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...

<< 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 ...

<< 2020 | 2022 >> As last year, but not quite as bad, maybe. I did at least start this blog, even if I only published like a quarter of the posts I've had in mind. I finally played SMB, as well as giving the original SMB a better go, and also replayed SMB. If you're not sure what to name a game, that's a pretty solid acronym to start with! I continued my quest to play some classic arcade games which is my favorite backlog project I've done (also by far the biggest which may be why). I got into visual novels and detective games a bit, which are tricky due to how much longer it takes to determine the quality of narrative compared to other aspects, plus storytelling standards in gaming are awful as always . I also started seriously watching films, which has been a lot easier to navigate, and have added a list of non-games at the end to get a bit personal and that jazz. Here's a playlist of songs I liked this year to go along with the lists...