It may come to you as a shocker, but I have never played a point & click adventure game, like the well-known Monkey Island series, for example. It is something I know exists and is beloved, yet I never touched it, despite several releases of the franchise being of my time. Pentiment falls into the same game category, and the coverage I follow had high praise for that title.
So, when I got sick recently, I figured this would be a chill game to pass the time while trying to recover.
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Last year, I wrote a summary of all the games I played in 2021. It was one of the ways of coping with the stress I deal with at work. And I like games. And writing. And writing about games. And digressing.
Two does not yet make for a series, but I’d like to continue the idea, and maybe I can turn it into one. So, here is my gaming year 2022 in review. I am not yet confident that I have nailed the format, so this blog post will differ in style from the inaugural version. I will start with a bit of story mode, as I am wont to do. Afterward, I’ll present the games in the order I started (or finished?) them. We’ll see. Lastly, I’ll reveal my Game of the Year in 2022.
AND DON’T YOU DARE JUMP AHEAD WITHOUT READING THE REST!
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To continue, press “B”.
To continue, press ”=”.
I hate when games do this, and Cyberpunk 2077 does it twice when starting for the first time. It greets you with two screens that you must dismiss with the push of a button before you get into the menu. Why, CD Projekt Red? Why? That is not the kind of a first impression you want. It makes for good variety in the introduction segment of my reviews, though 🤷.
(I later discovered that the first “screen” is an intro video. It just does not appear to be one in the first seconds. I am so used to games starting with a pointless screen to dismiss that I immediately canceled the video without knowing and landed on the actual screen to click away.)
Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to its second birthday, and the hype surrounding it and CD Projekt Red came crashing down hard on last generation’s Xbox One and PS4 consoles.
(Like the meteor wiping out all dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.)
CDPR has been very busy since then, and in February 2022, they finally released the next-gen update for current-gen (🙄) consoles. This finally incentivized me to purchase a copy for myself and see if this game is as good as it could have been without its many issues at launch. According to recent reports, I am not the only one doing so.
Unlike the Witcher games, CDPR decided to go with a first-person experience for a deeper immersion into the colorful yet dark and gritty world of Night City. The game’s art style is reminiscent of The Ascent, a twin-stick shooter I played last year. In contrast, Night City is a vast Open-World metropolis with a few rural places surrounding it. Geralt’s companion Roach has morphed into a car, and dirt roads and farm tracks have been paved over and are now asphalt. You can walk, drive, or use fast-travel stations spread across town to get around.
In its simplest form, you can reduce the combat system to be just a Shooter. Cyberpunk 2077 adds a couple more mechanics on top of that for more variety if you choose so. You can go the stealthy and non-lethal route or become a proficient hacker (aka Net-Runner). I am a simpleton, so my character is a tank that sh*ts bullets (although I also like to sneak when I can). Despite the options, from what I have seen, there is no way to play the game without ever firing a gun. Hacking is more than manipulating computers. It seems like everybody is somehow connected over an unprotected Wi-Fi, and you can utilize a person’s cyber implants against them. Ever heard of 2FA 😉?
CDPR has shown in The Witcher games that they are masters in storytelling. You can find the same mastery in Cyberpunk, which I was most interested in. You will meet many different characters with their own traits and agenda. There is a lot of action RPG stuff to do, a skill tree, an inventory – the typical Open-World role-playing experience, if you will.
Let’s get into the details, shall we?
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One of the “PC Master Race” issues with console gaming is the controls. I certainly was among them, and the more I play on a console, the more I keep coming back to this topic. 2021 was the first year where I spent the majority of my time playing on an Xbox Series console. Everything I tried during that year was okay, or it was still new enough to me that I could not differentiate between good and bad controls. On the PlayStation, I only played Horizon Zero Dawn, and I found it to be one of the best controller input implementations out there. In 2022, I have played fewer games in total in about the same period. Still, a higher percentage of them frustrated me with their implementation of analog-stick movement to the point where I was about to give up or actually gave up playing the game.
Why is it so hard for some developers to figure out an enjoyable controller feeling? Am I the only one noticing this, or are long-time console players just used to it? Let me take a step back and explain.
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2021 has been a challenging year, for obvious reasons, but also in other personal aspects that are not part of this little essay. Despite all the trials and tribulations, I have probably never played so many games in just one year – some of them in Coop and others all on my lonesome. Many of them I finished, others I, or we, aborted. But not only that, I have also managed to transition from PC gaming to console gaming – a long-held goal of mine.
As always, I am pretty late to the party because I have trouble motivating myself to write stuff, despite having the ideas and mentally developing concepts for them. Much thinking, few doing. One of my 2021 issues.
(I am surprised I managed to get this huge Halo Infinite review out the door.)Here is how this will go. I am starting with a story about why I replaced my gaming PC with consoles and a laptop. Then I transition into my experience with said consoles, and I conclude this gaming year review with the list of games I have played in lonely-mode or Coop. Don’t worry. I didn’t go Halo Infinite on every game. I kept it short-ish because the list is astonishingly long.
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Do you know the feeling that you occasionally get when watching a gameplay trailer, and you immediately want to get your hands on the game? Like, right now? This sensation does not come around too often for me, and two games managed to do just that last year. One was Outriders and the other one The Ascent, which I am discussing today. I am not sure what exactly did it for me, but probably because it reminded me of something I played in my youth. In 1999, a game named Expendable made the rounds, primarily due to its stunning visuals at the time. Back then, it demonstrated the power of a graphics feature called Environment Mapped Bump Mapping to enamor the game’s textures with depth information and more perceived detail. The core visuals will not excite anyone in 2021, but that game was full of effects and did not hold them back. Expandable still puts on quite a show.
Games like this are a rare breed and seem to catch my eye whenever one pops up. A more recent example of this type of game that I am aware of is Halo Spartan Assault and Halo Spartan Strike – of which I played the first one. Combine this with stunning visuals in a futuristic, gritty, cyberpunk-themed world, and you get The Ascent. Because it is 2021, no game can make do without some RPG elements. Thus, you get to create your character, level up, and collect loot along the way, making shooting stuff more enjoyable.
And enjoyable it is. Once you get to the point where your brain can cope with the twin-stick-shooting mechanics, and you start to both move and aim in the right direction, The Ascent begins to make a lot of fun – especially in Coop. I discovered how the game works with another player, which is always more motivating than figuring out weird concepts alone. After a while, it started to feel right, and I wanted to continue playing weekend after weekend until we had beaten the game – and that is a good sign.
Here is my report on The Ascent in Coop mode: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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In a recent blog post (that I somehow accidentally deleted; thank you to WordPress for having a Trashed section from which you can restore), I already summarized my first impressions of the smaller variant of the new Xbox consoles, the Series S. Now that I have had the Xbox Series S for a couple of months, it is about time that I go into more detail.
There are a few reasons why I bought the Series S:
Before I took the plunge, I was very conscious about what to expect. I watch Digital Foundry videos regularly where their team investigates the performance and target resolutions of many console games, old and new, among other things. From my experience with connecting my PC to my 4K TV, I was confident that a resolution of 1080p is actually good enough for me to enjoy a game. Sure, I can see the difference to 4K. But my TV does an excellent job of upscaling, and the picture does not wash out and become a blurry mess. Therefore, the Series S should not disappoint. And it didn’t. There is a caveat, though, and I will address it in a later section of this probably pretty long wall of text that is going to come.
The Codeslinger 