#infernax

10: The Quarry

I'm going to be a hundred percent honest with you here, I did not expect this to be a good game. I have a bone to pick with the developers of these games, with the exception of Until Dawn I have not liked a single one of these narrative adventure games they've been making for the past however many years. I didn't like Man of Medan, I hated Little Hope, never played House of Ashes (I watched someone else play it, it's fine I guess), and I completely forgot about The Devil in Me. Hell as one of the four people who actually played it I really didn't care for The Inpatient which is one of these narrative adventures but in VR.

Despite my dislike for most of this company's output I for some reason did give The Quarry a shot. It has some narrative problems that still somewhat annoy me six months later. Despite some quibbles I have with the story this is a very solid game. If you like the modern narrative adventure game this is a good one to play and has some decent B-movie charm to it. It's not a masterpiece, just a fun adventure. It might not be the most substantial adventure, and it wobbles like crazy if you look at it too hard, but I recall liking it. Honestly it's one of those entries where if I could think of something even slightly better it would be left off this list.

09: Gundam Evolution

It plays like Overwatch except it doesn't make me completely and utterly miserable to play. Also it really caters to my giant nerd boner for Gundam.

08: Infernax

Honestly this was a surprising game to play because I knew basically nothing about this when I started playing it. What little I did hear about it wasn't exactly a massive selling point, because honestly who remembers anything about Castlevania 2 outside of it being regarded as one of the worst Castlevania games made?

I was initially turned off by the game because I can't justify why but lately I don't particularly care for 8-bit NES style graphics, also I thought the overly bloody look of the game seemed a bit too immature and tryhard for my liking. But I kept hearing good things about the game so I decided to give it a whirl and to my surprise it was a really fun 2D action game. Some of the jumps are a bit too pixel perfect for my tastes, having to get your character to jump just so through some fiendishly placed blocks. The game has something of a moral choice system in it where you have to decide between two options that might seem a bit lopsided when look at them from afar. That said with the exception of the final area in one of the routes the game is a pretty fair and decent challenge. Only the final area is a bit chekpoint starved, but it wasn't enough to be a real deal breaker in any form. I wish to talk about the graphics for a moment, when the game goes into its cutscenes I feel that it really nails the look and feel of medieval/fantasy properties of the 1980s, everything just has that certain quality that a movie like Excalibur had (I was sort of drawing a blank on a monster flick to use an example here, the only thing I could think of was the movie Excalibur).

07: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

During the first twelve hours or so of the game I wasn't feeling it. It played like a polishing up of a lot of the systems in Nioh sure, but something about the game was just rubbing me the wrong way. Admittedly this might have come from the fact I had just come from a hundred and fifty hours of Elden Ring so I might have been a bit burned out on the masocore games. What I like about Stranger of Paradise is it really is an amalgamation of some of the best ideas from a Soulslike and some of the stronger aspects of Final Fantasy. I love the inclusion of the job system, and I love how the game lets you freely change jobs willy-nilly without having to completely start over to respec your character or use a limited use item to do this. The only thing it needs is to put in the jump button that put into Sekiro and Elden Ring and I think it might have been the perfect game.

I'm honestly blown away at how good the story is for this game. While it starts off just a rather odd retelling of Final Fantasy I it eventually becomes a emotionally moving tale. While I'm sure you've seen the meme scenes of Jack being his gruff angry self telling Final Fantasy I bosses to fuck off it actually pays it off really well. It's actually really surprising how emotionally invested I got in to Jack's journey by the end.

06: Blood West

I admit over the years I have relaxed my position on Early Access games. Five or so years ago I would scoff and turn my nose up at them, but then at some point I started looking at early access and being more receptive to them. Couldn't tell you why, or even what game did it but I find myself more willing to give Early Access games a shot. Should Blood West even be considered to having released this year? That's kind of a pendantic go nowhere argument, because time was I would've said no, when it hits 1.0 that should be considered the release date. But the game did come out playable in 2022, so it's kind of a crapshoot in my opinion.

That being said I was so utterly hooked and adored damn near everything about Blood West when I played it shortly after its release in Early Access. I guess I might just be a sucker for the concept of monster running riot in the old west, just something about the idea tickles me. Then there's the fact that the game is just damn fun to play through, and it has just enough going for it you can play it as both a sneaky Immersive Sim type of game where you don't just blast everything that moves. Or you can walk up in to town bold as you please and just gun down every single creature you see with reckless abandon. Of course this was within a month of the release, for all I know they've changed it up enough that you can't just waste every monster from one end of the map to another. I really need to play the second chapter they've released for this game.

05: MythForce

For some reason I feel that I've implied with a lot of the list here that I went in to a lot of these games feeling cold towards them. When I first saw the trailer for MythForce I didn't particularly like it because I felt it was emblematic of an issue with a lot of media today, this obsession with the 1980s. However I'm not always willing to let a negative initial impression turn me off from a game that could be good entirely, and so I decided to give MythForce a try. It's refreshing to see a roguelike that is willing to buck trends and be something other than a 2D game! There's an entire array of graphical styles you can use, you don't have to pigeonhole the entire genre to the 2D metroidvania sidescroller!

The game has a wonderfully weighty melee combat system that makes you plan out your combat encounters a bit more than just "I'm going to wade into that group of skeletons and show them whatfor!" I don't know if there's more to the Early Access version that exists now than the one castle environment, but I admit that's because I'm not great at the game and haven't cleared the area. That being said I do quite like the game, I was playing it in two hour chunks a day for almost an entire month.

It's a fun game and I like playing it once a week or so, it's just not the deepest game out there. It is however an excellent game to turn your brain off to and listen to a podcast or audiobook or a really dull movie perhaps. A great zone out game.

04: Holocure

As much as I like Hololive I was wary of this game because I didn't particularly care for Vampire Survivors. But it had a playable Calliope Mori, and who am I to turn down that chance? I like this game a hell of a lot more than Vampire Survivors, something about being able to lock down a direction to always be firing at is an incredible boon in this game and something I wish was in the other one. There was a big update recently that added more of the vtubers to the game as well as an extra level which greatly expanded the longevity of this game for me. I just adore how quick and effortless it is to sunk a half hour or so into any given run and have it feel like basically no time has passed.

I eagerly look forward to any updates they put out for this game. It is my biggest hope that one day they add Risu as a playable character. Also despite what others might say Miko and Mio are far and away the best characters in this game. I particularly love Mio's super, it being a fun and delightful Jojo reference. I wish Roboco played better than she does, but I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who love the way she plays.

03: Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

This is where the list gets particularly rough for me. For a good chunk of summer I thought for sure it was going to be a pure fight between Three Hopes and Elden Ring. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is damn near everything I want from an action RPG. The gameplay is solid enough on its own to make the multiple hundreds of hours it takes to one hundred percent the game engaging enough to not drag down the experience. Despite being a bit rough graphically being on the Switch I find I generally like the look of the game. The story was genuinely one of the most intriguing and best stories I played this year, even if there are some times where it is really stupid and some elements of the story just plain don't appear during certain story routes. For instance it never shows what goes on with Edelgard and the Empire during the Blue Lions storyline. But the game acts like it showed you all of this over the course of the game.

Perhaps this is because I'm a couple years removed from the original Three Houses but I generally found the storylines in this to be better than those in Three Houses. I do love the recent trend of Musou games trying to justify why the characters you play as can cut a bloody swath through thousands of men. Just a very solid and nice refinement of the Musou formula from the first Fire Emblem Warriors, and it's made better by focusing on one games worth of cast rather than the scattershot approach of including characters from multiple older entries.

02: Elden Ring

I love big Dark Souls. This was a wonderful game to come back to time and again over the course of the year. Elden Ring, prior to release I was slightly skeptical about, after all it has happened multiple times in the past a game decides to go big open world and is all the lesser for it. But I was very gratified and happy to learn that Elden Ring decided to take the open world formula and actually make the world worth exploring. Rather than just be large fields with nothing really in between points of interest the Lands Between is chockful of interesting areas to have a nice little poke around in. There's so much stuff to see and do in Elden Ring that it was constantly stunning me the sheer amount of stuff they crammed into this game. It made the game so much grander to explore through with how much of it is available right from the start, usually I find myself a bit paralyzed by indecision in open world games, but Elden Ring just lets you go around at your own pace. Even when while having my leisurely ride through the environs usually resulted in me triggering fights with monsters way out of my level range I was always having a grand time.

The inclusion of a thing as simple as a jump button was an incredible boon to this game that it makes going back to older Souls games a bit of a trial. I sort of think that since From Software has made nothing but Soulslikes for the past decade perhaps they should do something else. As it stands I don't think there's really anything they could do to build upon Elden Ring, to really improve upon the formula. I know it wouldn't really be that much of a different type of game from Elden, the Souls, and Sekiro but what if they made a new Otogi game? Hell make a Souls-y type of game set in the modern day time frame of Ninja Blade.

I adore Elden Ring, and greatly admire its gameplay. This to me feels like what all open-world action RPG games should be like instead of the likes of an Elder Scrolls. I do imagine though that the sheer love I and many others felt upon this games release is not unlike those of people who played and liked Skyrim back in the day.

01: Signalis