Every Video Game I Played in 2021
Jan. 3rd, 2022 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellificGREAT YEAR FOR GAMES* *specifically games that everyone else loved and experienced five years ago. Asterisk for unfinished!
The Witness - Was very focused on Winning and only listened to like, 2 of the worldbuilding philosopher quotes--the cosmology of The Witness is probably dumb (according to pals) but I am dumber! The puzzles, however, are a good time. Favorite areas were the places where the game had this really satisfying loop of puzzle affects environment affects puzzle (treehouse, finale tower)! Least favorite area was the desert.
Tough Love Arena - Browser-based fighting game, good to look at, Smash Bros-flavored button mashing 👍
Tenderfoot Tactics (again) - Once in January and once in December... you let me name a small party of goblins, I [swear eternal fealty to your game, I guess???]
WSJ Meta - Early this year a friend and I discovered that every Friday the Wall Street Journal puts out a special crossword that has a metapuzzle embedded in it. Metas require convoluted logical jumps on little information and are almost always infuriating. Failing at a meta is one part flailing blindly in the dark, one part bashing your head against a brick wall, all parts feeling phenomenally stupid... but when you DO get it, holy shit that high lasts all week. If solving a regular crossword makes me feel smart, solving a meta makes me feel like an unparalleled genius.
(fig 1: comprehensively failing to figure out some metas)
New Yorker Cryptic - Anyway then halfway through the year the New Yorker started putting out a weekly cryptic which is easier than any of the UK cryptics and provides the perfect amount of crossword enrichment, so I don't do the metas much anymore.
Into the Breach - Hundred-percented :>
Overboard - Small point-and-click "reverse Poirot". You are a wealthy English socialite outrunning a decline in fortunes by sailing to America with your husband... who you just pushed overboard [musical sting]. Time to get away with murder! My favorite part of playing this was how when I was not playing I would find myself eg washing dishes and thinking "Okay, I can drug THIS person at breakfast--or if I skip breakfast I could get the blackmail material--" Cheapest way to replicate being a young Victorian widow dressed in all black turning away from your husband's casket and slowly smiling beneath your veil.
Outer Wilds* - DNF :( had a bad time :( Kind of fatally, I'm 1) bad at 3D game navigation 2) bad at spatial directions 3) really really so bad at 3D nav, and a good chunk of this game is.... navigating 3D mazes full of traps with a countdown timer in the background. May revisit, I really wanted to like this one.
Disco Elysium - Loved the writing, the jokes, every instance of a montage. Many very smart people have done reviews of my favorite parts, which were: 1. Kim 2. the mystery resolution 3. body on the boardwalk quest 4. Kim!! so... I was thinking about how Disco lives in a different place (in my heart) than my favorite stories about places--in part because the playable world is very video-game-y (small map, hard boundaries, every interactable person has an associated quest), in part because my brain simply cannot translate textual directions like "the highway is to the north" into any kind of 2D map. Martinaise felt a bit like a diorama floating in the abstract concept of Revachol which was even MORE unmoored inside the idea of Insulinde. Not a complaint! I think it works well with the sense of Martinaise falling through the cracks, and also with the way you uncover layers of history as you play. Would love to see a full map of the city someday though!
Hollow Knight - My Hollow Knight reviews are: 1. cheating is fun 2. someone referred to the game as a formicarium which is true and well-executed on the game's part, but I wanted one shot where you-the-player got a sense of the sheer enormous scale of the thing. One of my favorite game feelings is being small in a vast and complicated world (and it's a game about bugs!!) and I think there's a bit of a missed opportunity there! So, so fun to play though.
Geoguessr -
Temple Solitaire - Replaced Tetris battle as my mindless entertainment game
Inscryption* - This is being posted in 2022 because I spent the last days of 2021 playing Inscryption. BOY do EVENTS keep HAPPENING in this game, huh?
The Witness - Was very focused on Winning and only listened to like, 2 of the worldbuilding philosopher quotes--the cosmology of The Witness is probably dumb (according to pals) but I am dumber! The puzzles, however, are a good time. Favorite areas were the places where the game had this really satisfying loop of puzzle affects environment affects puzzle (treehouse, finale tower)! Least favorite area was the desert.
Tough Love Arena - Browser-based fighting game, good to look at, Smash Bros-flavored button mashing 👍
Tenderfoot Tactics (again) - Once in January and once in December... you let me name a small party of goblins, I [swear eternal fealty to your game, I guess???]
WSJ Meta - Early this year a friend and I discovered that every Friday the Wall Street Journal puts out a special crossword that has a metapuzzle embedded in it. Metas require convoluted logical jumps on little information and are almost always infuriating. Failing at a meta is one part flailing blindly in the dark, one part bashing your head against a brick wall, all parts feeling phenomenally stupid... but when you DO get it, holy shit that high lasts all week. If solving a regular crossword makes me feel smart, solving a meta makes me feel like an unparalleled genius.
(fig 1: comprehensively failing to figure out some metas)
New Yorker Cryptic - Anyway then halfway through the year the New Yorker started putting out a weekly cryptic which is easier than any of the UK cryptics and provides the perfect amount of crossword enrichment, so I don't do the metas much anymore.
Into the Breach - Hundred-percented :>
Overboard - Small point-and-click "reverse Poirot". You are a wealthy English socialite outrunning a decline in fortunes by sailing to America with your husband... who you just pushed overboard [musical sting]. Time to get away with murder! My favorite part of playing this was how when I was not playing I would find myself eg washing dishes and thinking "Okay, I can drug THIS person at breakfast--or if I skip breakfast I could get the blackmail material--" Cheapest way to replicate being a young Victorian widow dressed in all black turning away from your husband's casket and slowly smiling beneath your veil.
Outer Wilds* - DNF :( had a bad time :( Kind of fatally, I'm 1) bad at 3D game navigation 2) bad at spatial directions 3) really really so bad at 3D nav, and a good chunk of this game is.... navigating 3D mazes full of traps with a countdown timer in the background. May revisit, I really wanted to like this one.
Disco Elysium - Loved the writing, the jokes, every instance of a montage. Many very smart people have done reviews of my favorite parts, which were: 1. Kim 2. the mystery resolution 3. body on the boardwalk quest 4. Kim!! so... I was thinking about how Disco lives in a different place (in my heart) than my favorite stories about places--in part because the playable world is very video-game-y (small map, hard boundaries, every interactable person has an associated quest), in part because my brain simply cannot translate textual directions like "the highway is to the north" into any kind of 2D map. Martinaise felt a bit like a diorama floating in the abstract concept of Revachol which was even MORE unmoored inside the idea of Insulinde. Not a complaint! I think it works well with the sense of Martinaise falling through the cracks, and also with the way you uncover layers of history as you play. Would love to see a full map of the city someday though!
Hollow Knight - My Hollow Knight reviews are: 1. cheating is fun 2. someone referred to the game as a formicarium which is true and well-executed on the game's part, but I wanted one shot where you-the-player got a sense of the sheer enormous scale of the thing. One of my favorite game feelings is being small in a vast and complicated world (and it's a game about bugs!!) and I think there's a bit of a missed opportunity there! So, so fun to play though.
Geoguessr -
Temple Solitaire - Replaced Tetris battle as my mindless entertainment game
Inscryption* - This is being posted in 2022 because I spent the last days of 2021 playing Inscryption. BOY do EVENTS keep HAPPENING in this game, huh?
no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 06:46 am (UTC)but oh man yeah, hypocritically, having disconnected free-floating pieces of history that you'd occasionally be able to later anchor to physical detritus super worked for me also hahaha
no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 07:12 pm (UTC)