Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Losing the Plot in a Recurring Dream

Spoilers, obviously.

I once had a dream that recurred onto itself. This was not a recurring dream, I've never had this dream a second time. This was a dream that told a story, finished the story, but since I was still asleep, my mind needed programming to fill the time, and it decided to play it over again. The dream's story was simple: a boy and a girl were in a SciFi hover bike race around a swamp. They were rivals who fell in love during the journey. But during a late race turn, the girl was killed trying to impress the boy by overtaking him, going too fast, and crashing into the swamp. The boy lives and wins, but is heartbroken. It is a basic idea but effective - by winning the race, the boy had lost what was most important to him.

Then my mind started the story up again. The boy and girl were alive at the starting line of the SciFi hover bike race. However, I knew how the story went this time. And because these characters were not real, merely extensions of myself, they knew it too. And that meant everything was different. Nobody could change the plot, yet the tone had shifted radically. What once was a fun romance, was now this sad march forward towards the inevitable ending. This was not a dream you forget easily. My subconscious was doing some very cool metafictional stuff.

I'm not nearly as creative when awake. If I could write while asleep, I would have some real banger pieces. So I've never really been able to come up with a good use of this idea. Unfortunately, I do not think Square Enix has managed to be successful with their own recurring dream either in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

It is a unique incident in gaming history that most of the same team of SE veterans such as Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura, Motomu Toriyama, and Kazushige Nojima all are still here, still working on this same game thirty years later. Just like many of their fans, they can never escape this dream of Midgar, Sephiroth, and Meteors. We have here another story about a boy, a girl, and inevitability. In this production team's previous attempt to retell the original Final Fantasy VII, they could not simply recount and replay the story as it happened before. They wrote-in a literalized force of fate called the Whispers in 2020's Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first episode of their three-part remake of the 1997 PlayStation 1 game. The Whispers were their admission in some ways that you can never tell the same story twice. The audience knows what is coming, you know what is coming, and in some ways, that knowledge possesses the characters like a physic virus. To pretend that the foreknowledge does not exist is be dishonest as a storyteller. 

Now we're in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the middle chapter of the retelling, and arguably the most essential. This is the chapter where the legendary tragedy that so deeply defines FFVII and really this entire series occurs. If any scene needs to be done well, it has to be that scene, you know the one. Unfortunately, the metafictional apparatus is just not adding anything interesting. This should be an exciting revision of these events from a new perspective. Instead, it's a frustrating and confusing experience. FFVII has a baroque plot (made more baroque by a very bad original translation), but it is a very easy game to read emotionally. Those emotions are timeless and universal. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's conclusion leaves me unsure exactly what I'm supposed to feel.

Top 10 Games of 2023: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Alright, let's do this. We're wrapping up 2023 forever.

Honorable Mentions:

Venba, dev. Visai Games

I feel bad leaving this off the list for such a petty reason as "length". I am usually of the opinion that games are much too long, meanwhile Venba is the rare exception that I thought was too short. Part of this problem is economic. $15 for seventy minutes of game is a hard sell when most other games offer much more content per dollar. There should be a space for short games, that is in theory the promise of things like Apple Arcade or the Xbox strategy. However, more than the price issue, I think Venba needs more scenes. This is a cooking game set around a South Indian family trying to hold onto their Tamil heritage while living as immigrants in Canada. If you've read my movie reviews, you'd know I'm really taken with stories about immigrant identity. Venba has a lot of heart and emotion despite its cutesy Cartoon Network aesthetic. There is a heartbreaking scene in Venba where you cook a massive meal for your increasingly-distant, more Westernized son, and he completely ghosts you, leaving you with a huge kitchen full of plates. There's was no sadder moment in video games in 2023.

Left me wanting more.

Cocoon, dev. Geometric Interactive

Cocoon is a puzzle game with a fun concept: you're a little bug guy who carries around orbs in a top down Zelda-y adventure. The big gimmick is that your orbs are also worlds that you explore. So you're jumping between multiple realms of reality, while using those very dimensions as tools in the puzzles. The green orb is a swampy environment that also powers the elevators. Cocoon is trying some things I think are good ideas. For one, it is a puzzle game that is very simple, very readable, it wants you finish it. It never gets into the intensely baroque and inscrutable territories of say, The Witness or Baba is You. Another fun thing Cocoon does is create several big boss fights without any combat verbs, and they're good bosses. The problem with Cocoon is that making things so "playable" means that we never get the depth of the concept. It is only towards the end of the game that we can have the surreal dimension bending of get orbs within orbs. Just as the realities are fully confusing and recursive, it ends. I also wanted more from this.

Sea of Stars, dev. Sabotage Studio

A western studio made a great retro pixel art Japanese-style RPG full of reverence and references for the past of the genre. That game is called Chained Echoes by Matthias Linda, which released in 2022, and it is a better game than Sea of Stars. Sea of Stars simply got beaten to the draw. There's still a lot that is really good about Sabotage Studios' version, I do not regret playing it. It's a beautiful game. It's combat is a lot of fun: it does the Mario RPG timing-based combat better than Mario RPG did it. One of my favorite things to do in a game in 2023 was use Sea of Stars' multiple tennis minigame attacks and have a huge combo. Plus the combat has a great rhythm, where you can recover MP with attacks so you're always building up magic attacks, using magic, and dropping limit breaks to keep up the momentum. The bigger problem is that Sea of Stars has a dull story. Every time you think it is finally going to do something interesting, it pulls back.

The ending is awful by the way. I might have been able to forgive it all, but that wet fart of ending cemented how little this entire adventure meant in the end. (The 100% perfect ending is no better, btw.)

Best Party Members of 2023:

Garl, Sea of Stars - Not everything about the story in Sea of Stars was bad. The best part of it was our chubby best friend with a heart of gold. Garl might be one of the weaker party members in this game, actually. But as a person, he's the best thing going around. He's a happy kid who is decisively not chosen by destiny, and still just wants to help out. You meet back up with Garl after years of training and he's brought snacks. Garl rules. Everybody loves him.

Cid, Final Fantasy XVI - There really aren't "party members" in this game, just semi-useful NPCs that follow you around, maybe draw aggro sometimes. However, I need to celebrate the existence of "Hot Cid That Fucks". He's so much cooler than the rest of this cast and story deserve. Ralph Ineson's voice is a special gift to all us children.

Geno, Super Mario RPG - Geno is such a bro. He's the emotional of core of the game. And he's the best black mage, you will never ever need to use the poor cloud kid once Geno comes around. Geno floating around the party in star form is an all-time great moment of friendship in a SNES RPG.

The Hunter, Midnight Suns - It is ridiculous how much stronger your OC is versus all the superheroes in Midnight Suns. They're the best healer on the team, one of their earliest attacks is a whip move that smashes enemies into each other, and eventually you get a monstrously broken sword spin attack that throws enemies in all directions. The rest of the Marvel universe ain't shit. I love chilling with Blade, he's a good guy, I wish him luck with banging Captain Marvel. He still ain't shit.

Best Boss Fights of 2023:

Titan, Final Fantasy XVI - I'm not doing a Dishonorable Mentions because the only game that really disappointed me was FFXVI, and let's be honest, the boss fights ruled. They were cinematic, anime as hell, preposterous in scale, everything you'd want from the Bayonetta-esque game this sorta is. (Since it isn't really an RPG). Titan features a whole Sonic the Hedgehog segment where you are a kaiju running on the tentacles of another kaiju that is kaiju-sized in comparison to you. Titan big.

Bahamut, Final Fantasy XVI - Yeah two from this game, this is the better one. An entire city gets wrecked. You go to freaking space. There's a fusion dance. It is amazing.

Kale, Hi-Fi Rush - The final boss fight of this game, also the best one. You get to start this one off playing as a kitty. That is a good reminder that in spite of everything wrong with the macroeconomics, video games are good sometimes. Kale is a great example of a final exam boss. He's a combination of everything you've learned so far, needing all your buddies to break his shields, real culmination of all your skills

Also shout-outs to the Korsica boss fight, for having the funniest event if you fail a QTE in video game history.

Fallen Hulk, Midnight Suns - Spoilers, sorry. This happens late in Midnight Suns, just when you think you've fully grasped the systems. Oh you think this is all a parade lap to the finish, you're unbeatable? No you're not. Turns out fighting a Hulk is terrifying. All game you've been fighting goons and monsters who mostly have strength in numbers. Not the Hulk. He's just bigger than you. You cannot beat him, you can only make him mad. The game has to write a ridiculous comic book cheat in the second Hulk fight to even allow you to win.

Climb to the Beat, Mario Wonder - I guess not really a boss fight, per se. Mario bosses are rarely very good. But this stage is ridiculously hard. It demands a level of perfection that I rarely care to reach in most games, I'm glad to have been pushed to the limit by this one. Nearly 100 deaths, truly Celeste C-side nightmare vibes.

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for Top 10 Games of 2024:

Three of these games are already out, so I got work to do. Another will be out by the end of the month.

10. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, dev. Rocksteady Studios - Cannot stop thinking about this game.

9. Earthblade, dev. Extremely OK Games, Ltd.

8. Stellar Blade, dev. Shift Up Second Eve Studios - I am embracing my full dirtbag lifestyle, I like butts and am not afraid to tell you that I like butts.

7. Hades 2, dev. Supergiant Games

6. Hollow Knight: Silksong, dev. Team Cherry - Refusing to give up hope!

5. Metaphor: ReFantazio, dev. Atlus & Studio Zero

4. Mina the Hollower, dev. Yacht Club Games

3. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, dev. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio - I might call this "Yakuza 8" a lot.

2. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, dev. Ubisoft Montpelier - Hell, I'm gonna buy this very game tonight.

1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, dev. Square Enix Creative Business Unit I - The demo is great, this looks amazing. The trailers have me so hyped. Sephiroth calls Cloud "a puppy" which both very homoerotic and Crisis Core survivors know what we're referencing here.

...

Anyway, I'll be back writing on this blog... at some point. Hopefully I'll have a review out before the October Spooky season.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 1 - Marvel's Midnight Suns

1. Marvel's Midnight Suns, dev. Firaxis Games

Superhero movies are not in a good place. Superhero games are in a much worse place. I've become something of a biographer of all these Marvel disasters over the years. I really like most of these games that nobody wanted to play. That Avengers game from 2020 had a solid single player campaign if you just ignored all the Games as a Service crap. Guardians of the Galaxy from 2021 was a fantastic video game, no caveats needed. Somehow I never find time for the big Sony Spider-Man games, but I found time for Midnight Suns, a game so unsuccessful that 2K fired its director, Jake Solomon, fired Firaxis studio head, Steve Martin, and were not coy in admitting the game flopped.

Clearly I gotta play this Suicide Squad game. That might be GOTY 2024, who knows?

Midnight Suns came out December 2nd, 2022N obody played it in 2022, let's us be honest with ourselves here. Everybody was too busy with Pokemon, God of War, hopefully Pentiment, whatever. Midnight Suns went on sale three months later and that was its real release date. Also, it had DLC support throughout 2023 despite missing its director and 2K asking that everybody forget about this miscalculation. "Let's think instead about that next Civilization game! Investors, money to be made! Do not look at the mountainous piles of your money we set on fire!" Not me though, I wanna talk about goofy superheroes. Because Midnight Suns is the best superhero failure yet.

There was a universe where Firaxis just made XCOM 3 and probably made more money, plus had a more secure future. Instead they did something entirely different. On the surface, every choice they made seems safe. People like(d) Marvel, even if I'm not sure there is a big fanbase for the Midnight Suns team specifically. (Most of the game's cast are not even part of that crew, which makes it more confusing.) Card games are extremely popular, including a successful card games in this very IP, Marvel Champions and Marvel Snap. And while it will never overthrow the mighty FPS, tactical RPGs have been thriving in the last decade. Mixing those three things together, however, was a bold choice and a difficult choice. Nobody has ever made a game like Midnight Suns before. This is not an XCOM game without aliens, if you just want that, you can play the Mario + Rabbids game. No Midnight Suns is the confluence of a deck builder, billiards, chess, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. With cosmetics. Firaxis found themselves creating a whole new genre here, and well, maybe there is not room in the market for new genres. At least not on the investment scale that a AAA game demands.

The first big choice is removing grids and distance entirely as tactical considerations. Your characters can pretty much attack anything from anywhere. Meanwhile, non-combat moves are very much at a premium. We're not slowly pushing our units forward like pawns taking a squares at a time. The arenas are mostly tight, in your face, and everything smashes into everything else. There is a kinetic frenzy to your moveset. You can bonk enemy units into each other, you can smash them into your other heroes, or you drop a freaking street light on their heads. It has the angles of billiard balls colliding. But also, you need to do careful calculations. It is not just that you bonk, but often the order of the bonking. The bad guys are usually much weaker than you, still have numbers on their side, reinforcements are almost always coming. You have a move limit, you have energy points, you have a limited deck of actions, this all requires a lot of thinking and care. Many turns can have huge momentum swings if you just play the cards right.

There is also a huge, terrifyingly complex economy in the background. While you're not bonking enemies, you have a secret club house full of heroes chilling, full of relationship opportunities, and other activities. You and Magik can go painting in the woods. Nearly every superhero has some kind of special task. So between every mission is this cycle of running around talking to the guys. There's the extremely married couple of Tony Stark and Dr. Strange in the basement who upgrade the facilities, there's Blade who does combat training, there's Captain Marvel who assigns units to side missions away from you, Spider-Man is in the shop, etc. etc. You're upgrading your cards, you're picking decks, you're upgrading units, you're optimizing all kinds of details. There's a million ways to decorate your room, there's side quests, there's a huge space to explore, you have a demon dog, you solve puzzles Midnight Suns is daunting. One wishes for a simpler system in the background. But also, I needed to do the loop of tasks every time. It is less chores and more chilling with all my buddies in this Northeast Sleepaway Camp full of heroes.

Just one more mission. That's the goal here: to make you lie to yourself and keep playing. One more task. One more part of the map to unlock.

Now there are flaws. Midnight Suns is very much a PC game in an era where everything has a console polish and finish. You can tell these characters were designed with the intention to be used in combat, not really in cutscenes. Every female character has the exact same body model. The physics of running around are not quite perfect. Sometimes conversations you see on the map will not trigger. Sometimes the specific tasks you need to do to get to the next part of the story are unclear. They ask you to create an OC-character, "The Hunter", who is also the most ridiculously overpowered character in the game. I could never get my Hunter's appearance exactly right, really wanted her to have an Eighties haircut but had to settle for a very Nineties perm.

Still, in an era where Marvel "realism" has become the default aesthetic for all superhero games, I'm glad to see Midnight Suns looking more like a comic book. Wolverine has his big goofy horn-mask complete with yellow spandex costume. All your cards are designed to create these double-page action shots, like Captain America jumping across the city to shield slam a guy in the face. Jake Solomon has admitted in Waypoint interviews that he's a huge Marvel dork, that's why he made this game. He wanted the big goofy set pieces, while also giving careful strategy and depth. Captain Marvel does not need cover, she can just punch things. So the aesthetic and the combat all work together in a really well-made game.

Midnight Suns was the best gaming experience I had in 2023. No game offered more depth in its combat, no game was more rewarding in learning all the depth. No game kept me on my toes, unleashing new challenges and new kinds of tactical puzzles every time I thought I had it all figured out. This game is decently long and fulfilling, plus there's a ton of DLC if you have room for seconds.

It was a big experimental swing, nobody has made a game like Midnight Suns before. And for that, Solomon was rewarded with having to find another job. We'll never get a Midnight Suns 2. In five years, this will be the kind of game that people will suddenly start asking "hey, that was cool, how come we never got another game like that?" The kind of game that podcasters pass around as little hobby horses they love and nobody else cares about. Oh well. If the world is too good to kick Venom in the face and have him smash into two of his goons, too good to hang with an X-Man in a bathing suit, then at least the world is thankfully a more serious and mature place than I thought. Right?

Right?

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 2 - Alan Wake 2

2. Alan Wake 2, dev. Remedy Entertainment

The final choice, as always, was really tough. This year I flipped a coin to decide No. 1 and 2. I agreed with its decision.

Confession: I'm a little coward. Watching a horror movie and living out a horror movie is a huge difference. I know I'm over here in my room and the little guy in the horror movie is in my TV, we are separate entities. But that's the magic of video games, sometimes the distinction doesn't matter. I got so scared of Alien: Isolation that I chickened out and stopped playing before I saw even one xenomorph. I never finished SOMA or Resident Evil 7 or for that matter, Alan Wake 1.The problem is never the actual ghouls or ghosts, in the end, fighting a spooky in a horror game is not fundamentally different than fighting a monster in anything else. Live or die, whatever, a fail state is not scary in of itself. The problem is that I die a million times just walking up to the spooky. Not knowing what's around the corner is infinitely scarier than whatever is there. It takes a lot to actually play the game-part of the game.

Alan Wake 2 is not the scariest game I've ever played. It does have extremely effective jump scares and really freaky death scenes when you do die. But it was most scary not before the horror, rather after. It lingered with me. I could not go out at night, without thinking some wisps would wander by and say "...Alan Wake!". I would take my dog-niece Molly out for a walk and fear the spaces between street lights. She would sit around, oblivious, sniffing, and I would look into the park near my house, covered in darkness, and panic quietly, hoping nothing would grab me while I picked up her shit. In November I went to Niagara Falls and took a nice long hike around the Whirlpool Rapids. And even in the day, traveling the woods, I was terrified, because every trail blaze was marked with a spiral, a key symbol of Alan Wake 2's mysteries. I write horror stories as a hobby, who is to say that this strange, mostly unfinished existence of mine was not just the upper layer of the great metafictional infinity that was Remedy's horror masterpiece? I was writing myself into the story - you do not want to write yourself into the story of Bright Falls, Washington.

The first Alan Wake was an ambitious game, an interesting game, and unfortunately not a fun game to play. Remedy has improved considerably in the past thirteen years. In Alan Wake 2 there's a lot less combat, most encounters feel more meaningful, and even if you do not like the combat, you can often just run away. Also, best of all, for me, you can just set the difficulty down to trivial, which is good because I absolutely suck at this game. I could not beat the very first boss. The dodge move feels like you can never actually outpace enemies and instead get stuck in an infinite check, never able to fight back. I guess the real mark of a horror game is that the combat is "bad" (you could probably beat Super Mario Wonder in the time it takes Mr. Wake to reload). Yet, people celebrate the un-fun-ness with "look how scary it is". As an action game, Alan Wake 2 is barely acceptable - maybe. The best parts of it are when you're not fighting, just exploring its terrifying locations like the haunted theme park and nightmare subway station. There's just a lot more of experience and atmosphere in 2, which is good.

As an interactive experience, Alan Wake 2 is top of the line. Nobody is doing artful cinematic horror as well as Remedy. They've expanded their Northwest spooky towns into a whole universe of oddity. The whole region is Finland without actually being Finland, complete with Norse and Finnish gods hanging around. Remedy are the same guys who made Control, and they do not want you to forget that. Bureau of Control Easter Eggs are floating around in the very first section of the game, and the crossover soon becomes a major plot point. Also, a big point is the increasingly thin difference between our real world and the digital world. Remedy has been mixing live action and graphics for years - this game has a whole movie inside it that even spoils its ending.

In Alan Wake 2, they go much further. The game's director, Sam Lake, casts himself as a character created by the author Alan Wake, who is a character he created. In a horror story all about loops, it is a fittingly surreal choice, fiction and non-fiction blurring until there is no beginning or end. Nothing fully real or unreal.

Where Alan Wake 1 was Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones meets David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, Alan Wake 2 is their Twin Peaks: The Return. (No good King analog this time that I can see.) Alan himself (Ilkka Villi & Matthew Porretta) is only the protagonist in half the story, with the other half going to FBI agent Saga Anderson (Melanie Liburd). Alan is trying to escape the Dark Place while Saga's investigation into Bright Falls finds herself written more and more into his narrative. Before long, she's a resident of this town, with unpleasant history and cooky relatives. With the series named after him, you'd think a Part 2 would be about the triumphant return of Alan Wake, Writer, where he can finally set everything right. Instead, what we see, is something much darker. Alan just wants to go home, get back to his wife. Instead, maybe that journey back is itself a destructive force. Maybe Alan's flailing desperately to hold onto any reality is not helping anything, just pulling more people down with him.

It is entirely possible we never get an Alan Wake 3. Which would be disappointing if you're looking for a clear conclusion, a clear ending, or even a simple happy one. Twin Peaks Season 3 left us with more questions than answers and you know what? They were right to do it. Alan Wake 2 really only exists as a quirk of bad economics. Epic Games funded this to make the Epic Games Store "a thing". Remedy was more too happy to use their money to make a game with rock opera interludes and metacommentaries on their entire studio history, without really answering anything. Nobody wants the Epic Games Store, exclusives will never solve that problem. I'm not sure the economics of the entire games industry are made on solid ground right now. But I can be glad somebody screwed up on the math enough to let Alan Wake 2 exist.

And if we never get an Alan Wake 3, I can be content remembering that closure and answers are overrated. The mystery is what is compelling, the pieces not fitting is what creates the horror. As long as need to be afraid, as long as we need the world to make a little less sense, Alan Wake will always be stuck in that lake that is an ocean, trapped for us.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 3 - Inscryption

3. Inscryption, dev. Daniel Mullins Games

I am flexible with the definition of "2023". Technically Inscryption came out in 2021 on the PC. It did ported to the Switch very late in 2022, which rounds up to 2023. And it got an Xbox release last year. I did not play it on Xbox or Switch, still the point stands. By the broadest definition of "game of 20XX", it counts. If you object, pay me $1000 and I'll leave this space blank. Also, didn't we have a game from 1996 on this list the other day?

Inscryption is a card game roguelite, one of many genres I write-off out of disinterest. It is also a metafictional horror experience, a genre I do not write-off easily. The card game element being just the first level of a much larger Creepypasta universe. You're stuck in some kind of Evil Dead cabin, forced to play cards forever. The goal of the roguelite is the escape the roguelite, which is fine by me. Let us totally shatter the run-based systems and take these core mechanics in new and maybe stranger directions. Right from the start, your cards, especially a cute rodent called "the Stoat" are talking to you, giving you hints about how to proceed and break the system. You can definitely trust little cards, right?

The first meta-layer to Inscryption is that you can stand up from the table you're playing cards on and explore. You can fail the card game, and you're going to fail the card game many times. With just the base systems given to you, it is very unlikely that you will ever develop cards strong enough to win the four levels and boss fights. Luckily, there is also a first-person Escape Room element that allows you to cheat.  You can use the card game to gain keys or knowledge in the upper level to truly proceed. For example, the Stoat will drop a hint that leads you to a safe combination, and there you find another talking card, with more knowledge. Later, there is a mechanic where you can rip out an eye for bonus points (it is grisly as it sounds, your POV loses part of its vision), and you can use this to actually see more in the cabin if you play it right. A few more high level mechanics, things just slightly tilted your way to truly win.

It is funny though that Inscryption wants so badly to break the roguelite since in terms of actual quality of "game", that is the best part. There's a lot of tactics, a lot of fun ways of mixing together powers, a lot of unique evolutions, and you can rip out your teeth for bonus points. It was so successful on its own that Daniel Mullins added a mode six months later where Inscryption was just this card game, nothing more. With some careful maneuvering and a little luck, you can snowball your powers into an unstoppable party of fighters. In my image for this post, I have a solid wall of Blues (as in "me", the author in card-form), all with high damage, self-cloning, and they boost each other. Totally unbeatable. Who could stop me? Not even the game itself.

And from there, the game was never as much fun, however, it only got more fascinating.

Once you've broken one system, you find yourself right in another one. We're like Neo escaping the Matrix, only to find out the real world is rigged completely by the machines as well. We're also uncovering a series of live-action FMVs involving a Youtube channel creator, Luke Carder (Kevin Saxby), exploring an obscure card game also called "Inscryption". Carder finds himself more and more drawn into the mystery of this unfinished, unpublished game, getting dangerously close its secrets. As we can see in our own experience, something has gone terribly wrong with this simple card game about animals, going from just a cute adventure into some kind of Sam Raimi nightmare.

If you reach end of Inscryption and then play an ARG game you'll eventually answer as to what mystical nonsense is really running this universe. The answer is as ridiculous as it is unsatisfying. But lore is never the fundamental engine of horror. Answers are not scary, questions are.

Inscryption is terrifying because it feels like a game completely out of control. However, it is always under control, even as it pushes out to surreal Doki Doki Literature Club places. You "beat" it only to find it evolve and transform into another thing entirely, then something else after that. You keep trying to "escape", but can there be an "escape" in video game terms? If you rescue Princess Peach, you've just reached the end of the level set, not defeated the fundamental concept of video game platforming. No matter what, video games have to be a rules-based world of clearly defined success and failure, engineered by some intelligence in control. In Inscryption we find ourselves just spiraling around from one kind of master to another, as long as the game continues, so does the spiral.

Hmmm... spirals, you say...

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 4 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dev. Nintendo EPD

I'm going to sound very The Wire Season 2 "We used to make shit in this country" right now: Nintendo used to make Zelda games. 

People got tired of the "Zelda formula". Nobody was more ready than me to burn it all down after Skyward Sword. But remember when we had Zelda games, on the regular? Imagine having a full Zelda game, every two or three years? We did not just have huge console releases, we had the smaller 2D ones on handhelds. Some of the those were fantastic damn games: Minish Cap is a glory, I love riding around in my choo-choo in Spirit Tracks. That's gone now. Indie games fill that space, sometimes great ones. We get one proper Zelda every six years and they are the most enormous experiences imaginable. Things of this magnitude can only take a whole console generation to come out.

I feel like this is a losing proposition no matter how good your game is. Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly decent product. However, it cannot stand up to the pressure of being the only full Final Fantasy for a decade. Starfield seems to have a similar problem of impossible expectations. Zelda is doing better than most, in fact. Tears of the Kingdom was basically everything everybody wanted from a Breath of the Wild 2 (minus playable Zelda, sadly). And yet, less than a year later, it feels like the temperature on this game is way down. It had a big month of hype as everybody showed off their wild creations with the physics engine toolset, and then people realized the game part of the game was mostly okay. We just had very few opinions about it all.

I had a great time with Tears of the Kingdom. I played this game more than any other game this year. I had whole sessions where I accomplished nothing in particular at all, just had fun exploring the sky islands and the deep underground depths. I just wanted to see where the floating island chains of breadcrumbs led, sometimes somewhere cool, sometimes nowhere. I loved the terror of the darkness, with this running paranoia that you'd run out of light seeds and maybe be lost down there forever. Some people could go out and use the Lego pieces Nintendo gave you and build themselves a fully functional Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. I could not. But I still enjoyed fitzing around with the rockets and propellers and wings and limited resources. It was fun to fail with those things, to just not be able to reach the enticing floating castles in the sky, that turned out to only have a Shrine in there anyway. There's real magic here in the loop of exploration: getting launched into the sky and doing Link's HALO jumps from low orbit down to find shrines or fun.

And yet... Tears of the Kingdom is the fourth best game of 2024. There's a lot of reasons for that. For one, it is just Breath of the Wild again, even down to the same map. You can't be the grand revolution in open world gaming twice. Heck, BOTW even in 2017 was only my third favorite game of that year. Nintendo brought back everything about BOTW - even most of the flaws. The dungeons this time are better, but I realize now after two 100-hour games of this that the core combat system flatly sucks. I avoided fighting monsters for most of TOTK because it is bad. It is an unfun experience. Nintendo is still terrified of having too much narrative. That was fine last time, when most of it was environmental storytelling in the post-apocalypse. Now that Hyrule has been reborn and is even thriving - a very thrilling narrative concept - we actually do need more meat on the bone. Zelda, and Ganondorf should be more characters in this. I barely know either of them! Nothing of the lore of Tears of the Kingdom makes any sense next to the lore of the last game. It is almost like this should not have been a direct sequel at all.

This is so big. There is no technical achievement in 2023 that was more impressive than Tears of the Kingdom. It is the finest craftsmanship in gaming. The physics engine is unbelievable, flawless. I cannot believe it never glitched out even once. And yet... 

I'm fine with big open world games and the loop of quests and the danger of the physics. I really do like what Tears of the Kingdom is doing. But after awhile, I'm tired of the survival game loot stuff, I'm tired of physics, I'm tired of climbing. I just wann to play a Zelda-ass Zelda game again, like Twilight Princess or Wind Waker, two of the greatest games ever made in my opinion. Nintendo does not make those anymore. The promise with these Switch Zeldas that we can have everything: immense open worlds, survival game friction, and still a Zelda game hiding in the core. I'm not sure that promise holds up. Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, it is not a particularly great Zelda game.

Top 10 Video Games of 2023: No. 5 - Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

6. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, dev. Square Enix 

You start Paranormasight playing as Shogo Okiie, a typical protagonist for one of these Japanese-style point and click adventure games. He's the assumed universal perspective (with all the cultural-political baggage that comes with): a young man, just horny enough without being gross about it, with no particular personality, skillset, or knowledge. Somebody innocent and ignorant enough they need exposition but generic enough to be inoffensive. Shogo also turns out to be probably the most evil perspective you inhabit. Right after acquiring your powers, you as Shogo go on a brutal killing spree across the Sumida ward of Tokyo. That is, until Shogo himself is found very, very dead. This genre of game gives you multiple paths and choices in a branching story tree. You can take Shogo's story in several different directions. Only problem is that none of them end well. It is all dead ends for Shogo.

And that's where Paranormasight actually begins. With the classic protagonist tropes fully abandoned. Indeed, none of the other characters you find even interact with Shogo in their campaigns. He has been seemingly erased from history, while the other characters keep bouncing into each other. There's also a creepy masked man standing outside the story entirely directing "you" to watch the events unfold on a television set. That "you" would be me, the player, the audience, now completely disembodied from any avatar. I was pretty hooked from this point onwards.

"Honjo" is the old name for a neighborhood of Tokyo since reorganized into the modern Sumida Ward. (I've actually been here, weirdly enough, just last September, did not even realize I would be exploring it soon in a video game.) Paranormasight is playing up the history of this area, back before it was absorbed into the growing Tokyo Metropolis and was just an Edo-era town. There has been a long-running rumor that this area was haunted, thus the claim of "Seven Mysteries" or "Seven Wonders". Paranormasight notes there are actually nine, not seven. These are all little ghost stories or urban legends, such as the sound of wooden clappers that follow you home on dark and stormy nights. If you played Kingdom Hearts II and remember the "Seven Wonders of Twilight Town", that was playing into this Japanese horror trope. In Paranormasight, each of these ghost stories gives a specially chosen bearer a secret deadly power, and a wish. Kill enough people and your wish may be granted.

Shogo had the lucky power of getting to kill anybody who turned their back to him. A different protagonist, Harue, a depressed mother searching for the truth of who murdered her son, gets the power to burn anybody to death if they have a lighter on them. Yutaro, one of the many possible suspects you run into, has the power to kill anybody who hears a ghostly song he summons. (The way you get around that little puzzle is one of many places where Paranormasight gets extremely meta and clever.) So you have nine chosen magical people running around Sumida/Honjo trying to hunt each other down, it's a great set-up. Some are trying to solve all the mysteries and same the day, some have no wish other than killing for killing's own sake.

The mildly disappointing thing with Paranormasight is how rarely you end up getting to use your powers after Shogo's opening arc. All the protagonists you play as are very cautious with their powers. There are only a few "Bad Endings". There are even multiple times where game seems to let you use your Killing Spell, and then it does not trigger. That's just a tease. However, we do get a lot of twists and reveals. There's a surprise Escape Room sequence too, where again, you have lost all sense of identity. This is a game that knows you have out of context/out of character knowledge you're bringing to each branch of the story and really wants to play with that idea.

The biggest mystery of all is not who is causing this Death Game in Honjo, it is this: just what the Hell are you? What is this audience apparatus interfering with the events of the story? How is that coherent with characters and character choice? It is always fun when a game wants to explore those ideas. Paranormasight is doing cool things.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 6 - The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

6. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, dev. Deconstructeam

You ever just make a giant mess of everything? That's what I did in this game. Total disaster of a run.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is probably the most obscure game on this list, coincidentally/not coincidentally the gayest game on this list. You are a witch, Fortuna, exiled for hundreds of years in an isolated space house. You summon a Behemoth, a great primordial demon of unspeakable chaotic power... but for what exactly? For revenge? To escape? Just because you're lonely and got nothing better to do? If you want to, you can get very horny with your new demon friend. Ultimately, all these choices are up in the air, since The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood lets you define not just the choices your fortune teller makes, but also the motives behind them. The story ends up remarkably flexible to your whims and desires. It only really becomes a problem when you start writing yourself into plot holes.

Gameplay-wise, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a "hang out" game, much like VA-11-HaLL-A, even down to the pixel art and dialog choices. Some of the people you meet are your cute witch friends, some of them are monstrous inhuman tree creatures, some are already dead. You give them a fortune telling and the plot progresses. Probably the highlight of the game is when Fortuna meets a young witch, recently awakened both as a magical being and as a trans woman. She was reborn into outer power and beauty. It is when this fantasy of unlimited queer power in the cosmos hits its fullest, like Heaven Will be Mine but with less horny and with deities replacing giant robots.

Really the most interactive element is an art minigame where you design your cards. You can have multiarmed bartenders wielding swords in space. Or tentacle dragons under the sea. (Cosmic Wheel also lets you use this same art engine to make a pizza in one of the best scenes.) Somehow these random Metal album covers you've created allow you to decide whether your best friend is diddling a magic-less human or not, and how they feel about it. It is a fun little side activity, there's a whole economy of the four classical elements. 

Some of the writing around the magical lore is just spectacular, gaming writing is rarely this good in any game: "Air is the collective unconscious, energy within a community, the ecosystem. Air is everything that surrounds us. Air is... Context." It is a mystical system that offers a philosophical view of the world, even if ultimately it is just a way to draw a headless suit of armor covered in eyes that lets you make up silly things. I do not think I lived up to any of the mysticism as Fortuna. Yet it was inspiring to see the game try for something bigger, some sincere spiritualism.

You have basically full power as an author thanks to Fortuna's talent for deciding fortunes. You grab a series of cards and are given a multiple choice that can either decide the future or the past. You can just casually doom our Earth to being conquered by AIs in a random joke, then that will come back to haunt you in later story threads. You can promise to feed your entire coven to your Behemoth, and he will demand payment for that choice eventually. That is going to be a problem if you actually do come to like some of the other coven members. This authorial power is immense, but is extremely dangerous. You can even terrify the Behemoth with certain calls.

In my case, I ended up with four contradictory threads running into each other all at once. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood gives you practically infinite power, so plot holes be damned, you can just give people a utopian ending. However, it was unsatisfying. It did not feel like I told a real story. I had to launch the game back up again and start from the beginning, just out of pride as a writer. I cannot pull a good ending out of my ass and be happy with that. Sometimes you cannot live with your mistakes. Sometimes you need to let all the good witches burn for the good of the narrative.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 7 - Super Mario RPG

7. Super Mario RPG, dev. ArtePiazza

A confession: I'm lying right now. I have not played a second of the Super Mario RPG remake that came out this fall on the Switch. (In fact, who is say I play video games at all? Maybe I'm a weirdo that likes to pretend I have opinions about digital products in some sick fantasy of consumption.) The reality is that I'm the kind of weirdo that has owned the original 1996 version of Mario RPG since it came out on the SNES Classic seven years ago. And well if the choice is between paying $60 to play a game and not paying $60 to play a game, I'll probably keep my money.

Still, having compared the two versions I can tell you that the remake is the better option. It is the thoroughly modernization you would expect. The new graphics are nice but lack the unique 3D pixels texture of the original, even if they kept Mario's very baby proportions in this new coat of paint. Yoko Shimomura remade all her original tracks so the game sounds better than ever. The best changes are just how much more civilized gaming is in 2023 versus 1996. You can switch out party members now, there's quick saves, there's Limit Breaks, and it no longer has a bizarre economy. The SNES version gives you a max capacity of 29 items and 999 coins. It is a preposterously small bucket to work with, and just removing that bit of stress makes Mario RPG much smoother.

The original, though, will always have a place in gaming history. Mario RPG was one of the first times Nintendo loaned out their biggest star for a spin-off project in a whole other genre. It was the first Mario RPG of any kind, with successors to this game becoming two separate sub-series: Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. The fact this was an RPG meant that Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom had to be better-defined as characters and places. Previously Bowser was just the mean turtle you beat at the end of the game, and the Princess was just a lady you rescued. Now both of them were full characters with speaking parts, some level of interiority, and a place in the world. It is a very silly world, Mario himself is treated like a celebrity - basically every NPC demands he jump for them to prove he is indeed, "the Mario". It is always charming to impress Mushroom Kingdom people with Mario's mad hops.

Finally, Mario RPG is again a great example of Nineties Square pushing the turn-based RPG as far as they could take it. Mario RPG gets really goofy with the dungeons and puzzle concepts. The game is really breezy for a dungeon crawler, most sections do not outstay their welcome. (Aside from the pirate ship and the final dungeon, those are long.) In fact, most of what you do is goof around and have mild slapstick. The dullest parts of the game are rooms with nothing but enemies. The very best section of Mario RPG is Booster Tower, where every room is another comedy section involving this Wario prototype bad guy, Booster, who wants to marry Princess Peach - while not really knowing why, it is just what villains do. It all concludes in a hysterical wedding sequence where you beat up a mutant cake. Between Mario RPG and Live a Live (remade last year) Square had fully pushed RPGs outside their humble origins as D&D campaigns and truly evolved them into limitless story engines.

Sadly Mario RPG was also Square's big attempt at a platformer game and uhhh... stick to your Moogles, guys. There's no sense of friction or momentum, and worse, it's an isometric platformer, so the perspective is never helpful. Luckily, this is Mario game where jumping is an after-thought, not the point.

Mario RPG's story even has some decently impressive set-pieces that are not comedy. I never understood why everybody was so obsessed with getting Geno into Super Smash Bros. - I understand completely now. He's basically Mario Gandalf, an angelic avatar of the higher realms here to set reality back in order. Seeing him inhabit his wooden doll body and then return back to heaven is really moving. It is sad seeing a good band of friends reach the end of their journey, some returning to heaven, some returning to being the villain, some just staying good ol' Mario forever.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 8 - Super Mario Bros. Wonder

8. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, dev. Nintendo EPD

Mario in three-dimensions never disappoints in creativity: Sunshine, Odyssey, Galaxy, these are wild experiments. Mario in two-dimensions has not been interesting since Clinton was president. That is not to say they have been "bad". I really love most of the New Super Mario Bros. games. The first New game on the DS has a very special place in my heart. However, they have been stylistically stagnant. Even for a company like Nintendo, often unfairly accused of making the same games over and over, 2D Mario this century has been totally flat. I could not name one significant difference between the 2D Mario game on the WiiU and the one on the Wii.

I cannot say that Mario Wonder is a major revolution in the series formula. You're still a little chubby Italian man or one of his friends, you're still mostly running ring, you're still jumping, and you're still fighting a tyrannical turtle. The reforms are mild, at best. The change is best reflecting in the art style - Wonder makes Mr. S. Mario look better than he ever has in 2D. Most of that comes from very detailed skyboxes, which are these amazingly lush landscapes that you'd never even notice since you're so focused on the action in the foreground. Another change is that you can play as one of the like 50 Mario characters: from old mainstays like Peach to new stars like Toadette to deeper cuts that nobody will ever pick like Blue Toad. The change is that all of these characters play exactly the same. If you're really addicted to the Princess' short glide, you might as well switch back to Mario, because it will just be confusing. Nintendo replaced the character-based movement mechanics with a new system involving equitable kinds of jumps. So anybody from Toadette to Nabbit can do the floaty Luigi jump.

Oh, also you can become Elephant Mario. That's a thing. Elephant Mario is just a reality we have to accept in the Covid era.

No, just looking great and making some minor changes to gameplay are not really the thing. The thing is that Mario Wonder feels boundless in its possibility space. It is the video game equivalent to Frank from Always Sunny at full dirtbag mode, barging into a funeral to gloat, announcing to all who might be disgusted, "Well, I don't know how many years I got left on this Earth. I'm gonna get real weird with it. Now block the wind while I roast this bone." Nintendo are 2D Mario institutionalists. Mario Wonder is not some new template that will define the series for twenty years. But for now, we can enjoy the game getting nice and freaky.

Mario games have had optional collectable items since Mario World. Traditionally, they have just been like Strawberries in Celeste, little extra challenges that test either your platforming skills or your ability to suss out Nintendo's Easter Egg hiding style. In Mario Wonder, you find Wonder Seeds, which completely fork the rest of the level. You could just keep going right and get to the flag *or* you can grab the Seed, and let something unpredictable happen to you. In the first world, we have an musical sequence involving Singing Piranha Plants, all of them babbling a baby talk tune straight out of Loco Roco. (Oh if you kill one of the chorus of plants, their part of the song ends early. Sad.)

Every level in a Mario game already is a surprise. Nintendo's great strength with these games is imagining a new method of platforming twist, milking it just long enough, and then moving on. With Wonder's new exploration into the land of freaky, we can have anything happen. Mario could get super tall. Mario could be a helpless Goomba that cannot jump. We could have a brutally hard Celeste B-side timed beat challenge. (I died nearly 100 times to this shit, hardest single gaming challenge of 2023.) It really makes you want to 100% the Wonder Seed hunts, since if you're missing one, you've missed one of the core elements of this game's joys.

Mario is family-friendly comfort food. I've been running right and going down pipes for like thirty years now. The formula is timeless, like a cheeseburger. You never fall out of love with cheeseburgers. But maybe sometimes you add some horseradish sauce or a lightly-roasted pineapple or candied apple slices or peanut butter. Not all the flavors work (I regret that peanut butter burger), still you can get excited again about a meal you've had a million times.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 9 - Hi-Fi Rush

9. Hi-Fi Rush, dev. Tango Gameworks

I feel an unpleasant way about celebrating anything Xbox did last year... Letting a trillion dollar company defeat the best anti-trust swings by the federal government "for the gamers" sure worked out great, right? Right? But I have to admit they released one really great game last year. Hi-Fi Rush is the reason I do not need to put Final Fantasy XVI on this list, thank god. There was a much better spectacle action game that came out in 2023, one that was half as long and did not despise all its female characters.

I should mention this: I have no musical talent whatsoever. No sense of rhythm, about as much ability to stick to a beat as a dog has. Still, I like rhythm games because I like music. I love Crypt of the Necrodancer. But that love is limited to the base difficulties and no further. The modes where you take damage for a missed note are for me unplayable. Hi-Fi Rush mixes together Necrodancer with Devil May Cry, where your attacks have to follow the music. Thankfully it is not too cruel to those barely able to dance along. As long as you're grooving any way you can, you can enjoy this. I whiffed a shamefully high number of attacks. I could never get through any of the deep combos. Got low letter grades on every fight. Some people could probably play Hi-Fi Rush like Prince shredding the electric guitar solo in "Computer Blue", I have to play like a six-year-old slowly plodding through "Chopsticks" on the piano. 

Still, I finished the game. That's the great thing about video games - you only have to get a little bit better at them to win. Real skills are hard and require hours of technique for mastery, games just need slight improvements and you can be done in about ten hours. Never do anything that's hard, that's why we have games.

Hi-Fi Rush is about a garishly colorful world of music, robots, and evil tech corporations. (Hm, you think Tango felt a certain way about being owned by Microsoft?) You play as Chai (Robbie Daymond), a clueless clucklefuck who accidentally gets his arm transformed into a super limb. Then using anime FLCL physics, he can summon Gibson Flying V guitars and bonk bad guys with them. Chai finds an oddball crew of friends, all named after foods for some reason, including hacker gal, Peppermint (Erica Lindbeck) and a robot cat, 808. The plot really is irrelevant, the game itself barely seems to care. There's bad guys, you bonk them, get to evil CEO guy, bonk him.

One of the best things about this game is the overall style. Hi-Fi Rush reminds me of the GameCube era's attempts to be cartoony. It feels like Viewtiful Joe or The Simpsons: Hit & Run, except even more colorful than you remember. It feels even more like that Simpsons game because the soundtrack is all mid-2000s heavy guitar buttrock. (Nothing wrong with buttrock!) Everything is all mild satire, not really biting capitalism but sort toothlessly gnawing on it, never breaking the skin, but maybe leaving a hickey. I do not think anybody at Microsoft was afraid of this game's depiction of Vandelay Industries.

Hi-Fi Rush feels small in a way major releases by platform holders never do anymore. It is not a video game meal, it's candy. We do not have mid-tier B-games like those early 2000s consoles had. Most AAA games never to justify all three of those 'A's, and attempt to be the biggest and most important game ever made. This is why Final Fantasy XVI did not really work, these kinds of spectacle action games should not be longer than 10-12 hours. They outstay their welcome once you've seen all the depth to their combos and mastered the counter moves. Hi-Fi Rush is about a Phillip J. Fry type, so unimpressive even his friends think he's an idiot, who luckily only has to save the world from a threat solved easily by bonking. Any more and Chai would be hopelessly lost. Anything more demanding and Hi-Fi Rush would completely collapse into unfortunate pomposity. Just let us fight a giant robot to a Black Keys song, it does not need to be bigger than that.

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 10 - Jusant

10. Jusant, dev. Don't Nod

A couple years ago I bought a PlayStation 5. And this hypermodern feat of ripping digital muscle and suggestive curves came packaged with a simple little platformer game called Astro's Playroom. To this day, I think Astro's Playroom might still be the best PS5 game I've ever played. (Though we have stiff competition coming later on this list.) Playroom was just a delightful, Nintendo-esque adventure of little robot guys and fun twists on the PS5 controller's various gimmicks - none of which any other game has taken much advantage of so far. One of the best parts of that game was a climbing minigame using the shoulder buttons, where you became a monkey and used the triggers to grab holds and swing around. Each press of the shoulder button was like gripping a part of the course with your hand. It was a ton of fun, really tactile in a way that the abstraction of traditional game controls are not.

Jusant is basically that one minigame but made an entire adventure. It is also very French. That 'T' in the title is probably silent.

Climbing sections are nothing new in video games. The Uncharted series made them an enormous focus, to the point they created something of a backlash. A lot of people found the non-challenge of Nathan Drake shimmying his way around cliffs to be pointless - you really cannot lose doing it after all. Personally, I loved those sections. I enjoyed the mild gameplay that filled in the various conversations. Even if the gameplay was trivial, there was a soothing quality to it. Meanwhile, I never much loved the big blockbuster set piece shooting in any of those games. Jusant has no enemies at all, it is just climbing. You cannot even die in this thing. Your climbing rope has infinite tensile strength and can never snap. No matter how badly you fuck up, you cannot fall to your doom. If you do hit the deck hard, it is no big deal, no health bar. Your little guy has immense upper body strength and only needs a brief rest to rebuild his stamina.

Jusant's plot is typical indie adventure game stuff. You're a small little guy in a big abandoned world, slowly exploring your way up the mountain through the ruins of a lost civilization. It reminds me of Rime, or everything Team Ico has ever made. There's something about dead worlds that fits so well to game design, we keep coming back to this place over and over, like a recurring dream. Your nameless little guy is carrying with him an even smaller little guy, this tiny blob creature. Together you and your blob are helping reawaken life in the barren wastes of these long-dead towns.

"Jusant" means "low tide" in French, which is a surprisingly nautical phrase for a game set in a vast, mostly lifeless desert. While you explore the empty homes, you'll see most of these people had a very coastal view of the world. They lived with canals, docks, water mills. And then one day, all of it dried up. Nothing is left alive but some grasses and little crawly bugs, both of whom make for useful grips while climbing. Your little blob can summon brief bursts of life, creating vine tentacles or brief blossomings of plant grips to carry you forward. You can find plenty of documents describing the adventures of people towards the end times, as they went on the same journey you did, hoping for some great solution to the endless drought. They never found one.

Climate change is something I deal with mostly by trying not to think about it these days. The concept of whole regions of the world becoming unlivable very quickly is increasingly less farfetched. That could be extremely grim, indeed, it is grim. But Jusant is mostly pleasant. You're going on a nice hike across a relatively short game. I like hiking, I like a good rock scramble. What else can you do in the face of oblivion except get some exercise in?

Top 10 Games of 2023: MASTER POST!

Well, just wrapped up movie list two days ago, only took one day off. Let's get back to writing lists:

Argument:

Usually it is not a big deal to be enormously late with these 'Best Of' lists. January is largely unimportant on the video game calendar. Everybody's holiday shopping is done, everybody's just getting back from holiday vacations. We should relax in January, it is bad form to blow the world up that early in the year. I mean, how much could possibly happen in a month anyway? 2023 is set in stone, nothing could happen that would make an otherwise very good year in games look like an absolute horror show....

...Oh. 

Oh God...

...

Well, 2024 is starting really, really badly. Over 6,000 people have already lost their jobs at the time of writing, meaning we almost certainly will surpass 2023's figure of 10,500 job losses. Which was already very bad, mind you. Then we'll probably lap that figure. The big story of 2023 in video games either A) people really loving the big AAA titles, or B) a slow, depressing trickle of layoffs. In 2024, that trickle has become a flood. The dam has burst. This is the most dramatic contraction in the industry I can remember, possibly ever. It was easy last year to condemn selfish studio execs for short-sighted layoffs to trim the numbers. This is much worse.

Matthew Ball has an extensive and terrifying recap of the state of the video game industry climate on his site. He will do the economics a lot better than I ever could, but the simple reality is that games are not making enough money. Worse, people are not playing enough games. And games are too expensive to make. In general the entire industry grew by about 1% in 2023, which is below the rate of inflation, so actually contracted. The bubble created by the Pandemic giving lots of people a lot of time to play games has popped - while at the same time 2023 was a bumper crop of video games. So a lot of things did not sell. Suddenly investors have become unwilling to loan money to projects, which is going to be back-breaking for smaller indie teams. That is not just because of the changes in interest rates, meaning money suddenly is "no longer free" - the rate on return is just not good. Labor prices are going up, the products are expensive, and suddenly even Spider-Man 2 is barely making even. The big push towards Games as a Service models are hitting the reality that nobody wants to play these, everybody has their Life Game already. There is no room for another Destiny when you already have Destiny at home and even Destiny is fucked.

I guess the silver lining is that the core business of game-making, that singular product that you can sell once and make a profit on, that all still works. And indeed, is probably the safer bet now that so many GAAS experiments have been complete fiascos. I mean, poor Rocksteady might not survive the winter considering how well Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is fairing. Meanwhile, Naughty Dog realized that chasing that dragon would mean the death of their studio as we know it, so they cancelled their multiplayer Last of Us game. Years of blood, sweat, and whatever the third word is in Jason Schreier's book title all go went the drain. But at least maybe someday we'll get a Last of Us 3. We'll never get another Arkham Batman game.

One thing I always do when writing these preamble lists is deplore how few games I actually was able to play in the previous calendar year. I actually played more games in 2023 than 2022 in raw hours, based on my Switch and Steam Year in Review reports. I still never found time for Actual Universal Game of the Year, Baldur's Gate 3, maybe I can fix that in 2024. Also, along the way I did not find time for so many great games, which I will list now: Tchia, Blasphemous 2, Goodbye Volcano High, Venba, Chants of Senaar, Metroid Prime Remastered, Dredge, the Dead Space Remake, Octopath Traveler 2, Dave the Diver, the Resident Evil 4 Remake, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Season, A Space for the Unbound, El Paso Elsewhere, and probably many more. A better world would be one where I had time for even like five more of these games. And there just isn't time.

The pandemic was horrible, absolutely horrible. But I will say, it was an opportunity for us to radically rethink our relationship with work, our relationship with labor, and how best we could allocate what are clearly vast and plentiful resources for people. We found time to play in 2020 and 2021. Now we have to go back to the office and suffer commutes and deal with bullshit. Why is it suddenly that we have to work so damn hard now? Suddenly doing more with less for people who do not deserve our effort? A better future would be one where people could play more than just four or five games a year. Or do whatever they wanted. I feel like my job is killing me in 2024, there's a fun 3D Celeste game out on itch.io right now, I'm too busy drowning in paperwork and feeling sorry for myself to get around to playing it. (Oh and writing like 50,000 words on reviews and stuff.) Everybody needs a better deal: both people who make games and people who just play games. Society as a whole saw that better worlds were possible and decided the shareholder's value was more important.

And this seems to be now a major problem for the industry. Nobody has time to play all of this. A casual fan of movies can see the 20 movies they're the most excited about during a year, easily. A video game fan has to work really hard to get through ten games. The competition is so fierce that sometimes I play a game that's fine and I cannot finish it because I'm worried I'm wasting my time, there's something else I should play. And that's unhealthy and it sucks, and I'm worried my relationship with this hobby will get poisoned one day.

I really tried, for example, to play Forespoken, the widely-loathed Luminous Studio game from early last year. I actually enjoyed quite a bit of that game, despite what an easy punching bag it was online. I loved the movement mechanics. It was like a fantasy superhero game instead of the RPG I was expecting, but that was not a bad thing. Then I fell off because the game was good but not great, nothing really pushed me to pick it up again, and there you go, $70 completely wasted. There needs to be space in the industry for things that are mostly okay, if not even slightly bad. You shouldn't have to make a masterpiece to matter, that's a ridiculous standard.

In the end, I sound as unexcited about video games as I probably ever have writing about them. The state of things is bad, even while in truth, the artform has never been better. There are incredible games, games that would be mindblowing just a few years ago. We're so spoiled, impossibly spoiled by quality, that people are feeling "ho hum" about one of the best Zelda games only a few months later. We gotta fix this. I need to be better. I can't solve capitalism and I can't suddenly employ an army of talented people whose dream has been shattered, but I can try to play just for play's own sake.

I need to play Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and enjoy the badness, and not worry about time.

Anyway, this turned out to be a very long preamble, so Review for Game # 10 will be out tomorrow. Then we got nine more to go until GOTY.

The Actual List Part of the List:

10. Jusant

9. Hi-Fi Rush

8. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

7. Super Mario RPG

6. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

5. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

3. Inscryption

2. Alan Wake 2

1. Marvel's Midnight Suns

Honorable Mentions and Etc.

Top Movies of 2023: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Okay, let's wrap this up. Got games to do come February. I have a lot of Honorable Mentions this year, I'll try to be as quick as I can.

Honorable Mentions:

Talk to Me, dir. Danny & Michael Philippou

I'm upset with myself that I could not find room for this one on the Top 15. Maybe I still should go back and dump Oppenheimer, actually. After all, that's just a biopic and this is a movie where a dude nearly blinds himself while possessed by ghosts. Talk to Me is a really solid horror movie about being young and stupid and playing dangerously. Only instead of the usual fun kids stuff like drugs, sex, mild vandalism, shoplifting (you know, victimless crimes), these Australian kids are summoning shambling corpses to take over their bodies. It seems like a harmless, spooky time, until Talk to Me gets very very nasty. It starts gross with a dying kangaroo on the side of the road, then keeps going down that way as our protagonist, Mia (Sophie Wilde) keeps playing with worse and worse fire. Heck of an ending too.

All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh

 This very easily could have made the list, and might have ranked extremely high, maybe Top 3. I loved 99% of All of Us Strangers. I was really blown with the tenderness and love depicted with all the characters. The magical realism gimmick of lonely adult Adam (Andrew Scott)'s time travel is clever, but the cleverness is less the point than the emotions it stirs. Adam can travel back to his childhood home to be comforted by, and eventually confront young versions of his parents (Claire Foy & Jamie Bell). Meanwhile, he is falling in love with a man in his building, Harry (Paul Mescal). It is a beautiful, sometimes delirious battle between trauma of the past and the possibility of a better future. Lots of great male facial hair - I grew a short beard because of this movie.

And yet... one of the worst fucking endings of the year. I'm furious with that choice. Furious. And yet, Andrew Haigh ends it on a gorgeous final shot, that maybe redeems the sudden swerve to horror tropes.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

One of the most fun movies of 2023 and audiences largely didn't care. Maybe this simply had bad luck, if Dungeons & Dragons had released a year later, everybody would still be horny for Baldur's Gate 3 and this movie would have killed. Or maybe not, I can never understand mass audiences. This is a great adventure movie full of fun characters, Chris Pine remains the S-Tier Chris into 2023. And while it never gets meta, you can see the meta plot of a Dungeon Master intervening in the story to make it keep moving. "Here, I'll give you an over-leveled NPC to help you through this dragon fight." "Okay, here's a teleportation devise." And then when the players start asking "wait, can we use the Portal Gun like this", the DM thinks and says "sure, you know what? That's cool". There's a gelatinous cube, there's an owlbear, there's death magic, Chris Pine sings, what more can you want? I'm impressed by the remarkably mature and serious scene featuring a hilariously tiny Bradley Cooper. Cooper is a better actor as a little Hobbit homewrecker than he is in Maestro.

Jawan, dir. Atlee

2023 was the big comeback year for Shah Rukh Khan, one of the great Bollywood stars. He had two huge action blockbusters, this and Pathaan, both extremely worth seeing. Jawan is the more ambitious movie, a play on SRK's 2007 film, Om Shanti Om, which also starred Deepika Padukone. This plot is full of twists, so I'll try not to give too much away. Let me just say that in the first few scenes, SRK appears as some kind of super human mummy in a small village and murders several attacks. Then we cut to an elaborate Taking of Pelham 123 train heist where SRK is now a bald Joker supervillain. And it only gets more bizarre from here. This is a also very relevant Indian work of social commentary, deploring recent Indian corruption scandals and government incompetence, and solving them with ridiculous Lupin III heists. SRK speaks directly to the audience, begging them to vote for their interests, not petty ethnic squabbles (very dramatic statement from a Muslim star during Prime Minister Modi's Hindu nationalist era). I wish Jawan ended with SRK punching Modi in the face, it definitely hedges the politics, but it's fun along the way.

Priscilla, dir. Sofia Coppola 

I really liked Elvis in 2022. Still, I was not pleased how little attention was given to Priscilla Presley, his wife. So Priscilla was an extremely necessary movie. Priscilla's actress, Cailee Spaeny is actually almost the same age as Elvis's actor, Jacob Elordi, in real life. But they have a a foot and a half difference in height. The way Sofia Coppola films them, Priscilla is a tiny little girl in her mom's make-up around leering horny fully-grown men. It is a very disturbing picture of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, even while Coppola shows the life at Graceland as exciting and glamorous. She buys in with the fantasy of rock'n'roll icon power at times, if only to make all this make sense, to show why anybody would do this to themselves. There's a lot of attention given to the technology and technique of femininity. Being Priscilla Presley is not an identity, it requires a lot of maintenance and staged decisions. Every part of this queen's life was manufactured by the King.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, & Justin K. Thompson

Yes, this is one the all-time great achievements in animation. I rewatched this movie recently and actually liked it more the second time. Maybe the multiverse jokes and Sony transmedia synergy were over-done. That Venom joke sucked. But I was glad to see Miles and Gwen back on another adventure, this time so much bigger and more absurd. The problem is that this is half a movie. Some Part 1s can at least be a complete story setting up a sequel, this is not. It ends on a cliffhanger. So in 2025 or 2026, Across the Spider-Verse 2 might rank very highly.

Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell 

I was literally halfway through writing the 2023 list when I finally saw this. No idea why Saltburn got such a weird backlash on social media. I guess some people think they're too good for licking tub drain water or sticking their dicks into grave soil. Saltburn is a gorgeous movie shot in the thin Academia ratio. That's a choice I usually find pretentious, not this time. Really great framing on a lot of shots. But the important thing is that Saltburn is a gruesome thriller, even it's social commentary is more tepid than that bathwater. And it ends on a nude dance scene that finally introduced Americans to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's pop jam, "Murder on the Dance Floor".

Suzume, dir. Makoto Shinkai 

This is the third time Makoto Shinkai has made basically the same movie since Your Name. I really like that movie, so he can doing it. Suzume is still a sincere magical romance across modern day Japan with some eco-commentary. The plot does get messy. Suzume is really too different movies, one about a girl running away from home with a college boy turned into a chair. The other is a road trip with her aunt where they listen to classic Seventies J-pop. I don't think the pieces fit together here any better than do in The Boy and the Heron, but who cares?

Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer 

A movie about the life of the Nazi with the worst haircut of them all, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). Höss built his sprawling, idyllic family home right up against the walls of Auschwitz concentration camp. He could have made his little colony anywhere. However, he was so desensitized to his actions, he legitimately could not see how raising his children right next to the machinery of death would be a problem until they are swimming in bone fragments and Zyklon B runoff. Most of Zone of Interest is the normal every day life of this German settler family, while low in the sound mx is the screams and gunshots of the genocide happening next door. It is an extremely disturbing and impressive concept. Zone of Interest is also very boring. The boredom might be the point. I simply do not want to watch Nazi Home Movies, sorry. Respect it a lot.

Huesera: The Bone Woman, dir. Michelle Garza Cervera 

Easily the most obscure movie on this list. I think everybody missed out on this Mexican horror movie. Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman in Mexico City about to have her first child. Then she is possessed by a creepy crawling demon woman. There's plenty of great movies about the body horror of pregnancy, which is fitting. It's an experience that sees your flesh radically transformed for the pleasure of a male partner and off-spring you may not even want. Glad that's not ever happening to me. Huesera combines that with themes of bisexuality, class, race, and indigenous black magic. I really should have covered this for my October demons series, just like Talk to Me. Dang.

Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster 

I appreciate the attempt, man. Certainly nobody has felt more anxieties than Ari Aster did in 2023. He's replaying the same themes of intense generational trauma and hopelessness that he put into Hereditary, only this time it is a comedy - of sorts. There's a lot going on in this movie from dystopian visions of modern society to fantasy journeys to a giant kaiju penis. Beau is Afraid is a three epic of a guy being extremely not okay. At least 3/4ths of this movie is one of the most interesting theatrical experiences of 2023. If your movie reminds me of both The End of Evangelion and Synecdoche, New York, you're doing something right. 

On the other hand... this is also making the Worst List

Dishonorable Mentions:

There's like 20 more movies I really recommend from 2023. It was a really good year for movies, so good even the new Saw sequel was fun. But now we have to talk the other side of the coin:

The Flash, dir. Andy Muschietti  

This is how the Snyderverse ends, not with a bang, but with an empty theater. Yeah, this was really bad. The most promising part is the scene where our super-fast hero puts a baby in a microwave. The rest is forced, awful comedy, until it is inexplicably melodrama. The Flash also has the ugliest special effects of the year (after MODOK) in its time travel kaleidoscopes. Ezra Miller is a deeply unpleasant person, and this movie needed to have two of them. Andy Muschietti as a creator feels desperate to impress while having no style of his own. He's trying to be Zach Snyder, he's trying to be James Gunn, he's trying to be Tim Burton, and he's none of these people.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods was also terrible.

Knock at the Cabin, dir. M. Night Shyamalan 

I am not sure how you can watch this gross movie about awful things and believe that the world is worth saving. Enough people legitimately believe that God wants to murder gay people without us needing to make a movie about it, just feels tasteless. Knock at the Cabin even has the temerity to end on a vaguely hopeful note, as if this experience was worth it just by inspiring faith. Fuck you. If the entire balance of reality depends on the blood of a really nice family, then reality is fundamentally vile and should be destroyed. "The lives of billions outweigh the lives of a few" - I am not engaging in this kind of math, leave that for the fascists. We must dethrone and overthrow the deranged God of this film.

The Exorcist: Believer, dir. David Gordon Green 

I reviewed this one already. David Gordon Green has been fired for the sequel, and that's a good decision. I don't envy whoever is tasked trying to clean up this mess. In fact, just cancel that sequel.

Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster

I respect this movie a lot. I also find the conclusion to be such an intense pile of misery as to be completely useless. This should be everything I love about a movie, a director's painful self-loathing represented on the screen. And instead, I'm left with this loathsome hollowness. A movie where better things are not possible. I can't love a film that depicts Jewish family roots as an inescapable cruse. Just not something I need right now - and it goes on for twenty minutes too long. I get it, already, Ari! I know it sucks, dude!

End with the giant dick, dude.

Best Performances of 2023:

Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie - Lol, I'm cancelled. He was the main character of the movie, and his song is the best part. Not even going to put Margot Robbie here. At least not for this movie.

Margot Robbie as Herself(?)/Actress/Wife in Asteroid City - Has only one scene, she killed it.

Sandra Hüller as Sandra Voyter in Anatomy of a Fall

Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie in Evil Dead Rise - "mOmMy'S wItH tHe MaGgOtS nOw."

Natalia Solián as Valeria in Huesera: The Bone Woman

Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon - This would have been a great movie if it were about Mollie. I think DiCaprio is awful in this movie.

Marshawn Lynch as Mr. G in Bottoms - The Academy were all cowards for not nominating Beast Mode, he's so damn funny in this.

Greta Lee and Tae Yoo as Nora and Hae Sung in Past Lives - John Maggaro as Arthur was also really good, but these are the stars.

Ji-Min Park as Freddie in Return to Seoul - Best performance of the year, I stand by it.

Mia Goth as Gabi in Infinity Pool - I'm a simple man, Mia Goth goes nuts in an exploitation movie, she's on the list.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright as Monk Ellison in American Fiction

Charles Melton as Joe Yoo in May December

Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre Bernstein in Maestro - Bradley Cooper made this whole movie begging and screaming for an Oscar, and well, give it Mrs. Bernstein instead, please.

Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal as Adam and Harry in All of Us Strangers

Sōya Kurokawa as Minato Mugino in Monster

Jason Mamoa as Dante Reyes in Fast X - Aquaman playing the Joker, it rules. He saves this movie.

Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as M3GAN in M3GAN - I don't think this movie is a masterpiece but M3GAN was the breakout star of 2023.

And Shah Rukh Khan for just being Shah Rukh Khan in two good movies.

Massively Inaccurate Prediction List of Best Movies of 2024:

If you check my lists from last year, I correctly named four of the fifteen movies that would eventually make my Top 15, which is actually not bad. (Also I had already seen Skinamarink by that point, so I cheated). Dune 2 is now the Hollow Knight: Silksong of movies, I'm sure it will come out one day.

15. Madame Web, dir. S.J. Clarkson - The trailer for this movie is so bizarre. It is a horror groundhog's day superhero movie. I think AIs are already running studios, because what the fuck is this? This could not make any sense to a human.

14. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dir. George Miller

13. Alien: Romulus, dir. Fede Álvarez

12. Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers

11. Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino - One of several movies I saw trailers for in theaters only to learn they were going to be delayed into 2024 because of the strikes. Really annoying but life has gone on.

10. MaXXXine, dir. Ti West - Kinda weird news about this one since Mia Goth is being sued for allegedly kicking an extra in the head. Hmm.

9. Drive-Away Dolls, dir. Ethan Coen

8. The People's Joker, dir. Vera Drew - People might be hyped for the wrong Joker movie this year.

7. Megalopolis, dir. Francis Ford Coppola - Or maybe this is the Hollow Knight 2 of movies.

6. Blitz, dir. Steve McQueen

5. The Taste of Things, dir. Trần Anh Hùng

4. The Shrouds, dir. David Cronenberg - Can the Cronenberg Family pull off a hat trick on my Top 15s?

3. Love Lies Bleeding, dir. Rose Glass

2. Mickey 17, dir. Bong Joon-ho

1. Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve - HYYYYYYYYYYYPE!!!