dC's Josuke Zone

I wanted to respond to this in its own post because i felt it might be a bit long and i dont want to inundate my few followers with my list over and over again. Anyway, virtues last reward...

Why is VLR my goty for 2012 in my decades list? (This post contains potential spoilers about vlr)

The reason i chose virtues last reward is because of how it shaped my taste in almost all sci fi media i enjoyed after the fact. Litereally every thing ive ever read or watched after playing vlr that showed even a hint of time travel, i would think about vlr and how it actually ended up being my ideal take on how time travel works. So often i would be consuming some media and think to myself "wow what if the time travel worked more like this wouldnt that be awesome?!" And then realize i just want it to be more like vlr.

A modern example of this, and this contains slight outer wilds spoilers

In the outer wilds you are stuck in a 22 minute time loop and part of the gameplay is investigating why and how youre in the loop along with other mysteries one might expect from a sci fi archeology space game. While trying to figure out what was happening, one of my earlier ideas was "what if what happens is you arent actually looping in time but youre conciousness is being sent to a different timeline's you" because thats how zero escape time travel works, and i feel its a strong showing of not only how impactful vlr was in that im still thinking about it, but also how its now my gold standard for how i want time travel to work in any media.

Vlr has its share of problems, but at the end of the day, the way its influenced my taste in sci fi is so prevelant to how i consume media, even to the point of being on my mind during this years goty, it had a profound effect on me and as such, is my 2012 goty.

I feel like i could talk at length about each of the games on the list, but this is a big reason i chose vlr, and i still have so much more to say but this is already getting long. I should really make something talking about why i chose these games more in depth and how theyre some of my fave games of all time as well.

Heres my games of the decade list, and for clarification its my goty for each year based on release date and not based on when i actually played it okay here you go

2010 Fallout New Vegas

2011 To the Moon

2012 Virtues Last Reward

2013 Papers Please

2014 The Talos Principle

2015 Undertale

2016 The Witness

2017 Pyre

2018 Return of the Obra Dinn

2019 Outer Wilds