Samantha Kalman is a game designer and musician. She's currently at Respawn Entertainment working on Apex Legends.
Wassup bomb kids? Bomb fam? Bombarinos? Bombadillos? Bombaramas? Fans of the excellent PS2 puzzle game Bombastic? And duders of all genders? It’s 2022 but with the ongoing time warp it might as well be 20XX, the exact year Megaman X occurs. I suppose our robot tech has come a long way, but Replicant tech is still lagging behind Capcom’s clairvoyant fortune telling. Honestly I’d take a robot apocalypse over this very real and very boring one. But enough about the droll of miserable reality, let’s talk about video games!
I have a short list for 2021. A lot of great games came out this last year, but unfortunately I wasn’t in a position to fully adopt 10 whole lovable games. I had to be selective about what I wanted to play and only a handful of games spoke to me enough that I really stuck with them.
#4 Deathloop
I always have this pattern with Arkane games ~ I’ll go into them hyped af, play a level or two and really soak into the experience, at this point I usually get frustrated that I’m not able to play stealthy or non-violenty enough. The allure of the perfect level playthrough hangs over me and I fall off. Or in the case of Prey, I got stuck in a corner without enough ammo/health to survive the skirmish of my save.
Although I didn’t finish Deathloop, it (ironically) helped me break out of my own personal trap with Arkane games. The emphatic violence and ridiculously intriguing setup kept me going for a while! I must have uncovered 60% or so of the solution to the perfect day, killed each visionary at least once, and earned that kickass shotgun which changed the game completely. The progression from stealthy nail gun and panic-escapes to kick-down-the-doors and shotgun everybody is probably my singular favorite moment from this year of play.
As a designer and a player, I enjoyed working toward the objectives, but the REAL game doesn’t start until Julianna shows up. I must have had every possible kind of encounter with Julianna players. Treading stealthy, watching rooftops / sprinting toward combat Cole’s apartment / playing it cool and mainlining objectives / getting a surprise drop and blowing her away with my shotgun. I was also a fan of hacking the turrets, and lemme tell ya a well-placed turret is a GAME CHANGER when playing against her. I liked this PvP game smashed into the core of a PvE game so much that I ended up playing a bunch of games as Julianna, just to climb up her progression tree.
Ultimately my impression of the longevity game is a common one. I was breathless for the first 20 or so hours, then hit a point where something in the objective progression fell flat for me. After about 26 hours I put it down, but I fully expect to return to it this year to finish off the story and find out what the fuck is actually going on with that island. And just enjoy murdering the visionary pricks a few more times.
#3 Lost Judgment
This was a late addition to my year in gaming! I’d been waiting to secure a PS5 to play it on some buttery framerates. The one PS5 I did manage to buy was a gift for my brother in law. Funny thing is he managed to get one too, as a gift for me. Love is when family buys each other impossible-to-find gaming consoles for each other for the holidays! As luck would have it, the evening after the gift exchange we had several inches of snowfall in Seattle. Being effectively snowed in with a little time off work, I had no choice but to sit at home and play through Lost Judgment. Woe, woe indeed.
Some of you may remember that the first Judgment was my game of the year last year! So I went into this sequel with high expectations. Perhaps mistakenly, perhaps unfairly, I was a little disappointed. Now don’t get me wrong, Lost Judgment is a great game! It’s my third best game of the year! But it hits different. OG Judgment had the benefit of telling a story that was centralized and eventually revealed to be formative to the main character’s VERY compelling story. This story is very different, as it’s centered around events at a high school starting with an investigation into the severity of bullying that’s occurring. It goes from there, and it goes many places! It’s interesting and mysterious and it’s not at all clear how all these events and pieces of the puzzle fit together until quite late in the game. The revelations and motivations of the characters are nuanced and mature in the way adult humans are complex. I absolutely applaud the game for leaning into that nuance for character motivations. In an industry of entertainment products where “shoot the bad guy” rules all, a bit of unapologetic complexity is most welcome.
A critical aspect of tension in the story is uniquely rooted in Japanese culture, which I think works against most western players who probably don’t understand some fundamental differences about how Japanese society differs from our own. Briefly, the role of obligations to the society at large is vastly different in Japan. An individual’s actions reflect on their family and institutions they’re connected to. Committing a shameful act can bring shame those around an individual. We don’t really have the same concept of shame ingrained into our social codes. An example of this is actually a story from the first Judgment. After the initial Japanese release, one of the actors who was cast as a key character was arrested by police for a real-world crime. The crime was seen to be so shameful that it violated these rules I’m describing. The response was for the developers and publisher of the newly-released game to recall all copies that featured his likeness. They took some time to completely remove his presence from the game and replace it with another actor. This is the kind of action taken in response to this shame; erasure.