide hit, and financially successful. I lean towards the latter.
Balatro — I did not get as addicted as many others, but I had my little period. Its biggest success is reaffirming the perfection of the 52-card 4-suit deck. Every year many people try to dislodge the 52-card deck with their own new thing. No. Accept our beautiful reality. Work with the 52-card deck. Find your place of contribution in the world of the 52-card deck. Enjoy life.
Betrayal at Club Low — It’s fun to have a visually “quirky/true indie” game also have a genuinely new and satisfying dice/skill points/probability mechanic.
Bloodborne — Watched it, and with games like Bloodborne you do disregard opinions of “watchers” a lot more than players’, but: it does feel like the gameplay has aged a bit, and a Bloodborne released today would put the player on a more satisfying flow of play. It seems quite good. Today it would be better.