Merry Christmas and happy holidays. It’s been quite a year. After last year’s December rush, I said two things to myself: “tone it back” and “god, don’t do that again lol.” But since then, I’ve had a consistent schedule, a bunch of new games played this year, and a lot of opinions and thoughts about this whole game recommendation/review thing.
Pretty much since the start, I’ve established that this website is a recommendation site, not a review site, and while I still stand by that, it’s hard to look at my body of work and assert that these aren’t reviews in at least some capacity. Sure I don’t point at a game and say “8.7 too much water”, but I still talk about the parts of a game I like, the parts I had trouble with, and try to give a good overview/impression for the people who do read my posts. So if I start using “recommendation” and “review” interchangably, thats why.
I’ll still only be posting about games I actually liked, and that I think you, the reader, will also like. So don’t expect me to play Hogwash Legacy of Transphobia, or Digital Suicide Asset Flipper 7. If a game ends up on this site, either I or my partner Lilla think that the game is something you should at least consider playing.
So you have a schedule now, what are the plans for next year?
The intention after last December’s rush was that I’d just do a review whenever I felt like doing one, maybe after finishing another game. But after the first couple posts in January, I fell into a steady consistent pattern of posting around one new review every other Saturday. Sure it’s only 26 or so posts a year, but for one guy who has a job, a partner, and mental health issues, that’s a pretty reasonable pace that won’t lead to me burning out. I think I’m going to continue this posting cadance going into 2024 and beyond.
I also do the occasional off-schedule review whenever something big happens or it’s a thing that I don’t feel comfortable scheduling in the usual bi-monthly slot. For example, mods, updated reviews or reviews about updates (For instance, Dinkum is in Early Access and is getting some very large content updates, so I’ll probably do an updated review when more content is released and Lilla and I play with the new things.) There may also be some guest reviews off-schedule too, it all depends.
The most notable case of a game being reviewed off-schedule was my post about Islands of Insight. When I published the review it was in a temporary 2 week open beta test, so I figured it wasn’t something to publish normally. Though I’ve heard that the content available in the beta is now available as a persistent Demo, but I’ve not been able to confirm that myself.
In terms of backlog, I usually have at least one review ready to go at any given time, sometimes multiple. It helps to have the extra things lined up for if I have a bad month, but it also means some games don’t get spoken about until way after I’ve actually played them. I try to prioritise releasing posts about games that are newly released though. I also have a couple backlogged reviews for games I played prior to this year to have as a fallback if things get really dire. (Sorry Milla, that Cambridge (Tetris) review will drop eventually I promise,,,)
What did I actually play this year, and which reviews were from the steam backlog of games I’d played before?
While a lot of my reviews from the Twitter days and the December rush are games I’d played anywhere from 2015 to 2022, every review published in 2023 is for a game I played in 2023! I know that seems like something trivial or not worth celebrating, but there were several times this year where I didn’t have any game’s I enjoyed recently to talk about before pulling through with a funky recommendation from Aliensrock, Icely puzzles, Real Civil Engineer, Game Makers Toolkit, or simply just the Steam store front page. They’re the true MVPs of the year, and I suspect they’re gonna carry me next year as well.
(Except for Usagi Shima. I didn’t play that one, but Lilla did, and that game was also released in 2023 so it counts.)
(Oh and RAVON, I have played it this year, but only because I’ve been playing it since 2021 lol.)
If this pattern keeps going, I might start posting a monthly review about a game from my backlog of played but unreviewed games so that my readers get more games to think about.
How do you pick the games you want to play?
By feel mostly, lots of impulse decisions. Sometimes it goes pretty poorly (Poor rain world you were so hyped to me by friends but I just couldn’t begin to get into it,) but sometimes it goes well too. A few games I start also get pretty boring to me too, those don’t get written about either.
My main preferred genres are rhythm games and puzzle games. I do also play other things though like the occasional Metroidvania or Life sim. I keep an eye on the store page, but a fair amount of games I try out also come from Humble Bundle’s monthly subscription. I’ve had it since before it became Humble Choice, and kept the lower price, and now that they’ve given up on the whole choosing an amount of games model, we’re starting to see more interesting stuff show up on the bundle again.
You may have noticed that the bottom of the homepage now has some extra filtering on it, instead of just having a big pile of tags, you can sort by platform or genre. I’ll also be going through and add tags for a game’s release year too, maybe its publisher, but that’s debatable. Maybe I’ll add the publisher if its a big well-known one with multiple games and bundle everything else under “independent”
Lets look at some stats for the year:
Reviews this year: 31 posts, of which 26 are bimonthly reviews, and the other 5 are off-schedule releases.
Genres: Mostly puzzle games (16 reviews), with some exploration, a handful of rhythm and action games (and one rhythm action game) Outliers include a shooter rpg, a parody racing game, a Minecraft mod, and a piece of Randomiser software.
Aesthetic battle: 6 super artful games that knock your socks off vs 4 cute and sweet games that make you feel warm inside.
Difficulty battle: 10 games to relax and vibe to vs 5 games that make you want to tear your hair out.
Recency battle: 8 games released this year vs a whole bunch I’d mistakenly put off for so long.
Popular publisher: Surprisingly not Devolver Digital, not specifically for this year anyway. Most of the games I play are published by the developer directly!
Now do that thing where you narrow down your list of 31 games into a bitesize chunk of best ones.
Fine. 5 games in no particular order: Hi-Fi Rush, Chants of Sennaar, Turing Complete, Talos Principle 2, and Viewfinder. They’re all wonderful games that I wholely enjoyed my time with, and as a bonus they’re also all 2023 releases, so it’s not even like I’m blinded by nostalgia goggles.
The funny that would happen if I named 2015’s Undertale my 2023 game of the year lol. I’d link the funny meme reference video here, but funnily enough another game-adjacent thing that happened this year is The Escapist shooting itself in the foot, and chest, and face, and dick.
What else are you up to?
Not much really. I’m a salaryman who plays and talks about games in his spare time. The other thing I do though is spend a lot of time at the local (for as local as 2 hours away can be) arcade, and record some gameplay of niche Japanese rhythm games to upload onto YouTube. And a bit of mobile rhythm games too. Who knows what games are gonna be up there by the time you read this. Check it out! Other than that if you know anything you think I might like or that you want to see, drop me a comment or hit me up at lanta@rockett.space, or at one of my other places.
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