It’s been a little bit hasn’t it? In the interest of cleaning out my backlog of unfinished work, and making it so that I don’t have to look at 18 drafts every time I log into this website, here’s a bunch of stuff I played enough to have opinions on, start write-ups, and then just never finish them.
Order is going to be how good the games are, because one of is these is simply one of the greatest games I ever played, some are the greatest games I played last year, and some were only marginally better then taking the money I spent on them and setting it on fire.
Without any adieu or whatever, lets begin.
Blue Prince – The Greatest Puzzle Game of the last 10 years.
I started a Blue Prince writeup after “beating” the game, then went back and played another 50 hours, and I have still not beaten the game.
Blue Prince is one of the greatest games in the last 10 years. It is easily the greatest puzzle game I have ever played. If you have not played it, and you like puzzle games at ALL, go play this. I took notes playing this game, and even with the screenshots, my Blue Prince google doc is 170 pages long. And yet the game never felt overwhelming, or extensively frustrating1.
Blue Prince is a masterpiece, it is brilliant, and you should play it. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to.
UFO 50 – 50 incredible games from Derek Yu and other collaborators for a video game console that never existed.
You know what was great last year? UFO 50. I played a bunch of UFO 50, I was going to try to review it, then it turned out that was going to be too hard, so I was going to review a single game from UFO 50, Avianos, a dinosaur themed 4x game with action selection mechanics, and I couldn’t even get that done. So yeah. UFO 50. It’s incredible, you will find something you love in it, and that’s ignoring all the other secrets and collectibles, and a billion other things I never even touched.
High Tide – Abstract Tile Movement Game by Marceline Leiman
I don’t know how to write a good review of an abstract ocean themed game about hexagon movement, but I’m not a full time game reviewer, and Dan Thurot is, so I’m just going to link to his review, and hopefully that makes up for stealing the images from it.
One thing I do want to quickly note is that it now has a commercial release, instead of having to make some sort of eldritch deal to get one of the very limited night market copies!
Hytale – Minecraft, but not finished, but also designed by people to whom “quality of life” is not just 13 random letters in a row.
What if Minecraft was designed by someone who cared about player experience on all levels of the game, instead of keep in a perpetual state of stasis by suits at Microsoft that are so scared of ever making any adjustments to their 2 billion purchase that Roblox already ate their lunch? You’d probably get Hytale, and if the game goes and manages to actually ship all of it’s content instead going back to development hell, it is going to be the best one of these crafting games.
It’s a big IF though. Like a HUGE fuckin if.
Gundam Card Game – I keep thinking it’s spelled Gundum, but I guess that’s wrong?
It’s fine. Structured resource structure to One Piece, mostly entertaining to play, and nobodies scalping it quite as hard as some of these other games, so that’s cool.
Donkey Kong Bonanza – It really feels like it should be spelt Bananza.
I was going to put Donkey Kong Bonanza here, but then I realized I’d mostly already finished this writeup? And never posted it? I think because I got laid off almost immediately after getting it to 80% complete. Anyway, you can read that write up here.
Highguard – Lessons should be learned here, but they won’t be.
It lived, it died, we hardly cried. The most notable thing about Highguard to me is that it’s not the very bottom of this list, but you can’t even play it if you want to, so who cares?
Age of Darkness: Final Stand – The Worst RTS I have ever played.
It is rare that I play a game that fails on every conceivable level, while still somehow making it to release. Age of Darkness is that game. It is so shockingly bad that even just thinking about it again, more then a YEAR after I last played about it brings to mind a list of problems burned into my brain after trying to play this. Here it is!
The games networking is awful and DC’s in multiplayer constantly. The game is micro intensive while requiring equally expansive macro. The units are both hard to control and incredibly dull, with no single character matching the personality of either zergling, space marine, or zealot. There are no alternate build paths, the campaign difficulty is a brick wall, the game just looks bad, and as a result of all of these it just isn’t fun to play.
There is nothing redeeming, nothing it does better then it’s ancestors or contemporaries, it’s not even bad in an interesting way, it’s just awful and I want my $28 back.
I’m not even going to link to it. They don’t deserve it.