Category: Uncategorized

GOTY 2023 — #2 Venba

Venba is a narrative cooking game from the small team of developers at Visai Games. Its lead developer, Abhi, describes it as an exploration of the relationship between first-generation immigrant parents and their assimilated children. The core mechanical idea of Venba is a series of cooking minigames that are interleaved with the story and dialogue…


GOTY 2023 — #3 Wildfrost

Wildfrost is a roguelike deckbuilder developed by Deadpan Games with character design and art by Gaziter. It joins a genre that’s now well-established, but not yet exhausted. The niche is so popular that any new contender must establish a strong identity and unique gameplay variations to hold its own. Wildfrost may not have the sheer…


GOTY 2023 — #5 Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is the sequel to 2010’s Alan Wake, a cult hit from Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment. It solidifies the connections in the so-called “Remedyverse” that were introduced in the DLC to 2019’s Control, and continues the story of Alan Wake more than a decade after it left off. The story follows two parallel…


Top 5 Games of 2020 – Backlog Edition

As I mentioned in my kickoff post, I decided to break my usual Top 10 Games of the Year list into two separate Top 5 lists: the ones actually from 2020, and the ones from my backlog. I’ve already written in more detail about each of these games, but 5 separate 750 word posts isn’t…


Backlog #3. Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a noire RPG in the style of classic computer RPGs, developed by Estonian studio ZA/UM. It takes place in Martinaise, a dreary, industrial district of the occupied city of Revachol. It’s a strange, gloomy detective story about class and politics, filled with both dark humor and unexpected sincerity. I struggled to find…


Backlog #4. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

I’m not usually drawn to games that wallow in frustration or hopelessness. The “it’s miserable, and that’s the point” kind of games like Papers, Please sort of miss the mark for me. For me, a frustrating game needs to provide a certain tonal balance to be worth the effort that it’s asking of me. Diaries…


Backlog #5. Dragon’s Dogma

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get invested in an open world action RPG. In the past few years, I’ve learned that their structure just doesn’t work with my play style and attention span. So I tried to play Dragon’s Dogma a couple of times this year, and I kept bouncing…