A quick review of some of the games I played in 2020.
Animal Crossing New Horizons
New Horizons is somehow still the least interesting and fun Animal Crossing game I’ve played. And that’s after almost a year of nearly monthly updates. A lot of the things that I’ve come to expect from an Animal Crossing game were not present at launch and instead had to be doled out piecemeal over time making the initial release feel unfinished and rushed, despite being pushed back by nearly a third of a year from it’s original release date.
Murder By Numbers
I’m always down for more Picross puzzle games so when I saw that Murder By Numbers combined that with a murder mystery I was sold. Immediately after getting it though I was let down.
The game is supposed to be set in the 90s but instead of doing any of the legwork to make it feel that way it just relies on using extremely dated pop culture references. Beyond that it also has a pretty awful gay bestfriend stereotype that hits on every guy with a dick in the game at every chance he gets which is very troubling. And those are just the issues I have with the way the game presents the story and not with the way it does puzzles which is equally frustrating. The first issue I came up against is that the puzzle screen has an annoying robot helper character taking up 1/3rd of the screen so the actual puzzle interface is smaller. This combined with the fact that the puzzles don’t control all that well with there being no way to alter the controls makes it one of the worst Picross games I’ve ever played. There’s also no real difficulty curve for the puzzles as they vary the difficulty with each one. Which at first doesn’t seem like an issue until you realize that some of the puzzles you need to solve to gather evidence may be way more difficult out of nowhere. All in all I wish I had skipped this game and have been trying to make sure that people don’t make the same mistake I have.
Kuukiyomi 2: Consider It
Kuukiyomi 2 is a sequel to Kuukiyomi: Consider It which was a WarioWare-esque game where you have to figure out how to be considerate(Get it?) to people in random time situations. The sequel doesn’t really improve on the gameplay in any meaningful ways but I still found it to be just as charming and fun as the first game.
Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity
This is the first Warriors game I've played to completion since Samurai Warriors 3 on the Wii and I’m glad to see that not only has the series maintained everything i loved about it but has improved upon it in many ways. There’s not much I can say about this game in specifics without going too deep into the Zelda rabbit hole but I will say that as a AU-prequel to Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild it checked every one of the boxes I wanted it to and then some. The only real downside is that if you wish to 100% it as I did you will have to collect a ton of korok seeds like you did in BotW. The only other issue I can remember having with it is that the outfits you can change Link into provide no extra benefits outside of aesthetics and that very few other characters get alternate fashions.
Picross S4 and S5
They’re picross games. I love the gameplay but outside of the new giant puzzles they introduced(30x40) they don’t really have any standout innovations to them. Also the giant puzzles are too big and trying to focus on the tiny squares hurts my eyes if I don’t stop and rest every few minutes.
Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light
Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a very slightly enhanced port of the original Famicom Fire Emblem game. The only enhancements that it has is that you can change the game speed to 2x for a quicker experience and it allows the rolling back of full rounds including going back to a previous map. Experiencing this for the time on my own I have to say that it’s a lot more fun and engaging than I was previously led to believe and not as challenging as the game is constantly handing you new troops to replace any weaker or dead ones.
Paradise Killer
I’ll get this out of the way right now, this is my favorite game that came out this year. It’s a vaporwave murder mystery set on an island of demi-gods that serve extraterrestrial horrors. You play as an exiled detective named Lady Love Dies as she is brought back to solve a murder of the council that leads the island. You solve the mystery by searching the entire island looking for clues and piecing together them yourself which I find incredibly refreshing. The artstyle of the game threw me off at first as the world is rendered in 3D but all characters are 2D images so it gives them this feeling of not really belonging to the world they live in. The music is also just fantastic. This game is just so perfectly everything I ever wanted in one and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in murder mysteries or weird cosmic horror stuff or even just vaporwave.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories
After waiting over a decade for this game it’s finally here… and it plays just like you would expect a game to play that was meant to come out 10 years ago.
The controlsare stiff and finicky, animations don’t look right, there’s way too many loading screens. All in all it’s a poorly done game but despite all that, or maybe because of it, it’s incredibly charming. The ending I reached had me scratching my head though as out of nowhere I was confronted with human traffickers that used the natural disasters to grab more people. Which was so unexpected and such a tonal whiplash after all the silly adventures I got up to throughout the rest of the game that I had no idea how to process it.
