The popular consensus is that 2023 was a banner year for video game releases (as well as for industry-wide labour contraction, i.e. the enshittification starts now. Capitalism!) GOTY felt like a vital conversation, which is very weird, because 1) I barely talk to other human beings about video games, 2) I guess we all mean Geoff Keighley's 4-hour-long streaming infomercial, yes? How did that get mass hallucinated into "the Oscars of video games" when the actual EGOT are circling mainstream irrelevance?

...I have an answer to that rhetorical question, believe it or not, and it goes like this: if you watched three new movies last year, and two of them were Barbenheimer, you might be mad Greta and Margot didn't get Oscars. Why wouldn't they award the best movie you saw all year? But if you watched 300 movies, you're already resigned that your best-of list will have, like, 10% overlap with Oscars noms, which are aggregated from busy industry types with preexisting biases who got a For Your Consideration streaming code in their email and can't be bothered with subtitles. The two tails and the peak of the bell curve are incompatible frames of reference. It's why the Grammies always felt alienating: when I was deeply and broadly into music, I would care about 3-4 "top 10 hits" a year, and now that I only listen to amapiano and 4-hour "liquid drum and bass" mixes on Youtube, it's fewer than that.

Video games, though: there's not as many of them as there are songs. Probably, still, not as many as there are movies. These days a triple-A costs 80 Canadian dollars. And they require time commitment on top of the money. You can't form a serious opinion after playing for 2 hours. Someone--a streamer, a journalist--for whom it was their literal job might "beat" 30-odd games in a year, 40 hours a week, and even that turn of phrase betrays deprecated Xennial thinking (does one "beat" Fortnite or Genshin Impact?) I'd guess most hardcore gamers who make it part of their personality don't actually play more than a dozen new games in a year, half of which would have also been played by any filthy casual with a current-gen console. And that makes it easy and fun for everyone to argue about which of those dozen is the best.

To wit, here are mine, having as usual spent 3 months on the writing:

1. Armoured Core 6. When I thought about doing a year-end best-of newsletter at first I only thought about listing my top 3 games, and that mostly so I could talk about Armoured Core 6.

   Back in 2019, Tim Rogers tossed out a line in his Kotaku year-ender to the effect that he thought FromSoftware's salad days were ahead of them: ten years from now everyone would be ranking whatever games they made after Sekiro. That seemed more mad than prescient, but Tim likely had the context I didn't, namely the evolutionary leaps in enjoyability between every "Soulsborne" entry from the original Demon's Souls on. (By way of example, I watched through Bloodborne this year and... didn't like it! Due to the reasons I always assumed I wouldn't, namely PS4 grimdark and the overall syphilitic, tuberculic, morbid-about-ladybits bachelor holed up in a drafty boarding house vibe, but also in the same way people who read a lot of modern fantasy have trouble getting into Tolkien.) No one, I think, even tried to relate the quad-zillion Armoured Core mecha combat games From had made pre-2005 to this lineage; it would have been like looking to Sahelanthropus for clues to humanity's fate.
   
   But! Instead of evolving linearly toward skeletal robustness (Elden Ring's grassland feudalism and 40-second boss attack wind-ups), From unexpectedly forked off a gracile branch: here we arrive at AC6, an updating of said PS2 giant robot formula with all the stagger meter and quality-of-life enhancements conducive to "mad bastard energy" (to quote an old hbomberguy Youtube comment). As always I'm drawn to the pared-down over the sprawling, Verhoeven over Wagner. Basically AC6 lives in my brain rent-free, even though I don't judge myself apt to pilot a Hyundai sedan. I love the fact that there's not so much as a 2D pfp of a human face to be seen in the game. That the arenas are frozen post-Soviet mining-metallurgy company towns 5,000 erdtrees across and every once in a while the game makes you stand in a copse of cloned Siberian firs and watch a sunset. That there's a double-barrelled shoulder-mounted grenade launcher that sounds, somehow, ineffably euphonic--BOOMBOOM, BOOMBOOM--that FromSoftware knows that, and named it "Songbird." That the silent protagonist's gender is attack mecha. That the two most rancid assholes in the game are named after Freud and Swinburne. That the space marines are full-on Starship Troopers, but the space Maoists are just as goofy. That the devs love Rusty, the heroic foil to your shadow, so much there's a mission where you do nothing but read black-box logs explaining Rusty's backstory in epistolary fragments. That the streamer I watched duly brought these logs up onscreen, scrolled, paused, then said, "I'll wait for Vaati's lore video." That the devs' love for Rusty partakes of the cynicism of the disappointed romantic such that they couldn't suffer him to live in any ending. That a skilled first playthrough is 15 hours of liquid lightning, excluding time spent tweaking the refractive index of your gunpla paint, but that you have to NG+ twice more to glimpse the true transhumanist future behind the curtain, dizzyingly alienating and cold as steel pillars in space.

   So, you know. A good video game!

2. Lies of P. The one that's a steampunk/body horror re-imagining of Carlo Collodi set in a Belle Époque Ruritanian city that merges Mucha's Paris and Zweig's Vienna (or Wes Anderson's?), in which Pinocchio is a person-sized BJD with a motorized whetstone arm and a striking resemblance to Timothée Chalamet. A Soulslike so fiendishly difficult and so structurally and aesthetically polished it's distinguishable from FromSoftware's own output mainly on taste factor: screen cap me for posterity if you like, but Miyazaki Hidetaka would never base a game's setting on a writer born south of Lyon, let alone give out Visconti's Tadzio's sailor suit as a cosmetic within 90 minutes of the title screen. Art Nouveau bishounen is just not his language, though P is more Coppélia than Collodi's original (whose arc swings from misbehaviour to obedience), an entirely congruent avatar with the ethos of artistic apotheosis through practice and self-abnegation shared by From and, say, your Russian ballet teacher.

   It's a bit out of nowhere. Neowiz isn't a neophyte studio, exactly--they're considered a player in the Korean industry--but there's also nothing in their recent output to rank them at this tier of execution. I don't think it's too guy-who's-only-seen-Boss-Baby of me to suggest that many of the design decisions seem to arise from a monomaniacal desire to fix everything that's annoying about Bloodborne; I can also pick up on the Metal Gear Solid II tribute, for one thing, thank you very much. But you have to be able to design a level that feels like a real conurbation and does the flashy here's-the-other-side-of-that-door sleight-of-hand and doesn't turn every bonfire runback into an Ironman and doesn't let you meander right past narrative content, not just identify all those pitfalls in the abstract. Even FromSoftware isn't doing this! When they want to put the story on rails they drop you back into a capture-the-flag arena squared off with danger zone tape and play checkpoint-timed dialogue at you! Like, I know it's probably not a solitary genius at Neowiz? But if it is one, I'd like to know their name going forward.

   I do have a major complaint about this game, and here I would like to preface that I'm not, like, trying to get it cancelled; what I am about to say cannot matter to its target audience, who don't read. Human society rests on division of labour: there are people who can time button combos to "iframe windows," and there are unfortunates like me, kept up at night by the conceptual chasm between "lore" and "literary analysis." You should now imagine that I have made a Dark Souls meme in which the player avatar is labelled "East Asian dev," the treasure chest is labelled "evocative worldbuilding about a transnational occult conspiracy in fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa," and in the second screenshot a mimic labelled "ANTISEMITISM" gruesomely eats the player.

   ...I mean, here is the thing: if all your draft stuff about swarthy, cultish foreigners coming to town and corrupting the pure old religion with capitalistic excesses and gnostic degeneracy feels primordially vivid, like it's really tapping into something fundamental about your setting, of course you're going to run with it. Who's going to tell you--gamers? Can't wait for that Frank Baum-based sequel; no such pitfalls await in fantasy 1900s America!

3. Alan Wake 2. For years friends have suggested I get into Alan Wake, a notoriously janky horror-adjacent shooter (types of game I don't play) on Xbox (a console I will never own) because it's-exactly-your-kind-of-jam. Be a fan of two mindfucky 90s TV shows that involve tromping around the Pacific Northwest rain forest and it's your personal brand now, you know how it is. In 2019 I fell in love with Control, which is exactly my kind of jam (a simultaneous love letter to SPC Foundation and the tenets of postmodern architecture), but couldn't finish watching because the twisty Metroidvania corridors were nauseating. Then, last fall, Alan Wake 2 came out, the press for which made me belatedly realize all of these plus Max Payne (remember Max Payne?) plus Remedy's other properties with the IP filed off were part of the same Stephen King-ian extended universe, that had sort of become the studio's whole thing, and that I would have to blitz through LPs of both AW1 plus Control plus DLCs plus whatever Alan Wake's American Nightmare was** in order to commit to the lore review.

   Do you have to review the lore first? I mean, I could have watched a summary. But also the core recurring Remedy mechanic seems to be picking up documents from the floor and reading them. AW2 lampshades its genre shift to survival horror, but the only two things trying to kill Alan in the first game were writer's block and the forest itself*** as a synedoche for Nordic cosmogony. AW2 dramatizes the exact opposite scenario: Alan struggling to control the palimpsest of reality by bashing out drafts like a cursed Borgesian NaNoWriMo. You shoot five whole enemies in the first five hours of his POV (there are three POVs! All first person! Nested into each other like Moebius strip matryoshka dolls!), which is also the number of times someone suggests to our hapless protagonist that he's committed "autofiction". It's difficult to avoid the sense that the thing is at heart an evolved CD-ROM point-and-click puzzle, that AW2's rapturous reception is in part because gamers have forgotten about point-and-clicks, and that if you are not up to reading primary sources, you might prefer a game that was interested in weapons as opposed to a Wittgensteinian investigation into the words that define the concept of weapons. Along with everything else.

   I thought of AW2 when I toddled down to PHI Centre, as one does, to catch the latest VR "interactive documentary" about the late-80s acid rave scene (originally commissioned and presented as part of Coventry UK City of Culture 2021 and supported by the BFI Film Fund, awarding National Lottery Funding, et cetera). I put on a headset and haptic backpack and stood in darkness beneath a white floodlight by a chain linked fence and picked up the ringing pay phone and a neon-coloured Xeroxed flyer came to life and asked me to pin it to a case board, the whole nine yards. (No guns please, we're in the UK.) The convergence of mechanics was striking when one considers that there was hardly any actual commonality of setting: other than the decade itself, one I'm of an age to still dimly apprehend the recollected texture, which required one to manipulate material objects in order to get anywhere on a night out. Put the interaction behind a button press and you have yourself a a minimum viable product.

   Having laid down the preceding paragraphs several weeks ago, I triumphantly cite The New Yorker's recent profile of Lucy Prebble--BAFTA-winning playwright, Succession writer, creator of Secret Diary of a Call Girl--which describes her both as a childhood devotee of King's Quest and a current Alan Wake fan. And Remedy is to make back its budget on people like this! Which is not to say there isn't a paradigm being adhered to. Insofar as I grasp the worldbuilding--light good, dark bad, devs are Finns--if the wizard who controls reality had been Karl Ove Knausgård, he'd have been back with his wife in their Manhattan penthouse years ago, stewing over their minor feelings about eclipsing each other in a marriage of creatives. But Xbox must Xbox, so Alan's plots tend to follow an overall framework of Angel Heart, with a helping of 1. Outside and a gentle table-side rain of Sleep No More--sequel-ready, and a guaranteed bad time. That hasn't stopped neo-gamergaters from conspiracy, because, uh. The other (more likeable) main character is a woman of colour. I guess.

   Those dank 20th century nightlife vibes, though? Abso-fucking-lutely impeccable.

** A 3 hour long Xbox Live Arcade shooter that recapitulated the entire plot of Twin Peaks: The Return in... 2012. That's how you know David Lynch really was fishing from the common pool, is when Sam Lake does it too.

*** AW2 finally added deer, not to mention said WOC working mom, who is an FBI agent with a mind palace. (No streamer I've watched has failed to call that particular mechanic "mind palace".) AW1 had lumberjacks but no deer! I get that Remedy simply did not want to hang those wireframes in the Xbox 360 era but imagine if they had gone full Deer Simulator with it.

Cheers,

Sabina xoxo

P.S. If (I think this sometimes happens) you got this email from someone on a very short list who forwarded it to you as a piece you might enjoy, I have... added a handy subscription form at the bottom? I have a day job, so I would be frankly embarrassed to ever ask my subscribers for money, and I can promise not to flood your inbox, ha, ha. But I do think there are more folks out there who would enjoy this type of writing I do, were they to encounter it, and that I would enjoy writing for.