Adam Conover is a comedian and the host of truTV's Adam Ruins Everything. In 2019 he launched a new podcast, Factually!, in which he interviews experts on a wide array of topics.
He's @adamconover on Twitter.
"Come on," I thought, "yet another simulation of a retro computer desktop? How interesting could this be?" When I finally played this in late December, I realized how stupid I was.
Every single pixel in Hypnospace is a pitch-perfect psychedelic parody of an internet culture that's now long dead. It identifies and riffs on characters that are instantly recognizable, but which I hadn't thought about in years, much less identified as tropes: The web developer who recently found out that he's Celtic, and so has covered his website with Celtic iconography; the bubbly pastel clip-art straight out of Apple's failed mid-90s online service eWorld; the grieving mother who has made a memorial site to "angels" who have passed on. It's hyper-specific and deeply, deeply funny.
Untitled Goose Game
This is on everyone else's list, so I'll just say that what makes a game great isn't the game itself but the experience you have playing it, and the experience I had playing UGG was Lisa and I making each other laugh uproriously playing it together on stream. If you played it alone, you missed out. Grab your partner or favorite friend, trade the controller back and forth, and honk at the screen goddamnit.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
No, it's not as fresh as Dark Souls. No, it's not as impeccable an experience as Bloodborne. But Sekiro does something very special. See, in earlier From games, you could fight almost any way you wanted: you could hide behind a shield, or dodge, or kite, or attack from range. Sekiro robs you of that ability; instead, it forces you to fight on its terms. If you don't learn the parry pattern, you're getting gutted. And it's that uncompromising nature that caused the most transcendent gaming moment I've experienced in years.
At the end of a long stream, I was banging my head against the brick wall that is Spear Guy over and over again, making little to no progress. My parries were mistimed, my attacks were sloppy, and they were only becoming moreso the later it got. Frustrated and angry, I finally declared, "Okay, this is my last run and then I'm going to bed."
And on that last run, I defeated him flawlessly. Somehow, all the muscle memory I had built from bad run after bad run gathered itself and found expression in my fingers. Every thrust, I parried. Every sweep, I jumped over. Every strike found its mark. It didn't seem possible; yet I had done it. Simply put: I transcended myself. And what better moment can a game lead you to than that?
Telling Lies
Sorry Bandersnatch; Sam Barlow's Telling Lies and Her Story are the only FMV experiences I've ever enjoyed, not because they allow you to "choose your own" narrative--a mechanic which hasn't been entertaining since I was eight--but because they gamify the experience of exploring an expertly-woven narrative. The random-access nature of searching for clips means that every player is able to follow their own curiosity to discover an experience that is completely customized to them, even though the story stays the same. It's a brilliant technique.