If you’re on the other side of the pond, then you’d be thinking of “soccer”, but I will be referring to the sport by its proper name. Football has been involved in gaming since as far back as Taito’s Soccer in 1973 (although that was a glorified version of Pong), all the way to all the modern variants of videogame football we have, from full team games, manager simulations, arcade versions…

When it comes to the modern iterations, it’s easy to come up with examples of each one: EA Sports FC would be the yearly version of the most well-known, almost fully licensed association football videogame; Football Manager is the most well-known football management simulation; other variants could be Soccer Story or Despelote, as an indie RPG and indie adventure, respectively.

Now, management fans are in their own niche, and indie games are indie games. I enjoy football mostly as a sport to play in real life, occasionally watch during national team competitions, and to play in videogames if the game is good enough.

With all of these niches, subgenres, and different games, you must be wondering, what is that specific niche that I am talking about today? Well, it is…

…individual control team games.

The specific niche here is the one for an online game, where each player controls one character in the team, with two teams of players facing each other. There are at least two games that fit this niche: EA FC’s Pro Clubs and Rocket League.

In the case of Pro Clubs, the proposed gameplay loop is actually really interesting. You create and customize your own player, male or female, your height and weight affect your stats, and it remains an RPG, with your character starting with a low set of stats that you can increase through a skill tree after gaining levels by playing games and completing challenges. In the matches, a team can include anywhere from 2 to 11 players per team, with the remaining positions being controlled by the AI. A player can fill any position in the team, including the goalkeeper, and will exclusively control their own character through the match.

In the case of Rocket League, the football aspect is heavily distorted by the addition of rocket-powered battle cars, but the basis remains the same: two teams of 2 to 4 players each face each other with the objective of scoring more goals than their opponents, using tactics and skill to come out on top.

With such big games in this niche, why is Rematch a fresh proposition? How does it compete against Pro Clubs and Rocket League?

On one hand, Pro Clubs suffers from stat imbalance. A player that has just started the game will always be at a disadvantage against players that have maxed out their level, and in that case skill and tactics become less relevant. If you play as a right-back and you cannot catch up to your opposing winger, the game becomes unfair, and then unfun.

In the case of Rocket League, it is all about skill and tactics, but it is such a special game that it does not directly clash with Rematch. I still wanted to mention it as I have seen Rematch referred to in the past as a potential "Rocket League killer”.

The Rematch pitch

What would Rematch offer that made it stand out? Made by Sloclap, developers behind titles like Absolver and Sifu, the French team wanted to combine their knowledge and experience behind these fighting games with their love of football to create an enjoyable, skill-based competitive experience.

Rematch was presented as a team-based, competitive, arcade football game where every player character has the same abilities and stats, and victory is achieved by overcoming your opponents by being more skillful and having better tactics.

With great animations and several match sizes, from 3v3 to 5v5, the original proposition was simple, but it was more than enough. The game immediately sparked interest among the football gaming community, and it released to moderate success, with close to 93,000 concurrent users at the peak, and now having settled at a monthly peak of about 4,000 users.

So what happened to Rematch? How did it have so much potential, and how was it squandered? And most importantly, is it possible to salvage the game? Before we go into detail about this, have you considered subscribing?

The vision vs. the meta

Sloclap, the developers behind Rematch, had a very clear vision for their game that they communicated during the private beta tests to the small community that had formed. For them, Rematch is a game where tactics and teamwork are the key to victory. The game’s prologue emphasizes the importance of passing the ball and moving as a team, and they stated several times that their goal was for the game to be mainly played as a team game.

However, they still wanted to allow a measure of skill expression. Along with the most basic functions to pass and shoot the ball, they included different dribbles. On an Xbox controller, holding LT and pressing A will perform a ground dribble based on the directional input, while holding RB and pressing A will perform a flick or otherwise raise the ball over your own player. These, along with simply tapping A to push the ball in a specific direction, are the main controls for dribbling with the ball.

The vision for Rematch was for players to use passing and teamwork to overcome their opponents, with dribbling used as a crutch to get out of tough spots or to get a better position before taking a shot. Players had a different idea of how to play the game.

Many people who played Rematch during the private tests did not know a lot about tactics, and working as a team is made difficult when your team is composed by random players from the matchmaking system. As such, the meta of the game became learning to perform specific dribbles that were considered the most difficult to defend against. For the majority of players, victory in Rematch came as a result of gaining possession of the ball and then dribbling your way to the goal all on your own.

While this went against the developers’ vision, they admittedly enjoyed that players found their own way to play, but this went beyond simply refusing to pass the ball. As players learned more about the game’s engine, and defenders learned how to defend against the best dribblers, players pushed the game to its limits, and started breaking the game in order to dribble.

In the first few months of the game, players would break the game in order to fly with the ball, perform impossibly fast dribbles that made the ball cover great distances while being untouchable, or teleport themselves short distances by abusing the game’s lock-on mechanic. Rematch was (and, to this day, remains) a buggy game, and these players found ways to abuse this to their advantage. Soon enough, the playerbase was divided between those who wanted to win matches by using better tactics and those who wanted to win matches by being better dribblers. The latter faction relied on glitches and bugs, and Sloclap could not allow that.

Fixing the game: too little, too late

As Sloclap started pushing patches, they fixed and removed some of the most egregious bugs. For certain bugs that allowed special dribbles to be made, they went the extra mile, added new animations and made these dribbles "legit”, albeit not as broken as they used to be. Once they were fixed, they weren’t a guaranteed path to victory, and now they are just another tool in a player’s kit.

Other bugs were fixed, only to return in future patches. Sometimes your power bar will reset when you’re charging a shot. Sometimes the ball will phase through you when you’re trying to stop a goal, or you will be unable to interact with the ball.

Fixing a game is not easy, and I don’t intend to criticize Sloclap for their slow progress or inability to solve certain problems, but I will criticize Sloclap for something else. While almost a year has passed since release, certain problems remain in the game, unfixed. At the same time, they have continued to work in adding collaborations with brands like Adidas or Puma, or certain players like Marc-André Ter Stegen or the legendary Ronaldinho.

For a team that reportedly counts with over 100 employees, I can understand that not everyone in the company is dedicated to fixing bugs, but I (and most of the community) finds it egregious that they continue to push for more monetizations and microtransactions when the base experience of a game that is not free-to-play is so bad, even a year in.

The fall

Rematch released to a decent amount of players, over 100,000 across platforms, and quickly added cross-play to ensure that no console would end up with too small a playerbase. Unfortunately, in just one month, the game lost approximately 60% of its playerbase on Steam, and more in another month. It is fair to say that Rematch currently holds around 10,000 players across platforms at its peak.

Every patch was a drop of water trying to put out a fire. Players demanded the game to be fixed, to have certain basic features added, and to not have to put up with players who abuse glitches in every match. Unfortunately, as Sid Meier and Soren Johnson said, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Even now, almost a year from launch, Sloclap continues to patch away exploits and glitches to keep their vision intact, while players continue to find new ways to gain an unfair advantage. Is there really a solution to gamers’ endless tenacity in their pursuit of the unbeatable strategy?

Is there a solution?

Sloclap has not made a comment so far stating that they will send the game into F2P (Free to Play) territory. Doing so could bring in many new players who refuse to pay the 24.99€ for the base edition of the game, but if they do it before the game is properly fixed, then there would be no hope for it.

At the same time, is F2P the solution? If they really fix the game, could part of the playerbase that quit early come back? I believe so. On release, I played often with a group of 7 friends. Now we are 3. Using my own experience, that’s a 57% of my playerbase that quit the game within the first two months. All of them have already said they are willing to return to the game once it’s fixed. Of course, my experience doesn’t translate to the whole community, but there is a general sentiment that some things are missing before the game is “ready”.

An ability to create player Clubs, and more solid netcode that doesn’t cause visibles glitches and rollback would go a long way. However, it’s all on Sloclap hands. They must either:

• Stick to their original vision for a tactical football game, and heavily nerf or remove all the newer dribbling tech that players discovered by abusing glitches. Rematch goes back to being a heavy team based, tactics game.

• Stick to players’ skill expression, fixing glitches but leaning more into new animations and button combinations to perform dribbling moves. Rematch progresses in the direction of selfish players who refuse to pass the ball, but it at least is not glitchy, and passing is still an option.

Regardless of what they do, I find it difficult to believe that Rematch will ever make a comeback, although a small sliver of hope remains. As much as I can criticize Rematch, the truth is I enjoy the game greatly.

Conclusion

This is my best read on what I consider the attempt for a newcomer to carve a niche for itself. Unfortunately, the developers were not up to the task, but I am hoping they will not surrender. I have a question for you, however.

With the arrival of a new month, it was time to start up a new MMORPG adventure. Considering that my time spent in SWTOR was cut short, it has been a while. As suggested by various comments in previous entries in this series, I finally returned to The Lord of the Rings Online. This is another game that is dear to me, and my Steam account registered around 145 hours before I started the new attempt.

Once again, I would be testing the game’s flexibility against my specific set of rules and constraints, in order to find out if LotRO is my ideal MMORPG.

My objectives and rules

As usual, I wasn’t planning on playing the game in a normal way. Since I am looking for a game that will give me a very specific feeling, I have a set of rules and options that I must follow in order to find out the real answers to my questions.

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

And I spent March playing The Lord of the Rings Online.

The Lord of the Rings Online

The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO for short) is an MMORPG released for PC in 2007. It is set during the time of the War of the Ring, with the first few quests set at the time that Frodo and his friends leave the Shire. In the game, you can create your fantasy of denizen of Middle-Earth, and you can also ignore the main quest to simply live out your adventure exploring from the northern regions in Eriador all the way to Mordor and even to the region of Harad, south from Mordor, in the most recent content pack.

The game feels closer to an old-school MMORPG, and is more similar to WoW than to SWTOR in the way it plays and looks. While the game offers the option of “Monster Play”, it is not like WoW where players can choose between two equally developed factions, instead being something akin to an asymmetrical option for players to engage in PvP.

Now, does LotRO meet the goals to suit my needs?

The Challenge

For my LotRO character, I decided to make a Dwarf Guardian, a dual wielding, high-damage dealing warrior. I named him Thrauki (or Þráki, if the game allowed these characters), and started the tutorial and following the main story, also known as the Epic Questline. The game was extremely easy, similar to SWTOR, where I was able to tackle on groups of enemies even at a higher level than mine, and dispatch them effortlessly. While I am sure that at higher levels it becomes harder, I went ahead with the “Path of Valour”, an optional challenge where you can set different difficulties in order to make the game harder in exchange for certain rewards, like extra XP from monsters or some titles for bragging rights.

If you start a Path of Valour before level 11, you are eligible for specific titles at level 50 and 130, depending on whether you chose difficulty 1 (Adventurous) or 3 or higher (Fearless or Heroic). I chose Fearless, difficulty 3, since it was the bare minimum to apply for the titles, and I didn’t trust myself to succeed on a higher difficulty.

Fair enough, this makes the game closer to tWoW in terms of difficulty. Fighting an enemy at my own level makes it relatively difficult, with the enemies receiving buffs in combat and me having to dodge extra AoEs that appear specifically in these difficulties.

In Ered Luin, where Dwarves and Elves begin the journey, I spent some time doing main and side quests and managed to get to level 9, but unfortunately, I became too bold, and died in a fight against an Elite enemy.

So, is LotRO a suitably difficult game? Yes, and in fact, the ability to tweak the difficulty to suit every player’s preference is great. In terms of challenge, LotRO is an excellent option.

After having lost Thrauki, so early in the month, and with not enough data about the game, I decided to create a new character to continue the research. This time, a Human Minstrel, a hybrid class able to heal and buff, as well as deal decent damage, named Bandakh. I set the difficulty to Fearless again, and this time decided to ignore the Epic Questline, to explore at my own pace for the sake of the other two questions I still had unanswered.

Intermission:

Enjoying the read? You can check February's attempt here.

The Immersion

Having started a brand new character, I decided to completely ignore the Epic Questline, instead focusing on doing only side quests of whatever region I was in at the moment, and travelling out of my own volition. With this I wanted to emulate how my progression happened in tWoW, where there was no linear progression between zones, and I was able to level on my own path, even switching regions halfway through to keep things interesting.

With Bandakh, I started by going to Bree as a main hub (similar to Ironforge in tWoW). I leveled in the Shire first, then Ered Luin, then I went back to the Bree-lands, then south to Cardolan…

My time travelling between zones, completing quests and fighting enemies was very engaging, with XP being gained at a decent pace that meant I was able to level faster than in tWoW. Not only that, but skills are gained as you level automatically, without needing to visit a trainer for this. I wasn’t a big fan of this, but it didn’t really affect my immersion.

I picked up 3 crafting professions, as well as the two available hobbies: Bird-watching and Fishing. I was also tempted to purchase a house in one of the many available neighborhoods, but felt there was no point since I wouldn’t be playing past March.

The game offers a mount from very early on, and many more ride stations than tWoW, although not as many as SWTOR. You are forced to “discover” a station first before you are able to ride from one point to the other, and even then, some routes are restricted, which means you need to follow specific routes for you to go from Mossward to Michel Delving in the Shire, per example.

By the time my time with the game came to an end, I was almost level 25, and I had set myself a goal to reach Rivendell, but unfortunately I ran out of time.

The Socialization

I created my characters in the Meriadoc server, which was labelled as “EU” and “RP”. Despite this, the game’s population is low to the point where RP rules are no longer enforced. At first, I was having a really hard time getting people to chat, but found success as I leveled up and met higher level PCs.

In a certain occasion I teamed up with another PC to do a “fellowship Quest”, which are higher difficulty quests meant to be completed as a group.

On another occasion, I roleplayed briefly with a PC called Catalinna, who very kindly also answered certain questions I had about the game. Per example, one of the reasons I was unsuccessful in communicating with other players is that the French and German servers were merged with the English one, and many players simply do not speak English and mostly stick to their own language. There are specific times of the day where certain players meet in locations like the Prancing Pony inn to roleplay and socialize, but normally it is difficult to do so without directly DMing someone or using third party communications (which I cannot do in this case).

Catalinna also highlights the great writing and landscapes in LotRO, as well as the mini-events and festivals that happen often in game, bringing the community together for specific things. In her own words, “Any gamer could find something to like about [LotRO]- whether you’re a Tolkien fan or not.”

As a final answer to my questions, apparently Hardcore challenges are not particularly common, which is understandable given that the final title you get for surviving is given at level 20 and never again at any point.

I felt like, in terms of social life in the game, LotRO has less to offer than tWoW for someone who stubbornly refuses to use third-party apps to find a community, but I think that is simply related to the player count. While tWoW has three servers and an overall player count of more than 10,000 players concurrently across all three, LotRO has eight open servers, with 15,000 active players across all them, but not concurrently.

The game is alive and well, but playing off the peak hours makes it seem less active. However, I still managed a healthy amount of interaction with other players, and in this case I would say it is a decently social game.

The Conclusion

I had low expectations for this game, for no particular reason other than thinking it maybe had too low of a player count or it would be too easy, but I was pleasantly surprised. With some player chosen tweaks, similar to tWoW, the difficulty is high enough to provide a thrill in my one life run. The world is amazing, not only as beautiful as Azeroth, but also a very loyal and accurate rendition of Middle-Earth, the OG fantasy realm. Everything is made with such attention to detail and love for the lore that just taking the walk from the Shire to Bree is extremely immersive. If I had to rate this game according to my specific set of rules, I would give it a 9/10. Once again, I am sad that I am leaving the game behind temporarily as I move on to a future MMO to test.

The April Attempt

I am currently waiting on a very promising fan-server for Final Fantasy XI which aims to recreate the original game’s feeling before it was tweaked for easier access to the endgame, however I doubt it will be ready in April. I have been looking at some less popular MMOs on Steam, and of course I still have Final Fantasy XIV in mind, but not quite sure of which one to play yet. As usual, I would love some feedback from you, reader, to help me pick my next adventure.

I have watched the whole of Vox Machina (the actual play, not the animated TV show), and I am halfway through the Mighty Nein actual play, although I will admit I am not as interested in it as I was in their first campaign.

Critical Role is a great example of Dungeons and Dragons taken to the peak in the roleplaying aspect. The world, the story, the characters… everything comes together in every session that the group plays to provide viewers with the modern equivalent of a radionovela, where each “episode” advances the story while showing dramatic encounters between the different player characters as well as the non-player characters narrated and performed by the Dungeon Master, Matt Mercer.

However, as much as I would say that I enjoy Critical Role, I must say… I don’t think they have helped make the hobby better. Allow me to explain.

The Impact of Critical Role on the tabletop role-playing community.

Critical Role officially started streaming in 2015, as the group, composed by voice actors Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, Marisha Ray and Orion Acaba brought their home game onto the set to play on livestream for any viewers.

As this is a gaming Substack, I’ll point the obvious. Matt Mercer is an incredibly prolific voice actor (McCree in Overwatch, Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom and Vincent Valentine in the FFVII Remake trilogy are just recent examples of his work), while Ashley Johnson and Laura Bailey are well known for their roles as Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us.

Outside of the cast’s talent for voice acting, I will mention how they made D&D look extremely fun and appealing. The cast’s rapport and ability to understand timing, pacing, and most importantly, each other, allowed them to role-play during their game sessions in a way that was extremely engaging from an audience perspective.

However, while it made the game look very fun, it also made it look like something it wasn’t. Many people joined the hobby with certain expectations, that roleplay, performance and narrative should follow a certain direction. Anyone that plays tabletop RPGs knows that each table is different. This issue has come to be known as the “Mercer Effect”.

The Mercer Effect

While far from being the only culprit to bring D&D onto the mainstream, Matt Mercer, the Dungeon Master for Critical Role, is the one that names this phenomenon, in which new players or fans of the show attempt to play D&D for the first time, only to find that the big majority of tables out there do not have the budget nor production values that are showcased in Critical Role.

This often leads to disappointment, sometimes complaints and demands, and occasionally rude comparison. One needs only look at subreddits like RPG Horror Stories or Crit Crab, like this story of a player attempting to copy a Critical Role character (and failing at it).

From my point of view, while I think that making the hobby approachable and interesting is a positive thing (the more the merrier and all that), there is a certain type of player that does not have the skills to coexist with a group that does not partake of the same obsessions. Matt Mercer himself has spoken against the “Mercer Effect” trying to still the waters, claiming that “[CR fans should] relax. [Their] DM is kicking ass, doing this for [their] enjoyment and journey… [they] should abandon expectations and just have fun together as friends.”

The Good: Production value and communication

Critical Role is very popular for a good reason. Whether you are watching it as a fan of D&D, or because you enjoy the specific voice actors, or love the concept of fantasy drama, it is difficult not to appreciate what is good in the show.

Many will talk about the incredible 3D maps that the DM brings onto the table, or the light show and fog, the curated music playlists, but there is something I particularly love about Critical Role, and that is how well each member of the cast knows each other. In their sessions, you will often find that every player knows what to say and also when to say it. Per example, Scanlan (Sam Riegel) performs a lot of comic relief during the Vox Machina campaign, yet his character does not come across simply as comic relief. He has a strong storyline and character arc, that resolves without stripping away his penchant for comedy.

This is what makes the show engaging to watch, for me. Seeing these people improvise while having a good understanding of how dialogue works, and knowing what each other wants and needs in a given scene, puts into perspective the big contrast when someone inexperienced tries to emulate it and fails.

The Bad: Performance over gaming

Over time, Critical Role has evolved to be more and more of a show and less and less of a game. The group went from being a close-knit group of friends to inviting other actors for variety and novelty, and the pacing of games dragged or rushed as the group strived to keep things interesting despite being off-script.

This caused the show to have some episodes that were intense and engaging, and others that felt like filler. The players’ interest in engaging with any and every NPC for deep conversation and roleplay meant that any moment in the game could turn into an hour long scene. At the same time, this also created a certain expectation in fans when it came to their own games: if a DM was not willing to turn every NPC into a fully named character with a page long backstory, ready to converse with the party, they felt it was lazy and shallow, and “Matt wouldn’t do it this way.” This falls back into the Mercer effect.

The performance over gaming also leads to people finding D&D to be something less than what it is. D&D is mostly a combat game, with some rules for exploration, survival and roleplay. There are other games that focus more on the roleplay aspect, and to prove this point, Critical Role eventually created Daggerheart, their own tabletop RPG where roleplaying takes the main priority.

Eventually, some people who played D&D started considering combat and exploration a minor aspect of the game, which lead to friction and frustration as parties clash when one member cannot fight effectively for the sake of “their character arc”, or one person insists on roleplaying when the rest wants to move on.

The Ugly: Parasocial Toxicity

As with any other celebrity, fans took to the Critical Role cast like moths to a flame. I’m not even going to talk about the cases where the cast itself was under fire (per example, Marisha Ray being so criticized during the first campaign), but rather, how the ideas of these players thinking they are just like the cast causes them to separate themselves from the actual table.

To put it bluntly: Critical Role’s party is a bunch of professional actors. The fan who is now going to try D&D is (in the great majority of cases) not a professional actor. There is this delusion that if Liam O’Brien can have ten minutes in a solo scene to monologue about his character’s perception of the party, then this other person who is not him can also have the table listen to them monologue for ten minutes, without the gravitas nor immersion that comes with years of acting under your belt.

When this spreads to a party-wide expectation, the results are catastrophic. You don’t want to point the finger at your friend and tell them “you’re bad at acting, so please tone it down”, but you also don’t want to sit there being judged because you don’t want to expose yourself in roleplaying scenes that last an hour, when you made your character to fight monsters and get rewards.

There is a fine balance here: you shouldn’t be too shy to roleplay! It’s a great experience when everyone immerses themselves in their character and forms real bonds as the characters rather than the players. But you should also understand that the ability to make others care about your character is not directly tied to how good of an actor (or actress) you are. You can play a year-long game without a single action spoken in first person, and have the table cry when you die.

You can also drag games to last twice their original length by forcing everyone to listen to you roleplay and narrate everything dramatically, and instead have them be relieved when your character dies.

Conclusion: You aren’t Critical Role.

This article may be a bit more angry-sounding than usual, but that’s because, after I found out the type of player that I am, I found myself between two worlds. I am too much a roleplayer to fit with the tables that don’t care for it, but I am not so intense or delusional to fit at the tables that think they are professional voice actors.

Everyone has their limits, things they shine at and things they don’t do so well. I am not good at accents and making voices, but I am great at using different vocabularies based on my character’s education, per example, and understanding what drives my character to do X or Y.

Still, if I reach a table where people want to roleplay, and someone insists on acting as if they were on a stage, or chatting for 10 minutes with every NPC we meet, I’ll be leaving that table. That’s just me, though.

Final Thought

If you enjoyed reading this (or the other articles), there’s a new thing I opened: a Ko-Fi.

I don’t want to activate paid subscriptions, but this is an extra way for me to receive positive feedback. Speaking of feedback, there is also this survey I made to gather feedback. It doesn’t register email addresses, or any data other than the answers to the questions, and it would help me greatly.

Finally, you can also…

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As the days continue to getting longer, I move away from horror. Having finished Silent Hill: f on the last day of February, March has come as a month of variety where I have been playing and beating some many different games, like Lost Judgment, Hitman: World of Assassination and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

It’s also the first month of 2026 where a new game release catches my eye, and for the first time the “Upcoming” section will include a game that releases in the same month. Let’s get on with it.

The Eyewitness

• Xbox announces the codename for their next console: Project Helix will be, reportedly, a “hybrid console” capable to play both PC and Xbox games, and it will “lead in performance”. In other words, the next Xbox console will likely be insanely expensive and might be able to run Steam?

• Gang of Dragon in financial trouble: It seems NetEase, which has been providing financial backing to Nagoshi Studio, will stop funding them, while they are still 7 billion yen (approx. 38 million euros) away from completely funding the development. Toshihiro Nagoshi is reportedly looking for alternate means of funding the studio. It would be a shame to see it cancelled since the Like A Dragon series has moved in a different direction away from crime thrillers.

• KotOR Remake is not dead: In a recent interview between IGN and Tim Willits, he claimed that the remake of the 2003 RPG is still in development. Considering there is also a new Old Republic era game in the works, it might be a positive for fans of the time period (such as me) in the galaxy far, far away.

• Valve under legal assault: The UK has sued Valve over their “excessive” 30% commission and price-parity rules, New York has sued them over their lootboxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, and the Performing Rights Society has sued them over their “illegal” use of copyrighted music across the platform. Somehow, Valve keeps winning the lawsuits, and personally I hope so, I don’t want to see who’d fill the Valve void and how.

Upcoming: Crimson Desert (March 19)

When Crimson Desert was first announced, I rolled my eyes. A single-player RPG that looked a bit generic to me, from developers who made Black Desert, which is an MMORPG that I am not particularly fond of? I did not think I would care.

Over the past few months, developers Pearl Abyss have been showing an immense amount of gameplay and content from the upcoming game, and the community has replied with increasing amount of incredulity. At first it was “The game can’t really have all of that.” then “Surely the requirements will be through the roof.” and after the requirements were shown, I am now reading a lot of “It must have some kind of downside, perhaps the story will not be very good.” There’s also the appearance of Denuvo, which many think will drag the performance down. However, I want to see it with my own eyes.

After seeing the kind of immersion the gameplay promotes, I believe it could be an interesting game, and so I have pre-ordered it, hoping it will really be all that it promises and more. And if it is, of course, you will be first to know.

Journal: Judgment and Lost Judgment

I am a big fan of the Yakuza (now Like A Dragon) series, and consider many of the games to be great crime thrillers with epic action on par with some of the best action movies. When the franchise moved into the JRPG genre, I felt a slight disappointment, but then they announced Judgment and I thought that the ARPG Beat ‘Em Up king would pass the crown down to another character, from Kiryu to Yagami.

While combat is slightly boring in Judgment, it improves greatly for the sequel, but unfortunately, most boss fights end up as a delicate dance of “dodge and punch” where the possibility of tanking the opponent in order to lay on them a whole combo is impossible when you are playing in Hard difficulty.

On a separate topic, I always found Kamurocho and the other settings in the series (Sotenbori and Ijincho, per example) to be extremely immersive, and I loved walking through the streets at my own pace, learning the layouts, and beating thugs against walls and signposts. With Judgment and its sequel, however, I haven’t felt the same way (nor when playing as Ichiban). Maybe what made the game special was Kiryu, and not the city itself?

The plots from the Judgment games are incredible, bound to hook you in within the first hour, with mysteries and twists that all make sense somehow. By all acounts, they are great games (especially Lost Judgment), but they did not hit for me the same way the Yakuza games did, back in the day.

Now Enjoying: Hitman: World of Assassination

I’ve always known about Hitman, since it’s a franchise sitting at over 20 years old. For some reason, I never really played any of the games, and even when the modern rendition of the games was released, I tried a demo for Hitman (the 2016 reboot that still counts for the official timeline of the game), and found that it was extremely fun and engaging.

Despite that, the games evaded my library until I got my upgraded rig. With the new performance, the most modern version of the games, Hitman World of Assassination, was very attractive, as it remasters the three games into one collection with all the bells and whistles like ray-traced lighting and sharper textures.

After seeing what IO Interactive has to offer, I am pretty confident that the upcoming 007: First Light will be a banger. The sandbox of each mission is so deep yet so well developed. Every opportunity to kill a target is designed in a way that completely fits the environment, and the result is that I am able to play the game without following any specific mission guidelines, and can still reliably find convoluted ways to kill them other than a garrote or silenced gun.

Overall, it’s a great game when had in smaller doses. Having one contract every other day gives me the time to enjoy each location (which tends to be gorgeous), plan my route in and out, commit murder, and move on to play a different game without feeling like it took me too long.

Before we get to the end…

I have set up a feedback survey (it does not require e-mail in order to take it), as I’m looking for feedback from the readers! Consider taking a minute to answer it here.

I’ve also set up a Ko-Fi page for anyone who’d like to tip.

The Poll: Console and/or PC?

Assuming we’re all gamers here: what platforms do you use and prefer? In my case, I own consoles for the comfort of playing on the TV, but also have a decent gaming rig for those games that are exclusive or to play with friends.

This is a conclusion I reached recently as I listened to “Ronfaure” from the Final Fantasy XI soundtrack. I could not put my finger on why, but it seems all of these games have a common effect on me; a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for exploration of an unknown world, and somehow, a level of immersion that most modern games seem to be unable to achieve.

There are many aspects of these old games that contribute to their mystical feeling, and some of them apply to games other than RPGs. In this article, I will be exploring what these aspects are and why they work the way they do.

Sound design is a slingshot to the past.

Why is it that interface sound effects feel so different now? Games like Kingdom Hearts, Pro Evolution Soccer, Pokémon, etc. had such crisp sound effects for their interfaces. After thinking on it, my conclusion is that the connection between the clicking on buttons and hearing those heavy sound effects is simply satisfactory. These games that often require you to spend a certain amount of time in the menus (before more and more games started including QoL features like quick-access radial menus and shortcuts) needed the menu to feel comfortable, and providing the interface with this rhythmic, heavy sound helped make the menus so iconic.

Modern games have taken a lot of different directions since, with some menus opting for quiet “swooshing” sounds or even removing the interface sound effects entirely. Next time that I play a modern game, I will pay attention to the UI sounds. Do the sound effects make me feel comfortable as I browse the menus? For a recent entry, Dragon Quest XI felt old-school when it came to its menu design.

Something else that I will try not to comment on too heavily is the audio quality. As an example, comparing the audio quality of a native PS2 game against a native PS5 game, we find that not only the audio quality is better (a higher bit depth and sample rate), but the amount of audio channels played at once is much higher on the PS5 than the PS2. A modern videogame can indulge on allowing any object within the game to emit audio, while an older game may have been conservative with its audio sources to ensure that every track would play properly. This contributes to giving the older games the sense of quiet, sometimes eerie, that permeates games of that era.

Negative space was used masterfully.

Most modern games that try to offer open worlds try to fill them with content. To be fair to them, many reviews use a big but empty map as a flaw, and developers try to ensure that the player will always find something to do in their world no matter how far they stray from the path. In this way, we have gone from maps like Final Fantasy XV’s empty Eos to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s impossibly crowded England. For some people, this is a positive. AC Valhalla has so much to do, that even after 100 hours I was unable to finish the game. Personally, I think that knowing when to offer negative space in a map is proof of great design.

What is negative space? It is simply the space that surrounds the main subjects. In Shadow of the Colossus, the journey between fights is often an empty space. Sometimes inhabited by collectibles like lizards or fruit, the game simply consists of a series of fights against colossi in between long stretches of traversing the land. If we removed all of that empty space, so that the game was simply a series of boss fights accessed through gateways from the altar room, would it feel as epic or colossal?

Another example of negative space is the famous ladder scene in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. After having battled The End (or, in his absence, an Ocelot squad), the game slows to a crawl for a couple of minutes before sending us into the next area. We are forced to manually climb a ladder while the vocals of the game’s main theme, Snake Eater, play out. This is a great example of negative space, or perhaps “Ma” (in Japanese), in the same vein as Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa movies famously used. Allowing the narrative (or the game’s world) to have the empty space, emphasizes the moments where things are happening. In case of a game’s world, the emptiness is what gives it scale, and allows the player a moment of respite to meditate on the journey so far.

In Final Fantasy XV, the driving mechanics are extremely simplified, which was heavily criticized. To put it plainly, it was boring; you were not allowed to drive off the road, and in the beginning you weren’t even allowed to drive manually unless you chose to drive at night, which came with a new set of dangers. While an off-road option was added later, I never cared much for it, and found the normal version of the Regalia to serve its purpose perfectly: allowing Ignis to take the wheel and drive me to my destination gave me time to observe the beautiful world of Eos, think about the game, plan my next move, and simply take a break from the action.

In older games, like World of Warcraft, the empty space gives the world a sense of scale, and the inability to easily teleport between main locations gives the player two new factors: danger from enemies that lie in your path, and calm from simply having to run forward until you reach your destination.

A lack of realism enhances the experience.

Something that adds to the mystique of these old games is the liminality of their worlds. I am not referring to the modern usage of “liminal spaces” as an aesthetic, although that does not differ a lot from how it applies in this case. I am, instead, referring to the more literal meaning of liminal (from the latin limen meaning “threshold”). These older games feature fully realized 3D graphics, with a higher or lower polygon count, and textures and shaders of varying resolutions. In modern games, the polygon count and resolution is so high that many games have achieved photorealism, looking so accurate to real life that they can often be indistinguishable from it, per example, racing games like Gran Turismo or the Forza franchise are able to produce graphics that can easily be mistaken for real life.

The recent Death Stranding 2: On the Beach features landscapes so realistic that, were it not for the appearance of technology and creatures that simply do not exist, one could take a video or photo in the game and pass it for real life.

This realism can sometimes be counterproductive. While these modern games with incredible graphics can be a visual treat and they use these cutting-edge advancements to their favor, the older games have a dream-like quality to them. It’s common to go back to an old game from your childhood and think “wait, I remember this game looking better than this”. Your brain will fill in the blanks, or to better explain it, the lower graphical fidelity in older games “leaves more to the imagination”.

This sense of liminality does not simply apply to the way the world looks or how realistic the graphics are. Modern games can sometimes have a city, in which you can find hundreds of NPCs. This can look impressive, however, some observation reveals the NPCs are shallow, and they serve no purpose. It’s rare for a game to actually make its NPCs contribute to making the world feel alive (per example, Red Dead Redemption 2’s NPCs are surprisingly reactive to the player’s actions, and this helps make them feel alive), and once you can tell that these NPCs are simply ragdolls moving to the rhythm of the game’s heartbeat, it breaks the illusion of being in another world. I find Cyberpunk 2077 to be particularly egregious on this, as the NPCs serve no purpose and often do nothing but walk or pose in their designated areas.

Older games would include less NPCs, due to hardware limitations, yes, but this doesn’t mean that it didn’t help the design. Kingdom Hearts’ Traverse Town is eerily quiet, with only a few sparse NPCs available to talk to, but this does not break the immersion of the town being a world in the game. Instead, it helps make Traverse Town feel like a dream: within the town there are monsters, and so the people in it are hiding indoors. Only a handful of characters venture outside, and despite the lack of traffic, the town continues to work during our time there.

My personal take and conclusion.

I give flak to content creators who try to state their opinions as facts. Just because I think that the games’ design means X or Y, it doesn’t mean the developers intended it that way. It is an aspect of games as art that they can make anyone feel differently about them.

For me, old-school RPGs are the perfect game, and my words in this article reveal the how, but not the why. Why do I love that playing these games feel like being in a dream? Why is it so important to me that the UI sound effects are crisp and loud? Why do I prefer to have an empty world to traverse with aged graphics, rather than a realistic, inhabited world?

Maybe playing a modern game does not separate me from my current day self, and playing a retro version allows me to forget about the current day and transports me to the past.

Maybe the day-to-day has me overstimulated, and I simply need an older game with less going on in order to truly relax. Perhaps older games were made with more love and care, and they are more enjoyable as a result.

I don’t have a definite answer, and what my thoughts are can vary on any given day. I love old-school RPGs, and more specifically, Fantasy RPGs, because they really feel like an alternate world. Their stories of adventurers, knights and wizards, being prophesied to save the world from a massive catastrophe, are much easier for me to engage with, so removed from any aspect of my real life.

What do you think?

Do you love old-school RPGs? Do you think my ramblings are non-sensical, and modern games are better? I would love to read your thoughts if you’d leave a comment below.

You must know by now, dear reader, two things about me: I love football, and I love playing career modes in football games.

Back in late 2023, I hadn’t played a football game for almost ten years. The closest I had gotten to it was playing FIFA 23 for a few hours for free with EA Play (included in the Game Pass) to test out the Player Career mode. Not satisfied with the Player Career, in which I tried to recreate myself and played for Cagliari before moving on to Bayern München, I went on looking for any alternative that wasn’t made by Electronic Arts.

The most suggested option was Football Manager, at a point in which its 2023 iteration had recently come out. Me, not one to spend full price on a game that I had never played before, settled on Football Manager 2022. What ensued was 100 hours crammed into too short of a time period.

The Good: Gameplay depth and replayability

When I started FM2022, I realized a few things that quickly made me unimpressed. No licenses (no real emblems or team names, or competition names), no proper kits, not even images for the player faces. This was easily solved with a few content packs that are free to download and add to the game. With this I added a bunch of leagues to the game that weren’t there originally, including the Icelandic leagues.

I was clueless and excited, so I started managing Fjölnir and learning how to play the game. The aspect of the game that hooked me was what happened outside of the matches. The main interface is really that of emails, which inform you of what needs to be done in preparation for the next match. Preparing your tactics and team, choosing what training to do, dealing with the players’ contracts, and managing the team’s morale through speeches at certain points of the week.

This part of the game alone was enough to keep me hooked for almost a hundred hours. This is the best that Football Manager has to offer. No two playthroughs will be the same. Any small tweak can change the outcome of a match. You can bring a youth player to the first team as a starter, and talk to him before the match to hype him up, and he might take it and be eager to impress. You can demand your striker to perform at his best because you need good results in that match, and the pressure could make him step up to the challenge or do poorly.

A slight change in tactics can be the difference between your team assailing the opponents’ goal with shots or not even being able to close down into the box.

For me, a football fan with little knowledge of tactics, experimenting with the low quality Icelandic competitions to learn what worked best and what didn’t was a great joy, and it made me spend a lot of hours on the computer, to the point where even my partner noticed.

When I made the move to Football Manager 2023, not many things changed. Veterans of the series will say that it improved, but I didn’t know enough to tell the difference. However, I played FM2023 for even more hours than 2022, and one thing I can say is that the depth of the gameplay is equally impressive in both games.

The Bad: Unpredictability

There seems to be a mismatch between the two match engines. To better explain, bear with me for a second. The match engine is what drives the simulation behind the “real time” matches in Football Manager. From kick-off, it simulates every run, every pass, every shot and tackle. The possibilities of foul, injuries, handball, off-sides… are all taken into account through the simulated match, which can happen at any pace, selected by the player according to how fast they want the match to go or how slow.

The slower the match, the more you see it develop, giving you the chance to analyze the events in real time to make precise adjustments. As I don’t like the idea of sitting for an hour just watching a fictional football match run its course, I tend to play with the option where only the important moments are played in real time, with the rest of the match sped up. I have the option to pause time when I need to make tactical decisions, and this way I can get through a match in less than half an hour.

The match engine has three graphical options. Commentary only, where a small window of text describes the actions happening through the match, is the most basic one and is always on when you’re fast-forwarding the game. 2D is the classic view: a top-down perspective with little colored tokens representing the players, ball, refs and assistants, to give you an idea of how the ball is moving, who is making runs, etc. The most modern addition to Football Manager is the 3D engine, which gives a more realistic representation of the match.

However, the 3D engine has a problem. There are not enough animations in it to realistically emulate every possible combination of events happening in the match. This is something that caused me great frustration. In a few matches, I conceded goals simply due to a through pass that went by my defenders while they simply watched the ball roll through. Without the 3D engine, this would have simply been a well threaded pass that caught my defense unaware. However, as depicted in the 3D engine, my defenders were simply deciding not to stop that ball, allowing the opponents’ striker to break through the defensive line and take a shot at goal.

Similar events involving strange handballs, deflected shots that landed perfectly at an opponent’s feet, and passes back to the keeper where the opponent’s striker gained a sudden burst of speed to catch the ball before it reached its target, eventually turned me off to the 3D engine, and I opted to turn it off entirely.

Eventually, this was also what made me quit the game, as I grew disillusioned that the majority of the matches in the game developed with events and actions that are extremely rare to see in real football.

The Ugly: 3D Graphics

I’ve already talked about how the match engine does not match the simulation of the game 1:1. This is the “Bad” of Football Manager, something that breaks the illusion altogether. But the match engine is also responsible for the "Ugly". The 3D kits can’t be modded, so teams always looked like they’re geared in bootleg versions of their teams’ kits. The animations are stiff, robotic - even in the most recent FM26 they still look like they’ve been pulled from a PS2 era game. For a game that is about the fantasy of watching a match from the sidelines, barking orders and making changes to bring a team of athletes to success, the combination between a match engine that is unreliable at showing you what is happening, and a match engine that is also showing you something that is quite ugly, unappealing and realistic, makes for a game that is difficult to love.

At the time of writing this, I have accumulated close to 400 hours between Football Manager 2022 and 2023, as I recently finished my final run, where I brought my childhood team Cádiz CF to a treble victory of Champions League, National League and Cup. The truth is that, in order for me to stomach that final season, I simply turned off the 3D graphics, and played only with the 2D version. While it still remained relatively unreliable, I could at least imagine better graphics while the strengths of the game kept me entertained.

Can Football Manager provide a better 3D graphics engine in the future? I think so. FM26 has already taken a step in the right direction with the engine switch to Unity. The new animations look slightly more human, and better lighting makes the pitch look better. But it’s still a long ways from looking good. Some would say it doesn’t need to look good, that the core of the game is its simulation and that should be it. But in 2026, why should we settle for one or the other? Can’t we have a game that maintains the simulation that so many players claim is great from the past 5 titles, and put some polish on the new graphics engine until it looks decent?

Conclusion: No FM and no FC

I came to Football Manager as a FIFA refugee. The way that FIFA (and now, EAFC) treats players who care about career mode has pretty much pushed us all away, as they now care about squeezing as much money out of Ultimate Team as possible. Konami hasn’t produced a good football game in years, and Football Manager scratches a specific itch that FIFA missed, while at the same time spraying you with lemon straight into your eyes.

Is there a solution for a gamer like me? Can I find a game that is deep in its mechanics, but with nice graphics like EAFC? Perhaps in the future. For now, I can at least play Rematch with my friends and pretend that that is a good representation of tactical football.

But let me stop here. If you, reader, can think of a game that beats FM and FC in quality and visual appeal, I would love to hear it. For now I’ll make do with playing football IRL.

And, as a separate thing, I would remind you, dear reader (if you have gotten all the way here I am assuming you really care about what I write), that I have now opened a Ko-Fi page. I don’t have any goals, and I don’t really need the money (in fact, there are many other places where it could be better spent), but I’ll always appreciate the encouragement if you’d like to tip in any way to support what I do.

And that’s all we have for February!

As much as I enjoyed playing Turtle Wow, I have a self-assigned duty to continue searching for those special games that fit my ideal of an MMORPG. For this month, it was Star Wars: The Old Republic, also known as SWTOR.

How does it fare against my standards? In order to find the answer, we will first see what the goals are, since SWTOR is slightly more modern in design and thus has a different approach to its questing and areas.

My objectives and rules

In order to ensure that I really go out there and look for the ideal MMORPG, I have set myself a list of goals to achieve, as well as rules to play by.

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

And I’ve spent February playing SWTOR while following these rules.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a 2011 MMORPG released by Bioware with EA as a loose sequel to their Knights of the Old Republic games. Set about three centuries after the second KotOR game, you get to play your fantasy of being any kind of spacefaring adventurer aligned with the Galactic Republic or the Sith Empire, and within this faction, play your own fantasy of being a light-side or dark-side actor.

The roleplaying aspect is well developed and reminiscent of Mass Effect, which makes SWTOR a very suitable single-player RPG if one is interested in having 8 interesting campaigns to play through set in the Star Wars universe. However, for the sake of this article, I’ll be focusing on different aspects of the game. Does SWTOR meet the three goals of my ideal MMORPG? Unfortunately, not quite. It’s fun, but not particularly challenging. It is quite immersive, but its social aspect is quite removed from the local areas.

The Challenge

SWTOR does not offer additional challenges upon character creation. It also no longer features server lists, as they were merged into region locked servers in 2017. This is no big deal, I decide to create a human female Trooper, as she is voiced by Jennifer Hale (Bastila Shan in KotOR, Commander Shepard in Mass Effect). The game starts me up in Ord Mantell, the starting planet for Republic Troopers and Smugglers.

Unlike tWoW’s more slow paced, deadly combat, in SWTOR I am able to tackle groups of enemies and dispatch them quickly with rarely ever losing more than 50% of my health. Even looking for Elite enemies, I am able to deal with them without much trouble.

Where the real challenge lies is in Heroic zones and Heroic missions, which are areas with stronger enemies that are usually meant to tackle carefully or in a group. I entered one Heroic zone in Ord Mantell and had to be careful with what enemies I was fighting, but I was still able to handle two or three at a time.

In order to keep the game challenging, I chose to handicap myself. Once I unlocked my first companion, Aric Jorgan, I started dismissing him, but he kept respawning every time I had a conversation with an NPC.

The leveling process is faster than I expected, and in only a few hours of gameplay I reached near level 20 in just my second planet, Coruscant. Doing side quests grants a lot of XP, and the main story is responsible for a big chunk of the level bar being filled. I promised myself I would stop following the main story once I unlocked my own spaceship, but on the way there I’ve had to play for a while and leveled up a lot.

The dungeons are what tickled me. They aren’t particularly difficult at lower levels, but, since I refuse to use matchmaking or global chat, finding a group to tackle them is hard. The game offers an option to play them solo with your companion and an assist droid, but that’s not what I play an MMORPG for. The very first dungeon (Flashpoint) of the game for the Republic, the Esseles, serves as a tutorial and entry to their mechanics, but I decided to skip it, as the few people that I saw in the area and I texted, asking to group up, ignored me.

Does the game have potential to be challenging? Yes. Even with my own handicaps it is quite easy, but one could even force themselves to use only level 1 equipment or quest only in Heroic zones. The true challenges lie in endgame content, and that one is not easily accessible, so the “Challenge” part of this game is a slight let down.

In the end, it was the Heroic zones that proved to be the deadly challenge. After I finally unlocked my spaceship, I decided to skip the main quest and travel straight to Taris, my next leveling zone. With no main story to follow, I decided to grab a bunch of Heroic quests. After all, I already completed a couple of them in Ord Mantell and they weren’t impossible.

However, in one of these missions, interacting with an item triggered an ambush by for Champion level enemies. Despite my best efforts, I was cut down in a fight that lasted about 20 seconds. This could have happened to me as well in tWoW, but my previous character being a Rogue made it easier for me to escape from dangerous situations.

The Immersion

SWTOR is not meant to be played without quest markers. In my attempt to explore Ord Mantell with the map disabled, I found myself having to open the map regularly to see where the quests were pointing me towards. Dialogue with NPCs would not give me directions on how to reach my targets, as the game was designed with a minimap in mind.

The exploration of the areas without following a specific marker is fun, but unlike tWOW where every journey felt dangerous and had to be planned, here I just feel like I am wasting my time if I am not going towards my needed location.

The modern graphics, sound design and amazing Star Wars music make SWTOR a real treat for the fantasy of existing in a galaxy far, far away. The behavior of NPCs, like droids moving around, soldiers battling enemies (harmlessly) on the edges of safe zones, or patrons at the cantina clapping at a holodancer, gives this sense of genuine immersion. However, I didn’t get to see much of player interaction during my time in the game.

The Socialization

My first pass through Carrick Station was quick, and I didn’t have much time to chat with others, as I focused on completing the main story until I had my own spaceship. Most players go through the motions as they rush to complete quests or prepare their gear for their next high level content.

At the Republic Fleet, I attempted to chat with other players, but was consistently ignored. People tend to play as if it was a solo game, and only group up with their guilds. I ended up moving to /whisper, hoping to get some attention from other players. Some kind players like Seniya Stari and Maya Luna answered me some questions about the game. Most players rush through the solo content to get to the endgame, and in the process ignore other players unless they are grouped up in matchmaking. Socializing happens in guilds only, with chatting in the open being extremely rare.

Seniya even invited me to her guild, Standard, but my time there was short as I ended up losing my run a couple days later. In terms of socialization, it exists, even outside of third-party apps, but not in the same open way that I had experienced last month in tWoW.

The Conclusion

As much as I love SWTOR, it unfortunately does not meet my goals for this specific type of game I am looking for. It’s still a game I heavily recommend, but it’s not immersive in the same way as my previous attempt was. The challenge exists if one looks for it, but it is missing the socialization required to beat it. If I were to give it a rating, for this specific challenge, it would be a 4/10. It is kind of fun and immersive, but it lacks challenge or a social community in the way that I’d need in order to play this way.

The March Attempt

After one hit and one miss, I am at a loss on which MMO to try next. One of the two Final Fantasy MMOs are appealing, especially since Final Fantasy XI is one of the old-school, hard progression MMOs still available. But of course, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions from you, reader.

If you enjoyed the read, and would like to see more, here is my previous attempt, playing Turtle WoW, and consider subscribing for free!

In Reykjavík, February is the month where days start getting noticeably longer, and we have an almost normal day/night cycle. This has a negative effect on the mental health of the locals, but for me it is great.

I don’t have to worry about sun glare on my TV or computer screen, and January has quickly become the favorite month of the year for me and my partner to play something horror. It’s also been the month with my first attempt at finding my ideal MMORPG, and the month in which I got engaged! But that last one is not game related so we’ll leave it at that.

Let’s move on!

The Eyewitness

February continues the January trend in terms of some bad news for the games industry, but with at least some promising announcements.

• Ubisoft Reset: Ubisoft announces a major reset that includes cancelling at least six games, and closing two studios. Hoping this somehow turns into a positive direction for the company.

• Xbox Developer Direct: Xbox showcased some nice upcoming games, from which I am most excited about Fable and Forza Horizon 6. I’ve seen that Forza was reimagining their progression, so I’m hoping for a fun game through and through.

• State of Play 2026: A surprisingly interesting showcase featuring a new JRPG from Konami that seems to draw inspiration from Death Stranding.

• Meta Studios: Meta closes three VR game studios, laying off over 1000 employees. Apparently VR gaming is not profitable enough anymore, and they will focus on AI from now on. A pity, since VR games can be extremely creative and fun if done well.

Upcoming: Fable (Autumn 2026)

When the first teaser for Fable was released, it didn’t make a big impact on the internet (unless you count people with negative reactions due to the apparent main character’s appearance). I didn’t particularly care about it one way or another. It has been years since I last played Fable 3, and while I found it to be very enjoyable, I haven’t been dreaming about the franchise’s return.

This gameplay showcase changed that. I know well by now to always be wary of developers promising more than they can deliver, however, what they have shown in their latest video does not seem to be anything out of the ordinary. A bunch of procedural systems interlinked to create the illusion of a living world, almost like an evolution of the already immersive world of Red Dead Redemption 2.

I am looking forward to Fable, and will probably be playing it on release. If it delivers anything close to what they have shown, then it will, at the very least, prove to be a very enjoyable sandbox RPG. I’m only hoping that it will also be good in the plot department.

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Journal: Silent Hill 2 Remake

I don’t consider myself a massive horror fan, but in the past couple of years I have grown to like certain pieces of the genre. Games that have an interesting enough plot, engaging enough action, or are simply fun to play will make my list.

In this vein, after having grown into the genre through Alan Wake II, The Callisto Protocol and Still Wakes The Deep, I decided to give a try to what is considered by many to be the holy grail of psychological horror. Silent Hill 2 (Remake, in my case) was, indeed, the most terrifying piece of media I have engaged with so far in my life.

It was also extremely fun, and while I have and am playing other games, I ask myself the question, what is it that makes SH2R so much scarier than any other game? I’ve narrowed it down to two things: the passive protagonist, and the familiar sense of the setting and the music.

Like many protagonists in the franchise, James seems to not react to the game’s events in a very realistic way. It’s almost like he is in a trance or stupor. He encounters monsters, non-euclidean spaces, supernatural events, and yet he remains quiet and calm for the most part. When he comes across other characters like Eddie, Laura or Angela, he talks to them as if he had just walked past them in a leisurely stroll in the park.

This strange behavior of the protagonist adds an extra layer of eerie to the game, but it also allows me, the player, to immerse myself in the game. If James won’t scream, express his fear, or his anger at the monsters he’s fighting, then it is my emotions that get channeled instead. This somehow makes the game feel more real and personal.

The setting and the music are another thing. Silent Hill is a (relatively) modern setting. It could be any town that I could visit in real life, and the majority of the levels (that aren’t the Otherworld) in the game resemble eerie and abandoned, but otherwise normal locations. The music as well; there are a bunch of eerie ambient pieces, others more suited for tension, and even then most of the game is silent, but the most memorable music in Silent Hill are those grungy themes that Akira Yamaoka pulls. The main theme of Silent Hill includes a melodic progression that reminds me of the James Bond theme, and a track in the second game’s soundtrack, Love Psalm of Eternal Devotion, ends up with a progression that is remarkably close to Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.

It is this aspect, I think, that makes Silent Hill 2 feel so human and real, that it makes the horror aspects of it stand out even more. Of course, it’s not the only thing that makes it scary, but it is, to me, what makes it the scariest.

Now Enjoying: Silent Hill f

Continuing in the vein of Silent Hill, I’ve spent the majority of my January nights playing Silent Hill f, cozied up on the couch with my partner by my side, our living room illuminated by the TV screen and a set of red lights adding an eerie vibe to the game session.

Silent Hill f is extremely intriguing in its premise, and from the very beginning it had us hooked. The setting, the town of Ebisugaoka somewhen in the 1960s, is far removed from what I am used to, and this both helps it be creepy and harms the game’s ability to unnerve me.

On one hand, the game is fantastic. Graphically and in sound design it is outstanding, the performances are well done, particularly Hinako’s, and the story is engaging and mysterious. So far all we have are theories and a burning desire to play more.

On the other hand, I feel like this game leans too much into action. Weapon durability as a mechanic, and adds onto it a stamina bar to manage during combat, as well as perfect dodges and counter-attacks (basically a parry mechanic). I am not a big fan of this type of combat, and while it is simple enough that you don’t need to be a Dark Souls veteran to succeed, it is a big part of the game, even though you can avoid many combat encounters by simply running. The difference in setting is also slightly detrimental.

Compared to what I said about Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f feels too alien to me. I don’t understand Japanese culture, the town is designed realistically, in a way that is foreign to me, and the music (while very good), does not have that same sense of familiarity. This makes the game very eerie in a sense, but nowhere near as terrifying as the previous release could be.

However, my only real complaint, which still does not mean that I am not absolutely loving the game, is that some of the puzzles require you to be relatively well versed in Japanese culture. Some puzzles use symbols and characters that are simply unknown to me and my partner, and we end up having to research what the symbols mean or proceeding through these puzzles on trial and error.

The Poll: Final Fantasy

If you had to advise someone on how to play the Final Fantasy games, how would you do it, if they went in completely blind?

Yes, I know I’m young. It’s early 2026 and a lot has happened in the past three months. Me and my partner purchased an apartment for the first time, now we own our home. A week ago I proposed to her and now we are engaged. By the end of the year we will be married, who knows when a child is coming?

I’m not even 30, but I feel so far removed from who I was 10 years ago, that when I hear or see something that connects me to that time past, I feel something tugging at the heart strings, and a void in my stomach. A sense of nostalgia or melancholy fills me at times, and I would assume this is normal for everyone else.

With how important videogames have been in my life, I have spent some time reliving old memories through trailers and game intros of my childhood and teenage years, thinking on how I used to live, and simply enjoying this feeling of nostalgia.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2 (2002, PS2)

I have a history with football games, with some specific ones making the list of those that had the most screentime in my life. PES 4 and PES 6, then PES 2009, and then a hiatus until I came back with FC25 and Football Manager 2023 and 2024.

None of them had an intro that beat the hype into me as much as Pro Evolution Soccer 2, and of course it is due to the choice in music. We Will Rock You is an immortal anthem of epicness. I was just 4 years old, sitting by my brother’s side as he turned the game on, not really understanding much of what was happening other than the fact that this really cool music was playing while the football was on screen.

24 years later this still holds as one of the best intros to a sports game ever.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2023, Nintendo Gamecube)

I played this one much later than it was released, and I didn’t even own it. I had it lent from a friend, and some of my best gaming memories before I even had a double digit age are calling my dad on the phone to have him guide me through the game, as he read a guide online while I played the game more than 500 kilometers away from him.

Listening to this now brings me back to those times, when I played Gamecube on a CRT TV, sitting on a foldable chair, exploring the map at my own pace, imagining my own adventure, and having practically nothing to worry about in life other than when the weekend would be over and I’d have to go back to school.

Neverwinter Online (2013, PC)

Neverwinter Online was the first MMORPG I ever played. With my very first instance of a real, ADSL internet connection, and an old laptop that was made well before gaming on a laptop was even considered by PC manufacturers, I downloaded Neverwinter and created a Rogue. At the time I knew nothing of D&D, and considered it to be just another fantasy game, but this is what created my attachment to Neverwinter (the city) in the Forgotten Realms’ lore.

I would watch the opening cinematic a few times per week, since I had to adjust the graphics settings to the bare minimum in order to have the game be playable, and somehow use my imagination to translate the smaller encounters I had in game into the epic battle seen in the opening.

Seeing the video now, it instead fills me with that old sense of wonder, when videogames were still mysterious enough to me that I could completely immerse myself in their worlds rather than being able to perceive signs of design.

Dragon Age II (2011, X360)

As one of the first games I owned for the Xbox 360, as well as one of my first, if not THE first Fantasy RPG I played all on my own, Dragon Age II will always have a special place in my heart. I picked this game up second hand from a store while visiting my dad in the summer, and when I got home and I put the disc in my console, I was greeted with this epic cinematic featuring Hawke fighting the Arishok.

Of course, it turns out that the Hawke shown in the video uses a Mage’s weapon yet is quite adept at melee combat. This was never 100% possible in game, but I would often watch the cutscene and be in awe of how cool the main character looked and how badass he was.

Watching it now, I am transported to summers in intense heat, using a fan to keep my console cool enough to play long sessions, exploring every dungeon and completing every quest throughout several different playthroughs, trying every possible class for Hawke.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006, X360)

I’ve talked about Oblivion before. I wanted Skyrim, but at the time it was out of stock in every single store I went to. A kind worker at one of the stores recommended me to get Oblivion for ten euros, second hand. He claimed that I would like it if I was interested in Skyrim.

When I played this intro, I was immediately drawn in, and even now, more than 10 years later, I can’t help but feel a smile on my face, and remember the many hours I spent exploring Cyrodiil, all on a single character.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (2014, PS4)

This one sets me at a later time in my life, not part of my childhood, but still of my teenage years. I’ve talked about how I started playing FFXIV. A second hand PS4, no money for games, and a lot of free time to try every free game and demo available.

Once again, this extremely cool and epic cinematic made me interested about the world. It has everything, banners from mysterious factions, a big dragon, enemies and monsters, and an epic soundtrack to accompany it all.

Watching it now, almost 5 years after I stopped playing FFXIV for good, fills me with melancholy rather than nostalgia. The cinematic brings me back to a time where Eorzea was a fantasy world for me to explore, full of people who were adventurers just like me. Nowadays it has become simply a social hub, and in a way that kind of hurts.

Fallout: New Vegas (2010, X360)

Fallout: New Vegas is another one of those Xbox 360 RPGs that I picked up second hand with absolutely no idea of what they were and what I was in for. I originally rented it for three days and did not understand a single thing, but the opening cinematic intrigued me so much, I saved up money to buy the game for real as soon as I could.

I’ve never been very good with Bethesda games, and Fallout in particular is a franchise that eludes me, despite my attempts, I have never finished either of the original trilogy, nor 4, and my time playing Fallout 76 was short and not particularly enjoyable.

New Vegas remains the only Fallout game that has hooked me to the point of completion, and this cutscene explains why, to me. The setting of New Vegas and the Mojave feel different from the other games, and the way the game begins, with our character on the wrong end of a gun, makes the story something personal and engaging from the beginning.

Even today, I consider it one of the best game intros for me.

Halo 3 (2007, X360)

Halo 3 was my first Halo game. My favorite franchise, my introduction to Master Chief was the ending of the original trilogy. My first few hours of Halo 3 were spent playing Matchmaking with my cousin, but once we finally started the campaign, I knew this would be a turning point in my life.

Cortana’s monologue, the way the music swells, then the marines’ dialogue with the strings in the background. It makes for an impressive introduction to a game, and watching it now gives me a longing for those old times of playing Halo until the late hours of the morning with my cousin during the holidays.

Kingdom Hearts II (2006, PS2)

Kingdom Hearts is a bit of a cheat in this department, because it seems the theme and intentions of the whole franchise are to make you emotional and pull at whatever it is we have in there that makes us sad and nostalgic for no reason.

Still, it doesn’t mean it can’t make it in the list. When I played it for the first time, at 11 years old, the intro to Kingdom Hearts II was cryptic and mystical to me. I didn’t understand it, but there was that cool part with the electric guitars and then the game was extremely fun.

16 years later, Utada Hikaru’s vocals remain as mystical as they were then, and while Kingdom Hearts as a whole has fallen out of my list of preferred franchise to game through, the memories of the times spent as a kid travelling to different Disney worlds, fighting creatures and going on adventures is not only something that I won’t forget, but something that I keep close to my heart.

UNDERTALE (2015, PC)

UNDERTALE was for a long time among the games that I considered the most influential in me as a gamer and as a person. There is a combination of music that appeals to my soul, along with a story that is the right amount of serious and goofy, with characters that feel human and harmless (most of them).

This game will always be a kind of comfort story for me, even though I have played it enough times for a lifetime.

What about you?

These past few days I’ve been feeling nostalgic. It might have been a consequence of playing Turtle WoW, but I don’t think it’s a bad feeling. We’ve come a long way, and there are many games that I haven’t even talked about that still find their way into my memories quite often.

What about you, can you recall any game intro or trailer that triggers you with that nostalgic feeling?

I’d love to read you, and also would appreciate it if you hit this button to subscribe and not miss out on any future posts:

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And that’s it for now!

…while looking for that special one, the game that fit all my expectations and desires for what a game could be. Of course, there’s rarely been one that achieved that status, but let’s be honest: there’s too many MMORPGs out there to say that none could ever be the perfect one for me. This year, however, for the sake of having nice things to write, I decided to give myself a challenge.

My objectives and rules

In order to ensure that I really go out there and look for the ideal MMORPG, I have set myself a list of goals to achieve, as well as rules to play by.

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

And so, for this month of January, I decided to start with…

TurtleWow: A fan take on Classic World of Warcraft

TurtleWow (tWoW from now on) is a fan-made server for World of Warcraft (WoW from now on) that expands on its original iteration and includes custom content diverging from Vanilla. The reason why I chose tWoW to play instead of Retail or Classic WoW is that tWoW is specifically tuned to be close to the gameplay of the original. Indeed, it plays just like how games in the 2000s used to play.

In this one month of gameplay, I have found that tWow already meets the three goals of my ideal MMORPG: it is challenging but fun, it is very immersive, and it has a social aspect that is not completely reduced by third party apps.

The Challenge

When it was time for me to create my character, I saw a list of additional challenges that tWoW offers. Some challenges are silly, like only being able to level by killing boars, or being unable to equip anything better than Poor quality items until level 60. Other challenges are tougher, like Hardcore, which means you only have one life to get to 60, or Level One Lunatic, which locks your character at level 1 and gives you a series of tasks to accomplish.

I chose Hardcore and picked a RP server. I figured that, since I’m only gonna play for a month, I might as well give myself the ultimate challenge. I create Radeg, a Dwarven Rogue, and pick the challenge, and begin my adventure in Azeroth, knowing that a single death means my progress is wiped.

The idea is to use guns and daggers, try to stay out of danger and pick enemies from afar. At the beginning, guns are a locked proficiency, but I make do with throwing axes. The leveling experience is slow, and it would be boring, but the added danger of knowing I can’t die once turns what would be your typical grinding and questing into a real adventure with higher stakes.

With no quest markers, fast travel or teleport options, the game revolves, at this stage, around the idea of picking my fights, sneaking around enemies, and navigating the map with a path in mind, checking direction often and making sure to stay alert and not be caught unaware by an enemy behind a corner or a tree.

In several occasions I had to abandon a quest or leave an area due to the density of enemies. In a normal game, I could risk it, kill as many as I could to complete my quest, then respawn and return, paying only a fee for gear repairs. In Hardcore, the inability to tackle larger groups of enemies turns me into an underdog, but through sheer will, I slowly make it through the game and the areas, leveling up and making it to Ironforge, then to Loch Modan.

There was, at a certain point in Westfall, a moment where I almost died. After being careless, I got ambushed by a group of Defias Trappers in a farmhouse. While I tried to get out as soon as I realized, their ability to root me in place held me surrounded by four enemies for a few seconds, enough for them to whittle down my health all the way down to 50 out of my usual 350. Combining my ability to Sprint and Evade, I ran out of there, and in my focus to maintain a straight line, as to not give my pursuers any chance to close down on me, I walked too close to a Gnoll, which was armed with a bow. The Gnoll managed to take two shots at me as I ran away. Out of my screen, all I could do was hear the whistling sound of the arrow approaching me once, then twice, then thrice. Not being able to see if I was being hit or not, since my health bar was already empty, my heart almost jumped out of my chest and I accepted that this would be it.

When I saw the ability to Sneak available, signaling that I was out of combat, I clicked it immediately, to hide away from any threats, and allowed myself to breathe again. I hovered the mouse over my health bar, and saw it at 19. That was my one and only lesson to never lower my guard. Hardcore is indeed the best possible challenge.

The Immersion

tWow lacks quest markers in the same way as other MMORPGs like FFXIV have. When a quest asks me to head to a certain area and slay a certain kind of enemy, nothing points me there but a lengthy text description as the quest giver tells me how to get there. Every journey feels like a deliberate choice, and the graphics, music and sound design give the game an old-school feel, in spite of which I really feel immersed in Azeroth.

I quickly disposed of General and World chats to a separate tab, and allowed myself to only read messages of other players near me. I believe the player population here is older than other games, and more people are willing to chat through the game rather than keep themselves to their favorite Discord server.

I had many chats in game, asking for advice or directions. In one occasion, I arrived to Ironforge and asked where I would be able to buy guns. This caused a gnome called Gimmet to answer “Right here, buddy!”, flex his muscles, then promptly run away. On a different occasion, I partnered up with a player called Grinjr to slay some Troggs near Thelsamar, and they spent some time giving me advice on how to survive my Hardcore challenge.

While these encounters were not traditional RP experiences, nothing in the chats alluded to the idea that these fictional characters were not the people talking, and so it felt immersive to me. There is a certain sense of respect in the community toward Hardcore characters, almost similar to the sense in which people treat those who are terminally ill. I know that all of these players really hope that I’ll make it to 60 without dying, but I’m sure many of them are convinced that I won’t.

The Socialization

As a Hardcore player, there are certain restrictions on me. I cannot use the Auction House. I cannot group up with non-Hardcore players, nor trade with them. I can only group up with or trade with Hardcore players if they’re only 5 levels above or below me. These rules are in place to ensure that one can’t simply receive great gear or be carried through leveling by a higher level, safe player.

I ended up invited to a guild, The Last Grrlgl, and the members are friendly, often have answers to my questions, and are supportive of the Hardcore run. The majority of my game experience is solo, except for this one occasion. I picked up an Elite quest, and the game promptly warned me that this quest would be difficult unless I grouped up. At the time I happened to cross another Hardcore player, Frostybrew, who was leveling in the same area. I reached out to them through /say chat, and we grouped up to complete the quest.

The Conclusion

tWoW really meets my expectations of what an ideal MMORPG should be in my eyes. I can genuinely see myself playing this relatively often throughout the year. However, if I stopped myself now, at the first sign of success, I may miss out on an even better jewel of a game.

Playing tWoW in Hardcore challenge really is my kinda jam. The game is difficult, it forces me to stop and think what my next move should be. I’ve had a few times where I’ve had an unexpected enemy show up and forced me to retreat, and I’ve had two brushes with death already, only at level 13. The fact that there is no main story for me to follow really sells me on the fantasy of being an adventurer in Azeroth. The scale of the world, the lack of markers pointing me in specific directions, and the vibe of the community really make it feel real.

It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s slow paced, it’s immersive. It might be the closest game there is to what I want from an MMORPG. However, I cannot stop here. If I were to give tWoW a rating from 1 to 10 in the scale of “how ideal is it for me” I’d give it a 9/10 so far; it would only really be perfect if it included maybe a few extra mechanics to make it more immersive, like more detailed crafting animations.

The February Attempt: LotRO or DDO

There are so many games to try, and at a rate of one per month, I will miss out on many. I have heard that The Lord of the Rings Online is a great representation of Middle-Earth, and it might be very immersive, with a great roleplaying community. I also know that Dungeons & Dragons Online, from the same developers, includes a Hardcore server, which might be my style.

I have still a couple days to decide, and so I turn to you, reader. Do you have a suggestion? Do you know of a game that could fit my needs? I would love to read your responses.

Happy New Year, dear readers! 2025 was a beginning for The Game Enjoyer, and thanks to you, whether you are a subscriber or just a curious reader, I arrive to the new year energized, wanting to write more and interact with the community.

One of my goals for this new year is to streamline my content. I like to write one monthly issue, but I also write other posts with ideas that come to mind. And so, the monthly issue, starting now, will have a new format to include different topics and ideas, as to not lock myself into a different theme every month.

And so I present to you: the new and improved The Game Enjoyer monthly issue.

The Eyewitness

Starting this year, I would like to include gaming related news in my monthly issues. Here goes a new section.

• AMD and Nvidia to raise GPU prices significantly: I consider myself lucky to have recently gotten a new rig, since it seems it will soon become extremely expensive to have a cutting edge gaming machine. The price to pay for AI use becoming more and more common, perhaps.

• RAM prices have gone up and getting worse: Not so lucky for me, I moved from a laptop with 64GB of RAM to a desktop with 32GB. Perhaps I should have gone for 64 on the desktop. If only I had known…

• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt could receive a new official DLC: If I had to take a guess, I’d say it might be a Siege of Dragonspear style DLC, trying to bridge the gap between this game and the upcoming sequel.

It seems we begin the year with mostly negative news. Gaming as a whole, whether on PC or on consoles, is going to get more expensive. Add to that games becoming more expensive, and it paints a grim picture. At least we’ll always have indies and older games, I guess. I can see myself dedicating more hours to Football Manager.

Upcoming: PRAGMATA (releasing in April 24th)

I’d like to include a section to talk about a yet unreleased game that has caught my attention, as well.

While I normally don’t pay attention to game award ceremonies, this time The Game Awards caught me at a time when I was free and awake for it, and I decided to watch it. I felt a particular interest in PRAGMATA, an upcoming action-adventure from CAPCOM that looks and plays in a very refreshing way.

In PRAGMATA, we control two characters at once; Hugh, a human spacefarer with an exoskeleton and an arsenal of guns, and Diana, an android girl with the ability to hack. The game’s levels involves a mix of platforming, puzzle solving and third-person shooter combat, but the game shines when it comes to how combat works.

The enemies presented in the demo were a series of robots. Shooting them seemed to not be particularly effective, but hacking them using Diana made them vulnerable to Hugh’s guns. The interesting part is that hacking is done in real time, using the controller’s face buttons. While you are hacking, you must still control Hugh, making sure he does not get hit by the enemies, who continue to advance and attack until they get momentarily staggered by Diana’s successful hack.

This singular feature, having to pay attention to two different screens at once in order to succeed, made me really interested in the game, and I can’t wait until it releases.

Journal: Mouthwashing

Here’s another one: not quite a review, not quite a retrospective. Just some thoughts.

After hearing much about it, a friend got me Mouthwashing for Christmas. It’s a short game, two hours was more than enough to get through the story once, and another two hours are probably enough to get the full list of achievements.

I have mixed feelings about Mouthwashing: on one hand, the characters and dialogue are written so brilliantly, so honestly and in such a human way, that I would understand anyone claiming that this game was the best indie of 2024.

On the other hand, as brilliant as the game was, I feel like many of its more classic horror elements (like having to navigate a maze while avoiding a monster, or drawn out segments for the sake of tension) inject filler into what could be a shorter, but just as intense or enjoyable experience.

Still, did I enjoy the game? Absolutely. Do I recommend it? Indeed I do, although, contrary to the game’s slogan, I hope it doesn’t hurt. It’s a game designed to punch you in the gut. Unlike others like Disco Elysium, which interacts with the player by pointing the finger at them at laughing when they think they’ve got politics figured out, or Undertale, which asks the player to treat the game and its characters like a living world and spare them the violence, Mouthwashing simply presents a cast of messed up, miserable people, and says “Look at them! They’re screwed and terrible, but they’re human. You could be terrible too.” and I think that’s pretty cool.

Now Enjoying: skate.

My friend sends me reels on Instagram. This one has skate. gameplay, and the caption says “Playing Skate doing only tricks I know in real life”. It is misleading, and in the video, the skater does a simple Ollie, then the model bugs out and performs strange poses before shooting up into the sky at insane speed.

I have installed skate. even though it is in Early Access and has apparently so many bugs that nobody plays the game normally. I am here for those bugs. I have a soft spot for ragdoll physics and the game looks fun. What ensues is the last two weeks of Christmas spent in my office, playing skate. both seriously and ironically. The game is actually fun! Whether you’re actually doing challenges and tricks, exploring the world just to chill, or doing your best to break the game’s physics to get the next viral reel, it’s actually an interesting game.

I give it a bit of time every day, maybe half an hour. I do a couple challenges, then I spend some time doing tricks and grinds around town. I then decided to send it full speed against an incoming truck. My character glitches under the truck and comes out mangled, back turned in an unnatural position but seemingly fine, and it takes a while until it adjusts itself.

The game itself accounts for all this, using their patented technology called “Imperva-tek“, that prevents your character from really getting injured, allowing you to dive off a skyscraper and land on your head if so you wish.

All of these games are giving me analysis paralysis.

The Poll: Squadron 42

I’m sure any gamer nowadays has heard of Star Citizen, nearly a billion dollars worth of development, constant delays, and just a buggy game that is more a tech demo to show for it. I love it.

Its single player campaign, Squadron 42, was announced to be released in 2026, but there is still not a specific date. So I ask you, players, what do you think?

And we come to an end. As the new format for the monthly issues, I’ll still tweak it a little bit, but this should be it. Of course feedback and advice are always welcome, simply leave a comment down there. And also…

See you in February!

My view of religion has changed and gone back and forth over time, but the sense of wonder these stories evoked in me remained unchanged, because it wasn’t relevant whether I thought them to be true or not. They were entertaining to listen to and imagine.

Over the years, my love of storytelling brought me to a love of writing, then a love of gaming, then roleplaying. I’m only 27 now, and I consider storytelling to be the ultimate and most important facet of any roleplaying game. After all, if you cannot look back on your game and think of it as an exhilarating story to tell others, the same way my father explained to me Samson bringing a temple down to massacre a bunch of enemies who tortured him, was it really that cool? (It’s a rhetorical questions, everyone has a right to enjoy TTRPGs in their own way).

By age 10, I put myself in the shoes of Link

I played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker when I was 10, on my good old Gamecube. What I remember the most is the sense of adventure and immersion when sailing. The map felt massive to me at the time, even though it pales in comparison with the game maps we have nowadays.

I really felt like I was Link, and I played things from his perspective. I went back to Outset Island to visit Grandma, routinely stopped at major settlements to stock up on items, and sometimes simply explored and fought enemies for the thrill of it.

As a kid, this was just the way to have fun, but my friends didn’t play the same way. They played games as a sandbox, and I recall being perplexed at seeing a friend find incredible joy in simply shooting civilians in Grand Theft Auto. To me it was unthinkable: if I was playing, I would not want to harm civilians, and especially not bring the cops’ wrath on me.

Now I understand why I found games entertaining in the way I did, and still do. To me, immersion remains an important piece of the puzzle.

At 13 I wrote hundreds of pages of Halo fan-fiction

I got internet access late into my life, compared to others. It wasn’t until 2011 that I genuinely had a consistent way to go online from home. Before that, I had to go to the public library, or I would have occasional access during the summer when I went to visit my father.

Once I did have access at home, however, I became a writing machine. As I had recently discovered my favorite game franchise of all time.

At 15 I was roleplaying on SWTOR

With my very first laptop I barely met the requirements to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I loved it, as a massive Star Wars fan, and I spent many hours not just questing, but roleplaying with my guild, a bunch of gamers who were all probably quite older than me, but who did not care to know me as a person.

It was just my character and theirs, and the stories we wrote together. Eventually I stopped playing, but SWTOR was simply the first of many videogame roleplaying experiences to come. Eventually, as I returned to the game years later, I failed to connect with my old guildmates, but the stories we created together helped shape me into the gamer I am today.

It was then that I became enamored with the idea of not just pretending to be a fictional character on my own, but as an experience along with other people.

At 22 I finally made the move to TTRPGs

At the very beginning of the pandemic, a friend invited me to her roleplaying group. One of the members had taken a break, and a spot was open. I joined the group that I still play with, five years later.

Here I experienced the full breadth of what tabletop RPGs have to offer. The combat, buildcrafting, and strategy were an aspect that I wasn’t particularly interested in at first, but I grew to like it over time.

The live interaction with other player characters, the improvisation at play, crafting stories in a more organic way than writing them… It was during this time that I finally settled on what exactly I want from stories and roleplaying.

Here I also learned what it means to be compatible (or incompatible) with your D&D group. Which leads me to the latest step.

At 27 I joined a Play-by-post game

In the past few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that, as a roleplayer, I live and breathe by the stories we tell. It doesn’t matter to me if a game only has a little bit of combat, or if combat is too easy. What matters to me most is how characters are played and how they interact with the environment.

My favorite characters I’ve played have never been the ones who were strongest in a fight, nor the ones who were the most successful at the end of a game. My favorites were the ones with interesting stories; an ex-criminal trying to reform, only to end up committing a terrible crime that was unforgivable; an inexperienced soldier learning to protect his people at any cost; a samurai overcoming prejudice and blind loyalty for the sake of defending the Empire.

I have the greatest fun when I am able to play my character in a way that it feels immersive to the game’s world, and if it has a theme, even better. To satisfy this need, I ended up joining a Play-by-post server. Here, I am able to write short narrations in scenes when my character acts. Roleplaying with others, going on quests or fighting at the arena all give me avenues to engage my creative muscle, while still participating in classic TTRPG mechanics.

In a way, this is a Love Found and not Lost

Fantasy and Sci-fi are my top two genres of media, and for a reason. Until the day I die, I will continue to craft fictional stories about heroes and villains. for myself, for my kids and for my friends. If I ever write a novel, that would be a dream come true.

As for you, dear reader, if you play table-top RPGs, would you like to read an article explaining some of my stories? Perhaps you would like to comment explaining your favorite character?

As Big 2025 comes to an end, it’s time to look back at the fantastic year in gaming we’ve had despite everything. True, some companies and developers have made bad moves. There’s been cancellations, price hikes, controversies… There’s also been an insane amount of high quality games of all genres for us to enjoy. In the future, I would love for the December issue of The Game Enjoyer to be a review of the year’s gaming library, but as this is the very first holiday issue, I’m going to look at it from a different perspective.

My favorite game from every year since I was born

I was born in 1998, and due to a few different factors, I had the opportunity to engage with gaming from a very young age, and to engage with older games that would normally be overlooked by people of my age. In other words, I didn’t have the money for new games, so I had to play older releases. In 24 years of playing videogames I have experienced all kinds of games, from the most classic racing and sports like Colin McRae’s Rally and Pro Evolution Soccer to well known beloved masterpieces like Ocarina of Time.

1998 - Spyro the Dragon (PlayStation 1)

The year is 2003, my older brother has bought himself a brand new PlayStation 2 system with his salary, and I, instead, am gifted a chipped PlayStation 1 from some friends of my parents, who have bought a PS2 for their son. At 5 years old, I didn’t understand any of what that meant, but I understood that I could play games that my brother was burning directly on discs on the computer. One of my favorites was always Spyro the Dragon. Even though it has been a long time since I’ve played it, I remember the crispness of the controls, the colorful graphics and also how confused I was as a child.

I spent most of my time in the first two levels chasing sheep and collecting gems, not really understanding the real objective. It wasn’t until years later, with the release of the remade games for modern consoles, that I finally played through the games properly.

1999 - Shenmue (HD Remaster for the Xbox One)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I dedicated a decent amount of my free time to play games from the Xbox Game Pass. Doing that enough allowed me to exchange points for rewards, extending my subscription for free. One of the games I experienced during that time was Shenmue. Drawn in by the idea that it could be similar to the Yakuza games, this game’s story, with less focus on combat and more on investigation and puzzle solving intrigued me near immediately.

What I cared about the most was how immersive it felt, navigating the town, using the phone manually, drinking sodas from the machine… I never finished it, but I still think fondly of my time spent exploring Yokosuka, and I would hope that more games took on Shenmue’s approach to level design.

2000 - The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Nintendo 64)

I grew up with a variety of consoles, from PS1 to GameCube, to PS2, to Xbox 360… Sadly I never got the chance to play those great games for the Nintendo 64 when they were fresh. Instead, I had the chance to explore a golden age of gaming through emulation in the early 2010s. While I loved Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask was the game that really sunk its fangs onto me. It’s eerie atmosphere, paired with how popular at the time videogame creepypastas were (Ben Drowned, anyone?) made me obsessed with this game for the best part of a summer.

While it is not my favorite in the Legend of Zelda franchise, it sits way up there, perhaps in the Top 3.

2001 - Halo: Combat Evolved (Original Xbox)

I was introduced to the Halo franchise by my cousin in 2008; it was going to be a holiday weekend at my grandma’s house, and I expected to spend these days playing in the house with him like other years: board games, wrestling, and some computer games. That time around, he had some kind of videogame console I had never seen before. He introduced me to the Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and from then on I became an unconditional Halo fan.

Through purchasing the original games thanks to the 360’s retrocompatibility, and later on through the great anthology The Master Chief’s Collection on Xbox One, I experienced Halo: Combat Evolved in many ways, from solo Legendary to split screen with friends or co-op online. Out of the many games in the franchise, Combat Evolved holds a special place in my heart.

Maybe it’s the unreliable physics, the absurd level design (placing a S.P.N.K.R. wielding Flood in a narrow hallway, really?), or the finicky hitbox that made getting off a moving Warthog a gamble for your life, but playing Halo: Combat Evolved is a unique experience that no other game in the franchise provides.

2002 - Final Fantasy XI (PC)

I had a phase of passion for Final Fantasy XIV, which started with curiosity at the free trial back in 2017, became my main game during 2019, and ended after I beat Endwalker in early 2022. After I no longer wanted to play it due to reasons better left to another article, I was looking for the thrill of a new MMORPG. I wanted something immersive, challenging, and with soul. I landed in a fan server of Final Fantasy XI. The idea behind this fan server was that the official release has a lot of bloat that makes progress much easier for solo players, but I wanted the real deal.

Back in the day (or nowadays, if you find a server that holds on to the old content), Final Fantasy XI was not for the faint of heart. Being able to lose levels if you die too much, combat being hard and demanding even at level 1, and no matchmaking features (those were added later) meant Vana’diel was a harsh, unforgiving world where you needed to talk to other players and band together even for something as simple as traversing the map to reach another settlement. Great times were had.

2003 - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo Gamecube)

During the time I owned a Gamecube, I only owned two games: Mario Kart: Double Dash and Donkey Konga. I loved them and played them incessantly, but none of them were as enjoyed by 10 year old me as The Wind Waker was when a friend lent it to me.

Having no internet at home, I spent hours lost in the game’s world, exploring, fighting monsters, and calling my dad on the phone to ask him to read up a guide online for me when I got stuck at a puzzle or a point in the story. I’ll always think fondly of this game, which I consider my Top 1 in The Legend of Zelda’s whole franchise.

2004 - Pro Evolution Soccer 4 (PlayStation 2)

Back in the day, second hand games were dirt cheap. When I was a kid, my mom would refuse to buy me any videogames at all. In all my years as a gamer, even now, she has only ever purchased me one videogame, and it was during the PS2 days. My gaming library grew with gifts from my dad, mostly, who took me to the game shop with a few euros to purchase second hand games. Back then, ten or fifteen euros meant that you could go back home with two or three second hand PS2 games. One of these times I purchased Pro Evolution Soccer 4. Back then it was already outdated, with most of my friends playing the most recent entries or FIFA. I didn’t mind, because to me, PES4 wasn’t about competing with my friends, it was about building my legend as a manager of a team.

As you may know about me by now, I care greatly about roleplaying in any game. And even then, as a kid, I spent hours customizing my team’s kit, creating fake sponsors to display on the shirts, thinking up stories for the players that I signed, and fighting every single match to be the greatest team in Europe. As I eventually moved on to a more modern game, I never could dedicate as much focus and passion to creating a custom club as I did back then.

2005 - Star Wars Battlefront II (PC)

My first time playing Star Wars Battlefront II was at a friend’s house on his PS2. I had never played something like it, and I dreamed of having my own copy to play massive battles on Geonosis, Kamino and space dogfights for years, until I finally found a second hand copy of the game. When I brought it home to play, I discovered the disc was damaged and it didn’t work.

I never got to play it until I got it on PC, years later. Even then, its campaign and the insane replayability kept me hooked for hours on end. My favorite was the space battles, where I would head into the enemy’s ship to sabotage it from within, and then try to make a run and escape before it was too late. While the modern Battlefront II is fun and engaging (and looks and sounds fantastic), it lacks the freedom of its predecessor when it comes to choosing ground or air combat on the fly.

2006 - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Xbox 360)

In December 2008, I went with my father to spend the holidays at my grandma’s house. That particular year my cousin introduced me to the Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and ever since I was intrigued by that white console and its insanely realistic games (considering I had been spending the past few years playing on the PS2).

Fast forward a couple of years, and I managed to get a second hand 360 for Christmas, along with just two games; Halo 3 and Mass Effect 2. When Skyrim came out, I managed to rent it from a blockbuster, and I immediately fell in love with it. Its realistic graphics, massive open world, and epic story drew me in. I begged my father to get me the game if we could find it in second hand, but of course, it was out of stock everywhere. A guy working at the game store told me “If you really want to play Skyrim, you may also enjoy Oblivion, and we have it on second hand here.” and he offered me a second hand copy of it. I took it, not really knowing what it was.

What ensued was a singular playthrough of over a hundred hours, all questlines complete, thousands of enemies slain and every dungeon explored. I squeezed so much out of Oblivion, and I enjoyed it so much, that despite me immediately moving on to Skyrim when I finally managed to get a copy in my hands and playing that for another 100+ hours, I still consider Oblivion to be the peak Elder Scrolls experience for me.

2007 - Halo 3 (Xbox 360)

The one that started it all. Halo 3 was just perfect. Combine a great campaign full of epic moments and great level design (yes, even Cortana), one of the best game soundtracks ever, add the climax to a three game long story, an insanely fun multiplayer experience before the era of rampant microtransactions, and a pinch of Blam! and you’ll get pure distilled OG greatness. Bungie was at its peak when Halo 3 was made, and I was at my most impressionable age when I was introduced into its tactical yet frantic multiplayer combat, and easy to get into campaign.

As it was one of my only two games when I first got an Xbox 360, I played and replayed Halo 3 in any possible way (thanks to the Skull modifiers adding a lot of replayability to it), but even now, more than fifteen years later, I still consider Halo 3 to be the flagship game of my favorite era of gaming.

2008 - Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)

During my many years enjoying second hand gaming on the Xbox 360 I picked up Left 4 Dead, and spent many hours playing it on split-screen and LAN with my cousin. I never got the sequel, but I always wished I did. While it wasn’t one of my favorites games on the console, I believe L4D and its sequel have a special charm when it comes to co-op gameplay, and their essence has been passed on to Fatshark and their Warhammer Vermintide and WH40K: Darktide games.

Still, with their great mod library, L4D remains a top tier choice to play nowadays, and it will eventually make its way to my Steam library when the mood asks for a great horde shooter.

2009 - Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360)

In the second year of me spending the Christmas holidays at my grandma’s place, playing Xbox with my cousin, he had purchased Halo 3: ODST. He mainly cared about the second disk, which included the Halo 3 multiplayer with all map packs and then some, but he also enjoyed the campaign and the Firefight mode. At first, I didn’t particularly care about ODST’s campaign that much. I enjoyed it, for sure.

It wasn’t until years later when it really struck me how genius it is. ODST sits in my top 1 of Halo games, and perhaps easily in my top 3 of any game ever. The jazzy soundtrack, ambiance, story… Halo 3: ODST is simply put a matter of quality over quantity. If you could only ever play one Halo game, I would definitely recommend this one.

2010 - Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360)

In the early 2010s I was very slowly but surely building my game library for the Xbox 360 (before it got RDoD’d forever). In a certain occasion I asked for Red Dead Redemption for my birthday, at that point I was turning 14 years old, but my father asked my older brother if he considered I was mature enough for such a game, and he gave him the greenlight. Thus, I experienced one of the best game stories at the time, and a fantastic open world full of side missions to complete and crimes to commit.

My fondest memory is becoming obsessed with the idea that there was a mistery at the abandoned town of Tumbleweed, and exploring it at night, thinking some ghost or monster would appear. With no internet access at home, I had no way of checking if it was real, and spent hours exploring and testing different ways to trigger anything to happen.

2011 - Dragon’s Age II (Xbox 360)

In another one of my second-hand game shopping sprees, I picked up Dragon Age II simply because the cover looked badass. I installed it in my console, and watched the intro video. It looked extremely badass. I had never played Dragon Age: Origins before, and I never played Dragon Age Inquisition until many years after it released. I doubt I’ll ever play Dragon Age: The Veilguard. However, Hawke’s story will always have a place in my heart. I played every class, every route, took every possible different choice.

Years after this, I did play the prequel, and attempted to play through the sequel. It turns out I am simply not as big of a fan of Dragon Age, but for some reason this specific entry in the franchise really pulled me in. I feel like it really tells how different of a gamer I ended up being as I got older.

2012 - Crusader Kings II (PC)

I had spent years seeing memes about Paradox Interactive’s Grand Strategy games like Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron. They never tickled my fancy, as I didn’t understand what was so appealing about staring at a political map for hours on end making choices. It wasn’t until after the COVID-19 pandemic that a friend recommended I try Crusader Kings II, saying that it was a “great roleplaying game”, as you play the role of a lord or lady, rather than being an invisible entity that controls the nation.

Of course, it didn’t take long for me to fall into the trap. While I am terrible at the game, every playthrough was an attempt at seeing how far I could get into my goals of becoming a powerful empire before a bigger chunk of land devoured me. Later on, I moved to Crusader Kings III, but I still have more hours on the second entry of the franchise than I would like to admit.

2013 - Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (PS3)

If you’ve been reading The Game Enjoyer before, you might recognize this game as the first videogame to ever make me cry. Aside from that, however, Assassins’s Creed IV: Black Flag was, at its time, the latest entry in a franchise that I liked a lot and from which I had played almost every game. Having only skipped Assassin’s Creed III by happenstance, finding this at a second hand game shop was a cheap gateway to many hours of pirate fun.

In retrospect, how good this game was makes me wonder why Skull and Bones is such a miss. Everything in Black Flag was well made, the sailing and naval combat, the map design, the amount of content, the ground gameplay, the story and music… What went wrong, Ubisoft?

2014 - Destiny (Xbox 360, PS4)

After having been a passionate Halo fan for just over 5 years, knowing that Bungie had left the franchise to Microsoft and moved on to make their own thing saddened me and excited me at the same time. When I saw their new project, Destiny (which had already been teased in posters in Halo 3: ODST), I daydreamed about what the game would be like and how much fun I would have exploring the new sci-fi universe that Bungie was crafting.

I couldn’t get my hands on the game until mid 2015, when the first two expansions had already launched. Soon after, however, The Taken King released. Even though now Destiny has a reputation for being a relatively poor experience (and with reason, it is grindy, they have removed some of the old content in Destiny 2 and most of the newer seasons are lacking in content), the original Destiny, which was eventually abandoned, remains a complete and fun experience that, in my opinion, is more enjoyable than its sequel.

2015 - Undertale (PC)

Before I was of age, I barely could get my hands on new games to play. On my old laptop, my best option was pirating indies and old games. In such a way I played Morrowind, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Undertale. I loved Undertale deeply. It was my first time experiencing a game that shed the game part of it just to tell a story that involved me directly, as a player, and while I know now that it is more common on PC than on consoles, it marked me.

Its mix of genuine wholesome characters, comedy, deep lore, creepy moments, and different routes and endings made me replay the game a few times. When I finally had money, I purchased a copy on Steam, then I bought the Collector’s Edition for PS4. I feel like I have paid its worth now even if I played it for free.

2016 - Final Fantasy XV (PS4)

One of the games I experienced while I didn’t have any games for my PS4 was the Platinum Demo for Final Fantasy XV. In this demo you play as a young Noctis as he navigates a nightmare. You explore fantastic worlds and fight goblins with a toy hammer. What drew me in from this demo was how insanely realistic the graphics looked, and how similar it played to Kingdom Hearts, which was a game series quite dear to me.

When the game fully released, I saved some money and waited for it to go on sale, and then immersed myself in it. There was something special about it, despite the fact that it was unfinished. How the party members talk to each other as you explore, the immersive mechanics for camping, eating dinner, changing your clothes, taking care of the Regalia… I really felt as if I was exploring Eos myself. When I beat the game the first time, after more than 80 hours, I decided I hadn’t had enough, and I started again. I still have that save game, and it sits at slightly over 260 hours. Final Fantasy XV remains one of my favorite game experiences and I would say I rank it in my top 5 of games of all time.

2017 - Yakuza 0 (PS4)

It was 2019, I had finally gotten hold of my economical destiny, and it was still a couple of months before I decided to move to Germany. My partner at the time was obsessed with Japanese culture, and one of their big favorites was Yakuza (currently known as Like A Dragon). The recommendation to play Yakuza 0 came as a way to enjoy a great game that I wasn’t particularly interested about, in a way to show interest for one of my partner’s favorite games.

One of the best choices I could have made. Yakuza 0’s rendition of Kamurocho and Sotenbori is not only packed with content, but also extremely immersive in its depiction of the famous city districts back in the 80s. With Yakuza 0 I not only discovered a love for the franchise, but also a love for immersion, for beat ‘em ups, and for tebori, the traditional Japanese tattooing style (I am currently getting a back piece done by an artist from one of the big families in Japan).

2018 - Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4)

When Red Dead Redemption 2 was announced, I already knew that I’d want to play it. I loved the first one, after all. Coming out at a time when I was already saving decent money, I didn’t wait for a sale. I picked it up on release date, and hoping to avoid spoilers, played it for many hours several days in a row, without looking for anything online.

Many of my friends dislike how slow and immersive RDR2 is, like how you must sit through an animation as Arthur loots dead enemies, or how you must manually clean and oil your guns to keep them in good shooting condition. Personally, I loved every minute of my adventure as Arthur, and I will forever rue that Red Dead Online didn’t pick up as much as GTA Online did.

2019 - Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers (PC)

I originally started playing Final Fantasy XIV in late 2016, as I had just purchased a PS4 and had no games. The prospect of a free trial for a game with no limited time or progress erasure was quite attractive, and I had always liked Final Fantasy as a franchise. I never fully got into the game until two years later, when I purchased it and subscribed to it on my gaming laptop.

FFXIV was a honey trap for a gamer like me: an immersive game world, full of other adventurers to talk to, great music and an interesting story (and that Heavensward expansion was fantastic), fun gameplay, and on top of that the possibility of roleplaying as my adventurer in a world that acknowledged that every player was unique. By the time Shadowbringers released I had already become a hardcore FFXIV fan, completing as much content as I could and spending a good amount of time chatting to my game friends in my free time.

Unfortunately, as good as it was, Shadowbringers attracted a big group of new players that had a different idea of how to socialize in game. Not soon after beating the story, I dropped the game, eventually returning only to finish the full arc with Endwalker. My story of love found and lost with FFXIV could be an article in itself.

2020 - Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Xbox One)

When the pandemic started, I lost my job, then my savings slowly drained away, and I was “rescued” from Germany by my family. Unable to find a job, I spent months in a strange state between depression and contempt. That Christmas, I received Yakuza: Like A Dragon as a gift, and it brought me great comfort.

Already a fan of the series, I wasn’t sure I would appreciate leaving Kiryu behind to begin Ichiban’s story, but I did know that I would rather they didn’t drag Kiryu back to countless comebacks just for money. I kept an open mind, and this game only ever surprised me in a good way.

Ichiban Kasuga’s journey from rock-bottom to a happy, though meager existence is already a well written gut-puncher, but I played it at exactly the right moment in life, when I had hit my personal rock-bottom. Seeing Ichiban overcome his obstacles with a positive attitude kept me focused and hopeful as I waited for the right moment to bounce back.

2021 - Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PC)

My usual aversion to anything that is critically acclaimed put me off Disco Elysium for a while. It wasn’t until a close friend said that it really was my kind of thing that I decided to pick it up and play. The Detective’s story, along with Disco Elysium’s gameplay mechanics, make for what is, in my opinion, the best computer game of all time so far. It’s Final Cut version, released in 2021, adds enough new features that I would also consider it the best game of 2021.

While the game wasn’t particularly immersive, its story and themes gripped me so hard that I did nothing but play the game for a week straight during a vacation period. It is a once in a lifetime experience and it has changed the way I write my tabletop RPG characters forever.

2022 - Pentiment (Xbox One)

Pentiment was one of those surprise wonders. Picking it up from the Game Pass, even though it didn’t look like my particular kind of game, I was hooked to its story and misteries, but also to how interactive the whole game is.

I believe Obsidian are the top developers when it comes to creating an RPG where your choices matter, and Pentiment is the peak of this particular style of gameplay. Andreas’ journey is not too different from Disco Elysium’s Detective, in the sense that Pentiment is as much a story about investigating a murder as it is about unravelling the inner workings of Andreas’ mind.

I consider it to be my best game of 2022 due to how well polished and detailed it is, despite being a game of smaller size than others.

2023 - Alan Wake 2 (PS5)

While 2023 gave me many of my favorite experiences (like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Final Fantasy XVI), I have to set Alan Wake 2 as the peak of that year’s gaming.

It features an engaging horror story with two complex and interesting protagonists, beautiful graphics that drag you into its horrific dreamscapes, great music full of foreshadowing, and what is probably the most memorable moment in the year’s TGA ceremony when Sam Lake went on stage to dance.

To me, it is special. The foreshadowing, details and connections, references to other games of the universe, and David Lynch-esque plot twists and mind-blowing scenes were a light-horror gateway into me finally deciding to play increasingly horrifying experiences.

2024 - Silent Hill 2 Remake (PS5)

My aversion to horror is caused by the fact that I don’t enjoy being scared (and it’s a perfectly natural reaction, mind you). Most horror games feature, in one way or another, jumpscares, either visual or auditory, and this is something I don’t enjoy at all. Alan Wake 2 makes liberal use of particularly annoying and irrelevant jumpscares throughout the game, and I eventually reacted to them with mild annoyance at best.

Silent Hill 2 features no jumpscares at all. Throughout the ~25 hours or so that I dedicated to beating this game, I dreaded the moment when something would jump at the screen, especially considering how many sequences in the game involve looking through a peephole or staring into the dark.

To my surprise, there was never a point in game where anything jumped at the screen, with only some mild moments of loud noises playing to unnerve you. Despite this, the atmosphere in Silent Hill 2 is so well crafted, that every single scenario, from the foggy streets early on to the Otherworld levels late into the game, felt so oppresive and tense that my heart rate was elevated at a constant state and I often had to take breaks while playing.

A particular moment that I will never forget was when I walked through a hallway, and an open room nearby triggered an audio cue, that sounded like a very deep voice mumbling some words. This was apparently a reference to the original game, but it triggered in me great panic and a fight or flight reaction. I booked it out of the hallway and never came back to explore.

2025 - Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (PS5)

What can I say? This being such a recent entry tempts me to write too long of a section, but I’ll do my best. I replayed Death Stranding 1 in PS5 in preparation for the sequel, but also to make my girlfriend understand the context of the story. She enjoyed it, and I appreciated the refresher. I picked up Death Stranding 2 on release date, and it blew me away from the very first scene.

I played it for about 80 hours, maybe slightly more. It is a beautifully made, complex and complete masterpiece that manages to surprise you every time you stray off the beaten path. Its online features feel unique to me and I enjoyed building connections with other players.

The story still sits in my mind. Sam’s journey is full of pain, and yet there is a lot of hope in Death Stranding 2. Kojima is not know for his subtlety, and it’s no coincidence that he chose to use Rainbows Keep Fallin’ On My Head as Sam’s theme. The game’s core message is simply that: you’re free to choose what to do and who to be, so why would you let the rain put you down?

I’ve never been much of a pessimist, but I’ve been trying particularly hard to be positive since I beat this game. No other game this year has hit me this hard.

Honorable Mentions

Despite these favorite choices of each year, there are many other games dear to me that could have made the list, if only they had released at a different date:

• Final Fantasy XII (2006, PS2): While I never beat it, exploring the city of Rabanastre was my first hint that I enjoyed immersion. And that soundtrack is so good.

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011, Multiplatform): I played this for a long time, and really loved it, but over time I have somehow come to consider it less of a great game if not for its mods. Nowadays I have a hard time starting a save with mods, let alone vanilla. And I only beat it once.

• Mass Effect 2 (2010, Multiplatform): I received this as an Xbox 360 game and I played it repeatedly as it was one of two games that I owned. The best in the franchise so far, with an unforgettable cast and story.

• Halo Infinite (2021, Multiplatform): You can say many things about modern Halo, but I am an unconditional fan of the series and I would be lying if I didn’t say that Infinite was one of my favorite games of 2021.

• Pokémon Emerald (2005, GBA): My first Pokémon game, and the one I consider to be the best. I play this a few times and for many hours. I loved how immersive it felt, building secret bases, adventuring with my Pokémon, and exploring the towns and routes.

• Final Fantasy XVI (2023, PS5): This would have been my GOTY for that year, but then I played Alan Wake 2. I felt that FFXVI was so polished and well made that it deserved more recognition. While the combat was easy and side quests fell a bit flat, the main story and acting performances really carried this game far.

What about you?

Dear reader, 2025 has brought us a plethora of great games, but if we set recency bias aside, we cannot forget games from years past that still make their presence known today. Who plays Team Fortress 2 or League of Legends? Who still likes to pick up two controllers at home and play so Smash Bros. with family or friends?

My life has shaped how I have interacted with videogames, due to access to technology and internet. This is my list, the games that have marked me in my life, according to year of release. I would like to know, reader. What game marked you the most, and in what year did it come out?

2026 will bring many more great games, and I am eager to put my hands on them, write about them, and read about what you have to say about them, too. From The Game Enjoyer, I wish you a Happy New Year, and I hope we’ll continue interacting in the upcoming issues.

What is Where Winds Meet?

I originally felt interest in this game after seeing a video showing the flight mechanics. It looked like amazing martial arts, and free-to-play, and I am always open to trying out a new MMORPG for a few hours.

I was wrong. Where Winds Meet (WWM for short) is, technically, a single player action-RPG, with Co-op mechanics, PvP, as well as a social Online mode, a signs communication system (similar to FromSoftware’s games), and a myriad of other sub-systems and minigames.

However, I do not want to call WWM an ARPG, because it is so much more than that. I call WWM a Wuxia Simulator.

Live and breathe the Jianghu

As a Wuxia simulator, WWM’s main story is a classic one, if you are into martial arts movies and Wuxia/Xianxia stories. These are two genres of Chinese fiction, with Wuxia being a more grounded fantasy about martial artists resolving conflicts through discipline and combat, and Xianxia being the more epic fantasy where characters battle gods, seek immortality, and gain incredible powers through training and cultivation.

The story involves us, the Wanderer or Young Master, setting off on a solo journey to discover the truth behind a few mysteries, including our own origin. Throughout this journey we will find out not just the secrets of our own story, but the lore of the land (which includes, for now, Qinghe and Kaifeng, but will open up over time to release more zones with more story).

I have been paying attention to WWM’s story, and I am pleased and surprised to say that everything is well threaded. Encounters and Side Quests that are seemingly unique in their story include details and nods to bigger storylines. In the bigger picture, every single small quests contributes to telling a full story, completely separate from that which we are living ourselves. In a way, you could say that WWM includes two main stories at once. Whether these two will fuse together at some point remains to be seen.

The Jianghu (the world outside traditional society) is full of characters, both heroes and villains, that can be interacted with to fight, speak with, debate, heal, and compete with, involving the player in all kind of mechanics, including a minigame for debating, for healing, playing music, throwing arrows into a vase while drunk, playing Mahjong, and many others.

There is also puzzles to solve and collectibles to find. Overall, the world is full of things to do, but the map does not show you any markers, meaning any completionist will have to actually explore the world, rather than complete a checklist, and I think that is wonderful.

Martial Arts, Mystic Skills and Inner Ways

The combat in WWM takes example from many games, including a tight parry and stamina system similar to Sekiro, an array of extra skills and moves straight out of a regular RPG, and different weapons and synergies that could be found in other ARPGs like Diablo.

You choose two weapons. Some weapons have specific synergies that imply they are better used together, but you can build yourself as any kind of hero or villain. I ended up settling on using the Sword and the Fan, giving myself the ability to deal damage, but also heal myself and others. Others prefer to go full damage by using the Dual Swords, Spear or Rope Dart, or to become tanks using the Mo Blade, or a ranged attacker with the Umbrella or the Fan.

Each weapon comes with at least two different martial arts that provide different uses. The Fan, per example, has the Panacea Fan and the Inkwell Fan. The Panacea Fan is all about healing and reviving allies, while the Inkwell fan is about damage.

The game offers different difficulty levels, and all but the highest one have assists for parry timings, which is good and accessible. Personally, I have played in Legend difficulty, as it allows you to have a badge that displays how many bosses you have defeated in the highest difficulty, and I love to have some bragging rights.

Some of the fights can be really, really difficult. But then again, if you crank the difficulty up, it’s for a reason. The game always allows you to bring it down, but once you remove Legend difficulty, you cannot turn it back on.

Aesthetics and the Gacha

Graphically, the game has some great features and some flaws. In my rig, I am able to squeeze as much juice out of the game as it has to offer, including some really beautiful Global Illumination in the open world. There is a lot of detail to be found in plants, and engraved pillars in temples, and decorations in fortresses, but the most amount of detail is to be found in character models and outfits. There is a reason for this.

WWM is completely free-to-play, but the monetization does not dip a single finger into the flow of game resources or stats. Every item that can be purchased in the stores or drawn in the gacha is cosmetic, and, apparently, people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for cool outfits for their virtual martial artist. It takes a few minutes of wandering the Online lobbies to see that people really do go for it.

Even if you don’t want to spend money in the game, exploration and achievements provide you with enough currency that you can do gacha pulls on your own, for free. I assume this is a way to lure you into, eventually, pay money for more pulls. I have resisted gachas for over ten years and I don’t plan to start now, but I am thankful to the whales for providing money to the company so that I can continue to enjoy my cool Wuxia simulator for free.

What I love and what I hate

I have played WWM for about 80 hours now, and I can’t get enough of it. Every aspect of the game feels like it was made to appeal to me, personally. The combat is challenging, but the variety in skills and moves still plays to a power fantasy. There’s an insane amount of minigames and different types of activities to engage in, both solo, co-op and online.

It feels like the world was designed to be coherent, and the gameplay for the sake of lore, rather than fun. That it manages to both be true to its setting, while at the same time being fun to play is nothing short of a miracle. Of course, the game isn’t perfect. It has certain bugs that make progression of some quests difficult, and sometimes boss fights can be glitchy (having a boss duplicate itself in a phase transition is not fun). The English localization is far from perfect, and apparently the English dub is done using AI-generated voices. For a person that is heavily anti-AI, that alone should be enough to keep you away from this game.

I used the Chinese dub from the beginning, and by the time I learned of the English voices I was too deep into the game. At the end of the day, I am not trying to convince you to give it a try, but rather simply thinking on the different aspects of the game.

Does it break into my list of favorite games?

Short answer is, surprisingly, yes. I would still have to sit down and really put brainpower into it, but I am pretty sure that my time with WWM, whether it will stop at 90 hours or 900, is so memorable that I will have a hard time not thinking fondly of this game.

And whenever the time comes for me to no longer play it, it’s not now. For now, I have plenty of wanderers to challenge, treasures to find, and Mahjong to play.

How and why I developed a personal method to deal with my backlog in 2025

Before 2024, I had developed a toxic relationship with videogames. I loved playing them, they had become my one constant in the turbulent period of my life between 2019 and 2021, and after those hard times passed, I still found myself playing videogames as a way to escape, even when there was nothing I needed to escape from.

Dealing with some toxic work environment, I eventually got burnt out at work and fell into a short depressive episode. Playing videogames didn’t bring me any happiness, other than the very occasional jewel that reeled me in (in 2023, per example I was absorbed by Final Fantasy XVI).

By the time 2024 arrived, I had my eyes set on a very specific game. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth was set to release in January, and the director (Masayoshi Yokoyama) kept saying the game would take “3-4 days with no sleep” just to clear the main story. I was looking forward to playing the game, but not to that.

So I decided to do something else instead. I played Yakuza 8 (for short, from now on) exclusively for 45 minutes every morning. I would brew some coffee, sit down while I waited to be fully awake, and do anything in the game; story, side quests, grinding for XP, minigames… As long as I was making progress, I didn’t care how long I played. If I felt like it, I would play longer. If I felt like I wasn’t in the mood, I would finish what I was doing and quit for the day.

It took me two months until I was satisfied with the game, having unlocked 65 out of 73 possible achievements for my adventure. I realized that this system really worked. No matter how long or filled with content the game was, it didn’t feel daunting if I only played a little bit every day. So I repeated this system with FFVII: Rebirth, then with Control (Ultimate Edition), then with Persona 3: Reload.

At this point, every big game I play, be it the RPGs, the cinematic adventures, or just a good old football game, I do it in small doses, always accompanied by a hot cup of coffee.

2025 and the calendar system

As a gamer, I am the kind that loves seeing things unlock on a screen. I’m not a super completionist type, but I love unlocking achievements, clearing maps of markers, and seeing progress represented in bars or icons. When 2025 started, I created my backlog calendar:

As a way to engage myself to actually commit to games, I created a little calendar, which I called my “Game Journal”. Every game was tracked there, color coded according to whether it was a game that I wanted, that I owned, that I had paused, that I was actively playing or that I had finished.

Seeing the early months of the calendar marked in mostly red, yellows and oranges, and seeing it slowly get overcome with blue (my mark of victory) fills me with great pride, and I am still eager to see if I can mark something else in blue before 2026 arrives.

Those games that are finished will be left behind, while the others will make it into the 2026 version of the calendar, for me to continue tackling my backlog instead of doubting over which game I should play next.

Combining the calendar with the slow pace

If you’ve read The Game Enjoyer from the beginning, you might have read the issue where I discuss how my perspective about videogames changed after being away for a month (not counting finishing Tears of the Kingdom on the Switch). I’ve been playing games no longer as a way to escape reality, but as what they’re meant to be played for; entertainment, competition, fun, and getting hit in the feels every now and then.

With this system, I split games in two categories: morning games and afternoon games. Morning games are those slow, big games, that I play a little bit every day, while sipping my coffee. This year, that category included games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Meanwhile, afternoon games are those that I play with my friends online, or on my own when I want to dedicate more than an hour of play to it, or when my partner is interested in seeing what the story is about. This category included games like Silent Hill 2 Remake, The Last of Us Parts I & II and Metal Gear Solid Delta.

This way, I was able to tackle several games at once, while making progress in all of them, and slowly clearing my games calendar.

Of course, every gamer is different; some people prefer to be more methodical while others just want to play what they feel like in the moment. Some are true completionists while others will just chase the main quest and then move on. Whichever you are, know that you’re not the only one who has struggled with the backlog. And if this system works for you, then I’m happy to have helped you.

But what about you, what system do you use to tackle your backlog?

The year is 2016…

That year I had managed to gather enough cash, between birthday gift savings and selling my old Xbox 360, to buy myself a second-hand PS4 with a controller. I scraped by so much, in fact, that my savings were drained to 0 and I could not buy a game to play with the new console.

Thus, my first month of PS4 gaming was led by free-to-play games and demos, including Warframe, War Thunder, PlanetSide 2, Neverwinter Online, and the free trial for the acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

Enter Jeggo Ish’tari:

Without much knowledge of the game, or MMORPGs in general, I picked the species that I found the cutest, and the class that I found the most interesting. Knowing that I would be able to play any class later on, I chose Arcanist, because the idea of a caster that used a book as a focus instead of a wand or staff was very novel to me.

My first few hours playing FFXIV were strange and isolating. I didn’t use the text chat, as I was on console, so it felt like a single-player game full of strange NPCs that did things like perform music and emotes in the cities, travel the map around me killing mobs, mining and chopping trees, and occasionally showed up in the multiplayer dungeons that I needed to complete in order to progress the game.

I didn’t get very far, and I recall stopping my playtime when my character was around level 26.

Moving to PC

It was a couple of years later that I really got into the game. I had gotten a second-hand gaming laptop that was powerful enough to run the game smoothly and with decent graphics. As, at that point, I was already working a proper job, with a real salary, I decided to give another try to FFXIV, as it had good reviews and I knew friends who had played the game and considered it good.

I purchased the game and subscribed, and I was surprised to see that my PS4 character was still available, and so I continued the game from that point. Having a keyboard available changed the whole environment for me. Everywhere I went, players around me came alive through chat, and there was a strange sense of light roleplay going on. Nobody was roleplaying seriously, yet most players preferred to chat only about game things and referred to themselves as their in-game names, and left real life conversations and discussion out.

This made me feel really immersed in Eorzea, and somehow, if some Quenyare or Fifira Fira showed up around Vesper Bay while I was questing, we would sometimes sit down and just chat for two or three minutes. It was a strange experience that I feel had started to disappear with the inclusion of apps like Discord, which allow players to disconnect from the social aspects of these games from the beginning.

In that period from 2018-2019 I played the game religiously, and quickly racked up the first thousand hours as I completed expansions, raids, trials, and made friends with people in my Free Company and in the world. There was still the odd player here and there, people with bad attitudes, or people who were more interested on playing the game from an NSFW perspective, but those were still a small minority, and most of the community was committed to adventuring in Eorzea.

Shadowbringers brought a surge in players

I managed to catch up to the Main Scenario in FFXIV just a couple months before Shadowbringers was released. At that point, Eorzea was like a second home to me, and I spent much of my free time online, questing, farming, or simply chatting with friends and playing minigames.

The expansion caught a lot of attention, introducing not only the Viera and Hrothgar species, but also the Dancer and Gunbreaker jobs, as well as the Trust system, which was a key aspect of my personal downfall in the game. Shadowbringers was considered at the time to be a near perfect expansion. Everything it added to the game was good, and it had great music, plot, art, dungeons…

I finished its main story and felt satisfied and emotional about it, then I engaged with its endgame content. High difficulty trials and alliance raids kept me entertained as I slowly reached my personal peak in terms of skill. Alternating between playing a healer or a tank, I was always in high demand for parties about to do difficult content, and at some point I had a certain reputation within my server as a reliable healer to take to trials and raids.

By the tail end of Shadowbringers I started seeing signs of what would eventually lead me to quit FFXIV for good: the social aspects of the game were slowly becoming increasingly NSFW.

Cultural shift in Eorzea

After having spent the past few tens of hours adventuring in the newer areas of the game, I decided to return to Limsa Lominsa to hang out for a while. I liked to roleplay in my head, and to me it made sense that, after such adventures in Shadowbringers, it would make sense for my character to want to return home for a while. I also wanted to buy a player house, and decided to do it in the residential area of Limsa.

On arrival to Limsa, I could feel a big shift since I was last there. The number of players who spent time AFK in the city, posing, and scantily dressed had skyrocketed. With that also came bickering and attitude. “You’re standing on my spot”/”You’re sitting on my bench” and NSFW conversations spoken openly in the general chat were a common occurrence, and it made me feel less at home (as much at home as I could have felt through a laptop screen, anyhow). It was as if all of these adventurers had suddenly grown tired of fighting, and realized there was much more wealth to build in OnlyFans or some fantasy simile.

My usual routine of chatting with random players as I met them in the world also changed. Most people became unresponsive, and it seemed as if the only things that mattered were which species you played as and how hot you could make your character look. Me, of course, as a Lalafell, could not be hot at all. Cute, perhaps, but nobody would give me the time of day (and considering, what kind of content they were interested in, I would not have accepted anyway).

This change in culture didn’t only affect the social areas of the game. The multiplayer experience also suffered a great deal. I recall a very specific turning point where I realized that I could not tolerate playing with randoms on certain content.

During the beginning of Shadowbringers’ endgame, I was up to date with the trials from Eden. These were a series of 8-player boss fights with relatively complex mechanics that required knowledge and reflexes in order to avoid getting killed.

Playing as a tank, at the time, I recall being stuck in a specific fight, and being the one who died three or four times in a row. I got a bit frustrated, and texted in chat to my party to apologize for my bad performance, and asked if anyone had any advice to help me support the team. I got a lot of support and comfort, telling me not to sweat it, that it was a new fight, and that it just needed a couple more attempts. I felt good having these players at my back, and sure enough, we beat the fight in the next attempt.

Later on, once the shift had happened, I joined a roulette, the game’s matchmaking system that provides scaled rewards to advanced players to have them help lower level players progress their content. These have always been a breeze, as you play through old dungeons where usually only one or two players will be brand new. In this case, I had several experiences a day where players would be performing particularly poorly. Dying in fights that didn’t need it, or bickering about pulling X number of enemies or wasting a Limit Break on Y or Z moments of the fight.

I realized that, at that time, a majority of players played FFXIV exclusively as a social game/erotic roleplay simulator. For them, playing the online dungeons served only as a way to grind XP, to get to higher levels, in order to unlock specific cosmetics for their outfits.

In Shadowbringers, and later on added retroactively to older dungeons, the Trust system allowed players to go through multiplayer dungeons with a party of NPCs, rather than playing online with other people. This not only contributed to removing a crucial aspect of the social side of the game, but also allowed these players who performed poorly to be carried by pixel perfect NPCs through dungeons, who would never chastise them for dying too often.

If you don’t like the romans, don’t go to Rome

It didn’t take long for me to finally grow tired of this. What I had once considered a virtual second home had now become a completely different virtual environment, full of people that I no longer wished to engage with. And I think: “What happened to those players who were like me? Where are they now?” Of course, some of them decided to stop playing for reasons similar or different to mine.

Others, however, continued to play with their group of choice. They simply migrated to platforms like Discord, where they can easily avoid the interjections and shenanigans of other players that they don’t care about.

While I eventually returned to FFXIV to settle the story once and for all with Endwalker, my adventuring times were over for good by 2021. I still miss those times greatly, but I have not been able to return to Eorzea, despite attempting it a couple of times, for the very same reasons. The playerbase seems to still be more interested in the kind of content that I don’t care about, and my old friends, those that turned a game into a living, breathing world for me, have moved on and disappeared. It happened to me, as I moved to Iceland and became too busy to dedicate more time to an MMORPG.

The crux of the question: is Discord bad for MMORPGs?

After I had decided that I had no more time to spend in Eorzea, I looked for another MMORPG. At the end of the day, I enjoy them greatly. The open worlds, big communities, and fantasy of creating your own character always attracted me. I tried Star Wars: The Old Republic, New World, The Elder Scrolls: Online, Throne and Liberty… No matter which game I played, I found the same issue. The game itself was great, each one was unique and they all interested me. SWTOR brought me to my childhood allowing me to live my fantasy of exploring a galaxy far, far away. ESO was very immersive, almost like an online Skyrim. Throne and Liberty was particularly interesting to me because I managed to start playing it on the day of release, and so I was never lagging behind others (except those that are unemployed).

The issue I found was the lack of community. No matter which game I played, if I ever joined a group of players, I was invited to a Discord server. And once I joined, I would be met with a series of requests and questions. “Introduce yourself!”, “Where are you from? How old are you?”, “Let’s use voice chat instead of text!”. Nothing wrong with that, but where were the players that didn’t care about the real me? I don’t want to be me, I want to be Astnuir, or Jeggo, or Raysel, or Ynja.

I found some people that had the same issue, but never managed to find my community within any of these games. Nowadays I have started Where Winds Meet, and I am very engaged with it, but I haven’t participated in any kind of online content, and I’m wondering if I should even try.

Conclusion

Final Fantasy XIV, I loved you and had a great time. I laughed, cried, found great friends and also had some drama. I played through difficult encounters and also had pleasant times exploring, fishing, crafting, and taking pictures. In a way, I am not sad, because the game is still greatly popular, and those players are enjoying the game, in their own way. But I am also frustrated; why did my version of Eorzea have to disappear to make way for theirs?

However, life as an adult does not leave time for Jeggo. I could play for 4 hours a day when I was 20 years old, but not so much at 27. And in place of FFXIV are a myriad other games to enjoy.

We’re at the tail end of the year, and after having spent August and September immersed in Death Stranding 2, I’ve finally opened my heart up to more games after having it broken by Kojima’s latest production. The polar nights take over daytime in Reykjavík, and with this nigh-permanent darkness I sit down to write about my latest game-enjoying adventures. After a quick run through of The Last of Us: Part II, which was a breath of fresh air for my girlfriend after she was slightly let down by the TV show’s second season, we give a quick thought at what cinematic game we’re gonna play next. Eventually we decide for Kojima’s James Bond inspired stealth masterpiece, now remastered for the new generation.

My Snake is exposed in Metal Gear Solid Delta

I have a love-hate relationship with stealth games. I love many games that are supposed to be stealth, but aren’t particularly challenging when it comes to the sneaking itself. Assassin’s Creed, The Last of Us, and recently, Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone and even Death Stranding itself are games that involve the player in different degrees of stealth gameplay, and yet they’re always somehow so simple.

The ability to mark enemies and follow them through walls, the comfort of tall grass and other debris that makes you practically invisible, and predictable enemy behaviors makes these games not so difficult when it comes to stealth. At least, even if I get caught, their action is nimble enough that I can finish off the segment through violence. I’ve rarely had to reload a previous save in these games simply because I was caught by enemies.

That isn’t the case in Metal Gear Solid Delta. With my usual stubbornness, I start the game on Hard difficulty (not Extreme or European Extreme, because I know I would regret it) and after approximately 30 minutes of gameplay and 90 minutes of cutscenes, we’re through the Prologue and into the game proper. There is something about this game that feels like a humiliation ritual to me. The gameplay itself feels slightly clunky (and apparently, from what veterans of the franchise claim, it plays slightly worse than the original version), but it’s just so good; the camouflage system, the sandbox of weapons and tools at your disposal, the variety of enemy behaviors, the different paths and ways you can move through the different areas… All of this comes together to form a challenge that is not unsurmountable to me, but just extremely difficult, for some reason.

No matter how careful I am or how much I think I am aware of enemy positions, it takes one step in the wrong direction, or one second of hesitation, and suddenly a guard has decided to turn his head towards me, or has turned a corner faster than I expected. Suddenly, the alarm is rang and several guards armed with rifles, shotguns, and ballistic shields are rushing the area looking for me, while I lay under a bedframe or half naked in a patch of tall grass, waiting for the alarm to be called off.

On another occasion, I spot on a guard the characteristic color of a film tape. I know these are collectibles that must be taken from them when you hold them up, so I do a quick round of recon around the area, then I formulate a plan. This guard periodically checks a room in the back of a cabin. I can sneak into this room from a hole in the floor, but the room is divided in two by a row of boxes to climb over, slowing my advance from one side to the other. To ensure that the guard won’t see me climbing, I place a magazine on one side of the room, then go back behind the boxes and wait. There is so much waiting in my gameplay of MGS Delta. Finally, he takes the bait, I sneak up behind him and hold him up with my gun. He raises his hands, I walk around him and point the gun at his head, triggering him to shake off any items he can give me. Somehow, the tape pops up from him straight towards Snake, and I heard the crunching sound of the tape breaking, signaling that I lost my chance to collect the item.

This particular attempt was after 6 failed attempts at collecting this tape, and sometimes ignoring the tape and simply wanting to collect the resources hidden in the cabin. Eventually I gave up; whatever is in that tape is not so important that I want to waste any more time running around this cabin for another half hour. Making my way out is somehow even harder, eventually I collect everything, make my way out, blow up a storage room in the process, and continue my path towards the Mountain Base.

One day I will learn how to play stealth games, but for now, I painstakingly advance through a masterclass on flunked tactics, unnecessary violence, and the art of waiting for minutes until stars align.

All-out war in 9 Kings

Due to my job having me work on rotating shifts, including a nocturnal one, I often find myself trying to stay awake overnight at home, in preparation for being awake overnight at the office. In order to do so, this month I purchased a few indie games that were in my wishlist. One of them was 9 Kings, a simple roguelite tower defense game that has hooked me like no game has done in a long time.

The gameplay loop is simple: you start a run as one of the 9 titular kings. You have a grid where you can place cards every round; some cards are troops that fight for you on the field, other cards are towers that attack enemies on the field, and other cards are buffs for your troops or buildings, or buildings that provide other benefits. After you place enough cards (once you have two cards in your hand the next phase begins), you fight the troops of an enemy king. Defeat them, and you can loot a card from that king’s deck. Lose, and you lose one life (out of 3), and you get to pick a card from your own deck.

Through the game, other things happen, typical from this kind of games: a merchant comes to let you purchase cards for money, or a spire appears to give you the chance to expand your grid. Once per run you have the chance to earn a blessing for a specific spot on your grid. There is a lot of tactical nuance and strategy to 9 Kings, but the runs last between 20 and 50 minutes at max, and overall the experience is really fluid and quick.

In my best run so far, I used the King of Greed. Using Dispensers, a kind of machine gun that shoots faster every time you earn money, and Mercenaries, a troop slot that has more troops the more money you accumulate, I conquered the first 20 rounds as a bolstered my forces. An enchantment on my Mercenaries gave them a chance to give me money for each enemy they killed, while the Vault in my base gave me money each round, and the Beacon furthered the attack speed of my Dispensers and Mercenaries. A normal run could end at round 33, but after I beat it, I got all the way to round 84 before I finally lost.

I heavily recommend this game for anyone who has some time to kill and likes games that reward thinking mathematically and placing structures in a grid to maximize benefits.

Challenging myself with Ixion

Another of the indies I picked up for my overnight sessions was Ixion. I have a passion for science-fiction; Star Wars, Halo, Mass Effect, Dune, and Star Citizen are just a few names that come to mind when I think what sci-fi universes I love the most when it comes to videogames, movies or literature.

I also have a penchant for some kinds of strategy games. Tower defense and city builders are right up my alley. Real time strategy is harder for me, but I can enjoy it if the micromanagement is kept to a minimum. Grand Strategy and 4X are intriguing to me, but every foray I’ve had into a game like that has ended with extreme frustration and catastrophic failure. When I saw Ixion, a city builder/survival strategy game, not so different from Frostpunk, but with the added benefit of it being set on a space station, I didn’t think it twice and decided I would try it.

From the beginning, I decided to crank the difficulty all the way up to challenging. In the words of the game: Challenge mode allows you to earn an exclusive achievement.

Say no more. With no idea of how the game works or what it’s about, I set the difficulty to Challenge, and embark on my journey. From the beginning I can see that the plot of the game actually matters in Ixion. Some lore and cutscenes set me in my position as the administrator of the Tiqqun, the space station that I will be overseeing. In Challenge mode, things can spiral into disaster quickly, but thankfully the Prologue of the game is still calm enough that I can learn the ropes without much fuss.

However, soon after beating the Prologue, my decisions start gaining weight. In Ixion, gameplay is divided on three layers of level design. The station’s interior, divided in 6 sectors, is where I choose where to build what. Each building serves a purpose and requires an amount of workers, and striking a balance between maintaining functionality, proper power usage and the health of the workers can be difficult in an of itself. Starting with only one sector unlocked, it takes good planning and a bunch of resources to open up the rest of the station. Directly interacting with the interior of the station is the exterior, where we can build different upgrades for the station, like solar panels that provide power for the buildings, or hull or engine upgrades that allow the Tiqqun to tolerate harsher environments as we move it through space. And then there’s the third layer, space itself. Ixion is not only about maintaining the Tiqqun in working order, but also about doing so while we purposefully move it as we explore the stars in search of answers and solutions to our problems.

It is this trifecta of managing the interior, maintaining the exterior and making the right choices in the exploration part that makes Ixion so challenging. In a particularly rough moment of my gameplay so far, I decided to move the Tiqqun towards a specific location to explore a possible quest. While moving, the ship does not use its solar panels, and so your station is powered by whatever you have stored in however many batteries you’ve built. Unfortunately, I didn’t prepare enough, and halfway through the trip my station blacked out. Without power, the EVA airlocks which allowed my workers to perform maintenance on the station’s exterior would not work, and by the time my station arrived to its destination, the hull was in pieces. I earned the achievement for managing to bring the station back from under 5% of hull integrity after this.

Ixion’s challenge mode can be very punishing for those who make reckless decisions, but I have found that it is also very flexible in allowing you to overcome obstacles after making bad choices. Disabling or dismantling buildings to get back the power or resources from them can always be done in a pinch, and those buildings can be reactivated or rebuilt later on. Running out of an important resource puts you on a timer to find more before you’re doomed, but even I, the self-proclaimed worst strategy gamer of all time, have managed to grasp survival from jaws of defeat at least three times in my first playthrough, and I’ve only come out a little bit stressed from it.

In other words: if you enjoy survival and strategy games, you will enjoy Ixion. And yes, I particularly recommend Challenge mode for that extra bit of suspense when choosing to expand to one more sector or move the station to that location over there.

Following my heart in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Picking it up from my backlog back in mid-September, I have found Dragon’s Dogma 2 to be everything I wanted from an RPG in these past few months. Most importantly, I have realized that, after all, Dragon’s Dogma 2 (as well as its prequel) is a Strand-type game.

Ever since I beat Death Stranding for the second time, I have been thinking on what games fit into this “Strand-type” sub-genre and what features it entails. A Strand-type game must not feature any kind of direct multiplayer gameplay, and instead involve multiplayer interaction through building connections. At the core of what defines the Strand is the idea of players connecting through gameplay despite never playing directly together. This is why I don’t consider games like Helldivers 2 or Dark Souls to fit the Strand-type. While they involve some degree of collaboration or asynchronous interaction, both feature direct co-op play and not a meaningful impact on other players’ worlds without it.

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, we connect with other players through sharing and recruiting Pawns, the game’s mechanic that allows us to build a party of adventurers. With your main character and your main Pawn being created by yourself, the game allows you to hire up to two extra Pawns, which can be created by the developers themselves, or by other players. But sharing Pawns between players isn’t what makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 a Strand-type game, it’s how the Pawns behaves that truly impacts your world, and therefore fits the genre.

When you discover secrets, like locations of treasure, secret dungeons or hidden Riftstones, your Pawns learn this. When you fight an enemy in an unconventional way, like pushing enemies off cliffs to kill them, or tripping a cyclops to be able to hit it in the eye, your Pawns learn this. Basically, any discovery you make in game is noted by your Pawns, which then share this information with other players. In the case of your Main Pawn, that means that when they are summoned by another player, this Pawn can share these secrets with them. In the case of recruited Pawns, they can share this info when they return to their original player.

From the opposite perspective, your Pawn may learn the location of a treasure or the solution to a quest from another player, and offer to guide you when you reach that point. Pawns that you recruit from other players also have knowledge of certain things and they offer you the chance to follow them into the discoveries. The game cleverly caps this feature by giving you the chance to give four different orders to your Pawns, by saying “Go” or “Help” to signal to your Pawns that you want to be guided, while “Wait” or “To Me” signals that they should stick to you and not go off towards any specific place.

Since recruited Pawns do not level up (as opposed to your main Pawn), the game encourages you to visit Riftstones often to see if there are any higher level Pawns available. These aren’t just stronger in battle, but are also likely to know more secrets to help you as you explore, and to be more proficient in combat by applying player used techniques rather than their normal NPC combat routines.

I’m having a great time with Dragon’s Dogma 2 overall, because it has great graphics, great gameplay, an interesting story, a fantastic sandbox, and it runs great in my rig with all bells and whistles. But on top of everything, I am having a great time with it because every time I sit down to play, explore the world, fight monsters and complete quests, I am interacting with other players, taking advantage of their progress to make my life a bit easier, or giving information to their Pawns to help them in the future.

This reminds me a lot of buildings and signs in Death Stranding and its sequel, and has done nothing but enhance what would already be a fantastic gaming experience.

That’s all for this month’s issue. As opposed to these last few months, I have spent more time now playing many different games. I have been enjoying gaming a lot more ever since my summer vacation, and I feel really energized to tackle on all of these different genres. I’m hoping to have more words to write about more games for the remainder of the year, as I prepare to play Megabonk, The Outer Worlds 2, and either Hell Is Us or Mafia: The Old Country.

If you have enjoyed this article, consider subscribing, sharing it, leaving a comment or restacking it. I have really enjoyed these first few months of writing on Substack, joining the community, and interacting with others. I believe The Game Enjoyer is here to stay! But there will be changes to future issues as I see what works and what doesn’t.

After having spent a few weeks becoming the star striker of Grimsby, Enjoyinho now sits atop the scoreboards, benefits from having full Manager approval, and is being a crucial piece in Grimsby’s push for the promotion, the League Two title, along with the BSM Trophy and the EFL Cup.

Despite wanting to move to the Eredivisie, the Dutch league, he is focused on getting as many good results for his current team. The strategy falls apart when, in an ordinary league fixture, Enjoyinho receives a dangerous tackle and eventually calls for a sub, and limps out of the pitch. He has a broken toe, and the team’s physios expect he will be out for at least three months.

Time passes by, and Grimsby gets mixed results without their star striker. They are knocked out of the EFL and drop a few spots at the table, which was still highly contested so early in the season. The manager moves on from Enjoyinho, and Deadline Day approaches.

Return from injury

Deadline Day passes by and Enjoyinho is stuck at Grimsby, injured for two more months, losing manager approval, and watching as his team loses and draws more matches than they win. It’s chaos for the goalscorer.

When the injury is finally healed, Enjoyinho goes back to training, and slowly improves the manager approval. Despite already being fit and primed to play, and having enough approval that it would warrant him being subbed in at some point. However, the manager leaves him benched, and the team is knocked out of the EFL Cup. It’s only three weeks after his injury was healed that Enjoyinho is subbed in for minutes at a time for a few matches.

Determined to earn his spot back in the Starting XI, Enjoyinho tries his hardest to catch up with success, however, a poor spell of form sees Grimsby only manage to get out a couple of draws and a victory in which he wasn’t involved. Not looking good for the goalscorer. Still, every match makes Enjoyinho sharper, and finally, in a fixture against Barrow AFC, Enjoyinho leads his team to victory with an impeccable hat-trick.

It seems like he is back to form, but after the match, some statements from the manager bring his recently restored morale down to the ground again.

That does it. Enjoyinho patiently waited for his chance to return after healing, and did his best to help the team, and when he finally gets back to form, this is what he gets as thanks? It is time to go, but after missing the fixtures during injury, FC Groningen starts to back out of the agreed deal for the transfer. Enjoyinho needs to make more appearances to convince the Dutch to sign him at the next window.

Now playing for a single minded objective instead of team glory, Enjoyinho continues to put out masterful performance after masterful performance, scores a few more hat-tricks in the next couple months, and leads Grimsby back to the top of the league table and through a round of the BSM Trophy.

Picking up media attention

At this point, the manager realizes that he has gold in his hands. Enjoyinho is making every fixture a victory, and the prospect of not having him if the team makes it to the League One is scary; even if FC Groningen pays a good fee for him, it may not be enough to buy a player with the same potential as the Brazilian.

A few weeks go by, with brilliant performances by Enjoyinho. His performances earn him a great recognition by the media.

The peak and fall

With a trophy in his career already, Enjoyinho is confident and feeling like there might be a path ahead with Grimsby. After all, if they make it to the League One, he will be needed to stay competitive. Maybe moving to the Eredivisie is not necessary, and he can just ask for higher wages and a contract renewal.

A few matches go by, with him back on the Starting XI. He’s not just scoring, but also assisting, and even getting good notes for a few good defensive performances; clearing the ball at corners and recovering possession on the counter press. On a match against Morecambe, at the end of January, tragedy strikes again: a bad tackle from a Morecambe defender sees Enjoyinho limp for a few minutes until he’s subbed out, and the physios confirm the worst.

Second injury

Broken toe, again. Three months out, again. Over the course of the recovery time, Grimsby is knocked out of the BSM at Semifinals, and drops to fourth on the League table. What’s worse, the points difference ensure that, even if Enjoyinho is brought back into action immediately and helps the team take all points home, there’s only three games left in the season. That is nine points, which is not enough even if the next team loses all matches.

At this point Enjoyinho is mad; last time he was on the pitch, he was leading the team to victory against Morecambe with an assist and a goal. After he was subbed out due to injury, that victory turned to a draw. Coming in to the next match at minute 75, he struggled to make a difference even against winded opponents. Now it is too late to lead Grimsby to anything but the promotion play-offs.

What’s on the horizon

However, not all is lost. Enjoyinho receives messages from his agent with promising news. The move to FC Groningen is actually being negotiated. Despite the setbacks, all goals were achieved, and after a few more days, the move is confirmed.

FC Groningen is a new environment for Enjoyinho, where he will be playing as left midfielder instead of striker. The pre-season begins and Enjoyinho performs well in his first match as a sub, with an assist and a goal. This, plus some good ratings in training quickly push him to become a starter, and after two matches, it is clear he is a good fit for the team.

However, at this point I am tired. This career has been enjoyable, and playing the game from an RPG perspective has been interesting, but EA FC is, at its core, a football game, and its main mechanics are based around football. Frankly, despite the many hours I have played this game for, which I have really enjoyed, I must be objective and say that the main gameplay loop of EA FC is flawed. The inconsistency of the AI and the “scripted” performances of some fixtures made me restart matches once or twice and put the controller down a few times during my time playing Manager Career. This time, playing as Enjoyinho, I could not bear it any longer.

While this season has been fun, and writing these two articles has been engaging, this is as far as I go.

I recently beat Death Stranding 2, and it’s a game that just hits different. I’ve never considered myself a big Kojima fan, as I never had a chance to experience Metal Gear Solid as a kid (other than a few hours spent into MGS V), and I only ever played the first Death Stranding after a friend lent it to me with a recommendation.

I played the first game in July 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, if at the start of it. I played it a second time with the Director’s Cut later on in 2024, then the sequel this year. I feel like it really makes a difference, and I wonder how I would have felt about it if I had played the original before COVID hit, as many think the first game is almost prophetic in how eerily it predicts the isolation story.

The Death Stranding and COVID-19

In 2019 I made my first big move and decided to move to Germany from Spain, I was only 21, and I didn’t have a whole career and life plan ready, but I wanted to go out and experience life away from my routine and classic environment. However, after the pandemic begun, I lost my job. This affected my personal life deeply, and soon enough I found myself trapped in Germany; my relationship with my partner had crumbled in a few weeks, as my mental health suffered due to the very real and inescapable fact that I had no way to escape Germany, and no freedom to do anything but stay there, waiting for the availability of a flight home.

In Death Stranding, the titular event collapses society in a realistic way: it doesn’t crash the world overnight, but humanity itself slowly withdraws its reach around the world as they realize the seriousness of the issue they’re dealing with.

Eventually, the world learns to live in a new way, coping with the dangers of the Death Stranding, much like how we found a new way of life trying to return to normal while shielding ourselves from the virus. The parallels between the worldbuilding in Death Stranding 1 and our real world during those times are quite incredible if we have in mind that the similarities are all due to a simple coincidence; Kojima and his team could not have possibly predicted a global pandemic.

Living in isolation and the need for connection

Stuck in Germany with no way to return to my family, my personal relationship with my partner, with whom I lived at the time, quickly became a burden on my spirit rather than a source of support. Unfortunately, this went both ways, and I’ll always particularly regret that I, in fear of losing my only home at the time, pretended as if nothing was wrong.

While I performed as my usual, pre-pandemic self, inside I felt isolated and in danger, not just of catching the virus, but of being left homeless without a way to return home. I quickly spiralled towards depression, but I found one strand of hope that kept me grounded. As more and more people got stuck at home, online activities became a source of connection for many. I was contacted online by a friend from Spain, and was invited to join a group who plays tabletop RPGs. This was the beginning of a series of games that lasts now, five years on. Playing games with these friends became a source of escapism, entertainment, and most importantly, connection.

Through this group I didn’t just get back in touch with old friends, but also met new ones. At the time, when I had no one to really trust with my deepest secrets and fears, this connection kept me going.

Back to Death Stranding, when I played the game, I felt like I could really relate to Sam. In a similar way as me, the Death Stranding had turned Sam into an isolated person who had no connections; the few that he had before the event dismantled by the trauma of it. Throughout the game, Sam doesn’t just help the UCA bring the country into the network, but he also creates new connections with the rest of the cast of the game. As he does so, his own trauma lessens, and so it happened to me.

AI becoming a major presence in society

One of the biggest themes of both Death Stranding games is AI taking over certain roles in society. Without delving into spoilers, and touching only surface lore; the first game presents a type of enemy, the MULEs. These are people who used to be Porters: delivery workers who ensured that resources and items could be received by anyone in the country, as they now live isolated from the rest of the world.

When technology advanced, society found that they could use robots to perform deliveries instead: no humans would mean no risk of causing Voidouts, one of the game’s mechanics that can lead to a game over. But soon, these former Porters found themselves without a job, and eventually became obsessed with deliveries. In the game, MULEs are simple; they will not murder Sam, but will try to knock him out, and if they succeed, they will take all of his cargo.

Now, in real life, we have already seen some of the effects of AI being used to replace human workers in certain sectors. While many people think that these human workers will simply move on to new jobs with different skill sets, I am slightly pessimistic. I don’t think many people are in a position to learn a new skill set or a more complex job. If deliveries, entry level office jobs, construction, service industry are all slowly phased out to be performed by infallible AI, there will be a big amount of people who aren’t able to catch up. Personally, I know some people who are either too old to learn a new job, or simply don’t have what it takes to do more than what they already know.

The second game delves even deeper into the themes of AI, but to write about it I would have to spoil some of the plotlines, and I believe it is better to let it rest, lest this article becomes a rant about AI.

Grief and getting over it

A great theme that permeates both games. As my partner watched me play Death Stranding 2, she came to the conclusion that “This game is so full of pain”. Of course, when the event that gives name to both games is a literal abnormality in the cycles of life and death, you can expect that death and grief will be central to its themes.

Sam, as a character, is a character with deep personal trauma, and learning to overcome it is what defines his character arc through two games. What is genius about Death Stranding is how the actors’ performances, the direction, the music and the script all come together to create a story that isn’t just engaging and heartbreaking, but also so honest. Sam, throughout the game, not only forms new connections; with BB, with Deadman and Fragile, with the people of the UCA, but also learns to move on from the past ones. Other characters parallel Sam, and the whole picture leaves us with a good moral to draw from: we can always find a new connection, we’re never fully alone.

In real life, the pandemic took many of our loved ones. I consider myself lucky, as none of my closest relatives were heavily affected by the virus; however, I did lose something. Due to the nature of my professional career at the time, and the effects of the pandemic on Spain (to which I had managed to return in the summer of 2020), I was completely unable to find a job. This wasn’t the effect of AI, but simply that, as a service oriented worker, the lack of tourism meant that no jobs were available for someone who had just returned from abroad.

The pandemic saw me relocate to the unlikeliest place, and by March of 2021 I found myself flying towards Iceland. Ever since then, I have lived in Reykjavík, and the new bonds and connections I have formed here have turned this country into my home. I did grieve over what I lost and what I missed being away from my home country, but I would not give up what I have now to get back what I had then.

Even then, Death Stranding asks itself the question, and has as a running theme, “Should we have connected?”. And after having played both games recently and reflected on it, I’ve come to think that its meaning is about loss. Is it worth it? Should you have made friends, lovers, or reconnected with that one relative that you didn’t talk to for a while? What is it all worth for if the world is gonna chew us up and spit us out? Do you connect just to suffer when you inevitably lose someone?

The games aren’t a nihilistic piece, however. Yes, it is worth it, every single time.

The Homo Ludens and our performative society.

Death Stranding (or perhaps all of Kojima Productions in its entirety) presents the topic of human evolution as being possible to go in two directions; the Homo Ludens (the playing man) is the step at which most of the main characters present themselves, while the Homo Demens (the demented man) includes those who oppose themselves to that which humanity represented so far.

The Ludens see the world through play, creativity, expression and connection. In Death Stranding, there is no currency for the player to use. All items and vehicles are crafted directly through the use of materials, and there are no available items or services that can be acquired through payment with any kind of coin. Instead, we receive and give Likes, much like in any social media. Many characters give Likes to Sam as we perform actions in the game, but not just NPCs. Other players will give us Likes when we help them, and in the same way we can give Likes to other players when their structures are helpful or funny in any way.

There are even direct instances where a character will give us, the player, a Like, instead of Sam, in a small fourth-wall-breaking moment.

On the other hand, the Demens react to the Death Stranding negatively, as the chaos of the event exacerbates their own narcissistic and violent tendencies. They obstruct the path to reconstruction and reconnection, and they have violence and isolation as their main idea of what the world’s status quo should be.

When I had just arrived to Iceland, I was working in a small café in a museum. During those times, many precautions were in place to minimize the risk of virus contagion. There was a limit on how many people could be in the local at once, a safety distance, and a list where every single person would register along with time and a contact number or address, to be contacted in case anyone at the time was found to have COVID.

One day, a tourist arrived, without a mask. As I was instructed, I let him know that he was not allowed to be inside the café without a mask, and that I could not take his order nor payment, even if he wanted the coffee to go. He insisted that he would not wear a mask just for two minutes to get a coffee and asked if I really would not give him anything without the mask. When I said it was the law and I could not really break the rules for him, he just chose to leave. In a way, this mirrors the Demens way; he didn’t care about the country’s efforts to adapt the city to the new standard, even if it was done in an effort to try and give us a sense of normalcy. He wanted to do things his own way, and without the opportunity to do so, he would rather “boycott” my local and try his luck somewhere else.

As for the Ludens, they are everywhere now. They are you and me, using play as a new way of experiencing human creativity. They are content creators and social media influencers, exposing themselves for attention. They are modern artists, finding new ways to create; film directors, game developers, architects and sculptors using modern technology to progress their discipline into new horizons.

Ludens are also the ones going into debt just to afford a trip abroad for a few pictures to post online; the ones grasping at straws, overreacting or ridiculing themselves on video for the chance to go viral; and the ones who go online to write long tweets or articles to complain about them. In our modern world, performer and audience have merged into a singular specimen, and the internet allows us to consume material at incredible pace, egging us on to create our own, to add our grain of sand to the beach, and just hoping for a few Likes.

Ludens and Demens aren’t meant to really be the next steps in human evolution; it is clear that we, Homo sapiens, are already the Ludens, and we have been for a long time. Technology has simply altered the way we play.

My review of the Death Stranding duology

When I played the original game’s Director’s Cut version, I considered that it was fantastic. While it had its flaws, the originality of the concept and the brilliance of the direction put it up there as one of my top ten games of all time (of my personal playlist).

The sequel amps it up in all aspects that make the game part; the gameplay, the level design, the mechanics, are all improved and expanded in ways that really turn this into a masterpiece of a game. As for the story, it is just as good as the first one, but it also builds upon it, and while sequels aren’t necessarily always better than their preceding entries, in this case it really helps its case that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach assumes that you have played the first one when it comes to its lore and worldbuilding (although it includes a nice glossary menu that you can access at any time in order to read up on concepts, characters and past story).

I won’t grade the game, because I feel like giving it a grade is too simple of a final evaluation for this game. I’ll just give it a few words from my perspective. The way that these two games have mirrored, just by coincidence, the way the world has progressed in the past few years, as well as parts of my personal life, really affect how I view them. As I sat on my chair, watching the credits roll on the sequel, I thought back to the full experience, the duology, Sam’s character arc, the world of Death Stranding, and where I was when I first played the game, stuck in Spain during the quarantine, with not a single euro to my name, and no chances of getting a job.

Back then I thought how much my life had changed, and how crazy it was that I could still relate so much to the game’s story, even though the events in the game don’t directly parallel my own life. Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach are honest masterpieces crafted with love, and any person who dedicates the time to really experience the games will find that they have something to relate to, because, at their core, both games are explorations of what it means to be human in a post-Stranding, or post-pandemic world.

I’ve already written a short article discussing what I consider to be an RPG, and how a particular game fits within its definition. You can read it here, and if you have, then you’ll be thinking “How is a football (or, if you’re American, soccer) game an RPG in any way or form?”. I know it sounds crazy, that’s why, in my last article, I decided not to mention this game. I thought that it would be better to show than to tell. And so, I introduce you to Enjoyinho.

Character Creation

As the very first step, I decided that I wanted to create my own fictional player. While the game would have allowed me to pick any real life footballer, or even a retired legend to start a modern career with, I wanted something that really represents The Game Enjoyer. Enjoyinho is about 5’9”, about 155 pounds, and enjoys playing as a left winger. Coming from Brazil, he’s arrived to England to play in the English Premier League. Although he’s young and with potential, he doesn’t have what it takes to sign for a big team, so he’ll have to settle for the League Two and work his way up, season by season. Not long after the initial cutscene, I am thrown into the game’s menu along with a ton of tutorials.

Personality and level-up

Starting at a lowly 60 OVR (or another game’s equivalent of level 1), and with our very first Personality points taken from a choice on how to post on social media about having joined Grimsby, Enjoyinho is not a particularly good player, but he’s good enough for League Two, or so I’d hope. Browsing through the menus, I find a plethora of things to check, but most of them aren’t particularly useful at this point, except for the Player Growth screen. This is where I level up my player, and build his skills to fit my particular playstyle.

As a left winger, I want Enjoyinho to be fast, good at dribbling, and also have good finishing. I need him to have high stamina to be able to last the whole 90 minutes of a match, but min-maxing is not always advisable; even a forward player has some defensive duties to attend to, and having too low of a stat on defensive skills could make the whole team (or party, if so you prefer) suffer later on. For now, there’s not much I can do to improve my player, so I move on with the pre-season tournament.

Fixtures are your main quests

Before the season starts, Grimsby joins a pre-season tournament against some teams in Europe.

Before every match there is a training session, where you get to choose exercises to partake in; which then give you XP according to how well you performed, and some Personality XP based on what exercise you did.

In the very first match, Enjoyinho, who has been sat at the bench (the manager did not have enough trust in him to put him in the starting XI), is subbed in for the team’s left striker on the 70th minute, while the team is ahead by 1-0. The coach gives me some extra objectives that I should aim for if I want him to trust me and eventually get a spot in the Starting XI.

In my previous experience playing Player Career, a brand new player would have a hard time making a difference individually unless you’re playing at a low difficulty. I set the game to World Class, which sits at a 5/7 on the difficulty settings. Imagine my surprise when, during one of the few chances I got to approach the box, I managed to score a brace, securing the victory in Grimsby’s first match of the season, with my bad leg, nothing less.

So, after the match is over, I get to review my objectives:

Purchases and Investments: A step towards immersion

After having played a few matches during the pre-season, I finally accumulate some money in my pocket. Wages are paid weekly, and you can demand a specific wage, which in turn makes the team give you harder objectives to fulfill: if you want to be paid like a star, you need to play like one.

I finally open the tabs for which I got tutorials earlier, starting with the shopping activities.

The Shopping activities seem like a classic progression pipeline for me to put my money in; the further I go right, the higher the prices, but the higher the bonuses. However, this is wrong. As the Personality type is shared in a percentage between all three, investing exclusively in activities that reward me with the Personality type I want helps me unlock the perks I want earlier. So far, I only buy the Beats, which give me some equalized Personality XP. Then I move on to the other activity.

The Investments are still far from reach, but at this point, I am settling into what the rhythm of play of the Player Career is. I play matches for my wage, which I can demand to a certain point, triggering a higher difficulty for objectives. If the manager gives me harder challenges but I complete them, I get more money AND I get to be in the Starting XI. The money then helps me develop as a better player, and with a higher OVR, I perform better. Eventually, I plan to outgrow Grimsby Town, and move on to a better team. Along all of this, my agent messages me with comments on my performance and ideas on what move to do next.

Switching factions; preparing for a transfer offer

Soon after my first two matches, my agent sends me two plans for transfer. Apparently, I can discuss options with other teams, which will send me a list of objectives for me to accomplish if I want them to sign me during the next window. Out of all the options that my Agent gives me, I decide to explore the possibility of signing for the Eredivisie, the Dutch league.

In order to get FC Groningen to sign me next window, I would have to ensure I make appearances in at least a third of Grimsby’s fixtures until then, be succesful in nineteen One on Ones (which are not exclusive to the opponent’s keeper, but also defenders and other players), and, optionally (to be given the chance of a higher wage), have a 10% precision on shots, get one hat trick, and have an average Match Rating of 6.0.

If I accomplish all this, it’s very likely that I won’t see the season end with Grimsby, and will be flying to the Netherlands soon. Before any of that happens, I have to ensure I keep performing well.

The plan, leveling up and expanding Personality

Each of the three Personality types fits a different style of play:

• The Maverick is a glory seeker, and to expand this Personality type you must act as one. Take your chances to put yourself on the spotlight in social media and pull off solo runs during matches, and soon enough you’ll be unlocking perks that improve your scoring ability, like special types of shots that are more powerful and accurate, or perks that ensure that you get that little extra boost to get past your defender.

• The Virtuoso is all about the beautiful game; dribbling, passing and creating chances. Not so different from the Maverick, instead the Virtuoso is less of a glory seeker and more of a tactician, and as such, using social media to talk about performing better next time, or keeping it up, and assisting on goals and being part of a play instead of solo runs, unlocks perks that allow you to perform better passes, dribbles, and to have better control of the ball.

• The Heartbeat is the most different one; this one is all about team work and being a leader. To expand on this Personality you must be good at defending, and use your social media to further your team spirit, not giving yourself the spotlight but sharing it with your team. When you do so, you get perks that give you boosts to stamina, to defensive ability, and for your teammates to have an easier time receiving your passes, etc.

As a striker, I strive for the Maverick type; I want Enjoyinho to be the top scorer of any team I sign for, to score incredible free kicks from ridiculous distances, and to lead my team through difficult fixtures by scoring hat tricks against unbeatable teams. During my next games, I will be doing my best to do so.

Conclusion

When you really get down to it, the Player Career mode isn’t that different from some indie RPGs out there. There’s a lot of heavy lifting being done here just by menus, but at the end of the day, many of the defining features of an RPG are being represented here. I’ve created my character, with a background, appearance, and level 1 stats. I have begun the game within a faction and immediately set to complete quests for them. With my hard earned money, I have purchased items that improve my stats and XP gain; with such XP I have leveled up, so that future quests will be easier to complete.

And when I have leveled up enough, and the current quests are too easy to complete, I’ll have the chance to move to a new faction, with harder quests and higher rewards. The main goal? I am looking to play as a striker for a team that competes in a Champions League final. Now, whether I do get to do this in a journal style for The Game Enjoyer, or whether this remains as a singular post, and I uninstall the game, is up to you, dear reader.

If, on the other hand, you’re thinking “this was an okay read, but I don’t particularly care about Enjoyinho”, then I hope this was at least an eye opening moment not to the possible virtues of EA FC, but to the idea that many games could be hiding interesting mechanics that could change the way we see them, if only we showed some curiosity. I’ve never been a fan of EA FC (formerly FIFA), and had last played a football videogame back in 2009. I am quite interested in roleplaying as Enjoyinho, however.