I would say Hades for putting a decent story into a rogue like. Like the gameplay loop is good enough to sustain multiple playthroughs, but the story is the icing on the cake that makes it all so much more intriguing.
FFVII Remake presented the same story with the same characters, that still feel as relevant today as they did yesterday. I’m not entirely sure what happened with the end, but I’m looking forward to what comes next. Either the game is teasing us that Aeris can be saved this time round OR they’re just going to kill her again in an attempt to make it more devastating.
However, I’m also playing through 13 Sentinels and boy… it is starting to get interesting.
I only got to Control and Outer Wilds this year, but those are clearly high on the list of rich, interesting worlds full of fascinating details. From 2020, Paradise Killer was the game that absorbed me utterly and threw at me one incredible tidbit of lore after another, with a complex but entertaining murder mystery at the core.
I also want to shout out some smaller profile visual novels:
Mizuchi and A Summer’s End - Hong Kong 1986 are well written lesbian romances, with a good amount of depth in how the characters relate to the world. They talk about the emancipation of women in very specific settings, in a way that makes it both universal and a direct source of growth for the characters.
Extreme Meatpunks Forever - Bound by Ash is a good follow-up to the first season, putting front and center the struggle of four queer young-to-mid adults with fascists and mental health issues in a strange world full of meat mechs. Though it gets quite serious, it’s big, bombastic and full of jokes; it has the “road trip adventure” vibe of a classic JRPG.
Playing Ciconia When They Cry Ep1 in 2020 was certainly a choice to make. I would recommend maybe playing that in a less “Cool Zone” time… Still, it’s a really interesting start as a direct response to previous When They Cry games that were focused on Japan’s history and Japanese politics; here, it’s a cynical take on geopolitics with a large international cast, diverse in race and gender, that tries to tackle issues of xenophobia and social inequality on a global scale.
I’ve had the chance to sit with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla long enough at this point that I think I’ve figured out part of why I’m clicking with it so much more than Odyssey (despite liking Kassandra so much more): its narrative structure.
Odyssey very much believed in giving you side quests. You’d get wrapped up in the tale of some local corrupt politicians on your way to dealing with some other quest giver who needs a favor so you can continue your actual quest of meeting your parents, but you’re so deep in tangents this point that you lose the plot. It also didn’t help that the main story power requirements quickly outstripped any effort to try and mainline it, meaning that you’re stuck on an…odyssey of grinding (maybe I actually missed the point of Odyssey) that outpaced my ability to care.
Valhalla eschews side quests in favor of Mysteries - little one-off world events that are designed to be bite-sized and optional. The power-scaling is a lot more forgiving, to the point where I’m sure people with a bigger appetite for difficulty than I have should turn it up to Hard. And the overarching narrative is as simple as “Eivor wants more alliances,” which means that each individual arc is allowed to be (largely) self-contained. The result is a much more digestible game than Odyssey, which has made it a lot easier for me to dig in.
Paradise Killer I think might take it for me. The core mystery is fine but where the writing really excels is in its world building. The game throws you in knowing nothing to a surprisingly lore filled world and while it initially beats you over the head with the important parts the rest you just pick up over conversation with characters in a pretty natural way. And the world they’ve crafted is absurd but I wanted to learn everything I could about it.
