Meet Julie Muncy, former contributor at Wired.com and present video game and narrative design consultant working for firms like Hit Detection. We were asked to tell you that she is, in fact, very charming and pretty.
Well, haven't done this in a while. Thanks to Giant Bomb, I am making my triumphant (?) return to Game of the Year lists after a several year absence from video game writing. As such, please bear with me, as I no longer understand where I am or what I'm doing. What year is this?
Okay. Okay. I can do this. Let's go.
10. The Fuse Puzzles in Dead Space (2023)
I have mixed feelings about the present trend of remakes. On the one hand, it's easy to argue that they represent a failure of creativity and the stagnation of the ability for the most commercially lucrative entertainment medium in the history of humanity to make decisions with any amount of risk whatsoever. And, like, yeah, that's all true. But, since getting involved with development consulting, I can't help but ask myself: what would happen if this didn't get made? Maybe something else would get made in its place, but maybe not. Maybe these talented, clever craftspeople and artists would just not have jobs. So, even as the critic in me laments the frequency with which remakes of old games dominate the conversations we have about the medium, I'm inclined to admire the care with which they're often created.
Enter this year's Dead Space remake, which features one of the most brilliantly bitchy horror mechanics I've ever seen in a game, remake or not. Imagine this: you walk into a room. It's probably full of monsters, and you have to cross it. It's big, and dark, and terrible. But the electricity's busted. You have two options: power the lights, letting you see your surroundings in this impossibly large mechanical hellroom, or you can power the gravity, giving you the ability to orient yourself in space--just, y'know, without being able to see shit.
This one innovation is so striking, and so mean, that I sometimes just sit, and think about it, and commit to writing a letter to the manager of video games complaining about it. If there's any way EA Motive could truly have paid tribute to the classic that is Dead Space, this is how: by being vindictive as fuck.
9. Life is Strange
I warned you that my grasp on linear time isn't so firm nowadays. This August, in the midst of a deep depression, I revisited and fell in love with Life is Strange (2015) all over again. It floored me.
Listen, Life is Strange is corny. It's awkward. It's, uh, sometimes pretty ableist in ways that make me uncomfortable. But it's one of the most moving trainwrecks I've ever been party to. I never got to have anything approaching a normal adolescence as a teenage girl, but Life is Strange, in filtering an idea of that experience through its surreal lens, manages to evoke in me nostalgia for something I never had. The feeling it gives me is quintessentially teenage in its intensity and illusive urgency: a sense of grief, melancholy, and love that is so large I feel like it might break me open.
Did you know the tie-in comics are also really beautiful? By way of sequel, they turn the story into a star-crossed interdimensional love story it always flirted with being. I know technically comic books "aren't video games" and it would be "irresponsible" to just devote the rest of this list to comic books but this is my list and
8. Hi-Fi Rush
Hi-Fi Rush fucks. It slaps. It bangs. It's one of like four games on this list to feature some sort of Twin Peaks parody.
I don't actually have anything else to say about this game. Some experiences are just so impeccable that your thoughts bounce off of them, like light off a mirror.
7. My Wife Telling Me About Playing 100 Hours of Dwarf Fortress
Are there even any dwarves in this game? I'm serious. Because, while I'm too stupid to sit down and play complex, numbers-and-logistics-driven simulators that are less video games than portals to absurdist fantasy dimensions, my wife is much smarter than me, and in their time telling me about Dwarf Fortress I don't think they ever actually mentioned dwarves. I remember rats, and giants made of stone, and I believe some sort of superplague? Cannibalism was definitely involved. More cannibalism than I'm comfortable with, frankly. Someone got thrown down a well, once.
But dwarves? Where are the dwarves? Probably all dead, now that I think about it. Superplagues and all that.
Anyway, I don't recommend playing Dwarf Fortress.