It’s been a pretty busy year for me, what with the filming and release of Marble Hornets: Rosswood as well as the release of the final issue of the Marble Hornets Comic Series, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have time to play video games! I may have had a little LESS time compared to last year, but hey…uh…
Just like last time, I’ll have my top 5 games in reverse order here (for SUSPENSE), along with a link to buy it on Steam if you’re so inclined. Again, I don’t get paid anything for that. I’m just a swell guy.
I love a game that makes me feel smart, and I love games that have an old internet. The Roottrees Are Dead has both! On the list it goes!
In it, you are assigned to figuring out the family tree of a wealthy family after a good chunk of them are killed in a plane crash. Not super upbeat, I know, but the game barely dwells on it before throwing you head first into the mystery of the multiple familial relationships, and of course the SCANDALS. I know it’s hard to believe, but some of these super wealthy folks were bad people!
While it doesn’t have a full on fake internet the way that something like Hypnospace Outlaw did, it’s still fun to interact with the not-google search engine with all the keywords and names you dig up during your investigation. Everything you discover then goes on a big conspiracy theorist style corkboard complete with yarn connecting everything. It’s a ton of fun to slowly fill in all the blanks. While the later parts of the game expect a little too much from you, I still enjoyed it from beginning to end.
Remember Telltale Games? I miss them. They definitely had some low points, but The Walking Dead’s first season and Tales From The Borderlands easily eclipsed it. Seriously, I don’t care one bit for Borderlands, but Tales was something special.
Dispatch is the first game from some ex-Telltale folks and boy does it ever show. You play as a forced-to-retire superhero that takes a desk job as a kind of superhero dispatcher in charge of a team of barely useful ex-villians. Admittedly, that’s pretty well worn ground by this point. Oh, bad guys trying to be good? Superheroes that swear? Shocking! But despite all of that, I was still enraptured by Dispatch’s story. There’s some very Telltale style hard decisions to make sprinkled in as well, though not quite as constantly as the old Telltale games proper had. It strikes a good balance though, with each dialogue choice and action feeling weighty whenever it happens.
Not to harp too much on the comparisons, but what really places Dispatch above even the best Talltale had to offer is its production values. The animation is so much smoother and way less awkward than the samey, stiff Telltale style we all grew accustomed to back then. Of course those were older games, but it’s still striking to see Dispatch after seeing the previous stuff.
Strangely, the only part of Dispatch that I didn’t particularly care for was the actual “game” part of it where you have to, uh, dispatch the heroes around the city to do all kinds of menial tasks. It’s not outright bad or anything, it just didn’t engage me as much as the story parts did. Most of the time I would shrug my way through it, going as quickly as I could to get past it so I could move on to the next story beat. I know some people loved this aspect of the game, but it kinda felt like busy work to me. But hey, the rest of it is well worth a look!
I LOVED the first Hades game. If I was doing these lists back in 2020, it would surely be at the top. It consumed my thoughts until I finally finished it. The sequel did much the same thing.
If you played Hades 1, then Hades 2 will feel very familiar. Instead of trying to escape from the underworld, this time you’re stuck between it and Mount Olympus, and now you can either go down to save Hades or up to save the other gods. In practice, that means there are two routes you can continuously bang your head against until you finish, instead of the one single route from the first game. And to finish Hades 2, you have to beat both routes multiple times. Quite a task.
There’s a ton of stuff going on back at your home base this time around too. Building relationships with other characters, tending a garden, combining materials, upgrading animals (?!), it’s a lot to keep track of. Luckily none of it feels like a chore thanks to the interesting characters and real progression you can make by doing all of these side things.
It didn’t quite give me the same high as Hades 1, but I was still determined to finish it over the two-ish weeks it took me to do so. If you liked the first game, this one is a no brainer.