Hands down, Devotion by Red Candle Games. It was only on sale for a week when it came out, and was getting well-deserved rave reviews, but was pulled because an idiot put in an art asset that said “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh moron,” and Red Candle’s Chinese partner lost their business license and pulled the game from Steam. GOG was going to carry it, but they wimped out because Cyberpunk 2077 was about to come out in China, and they didn’t want to risk their sales, so they claimed “gamer voices” for why they were backtracking on carrying it, and refused to answer anyone asking them for details. The game is available, but only on Red Candle’s website,
but they were only able to get a store up and running after people had forgotten about the game.
It takes place in 1980s Taiwan, and is an amazing domestic horror - you play as the father, Du Feng Yu, cycling through three different years of his family falling apart, trying to figure out what happened to his young daughter. Some parts of it just hit way too hard, like this screaming argument between Du and his wife, when you’re playing as the daughter listening to it from her bedroom. It gets heavy. And then there’s the tongue thing. IYKYK.
I absolutely love this video by Jacob Geller, An Uncanny Really, looking at how Silent Hill 2 and Devotion handle the uncanny. Devotion absolutely deserves to be compared to Silent Hill 2.
This video, by Super Eyepatch Wolf, Devotion: The Most Disturbing Game You Can Not Play, is also really good, and opens with a lot of history for understanding Red Candle’s first game, Detention, which is also really good and takes place in a high school in Taiwan in the 60s during the White Terror.
Far: Lone Sails is a beautiful art piece with unusual gameplay, and the sequel is great too.
Bedlam is kind of a love-letter to 90s and 00s FPS games. The gameplay isn’t amazing, but if you spent a lot of time in games like Quake, Unreal Tournament or Halo CE back in the early days of online multiplayer, this game is for you.
Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and tactical combat. My only significant gripe is that I want more of it: More tales, more character customization… just more. (Although I now see that a cosmetic pack is available; I’ll have to check it out.)
Gigantic caught my attention when I was looking for an Overwatch alternative, because of the art and the praise from fans. I wish development hadn’t shut down before I had a chance to play it. (I hear there’s an unofficial client and server out there somewhere, though, so maybe I’ll get to at least try the work-in-progress that was never finished.)
Wildermyth is just so endearing I loved my time with it.
Taking the same character through each campaign was pretty fun like I was making a serialised demi-god: Doofus and the mountain horde, Doofus and the ancient threat etc. Because characters age though the campaign, it has interesting implications in the world lore. Like we’re an archivist document the various legends of Doofus, acknowledging where they contradict and maybe speculating on how the differences in each culture’s legend of Doofus reflects back.
Downside is I optimised the fun out of the combat in always having Doofus at the center of the strategy, each encounter then played out the same.
Agreed on the holy trinity. But even though you’re devout to the holy trinity, sometimes there are temptations.
Illusion of Gaia is that cool friend you haven’t seen in a long time who shows up, and you bond and reminisce like you haven’t been separated at all. Then you discover Illusion of Gaia has friends you haven’t met, and they roll together in a cool club called The Soul Blazer Trilogy.
My favorite thing about Illusion of Gaia has to be the fact that the manual contained a complete walkthrough of the game, at least in the North American release. Unless it was the same energy as “the dumb Americans (who invented the genre and introduced it to the East) don’t understand RPGs, so we’ll make Mystic Quest really simple and dumbed down for them” I don’t know why they did that.
Also, I was like 13 when I got my used copy of Soul Blazer…is there a more melancholy game on the SNES?
Brute Force for the original Xbox. 4 player squad based gameplay, with different squads full of characters with unique abilities. It was a ‘platinum hit’ but I’m pretty sure anything that sold more than 500 copies was
I was mildly a Borderlands fan, but then I played Tales from the Borderlands and fell in love. It’s such a great game with amazing writing and music that I’m always surprised to hear that most people, including fans of the main Borderlands games, have never heard of it.
That’s one I did play, the only other Borderlands I finished was the second but I think it did a good job of keeping what made Borderlands Borderlands while going to a completely different genre.
As the first of these is a platformer, the second is a topdown shooter, and the third one is a match 3, so commercial success was not that expected anyways, but I really think they excel at what they were set out to do.
I feel like Dustforce got decent buzz when it came out. I imagine it was helped by its phenomenal soundtrack. The game was too hard for me to really enjoy. But that soundtrack, I still listen to it occasionally.
The same artist did the soundtrack to Tunic, and while not as good to listen to outside the game, it adds so much to the ambiance of the game and elevates it.
Eternal Darkness is one of my favourite GameCube games. I feel like it might be long enough ago that they could do a remake with modern sanity effects.
And Halo Reach is my favourite Halo game, loved it.
Nightdive Studios (they, among other titles, remastered System Shock, which has received pretty good reviews) wanted to remaster Eternal Darkness, but Nintendo - who owns Eternal Darkness - doesn't want that to happen.
Also, the original developers of Eternal Darkness want to create a spiritual sequel, but that seems to be... an eternal project. Check out Shadow of the Eternals, if you want to follow that project. There's a gameplay video from like 2013 or 2014.
They have tried twice. And yes, they still want to make it happen. But last time I heard the team made a game they need to support for few years (some kind of online game), so it's going to take some time before they can try again.
They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.
Definitely didn’t get the appreciation it deserved on launch. I seem to remember it was launched right after that year’s Battlefield and right before that year’s CoD. Terrible decision. It definitely stood the test of time though and is very highly regarded now.
Played some Heroes of the Storm with an online friend. I absolutely love this game, I only play it Vs AI, but it's the only MOBA I ever really got into, because I don't much enjoy competition and the AI is always there.
I never thought I'd get to this point with a competitive styled game, but I know all of the heroes, almost all of their abilities, I understand matchups or even possible talent choices and ideal or poor team comps. It helps that the game is locked in maintenance mode and I don't worry about an ever inflating hero pool and an ever evolving meta.
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