Hello! Welcome to the new year! I hope you’re doing well. How am I? Thank you for asking! I’m writing this in the middle of a night shift and I’m basically on the brink of passing out during my job, so that’s probably not good. HOWEVER! I also bought a Steam Deck this month, so I’ve been playing the fuck out of all sorts of games this month. With that being said, here’s what I’ve been playing in January!

WHAT I FINISHED

I finished 7 games this month, some better than others, and dropped at least 1. Endless Monday: Dreams & Deadlines was a delight, so much so that I wrote a whole review about it that you can check out here. I also started, finished, and wrote about the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, and how weird of a game that is.

The game I played concurrently with Tomb Raider was a wee one titled The Evil Within, which I liked a whole dang lot. I sincerely wasn’t expecting to enjoy this game as much as I did, but at this stage in my life I’m comfortable accepting that I fully fuck with anything Shinji Mikami cooks up. He has this ethos around survival horror games that I enjoy; an obsession with crafting haunted houses. He just loves to build a series of set pieces that sound cool or scary, and contrive a narrative around those moments as an excuse for a coherent video game to happen.

The Evil Within is likely the final boss of this concept, it being set entirely within the psychotic mind of a serial killing brain surgeon/human experiment doer. The story of this game is kinda ridiculous, but it also goes hard, which is ultimately the most important thing. Plus, I love it when any game designs its monsters or visuals around the inner workings of a mind. Enemies as metaphors for events or meanings in a person’s life is something I’m always going to enjoy, or the basic entertainment of being a little sleuth, piecing the mystery together on why everything is so fucked up.

The Evil Within revels in this silly self-awareness, and invites you to have fun with it at every turn. That said, while I can’t say I was particularly scared by it at any point, I can confirm that I was always low on ammo and resources and, as a result, always on edge. By the final encounter, I was quite literally out of bullets and resorting to throwables to win the game. It’s a situation that is born from a game designed and paced to utter perfection. In RE Remake, I defeated the final boss with my very last pistol bullet (and then a rocket launcher of course). It’s a feeling of desperation that never left me at any point playing this game, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I just had so much fun playing The Evil Within. I can only think of a couple moments where I wasn’t actively having a blast in this game. I would quite happily come back to it sometime to do it all again, but unfortunately, I have a sequel to try out.

I finished The Evil Within 2 as well and I still really liked it, but it didn’t quite hit for me in the same way. I feel like a lot of the design differences in this sequel are a little more generic than its predecessor. If The Evil Within was doing Resident Evil 4, then TEW 2 is definitely closer to Resi 2. Less focused on relentless action, and more so concerned with exploration and mapping out an open area rather than proceeding through one-and-done set pieces. It’s still good fun and I enjoy it, but it leads to the entire game feeling a bit samey where the first was constantly shifting and trying new things. Even when some moments fell flat, I could respect the attempt to shake up the pacing a bit. The sequel plays it safer, and is more consistent as a result, but also more forgettable.

I have nice things to say, though! For instance, stealth used to be a mechanic I could take or leave – it was always a little clumsy to do and felt like an afterthought to the already enjoyable shooting mechanics – but in the sequel, it is basically essential. Enemies aren’t necessarily tankier, but they are quicker, meaning I tend to use more ammo on them than I’d like. Even basic monsters pose a serious threat if I lose focus, so preserving ammo has become a necessity for survival. It makes exploring nooks and crannies feel much more rewarding too; finding the parts to make a sniper rifle, or discovering a shotgun hidden in the back of a basement, has proven to be honest-to-god gifts from the heavens in a world as dangerous as this one now is.

Not to mention, searching houses for loot can sometimes uncover weird and completely missable spooks that had me on the edge of my seat regularly. Enemy variety is better off now too with the inclusion of the scary women in white, who have had my stomach drop more than once when I notice their presence, or the poison guys who are admittedly more boring and I’m not that into, but the design is still cool! The Evil Within is known for its stellar enemy designs, and the sequel is no different. It’s all very unique and yucky and cool and I like them!

I tried Gotham Knights for a good few hours, and while the combat is really fun and crunchy, the open world design is incredibly boring so I dropped it. Subway Midnight was a cool, spooky little experience but I found a lot of the puzzles a bit frustrating, and the path to the true ending is a matter of either picking up the thing you need or missing it by accident, so I just looked up the good endings online and left it at that. The Cub is my first 2024 release of the year and yeah, it’s alright. I wrote a review about it if you’re curious, but to summarise, I liked it fine enough.

Finally, I managed to complete a replay of Final Fantasy VII Remake which I started last year, in anticipation of its upcoming sequel. I think any game that does shit so cool that it almost makes me cry deserves at least a little praise. FF7R is legitimately astonishing, one of my favourite games ever made, and I am beyond excited for what comes next in this story. I’m aware that it’s possible one or more of my lovely beautiful party members may not survive Rebirth, and while that crushes my soul, I’ll choose to live in blissful denial for now.

WHAT I STARTED

No big releases this month, so I’ve dedicated most of my time to emptying out my backlog a little bit. I started off with something that’s been on my list for quite literally a decade: Red Dead Redemption.

As a huge fan of the sequel, it might be a surprise to some that I’ve never actually sunk my teeth into its predecessor. It’s definitely been a weird experience, to tell truth. RDR plays much more like a conventional action game, in ways that its sequel somewhat deviated from. For one, a lot of the simulation stuff is absent: you don’t need to manually equip your guns off your horse, you can whistle for said horse from any location, animal skinning and body looting is a simple seconds-ling cutscene rather than a dedicated animation dependent on the subject being yoinked.

The process of playing RDR is comparatively streamlined, so it’s not surprising that the story feels a lot breezier here. John Marston’s tragic tale is a well told one, with all the hallmarks of a Rockstar game: borderline irredeemable bastard gets in with all the wrong crowds, it blows up in their face catastrophically, cycle and repeat ad nauseum, and it’s all propped up by fantastic performances and some top-tier dialogue. Playing RDR gave me this overwhelming sense of no good deed being done. I kept doing awful things and justifying it as simply a means to an end, but I’d regularly leave places in greater disarray than I found them, and often I’d end up alienating the people who had grown to care about me. It is virtually impossible to be a good person in Red Dead Redemption, and that is absolutely by design.

When you’re not destabilising regions, you will find yourself talking to locals and uncovering little stories to follow. Some of these span the course of many missions, while others are done in a few minutes. In totality, they paint a vivid picture of the Wild West as a strange, ghostly place. Stories will often leave threads dangling and stones unturned, evoking this haunting ambiguity that I think about even now. America is a land of weirdos, but if nothing else, they’re a compelling bunch.

I really like the time I’ve spent with Red Dead Redemption. Not as much as its sequel, most likely, but that’s something I can make peace with. I know where this road ultimately leads, but I can only hope John does right by the people he loves before he reaches the end of his story.

As far as games I’m still playing go, we’ve got a few on the list. I’m finally dipping my toes into Ace Attorney and so far, I love it. It’s so silly and irreverent, but also really sweet, and I’m really interested to see where my beloved Phoenix Wright ends up.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is really fun, unsurprisingly given it’s a Firaxis game, but what I’m most interested in is the social link mechanics, and getting to have normal ass conversations with these godlike superheroes. I love that kind of approach to superhero media, so I’m excited to play some more soon. I’ve also been playing Atlas Wept, another 2024 release which shares its DNA with Undertale, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and pretty much any other famous JRPG you can think of. Its deceptively simple presentation belies a genuinely compelling narrative about defying conventions and finding hope in a world that often feels like a prison. It’s really cool, really fun and really cheap, so pick it up on Steam right now, ya motherfucker!

Moving back in time a little, I’m finally giving Pizza Tower a try, and goddamn if that game doesn’t have a fucking personality. It’s the kind of game that you just have to see in motion. The animations, and the game’s general commitment to its Flash animation aesthetic, not only communicate such character from our heroic protagonist Peppino. The closest comparison I can make to the kind of dedication this game has in capturing an artistic moment in time is, bizarrely, Cuphead, which I hope reads as the high praise I’m intended it as. I’m really looking forward to continuing my journey up the Pizza Tower and save Peppino’s beautiful pizzeria from destitution.

Okay, I’ve gotta rapid fire some of these or we’ll be here all day. Videoverse is a mid-2000s chatroom simulator that tells a story about connecting with others across the world and the beauty of exploring your identity through mutual hobbies and interests. It’s a really sweet little game so far and I need to get back to it at some point; I just keep getting distracted! I started playing BioShock on a friend’s recommendation and I’m not 100% sure about it right now. It’s definitely cool, but I really feel like I’d have appreciated it more at the time it released rather than 2024. A lot of other games have done what this game did but better by now, and that’s not BioShock‘s fault by any means. Also, the controls are really annoying and fiddly and I die a lot from accidentally switching to the camera in a panic and oh my god would you kindly let me choose which guns are bound to my RB button please!!

Finally, to wrap up the month, and to celebrate the latest release in its series, I finally played a Yakuza game. More specifically, I’ve been playing Yakuza 0, and I absolutely love it so far. It’s got me enamoured in ways I cannot explain, and while the prospect of playing all these games scares me, I can see myself doing it because this is a series that suits my tastes well I think.

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So that was my January in games! I played an awful lot this month, no doubt because of the Steam Deck purchase. However, I don’t think that’s the only reason. A new year brings with it a certain drive to do better, and one of my worst habits as a gamer is my capacity for abandoning games before I give them a fair shake, and picking up whatever the ‘it’ game of the moment may be instead of, for example, a couple cool indie games instead.

2023 was a valuable year in this respect; with every year that passes, I become more conscious of the games I really like, and what I don’t. For instance, I found that I wasn’t very into the big budget prestige games of last year. Exceptions arise, of course – I adored my time with Baldur’s Gate and Starfield – but in general I found blockbuster releases like Spider-Man 2 just washed over me. This isn’t exactly a hot take, but there’s a palpable sense of safety to those games that I find intensely boring. Spider-Man 2, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Tears of the Kingdom… these titles are inoffensive, and I find myself gravitating more so towards games that take risks and put their souls on the line. More than ever, I want to feel the presence of the artist on the other side of the screen.

That’s why I’ve done out of my way to try out new and old indie games this month. So many wonderful stories get swallowed by the Steam store amalgamate; had I not actively gone searching, I would have never played Atlas Wept, and my life would have been a little worse for it. Even games like The Cub which were ultimately disappointing had such a strong vision and sense of intent that you just don’t get from a triple AAA scene more concerned with shareholder satisfaction than artistry.

I am by no means a revolutionary for all this. Ultimately, I’m still finding ways to justify feeding into the capitalist machine or whatever. I guess this is more a personal journey of mine. As I get older and I find myself more often than not working a job than enjoying a good game, time feels shorter and more precious. Video games are art in all respects, but as the industry cuts costs and thousands of talented artists are abandoned by the system, it can feel like the medium is leaning heavily into games as products and not a method of artistic expression. I hope these writeups help in any way to dissuade you from that notion. There are so many games made with passion by the most amazing people, just waiting to be experienced, and I hope I can assist in bringing them to light, if only a little.

That’s it, I suppose. Play video games, and love them. This is my final message. Goodbye.