Weird games keep winning

There is a lot of doom and gloom right now about how expensive it is to make video games, or at least AAA ones, and how major games keep “failing.” It’s a persistent issue that arises as the industry navigates an uncertain future, and previously untouchable giants like Ubisoft have struggled to find their footing in a modern landscape that seems more willing than ever to push back against products that are perceived as boring or formulaic. 

Many publishers and developers are releasing clangers instead of bangers right now. MindsEye had a degree of underserved pre-release hype that I still can’t explain, and, with the exception of some questionably enthusiastic videos from the odd YouTuber, it got hammered on launch. Concord very famously became Sony’s greatest failure, despite a huge budget and a paid-for PR campaign that included an episode of Amazon’s Secret Level. 

Monster Hunter Wilds has sold gangbusters, but has let people down in the endgame as the team struggled under the weight of needing to supply people with things to do, and the game now sits at Overwhelmingly Negative on Steam. Ouch. Even GeoGuessr managed to mess up their Steam release, and one of the most popular games on the planet is sitting there with a Mostly Negative user rating at the time of writing. Skull and Bones, Suicide Squad, XDefiant, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and many more titles have failed to land with the audience.

But that’s okay! No matter what anyone tells you, it is okay that objectively or subjectively bad games exist, because there will always be good games, or games that people enjoy. For every game you dislike, there are ten others that will prove to be very rewarding experiences for you. And if you look at some of the stuff that has been kicking off hard over the last year and finding success, I sense a pattern emerging. 

People just wanna have fun

Earlier this year, Schedule 1 got everyone in the mood to sell drugs. The game was really about inventory management, dressed up as a drug-dealing game, and everyone loved it. The graphics were simple and goofy, and it ticked all the right boxes as it allowed for discovery in the form of recipes. The gameplay concept was simple, but the high-end execution was difficult. 

Casual players could just sell some weed and make some cash, then move on to their next drug, doing minimal experimentation. People who wanted to play perfectly could find out the exact blend a customer wanted to maximize their happiness and profit, and could experiment with thousands of ingredient combos to come up with something new and interesting to sell. 

Blue Prince took the concept of a puzzle manor and really tied it up in knots. With limited time to explore, an ever-shifting layout, and things on your current run being impacted by a previous run while having an effect on your next run, the level of complexity adds up. It felt like solving the manor puzzle was the game—until you did solve the manor puzzle, and then the game became something else entirely. 

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a role-playing game, yes, and they can be popular, but it is also a third-person, turn-based tactics title. With rare exception, they tend to have an upper limit to their appeal, but this turned into one of the genre's breakout hits by giving the gameplay a little twist and being a deeply fun experience oozing charm, passion, and love for the medium. 

PEAK is a game about climbing hills, either with your friends or by yourself. It was built as part of a game jam and then grew into a bona fide smash hit, selling two million copies in just nine days. That’s a lot of people playing a game about goofy little guys climbing a mountain and trying to avoid bees. The game did so well that the poor social media person for Aggro Crab, the developer, had a little pretend crisis on Twitter (never calling it the other thing, sorry) about how well it sold compared to their other game, Another Crab’s Treasure, which is also SUPER fun. I mean, why not find a cheeky way to use your current success to shed light on other great work your team has done?

R.E.P.O. has taken the cooperative horror genre by storm, dragging players away from their Lethal Company addictions. Monster Train 2 has enthralled fans of deckbuilders while avoiding all the bad things that can pop up in that genre. Last year's real game of the year, and sorry to anyone who got this wrong, was Balatro, a funky card game that has legitimately become the MF DOOM of game design as it’s now your favorite game developer's favorite game. 

Monster Train 2 didn’t want to let the other deckbuilders have all the attention, so it released a sequel of sheer perfection. Split Fiction, Infinity Nikki (until it scuffed its own success, I guess), Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Cabernet, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Mario Kart World, The Alters...the list can just keep going. Games that offer fun, focused experiences that fans have fallen in love with. 

For every doom-and-gloom story, there are multiple victories, but they are just not as interesting in the current discourse. People are so hungry for fun, enthralling experiences, and developers all over the world are scoring wins. It’s not something we should lose sight of; it’s something to be celebrated. I am firmly convinced that players are eager for surprises right now. The over-saturation marketing campaigns of slow-drip information releases that start years before launch, early access articles and videos, exclusive deals with media outlets or YouTubers don’t hit how they used to. People just want to be surprised by something they love again, and I love to see that kind of passion being fostered in player bases in the age of the algorithm. 

Bring me my Bridge Baby or bring me death

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has been released, as Sony continues to support the arthouse shenanigans of one Hideo Kojima. The original Death Stranding was about a man leaving his former world behind, walking through devastation toward an unknown future, and largely burdened by the weight of being the only person who could possibly do what he does.

Yes, it was an autobiography. 

Kojima had just parted ways with Konami, where he had worked since 1986. During his time there, he had chiseled out a reputation for being an eccentric visionary, giving the world the Metal Gear series, which was an absolute fever-dream vision of the military industrial complex and why all politicians suck. He had wanted to reboot Silent Hill because he felt he could harness the incredible power of his own fear to make something truly disturbing. He just has a very interesting way of looking at things, and seems to find commercial success almost by accident, focusing instead on the minute details of stories that are...dense, shall we say.

Hideo Kojima is blissfully unbound from the concept of giving a crap what you, or I, or anyone else thinks, and yet I cannot help but think about Death Stranding 2 all the time. It has moved on from its predecessors in important ways while staying very similar to that earlier experience. The game has dared to give people what they said they wanted from the first game, and now dares you to play it.

When Death Stranding first released, it felt important; the message that making human connections really matter had a weight to it that felt prescient. Well, here we are. Death Stranding 2 arrives with a similar message, hammering home the idea that reaching out to others leaves you open to feeling pain, which is exactly why you should be reaching out to others. There is no way out of this scenario alone, even if you are special, can carry more weight, and can walk that bit further. What's the point if there is nobody to walk toward?

Death Stranding 2 is a remarkable thing, and I find myself very happy that it exists. People will fight about this game forever. They will argue over whether it is good or bad, or worth it or not. They’ll argue about what it means, what Kojima is saying, and what we should take from it. People will shown their entire ass as they attempt to painfully tie the message that they perceive within it to their personal politics. It will be gloriously, stupendously, and inexorably treated as a piece of art far more often than it is treated as a product.

I love it.

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Madison Benson spent some time with Ruffy and the Riverside, a 3D platformer with some built-in puzzle solving that got her neurons firing.