Critical Cycle

<< 2024 | 2026 >> This year felt like escaping limbo, perhaps by moving backwards but necessarily so. Hopefully next year holds forward steps and a greater capacity for fun and games. Here's  a short playlist  before getting to it.  Best Games A round-up from my  recommendations through the year . I've thought about whether I should change my approach to this section. As-is it's mostly summary, only adding a few bonus sentences or bracketed asides, and then worst and non-games are more of a novelty (even if I did tweet about them or whatever, they won't be wholesale copies). Maybe next year I'll try to write a bit more and/or reword old feelings on highlights, at least if I have a broader selection to choose from. 1. Baba Is You (PC) Walks such a fine line between guidance and challenge that the few times it breaks down (like Bottleneck) go to show how incredible it is as a rule. Almost always elegant, novel, streamlined, secretive yet too exci...

<< 2023 | 2025 >> Spent a lot of time tinkering with tabletop rpgs this year, hopefuly I'll get back to some blog posts that've been on the backburner. Take this mixtape before continuing. Best Games A somewhat sparse year ( full lineup here ), so I'm getting creative. Not creative enough to include DLCs, mind you, gotta have some standards. 1. Monster Train (iOS) So many cool builds to find and combinations to explore, with immediate run variety and short length. Lots of awkwardness here and there, one-floor set-ups are a lot less dynamic than res/spell oriented ones, a lot of champs kinda suck, and the dlc is as messy as it is cool, but tends to work out. 2. An Angel Dances in the Sparks of a Bonfire ( Web ) Takes the most fundamentally compelling part of shmups and isolates it to display all the raw beauty within (i.e. routing bullet patterns without relying on memorisation). The deepest 1D movement like how Getting Over It is the deepest 2D movement...

  << 2022 | 2024 >> Kind of a slow year, and seems even more-so with how concentrated my time was, spending a couple hundred hours in Civ and variant sudoku probably getting close. In periods it's refreshing to just sit down for 2 hours and have a complete experience, or sink into a book with a more guaranteed level of quality, but even if this year's list is a bit meagre and it can take tens (if not hundreds) of hours to understand some games' exact level of mediocrity, I'm always coming back hungry to learn and experience all the nifty things the medium can offer.  Here's a mixtape , and cheers to a brand new year. Best Games Thought Monster Train would sneak the top spot last minute but I haven't even bought the dlc yet so it'll have to wait. These plucked from the good games I played this year . 1. Sid Meier's Civilization V (PC) Huge step up in UX, while giving diverse and interesting options to explore and opti...

The Last of Us released to absurd fanfare in 2013. Quickly compared to Citizen Kane, cited as proof of the storytelling potential of games, and now shifting to proving legacy media's superiority in the TV adaption. Yet, I kind of love it - much of that directed at something that doesn't seem intended by the creators, complicating things further. This is split it into gameplay (mostly the messy melee system) and story (centered on the ending). The Bottom Line  [★ ★★ ★☆ ] Great storytelling execution, solid atmosphere and environmental storytelling, and a fantastic ending. The overall pacing is marred by tedious traversal, and the gameplay is very mixed, some high points but a lot of issues. Left Behind is more intimate, not as hard hitting as the main game but solid storytelling and the arcade is brilliant. Letting you turn infected against other humans is neat, probably the best event / set piece style content in the package. Game Methods I played the remaster in Novembe...

One of my favorite kinds of games are ones that take a genre I have little interest in, buried deep in simulationist convention, and proves there is potential for pure arcade-y mechanical excellence. Stripping away components that only serve to emulate reality, interrogating what purpose they each have for the game's dynamics, and coming out the other end with something that feels like it comes from a completely different time or place. It's similar to the pursuit of minimalism , but more-so the removal of maximalism than trying to minimize the things that actually work into their most basic forms. Note that the examples of genres/games I don't like may not be super accurate because I haven't played them much. I've got some blind spots like RTS that I'd like to work on but if things go according to plan I will never touch FIFA again, so feel free to correct any mischaracterization. Super Monkey Ball vs racing games Racing games are like speedrunning a really ea...

<< 2021 | 2023 >> This year has been a bit of a mess, moving a dozen times which makes for a fractured look back. It makes me appreciate how rich and beautiful the world is though, seeing so many different environs. Here's a playlist of songs I liked this year to go along with the lists. Best Games Selected from all the games I enjoyed this year . Felt like I didn't play that many games but this is the most decked out it's been since I started doing these rundowns. To think last year I had to pick a single-star chump that got the honor of 10th place, but now I'm having to cut multiple two-stars. 1. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (PC) More contained and focused on physical riddles than the base game, with layers of meaning to everything you discover. Every leap of logic not being obvious enough to predict, but not so obscure as to be unintuitive makes for organic linear progression. Read my review of the whole game ! 2. Elden Ring ...