Signalis at the start of December. Excellent. It’s top five of the year for me.
I saw Record of Lodoss War–Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth leaving Game Pass, a title I recall from 2021’s Quarterlies, so I gave it a spin. It was a great, kinetic side-scrolling action game that appealed to my 16-bit memories. When I saw cracks in a wall pattern, a long-dormant piece of my brain screamed “Hit it!” Lo, a secret passage. I say kinetic because it kept moving–new weapons with lovely trade-offs between awkward timing and effective arc, more abilities than I would bother to learn in its four hours, dialogue with no drawn-out cutscenes, and teleporters in useful but not convenient locations. At some point I tried the invisibility special attack. OP; great success.
I found my way to Slice & Dice (by tann). A gem. @Misguided does a great job describing it. Slice & Dice (by tann), my new GOAT (roguelike dice tactics game)
Not a runner up, but I won’t talk about it anywhere else: Chaos;Child, a visual novel by the same writing team from Steins;Gate, which I didn’t play but I did see the anime and liked. (Loved, if I cut out the last two issues that undercut the emotional arc.) Uh, anyway, the twists in the first play through were way too forced. With them as established fact, the other endings got progressively better. I felt good about the characters by the end, which is an oddly impressive degree of writing for the team that put themselves at such a deficit to start with.
I only roughly like Tunic. It improved when I was sick and spent that time working on Tunic’s puzzles. I reached what I believe are the big three. One friend already gave an outside hint for one. I might need to ask for the same on the other two. Since I’m recovered now, this sort of back-tracking and vague progress isn’t as appealing. I’m still quite amused that the manual’s coded text generally doesn’t say anything helpful.
I started Olija. It appears raw but is better in play. Outsized sound compared to my expectations. I like.
Spiritfarer teaches me that I’m unlikely to ever love “cozy” games. I fear I’m missing the point when I try to rush through things in search of “the good part”. It’s lovely, though.