Red Pages Podcast
Red Pages Podcast Games of the Year 2019
Gord's Pick
I don't like Game of the Year.
Every year I joke about choosing Dwarf Fortress which is a game that transforms me into a mechanical methodical process, that redirects all of my mental capacity into one point.
It's a drug. It has rewired my brain. I'm a different person because of Dwarf Fortress -- not emotionally, but programmatically.
Dwarf Fortress is perpetually between proof-of-concept and official tangible release, but there's a Steam page for it, but the release date is "time is subjective". Maybe next year. Maybe in another thirteen years.
I struggle with making definitive statements. My understanding of my own emotions is abstract. Sometimes, as with The Norwood Suite, I realize that I have in fact felt a deep resonance with an experience that I had written off. I thought about that game for weeks. That manor still exists in my head.
Because of these things, I find it hard to be analytical. Did this give me an emotional reaction? Uhh, sure. Okay, in what ways? What did it do well? What fundamental aspects can you boil down to compare with similar ones from similar experiences? I have no idea.
I can hold up this broad stroke of experiences and gesture towards it, saying here I played The Missing (deeply uncomfortable, forced me to grow), here was Link's Awakening (nostalgic but fluffy now please do an Oracle double release), here is God of War (I had to go tell my son how much I loved him), but I don't know how any of them affected the mosaic, or painting, or whatever this analogy is.
I can tell you Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not my Game of the Year, and I can even tell you why.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not it
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has some fun moments. You get to do some cool things and feel like a badass. It's nice.
And it took a bunch of cues from the influential Dark Souls franchise/megagenre.
But it feels like a souls-like-lite. I'm glad for the direction and I think there's a place for this kind of game but all I could concentrate on was how it fell short. Like the weird relationship between the feeling of risk and your experience balance, how it swings between low-pressure at low-balance to high at high, but then drops back to zero when a full bar is translated into a skill point that doesn't drop on death.
Or the lack of fast-travel. Chasing down achievements was punishing when two percent of my remaining map exploration was on the back half of Kashyyyk. I think I left that for last, got the platinum trophy, and laid that save file to rest on the spot so I wouldn't have to climb back out.
The combat system is good. It rewards skillfull play and every death is fair.
I felt like the PS4 Pro was the wrong platform to buy this game on. I felt like I was being told that I had made the wrong decision. Having every single scene load without textures is jarring and honestly unconscionable for a triple-A title. It's ugly. This game is ugly. I don't care how pretty the prettiest part is, if your game at any point loads models without textures, it is all as ugly as that because that's the only part I'll notice.
The load times were terrible! Maybe that's a limitation of the hardware, or maybe you shouldn't shoot for more than the hardware can handle. Loading a new planet is fine, because modern game design dictates that you hide loads with a light-show and character interactions (also see: God of War 2018) and they did that but dying in a tough fight twenty times in a row is twenty minutes of looking at my phone wishing I was playing the game I sat down to play.
I guess I do know how I feel sometimes.
Okay. What other games were important to me in 2019? Fire Emblem: Three Houses was great! There's a lot to like. It's not the game that got me into the franchise but it's a solid delivery on my expectations coming out of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.
Did it move me?
I dunno.
They did some cool stuff with storytelling and I like that and I want to see more of it. Maybe this'll be a runner-up.
So what was my Game of the Year?
You know what it was?
Gloomhaven
It was Gloomhaven. If there really are comparable metrics, this one wins across a good many of them and by a lot.
It brought me and my friends closer. It has a lot of complex parts but is designed well enough that the game runs smoothly; It is really well-designed. We talk about the game while we're not playing. We play once or twice a week for hours a night. We get to formulate plans and do cool things, and we're always pushed to try out new stuff, which is introduced exactly often enough that nothing ever gets tired.
The universe is made from whole-cloth, not even touching the Tolkien/D&D multiverse at any points. The Legacy aspect of the game manifests in concrete ways that makes our decisions feel important and never punishing. The game scales really well and we've been able to bring visiting players in to share the experience.
Gloomhaven is monolithic. It comes in a huge box just packed with tokens and envelopes and sealed cartons and figurines and so many cards. It's heavy. It's vast.
It's tough. We need to be playing at our best, and we still lose, but we get back up and work together to find a solution.
We're always excited to sit down and play, even though we've played dozens of games by now for well over a hundred hours.
We feel like we picked exactly the right group to play it with. Every one of us shares that level of excitement for the game, and it exists as this warm scaffolding for the time we get to spend together.
It's great. It's a source of joy.
It was released in 2017 and Justin is going to hate that.