While it’s unfortunate that Covid-19 continues to impact our daily lives, and game development timelines, the lack of major releases gave me the time to play both indie games and games that I never got around to when they came out.
This list is dedicated to the latter category. Games that I played, but were not released, this year, starting with:
Eliza
As someone who has spent most of his working years in tech, Eliza depicts an all too familiar aspect of my chosen profession in a way that feels only too real. I spend more time than I probably should thinking about how large corporations believe themselves capable of distilling important mental and emotional labor into algorithms, and how those ambitions often fell short at the cost of good people who rely on them not to.
More than that, I ponder how I would be devastated if a project I or someone I know worked on was used in such as way as to either cause harm or prevent someone who may have otherwise gotten much-needed assistance from doing so. Watching Evelyn go through those struggles in Eliza, knowing what I know about the industry in real life, hit close to home for me.
These are questions and themes that don’t come with easy answers, and sometimes we can only give our best and hope it works out.
Quantum Break
Once an Xbox One exclusive, it’s been quite some time since Quantum Break arrive on PC, and during one of the slower periods of game releases, I spent a weekend beating it. It’s clearly an artifact of a strange period in Xbox’s history, but I still had fun with my time playing it.
Though the idea of a TV show that occurs in parallel with the events of the game is fascinating, in practice it’s not all the different from a long cutscene in something like Metal Gear. Albeit, the presentation is far more appealing here than it can be in some of Kojima’s older works.
What truly kept my attention was the world and setting they had set up, alongside the rules they established for time travel. Seeing characters react to the inevitability that certain events are destined to occur because they’ve already happened, even if they happened in the future, and how that affects them, was fun both to watch and reflect on conceptually.
It’s not much, but there is something here that a lot of us slept on, myself included.
Magic the Gathering: Arena
What can I say? They print a new version of my favorite handsome leonin planeswalker, even if they turned him evil, and I’m simping for him so much that I reinstalled the Arena client.
Unfortunately, I never actually managed to build a deck around him, and this check-in made me remember why I fell off the bandwagon in the first place. Though they’ve recently made some improvements to the Arena economy, it’s still far and away one of the worst I’ve had the displeasure of participating in, and I have played a lot of the free-to-play digital TCG clients over the years.
It became clear over the few months I returned to it that because I’m not a paying player, I am unlikely to develop the card collection required to play the decks I want because it’s far too slow and tedious to build up the wildcard needed to purchase (without trades, dusting, or refunds) the lands that I need for anything other than mono-colored decks.
When Brother’s War came out, I realized I didn’t have it in me anymore, so I just uninstalled it again. I’ve got too many games to play to let one that annoys me dominate all of my spare time.
Final Fantasy XIV
Case in point, I don’t need to play Final Fantasy XIV daily to stay current with what’s ongoing in the land of Eorzea. And yet, I log in almost every single day, not because I have to, but because I want to.
It’s been a year since Endwalker dropped, and in that time I took part in my first Savage raid static. While it fell apart due to scheduling conflicts before we could finish the third fight of the tier, I had a blast working with my team to get better at each fight. I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy higher-level content in FF XIV, because it’s a fundamentally different experience from the more casual story-based content that had been my bread-and-butter up to that point. But my experience with that raid static leaves me wondering if I might be so bold as to attempt the next upcoming tier… with randos in Party Finder!
Yeah, that’s definitely not something I would have considered this time last year. I consider it a mark of personal growth.
Hitman 3
People who frequent this place know that I can never pass up an opportunity to play more Hitman. In fact, one of the first things I did with my Steam Deck was figure out how to get the Epic Game Store working on it so I could play Hitman 3 on my couch.
Though a lot of the new additions slated for this year have been moved over to next year, like the Freelancer mode I am looking forward to playing on stream, there was a whole new map added to the game this year. Once I got the issues with my Nvidia drivers sorted out, I had a blast playing and replaying it to full map mastery as is tradition for a new Hitman drop.
And despite Freelancer’s delay, I was privileged to play the beta version of it, even if the timing didn’t align with my streams. It was enough to whet my appetite for the full version in due time.
Until then, it’s enough to open the game up again for the occasional Elusive Target or just to replay a story mission once more.
The Bouncer
I still have a difficult time believing that I convinced Acharky to join me for a run of The Bouncer, in much the same way he sat in for The Quiet Man, the dumbest game I have ever played on camera in the eleven years I have been on YouTube.
The Bouncer doesn’t eclipse The Quiet Man in terms of sheer boneheaded audacity, but it makes a good effort. Obviously, it doesn’t help that this was one of the first games Squaresoft ever developed for the PlayStation 2, but even with that context, it’s surprising that a game like this was released. I can’t be mad if The Bouncer had to crawl for the likes of Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts to run, but nor do I have to excuse it.
Still, it was more than a few laughs between Acharky, myself, and my audience, so it did more than enough for me.
Hypnospace Outlaw
A child of the 90s, I am intimately familiar with the era of dial-up internet, when websites were frequently defined less by practical design and more by gaudy, ostentatious displays that children my age considered “cool” at the time. Artifacts like the Space Jam website are living testaments to this nearly forgotten era of internet history, back when it was even more of a lawless wasteland than it is now.
Hypnospace Outlaw hearkens back to that era of the internet, and that nostalgia trip alone made it more than worth the playthrough. Playing it felt like opening a time capsule of those old single-page websites that kids like me once set up just to talk about some weird anime they liked or shitpost about how much school sucked. I didn’t realize until I was face-to-face with it how much I subconsciously missed that era before Chrome felt the need to eat up all of your CPU just to open up Twitter.
Beyond the nostalgia, they use that time capsule to tell a tale of corporate negligence, and how dire the consequences of it can be: A tale that becomes all too familiar in the wake of modern tech giants, similar to Eliza in that respect.
A friend recommended it to me, and I’m glad I took the time to check it out.
Wordle
Obviously, I was a bit late to the Wordle party, but once I started I’ve done my best to keep up with it. In my home, it’s become the activity my mother and I do each morning to see which one of us can solve today’s Wordle in as few guesses as possible.
The game is almost immaterial if I’m being honest. What I’ve found is that it’s mostly a venue for social interaction. Not just with my family, but friends who I keep in touch with to compare notes. Wordle is a great icebreaker to start up casual conversation in my neck of the woods, and I’m always down to have more of those in my pocket.
Fortnite
Similar to Wordle, Fortnite is less a game I’m interested in playing and more of a thing to do while chatting with my friends over Discord calls. I’ve tried playing it before, but I just couldn’t get into it. I was growing tired of shooting at another player only for them to build a house in front of me to block my shots.
In the advent of No Building mode, a lot of my friends have seen fit to return to the game. I resisted for a time, but when they pointed out that my favorite Marvel villain, Venom, was on sale in the Fortnite shop, I decided that it would serve as a good time to jump back into the game. Worst case, I would be out the cost of a skin.
What luck for me that it’s been so long since I’ve last played a Battle Royale that it feels fresh again. And without building as a thing I need to worry about, I’m having much more fun now than I did back then.
But honestly, it’s the company I keep that I play for. Without them, this would just be another install to delete the next time I need to reclaim space on my PC or my PS5.
Legends of Runeterra
Legends of Runeterra and Marvel Snap are the two card games I still keep up with, and it’s not difficult to pinpoint why.
Riot realized some time ago that the Path of Champions is far and away the most popular way to play Runeterra, and since then they’ve been doing good work adding more to the mode to keep it fresh and interesting. Recently, they added my favorite champion, Nasus, to it, and that’s been great for me since I’m always happy to bonk enemy champions with his signature Syphoning Strike.
Beyond the single-player offerings, Runeterra remains one of the most generous card economies I’ve ever been a part of in the space of digital TCGs. Until the latest card update, I had a 100% complete collection of full playsets of every card in the game, and I’m well on my way to achieving that again, all without spending a single dime. (On cards: Cosmetics are a different story.)
I’m happy to login in every day just to do one Path of Champions campaign over my lunch break, and I doubt that will change anytime soon.
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With that, I’ve gone over all the big highlights of the year that weren’t released this year. Personally, professionally, and in games, 2022 was a year of profound positive change in my life, and I hope you had a similar experience. Cheers to 2022, and may the next year be gentle to us all.
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