aurahack is an illustrator and character artist that works in both games and music. You might’ve seen some of the vinyls she’s made or some of the buffoonery done for videogames.com in the past. Currently, she is chairwoman of the Ascari Respect Zone, headquartered on her Twitter, which is also where she regularly posts art and great opinions. You can support her on Patreon or find her on Twitch where she streams art every Monday and Thursday @958 .beats.
I’m happy to be back with another list of cool games even if this year was still a weird one. My gaming habits changed a lot. About 1100 hours (to my count at least) of my game time this year exclusively in two games. I fell down the live-service game hole big time. I think I just... needed a routine? Consistency? After so much time spent indoors and playing the pandemic by ear and not really committing to any long-or-short-term plans, it felt nice to have something regular in my day. Week. Month. Some of it kinda took over my life for a while! Some of it... you ever have a game that just, changes your outlook on life? We’ll get to that.
I also made time for other cool stuff. Here’s a bunch of it!
Honorable Mentions
Shin Megami Tensei V
They released an actual new Shin Megami Tensei game in 2021 and... it’s exactly that, for better and worse. I’m kinda stunned! I mean, I’m kinda stunned it came out as a Shin Megami Tensei game and not as a Persona-like. It’s great! It’s all I could have asked for! For better, we got a new SMT soundtrack that’s suitably weird. Abstract, haunting, and full of borderline-bit crushed guitar riffs. It introduces a couple of changes to the battle system that while I don’t think always pans out, they’re interesting. They’re genuine attempts to mix the formula up that aren’t just “make it more frictionless”. There’s also some great demon dialogue this time around. The guys who call you a bitch for having your party full when you try and invite them make me laugh out loud every time. Maybe best of all, we got the Nahobino. I would gladly do nothing but stare at that man until the real apocalypse eventually eliminates us all.
But also, for worse, it’s... I don’t know. Unlike IV or Nocturne, V doesn’t have much in the way of that old-style SMT weird environment art. I mean it has some but its predecessors got so truly abstract with that stuff... I miss it. I miss that era, the SMT IIIs and DDSes and Devil Summoners. The era of internal-Atlus dev that knew its niche and its market and had a team that was generally allowed to explore the weird stuff they wanted to explore. Like cults. So many cults.
The biggest bummer is that SMT V is a lesser game for being on the Switch. It’s pretty heartbreaking. I don’t want to say “it’s unplayable’ but it’s hard to play! For real! The framerate gets to be downright awful in some spots and the field of view is incredibly restricted. It’s hard to see ahead of you in some areas and with the rest of the UI taking up what little screen real-estate there is on the Switch, you feel like you’re playing the game with horse blinders on a lot. I somehow manage to have a pretty high tolerance for stuff like motion sickness but the FOV in SMTV is so strict that it felt kinda disorienting at times. I really hope to revisit it when this inevitably makes it to another platform.
Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster
The only thing more blessed than getting a new Shin **Megami **Tensei **game in 2021 is getting a remaster of the best Shin Megami Tensei game in 2021. Atlus deserves a lot of credit for the work done on Nocturne’s remaster. Revised localization, all-new (and great) voice acting, updated UI work without detracting from the original’s art direction, upscaled everything. Very rarely do these, especially with niche and beloved games, feel like they come out “better” than the original and that might be debatable for some in this particular instance (I think it is, personally!) but at the very least it’s a fantastic way of playing one of the best JRPGs ever made.
Playing SMT V and Nocturne this year really made me appreciate that style of game so much. What if things were fucked up and weird, and the story wasn’t the draw. What if games were just about you killing God and deciding who rules when God is dead. What happens in between? Who cares. Some people want power for themselves. Go ask em’ about it. Oh shit, they’re a cult, and they built a temple inside a skyscraper and it looks like an alien spaceship in there. The story, loosely defined as such, is an excuse to get you from moment to moment as you explore a weird and cool world full of cool demons.
This was always Shin Megami Tensei and it makes a lot of sense that, over time, newcomers to the genre drifted more to the cinematic story experience but we still get to have the former. And this year, we got to have more of that than we’ve had in a long time, so I’m very happy. I hope the Nocturne remaster did well enough to warrant them revisiting some other stuff of that era. The Digital Devil Saga games in particular, I’d love to see.
Valheim
I don’t have a ton to say about this other than, like for a lot of people, Valheim took over a couple of weeks of my life because for the first time in a while we had a new Minecraft. Not really in staying power (for me) but in that early “a bunch of friends are working together to make progress in exploring this uncharted world” way. We’d log in at night at disparate times as everyone was doing tasks and eventually go on journeys together either to mine or discover a part of the world we had discovered earlier. Some of us would log in the next day excitedly telling everyone else about a new thing they had JUST discovered when sailing around the map alone at 2AM the night before. To get to re-live that kinda stuff in a new context was great. So was staying up late a couple nights and rebuilding entire parts of our base to the surprise of my friends. It’s my favorite part of those games. But like most of this stuff it hinged a lot on people keeping up with it and the group I had moved on to other stuff so I ended up doing that too. Fun time while it lasted, though.
Chorus
I played a bunch of Chorviss and I will probably not see it to completion because it being an open-world game is exhausting and unnecessary but the couple hours I did put into it are good fun. It’s stuck with me since playing it though because it’s one of the strangest, I don’t know, examples of half-step execution I’ve ever seen. There is SO MUCH in that game that kicks ass from an idea standpoint. Space dogfighting game where you play as a cultist war criminal so disgusted by your actions that you move to take the entire cult down, constantly taunted by your homicidal ship AI to chase violence at every opportunity. It writes itself! Genius shit! Except, it apparently doesn’t write itself! So so much of the game’s writing and voice acting just flops on every idea it sets up. Every idea is the world’s easiest pitch setup and every attempt at execution is just motionlessly standing there with the bat in hand, striking out long after your time at bat is over. Chorves just repeatedly introduces so much cool shit and refuses to do anything interesting with it. It’s bizarre. The amount of polish the game has otherwise makes me wonder where the ball dropped.
At the very least, the space dogfighting is super fun. It takes a bit but once you get the drifting and teleporting abilities you really get to feel like the all-powerful ace pilot of the Space War Crimes cult you topped the ranks in. Every enemy becomes meaningless cannon fodder. It’s a great feeling. I just wish this wasn’t the only part of it that was so impeccably done. Abstract space religion/corrupting AI stuff is nothing but my jam but the game ends up feeling like it was conceptualized by someone who had an incredible vision and the rest of the team just could not pick up what they were putting down. I hope whatever’s next for that team makes better use of the talent they clearly have there.
Boomerang X
Haven’t beaten it yet because I started playing over the holiday break but holy shit. Nearly every ability you get feeding into the already frantic pace of movement **is inspired. If I was making a fast-paced shooter anytime in the future I’d be looking at Boomerang X as the movement blueprint, easily. Really fantastic art style too and the way the music slowly builds in every encounter per wave cleared makes for some real “holding your breath”-type moments.