Dredge
Eldritch horror fishing game with Resident Evil 4 inventory management. That’s the pitch. And it’s a home run.
Dredge was one of the biggest surprises for me this year when I started hearing it discussed. A fishing game? Really? But I was curious, and I’m glad I was, because the team at Black Salt Games have created something incredible. You and your little boat ship out from port in the morning, catch as many squids and flounders as your measly starting rod can manage and cram them into your grid-lined cargo hold. You hurry back to port before the darkness sets in and you start seeing things in the dark fog of the bay. You sell your slimy goods to the fishmonger with the weird vibe, and you hope you made enough scratch to buy a bigger boat or a better fishing net or stronger engines. And you repeat.
It’s a simple gameplay loop, but it expands as your capabilities do. Suddenly, your lights are better, so you can risk night fishing for longer and longer. Your boat gets faster, letting you leave your starting cove and venture across the open ocean to other islands on the horizon. And there’s the matter of the mysterious hermit in the old shack off the bay who wants you to find some weird old relics for him.
Dredge is a game of making and breaking routines. It’s not breaking any new ground, but the fishing itself – managing your precious hours of sunlight, selecting which fishing spots to visit, making time to dredge shipwrecks for upgrade resources – is so solid that it’s easy to fall into something of a flow state, looping a few days in the same general pattern, just to have that rhythm shattered when, huh, what was that real big shadow on the horizon? Wait, what’s that red pillar of light on the other side of the island at night? What do you mean there’s a giant angler fish down there?
At first glance, Dredge seems like a bizarre game, a hodgepodge of gameplay ideas and aesthetics that feel completely incongruous on paper. But in practice, this game is something incredibly special, a tightly designed and beautiful little game with enough depth and mysteries to keep you puttering around its islands for hours.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
I’ve been a longtime fan of the Armored Core series, but always in the abstract, from afar. I grew up in the era of early Toonami, eagerly devouring various Mobile Suit Gundam series and Gurren Lagann, while occasionally fiddling with an old Mech Warriors game on our Windows 95 PC. I have fond memories of renting Armored Core IV and V from my local video rental place, firing them up, having fun slamming different mech parts together to try to build the coolest looking robot. Then I’d start up a mission and almost immediately bounce off. For whatever reason, the gameplay just couldn’t grab me; maybe it was the control scheme feeling so different from the other 3rd person games I was used to, maybe it was the difficulty of the resource/finance management aspect. As much as I wanted to love this series, I could never break in.
Fast forward to the release of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon this year, and it’s safe to say I’m in now. This game sank its hooks into me and did not let go until I had blitzed through New Game ++ and seen every ending and mission the branching storyline has to offer. The controls still feel distinctly different, recognizably Armored Core (or at least, gen 4 and 5 Armored Core, we blessedly haven’t returned to the days before they embraced dual analog movement/camera control) but instead of bouncing off this time, I was able to lean in. Learning how to assemble a mech, how the different legs allow you to move, how to balance your damage output with your newly implemented stagger output (a very Sekiro addition) with your health and mobility is an incredible puzzle to chip away at, and the addition of the ability to change up your build if you’re taken down mid mission and continue from a checkpoint is a wonderful upgrade to the user experience.
It also needs to be said: this game looks, feels, and sounds incredible. The mech designs are top class (Shōji Kawamori returned as one of the lead designers for the robots, and his absolute mastery of the style shows) and they have this incredible sense of weight to how they move through the world, and yet none of that comes at the cost of sluggishness. The soundtrack by Kota Hoshino and Shoi Miyazawa strikes a tremendous balance between ambient electronica and emotional, more orchestral boss themes, and the sound design of the firearms, energy blasts, and explosions is among the best I’ve ever heard in a game.
I appreciate that for some die-hard AC fans, some of the above points may not be entirely positive; there’s a level of complexity and difficulty from the older games that has definitely been sanded down. That said, for the first Armored Core game in a decade, it is a triumphant return. FromSoft has brought 10 years of experience on their Souls/Borne/Sekiro/Elden Ring formula to bear on the level design and boss encounters (and my god, some of these boss fights are all-time greats for me), and the result is a truly special game, not quite like anything else on the market. If you’ve been Armored Core curious like me, Fires of Rubicon is an incredible way to take your first plunge.
Chants of Sennaar
Being fully honest, I’ve hemmed and hawed about including Chants of Sennaar on this list. It’s far from perfect and some elements of the design feel completely out of place; and yet, in spite of that, it grabbed me by the throat and would not let me go. It is an old school adventure game with a unique twist on the kind of logic it asks you to tap into, and is a must play for anyone with fond memories of Myst or recent puzzle-em-ups like Return of the Obra Dinn.
Chants of Sennaar is a game about communication and how it breaks down. You wander a gorgeous yet simple stylized world, talking to NPCs, reading signs, and learning the lay of the land. The only twist: none of the text is in any earthly language, and your task is to decipher it. Using context clues from the labels on levers, what symbols repeat in sentences, and a lot of cross examination, you build our your understanding of this new language in your notebook, occasionally getting the chance to “lock in” your hypotheses and find out if you were right or wrong, and using this new knowledge to climb higher in the tiered tower you’re exploring.
And then you meet a new caste of society, with their own unique language and syntax and grammar, and suddenly you’re translating between two, three, four different fictional languages.
This core loop of interpretation and translation is infectious. I blitzed my way through this game to 100% completion over two marathon sessions, and it took a great deal of willpower to tear myself away from the first to take care of mundane things like “eating” and “sleeping.” The only missteps are the points at which they deviate from these puzzles into more traditionally gamey diversions. The occasional tile-sliding or block-pushing puzzle is dull and out-of-place but not offensive, but the forced stealth sections (read: clicking to move from cover to cover when a guard/monster isn’t looking at you) often feel more like a chore than anything else – an obstacle to tediously move through so I can get back to my Rosetta Stone-ing. The final hour-ish in particular is frustrating, because an interesting (if on-the-nose) twist, diving into themes of how those in power divide groups and foment distrust and exert control, is expressed through more forced stealth and a frantic chase scene with a big monster.
And yet, for all of that, Chants of Sennaar has stuck with me. Rundisc has created an incredibly special little game, one that I hope to see explored and iterated on going forward. Like last year’s Tunic, this is a game that asks you to think differently about how to process the information it gives you, and the result is a truly infectious little puzzler.
Baldur’s Gate III
If you, like me, are of an age where you’ve started seriously looking at lumbar-supporting office chairs, you probably have some degree of nostalgia for old school CRPGs. The old Fallouts and Torments used to be titans of the industry, tiny pixelated characters walking around rich, detailed isometric worlds, talking and fighting and puzzling their way through dozens of hours of adventure. Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II were right in that mix, and are still beloved entries in a genre that, as time went on, slowly but surely went more and more dormant. And yet, when Baldur’s Gate III got its proper release earlier this year, you’d think these were still a juggernaut. People went nuts.
Let’s not get it twisted; the genre hasn’t been dead. The recent Disco Elysium offered a delightfully odd permutation on the form, and Larian, the studio behind Baldur’s Gate III, has decades of experience with their Divinity series, including the well received recent entries in the Original Sin run. But none of those took over the popular scene like Baldur’s Gate III, and even a few hours in this game is enough to start to feel how special this game is. Everything here works, and works better than you’d ever expect.
At its core, Baldur’s Gate III isn’t treading any obviously new ground. Like its predecessors, it takes the most current ruleset of the Dungeons & Dragons TTRPG system, adapts and streamlines it where necessary, and builds an adventure around it. The story hook – you and your companions have been infected with parasites that will at some point transform you into horrible monsters – provides a strong forward push for the story, and gives you solid reasons to interact with and help the various factions you meet along the way as you search for a solution. What’s surprising is everything else they managed to build on top of this core system. Baldur’s Gate III isn’t just the best CRPG to come out in years, it’s also one of the best immersive sim games of the last half decade.
You can sneak your way through enemy camps. You can lay a trail of explosive barrels along a battlefield to blow up hordes of enemies. You can douse the ground in oil and light it on fire. You can stack boxes on top of each other and climb to the top of them to gain a bonus to your ranged attackers by giving them the high ground. Much like with Tears of the Kingdom, there are a staggering number of systems at work in this game, and somehow they all manage to overlap in ways that make sense and allow you to make creative decisions and find unexpected solutions to the puzzles the game throws at you.
And in spite of all of this, the most impressive thing about this game has nothing to do with the core gameplay: I cannot leave this without discussing the performances. CRPGs have always been dialogue heavy experiences, usually through blocks of text and some voiceover for good measure. Not so here. Baldur’s Gate III is a feat so impressive it feels impossible. There are more than 200 performers credited for this game, and almost every single major conversation with every single character in the game, from your core party members to shopkeepers in the 3rd act of the game, is fully performance captured. The result is the most believably real characters I have ever seen in a game of this scale. You can see the specific mannerisms and facial performance choices that the actors were able to make, the way one party member smirks on his sardonic one-liners or another waggles her head when she’s nervous. I cannot fathom how much time it took for the performers, directors, and animators to pull this off; all I can say is that it was time well spent, because this, for me, is what sets Baldur’s Gate III apart from the crowd.
If you’ve never played a CRPG before, you should play Baldur’s Gate III. If you’ve played a ton of CRPGs but somehow haven’t picked this one up yet, you should play Baldur’s Gate III. If you’ve never played a videogame before, I can think of far worse places to start than Baldur’s Gate III. I can’t tell you the last time I was 20 hours into a game, with no end in sight, and was already thinking with excitement about different things I’d do on my next playthrough. I don’t imagine we’ll see another game quite like this for a very long time; no great worry there, though, I’ll be starting new games and chasing down all of the plot threads available here for years to come.
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