I did miss playing a few notable games this year, because I have been extremely busy working on finishing Mewgenics. So when you see Expedition 33 missing from this list, know that its on my backlog to play next year when I have a lot of time again.

A reminder of my rating scale, with scores from 1 to 4 stars:

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

Anyway here we go!

Nubby’s Number Factory

This game is addicting, the same way any “watch the number goes up” games are. The 90s shareware vibes are fun. Is it good though? Well, not particularly. The game’s framework sort of promises the same sort of depth and replayability as something like Balatro does, but it doesn’t have nearly as many items, the proportion of those items that are “useless” is pretty high, and the number of “viable builds” is pretty low, so the game loses almost all of its variety once you learn what you need to actually do to win a run. The first update fixed some of this, but the game still feels like it promises more variety than there actually is. Additionally you can “win” a run pretty early on (it doesn’t take that many items to get an “effectively infinite” scoring build) at which point clicking through to round 80 to *actually* win becomes a bit of a chore. ★★

R.E.P.O.

My friends were playing it and I joined in a few times. I get the term “friendslop” now. ★★

Blue Prince

Blue prince is a fascinating game, it mashes 2 genres together that would normally be at odds with each other, and *kinda* makes it work. If you just accept the game for what it is and take the ride it wants you to take, the first 20-30 hours are truly enjoyable, wholly original, and a fascinating experience. The rougelite aspect of it sort of forces you to never hyperfocus on one puzzle thread, and constantly distracts you with new puzzles as you run into things you’ve never seen before. The thread you’re following might deadend on this day, but its ok because you can just shift your goals and look at this other place instead. It manages to hold this pretty well up until you reach room 46 for the first time.

But that’s the thing, room 46 is very clearly not the end of the game. Your reward for reaching it is more puzzles. A big impressive looking setpiece puzzle. And the game sort of starts falling apart the deeper you get into it. The game gets in its own way too much as you start exhausting puzzle threads, wasting your time with slow resets, transitions, walk speeds, waiting, and of course RNG. You continue to have to deal with the roguelike room-drafting portion of the game well past the point of it still being interesting, and while the game does slowly break as you adjust rarities and such, it never breaks *enough* to alleviate all of the friction.

The late game puzzles tend to keep getting more and more vague. I’m not against this style of puzzle, I really do enjoy the La-Mulana games for instance, but these sort of “Guess what this riddle means” and “Guess what the developer wants you to do” style puzzles basically don’t work if you don’t have easy access to try and experiment with what you think they mean. And so many of these require you to line up a lot of different RNG events together, specific items, room combinations, specific things in the outer room, it makes it really hard to just *test theories*. There’s a time investment in testing a theory, and most of the time you’re gonna be wrong, and the nature of the puzzles often means you don’t know if you’re wrong because you misinterpreted info you already have, or if you are actually missing some other piece of info. I don’t think this was the right style of puzzle for this framework. More “connect the boiler to the furnace for a thing!” style puzzles and less “ok so Tor is Rot backwards so it means rotate counter clockwise, obviously” ones.

The first act of the game is still fantastic and wholly original, and absolutely worth playing. Its a flawed game but deeply interesting. ★★★

Pony Island

After Pony Island 2 was announced (which I am for sure gonna play considering how good Inscryption was), I bumped the original up my backlog a bit, and finally got around to playing it this year. It’s... fine. Its a lot of the same thematic ideas as Inscryption, just smaller and with less interesting gameplay, which I guess is pretty much what I expected. Its got some cute parts though, and I definitely got got by the asmodeus fight a few times. ★★

Starvaders

It’s a rougelike deckbuilder with units on a grid. Its well designed and pretty tight with its balance. The different classes and characters feel vastly different from each other, which is good, though the viable builds for any particular character tend to feel a bit similar. It’s a perfectly enjoyable, well-designed game, though after 17 hours or so I’ve unlocked everything, beat it with all characters on the hardest difficulty, and feel like I’ve seen everything the game has to offer. ★★★

Doom: The Dark Ages

It’s fun. It’s kind of slop. It’s not very complex or deep, but neither was Doom 2016 which I thought was great. I didn’t like Doom Eternal’s heavy handed approach to making you switch weapons and shit, so I’m glad that Dark Doom stepped back from that and went a different direction again. The shield bashing and parrying is fun and was integrated pretty well into the combat, it works better than you’d assume. The plot is absolutely asinine, one of the best parts of Doom 2016 was how self aware it was over the dumb parts of its plot, with Doom Guy just crushing or punching anyone and anything who attempted to provide expository dialogue to him. That game was simple, and the vibes were good. I’m not sure WHY they abandoned that for the later 2 games in the series, but the result for Doom TDA is just a lingering feeling that “the vibes are off”. It punctuates the fun fast demon slaying parts with weird slow sections where you control a mech or ride a dragon, multiple times. The last boss is ripped straight out of a dark souls game, which I can’t say I didn’t find fun (you know, as a massive fan of Fromsoft’s output), but its a very odd choice for Doom. Its a rollercoaster with a bunch of random shit in it. Its enjoyable enough I guess. ★★★

Monster Train 2

It’s monster train 1 (which was fun) but more. My one big complaint is that about half of the events are just direct references to other games. It kind of feels like it cheapens the whole game to see “Jimbo from Balatro” show up every other run. ★★★

Elden Ring: Nightreign

Elden Ring’s cash grab multiplayer spinoff. For what it is, this game is pretty fun if you’re playing with friends. It’s not *special* in the way Elden Ring was, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be that. It feels a lot like an “Official Mod” instead of its own thing. It’s a cobbled together remix of a bunch of things from elden ring in a co-op multiplayer shell with some very gamey mechanics like a shrinking circle and ability cooldowns. It’s a weirdly bold decision to make this as a standalone game, and its also hard to even call it a cash grab because the design of this is nothing like anything fromsoft has made before. It’s oddly experimental in a way. ★★★

DELTARUNE chapter 3&4

This is always a tough game to write a review for, because its NOT DONE YET. Undertale was fun because the game was so fully-realized, you could poke and prod at it in all sorts of ways and the game felt like it would always give way to something if you did. It would comment on the ways you played and broke the fourth wall in interesting ways and just felt like it had stuff to say and a point to everything. Deltarune (so far), is “bigger and better” than undertale in a lot of ways, and the combat system does start to shine a lot in the most recently released chapters. The fights are harder, the patterns to dodge are more intricate, there’s more and more interesting gimmicks, and like, its all quite good. But it’s not complete yet. The chapters so far don’t go as far as undertale did with its choices and fourth wall breaking, and without knowing where the whole thing its going, its hard to evaluate or interpret the things its presented so far. It feels like a mystery box TV show in a way, with aspects of its plot and characters clearly having things that are off about them, but missing resolutions currently. I will withhold a full rating until the game is done.

Mario Kart World

It’s about as good as Mario Kart’s ever been, the levels connecting into each other and sometimes foregoing the lap structure to do long linear tracks instead feels cool and adds a good amount of variety into the game. Open world exploration mode is a gimmick. I played it with family while on vacation, but don’t care enough to play it outside of that context. ★★★

Kaizen: A Factory Story

Look I love that zachtronics is back to making games (albeit under a different company name this time), but this is probably my least favorite of their games so far. It’s not unfun, but its quite limited and repetitive and feels more on par with a smaller game within Last Call BBS than a standalone game. A lot of effort was put into a story and voice acting that was not compelling in the slightest and was just clicked through to get to the puzzles faster. ★★

Donkey Kong: Bananza

Nintendo did a new take on Donkey Kong and its extremely solid, fun, and polished. I like how they went all-in with their main mechanical gimmick (destructible voxel terrain). The levels are made out of destructible voxel terrain. The moving platforms are made out of destructible voxel terrain. The enemies are made out of destructible voxel terrain. EVEN THE NPCS are made out of destructible voxel terrain. The major bosses are all either made out of voxel terrain or interact with it in some unique way (creating terrain of various types or destroying the platforms you’re standing on or whatever). There’s a bunch of different types of terrain that all have different properties and interactions, and it all just helps the game feel extremely focused and cohesive. ★★★★

Merge Maestro

It’s cute and simple. The balance is a little bit off. So many of the sets seem like too much work for what they offer, some of the enemy designs nullify entire strategies (pufferfish), and some of the mechanics are a little bit unclear. But it is a pretty fun and simple game besides that. ★★★

Baby Steps

Baby Steps is fantastic. It sorta feels like the ultimate evolution of a Bennett Foddy game. A funny “joke” physics control scheme plus “getting over it” style challenges that like to reset you to the bottom of large climbs, but in a large 3D world and a scoped like a full game, and full of humor that hits pretty well. Baby Steps’s control scheme is much more comprehensible than his past stuff, Nate *basically* does what you want him to do (if its possible), so the fails always feel like its my own fault. The game is divided up into chapters that act as soft checkpoints where you won’t ever accidentally fall back down to a previous one, so while the game still has a lot of that Getting Over it DNA in it in parts, they’re confined to smaller segments and never feel unreasonable or unfair. The open(ish) world usually offers a few different paths upwards of various difficulty, so despite being marketed as a “streamer rage game” its actually foddy’s fairest game. I never finished Getting Over it but I finished Baby Steps. Legitimately great. ★★★★

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Its Hollow Knight, but more of it. The main improvement is the movement, while everything else is pretty much as expected. All of the bosses were good, none of them felt unfair, and the exploration was good as well. I was lost often, but never *enough* to need to check a guide. The game just sort of exuded quality. There were no bad parts. I mean, I got minor nitpicks of course, but this game is sort of the ideal metroidvania. It does everything I want out of a metroidvania and does it as good as can be done. It’s basically perfect. ★★★★

Hades II

It’s “Hades Again”. Its Hades in all the same way the original was. I liked it enough to complete it, but the original Hades tended to get old very quickly after the main story was completed due to how easy it was to force builds and how streamlined and uniform most of the powerups were. Hades 2 is the same way, except because its so similar to the original it tends to wear out even earlier as I feel like so much of it is just retreading the same ground again. Most of the boons are just boring damage increases that all feel pretty similar. ★★★

As a side note, I tend to slap so many roguelikes these days with the “it gets old after you’ve done everything in them” criticism. Maybe that’s unfair, because it would be a pretty weird criticism to levy at another kind of game. “It took 30 hours to beat and then I didn’t want to keep playing”. But I think the thing is that, the roguelike structure *promises* infinite replayability and variety, and the best ones in the genre fulfill that promise. So I do feel like its a real issue if a roguelike can’t hold my attention past the point where it stops dangling carrots in front of my face. Feels like they rely too much on progression systems to keep you interested instead of making the core gameplay as engaging as it can be.

Metroid Prime 4

As I played through Metroid Prime 4 I just couldn’t help but feel like something went deeply wrong during dev. Yes, it restarted development in 2019. That still gave them nearly 6 years of dev time to finish it. And yet this game feels like an 18 month rush job. Few aspects of the game feel well thought out, most new features feel antithetical to what Metroid games are supposed to be and take away from what I like about them. There’s 5 total “dungeons” that do not connect to each other, and each one is just a linear path in to grab a powerup, beat a boss, and then leave. Subsequent visits for powerup collection rarely expose significant new map sections and are mostly just repeating the same hallways again except sometimes you can open box with a missile expansion that you couldn’t before. The NPCs are annoying in the worst way possible, constantly interrupting you to give you dialog that feels so stereotypical that it almost feels like a parody.

After getting the bike, Mackenzie phones you in to tell you “You can visit the remaining areas in any order you like”. Which is a complete and utter lie. I’m unsure why that line is in there. Is it a relic of an earlier build where you could actually do that? It doesn’t even matter much because 20 seconds later he phones in to tell you where you should be going anyway. The game does not want you to explore at all on your own ever.

There seems to be a common sentiment that the hints are bad and the desert is underbaked, but I’ve also seen a lot of people saying “if not for that the game would be great”. But I don’t think so. Almost every part of the game has fundamental problems. The level design is pretty bad, mostly linear tunnels with few branches or loops. Go in, fight boss, go out, with little actual exploration needed. It makes you repeatedly go back to base camp for upgrades, but the area its in is the same each time. There’s never any new paths to take now that you have new powerups, just an occasional missile crate to open, so the backtracking there is *actually pointless*.

There’s a lot more I could nitpick about this game but its biggest issues are fundamental. This is not what I want out a Metroid game, and not what I want out of a non-Metroid game either. A huge disappointment. ★

And that’s all of the games I played this year. Oh, but I haven’t mentioned which of them were Game of the Year for me yet.

GOTY for me, this year, goes to Blue Prince.

This is a weird pick because I only gave it ★★★, while plenty of other games this year I gave ★★★★. But let me explain! Despite my issues with the latter portion of the game, nothing else this year managed to stick in my brain quite the way Blue Prince did. For at least a month after starting the game, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s weird, its new, its bold and risky. And even though it didn’t quite stick the landing, the parts of it that worked well worked so well that they outshined pretty much everything else from this year.

Silksong was also fantastic, a rare “perfect game”. You know that speedrunner joke where someone will say “this category is now dead” after getting a run so good that it feels like nobody will ever beat it? Well Silksong feels like that to me. (2D) Metroidvanias are now dead. Silksong pretty much nailed it and I’m not sure what anyone could possibly do to improve on the genre at this point. But it is, fundamentally, a “safe sequel”. Hollow Knight was already fantastic, so its not really a “big step” to go from that to Silksong. But it is impressive that they still managed to improve almost every aspect of it. I do think it is the “best” game I played this year.

But if you ask me to *recommend* ONE (and only one) game from this year to play, it has to be Blue Prince. Just because there really isn’t anything remotely similar to it out there. It is a wholly unique and very special game.

But the thing is, lives were not completely pointless. There is a certain tension that happens when you're at 1 life left. Even if the stuff in front of you isn't even a "hard part", that tension can impact the way you play and was a small part of the appeal of those older games. There was something was missing when games removed lives. What seemed like a purely good "quality of life" change wasn't just shaving off a rough edge of older design, it took a small bit of substance with it.

By the 2010s the modern Roguelike genre had formed, a genre basically based around "you only have 1 life". Limited lives are back! A few extra mechanics like random generation and deeply varied interactive systems that encourage exploration and experimentation really helped recontextualize "limited lives" into something that was more than just a way to rob kids of their quarters. It was a way to ensure that mastery of a game truly required understanding and mastering all of its systems, not simply practicing one thing over and over.

In 2017 Edmund McMillen and I released The End is Nigh, a game where (spoiler) the limited lives mechanic was a sort of core vision of the game from day 1 of development. We wanted to make a game that felt hard and forced you to play it multiple times until those hard parts felt trivially easy. The original design had 1 life from the start, and slowly earning more as you got better at the game and found the collectible tumors that would permanently grant you extra lives. We eased back on that, instead choosing to only introduce limited lives in the 2nd half of the game. This still accomplished a similar goal, people would reach the 2nd half of the game, realize they needed to collect tumors to have a chance at beating it, and go back to the first half to search for them, hopefully realizing in the process that things they thought were hard the first time were easy to them now.

Lives went from a medium staple, to "outdated and bad", and then came back when people realized that they still had use as a game design tool in the right contexts, with thought put behind them. "Quality of life" changes aren't just "shaving off the rough edges", they almost always shave something interesting off as well.

Dark Souls came out in 2011. Dark Souls has a big cohesive world but there’s no map and no fast travel (well, during the best part of the game at least). You die a lot. The stats dont make sense. There aren't checkpoints before bosses, you need to run back through a good portion of the level just to reach the boss again. The plot doesn't make sense unless you read all the vague flavor text on the item descriptions. This game has no quality of life.

Future games in the series and games inspired by it have offered many quality of life improvements. You can fast travel from the start now. Sekiro put checkpoints immediately before most bosses. Elden ring added a map. The games are smoother to play and make more sense and are just better in a lot of ways.

And yet, there is undeniably "something lost" when applying all of those quality of life changes. Dark Souls 1 offered an extremely unique experience that hasn't quite been replicated by its follow ups. The lack of a map and fast travel combined with its brutal difficulty meant you became intimately familiar with its world layout as you explored and backtracked and repeated the same tough sections over and over. By the time you beat the game you know the world, you know how to get from point A to point B, where everything is in relation to everything else, and can probably identify any specific location in the game from a screenshot alone. The lack of checkpoints before bosses make you feel anxious the farther away from your last bonfire you get. If you find a boss but haven’t found a bonfire in a while, do you attempt to fight the boss? Or do you explore for a shortcut first?

Even as a professional game designer it can be tough to recognize what the "point" of those janky mechanics are. Its hard to know what you'd lose by shaving off those rough edges without the future games that did just that. And maybe what’s shaved off isn't even that important to the experience. Lives in Mario certainly weren't. But they are in other contexts.

Hollow Knight: Silksong came out recently. Its a great game but there's some odd controversial designs carried over from the first game like a weird mapping system and sometimes long boss runbacks. There's a lot of discussion about it, and ways the game could do some quality of life changes to fix that stuff. And I mean, wouldn't that be nice... No boss runbacks! Compass not taking up a slot! I have no idea what would be lost with those edges shaved off. But I do know that something would.

A reminder of my rating scale, with scores from 1 to 4 stars:

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

Anyway here we go!

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

This is some of the best level and world design Fromsoft has ever done. For the most part it takes everything that was good about Elden Ring's base game and amplifies that. The world is large and layered, almost-maze like while still feeling super open. Most areas on the map have multiple different ways to reach, with different challenges depending on which direction you come from. You can see so much stuff in the distance (or even close by) that you just don't know how to get to, until you observe the surrounding areas and compare it to the map and follow leads that look like they might take you where you wanna go, or might not. Its fun to explore, and I love the approach to open world design that Fromsoft has taken, vs the way other open world games just make it kind of trivial to go anywhere you can see. There was some of this in the base game, but the way the DLC map wraps around on itself so much really feels like that approach on steroids. It hasn't been this good since Dark Souls 1.

The bosses are for the most part pretty good, with Rellana being a personal favorite fight, hitting that sweet spot of "tough, but fair" that was missing from some of the hard bosses in the base game. Most of the bosses in the DLC felt this way, but the final boss is bullshit to a whole new level. The first form is fine, like yeah its difficult, he hits hard and his combos all have odd timings, but its learnable. The second form is where it becomes bullshit, where he has all the same combos as before, except they spam holy light all over the place that seem impossible to dodge, while also adding like 4 or 5 new moves into the mix that are hard to even see or tell what's going on, and impossible to dodge. It kinda felt like you just had to race him and hope you could do more damage to him than he could to you. I think its the most bullshit boss they've ever done, it took me longer to beat than Isshin, and didn't feel nearly as good. But the rest of the DLC is great, and an overtuned final boss doesn't really take away from the fact that this is some of the best content Fromsoft has ever put out there. ★★★★

World of Goo 2

It's World of Goo again. I'm not sure the game does enough to justify its own existence. World of Goo was a fine game but definitely a relic of its time, and the sequel doesn't quite advance it enough to make it feel new. The first few worlds of the game feel like a retread of the first game with a small handful of new mechanics (of which, the liquid physics + conduit gooballs are basically the only substantive addition). But then World 4 came along and it finally felt like it was doing something new and interesting (even if the noir adventure levels were kind of tedious). I wanted more of that! But then that ends fairly quickly, you get a small handful of challenge levels, and the game is over. It wasn't bad, but it really needed to be more than just that. ★★

Deadlock

Deadlock takes the high level strategy and tactics from a moba and places it into an overwatch-style hero shooter core gameplay loop. It works amazingly well, and somehow this game ended up being my most played new game this year, despite being in alpha and clearly unfinished. Valve is absolutely cooking something here, although I feel like the opening up of the beta may have been an accident, and they seem to be struggling a little bit with trying to balance the needs of having an actual playerbase with also like, finishing the game. But I think the core gameplay and movement mechanics and all the pieces of this game are absolutely amazing and fun, and I am excited to see how it evolves as they keep working on it. No score yet, because the game is not done yet. I will review again once its out for real. But watch this game!

Nine Sols

You play as a weed smoking enlightened atheist sigma male alien cat who's sick of all the normies and wants to spread the good word of Science by force. The combat is great, the level design is less so, though it does get better as the game goes on. The parry-focused combat is very nice, and I liked the way all the skills you have work in tandem during a fight. There's a superficial resemblance to Sekiro in that... there's a parry, but the talisman attacks and dodges and charge parry really make it feel like its own thing, though when it works it works and (like Sekiro) the fights tend to feel more like a rhythm game than an action game.

Exploration wise, there's only one checkpoint per "area" and its usually in the middle, which means you can "beat" an area and then have to do half of the next one before you get to a new checkpoint, and that tended to make early exploration rather tedious. You die pretty quickly, one mistake and you can get combo killed, especially if you let your guard down after getting past a "hard" area. The design doesn't do a great job of guiding you in the correct direction a lot of the time, a lot of areas look fairly samey, and there's an atrocious forced stealth section in the middle of the game.

The final boss is kind of a ridiculously insane difficulty spike and feels exactly like the type of difficulty I hate in games like these. It sort of gives up on having easily readable hitboxes which forces you to basically just memorize what buttons to press to beat patterns, but also has three forms and since you can't sight read the attacks and one mistake will kill you, learning the later forms is just tedious and frustrating. Add in the janky hitbox on the grab attack and after like 2 hours of trying I ended up just turning on story mode to clear it.

Also, I appreciate that the main character is basically an asshole and a villain, since its a nice change of pace from the usual here. ★★★

UFO 50

It's a collection of 50 retro-style games made for a fictional 80s console akin to the NES. It's a mixed bag, very reminiscent to how it feels to just pull random NES games you never heard of out of a collection and give them a try. At least, that’s the first impression you get. Cause like, on a surface level that's what UFO 50 is. You give all the games a try for a minute or two and then go back and finish the ones that seemed interesting. Doesn't matter what type of games you like, you'll be able to find 5 or so in the collection that you can enjoy. Might be a different 5 for everyone, but theres so much variety in here that you can certainly find *something*. But this is a *collection*. Is UFO 50 more than the sum of its parts? There is a meta narrative woven throughout the games in the collection, and the order they're presented in. It's enough to say that yeah, that adds something to the collection that makes it function as a whole instead of a bunch of random games. So its a little bit better than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, what you see above is more of my first impressions of UFO 50. I actually had to come back and rewrite this review cause I kept playing more and more of it. And realizing that hey, there actually is *a lot* more to this game than the first impressions would imply. Like, there were actually a lot more than just 5 games that I liked in it, in fact almost all of the games in it are interesting in their own unique ways, it just sometimes takes a little bit to get into them and see what they're actually about. And that the tiny handful of "bad" games in there are bad on purpose as part of the meta-narrative- a janky "first game", an fictional executive forcing himself into a project lead role, a bloated sequel that flopped and led to the fictional company going out of business, and stuff like that. And even these bad games have appeal to them to some extent.

But the real thing that started standing out as I played more and more UFO 50 games is that, these games aren't just copies of existing NES games. Sure, there's obviously some homages in there, but the majority of games feel unique and experimental and not 1-to-1 with specific games that existed at the time. Like, in a contrast to something like Shovel Knight, which is very much an homage to a bunch of specific NES games (Megaman, Mario 3, Duck Tails, and a bunch of others), UFO 50 is an homage to a whole *era of game development* instead, where many genres didn't exist yet and devs and designers were still figuring out what worked and what didn't and would experiment with weird shit. And a lot of these games feature *interesting* mechanics that work in small experimental doses like this but would kind of suck if applied to larger games that had more time in development.

Anyway in my original first impressions review I wrote a bunch of mini reviews for individual games in the collection, but I sort of think that does a disservice to the collection as a whole. Its not a bunch of individual games after all. So I'm leaving that out here. Maybe once I finish playing *all* of the games I could give byte sized thoughts on each one? Anyway, UFO 50 is a phenomenal experience, and a very special project. ★★★★

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Its a top down mainline 2D Zelda game, but with a bunch of design philosophy pulled from BotW and TotK. The whole game feels like a hybrid of every other zelda game. But this combination of it doesn't really work. Making open ended puzzles with multiple solutions is difficult, because you want there to be a lot of creative ways to tackle a problem, but if *too many* things result in success, then it stops mattering entirely since you can just do the same thing over and over. And unfortunately, Echoes of Wisdom falls way too far on that side of it. You have too many tools that just solve every single puzzle for you, basically by default. There’s no "creative problem solving" in just using floating platforms or clouds to jump over a room filled with puzzles, that’s literally just what the clouds do by design, and it just... lets you do that. Everywhere. Later in the game I stopped even understanding what the puzzles in a given room were supposed to be, it looked like the rooms were arranged with some kind of intent, but figuring that out never mattered since half the things you have just let you skip over everything. It felt like "there's puzzles here, but they weren't designed for me".

The game also seems to lack conviction to its MAIN GIMMICK ("play as zelda, not link") by just... letting you become link whenever you want to deal with enemies that way. And I don't quite understand why they did it like that. Zelda's moveset is interesting and distinct, which felt appropriate, made her feel distinct from link and more "wisdom-y". It's her game after all. But oh don't worry you can just transform into link at will anyway. It muddies it.

Anyway it's still a zelda game and it still has a lot of the charm that makes those games fun, but it just doesn't feel correctly realized. ★★

Factorio: Space Age

Factorio is one of the greatest games of all time so I was super hype for the expansion. And yeah, its good. It took me an entire month to beat it. There's so much smart design in there and the planets really do elevate the game a lot. I love the distinct flavor of each planet. My recycling plant on Fulgora was super fun to figure out and very satisfying to watch work. I love how a working Gleba factory is a machine that eats fruit and poops spoilage (even if building that correctly was exceptionally annoying). Vulcanus was... well it was just Nauvis again but easier. A useful planet for sure but kind of boring. Aquilo felt like an isolated outpost for manufacturing a few specific things, and the heat pipes mechanic felt like its entire goal was to make you build spaghetti. The final trek to the solar system edge felt like a much more appropriate climax to the game than just launching a rocket was in vanilla, it wasn't just "make these resources and you win" but you actually had to design a whole ship capable of surviving that journey, and tied together so many different goals and features you had been working on until then.

That said I also have some minor complaints, which (knowing factorio) I'm sure they'll address over time. Quality was kind of frustrating and janky to deal with, and it not being streamlined made me kind of just not want to engage with the mechanic at all beyond gambling for a few specific things. The enemy balance on Nauvis feels the same as vanilla, which is a bad fit for space age when you're spending extended periods of time away from Nauvis, on other planets. The time and pollution evolution is quite annoying when you're spending a lot of time just trying to figure out designs, and I feel like that was all balanced for people who already knew what was expected of them. The game is also very long, and I *was* getting tired of it by the end. None of that takes away from just how well designed the expansion is otherwise though, and Factorio still offers an exceptionally unique experience that you can't really get anywhere else. Even more so now. ★★★★

Antonblast

Joining Pizza Tower in the "Wario Land 4 inspired chaotic indie platformer" genre, Antonblast is clearly made with a lot of love and has a lot of personality. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite make up for how annoying this game is to play. The visual clarity of the game is *awful*, explosions and effects and screenshake are near-constant and get in the way of being able to tell whats going on at all, the game is too zoomed in for how fast it wants you to go, the hitboxes are awkward, and the controls have just enough jank to them to feel annoying when they dont quite do what you want. While I found Pizza Tower damn near perfect and was curious to see another indie take on Wario Land 4, the issues got in the way and I stopped playing half way through. ★★

And that’s all the games I played in 2024! It was an exceptionally strong year for games, 6 of the games I played here I rated at ★★★★ (Balatro, Animal Well, 4D Golf, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, UFO 50, and Factorio: Space Age), which is a lot for me. In other years its been 1 or 2 games, and GOTY being obvious. That’s not the case this year, it really was a hard decision!

But in the end I think it has to be Balatro. While its not that rare for a game to be “perfect” (there’s one or two almost every year), it is very special that a game can be perfect while also having as much variety and personality as Balatro does. It’s a crowning achievement, it deserves all of its success, and will likely prove to be the most influential game of the year as well. Congrats!

Here’s a quick recap of my rating scale (it’s a 4-star system). These are subjective ratings, how much I personally enjoyed playing the game, not an objective statement about “how good a game this is”.

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

With that, lets get into it (in roughly chronological order)

Cocoon

I didn't get around to this one in 2023, but after seeing it on so many GOTY lists I did decide to give it a try. It's fine, its very polished and pretty, though I feel like that came at the expense of a lot of the depth and interesting stuff you could do with the mechanic. Patrick's Parabox and Recursed are both games that feature a similar main mechanic that go far more in depth with it than Cocoon does, though without the production value and world cohesiveness. I don't think I ever got stuck on a puzzle in Cocoon; they were all pretty linear, usually with only one thing you *could* do at any given point in the puzzle. Many puzzles you can figure out instantly from looking at it but then it takes 2 minutes of orb shuffling just to get it configured correctly. It kind of feels like its cosplaying as a puzzle game, it presents itself as one and makes you *feel* like you're solving puzzles, while its just sort of taking you on a linear rollercoaster instead. For what the game wants to do, it clearly does it well. I just do not vibe with it that much. ★★

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell

I kinda just felt bored while playing it, the combat is a mess (most fights just devolve into mashing attack and heal since the game tends to eat your dodge input if you ever try to time a dodge in a fight, the visual effects are so intense they just constantly obscure whatever is happening), the exploration is limited (its a pretty linear progression on a small map without much need for metroidvania progression since there's not that many mobility related powerups anyway). Despite the game being short it still felt like it just dragged on towards the end, which is absolutely not the thing you want with a short game. I liked the previous Momodora game, so I'm not really sure what happened with this one... ★

Pseudoregalia

The movement tech is very fun and the way the map opens up with each new powerup, both when you first get the powerup AND when you learn about the more advanced movement tech associated with each powerup is neat. Most platforming powerups have some sort of "bonus" advanced way to use them to discover, and I definitely got myself into trouble getting deep into areas I was not supposed to be in yet. The environment art in the game is pretty bland and ugly, and not in the "it looks like an N64 game" way, I just mean like, even early N64 games looked better than this. I can look past art normally, but in a metroidvania specifically that environment art serves a purpose, and each room looking like a greyboxed level made it much harder to keep track of where I was in the world and how parts connected together, especially combined with the lack of a map*, which resulted in a whole lot of aimless wandering towards the end. The combat parts also left a lot to be desired, but for what appears to be an extended game jam game that only took a couple of months to make, its very good for what it is. ★★★

(*for what its worth, I believe they later updated the game with a map)

Blasphemous II

Enjoyable, some neat ideas with the progression like how its pretty open in the beginning and your initial weapon choice effecting which routes you can take at the start (would love to see this idea taken even further). World design and exploration is nice but the individual room design leaves a bit to be desired, lots of "long hallway with enemies spammed in it" type rooms, and enemy placement feels like its just kind of spammed without thought. Some enemies feel ridiculously tanky even with a maxed out weapon. The penultimate boss fight was a weirdly huge spike in difficulty that almost felt unfair, like it needed a few more frames of animation to properly show attacks winding up. Other than that the game was fun, a perfectly serviceable metroidvania. ★★★

AM2R

Can you tell I went on a bit of a metroidvania kick for a couple weeks? Anyway I didn’t play this when it came out because I opted to play the official Samus Returns instead (ugh) and didn't feel like playing another Metroid 2 remake in close proximity, but hey it's been long enough so I decided to finally check it out. AM2R feels very close to a GBA-era metroid game, like a "what if nintendo remade Metroid 2 right after zero mission?" alternate universe thing. And, aside from some absolutely wonky default controls (that luckily were very customizable) it does that pretty well. That being said, while AM2R does a very good job at remaking Metroid II... its still Metroid II, and a lot of the bad parts of Metroid II are still present here, most notably the boss fights against the various metroids being pretty bad (and a lot of the newer fights they added in AM2R were also pretty underwhelming), and just the general structure of the game not quite feeling metroidy enough. I think I had more fun with it than Samus Returns (which I found mediocre), which is saying something since its a fan game, but it didn't do much to make me not still think of Metroid II as the black sheep of the franchise. ★★★

Balatro

Perfect? Balatro feels like the sort of ultimate form of this style of game that has been evolving over the past couple years, a sort of combination psuedo-incremental (number go up) game mixed with drafting builds (games like Luck be a Landlord, Loop Hero, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of others). Balatro isn't a genre groundbreaker, but it does feel like the ultimate evolution of that genre, the new gold standard, and one I would classify as pretty damn close to perfect. All the numbers feel perfectly balanced, all of the jokers are sometimes useful and sometimes useless, they all have their place, and they all feel roughly equal. Usually that sort of exact balance comes with a kind of uniform blandness, where nothing ever stands out or becomes interesting, but Balatro avoids that and still allows for tons of interesting builds and broken combo potential. At the end of a run I might be barely scraping by, or winning in one hand, or getting a billion points when the requirement is 500k. The variety is there, and its fun to unpack during runs. It’s a very smartly designed game, and probably my favorite of the year so far. ★★★★

Helldivers 2

It's a maybe a bit odd of a comparison, but this is the closest a game has gotten to recapturing the feel of Left 4 Dead since... well... Left 4 Dead 2. It's chaotic, fun, and has a lot of really smart mechanics in it. Having to enter DDR style strategm codes in the heat of battle gives you the ability to fumble them and that creates for some pretty intense, hectic and hilarious situations. Blowing up your teammates accidentally, or your own rail gun, or all the other ways to friendly fire. It's simple but good. That being said, the whole "live service" aspect of the game is a real bummer. There's too many resources and battlepasses that kind of get in the way of just playing the game, and drip feeding new content over the course of a season is annoying when the stuff that is there at any given time is pretty limited and repetitive. ★★★

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

A Ubisoft AAA metroidvania. Yes, the whole game is very by-the-numbers, but the numbers do add up here. Its big, the combat and bosses are fun, and the platforming challenges during exploration were fun as well. They drag on a little by the end, every platforming challenge feels scientifically designed, standard rule-of-threes type stuff, so it does start feeling a little bit tedious at times, but they do make pretty good use of the platforming abilities you get. A good game, but just a bit generic. ★★★

Animal Well

Ok so, I played through Animal Well about 2 months before it officially released, which for a game this full of secrets is always an interesting experience. Anyway it's a pretty cute pixel art metroidvania that you can finish in about 5 hours. At least, that’s when I got to the credits roll. I did play for another 30 hours after that trying to find as many secrets as I could, without help of the wiki (because it literally did not exist yet when I played it haha). The game itself is very reminiscent of Tunic and Fez, though Animal Well is far more focused on its secrets than those games were, and I feel like the game benefits massively from that focus. It does a great job of feeling like the secrets are actually leading somewhere, and keeps adding more and more layers to them as you solve more and more of them. The game is also smart about getting out of its own way once you get to the point where you're 100% focused on secret hunting. You find more and more ways to navigate the world, teleport around, and open shortcuts, so by the time you're just wandering around the whole world looking for eggs and rabbits, the game just lets you do that with having to worry too much about platforming or combat or puzzles getting in the way. Its very good. ★★★★

Fallout 2

After watching the Fallout tv show, I had a hankering to play a fallout game. Previously I had only played Fallout 4, which was weirdly unmemorable. As in, I played 40 hours of it, and I barely have any memories of what happened during those 40 hours. Anyway I polled twitter asking for which one people think was the best in the series, and the consensus was either the classic ones or New Vegas. So I gave Fallout 2 a try. Like, I tried. Twice. Just could not really get into it. I think its just an age thing, its old and janky and the beginning of the game is just not fun. (I’m not giving it a score)

Fallout: New Vegas

So I switched over to New Vegas instead, after installing 200 bugfix mods so it could run properly (but I avoided any gameplay changing mods). A lot of people think this is the best in the series and I wanted to know why. And well, yeah, I get it. The story is great, the moral choices were actually real dilemmas, like... every faction in the game kind of sucks, so theres never an obvious good/bad answer to anything, its just like... who sucks less, but even that depends on which perspective you're looking at things through. And you can get stuck thinking through this stuff, unless you shortcut the decision making process by deciding to, you know, ROLEPLAY and just make the obvious decisions the character would make. It is a role-playing game after all. That part of the game is neat and well done, and after beating it I just wanted to play through again just to see the other faction storylines as well. But man the game is fucking slow sometimes lol. A lot of the interior spaces are mazes of samey looking hallways that make navigating them kind of annoying especially when you have to repeatedly navigate the same hallways cause a quest giver is buried deep inside someplace. Maybe I'll just increase the run speed a bunch with a mod if I play it again. ★★★

Another Crab's Treasure

It's an ambitious game for a small team and I absolutely respect the attempt to make a souls-like that does its own thing and doesn't also just copy all of Fromsoft's vibes and mechanics verbatim (*cough* lies of p *cough*), but this game is really rough. It sort of presents itself like "a soulslike disguised as a cutesy 2000s era mascot platformer" but in reality its kind of more like the inverse of that. A lot of the level design feels straight out of a collectathon platformer, big open spaces, lots of platforming (and invisible walls), and the soulslike aspects of mostly show up when the bosses do. I like that aspect of it. Its just really rough with its execution. The platforming is janky and you slide off edges all the time, get stuck on geometry, fall through holes in the ground, get to areas with no collision, etc. The combat is decent but it seems like the timing windows on dodge and parry are tuned way too tight. The game also seems to like to eat inputs (most egregiously if you try to input an attack or dodge while its in slowmo from your shield breaking or respawning). And then the game ends with 3 2-form bosses in a row, which is I think more bosses than like the rest of the game combined. It gets very tiring at that point. It's an ambitious game and I respect that, the good parts of it are pretty good, but that comes with a lot of jankiness that takes it down a bit. ★★★

Hackshot

It's a sort of cute and interesting hybrid of peggle + zachtronics style game, with the aesthetic and "optimization-focus" of a zachtronics game, minus the programming parts. Which written out sounds kind of dumb lol. "Its like these other games but with some stuff added and some stuff removed". Ok it's its own thing. The goal is to hit a bunch of targets on each level with a bunch of balls, but you can adjust the physics of the balls per shot by spending points (inverse gravity, high weight, no bounce, etc), and you can redo shots as many times as you want to try and beat the level in as few shots as possible, or with as much combo as possible. It's simple and well made for what it is. I enjoyed it but didn't finish it because it started requiring me to engage with the optimization parts to progress (get as many points as possible per level instead of merely beating them) and trying to max that out often felt a bit pedantic in what was required. Still, the game is a good example of how far you can take a relatively simple concept, and how there’s still a lot of space to make interesting stuff in a genre as simple as... whatever "vaguely-peggle-like" is. ★★★

4D Golf

So I played this game and thought it was a funny concept but not very fun and bounced off of it. Then I came back and gave it another try. And then came back later to do the challenge levels. It grew on me more and more each time as I started to realize just how clever the game is on multiple levels. You see it'd be pretty easy to just make a version of "4D Golf" who's sole purpose was to confuse people and break their minds, but this game puts so much effort into making it comprehensible, with a ton of different ways to visualize things and all the toggles and views you could ask for. The volume view especially is helpful, because as it turns out the "surface" you play on in 4D golf is actually "only" 3 dimensional (if the ground is flat), so when you tilt the camera in the right way you get what is basically "3D golf with no gravity". And with that suddenly everything weird feels comprehensible.

But once you start getting a feel for that, the game gradually implements more and more dimensionality to the courses, with hills and ramps and eventually gravity changing pads so that you can't *just* think of the game as 3D golf anymore, eventually culminating in a mind breaking 5D level. Which is impossible to visualize. The "Volume View" of the 5D area is actually 4 dimensional, no longer 3 comfy familiar dimensions there, but you spent so much time before that getting familiar with what 4D feels like that when you view that 4D volume mode... it almost feels familiar. Like the 5D stuff is *kind of* a joke, in that the point is really "haha oh its actually 5D" which is even more impossible to visualize than the 4D stuff... but the way the game builds up towards that gradually, and the new perspective the 5D stuff gives you on the quaint, trivial 4D stuff earlier in the game, like it all just works. I don't think it's even possible to execute on the concept of "4D Golf" better than this game did. ★★★★

Hyperbolica

After 4D golf I checked out the dev's previous game Hyperbolica briefly. It's a neat hyperbolic space tech demo, but has a very bad game stapled on top of it that does not compliment the tech in any way, and is almost anti-synergistic with it. The main feature of hyperbolic space is that you can pack a *lot* of space into a circle. Traversing the perimeter of it takes exponentially longer than going across it. Which just kind of makes exploring the space annoyingly tedious (nevermind the motion sickness from it). So the game being loose exploration with 2000s-era shovelware minigames that require you to search annoyingly large spaces to find a specific NPC to even trigger the minigames in the first place... it’s simply not the correct gameplay for the tech gimmick. ★

Isles of Sea and Sky

For the most part its pretty fun. Sokoban-style puzzles mixed with a zelda-ish structure, including item unlocks. The puzzles are creative and a bit more loose than is usual from this type of game, which can really make them pretty difficult as they often have red herrings or unnecessary elements that obscure what the "designer intent" actually is. This is not a bad thing, when a puzzle game is *too tight* it often ends up trivializing puzzles because you know that everything on screen is relevant in some way so it just becomes a matter of ordering it all correctly. Isles of Sea and Sky does do a very good job of incorporating counter-intuitive solutions and red herrings into levels, so the puzzles feel more organic. That being said, this game does have a fundamental flaw in that the zelda-style item progression makes some puzzles actually impossible until you get the appropriate item, (and those items can sometimes trivialize older puzzles if you skipped them), but being a puzzle game its not obvious whether or not a puzzle is beatable the first time you see it. Some stuff like the colored blocks are signposted well enough, but since you don’t know what the elementals or items do until you get them (or even what screens will have elementals) its sorta hard to even know what you're missing sometimes. But you can also just skip most puzzles the first time you enter an area and focus specifically on the ones that unlock relevant items first. ★★★

And that’s what I’ve played in the first half of 2024 so far. So many games came out recently that I still have yet to play, and there’s even more coming out soon (especially looking forward to the Elden Ring dlc). See you at the end of the year for my second batch of game thoughts!

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

With that, lets get into the reviews (in mostly chronological order of when I played them).

Pizza Tower

Pizza tower is just kind of great, like I thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough beginning to end and have basically no complaints with it. It’s fun, full of humor and charm and personality and has this weird chaotic vibe that you don’t often see in “real” games these days (though is familiar to those who grew up playing Newgrounds web games in the 00s). Every level is unique and ridiculous, forcing everything it can into the “pizza restaurant” theme, but never drawing too much attention to it or trying to subvert the inherent silliness of it or anything. It's just pure fun. That’s all there is to it. ★★★★

Metroid Prime Remastered

Metroid Prime is one of my favorite games of all time. Big interconnected map, lots of exploration, cool abilities and all that. A great game overall that felt far ahead of its time. But that was over 20 years ago, and as is the case with a lot of revolutionary games from that time… they are showing their age. While the level design and general structure of Metroid prime still holds up very well, and the remake *did* modernize the controls, there’s a lot of little issues that they did not bother to address. Locking you in rooms to re-fight the same enemies over and over in the late game is a big one, and the game is generally easier with the modernized controls, but they still make you beat the game once before you can unlock hard mode (I’ve played the game so many times already it would have been nice to just be able to start on hard mode). I get it’s a “remaster” and not a “remake” but I would have maybe liked it to lean more towards full on remake and actually fix some of those outdated issues. As it is, it's kind of just Metroid prime again. ★★★

Returnal

Well they ported Returnal to PC so I actually had a chance to play it finally. It’s sort of interesting, because Returnal feels like a AAA attempt at a very popular genre (rougelike/lite) that’s been almost entirely dominated by indie developers since its popularity explosion a decade ago. And like, the game’s fine. It controls very well and is fun to play, but the roguelike structure doesn’t really feel like it adds a lot to it? Like the game clearly wants you to have a specific, curated experience with it the way most AAA games do, but the main appeal of a roguelike structure is the whole idea that every run is different and all of the interesting builds and emergent mechanics that can add variety to the runs. Returnal lacks a lot of that. While it's full of guns, parasites, artifacts, malfunctions, and such that are different every run, the guns are really the only thing that actually make the runs feel different, but even then there’s only a handful of guns to find. Everything else feels like generic “spreadsheet design”. Everything has positives and negatives that are almost too perfectly balanced, which makes the whole game feel a bit too uniform. The moment to moment gameplay is fun enough to carry the game through to the end despite all of that though. ★★★

Storyteller

It’s a very simple easy to understand concept (place comic panels and characters such that the comic tells the story that goes along with the title provided). It’s short (you can beat the whole thing in about 2 hours) and not too difficult, but cute and definitely had a lot of moments that made me smile while playing it when I realized what was happening. ★★★

Resident Evil 4 Remake

Ok so remember when I was talking about the Metroid Prime remaster and how that game is amazing but also showing its age? Well, guess what. The same thing applies to Resident Evil 4. Amazing game, but also super dated at this point. However, this is an actual proper remake of the game. And its fucking amazing. Like this is the absolute gold standard for what a remake of an older game should be. I haven’t played RE:4 since the first time I played it in like 2007 or so. And yet the remake felt deeply familiar the whole time, every area was like “oh hey I remember this!”. But the actual wild part is… this is a completely new game. Like at some point I was like “wait… I don’t remember this boss being like this” and I looked it up and it made it apparent that they changed like everything in the remake. Bosses that didn’t age well? Redesigned. Annoying mechanics? Removed. Controls? Modernized. Enemy behaviors? Reworked entirely to play better with the modernized controls. Even story beats and characters were rewritten and adjusted to fit better with modern sensibilities. But you don’t NOTICE this while playing, because it was all done with care and reverence for the original. They successfully managed to make a game that feels like how you remembered the original being, instead of just being a direct port. This is what a remake SHOULD be. ★★★★

Counter Strike (CS: GO and CS2)

So I usually play some sort of shooter game with friends in the evenings regularly, previously that was call of duty warzone but oh boy they really fucked up that one didn’t they? Anyway once counter strike 2 was announced I figured it was maybe time to actually learn how to play counter strike, so we started playing CS:GO instead. The playerbase is older than that of call of duty, so you don’t have 13 year olds screaming the N word at you over voice chat all the time. Instead you have fully grown 30 year old adults screaming the N word at you over voice chat. 

Anyway that’s not a problem when you play in a group of 5 and I do have to say this game is very fun and surprisingly deep. It’s super refreshing playing a game that is confident enough with its mechanics and balance that it doesn’t feel the need to shuffle everything around with a balance patch every month. The game doesn’t change, so you can *actually* feel yourself improving the more you play, since it doesn’t soft-reset your skills all the time by making you unlock new guns or resetting the balance.
CS2 fixed a ton of annoyances that made CS:GO feel a little bit inaccessible to those of us who did not grow up playing the game (like letting you have the crosshair actually follow the recoil, which is a HUGE improvement). Kinda dumb that they didn’t keep all the modes like arms race, but whatever. The game’s fun. ★★★★

Dredge

A “Lovecraftian fishing game”. Such a promising concept, but unfortunately the game is kind of a boatload of missed potential. The game started strong, but petered out really quickly as I maxed out my boat about halfway through the game just playing normally, and then there was no motivation to keep catching fish on your own beyond that, so the game becomes just about doing the biome puzzles (which become sort of atrociously tedious in the last 2 biomes)

There’s no puzzle or resource management on which fishing rods to use either since you can just use the 2 best rods together to fish everything, which is a shame since trying to fit odd shaped rods together seemed like it would be fun… if you ever had to do that. Fish rot too fast and inventory fills up too fast meaning all “fishing excursions” last one day, big bit of missed potential there since needing to prepare for a "long trip" would have been a fun motivation to earn money and stock up on supplies. Story also kind of sucked, the motivation of the main character ("bring back a dead girl") is hidden until the ending of the game like it's some kind of spoiler… but the game had a bit of a motivation issue anyway so why not make it clear why I’m doing all of this earlier? The Lovecraftian stuff is neat but the game never like, tests you on it. There's no fish that require you to “go insane” in order to catch them, which would have been a neat way to tie that aspect into the rest of the game. The potential was there for this to be an amazing game… but it's kind of a shame it wasn’t. ★★

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It’s a really bold decision to just reuse the same world as Breath of the Wild and do a direct sequel in it. For a game that is entirely focused on exploration, they chose to place you in a world you already explored? That is an INSANE decision. Yet somehow, they made it work.

While BotW was a very pure and focused game, TotK is complex and messy. BotW gives you some basic ass zelda items in the start, that are pretty simple but have a lot of emergent behaviors to them that you have to learn how to use to make your way through the hostile world. TotK gives you fucking godlike powers of creation right at the start and says “You can do literally fucking anything with this, go wild”. Ultrahand is almost overwhelming with how flexible it is when you first get it. The other mechanics sort of feel secondary to Ultrahand and Fuse but they have a whole lot more use than like, the ice block did from BotW (and time rewind in particular is so good at cheesing puzzles). But you know, it is a sequel, so that complexity is warranted. Breath of the Wild still exists if you want that more pure experience. But I already had that, so giving me these powerful complicated tools feels appropriate. 

Exploring the same world again proved to be a really unique experience that I have not had in games, where the main motivation for exploring is “hey I wonder what happened to this area I remember from BotW, how is this NPC doing now” like you want to go check in on all the friends you met in the first game, since its 5 years later. It’s really cool.

While at the start the sky seemed more interesting to explore than the depths, later on the depths proved to be the far more interesting area. The way the surface and the depths related to each other was really fun to figure out, and because the light roots and the shrines lines up with each other I was actually able to get 100% shrine completion without needing to look up any guides (something that I eventually had to resort to for the last couple shrines in BotW).

If I have one small complaint, it's… uh. One of the really important aspects of Breath of the Wild was that you *could* just go kill Ganon right at the start, whenever you want. Your main quest is kill Ganon, you know where he is, you can just go do it. It flavors the game as a player-driven adventure. You want to do all the other stuff so you can get powerful enough to kill Ganon. Even if you never actually go kill him right away, its very important that you CAN. And well, TotK copies that straight up. Though they try to pretend that you don’t know where he is… he’s exactly where you expect so you can just go kill him and win. Mission accomplished. The problem is, TotK has TWO main quests, not one. “Find Princess Zelda” and “Kill Ganondorf”. But Zelda just shows up if you kill Ganondorf without finding her on your own first, making that one… entirely optional. The “Find Princess Zelda” quest is super interesting however, and I wish they would have just made it mandatory. It feels like the perfect counterpart to “Kill Ganon” from the first game, instead of a clear goal that you have to prepare to tackle, its a mystery to solve. Zelda is out there in the world, you can just go to her right from the start, but the problem is you don’t know where she is, and you don’t know what to look for, so your adventure is based around trying to solve that mystery and discover the solution. It’s a cool mission that should have been mandatory!

Anyway I wouldn’t even have a nitpick that minor if I didn’t think this game was amazing, so Tears of the Kingdom is my GOTY ★★★★

Diablo IV

They added an open world to diablo. I think the builds and loot were more interesting that diablo 3, but its been so long since I played III that I don’t even remember if that’s true or not. So much of the game feels weirdly not thought out, especially regarding the overworld. The horse feels like it got tacked on last minute as a solution to traversal being tedious, but then they were like “ok well if you can run past all the enemies then what’s the point of the overworld” so they shoved in barricades to force you to dismount and then put a weird cooldown on getting back on the horse and it's just tedious and frustrating. It's fine at being an addiction loop, but not much more than that. ★★

Wildfrost

So I’ll admit part of why I bought it was cause the game had a lot of negative reviews complaining about ONLY difficulty but saying the game was good otherwise, and hey I like difficult games so why not? But like, ok so those reviews aren’t like wrong or anything, but I think the complaints stem not from it being difficult but from the way that difficulty forces you to play the early game in a really tedious min-maxy way if you wanna actually win. Every fight, a loot goblin shows up, and instead of rewarding you for killing it, it rewards you for attacking it as many times as possible. 4 gold each attack. So in fight 1 (the easiest fight), you have to delay actually winning the fight by keeping 1 enemy alive and making sure you don’t accidentally kill it while you hit the goblin with as many snowballs or 1 damage attacks as you can. This is the way every successful run starts, and oh boy does it get tedious after a while!

I am aware that they put a content update out that supposedly fixes some of the balance issues, but the game doesn’t have a ton of variety either and I kind of exhausted what there was of it before that update came out anyway. ★★

Armored Core VI

Would not have cared about this game if it wasn’t made by Fromsoft. They’ve been making consistently amazing games for the last decade that hey I’ll give this one a shot. I think most people who bought it did for the same reason too. A positive reputation will do that.

I put 4 shotguns on my mech and then pretty much one shot every boss from then on out. It’s fun. The mission structure of the game feels a bit dated, like a PS2 era game where you select missions from a list and then play the level. The game is good, but it doesn’t really feel *special* the same way Fromsoft’s other games have been. ★★★

Baldur’s Gate 3

I’ll start off by saying that this is not the type of game I normally like, and I knew that going in. But BG3 made enough of a splash this year that I felt a duty to at least give it a try and see why people like it so much (especially since we’re working on our own tactical RPG with some DnD influence right now as well, it’s worth knowing what others are doing in this space too). I’ve played a little bit of DnD with friends before so I’m not completely blind to the mechanics.

So yeah, this game is definitely cool. The heavily branching quests feel like they go deeper than any other game has done, the combat is neat and actually interesting, there's a lot of emergent storytelling present. I built a Rogue and wanted to deception my way through as many scenarios as I could. I tricked a “smart” ogre into repeatedly helping me in combat by promising to pay him double next time instead of paying him now. It cannot eventually go wrong. 

I hate that you can save scum the dice rolls. “You don’t HAVE to save scum though, just roll with the bad results”. But that’s not really true… I deceptioned my way past a door with a series of good dice rolls, then ended up dying in combat in the house I tricked my way into. The game respawned me before those dice rolls. I had to save scum to get back on the “canonical path” that I had been on. That was my story, I wanted to continue along that path, and the game made me save scum to do that. 

The combat is neat. One encounter, this strong (boss? miniboss) enemy kept doing a war shout that would knock my party members off a ledge down into a pit of spiders. I died like 10 times before realizing… hey what if I just push him into the spider pit instead? And I did… and it worked. That was cool. 

But the combat is also agonizingly slow, especially when you die and restart a few times. This did not really fit well with me being able to only play an hour or two of it a day, when combat encounters would take multiple real life days to complete… I just slowly lost interest in playing over time. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future when I can really dedicate some time, but for now, ★★★

Chants of Sennar

Chants of Sennar is a puzzle game where you are exploring a society where you don’t speak the language of the society. Characters will talk to you in a language you don’t understand, signs will be posted in the same language, and you have to learn what the symbols mean via context clues, slowly building up an understanding of the language these people speak so you can use that to solve puzzles. You can type your best guess for any given symbol, and then that guess shows up under it, and seeing it show up like that on other dialog boxes or signs can help you understand if your guess was correct or not. Like hey, I thought this word meant “hello” but this guy just said that to me then walked away? Oh maybe its like “Aloha” where the same word means both hello AND goodbye depending on context? Or hey, maybe I guessed this word wrong and just had to live with the incorrect guess until it really stopped making sense? Wait, was this whole language right to left instead of left to right? Double meanings, wrong guesses, inaccurate translations, it's a really cool thing to uncover on your own the more context you find.

Here’s the thing though. I kind of lied. The game I described is not what Chants of Sennar is. It’s *almost* what it is. And if it actually was that I’d be putting it up there with Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn as one of the best adventure puzzle games of all time. But it fucks it up entirely with ONE mechanic: The notebook. Shortly into the game, a notebook pops up and makes you match symbols to pictures. If you correctly match all of the pictures on a page, it confirms that those symbols mean that picture, and locks them in and corrects whatever you typed for the symbol into an official, canonical translation. As soon as this happened I basically shouted NOOOOO at my computer. Don’t do this! The game didn’t NEED that! This isn’t Obra Dinn, the confirmation that you translated the symbols correctly is the ability to actually solve the overworld puzzles! All of that stuff I mentioned about living with mistakes or letting me be confused as to why my best guess translation didn’t match up exactly… gone. That never happens. The game confirms that what you thought was “hello” means “greetings” and then the next thing that happens is you see someone say “goodbye” using that symbol and walk away. When you get to an area of the game that features a right-to-left language, it literally never even lets you be confused about that, the notebook immediately opens and it immediately confirms that the language is right to left with the first page of symbol matching, before you even have a chance to be confused about it. 

So the game kind of just ends up being a generic puzzle game that is aesthetically about languages, but actually just about matching symbols to pictures and then solving generic adventure game puzzles. It’s a shame since it's so close to being amazing. It just needed to not get in its own way like that. ★★★

Lies of P

I love the Fromsoft souls game so when people were hyping up lies of P as “the first non-Fromsoft souls-like that actually gets it” it definitely piqued my attention. So I played through it and like, it's fun I guess. I mean they’re copying a lot of mechanics directly from some of the greatest games of all time, and they do a pretty good job of that, so of course it's at least good. 

The level design is pretty lacking though, so the real meat of the game is the boss fights. And they’re fun for a bit, but sort of quickly become kind of bullshit, with the difficulty feeling more cheap than fair. Lunge attacks where the boss will slide towards you on the swing so you can’t visually judge the safe distance from looking at the size of the weapon, surprise second forms that are the “real fight” that you can’t practice without going through the time-wasting first form every time… weird attack combos with no real rhythm and weird delays that are impossible to sight read so you just have to memorize the timings… rapid attack sequences that give few opportunities to hit back… attacks that will only sometimes continue only if you try to go in for an attack. I mean, a lot of this has shown up in the late game bosses of Fromsoft’s games too, but in lies of P it feels like every boss is a “worst of” montage of this kind of stuff. 

And well… I kind of disagree that it “actually gets it”. Lies of P is pretty well executed, but most of the good stuff about it is just a pretty much direct copy of Fromsoft’s stuff, and most of the bad parts of it are the the things they couldn’t or didn’t copy directly (the level design, the P-organ stuff, the weird timer tree, etc). And that indicates to me that they don’t actually deeply understand the genre, more that they were just quite good at copying. That’s enough to make the game enjoyable for the most part, and the team clearly has talent, so I am curious to see what they do next. ★★★

Sea of Stars

Not usually a fan of RPGs so I kind of ignored this until I realized it was by the same people who made The Messenger (a game I did enjoy), so I figured I’d give it a try. And like, it's well made and the graphics really are incredible (I got programmer stunlocked for a bit trying to figure out how they did some effects), but the game itself is kind of bland. The battle system has a couple of neat gimmicks with the lock system and the charge attacks but it's not enough to remain interesting for more than a few hours, but this is a 30+ hour RPG. No real character customization or builds, and level ups and new weapons are just basic stat boosts. 

But whatever, RPGs are about the story right? Unfortunately it’s also a bit weird. Like its fine I guess, but this game is a *prequel* to The Messenger, and a decent amount of the plot is just resolved in the worst possible way. The main villains for the first half of the game just get teleported into the future to become bosses in The Messenger. It’s not a satisfying resolution to anything and it makes the game feel like it does not stand on its own, merely here to be auxiliary to The Messenger.

Half way through the game sort of teased a switch to 3D (mirroring the way The Messenger switched from 8 bit to 16 bit when you entered the second half), but that was just a tease and didn’t amount to anything. I almost feel like they wanted to do that switch but had to cut it for scope reasons. This game needed something like that to make it special and not just a basic snes RPG, but it didn’t have anything like that. ★★

Super Mario Wonder

The Best 2D Mario since Mario World. But it’s not like there was much competition there anyway… pretty much just the blandcore New Super Mario Bros. And I guess Mario Maker… but that’s a weird comparison to make. Either way Mario Wonder is pretty good, fun times all the way through. But other than the wonder flowers (which were cool) it kinda just felt like every other 2D Mario. Nintendo does a much better job carving out unique identities for the 3D Marios, it would be nice to see them apply that to a 2D one sometime. I 100%’d it in a weekend and then never thought about it again. ★★★

Suika Game

I made a watermelon once. ★★★

Mosa Lina

It’s a physics puzzler with a decent amount of emergent interactions between objects. From a large set of hand designed tools and levels, it picks a random set of tools and a random set of levels and you have to beat those levels with the tools provided. Sometimes it's impossible, but most of the time when you think it is there is actually some weird emergent interaction that you’re overlooking. It’s definitely a unique design and pretty neat for what it is, though it sort of lacks the longevity I would want out of this kind of game. ★★★

Bombe

This is a weird one for sure. It’s minesweeper… except you don’t actually solve the puzzles. Instead you build an automation one rule at a time that can solve more and more minesweeper puzzles automatically with each new rule added. If you liked Zachtronics games the way I did, this will definitely stunlock you for a few days, if you can get past the janky interface. ★★★

Dave the Diver

I kind of hated this game lol. The best way I can describe it is that this game kind of feels like it’s allergic to itself. The game never lets you breathe, it never lets you settle into a nice fun little game loop where you go fishing and then sell sushi so you can upgrade your dive gear to explore deeper and get rarer fish. As soon as it thinks you might be getting comfortable it pulls you away to do some tutorial, or listen to a guy tell you how to farm, or make you play some weird minigame, whether you want to or not. And this never lets up. Even the main exploration does this, you’ll enter a room that has a puzzle and it just won’t let you solve the puzzle. It will freeze control, pan the camera to a button, pan back to Dave and then Dave will say some shit like “I should go press that button!” and then give you control back. It does this literally every time there’s a puzzle, even in the final area of the game. I’ve played video games before! I fucking know I should go pull that lever! Stop taking control away from me!

The beginning of the game sort of feels like a 2D Subnautica, earn money to upgrade dive gear to go deeper and deeper. And if they kept that up this game would have been cool. The sort of promise that that was what the game was about is the main thing that kept me playing it…  But it very quickly bottoms out, and then you have to run errands for the sea people for 10 hours. Bullshit like “please go catch me 4 crabs” and dumb fetch quests. And boss fights that feel completely out of place, including the “kronosaur” which is the glitchiest most unfinished feeling fight in the game, right at the end. Every additional hour I played made me hate the game more and more and as soon as I saw the credits I uninstalled it so I’d never have to play it again. ★

Cobalt Core

It’s a cool setup for a deckbuilder, like the positional aspect to it is slick, but man the cards and relics are just so bland and boring. Most of the cards offered as rewards are barely better than the starter deck cards (and it even sometimes just offers starter cards on rewards screens). The best strategy seems to be just upgrade the starter deck cards so they cost 0 asap and then barely take any new cards unless they serve a very specific purpose or combo. The game is cute and the base mechanics are very good, so I hope they manage to update the game or do a DLC that can make the rest of it more interesting eventually. There’s a ton of potential there. ★★★

Look I started making games in the early 00s when I was 11. Here's the tutorials I used, a book called Flash 4 Magic. It came with a neat little CD-ROM of all the examples in the book, and since there’s source files I could tinker around with them and figure out how they worked even though many parts of the book were over my head. Not a very useful answer in the year 2023. I have very few specific suggestions for people, since it's been 20 years since I was a beginner and the times have changed. The communities have moved. The tools are different.

But the one piece of advice I do have that is eternally relevant, if you wanna make games... you have to MAKE GAMES. Plural. Lots of games. As many as you can. If you wanna do a thing, you gotta practice the skills, and you practice the skills by doing the thing, and the more you do the thing the better your skills become, and the better your skills become the easier it is to do the thing. The advice works for just about everything.

Anyway the usual tangible, actionable advice I give for this is that you get started by making (AND RELEASING) a ton of small projects, NOT by jumping into your big ambitious dream project right away and grinding at it for years, thinking you can skip straight to marathon running without learning how to walk first. Every time I post this on twitter it goes big viral, its the type of thing people absolutely love to have "takes" about after all, but twitter lacks nuance, and many people misinterpret exactly what I mean by this, so this post serves to clarify. I have made the small version of this post enough times that I feel like its time to make a big version of it. It's like poetry. It rhymes.

First of all, this is not advice just for people trying to make a career out of games, or just for hobbyists. It's advice for everyone with ambitions of making games, big or small, free or commercial, personal hobby projects or magnum opus dream projects. I suspect some confusion here is because there's a separate, tangentially related piece of *business* advice that goes, roughly, "there’s so much luck involved in success that the more attempts you make the higher your odds are of finding that success", or, "its better to make 10 small games than 1 large game since the small ones each have a chance of success" or some other variation of that law-of-large numbers rule. I'm not talking about that. I mean, it *is* a side bonus you get from making a ton of small projects, but my advice here is more about learning and self discovery, and the easiest path you can take towards actually making that ambitious dream project a reality.

Because, I WANT you to make that big ambitious project. This is not meant to discorage you from dreaming big, quite the opposite. It's here because, jumping straight into a big game as your "first" game is exactly how you end up losing motivation and never finishing that game, or ending up with something that ate years of your life that you can't even stand looking at anymore. If you follow this advice, you are infinitely more likely to actually end up making your big game, and it will be better for it, and there's even a chance you might get there quicker too.

PART 1: THE WHY

Why do this? Why make a ton of small games instead of just starting right off on a big thing? Why is this the near-universal advice from experienced game developers? What if I'm built different? There's a ton of different reasons why this is a good idea, and I'm gonna lay out a lot of them. Even if you disagree with one or two of them, you should understand that the totality of all of this is why this advice is good. There are any number of situations and mitigating factors that could make you an exception to any singular one of these reasons, but probably not all of them. Maybe you have prior experience in a related fields like art or programming. Maybe you have an existing audience from something else. Maybe your dad owns an emerald mine.

REASON 1: LEARNING THE BASICS

Here's the thing. Your first game is going to suck. No matter how much you try or how much passion and ambition you have. The first picture you ever drew as a child was nonsense scribbles on a piece of paper. Your first game is the equivalent of that. Your second game? Probably also going to suck. Scribbles again. Your third game? Look, its still not likely to be good, but maybe there's something there. The scribbles are starting to look like things. You keep working at it, they become more and more like actual games. Scribbles to drawings.

If you make your dream project your first project... its gonna suck. A terrible fate for a *dream project*. You gotta get your feet wet first. Learn to walk before learning to run. Keep the dream there, but make sure you can do it justice.

As the saying goes, "Your first 10 games are going to suck. Get through them as fast as possible".

This seems obvious when applied to other art forms, but for whatever reason it seems like people have a hard time internalizing it when applied to games. You don’t start by painting the mona lisa, you scribble nonsense with crayons as a baby first. You don't teach a kid to read by handing them a copy of War and Peace and telling them to "have at it". You don't teach a kid to cook by handing them a can of beans and going "good luck, figure it out". You don't learn how to sculpt by buying a 1 ton block of marble and just going ham on it. You start by carving soap with a butter knife. You learn how to play musical instruments by playing hot cross buns over and over. You learn math by learning how to count first. You write short stories before you write novels, make 2 minute videos before making movies.

REASON 2: LEARNING HOW TO FINISH AND RELEASE GAMES

Releasing games is a skill that requires practice. That's part of why I always make sure to say make AND RELEASE a bunch of games. Do you know how to avoid feature creep and actually finish your game? Do you know how to take your game from finished to released? Do you know how to get people to play it? How to market it? What a hook is? Do you even know how to upload it to whatever site you're uploading it to, or their process for review and approval and launch? Do you know anything about business or marketing or how to identify scam publishers from legit ones or whatever? Do you know how to negotiate sponsorships, buy out deals, publishing deals, how to read contracts, etc? Do you know how you're going to react to getting a bunch of negative feedback? A bunch of bug reports? A bunch of *positive* feedback? Troll reviews filled with slurs and personal insults?

If you're hinging your future on a big project... none of this is stuff you wanna get blindsided by at release. I have personally seen many devs I know get completely overwhelmed to the point of depression and burnout post-launch just because they never had the experience of what a game launch is like. It gets easier the more you do it. Make mistakes on less important projects so you won't make them on important ones.

REASON 3: ARTISTIC SELF DISCOVERY

What is your artistic voice? What do you find interesting and fun to work on and what are you actually good at? Games are art after all, so what do you want to say with your games? What game out there is desperately missing, that you are specifically well suited to create?

It's a hard question. One people spend their entire lives in search of an answer for. It's unlikely that your first idea, one coming from a place of zero experience, is going to be the answer to this. After all... if you've never made a game before, how do you know which parts of game design you're good at? Which parts you enjoy doing, and which parts you loathe.

I'm gonna reference Derek Yu's classic venn diagram about what kinds of ideas have potential here.

You should be striving to make games in that middle part of that venn diagram. That’s where your strongest voice will be. If you've never made a game before, 2 of those 3 circles are blind spots, so its gonna be nigh impossible to actually hit that sweet spot. Making a bunch of small games gives you an opportunity to experiment and discover things about yourself. Maybe you discover that hey, you just really really hate doing dialog boxes. Just, kills your motivation working on it. Can't write for shit or they always feel bland. That's a very useful thing to learn about yourself before starting your 5 year dream project "DIALOG BOX QUEST".

Or maybe, you made a really fucking cool homing missile in one of those projects. Just like, innately satisfying. Wasn't the main point of the thing, you just added it in and it was cool. And people you showed the game to also comment on how cool the homing missiles are. So like hey, this is something you're good at. Maybe that big idea of yours has room for homing missiles in it somewhere. Over the course of making a bunch of smaller games, you'll find tons of stuff like this about yourself. Those circles won't be blind spots anymore, and you'll actually have an understanding of who you are as an artist.

REASON 4: DISCOVER WHERE EFFORT IS MOST EFFECTIVE

Its a really incredibly common mistake for newer game developers to waste time and effort on things that like, kind of don't really matter. There's a hard cap on the amount of hours in a week. You don't have unlimited effort to spend, so you should want to spend that effort where it will have the most impact. This is a very hard skill to learn. It takes practice and experience to get right, and even experienced devs get it wrong often.

I'm not here to tell you specifics on what matters or not. Every dev has different skills. Everyone has different priorities. But like, if you choose to do a small, 2 week project, you're gonna learn real quick which things matter and which things don't. If you spend 1 week making fancy animated menus and 1 week modeling a main character, well that’s all your time spent. Hopefully you have learned something about time management and prioritizing. A nice thing to learn in 2 weeks instead of 2 years.

These issues don't go away by simply increasing your time budget. Time is always limited. The priorities are gonna shift for a 1 month project vs a 2 week project. They'll shift again for a 6 month project. They'll shift for a 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year project as well. But there's always limited time, and you're always gonna need know how to prioritize the impactful stuff. And the more you do it the better you get. The stuff you originally thought would take months now takes weeks because you know where the effort needs to go. These lessons apply tenfold to bigger projects, but you can only learn them by doing.

Your favorite games are all examples of being smart with how their time was spent. They knew the things that mattered and the things that didn't, and what to spend their effort on. After all, there’s a fixed amount of hours in 3 years, a game like Hollow Knight is not simply the result of "just putting a ton of effort and passion into it". I mean they definitely did put effort and passion into it, but they were smart about it. Hollow Knight didn't have any sloped platforms, and didn't have any moving platforms in it. Did you notice that while playing? Probably not. Sloped platforms and moving platforms are surprisingly difficult to get right, they take a lot of time and cause a lot of issues, so they decided, those don't matter for this game. And they were correct. The time they saved not having to do slopes or moving platforms could be better, more effectively spent making the world larger, the art better, and making cool bosses. The things that mattered for that game.

I have a million other examples of the smart ways great games "cut corners". It should be a blog post of its own tho. Pay attention to it next time you're playing a great game. You may learn something.

REASON 5: DONT KILL YOURSELF

There's 1000 posts on reddit and twitter and GDC postmortems and everywhere from devs who poured everything into their game, went into debt, quit their jobs, dropped out of school, only to release and earn $0 (or very close to $0). There's often tons of posts and comments coming up with reasons why the game earned $0, lack of marketing, bad art, no multiplayer, whatever.

But the thing is... there doesn't need to be a specific reason why a game earned $0. MOST GAMES EARN $0. If its your first game its especially going to earn $0. Those comments people give... the feedback isn't wrong, but even if you did do marketing, fixed the art, added multiplayer, or whatever else they were suggesting... the likely outcome is you still earn $0. And comments would have a whole new set of justifications as for why. But again, games don't need a reason to make $0. They need a reason to *not* make $0.

Anyway, this isn't a business advice post, so I'm not gonna tell you all the ways you can make a game not make $0, though I *will* say one great path towards that is to uh... make a lot of little games, and maybe one of those might get some kind of viral attention or win some awards or attract the attention of a publisher or something. Expanding on that game is a good way to not make $0.

But no, the main point of this section is not how to make money. It's about being smart about the risks you take. There's nothing wrong with releasing games that fail (by whatever definition of fail you want to use) as long as you can feel proud of it or at least learn something from it. But if you dropped out of school or quit your job or took out a huge loan and spent years working on something, well those flops hit a lot harder.

I wanna make sure I'm not misconstrued here, I'm not saying "never take risks". Risks are absolutely necessary! What I'm saying is, "practice in a low stakes environment". Your two week project is not gonna ruin you if it "fails". The stakes are low. There’s room to make mistakes, which means you can learn from those mistakes, which means your next thing will have a higher chance of success. At some point you may decide that chance is high enough that you do wanna take that jump and make a big ambitious project. Great! That's the goal! But if you skip that first step... the chance is gonna be pretty close to 0.

In fact, a low stakes environment is a really damn good place for taking risks and doing weird stuff. So many great indie games spawned from Newgrounds. So many unique games spawned from game jams. There's a reason for this! A low stakes environment is freeing. If your game doesn't *need* to make money, and there’s no expectation that it will, then you can do whatever the fuck you want with it. Who cares what other people expect? Give them something weird. Unshackle yourself.

REASON 6: DUMB BUSINESS AND MARKETING STUFF

I'm trying to not make this post about the business and money side of making games. But hey, if we really wanna cover all the reasons why making a bunch of small projects before jumping into a big one is a good idea, well there are money and business reasons as well. And if your end goal is a *career* and not simply a hobby, then you will inevitably have to make money on it.

The games industry is weird. There's a ton of dumb luck involved in success. The more games you make, the more chances you have that any individual one takes off in ways you weren't expecting, and hey that's something that could be the trigger you need to turn it into a bigger project.

It's not just about the attention tho, it's also possible that you might just stumble onto a game concept that turns out to have far more potential than you originally thought. My first big commercial game project, Closure, was the result of one of these. The flash game it was based off of took 2 months, but god damn it was really cool and got a million plays on Newgrounds, and it was hard not to look at that game and just think of all the potential ways to make it bigger and cooler.

Making tons of small games also helps you build up an audience and fanbase that can support you and help hype up your bigger projects. Marketing's hard after all, "do marketing" is correct advice but not really actionable for a lot of games as you cant just start that process as an afterthought at the end of development, it just doesn’t work that way. It needs to be part of the project from pretty early on, and the game needs to be marketable. You gotta practice that too, and smaller projects are once again a great way to practice that so you don't mistakes on your larger ones. Having an existing fanbase makes the whole thing easier too, so anything you can do to build up that fanbase is great.

Making tons of small games also helps you network with other developers and make friends and find other people to work with on projects. Few people are gonna wanna join up to work on your dumb big dream project if you don't have anything to offer them, but "hey lets team up for a game jam" is a lot easier sell. And if you work well together then those relationships can chain into bigger and better things.

REASON 7: IT'S FUN

Making games is fun, and making lots of games is lots of fun. That's it. That's this section.

PART 2: THE HOW

So, how exactly do you make a small game? What counts as a small game? Let's go over that part now. What I am saying here is mostly recommendations, not rules. You don't have to follow them to the letter, or at all if you don't want. After all, the only real advice is "make and release a bunch of small games before making your big one". So if you already have an idea on how to do that, then great! You can ignore this entire section. But since some people want tangible advice as a guideline, then here you go.

"How much time should I spend on a small game?"

2 weeks. Maybe less, depends on how much free time you got. But 2 weeks is plenty. After a few 2 week games you can move up to 1 month games if you so choose, or you can keep doing 2 week games, or maybe even a 1-weekend game jam game. But 2 weeks is a sweet spot for beginners.

"WTF? 2 weeks? How?"

You think smaller. Whatever your idea for what you want to make is, think smaller. What CAN you do in 2 weeks? Keep shrinking the idea until it seems like 2 weeks is more than enough, then do that.

STAGE 1: THE TUTORIAL

You can go from zero experience to a working Pong clone in a few hours. So maybe pong is too small. Or maybe not, that'd be a valuable couple hours if you are starting from nothing. Your goal here is to get your feet wet and learn the tools, not to create greatness. Snake is another good one, a bit more complicated than pong, but quite a bit more fun, and you can go 0-to-Snake in a day or two probably, and snake has a lot more room for adding twists and gimmicks to it to make it unique than pong. Speaking of which, if you pick something you can get up and working in a day or two and then spend the rest of that 2 weeks adding twists and gimmicks to make it your own, that’s a great thing to do too.

A simple platformer might be harder to do in 2 weeks from 0 experience. It's possible, but much easier if you at least learn the tools first. But with even one or two extremely tiny games under your belt first, a short platformer in 2 weeks is very doable.

Whatever you choose to do here, the goal of this stage is to learn the tools and the basics. It's probably not fulfilling to just simply clone pong and snake and mario, but its over quick. Try to come up with unique twists to add onto them and it's a little more fulfilling. But learn what you need to learn and move on. If you had any prior relevant experience you can safely skip this stage.

STAGE 2: THE GRIND

You know how to use the tools, now you can actually make your own games. This is the fun part. This is where you come up with your own ideas and attempt to make them. This is the stage where you should start learning how to finish and release your games. Put them up on newgrounds or itch.io for free. You want people to play them and give you feedback. Something playable in the browser is going to be a lot easier to get people to play than something they need to download and install. Consider tools that let you do web builds.

Now here's the kicker. Once your game is released and uploaded, close the book on it and move on. Take the feedback to heart, but put it towards the next game, not the one you just released. Your goal here is to make a lot of games, not iterate on one forever. If you want to practice fixing bugs and doing updates, budget that into your 2 weeks. Make a 1 week project and spend 1 week updating it. Then move on.

Unshackle yourself from expectations. Stop watching youtube video essays about game design, the vast majority of those are useless for actually making games (most of the people who made them are not game developers, and don't have any actual experience for you to learn from). They're entertainment only. Try to learn by doing. Experiment.

Try to work in a variety of genres and styles. Pick things you don't like about other games and try to improve them. Mash genres together. "Why is making an RPG a game dev meme?" Make an RPG and find out. "Is 3D really that much harder than 2D?" Make a 3D game and find out. "Is a combat system where you do X and Y a good idea?" Make it, and find out. "What if I made a visual novel where you do inception on plants". Make it, and find out.

Try to get people to actually play the games you release. Post them on relevant reddits and twitter and social media. Make some juicy gifs to attract people to your page. Literally just ask for feedback, people will give it to you. More than you want. Some games will grab people's attention, some won't. Get them in front of people and figure out which is which. Other game devs are an easy audience to reach for getting that initial feedback, but strive to break out of that bubble and get feedback from people who aren't game developers, who aren’t your friends and family. The general internet. Gamers.

Be prepared to abandon plenty of prototypes if they don't work out. 2 weeks is a guideline, if after 2 weeks you don't have a fun game, shelve it and move on. Don't get stuck. Make LOTS OF THINGS.

STAGE 3: THE BIG PROJECT

At some point, you're gonna wanna make your big project. How will you know you're ready? When is it a good idea to finally take that risk? The only real answer is, "you'll know". But good advice here is stay open. Maybe one of your small games gets more attention than you thought it would. Maybe one prototype shows far more promise than anything else you've made. Maybe you place in the top at a game jam. Maybe you just feel like that fuzzy indeterminate path towards your big idea is now clear and achievable. Any of these can be reasons to finally take the plunge. "You'll know".

When you start this project, you'll have an understanding of what your goals are with it. You'll know your strengths and how to play to them. You'll know your weaknesses, and know who to ask for help. You'll know how long it should take. You'll know what the important stuff to focus on is. You'll know what its hook is, and how to get people to care about it. Fans of your smaller projects will be there to kickstart your hype and cheer you on. Friends you've made are there to help. You know how to get and respond to feedback. It's energizing. It's so much better starting from here than from zero, and your game will be so much better for it as well.

PART 3: THE BUT

This is the section where I address some of the common reactions to people who see "make a lot of small games" and just, really wanna disagree with that for whatever reason.

"But what about <insert successful indie game here>!? They didn't do it this way! Why should I?"

Chances are, they actually did. You just didn't see the trail of smaller games or other relevant projects they made before they had their breakout hit. Look up their history, or even just ask them about it on twitter. The information is there. Obviously there are still *some* exceptions, but much fewer than you'd think, and even most of those had some other mitigating factors in their story.

"But what if I don't want to make small games first? What if I'm happier just grinding forever on my big project?"

You do you. Just be aware of what you're doing.

"But what if I don't want a bunch of shitty games released under my name?"

Nobody's gonna remember or care about the stuff you put on your itch.io account. They'll only remember the hits. The illusion of an "overnight success" despite a dev having 50 games under their belt before their big hit is a testament to this. Literally don't worry about it.

"But what if I'm already years into my big project but didn't do this, are you telling me I'm just supposed to abandon it to make smaller games I don't care about?"

I mean, no not really. But why not try? 2 weeks ain't a big time investment right, if you try it and hate it you didn't lose much. Chances are you won't hate it tho. If you're asking me this I assume it's because you're having some doubts about your project. Maybe its not as fun as you hoped, or maybe development is feeling like you're stuck in a quagmire. If that is the case, then yeah I do think it would be immensely valuable to take a break and make a few small things. It could be just what you need to refresh that motivation and become inspired again.

"But what if, fuck you!"

A surprisingly common response. I'm not sure what about this advice makes some people so vitriolic, perhaps they know its true

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