Spoiler Warning: all the Evangelion spoilers under the sun.

Yesterday, I watched the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, and with that, I have now watched all the Evangelion that a person could currently watch. I am free.

I’m not free. That was a lie. I’ve spent the entire day thinking about fucking Evangelion. I will never be free. I wanted to write up some more coherent thoughts on the whole thing but didn’t want to just drown everyone in tweets so this is what you get. You get a blog, like we used to write, back when there was still hope in our hearts.

Okay so here’s my stance on Evangelion. The series is mostly good. The dance sequence is the best thing in the franchise. The original ending is honestly the only ending that should have been made. I do not like End of Evangelion. As a movie it’s bad, so I’ve assumed it’s been a joke all these years. Those are the takes that matter, you now understand me and I understand you. Let’s continue.

This brings us to the Rebuild movies, which I was fairly skeptical of going in. All I knew was that they were a retelling of Evangelion which might actually be a secret cyclical sequel and spun off into whole new directions. To this day nerds are debating which is the correct canonical interpretation but it doesn’t matter. The first movie literally opens with the red sea from End of Eva, Rebuild planting its feet as being a thematic continuation of Evangelion.

Which is maybe the most shaky foundation for any storytelling considering episode 25/26 are essentially a 45 minute powerpoint presentation on the themes of the show, and End of Eva is a gigantic middle finger to everyone and anyone who was still invested after that point. Where is there left to go?

1.0: You Are (Not) Alone doesn’t provide many answers, mostly sticking to the first six episodes of the show with the big changes mostly being cliffhangers of what is to come. What the fuck is Kaworu doing on the moon? The biggest change comes in the form of Misato revealing Lilith (side note: the big angel in the basement. They call it Adam for almost the entire show, the whole premise is that the Evas were built from Adam. But it’s actually Lilith. I hate lore.) to Shinji, making him aware of the existential danger they are facing. His resolve to pilot Eva is strengthened by a series of phone calls from his classmates wishing him luck. The whole thing is mostly the same but it’s less focused on the interiority of Shinji. And so by the conclusion, he’s more adjusted and assured than he ever was in the show.

2.0: You Can (Not) Advance takes this ball and runs with it, to the point where the first half of the film is essentially a slice of life comedy. It’s fantastic. For one, you get a sense of Tokyo-3 as an actual functioning city in an excellent montage, a beautiful and light sequence that takes away from the idea that the sense the series builds up where the characters live in desloation and isolation every damn day. For two, the changes to the story come mostly from Rei, who has a much stronger relationship with Shinji, and like Kaworu, her counterpart, almost seems subconsciously aware that this has happened before. She spends the whole film determined to fix this, even going so far as to arrange a lunch with everyone and she makes Gendo promise to come.

She makes Gendo Ikari promise to come to a party. She did that. Your fav could never.

The elevator scene happens, and at the moment Asuka goes to slap her she reaches her hand up and stops her, and then they actually talk about their problems! It’s incredible! The film actually paints the idea that these characters, trapped in this awful story with their awful brains, do have a route to happiness. After the original show and End of Eva focused so completely on the interiority of these characters, 2.0 actually demonstrates that their hope lies not inside them but in their connections, in the communication between them. It is the subtext of the show made literal in the retelling and it’s very beautiful to see.

Of course, this cannot last, and everything falls apart. In this version, Asuka is in Unit 03 when Gendo activates the Dummy Plug system and forces Shinji’s Eva to berserk out and attempt to kill her. Obvious changes in the plotting aside, the framing of this scene is entirely different and this is where Rebuild truly comes into its own.

In the original, the scene was shocking, putting us entirely inside Shinji’s state of mind as he watches as his father takes direct control and forces him to attempt to kill a human being. But here, driven by the song choice, the scene is instead deeply sad. We are not feeling Shinji’s pain, we are more than familiar with Shinji’s pain, but instead we watch as despite how avoidable it should be, this grand tragedy repeats again, and it’s all so deeply pitiable.

This all builds to the conclusion, where we get the events with Shinji leaving Nerv and coming back to pilot Unit 01 in a time of crisis. Unlike before, the crisis is Rei, who has sacrificed herself and been consumed by an Angel. We get the entire sequence leagind up to Unit 01 awakening into its true form, but instead of going beserk and getting his entire Ego destroyed by the Eva, Shinji is going to save Rei with nothing but his force of will. It is the first time, in the entire franchise, that Shinji has done something for himself. Nobody is ordering him to get in the robot, he doesn’t feel obligated to save everyone, he doesn’t care about his dad anymore. As EVA 01 awakens, it starts to cause Third Impact and end the world, but it doesn’t matter. It all fades away as the music plays, and we get the moment we’ve waited for for decades. Even Misato is cheering him on.

I was honestly taken aback by how smart, mature and hopeful the film was. It is the best representation of the thematic ideas of Evangelion in a two hour shell. I think 2.0 is a fantastic movie, and it feels so complete that of course everything fucking fell apart behind the scenes and whatever plans that they had for Rebuild were abandoned.

3.0 is a mess. The experience of watching it without knowing what was going on was wild because yo, it’s fourteen years later and Misato is commanding an airship and leading an organisation to stop Gendo’s plans for instrumentality. It’s crazy and yet it’s ultimately a cowardly wreck of a movie that refuses to commit to any of the interesting ideas of what came before and instead retread old ground and ultimately say nothing. Which is ironic, given what Evangelion puports to be all about.

For one, despite it being 14 years later and everyone being older, this doesn’t apply to the Evangelion pilots because “it’s the curse of Eva” or some nonsense, which isn’t true and is a plot point they made up to justify Asuka still looking 14. And like, she has an eyepatch. If this movie had 30 year old Asuka in an eyepatch it would automatically be the coolest shit ever made. They had that on the table, and they threw it away.

Anyway it turns out that Shinji being happy and doing the right thing for once totally ended the world because of Gendo’s Brain Genious Plan #1 and then he sets out to right everything with Kaworu but that also causes another Impact because it too was a trick from Gendo’s Brain Genious Plan #2. Literally every single bad thing happens because nobody explains anything to anyone. If it at least ended with Shinji realising “wait, maybe being angry at my dad isn’t because of a complex, but because he’s an abusive monster trying to end the world” it would have been worth it, but it doesn’t. He’s near comatose and dragged from his entry plug, full on End of Eva breakdown mode.

It’s bad. I’ve seen people say that this is because it doesn’t have an ending and it’s all set up for 3.0+1.0, the final movie that will make everything make sense. Which it won’t, come on, it’s Evangelion. The whole thing is tied together with string and heart and it’s not that deep. The second movie ends in a trailer for an entirely different movie that contains this fucking amazing image and they threw it out. It’s a series made from abandoned plans of abandoned plans, and it always has been. It’s not building to some wild, final hour twist that will bring everything together and make it all make sense. The last time everyone wanted that they made End of Eva. Be careful what you wish for, you know?

Anyway. Those are the takes. This ended up being longer than I expected but the gist of it is this: the second Rebuild movie is a fantastic exercise in mythologizing and maturating what Evangelion actually means, and I’m always going to love it for that even though 3 is kinda a kick in the teeth after you get past the holy shit factor of the time skip.

One day, the final Rebuild movie will actually come out and I’ll get to live this Discourse in real time. I am steeling my body for that day because I doubt anyone will survive. Turn me into orange goo and set me free. One last ride.

This Is (Not) Going To Go The Way You Think was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Puyo Puyo Tetris & Forza Horizon 3

Welcome, everyone, to the new and improved Abnormal Mapping Medium page! We occasionally do writing here but we’ve not really had a good space to publish it since the site relaunch earlier this year, and so here we are. Trying Medium out. Let’s hope it doesn’t get shut down in a couple months.

As part of our patreon, M and I release weekly writing in the form of the Patreon Letters, which are generally loose and informal pieces where we muse on a game, or film, or something we’ve been thinking about that week, that wouldn’t really fit on the podcasts.

In order to give people a taste of what they’re missing out on, we’re going to publish one letter from each month for free on the medium. If you like what you read, you can get exclusive weekly letters — and access to the whole catalog — for just $5/month. We’re two poor, queer friends running a small podcast network so we rely entirely on word of mouth and your support to keep going!

This letter was originally released May 20, 2017.

The honeymoon period has worn off with Puyo Puyo Tetris. There was a good week or so after it came out where I would hang out with friends on a Discord server, and we’d play round after round trading wins on Swap mode. It was all the fun of a fighting game (tense, short matches; a mix of tight execution and setting up combos) but in something I could play with people in America and Australia at the same time. I had a huge blast.

But as Puyo Puyo Tetris is basically a fighting game, the inevitable has happened and in order to stay competitive with each other we’ve got to start, you know, practicing. I’ve practiced a fair bit and I’m getting better, but the enjoyable togetherness of those first few days has definitely been lost. I know this is the complaint that everyone who wants to keep enjoying competitive games on a casual level has, but it still sucks, and PPT falls prey to it pretty quickly. Losing feels horrible, if you’re in any way skilled at Puyo it’s incredibly easy to wipe a new player out with a single combo before they even have a chance to respond.

Last time we played, both me and my friend traded wins about 50/50, and yet we left the session stressed out and grumpy from the mindset shift we’d had to make in order to, as they say, get good. It’s just not something I’m interested in and I wonder if that means every competitive game is going to have a shelf-life for me, or if something will come along that makes getting over this hump feel less like gruelling work to me.

Shifting gears (tip your waitresses) for a second, I’ve played a lot of Forza Horizon 3, which is in a lot of ways incredible, and in other ways a tragic indictment of the way driving games have gone over the last decade or so. The Horizon series is developed by Playground Games, a UK based superteam of sorts, created from the ashes of studios such as Bizarre Creations, Critereon, Psygnosis, and Black Rock. And you can tell, the moment to moment play is a perfect synthesis of Forza’s simulation leanings, and the arcade sensibilities of all these classic British arcade racers. You speed down highways, weaving through oncoming traffic, hitting near-misses and drifts to build up huge skill point combos. I grew up on those games growing up as my main view into racing games, and Horizon feels like home.

But Horizon isn’t Burnout, it isn’t Project Gotham and it isn’t Forza either. It’s this Frankenstein’s Monster of each of them, and is so dedicated to allowing you to pretend it is any one of these games that it ends up with no identity of its own. The game bends to your choices; you drive up to a marker and every race will be filled with opponents driving cars of identical rank and type. If you want to play the entire game driving a Dune Buggy, you can, you will race against Dune Buggies, you will see nothing but Dune Buggies in the open world, you will forget that there ever existed a time where the human race drove in anything more than four wheels and a rollcage.

It’s incredibly frustrating, because this is a game made by a small army of the best racing game developers in the country, and they’re never allowed to take any real authorship. You don’t even have to race the incredibly tailored events they set for you; as the Boss of the Horizon Festival you can edit the Race Blueprints and make everything a 1 lap race with clear skies and no traffic. There’s no need to buy new cars, or upgrade, or tune, because you can’t be an inch behind ahead or behind the exact perfectly focus tested reward curve. It ends up making the actual game feel like a waste, just another open world game with a naked treadmill where you make the numbers bigger and the points don’t matter.

Which is a huge bummer, because I don’t hate Horizon. It’s one of the few left carrying the flag for a style of driving game that I grew up on and hold very dear, but we’ve come a long way from the days where Burnout 3 had a mode made of individually crafted puzzle levels. In a world where so many big games are sacrificing authorship out of loyalty to player choice, and more small games are using procgen because it’s just so much cheaper, it’s always sad to see something so cool fall down to these trends. I understand the economics of these decisions, but I can still lament them from the sidelines. What can I say, I like it when game design.

Other Letters from May 2017
May 13: 30 Rock and Nier Automata
May 27: Disney Branding and the Insidiousness of ‘Cool’

Get access to all of our weekly writing for $5/month!

Free Patreon Letter: May 2017 was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I picked the best ending of Save the Date on my first playthrough. I didn’t know it, because I hadn’t seen the other outcomes yet, but being a glib video game guy I did the contrarian thing and said no when told to begin the goal, and the game ended in a slightly down but not really that impactful non-ending. This is the best you can hope for in this tale of disasters, universe hopping, and narrative deconstruction.

What I think really works in Save the Date is that it relies upon the logic of the game structure without really bothering to pick it apart. You know you’re in a game, and quickly you’ll get to the point where you convince your date that she is a video game character, and that’s really where the interesting stuff begins to unfold. Beyond all the silly bad endings, in this one spot where these characters begin to reflect on the nature of their being, is one of the better examples of games narrative deconstruction through games I’ve seen.

It touches on even more subjects, and often with more earnestness, than something like The Stanley Parable. I think it suffers many of the same faults, too, in that it tries to be a bit too clever, and I wish that it had some commentary on the one ‘good ending’ within it, but by and large it goes out of its way to ask you to reflect on what it means to have endings, to tell stories, and what characters and art itself does for the one who engages with it.

Save the Date was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

CAVE! CAVE! DEUS VIDET. is a visual novel that attempts to do this through those mechanics. In this instance, it’s goals are small: impart art history, and an understanding of what a piece of art can mean in historical context, in a way that is explored through the very nature of a problem the game presents to you. In this case, it’s the historical significance of a Bosch painting but told through madness and time travel.

It’s a weird thing, notable immediately for how striking its art styles are, and how it uses them to impart ideas of symbolism in the basic modernistic approaches to the main story that carry over when you get to the part where you’re decoding the paintings themselves. This is an initial chapter of something that purports to be ongoing, and I’d love to see more.

CAVE! CAVE! DEUS VIDET. was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bokida

I wish I liked Bokida more, because its stark world and strange creation/destruction mechanics are very cool. The problem is that you’re given a lot of abilities and nothing fun to do with them, leaving you to just go from point A to point B and vaguely interact with the environment until the chapter ends. It’s supposed to be the first bit of a larger game, but there’s no concept of what the larger game could do that would be more interesting given the limited toolset and world you’re given. It’s neat, but totally empty.

One Last Dance for the Capitalist Pigs

I really like the hand-crafted aesthetics of a lot of the games I’m playing lately, where it’s clear that someone made something by hand and then just scanned it into the game. There’s an honesty to it, a sense that this crafts-centric way of thinking about games is really what liberates people to be weird and experiment with more personal stories. One Last Dance is definitely one of those.

Deus Ex by way of a politics 101 class, One Last Dance is a story about fighting capitalistic oppression through a weird blocky world made of markers and paper, where you try to destroy the reality television that oppresses people by going to a shop run by Karl Marx. Who is a chicken. It’s a strange game, quirky in the most fundamental ways, and wholly speaks to being created by a singular vision. It’s hardly profound, but games with such clear authorship are few and far between.

One Last Dance isn’t a perfect game (I go on at length in the video about a really needless puzzle area), but I really like just how weird it is. There are few games that try to be so relentless strange, and One Last Dance pulls it off with an honesty that seems almost naive in its uniqueness.

(Source: http://www.twitch.tv/)

Bokida and One Last Dance for the Capitalist Pigs was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Galah Galah is that game. A weird series of what are essentially mini-games jammed together into a not-quite-cogent narrative, this trip down the pixel rabbit hole is amazing in just how evocative it can be while having almost zero internal consistency. Yes, there’s some recurring ideas and graphics. But for the most part every minute you’re thrust into an entirely new space, left to figure it out for yourself, until the game whips you to something wholly different.

What’s great about this isn’t just the atmosphere, which is intense but almost always very clear, but also just how effective nothing more than tenuous threads can allow a player to draw conclusions between disparate play elements. In a medium where narrative is often plotted with all the rigidity of railroad ties, seeing something abandon any storytelling outright in favor of this loose free-association between game maker and game player is fascinating. It only barely holds together, but Galah Galah is a good argument for holding together not being a driving necessity in games.

Galah Galah was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a lot I like about Gingiva. First and foremost is the art, which is gross and surrealist and full of character. Second is the story, possibly about sweatshops? but definitely about the link between capitalism and misogyny. It’s expressed through a world in which you are a headless woman paired with a murderous set of teeth, set loose to take down The Man, which manifests in a lot of weird ways.

The problem is this storytelling is presented in the context of a turn-based JRPG, and along with that come a lot of the trappings of such a game. All of your attacks and statuses are weird, but they all map faithfully to Final Fantasy style tropes. Your characters are strange and the enemies even stranger, but they all line up time and again to play out battles. Gingiva is a cool game that struggles under the yoke of being an RPG that demands a lot of grinding and constantly throws enemies at you.

It’s a problem with a format like RPG. RPGs are either about a complex numbers game or a (admittedly less ubiquitous) vehicle for delivering big complex stories in games. The problem is that in a smaller, more individualistic game-maker space there’s no need to wrap your strange narrative-driven game in a bunch of ‘gameplay’ to pad it out and meet some semblance of expectation. Instead, all that stuff just gets in the way.

I played Gingiva all the way through, which took me several full evenings of effort, and at the end I felt like my time and energy had been badly misused. Not because the game is bad, because I really liked a lot of what it was about, but because the very genre and its baggage made what should have been a very focused, entertaining exploration/narrative game into a total slog. Which is unfortunate, because this is a game otherwise worthy of people’s time. But in a world with thousands of games

Gingiva was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

These are all preserved in the new game, as Strider runs and slices and ellipses his way through a world that seems ill suited to his skill set. You show up with little more than a marker on your map telling you where to head next, which you set to with grim determination, all the while collecting various color-swap upgrades to your weapons and a seemingly endless cavalcade of useless concept art and enemy bio sheets (made especially pointless by being inaccessible from in game, you have to go to the main menu to see any of it). All of it gives you another colored door to open up, or a specially marked floor to destroy, but none of it is particularly useful in battle (the game goes out of its way to give enemies color coded shields to try to encourage weapon switching, but that’s about it), so for the most part the upgrades seemingly only exist to get more upgrades, most of which are only there to be there in the form of all that ancillary material.

Even worse, the game makes it nearly impossible to go back and find what you’ve missed. Pickups that you’ve seen but haven collected aren’t always marked on the map, and because the game’s many maps aren’t grid based (how gauche to suggest tile sets in the high tech future of 2014 video games) the way you fill them out means that rooms you might have only glanced at and not comprehended will still show up as visited on your map just like any other place you’ve been to a dozen times. Most damnably, when you finally hit that point in these types of games where you’re kicked loose to collect all the upgrades before the final boss, the game offers almost no fast travelling features. Strider’s many upgrades never include a speed dash or an infinite jump or a flying tackle move like Metroid or Castlevania, and the world itself has only sporadic warp points, most of which are also unmarked on your map. Don’t remember how to get from one area to the next? Well, if you go right far enough, eventually you’ll figure it out. But in the meantime you’ll fight 100 of the same enemies, only by now you’re tired of them and the tiered upgrades haven’t actually equipped you to tear through them as fast as you probably should.

Likewise, most of these upgrades are pointless in actual battle with the game’s many bosses. They’re strangely chatty (think Bionic Commando Rearmed, which is clearly what this game is trying to emulate), coming up against a nearly mute hero, and the game seems to want to bend over backwards to provide a mythology only in these few moments before it turns into a boss fight. As such, the boss fights are undoubtedly the highlight, as they’re the one shining spot where Strider embraces its arcade game roots. The problem is that the bosses are all insufferably long-lived, because Strider himself is long-lived and you fight so many enemies on the way to said bosses. That minute to minute aesthetic coolness of killing 20 guys as you run down a corridor also means that you spend 10 minutes looping a bosses attack animation as you do minuscule chip damage to their meaty life bar, while they seemingly wipe out huge percentages of yours. It feels like an over-correction, turning what could be flashy tests of skill into long battles of attrition, especially when many bosses show up more than once for a high-powered rematch.

The whole thing feels at odds with itself, and the game that comes out the other end seems sterile in how little it embraces both sides of its fractured self. The loop of going from room to room and slashing guys isn’t without its moments, and it captures the speed you’d expect from an action title, but saddling it with the character building mechanics of a Metroidvania style game meant that even at 5 hours long so much of it felt like a slog built for a character with way more room to grow than Strider. By the end, when you’ve fought two separate grunt gauntlets to get to a strangely easy final boss, and you watch what might be the most rushed, half-assed final cutscene I’ve seen in a game, you wonder what it was all for? There’s not enough here to count as an actual reinvention of this character, but it’s so far removed from its roots as to obviously not be a retro remake. Instead Strider sits on the fence, and manages to commit to neither, becoming two good ideas that make a middling game.

Originally published at abnormalmapping.wordpress.com on July 11, 2014.

Strider (2014) was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bellow is my list, which I’d love if you took the time to check out. On Friday we have Episode 3 of the podcast, and a week from today Jackson is going to post their own goty list, which will undoubtedly steal all of my best ideas.

And now for the list! These are ten games that I think are the best in 2013, though there are plenty of other games I played and loved a lot. This list is alphabetical, because ranking is hard and I won’t do it! All right, that’s all. Let’s get to the show.

M’s Goty of the Year 2013

ATTACK OF THE FRIDAY MONSTERS: A TOKYO TALE!
by Millennium Kitchen

Attack of the Friday Monsters is a game about the intimate spaces that make up the parts of our lives we barely remember. Framed around a single summer afternoon, you take on the role of a kid who explores his new rural Japanese town, meeting and befriending the other children and learning the rules of their private games and the myths that children create and tell each other. The story, such as it is, remains as quiet and free of conflict as possible, giving you a variety of tasks to accomplish or not accomplish as you want. Your avatar is as distractable as a player in a quest-heavy game, and his childlike mind mimicks the player’s tendancy to go after not what’s prescribed, but instead the flashes of potential that exist down the roads you aren’t supposed to go down and the people and places you aren’t supposed to visit. It is a game that is all heart, exposing the core of feeling in the mundane day to day interactions that we have as people, all focused through the eyes of a child to bring the potentials of the human into sharpest relief.

DEVICE 6
by Simogo

There is a moment near the very end of Device 6 where, after solving nearly every puzzle the game throws at you, you (both the player and Anna, the protagonist) encounter an animatronic man with a guitar who begins to sing a song dedicated to Anna’s efforts in getting this far down the rabbit hole. This puzzling moment stops you in your tracks, and for a second it’s just you and Anna and the music, before you turn a corner and rotate your phone to go down a different path and the music fades to a gauzy blur the further away you get, curiosity pulling you even deeper into the strangeness of Device 6’s mystery. Part novel, part adventure game, all beautifully bespoke enigma — Device 6 is a game that stands at the multi-pronged intersection of graphic design, iOS game design, and puzzle creation. It’s a strange thing, a 60s style riff that bends your mind around the possibility space of a phone and your connection to a device that you touch and tilt to interface with. Device 6 is a game of experiences, of moments of discovery, and of the coolest moods induced by tone and artifice. It’s point is brief, but its elegance is unparralled.

ETRIAN ODYSSEY IV: LEGENDS OF THE TITAN
by Atlus

Great JRPGs were actually not in short supply in 2013, so long as you have a Vita and a 3DS, but Etrian Odyssey is something really special: a purely mechanics-driven game that offers challenges without ever going out of its way to punish players. The explore-and-map features of prior Etrian Odyssey games are as compelling as ever, but the inclusion of less punitive fail states and a general increase in accessibility and variety in the types of actions means that the game reaches a level of balance that feels endlessly explorable without being outright overwhelming. Every job is useful and no job seems that wildly overpowered, and as you explore the vast labyrinths (each one beautifully organic instead of the usual stock dungeons of most RPGs), you can feel your progression as you feel more assured taking on challenges and your characters become capable of carrying out that confidence. There’s something uniquely empowering about a tough, fair, well-made RPG, and EO4 accomplishes that better than any other JRPG this year.

GONE HOME
by The Fullbright Company

Gone Home is, I hope, the game of the future. It’s a game that offers the most bare premise: can exploring a space in itself be both entertaining and a narrative? Exploration is something games have been doing since their infancy, but it’s the rare game that hangs its entire being upon it. Even a game as abstract as Myst is riddled with puzzles that gameify your romp through a carefully crafted world. Gone Home has little of that, only a few locked doors (which you can turn off) and your own measured examination of the lives of the people who inhabit its house. It is a game with no NPCs but a handful of peerless examples of fully fleshed charactarizations in games, told entirely through level design, text, and sparing voice over. And it is, above all else, a game that is peerless in how it uses the elements of a game to create empathy. There are other great games that do this, especially in 2013 (Papers Please and Cart Life are both great examples), but Gone Home is so effortlessly unrestricted by the burden of what ‘gameplay’ has to be that it becomes a simple dialogue between the intent of the authors and the reactions of the player. Gone Home is the purest example of what a video game is, and my sincerest wish is that more games follow in its confident footsteps.

HATE PLUS
by Christine Love

Where Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story was a game about digital archeology, the sequel Hate Plus is a game about the tragedy of historical research. There’s not actually a mystery because you know the end result of the characters you’re reading about, but instead you’re thrust into the the role of someone who has to try to decide who to empathize with when given every viewpoint and knowing the terrible results that the characters you encounter could not see coming. The game outright asks you who can be seen as good or evil, when the world itself is so full of shades of grey, and then the game even has the audacity to demand you stop playing it to go think about that answer as you’re forced to play the game over the course of three days. This hostility towards progress in favor of contemplation is a small but significant advance in narrative storytelling, revealing the fundamental truth that narration is as much (if not more) about how we engage with it than it is the bare fundamentals of plot and character.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: A LINK BETWEEN WORLDS
by Nintendo

A Link Between Worlds’ origin as a remake of Link to the Past is obvious from every nook and cranny of its lovingly crafted world. But while a remake would have been fun, when the plan deviated to a sequel what Nintendo did instead was use the framework of two great overworlds and 10 dungeons and shook out everything else that had accrued on Zelda in the intervening 22 years. Gone are the fetch quests, the elaborate tutorials, the lengthy cinematic story beats. Instead you’re tossed out of bed and told to go do a thing, and rapidly given a wealth of equipment with which to do said thing. By removing the idea that Zelda is about gated progress through a series of Item Chests that unlock the same set of static abilities, within an hour Link is fully ready to do nearly everything. This moves the goal not into acquiring more keys to environmental locks, but in exploring fully every piece of the worlds you encounter. There’s a confidence that the player is able to tackle the puzzles, so the game has no hesitation about throwing you into ingenious dungeons that force flexibility and encourage experimentation.

It’s an exhilarating experience to play a game that has all the convenience of 2013, but none of the hand-holding that bogged down many of the modern Zeldas. There’s a trust implicit in that design that reminds me why this series was, for a long time, Nintendo’s greatest accomplishment. The freedom to exercise your will upon the world in order to tease out its rewards is unique among Nintendo properties in the modern era, and its interest in more moment-to-moment challenges and not linear progression seems more in keeping with modern indie roguelikes and games like Dark Souls than the stodgy Zelda we’ve come to expect. A Link Between Worlds stands as one of the greatest entires in the Zelda series to date, not because of its use of prior glories, but because of how it embraces player-led pacing to unfold as fast as you are capable of tackling its many obstacles.

THE STANLEY PARABLE
by Galactic Cafe

To speak concretely about The Stanley Parable is easy, but misses the actual impact of discovering its many twists and turns. A labyrinth of side stories and endings, The Stanley Parable masquerades as a Portal-esque also-ran but is instead a lengthy meditation on what exactly it means to have ‘choice’ in a video game, and how much player agency can truly exist in a system that has to be authored by another human being. The Stanley Parable is funny and charming first and foremost, but it’s incredibly smart with how far it takes many of its premises, from simple concepts like the absurdity of narrative art telling stories about freedom of choice, to questions about the actual use of player agency in a scripted experience, to bigger questions about the very nature of free will within both games and in live in general. It’s dizzying how far it goes to offer what on the face seems like an effortless romp through some tropes, but which quickly reveals itself to be something far more contemplative, full of questions and graciously careful about answers and always, always looking to find the truth in the variety of possible outcomes of what is often prescribed as one of the biggest aspects of modern video games.

3D SUPER HANG-ON
by Sega and M2

Why is an arcade game from 1987 on this list? Because I’m speaking specifically about the 3DS emulation of Super Hang-On that was released on the 3DS eshop in 2013. And because this is my list and prescriptivism is stupid. 3D Super Hang-On is an emulated version of an 80s arcade game, but it’s more than that. The various versions of the game are all represented, the game is converted to 3D and given myriad difficulty and display options, and it utilized the 3D and the gyroscope of the 3DS to create the experience of sitting on the tilting arcade cabinet, allowing you to lean through turns and have the screen skew left and right against your motion. All that is ridiculous and worthy of praise for its inclusion, but more importantly the game just SCREAMS along at 60 fps, with bikes that careen through brightly colored skies and 3D scrolling international locales, evoking the kind of pure arcade racing experience that’s in short supply these days. 3D Super Hang-On scratches the same kind of itch as OutRun 2 does, and I know of no higher praise than that. I could race down its winding, ridiculously endless roads all day, feeling uplifted and exhilarated by the simple joy of the challenge of the race. Who needs hundreds of cars and dozens of real world tracks carefully embalmed for your digital consumption when you have a pixel sun in the sky and chiptunes blowing around you as you careen around the next big corner into the beautiful simplicity of the fastest, purest racing around.

SUPER HEXAGON
by Terry Cavanaugh

Super Hexagon is the mechanical soul of video games distilled down to its very core. There’s no plot and nothing to say, in fact there’s zero time for thought at all. There’s only the reticule of the player, weaving back and forth along its central point of circular motion as it tries to avoid the inevitable death of collapsing shapes. There is a rarified air of mechanics-driven games where a good player can slip outside of their conscious mind entirely and achieve something colloquially referred to as being ‘in the zone’ but which is ultimately not indistinguishable from a meditative state. Super Hexagon starts at that point, and descends further down from there, all to the flashing lights and pulsing electronica that move like the beat of a steady, focused heart. Super Hexagon is a game that demands the utmost attention of the player, to find that place from the first second and remain there for the brief, draining sessions lasting often seconds at a time. There are two reactions to its impossible task: rage and tranquil acceptance. Those extremes make sense, as the game basically asks that for a player to avoid mechanical obliteration, they find it within them to obliterate the self.

TEARAWAY
by Media Molecule

Tearaway is a game that came out of a different time, a time when 3D platformers were unrolling the boundaries of what kind of worlds a game could be and exploration and traversal were key. That late 90s idea of video games is mostly dead, relegated to the odd release of Mario or Ratchet & Clank, but every once in a while someone has the gumption to try a new 3D platformer. A fool’s errand, but one I happily show up for each and every time. And this time, Media Molecule have created something special. By mostly neglecting the build-anything concept that made LittleBigPlanet an enduring idea, they’ve instead created a game where the care instead has gone into a set world, a papercraft paradise for you to explore through the myriad mechanics of the feature-heavy Playstation Vita handheld. You’ll touch (back and front), tilt, take pictures (back and front again), pinch, poke, swipe, and otherwise doodle your way through a variety of situations that continue to unroll the delights of discovery. And through it, the game constantly offers you feedback, chances to take pictures and earn models of the game’s characters for you to bring into the real world, even as you draw or take photos of yourself in order to bring them into the game world. It’s an incredible bit of synergy, oozing charm and surrounded by a solidly delightful little platformer the likes of which we rarely see in today’s world. Tearaway shouldn’t exist, and I’m happy it does, because it is modestly remarkable simply by the nature of what it is and how cheerfully it all works together.

M’s Goty of the year 2013 was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nintendo’s announcement that they were going to make a free to play (F2P) game was something I was kind of concerned about. Square Enix has basically turned F2P into an abusive slot machine meant to gouge players, so seeing another big traditionalist company try to do the same thing was a worrying idea, up until Nintendo announced that in actuality, their F2P game was going to be a haggling game, where you’d try to coax down the price of the content presented in the game from a virtual store keeper. Okay, that at least sounded interesting. Enough that I’d give it a try. Which, it turns out, is the point.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is based on a lie. That lie is that it’s free to play. It’s not at all that game. What you’re downloading is the first half hour or so of the game, a playable demo that then gives you the full storefront, in which a middle-aged dog shopkeep named Rusty wants to sell you ten (baseball themed) video games that your Mii can take home and plug into your Nontendo 4DS. After the early content, where you’re given a free demo of one of the games he’s selling, and get the setup to the story of Rusty’s ramshackle life with his litter of puppies and bevy of problems, that’s it. You hit the wall. To go further, you need to commit to purchasing something.

But that’s where the actual game begins. You see, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is absolutely a collection of baseball minigames, but it’s also a strange adventure game where you navigate a protracted comical conversation with Rusty in order to get him to lower the prices of the games through haggling and using items you receive from playing the games he sells (conveniently made real through the Nontendo 4DS’ 3D printer, which seems winkingly more useful than actual extra features of Nintendo’s current home console). For example, one of the sequences involves you offering up a remedial cooking class voucher you got from your system, but first you have to appeal to his insecurities about being the oldest person taking a class to learn such a simple life skill. Do that, and he’ll knock down the price on the game you’re haggling over, always by at least half and sometimes much more.

That, ironically enough, is the actual game you’re paying for. The baseball games are cute diversions, simple and appealing in the same way Wii Sports was often simple and appealing. You do various catching and throwing games against human bodies with pitching machine heads, completing challenges and winning medals and items. But the real meat of the game lies in this progression with Rusty, the picture book story sequences about his mishaps in the world, and the conversations you have to try to rescue him from his troubles with your array of items. This is the hook, the loop of story and the haggling feedback loop.

It’s also brilliant. The game does a good job of balancing making Rusty look increasingly sympathetic as you talk him out of more and more money his failing shop needs, while you get the benefit of ‘cheaper’ games in this ostensibly F2P title. The real magic happens when one of Rusty’s kids, who is treated as your sidekick and tutorial-giver, offers to tell you outright when you’ve hit the bottom of the bargain barrel and the price reaches its lowest point. That he’s basically betraying his father and keeping himself poor is moot. The whole game is a breezy hand-waving affair about what’s actually happening, the same kind of broken capitalism narrative that Animal Crossing indulges in with Tom Nook’s constant strong-arm real estate tactics. Nintendo’s localization team is in rare form here, and the game is constantly charming and funny about a very strange and potentially offputting situation.

By giving this push and pull tension but setting hard limits, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball creates a game in which the act of buying it is the narrative hook. It’s masquerading as a free to play game, but that’s really deceptive. In truth, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball costs $16 in total (I almost thought about not saying the final price, considering it a spoiler, which is both ridiculous and serves to underline my point), but the journey of purchasing the various parts of the game is what sets it apart and makes it something special. It’s a game about our relationship with paying for games in a world of in app purchases, seen through the lense of an outdated mode of commerce (who haggles for anything in 2014?), presented through the most superficially cynical way we engage with video games.

It’s a heady idea, that the act of purchasing could potentially be as much a part of your game experience as anything else, but why not? We live in a world where the narrative of a game’s production and marking, the release, the long tail of people playing and talking about it, and the final acts of its impact and spirtual successors are often as interesting as the game itself. Why not the purchasing be included in that narrative? I’m fairly certain that this is an idea that can’t readily be co-opted by other games, but having one example of this experiment is fine. It’s a strange beautiful thing, as much a subversion of free to play games and games as products as it is a product you can buy and a thing advertised as free to play.

That murky double-standard might be troubling if the game wasn’t so up front about winking and asking you to play along in its retail theatre, but instead I find myself looking forward to each time I get to spend a dollar and change in my battle of wills against Rusty, and I marvel that I’ll be kind of sad when I run out of things to buy, and the narrative of this strange real deal adventure comes to an end.

When Lying About F2P is Your Hook: Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball was originally published in Abnormal Mapping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.