Yakman_
2023
This review contains spoilers
While it certainly does stumble at points (mostly around the ending) I think much of my excitement of this game comes from the potential that an entire adventure genre based around learning conlangs (or real world languages) has. The narrative of the game is pretty clearly a modern retelling or reimagining of The Tower of Babel, which results in the game going for variety rather than depth of any of the four languages it teaches the player. However, there is some pretty significant crossover in how the languages are constructed; all of the languages are written left-to-right, are logographic, and don't have a spoken component (as far as the player is concerned.) This isn't to say that the languages themselves don't have significant differences in their construction (the bard language in particular was difficult for me to wrap my head around when I was trying to translate it because of its sentence structure) but that is to say that the potential that this game shows has a LOT of room to grow.
I think the surprise malware-horror ending that every indie game made post-Undertale engages in takes away from this particular ending a little bit, and there were points where the direction is a little too unclear made worse by the utterly labyrinthine design the maps engage in. When this game is successful though, it nails both the rush of feeling smart for solving a puzzle, and the enjoyment I get from getting a difficult Duolingo question right on the first try.
I think the surprise malware-horror ending that every indie game made post-Undertale engages in takes away from this particular ending a little bit, and there were points where the direction is a little too unclear made worse by the utterly labyrinthine design the maps engage in. When this game is successful though, it nails both the rush of feeling smart for solving a puzzle, and the enjoyment I get from getting a difficult Duolingo question right on the first try.
2017
Maybe the best incremental game Ive ever played, mostly because its incrementalism exists to actually prove a point. Not only with like seeing what it would like to be an AI with the express goal of making paper clips from the first person, but also like reading it as a business sim, it really expresses how capitalism incentives particular behaviors. Like it makes sense that several economic crashes would occur because of extremely high risk debt, because at a high level of wealth, its the only way you can chase the high of making it big. It really feels nice to see number go up, and then to see number go up faster. And that itself is the problem.
I played this for like 5 hours straight, what the fuck.
I played this for like 5 hours straight, what the fuck.
2021
You basically play as Martin Shkreli, the poison salesman from the Runescape quest Murder Mystery, and the Potion Seller from Potion Seller. Pretty good!
2022
This is it.
This is the most a modern AAA game has ever been. This is The Last of Us. This is Dark Souls. This is Skyrim. This is GTA5. This is every major trend that the modern AAA game has been for the last two or three generations, this HAS to be the end of some era, there’s nowhere else to go with this formula, right? With ANY of these formulas.
I don’t even really mean that it’s the best or my favourite game of the past 15 years, its got plenty of problems that every open world game like this has. Not everything can be in depth or detailed as any single part of Dark Souls or Bloodborne, you sacrifice this for your open world. After too long, the seams start to appear and you’re noticing some copy-pasting in dungeons, or enemies that are exactly the same except in their damage output and health pool. These are corners that need to be cut for a game this big. The goal of an open world is excess, but for that excess you need to sacrifice quality somewhere. There goes the balance in some areas too, a needed walling of content through difficulty, or level scaling. I think they chose the better option, level scaling completely ruined Oblivion for me, and leads to a lack of variation in combat difficulty. But it still sucks to get one-hit by a boss you didn’t expect (or did) and lose a level’s worth of runes when you forget to pick them up or get killed before you can pick them up, or leave of yr own accord because you’d much rather play somewhere else for a bit. The horse combat kinda sucks. Problems that the Souls games solve by being mostly linear with bonus content on the side.
But can we talk about how this game exists and functions? How it’s maybe the plutonic ideal of video games, the type of game that you’d imagine in yr mind when trying to imagine what the best game of all time would look like by using the most surface level traits? The type of game that film and TV writers imagine when they need to show a character playing a “serious” game? Like the game works, and its really good, and doesn’t fall apart. This game is for other people more than me, but I cant help but respect it for maybe being the most video gamey video game since maybe DOOM. I think this game’s legacy will sour a bit as our contemporary trends become even more passé or old fashioned or dated in upcoming years, and I think Dark Souls and Bloodborne will be seen as just as good and probably even better as fully realized games. But I think this game is incredible for its existence alone, of all of these diverse elements of the last 10-15 years coalescing into a single definable game.
This shadows over the rest of 2022 and it’s just barely March. This is it, this is GOTY in 99% of lists, and in the top 3 of 99.9%. This is a central swan song for every game even sort of like this. Where does the pop dimension of games even go after this? How do we even look at big blockbuster games after this? What do the next big trends even look like after this comes out considering that this makes the vast majority of modern AAA games redundant?
This is the game that Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be to the people who fell for the hype; the first, and possibly only ever, AAAA game, it is incredible that this even exists.
This is the most a modern AAA game has ever been. This is The Last of Us. This is Dark Souls. This is Skyrim. This is GTA5. This is every major trend that the modern AAA game has been for the last two or three generations, this HAS to be the end of some era, there’s nowhere else to go with this formula, right? With ANY of these formulas.
I don’t even really mean that it’s the best or my favourite game of the past 15 years, its got plenty of problems that every open world game like this has. Not everything can be in depth or detailed as any single part of Dark Souls or Bloodborne, you sacrifice this for your open world. After too long, the seams start to appear and you’re noticing some copy-pasting in dungeons, or enemies that are exactly the same except in their damage output and health pool. These are corners that need to be cut for a game this big. The goal of an open world is excess, but for that excess you need to sacrifice quality somewhere. There goes the balance in some areas too, a needed walling of content through difficulty, or level scaling. I think they chose the better option, level scaling completely ruined Oblivion for me, and leads to a lack of variation in combat difficulty. But it still sucks to get one-hit by a boss you didn’t expect (or did) and lose a level’s worth of runes when you forget to pick them up or get killed before you can pick them up, or leave of yr own accord because you’d much rather play somewhere else for a bit. The horse combat kinda sucks. Problems that the Souls games solve by being mostly linear with bonus content on the side.
But can we talk about how this game exists and functions? How it’s maybe the plutonic ideal of video games, the type of game that you’d imagine in yr mind when trying to imagine what the best game of all time would look like by using the most surface level traits? The type of game that film and TV writers imagine when they need to show a character playing a “serious” game? Like the game works, and its really good, and doesn’t fall apart. This game is for other people more than me, but I cant help but respect it for maybe being the most video gamey video game since maybe DOOM. I think this game’s legacy will sour a bit as our contemporary trends become even more passé or old fashioned or dated in upcoming years, and I think Dark Souls and Bloodborne will be seen as just as good and probably even better as fully realized games. But I think this game is incredible for its existence alone, of all of these diverse elements of the last 10-15 years coalescing into a single definable game.
This shadows over the rest of 2022 and it’s just barely March. This is it, this is GOTY in 99% of lists, and in the top 3 of 99.9%. This is a central swan song for every game even sort of like this. Where does the pop dimension of games even go after this? How do we even look at big blockbuster games after this? What do the next big trends even look like after this comes out considering that this makes the vast majority of modern AAA games redundant?
This is the game that Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be to the people who fell for the hype; the first, and possibly only ever, AAAA game, it is incredible that this even exists.