In its struggle to understand and make sense of life, art has a way of remaining relevant even when, in chaotic times as ours, it might feel more useful to march in the streets than plug into a video game’s digital distractions. Yet these worlds do contain value. Each of these games bears a specificity that draws from contexts both present and past, showing us novel ways of looking at both.
Coming-of-age narratives showed up in a big way this year, exploring the messy moment of a new world’s birth. Other games use the potent tool of nostalgia to provide a brief respite. And mystery games have had a mighty resurgence, with several detective stories having their protagonists put an opaque and incomprehensible narrative back together in a way that makes sense.
It’s little wonder that such games would hold appeal right now.
Artis Impact
The beautifully rendered pixel art world was made, along with every other part of this role-playing game, by a single Malaysian developer. It follows the abbreviated journey of a magical girl hero and her sardonic robot sidekick through a dystopian landscape wrecked by a war between humans and bestial “AI” who roar in distorted static before they are struck down by balletic sword strikes. She also cooks herbal soup, takes naps and sweeps the floors of her neighborhood corner store.
A brash, sketchy approach, using comic book cells and snappy animation for more dialogue-heavy moments, allows Artis Impact to be bold in its storytelling. It can evoke grand ideas like alienation and despair for the future, and in the next beat fire off joke-a-minute dialogue poking fun at itself and the role-playing genres it is riffing on. (PC)
Baby Steps
This is a video game about the absurdity of video games. Most make it feel sublimely easy to run a little character around a three-dimensional world. Baby Steps forces players to stop and question this basic assumption. Every step you take is painful and deliberate, as you control each leg separately and must maneuver them in such a way that your character doesn’t trip or stumble.
No matter how carefully you play, your avatar will fall countless times, in comically painful-looking ways. The others you meet along the way — sneering would-be guides, alpha-male donkey men with giant dangling members — paint a world of distorted, vicious masculinity that pokes fun at the classic video game power fantasy. (PC, PlayStation 5)
Consume Me
Though it’s ostensibly a game about dieting, Consume Me quickly reveals itself to be a touching autobiographical exploration of the anxieties of teenage girlhood. Using an inventive roster of interactions like mealtime Tetris, folding laundry and stretching a gangly figure into various positions as “exercise,” the game shows the character progressing through the final years of high school and into college, struggling all the while to balance the pressures placed on her by parents, school, crushes and, most powerfully of all, herself.
Consume Me tells a compelling tale of belief systems, of finding and losing and finding again some container for all those messy feelings that bubble out from within. (PC)
Despelote
Another autobiographical story, Despelote focuses on the years surrounding Ecuador’s unlikely entry into the 2002 World Cup and is presented through the first-person perspective of a young boy obsessed, like everyone else in his city, with soccer. Its dithered halftone art style casts everything in a dreamlike haze, perfectly fitting the game’s narrative framing: a half-remembered dream of a childhood that may or may not have happened.
Within this dream, your character fights with his sister over TV time, plays soccer in the streets with friends and gets dressed down by his aggrieved mother. It’s a beautiful meditation on how we tend to remember growing up and the pleasures of childhood, encroached upon always by the values and pressures of the adult world. (PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Hades II
Hades II continues the tradition of top-tier roguelite action established by its predecessor. It’s just as frantic, cool and engaging to play as young Melinoë as it was to control Zagreus.
The sequel deepens the systems of the first, as Melinoë’s style requires a bit more strategy. She’s a witch, after all, and uses magic, mostly, to dispatch enemies, trapping them in her wards and sending out dazzling bolts of energy. This shift in gameplay aligns with a heightened sympathy for a character, who, unlike the rebellious Zagreus, must work her way back into the underworld, to a family she lost before ever really knowing. (PC, Switch, Switch 2)
Keep Driving
This is a nostalgia-fueled-road-trip simulator, a staring-at-the-clouds simulator and a scarfing-up-the-last-bite-of-pizza simulator, all at once.
Keep Driving’s charm is in its systemization of vibes. Power-ups come in the form of freecycled CDs, air fresheners and car decals. Instead of enemies, you’re squared off against potholes and drowsiness. Set in an impossibly vibrant millennial fantasy, Keep Driving isn’t just a love letter to the car as a mode of transportation, but to the youthful, unconstrained freedom it represents. (PC)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
A surprising encore after a rough, politically problematic freshman outing, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is set apart from a vast majority of open-world flotsam by the astonishing depth of its systems in a historic Bohemian setting.
Refuse to bathe and townspeople will avoid you. Let your sword get dulled and it will shatter over the next bandit’s pauldron. Eat or drink too much and find yourself an incapacitated mess. These intricate simulations fit perfectly within a complex and intriguing world with seemingly endless activities. You’ll go from defending a Jewish ghetto to marching in a doomed battle column to spending a day learning rare vintages in a vineyard. (PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Mafia: The Old Country
Where Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 offers scale, Mafia: The Old Country shows how you can tell a gripping story by narrowing the focus into a tightly paced and efficiently delivered narrative. Its open setting serves principally as a stunning backdrop to an intimate crime drama that follows an upstart orphan’s ambitious rise through the ranks of a turn-of-the-century Sicilian mob family.
The specificity of time and place provides rich depictions of a country in upheaval, with sulfur mines, striking workers and factories encroaching on vineyards and lavender fields. It also lends historic depth to the more personal story, a romantic yarn about reaching beyond one’s grasp. (PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
The Roottrees Are Dead
The success of The Roottrees Are Dead rests on the inherent pleasure of cracking a case and finally coming to understand the who, what and why of it all.
Laid out before the player at the start is a big corkboard of question marks, a mysterious family tree you must explore to handle an inheritance dispute. Doing so requires plumbing through newspaper clippings and old websites. The feeling of success when you discover a new series of identities, seeing their portraits and bios fill in, is made all the more pleasurable by the fact that you didn’t just passively watch it happen. (PC)
The Séance of Blake Manor
Some mysteries are bigger than us, and have deep roots in what came before. Everything in The Séance of Blake Manor screams this fact, from its eponymous locale, a centuries-old estate in a Britain-subjugated Ireland, to the dreams and visions that haunt your investigator, tasked with finding a vanished woman among a suspicious crowd of mystics.
Every query and rote observation takes minutes off the clock and leaves you closer to potential failure. As a result you must carefully dance through the web of lies laid out before you, avoiding traps and pitfalls. The clean 2-D art, reminiscent of a storybook dredged from a grandparent’s attic, hides rich depths of mystery and puzzling interaction. (PC)
Honorable Mentions: Absolum, The Alters, Blue Prince, Promise Mascot Agency, Silent Hill f
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