I'm in a sharing mood so I figured I'd take a post or two to talk about some games that I feel count as "get to know me" games. These aren't necessarily my favorite games, and they're certainly not the games I'm best at. But all of them are games that live in my brain and that I come back to play, no matter how long ago they came out. And I'd like to highlight a few of them.
I'm in a sharing mood so I figured I'd take a post or two to talk about some games that I feel count as "get to know me" games. These aren't necessarily my favorite games, and they're certainly not the games I'm best at. After mulling on it a bit, these are either games that I repeatedly come back to, video games that affected the way I think about games, or both. And I'd like to highlight a few of them.
Hyper Light Drifter
A few of these are "no duh" picks for anyone who does know me and this is the first one. I call Hyper Light Drifter my favorite game and at this point I'm not even sure how to qualify that, but I play this game front to back once a year and I'm not actually tired of it. In the last year I've decided to try actually challenging myself with it. One of my goals for 2024 is a deathless run.
Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D, pixelated action game. You play as an unnamed wanderer with a terminal illness, out to destroy... some piece of ancient machinery that threatens the land. The regions you travel to are each undergoing their own crises. You have a sword, a gun, the ability to chain dashes together, and a mixture of the above. It's colorful and has a killer soundtrack.
It's another one of those games where the studio immediately made the jump to 3D after their first game, and I wish they'd given 2D another crack because their first go around was incredible. Art and cinematics by Cosimo Galluzzi, music and sound design by Disasterpeace. The art style is a chunky, pixelated style that manages to avoid feeling like it's calling back to a "retro" aesthetic. It just stands on its own.
It has its ups and downs- the map is deliberately obscure, the lack of any dialogue or direction (outside of some tutorial text) can leave you a bit adrift, it's a hard game on top of being a finicky game that demands some very precise timing. I think the warts make it more endearing to me. I do wish they'd taken another shot at a 2D game, but Solar Ash was really mechanically solid, and I'm interested in seeing what Heart Machine is cooking with Hyper Light Breaker.
Also, there are lots of cool animal people designs.
Project Wingman
Another bit of a "duh". I'm not sure there's a better way to describe Project Wingman other than "an Ace Combat fan game with no middle sliders". I enjoyed my time with Ace Combat 7, but Project Wingman really clicked with me. triple-digit playtime since 2021 would attest to that.
Project Wingman is an arcade dogfighting game with a core development team of less than 10- a developer/artist, a key artist, a writer, and a composer. It plays almost exactly like Ace Combat, except everything is heightened. Planes can carry up to 4 special weapons, ammo counts are through the roof, post-stall maneuvers happen on the press of a button, and dogfighting happens with the afterburners on. The story itself is on the darker end of the Ace Combat narrative spectrum- you play a mercenary hired by the rebel forces of the nation of Cascadia, who have separated from the rest of North America (geographically, this is a post-volcanic calamity setting) in their fight against the hegemony of the Pacific Federation. Things go bad and you get to show off that you have some terrifying special sauce that sets you aside. Are you a remnant of an old alliance of mercenary kings? Have you secretly just been sandbagging some innate skill? Are you simply built different? (I maintain that Monarch doesn't have internal organs) It's terribly fun, Mercenary difficulty is ridiculous, and I love it.
One day I'll actually sit down and get set up with some of the older Ace Combat games to round things out. But until then.
Citizen Sleeper
This is one of the more recent entries in these posts, but when it hit me, it hit me hard.
Citizen Sleeper is an interactive fiction that draws on tabletop games. Every day, you wake up with a dice pool, and have to choose how to spend your dice over the course of the day, choosing between risky outcomes or guaranteed successes. You're a Sleeper, an indentured laborer with a copy of someone's consciousness implanted into an artificial body. You've escaped to the station of Erlin's Eye at a critical moment and are plunged into an unfamiliar culture while trying to escape the corporation chasing you.
I teared up three times while playing this game and there are one or two endings that still hit me like a ton of bricks. I got to the end of the game and all I could think was "I hope I can write something that feels nearly as impactful as this one day." It's a story about labor, community, and what life means when living feels more like surviving. It's uncompromisingly anti-corporate and humanitarian. It manages to make the station it's set on feel like a living, breathing place, and it's chock full of striking character art. I'm not sure there's much more I can share about it other than to say "it's worth experiencing". It doesn't have the clockwork mystery of a game like Outer Wilds but the mysteries it does have are so compelling.
If any of this sounds good to you, or you've played Citizen Sleeper and want more, you should also check out In Other Waters.
Titanfall 2
Apex Legends is good. I'm not gonna argue against that. But man, there really isn't anything quite like Titanfall 2.
Titanfall 2 is a hyper-kinetic first person shooter. It has wallrunning, double-jumping, grappling hooks, cloaking, and speed boosts. It also has giant mechs. I never got my hands on Titanfall 1, but I was on board with 2 from the start. I can't think of any other game that manages to overlay those two modes of play- on foot FPS combat and bursts of fast-paced mech combat- on the same map. Flying around the map feels amazing. Using grappling hook moment to fling yourself over a roof, hit the ground in a knee slide under a half-open garage door, jump through an open window, and get punched mid-air by a mech you didn't see feels amazing. Seeing a Ronin panic because you're in a Northstar and slapped them with a fully charged railgun shot and then charged into their face feels amazing.
I should talk about the campaign, too! The multiplayer is endless fun, but Titanfall 2 has, disputably, one of the best FPS campaigns of 2016. It has what is indisputably the best button prompt of 2016 and possible of the twenty-teens, and you'll just have to see what that means for yourself because it's that good. It's a brisk campaign, beatable on normal difficulty in two to three sittings. Each level has its own gimmick and a fun rogue's gallery of mercenary dipshits to blast your way through. It does a surprisingly good job of characterizing your two-story tall mechanical boyfriend war machine. Which is good, because player character Jack Cooper... doesn't have much going on. No disrespect to Matthew Mercer, but, whatever. If you haven't played it and want a fun 8-10 hour FPS campaign, I'd recommend it. Especially if it's on one of the extra-steep sales it sometimes goes on.
I don't have an actual screenshot for TF2 because since 2022, Titanfall 2 has periodically just decided it's not actually a functioning .exe on my computer. So rather than fuss around with that I just grabbed this pic of Jack and BT.