i am happy to review repentance The site earlier this year, if you read it, you probably wouldn’t be surprised that it’s my GOTY. Rarely have I been so enthralled by a game that, at first glance, seems unlikely to click: its art style, painstakingly mimicking 16th-century manuscripts and frescoes, is therefore bursting with color and characters drawn in rich black. After a century of conditioning from morning cartoons and Monty Python episodes, the overview, to modern eyes, is decidedly unserious. You’d be forgiven for playing an entire game expecting to be interrupted by a giant foot.
Except, you won’t, because what ensues is not cheap comedy (despite some tasteful visual gags), but a masterful study of how art shapes our perception of history, which begins with a Cadfael-style murder at a local monastery mystery, but fans enter a quarter-century-old epic about life and love in a small Bavarian town nestled in the Alps, surrounded by a backdrop of Roman ruins, pagan folklore and religious turmoil .
It’s a stunning piece of work that really pushes the boundaries of what video games are capable of – here, they resurrect the artistic sensibilities of a long-dead society in order to put us in their shoes. Doing this with their art, not ours (like Assassin’s Creed or something) and dialogue and meditation, rather than violence (like Assassin’s Creed or something) proves that the medium has gone how far it has come, and—for better or worse—showcased the possibility of a subscription model. As Josh Sawyer himself said, the game wouldn’t exist without Game Pass, making it easier for studios to take risks on passionate projects like Pentiment that have the potential to pay off big.
If you haven’t already, you should.
Marvel’s Midnight Sun
I’m not sure what else I can say about Dom and the Midnight Sun that I haven’t covered yet, but here’s the elevator pitch: imagine a witch’s cauldron bubbling in a run-down convent. A haphazardly haphazardly tossing ingredients into the mix—spoonfuls of XCOM and Slay the Spire. Lots of BioWare. Sprinkle Fire Emblem artfully.
The cauldron is kicked over by Captain America, and the witch is arrested for sedition. result? It’s, frankly, one of the most refreshing Marvel mythos in any medium, and a very solid strategy RPG.
weird west
The theme running through all of these GOTY picks is that I fully expected to bounce back from them, but ended up ecstatic. Weird West is no exception: initially I thought it looked too bogged down in terms of stats and incomprehensible, well, weird. But I needn’t have worried, because it actually has the wonderful trio of things I love in RPGs–accessible, systems-based gameplay that doesn’t let you be blinded by stat sheets. A powerful and twisting story with well-written dialogue and memorable characters. And, there’s a huge living world to explore, full of normal people just trying to get by (I’m a huge fan of talking to monsters, you know?).
Weird West is a belter, I think it flies a bit under the radar, so if you’re a smart fan, you should check it out for yourself, leftfield games are a bit of a spice for them, though so accessible.