Chris Dow's Completed Games of 2022 (Part 2)
As the story goes, a few years back, whilst procrastinating at work, I found that the safe search filter employed by the school I taught at did not block the games message board Resetera. These days, my current employer does block the big R, and although this means my interactions on that board have dropped off significantly, I do still partake in one thread: Wozzer’s 52 Games. 1 Year.
For years now, Wozzer has encouraged people to aim to finish the equivalent of one game a week across the calendar year. People were free to log their completions any way they wanted. A short review. A score out of ten. Number of hours it took to beat.
2022 is the fifth year where I have bested this challenge.
This year, the Steam Deck meant that the amount of games I beat dropped significantly as I was playing more, but finishing less. However, with just a few days to go, I hit the magic number.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, please consider subbing to our Patreon. Backers get live updates as I finish games throughout the year via our very special Discord channel.
If you missed it, Part 1 of this series, covering completed games #1-#26 is right here.
27. Aperture Desk Job (PC) - 16/07/22 - ~1 Hour (Credits)
Not sure whether to start counting ‘Steam Deck’ as a platform distinct from PC or not. Regardless, what an *insane* piece of hardware.
This little chamber piece, ostensibly a tech demo for the Steam Deck itself, is a Portal-adjacent game set at Aperture Science Labs. It wraps in under an hour, but it’s a great laugh for the time you’re in this world. It looks incredibly on the Deck, it feels incredible on the Deck, and it showcases just about every input device on the new machine: face buttons, analogue sticks, back triggers, touch screen, haptic touch pads, gyro, microphone, the lot.
As is customary with Portal games, it also includes some excellent, funny voice acting, this time courtesy of JK Simmons and Nate Bargatze. A really good time.
28. Glass Masquerade (PC) - 10/07/22 - ~10 hours (All Trophies [Steam])
I beat Glass Masquerade during the first UK lockdown back in 2020. It was a strange, bittersweet thing. Switch in hand, I placed shards of glass into place to soothing music whilst the TV announcement unknowingly condemned me not to see my partner for the next 4 months.
In 2022, things are different, and I’ve played the PC version of Glass Masquerade for around 8 hours on the PC, with the final 2 being completed on the Steam Deck. As a showcase for cloud save, it’s great.
The PC version has a large chunk of DLC (effectively doubling the size of the game), hence the inflated completion time versus the Switch version a few years ago.
Probably the best video puzzle (as in jigsaw puzzle) game there is. Keen to try the second at some point.
29. Bloom (Playdate) - 08/08/22 - ~6 hours (Credits)
What a stunner. I was the original O3C proponent of Backspace Bouken, RNG Party's first 'big' game, but I think Bloom is way more interesting. Way more unique. Way more affecting.
Part visual novel, part gardening sim, you play as Midori, a university drop out who has opted to start a flower business.
The game unfolds via text messages in semi-real time. You grow and harvest flowers, all with their own timers for seeding, watering, picking, etc, and each time you check back in to the game, snippets of conversation appear in a messaging app on your in-game phone. It's not quite real time, in that messages come through after time has passed as opposed to at set times, but with a little suspension of disbelief it still works great.
Most effective are the way the writing handles events: texts that lead up to an off-screen event, then texts that cover what did or didn't happen at said event after the fact. It's an incredibly immersive way of framing things.
The game deals with Midori's relationships with her girlfriend, friends, and parents alongside her business, and there were moments of real gravity in the way these conversations were handled. A beautiful thing.
One of the pricier side-load titles for the Playdate (as in, it's outside the 'season' of games delivered by publisher Panic) but absolutely essential.
When I'd finished the game I still checked in daily for another 15 or so days to get all the unique 'Daily Horoscope' dialogue and to complete my gacha toy collection, so I've added an hour or so's playtime to reflect this.
30. Acting Lessons (PC) - 11/08/22 - ~11 hours (All Trophies [Steam])
Technically a replay, in that I reached at least one ending a year or so ago.
Went back to mop up the remainder of the achievements for taking different story paths, and exploring different outcomes for the protagonist.
It's a visual novel. But it's a Western visual novel. And a visual novel which starts one way and ends a very different way. Oh, and a visual novel that peppers in sex scenes all over the place.
Despite that though, this is an adult visual novel, not only because of its X-rated scenes, but because of its wider themes.
The plot twists between terminal illness, trauma, racism, nepotism, meritocracy, polyamory and alternative relationships and remarkably, manages to be surprisingly well written considering it's penned by a single, likely pretty horny, developer. Sure, things get a bit overwrought in places, but somehow the game’s script is able to tackle a variety of quite challenging issues through it’s story with reasonable nuance.
A genuinely surprising game.
31. Pick Pack Pup (Playdate) - 16/09/22 - ~2 hours (Credits)
A simple match-3 puzzle game, but one that features a really interesting story.
You’re a dog working at a fulfilment centre for a Amazon-alike. Each of the 30 stages asks that you pack items in certain ways, i.e. fighting against a timer, or aiming to pack certain items whilst avoiding others. It’s all simple stuff, but it’s wrapped up in such nice dressing that it’s great fun for the couple hours it lasts.
When complete, there’s a whole bunch of additional modes to play - endless, timed, etc etc. A great game to leave installed on the Playdate for quick 5 minute sessions on the loo.
32. Save Room (PC) - 16/09/22 - ~2 hours (All Trophies [Steam])
Oh, this is tasty.
A puzzle game built entirely around the inventory management of Resident Evil 4.
At first you're just bunging guns and ammo into a simple grid, then a few stages in you're combining herbs and gunpowder, deliberately eating rotten eggs, and juggling healing items to make things fit into increasingly awkward geometry. Great fun.
2 hours all in, doesn't outstay it's welcome, but gleefully pushes the limits of the original game's inventory system to its limit without ever becoming arbitrary. Big recommend for an evening's fun. Plays great on the Deck too with mouse mapped to the touchpad.
33. Harold’s Walk (3DS) - 17/09/22 - ~1 hour (100%)
The 3DS always struggled for true 3rd party exclusives, even on its digital store front. Doing some recent digging though, I realised there’d be a fair amount of end-of-life oddities dropped onto the eShop including a fascinating game called Automaton Lung which seemed to be a weird liminal space, exploratory collect-em-up. Bit of research, and it turns out the developer of that game had already put out two weird games prior on the handheld: Harold’s Walk, and Harold Reborn.
Harold’s Walk is a short 3D platformer that again pretty much fits the genre description I just gave Automaton. Wander strange spaces collecting crowns, and avoiding one solitary enemy type: a pair of legs with an eye stuck on the groin.
Visuals are weird, music is weird, post-game is weird. It’s all weird. And therefore cool. In a weird way.
34. Lego Builder’s Journey (PC) - 25/09/22 - ~3 hours (All Trophies [Steam])
Played this back on the iPad when it first hit Apple Arcade, and it was so, so nice to revisit it.
A Lego game unlike any other Lego game. A properly heartfelt indie tearjerker isometric puzzler rather than the collectathons of the Traveller’s Tales games.
It’s also, and I don’t say this lightly, perhaps the most visually stunning game I’ve played on any format. It looked great on the ultra HD screen of the iPad, and in its PC port, even at a lower resolution on the Steam Deck’s screen, it looks even better owing to the multitude of visual options the home computer build affords.
You’re not getting ray tracing when played on Deck (perhaps that’s an excuse to buy it again sometime on the PS5!) but you are getting one of the most accurate lighting models I think I’ve ever seen. Honestly, it highlights every single plastic edge of these bricks, with beautifully accurate shadows and reflections. You have see if for yourself, honestly.
35. Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden (PC) - 08/10/22 - ~6 hours (Credits)
This is one of those mythical freeware / flash games at this point. Presented as a canon sequel to both Mega Drive sports game Barkley, Shut Up And Jam and the film Space Jam, you play as Charles Barkley, NBA Superstar, in a parody RPG that’s played COMPLETELY straight.
I’m not going to spoil any of the story, as pretty much all the game’s humour relies on you buying into the gameworld’s utterly dumb premise, but I will say it’s a genuine laugh from start to finish, and despite launching in the mid-2000s it mostly avoids the edgelord internet humour that makes a lot of this era’s media somewhat problematic when viewed 15 or 20 years into the future.
There’s still some misfires that make things a little uncomfortable in places. Status effects in battle for instance are all named after actual medical conditions and disabilities, which feels a little ableist, even if, in execution it’s no worse than the type of jokes South Park still makes today. It also centres a whole quest line on taking down a character unfortunately based on Bill Cosby - although it’s hard to know how much anyone was aware of his behaviour and misdeeds back when this game was being developed by its 3-man development team, it’s still a little icky when viewed in 2022.
Overall though, this is a brisk, genuinely amusing RPG, that uses linearity by choice to poke fun at the genre, RPG-Maker culture, and the stock we place in esoteric media in a way that made me laugh throughout its 5 or 6 hour run time.
I played this on the Steam Deck, but, as a word of warning, be prepared to get deep in to the inner workings of Linux, Proton and Wine compatibility to make this one play. The challenge of getting it up and running easily took longer than actually beating the game in sheer hourage.
36. Machinarium (Switch) - 22/10/22 - ~6 hours (Credits)
I’m going to talk about this at length on the podcast, but as a quick Cliff Notes version of my review: great aesthetics, so so puzzles and interface. Truly gorgeous art and sound direction that carry a decent indie point and click adventure.
37. Pepsi Invaders / Coke Wins (2600) - 23/10/22 - ~45 mins (All Achievements [RA])
People say that Atari 2600 games don’t really hold up, but I think it’s all a matter of context.
Coke Wins is a stupid Space Invaders clone that has some odd marketing story behind it regarding sales of Coke versus Pepsi back in the early 80s. Ignoring any of this branding though, it’s just a simple single screen shooter. Shoot the enemies, don’t get shot. The only real twist is that the game runs on a 3 minute timer. You’re score will always be dictated, in part, by your speed.
And that’s cool!
With Retro Achievements integration on top of this simple conceit, you’ve got a fun high score chaser. Achievements asked that I reached a certain score, naturally, but also that I did so without dying. Then, as a final challenge, asked that I survive the 3 minute Pepsi onslaught without firing a shot.
It’s not particularly hard, but having this RA set meant that I sat and played Coke Wins for the best part of an hour.
38. Effie (PC) - 29/10/22 - ~10 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
It’s a 3D platform game, that's a little bit open world in that you can tackle big stages in any order with a pleasant Hyrule Field style hub world in between. The game does its best Breath of the Wild impression by sticking the odd little encampment here and there for some bonus loot, but this is not a Zelda-like by any stretch of the imagination.
You collect things, find treasure chests, fight enemies, solve little puzzles. All pretty standard stuff, but comfortingly assured in execution. It’s an indie game, sure, but it’s one of those ‘pushed the boat out for an Unreal Engine’ license indies, rather than a ‘my first Unity project’ indie, with a decent level of polish to it all. Reviews seem to suggest it had a bit of a rocky launch, and there are still performance hiccups here and there even on decent hardware, but it was mostly smooth sailing.
The game should take around 6 hours to beat, but an hour or two from the game's end I realised I'd locked myself out of 100% completion, so restarted. A decent time, all in.
39. Block Buster (Supervision) - 30/10/22 - ~90 mins (All Achievements [RA])
I'd never ever heard of the Watara Supervision.
When exploring Retroachievements, I saw there were a bunch of lesser known platforms listed under 'other' - i.e. not a Sega, Nintendo, or Sony device. I'd heard of the Intellivision, the Wonderswan etc. The Supervision was totally new to me though.
Released as a competitor to the Gameboy, this is another 4 tone, monochrome handheld dealio. The games are almost all universally terrible with horrible flicker, delayed input polling, and assets / game ideas just lifted wholesale from other machines.
Block Buster is basically Tetris, but with a double width well, stuttering controls, and the music from stage one of Super Mario Land playing on loop. The achievement set asked that I get to 200 lines total. Both easier and more challenging than it seems owing to a perpetually slow game speed, even as levels stack up, and sticky movement and dropped inputs.
40. 8-Bit Bayonetta (PC) - 30/10/22 - ~30 mins (All Achievements [Steam])
This is that new Bayonetta everyone's going on about, right? I mean, I didn't hear much voice acting, so I can't weigh in on that debate..
(It's a stupid score chasing mini-game released by Sega for free at somepoint in the distant past. It's a decent time killer for the 20-30 minutes it will take you to unlock all of the achievements.)
41. 2nd Space (Mega Duck) - 01/11/22 - ~2 hours (All Achievements [RA])
You start down a rabbit hole, and the end is seemingly always bottomless. Is the Welback Holdings Mega Duck more or less obscure than the Watara Supervision?
Who cares when I now have a full romset, playable from my emulation setup on the Steam Deck.
This is another monochrome Gameboy competitor, with very similar specs to the Nintendo handheld. If the Supervision felt like the 'we have Gameboy at home' console, the Mega Duck just feels like a Gameboy, at least when played via emulation.
Starting at the top of the library, alphabetically, 2nd Space is a really fun arcade title - part maze game like Pac Man, part 'painter' like Qix or City Connection. You're aiming to pass over each floor tile whilst avoiding enemies. Different to Pac Man, whilst you have to keep to a grid, the enemy characters can float freely over obstacles meaning there's a good amount of strategy to juking back and forth to buy time until a clear path has opened. If you manage to circle and entire obstacle whilst an enemy is on top of it, they're destroyed for a big points bonus, and a little breathing space.
20 stages in all, on my first play I ran out of continues on stage 19, frustratingly, but managed to vanquish the full set on my second play.
42. Arcade Paradise (PC) - 26/11/22 - ~40 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
GOTY.
43. SKYE (PC) - 17/12/22 - ~5 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
A free, maybe student-made (?) flight game set in a fictionalised version of the Scottish Hebrides.
Simple enough, with a bunch of point to point missions, a couple time trials, and 50-odd collectibles scattered across its map. At least 2 hours of my play time was spent looking for the final collectible - not much fun, so if you like to imagine me scoring these games, dock a point from whatever value you’d assume I’d have given it.
It’s got nice, plaintive piano music, and a pretty watercolour style filter across its entire presentation. A bit like what Platinum Games tried to do with Babylon’s Fall, except it looks quite a bit more polished despite coming from a tiny team of nobodies working on their first game.
44. They Came From The Sky (PC) - 19/12/22 - ~3 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
A simple arcade score chaser. You bounce backwards and forwards across the top of the screen as a UFO, whilst attempting to abduct humans and animals walking below. You have access to a ‘warp’ which launches you faster in the direction you are facing which helps to avoid eventual enemy fire and projectiles as the difficulty ramps up.
It’s good fun! Achievements are tied to attrition rather than score though which is always a bit of a shame. By all means reward me for playing for a decent stretch, but also, give me something to aim for! As all unlockables are tied to coins that drop randomly, there isn’t much sense of victory either. If I received a new UFO at 100 points, 200 points, 300 points, etc I think the game would have felt more enjoyable.
45. Marble Trap (PC) - 20/12/22 - ~8 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
I don't know how I came across this game initially.
Was it in a bundle? Was it 11 pence in a Steam Sale? Did it just manifest itself into my library?
A cool ball rolling game. Basically just Marble Madness - isometric, quick stages.
I beat it a few years back when it had 50 stages. Then I beat it again after an update that took the total to 100 and added 3 collectibles in each level. Cheap and cheerful. It felt good in the hand. Not too taxing. Like a nice bag of crisps on your morning work break.
Fast forward to the end of 2022, and a third title update drops with another new crop of stages, taking the game to 120 levels total.
I am not joking when I say that stages 1-110 took a cumulative 2/2.5 hours to beat, with the last 10 taking a further 5 or 6 hours of play. Stage 116, 118 and 120 each took me at least an hour alone.
Aggravating, yes, but also strangely enjoyable because the movement of the ball is so precise and enjoyable to fling about. If the game was more popular, this would be a leaderboard and speedrunners dream, with every stage having corners to cut, or obstacles to bump off of for slightly reduced times.
Maybe you'll pick it up one day in a bundle. Maybe you'll pay 11 pence in an upcoming Steam Sale. Maybe you'll be lucky enough for it to manifest into *your* library?
Either way though, it's a good time.
46. I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 (PC) - 20/12/22 - ~30mins (All Achievements [Steam])
A proper throwback here.
One of the earliest XBLIG titles to get media coverage owing to the fact it was a) a dollar, b) made by James Silva of Ska Studios (The Dishwasher, and more recently Salt and Sanctuary), and c) was a twin stick arena shooter built around a silly soundtrack composed and performed by Silva himself.
You shoot zombies, and then other enemies that pastiche games like Geometry Wars and Asteroids, etc as the music shifts genre and you essentially play through a 15 minute long EP. If you survive until the end of the music, you win. If you don’t, you lose.
I’m not sure when this game came to Steam, but it’s a real treat to go back to something as puerile but also nostalgic as this on the Steam Deck.
I played through it fully, twice. Not because I needed to for the games solitary ‘beat the game’ achievement, just because it was decent fun and the soundtrack’s a good laugh.
47. Tachyon Project (PC) - 23/12/22 - ~5 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
After beating Z0MB1ES I went on a bit of a twin stick kick. Played a chunk of a game called Death Goat which is literally just a high score arena shooter, picked up Geometry Wars 3 in the Winter Steam Sale, AND installed Tachyon Project, a story based twin stick shooter I’d beaten previously on Vita.
Its PC port is much, much harder, as to make the game engine run at all on Sony’s handheld, enemy counts were dropped significantly, meaning that even its toughest challenges weren’t all that. On PC, if you want to beat this thing, you need to *learn* the game.
Like Geometry Wars, its clearest influence, you’re battling against wave after wave of distinct enemies, each with their own behaviours, weak points etc. Unlike Geometry Wars, scoring and life are handled completely differently. Here, your life is tied to the time remaining, with collisions with enemies or projectiles cleaving off precious time. Score comes not from destroying baddies, but instead by harvesting gems they drop afterwards, and a multiplier ticks up with each consecutive kill you achieve without taking damage. As a final mechanical spanner, smart bombs (or other special weapons you can earn and equip) are free to use at any point aside from during small cool down windows, but also eat away at your time / life meaning that if your clock is down to single digits, you’re not going to doing much bombing.
None of the game’s ten stages are that long, but some took a lot of tries to get through, as although there are 6 checkpoints a stage, certain challenges can be really tough to pass without precise movement and attack.
48. Beeny (PC) - 23/12/22 - ~30mins (100% [Steam])
Back in old 2020, I beat Marcus Horn’s MacBat 64 and said “Generally, when games aspire to mimic the N64 or the PS1 they make rookie errors by forgetting hardware limitations. This year though we've seen Paratopic largely nail the affine texture warping of the Playstation, and now MacBat really lean into the N64's incredibly low resolution texturing.”
Beeny is Horn taking on the pre-rendered sprites of Donkey Kong Country on the SNES and absolutely nailing the specifics of the hardware again. Honestly, the backgrounds and character work look exactly as if they were produced on those old Silicon renderers Rare were so fond of back in the day.
The game itself is a very simple platformer. You hop up branches of a tree or similar in each stage to reach a beehive at the summit. 10 stages, with each taking a maximum of a minute to beat. At the game’s conclusion you unlock some bonuses that I won’t spoil, and a time trial mode where you’re aiming to re-beat each stage in a pre-set par time. Still pretty easy, but fun!
49. Sex & Drift (PC) - 23/12/22 - ~3 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed getting more into PC gaming since receiving my Steam Deck and using it as my daily driver for all gaming is the width and breadth of experiences available not just on the device more broadly, but through the Steam store itself.
It’s the Winter Sale as I write this, and last night, I filled my basket with: AAA games; one man indie developed titles; a NES emulator that converts games into 3D on the fly; old GBA games repackaged by enterprising software houses buying up IP; the list honestly goes on and on.
The lack of filter or censorship also means genuinely bizzaro stuff like Sex & Drift makes it to the Steam front page too - a racing / drifting game where beating ‘boss’ drivers unlocks deeply un-arousing images and looped animations of a variety of sexual acts. For just over a quid, I genuinely couldn’t pass up at least giving the thing a go. In skimming my basket to try and bring down the cost to something a bit more reasonable a few days before Christmas, all sorts of better games got the chop, but Sex & Drift made the cut.
Racing is so so, controllers aren’t supported and so need Steam Input to translate WASD acceleration and steering to a more comfortable setup, and music and assets all come from stock libraries resulting in a soundtrack I’ve definitely heard in at least one other game this year alone.
But, this amateur mix of ‘my first Unity project’ and ‘sleazy page 3 in the 1990s level erotica’ just strikes such a unique vibe that I couldn’t help having at least a bit of fun playing through it. This stuff just doesn’t exist anywhere else. For years, games and sex only mixed in doujin development circles (think the PC-98 scene - some amazing looking pixel art, but boobs everywhere) but in 2022, Sex & Drift is available for absolutely anyone providing their Steam Account allows them to see adult content.
50. Coffin Dodgers (PC) - 25/12/22 - ~3 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
Coffin Dodgers is a very average kart racer. The ‘hillarious’ twist here, is that you control a geriatric of your choice atop a mobility scooter, and literally race death, with a comedy depiction of the Grim Reaper a consistent fixture of each race.
After each series of races, the bottom ranking competitor turns into a zombie, having been taken by our pal Death. The single player component of this games was easy. Three or so hours all in, no big deal. But it has an online component too. Finding someone to play with was the first challenge, but after that, the more frustrating achievements are tied to winning an online race on Halloween, Christmas Day, and Valentine’s Day.
With Halloween and Christmas Day now out of the way, I’m taking this as a victory for 2022, even if I won’t get the final achievement for 2 months yet.
* edit * Now complete!
51. Devious Dungeon (PC) - 25/12/22 - ~5 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
I knew this game reasonably well from its Vita port. However, I never finished it there. On the Steam Deck, it’s been a fun time though, just dropping in for ten minutes here and there to grind through the 60-odd stages. Today, Boxing Day, I’ve eaten a roast of leftovers, then sat and watched the return of Premier League football with one eye whilst picking through the last few jobs in Devious Dungeon with the other.
A genuinely brilliant day.
52. Beasties (PC) - 28/12/22 - ~5 hours (Credits [Steam])
And that’s your 52 games for the year.
Beasties is a match-3 puzzler, monster catching RPG-lite. Think Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, and a bit of Pokémon. It’s a frustrating game in that its clear its had a lot of care put into its world, art and monster designs, yet whiffs the basics with really unsatisfying battle mechanics that pale in comparison to what Puzzle Quest or Gyromancer were doing a decade ago.
A Bejewled style match-3 is a Bejeweled style match-3, but Puzzle Quest made things more interesting by giving you abilities that could strike enemies directly, or, more importantly, influence the board directly. Being able to convert gems to colours that favour your team and build, or merely that wouldn’t benefit the opposition meant that every battle could be approached with strategy, and that even with your back against the wall, careful planning might allow a satisfying ‘Hail Mary’ victory, even at the jaws of defeat.
In Beasties, you’re at the behest of the cascade, with your only influence over the board being to make matches, with a match of 4 or better affording an extra turn. No attack gems on the board? Well, you better hope no drop into position for the enemy as otherwise you may end up losing one of your monsters through nothing but RNG and the cosmic will of the universe.
Other annoyances: Zero onboarding, meaning that I didn’t even know how to catch additional monsters until an hour or so into the game; Random battles that seem to take inspiration from the very worst of the NES era by popping up every 2 or 3 steps; No resurrection items meaning that to bring a Beastie back to life you need to walk painfully back to the game’s single village; No ‘Pokédex’ or stat tracking, meaning that the compulsion to collect dies pretty quickly when you realise there’s nothing specific to aim for.
I enjoyed it enough to complete, but not enough to recommend.
53. Maytroid (PC) - 30/12/22 - ~3 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
Maytroid, or to give it its full name ‘Maytroid. I swear it’s a nice game too’, is a short, indie Metroidvania. It’s based around a map of challenge rooms and combat encounters with a few bosses dotted around that, naturally, give you new movement abilities that unlock more of the map.
I started playing this one mainly because the internet says it doesn’t work on the Steam Deck (it does), but quickly found myself surprisingly engaged, even though this isn’t my usual genre at all. Movement feels good, sprite art on characters is nice, even if background tilesets are pretty generic, and its story was interesting, if a bit hard to follow sometimes due to iffy translations.
I played through on the easiest difficulty which meant my health regenerated each room, and setbacks from death were never that punishing in regards to resource collection, but it’s the type of game I can imagine a certain type of person would really enjoy romping through on a higher setting as everything here is really solid, despite the game having next to zero reach.
Maybe give it a go!
54. JEF (PC) - 31/12/22 - ~4 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
How do you review something like JEF?
It looks like a 3rd person adventure game, and certainly, there are elements of it that align with a sort of wonkier, looser Psychonauts, say.
But the actual experience of playing through JEF and uncovering its strange secrets is more like watching the narrative of an episode of How To with John Wilson unfold, listening to the self-titled album by the group Hymie's Basement, picking through Robert Crumb illustrated panels in old American Splendour issues, or, to bring it back to videogames, like playing through the 1984 Spectrum game Deus Ex Machina.
It's a game, but it's a piece of art.
— — —
And so that’s your lot. 54 games beaten, lord knows how many games played.
Here’s to 2023, gang!
