The Incredible, Interconnected World of Dark Souls 1

Since publishing my last post, I have beaten Dark Souls: Remastered for a second time. That’s how good it is. I was enraptured. It seems the kind of game I’ll play once every year or so, an elite group. Before playing it myself, I didn’t really “get” Dark Souls – I had seen footage of some bosses, heard about how good it was, how hard it was. Now, I understand. I understand how revolutionary this game was, how impactful it still is, how masterful the combat is, and how wonderful its world is designed. Here, I want to tell the story of my two characters, how I experienced the game both times, and will tie that all together with the incredibly well-designed spaces of Lordran that I got to explore throughout my time with Dark Souls. Many spoilers below, so I recommend playing the game before reading this. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. You will go through many hardships, but Dark Souls is as fair as it is challenging.

I named my first proper character Luna, pictured above during one of the only moments in which she wasn’t wearing armor. Wearing the Black Iron set didn’t feel quite right for that cutscene, as a guard of the Sun Princess preparing to link the Fires. Luna started as the Warrior class and struggled much at the beginning of her journey. She first died to the Asylum Demon as I, filled with hubris, attempted to defeat it with only the broken sword you are given at the very beginning of the game. She wielded the Uchigatana for nearly the entire journey, after murdering the Undead merchant for telling her to jump off a cliff. I got the Grass Crest Shield soon after gaining access to Darkroot and carried that to the endgame as well, during which I wore mostly the Black Iron armor set. Well, I wore it after returning to the Undead Burg to get Havel’s Ring, anyway. The bearer of that ring killed me many times in my first journey to the Burg before I realized that I should just focus on the Taurus Demon instead.

 

I put most of my levels into Dexterity, since the Uchigatana scales only with DEX and I love its versatile moveset. I invested a single early stat point into Resistance because I thought I couldn’t go wrong with a little more defense against poison, bleed, and curse. Of course, that was indeed wrong. RES is the worst stat in the game and should probably have been removed, though it’s probably good that this is my biggest complaint about the whole game. My trend of investing one too many points into certain stats continued, since I ended up with 16 points in Strength, put just 20 points into Attunement, three shy of the next spell slot, and 41 into DEX, one more than the “soft cap,” since I thought the cap was 50. In short, I made many mistakes, both in combat and in my build, but pushed onward.

 

Like many players, I bought fully into the “Chosen Undead” narrative, believed Kingseeker Frampt, adored Gwynevere as a beacon of light in a dark world, and linked the Fire at the conclusion so that the Age of Dark may be kept at bay for a little longer. This seemed, after all, to be the “good ending.” More on that later in this post.

 

I didn’t get the Rite of Kindling from Pinwheel until near the end of that first journey, since the Catacombs were the last major area I visited before placing the last of the Lord Souls in the Lordvessel and marching onward to the last fight against Gwyn. That’s why I was happy to have the Heal miracle, to patch up lesser wounds. I didn’t kill any Fire Keepers for their souls, nor did I kill Lautrec for his ring, though his sidequest disappointed me. I revived Anastacia after disposing of him, all of which I’ll never bother with again since he has the best ring in the game and kicking his ass off a ledge is the rare combination of easy and extremely satisfying.

 

Luna never visited Oolacile, though she did rescue Dusk. I just kind of forgot about the Artorias DLC in my mad rush to link the Fire. The first journey took me around 31 hours, if memory serves.

 

I fought every boss but Gwyndolin and those in the DLC with Luna. The Taurus Demon gave me the most trouble, funny enough. It killed me upwards of ten times and led to a temporary uninstall when I thought it stole 8000 souls from me by leaping up to the tower from which I planned a plunging attack and sending me off the ledge. Turned out that my souls were just atop the tower. No harm, no foul. The day after uninstalling, I re-installed and beat that demon by equipping my strongest weapon at the time – a battle axe – and baiting it to the other end of the wall after the first plunging attack. I repeated the strategy one last time for a relatively easy kill, a welcome reminder that every boss would have a weakness and could be overcome.

 

My first big triumph while controlling Luna was against the Capra Demon, which lurks in the Lower Undead Burg. I dispatched the dogs with a two-handed heavy attack each, then was free to dodge roll and punish the goat-headed demon’s lag on my way to a first-try victory. To appease my ego, I here list the other bosses I defeated on the first try (before getting to the real points I want to make): Moonlight Butterfly, Seath the Scaleless, Crossbreed Priscilla, Demon Firesage, Centipede Demon, Stray Demon, Pinwheel, and Gwyn, Lord of Cinder.

 

Most of the other bosses kicked my ass at least five times, for the record. And for a few of those first-try fights, I was assisted by either an AI or a fellow player. Gwyn killed me a few times in my second playthrough, since I didn’t save Solaire the second time through.

 

Anyway, though the boss fights of Dark Souls are undoubtedly some of its best and most memorable moments, the single moment of my first playthrough that stands out above all others is the first elevator ride back to Firelink Shrine. Well, not if you count the time when I played on mouse + keyboard and rode back up from New Londo Ruins over and over after killing the passive Hollows down there. That was me trying to get used to the unusable controls and failing, and also inefficiently grinding for souls so I could afford the Heal miracle which I then couldn’t use anyway, because I didn’t understand Attunement back then.

 

No, in my first proper playthrough on a controller, the moment I’m talking about is when I first returned to Firelink from the Undead Parish. See, the Parish was pretty tough the first time around. I died during the fight with the fanged boar once, after landing a single backstab that came just before dying to a crossbow bolt from above. I enlisted the help of a summon sign’d player from another realm to help me clear out the Tower Knight and Channeler minibosses, since they absolutely destroyed me in my first time entering the Parish proper. Then, of course, the Gargoyle fight was pretty tough… and I didn’t find Andre’s bonfire until after I had already cleared the zone. That made the trek back and forth from the last checkpoint pretty tedious.

But Ringing the first Bell of Awakening was one hell of a triumphant feeling.

Adding to this feeling was my exploration of the surrounding area, finding Andre, upgrading my katana, running past the Titanite Demon, finding the Grass Crest Shield, and eventually returning to the Parish to find the elevator… back down to Firelink Shrine. That was an “Aha!” moment of familiarity, and Lordran began to make much more sense, began to feel like a world I was inhabiting rather than just a set of polygons.

 

I’ve started Sekiro since beating Dark Souls again, and it’s a great game too, don’t get me wrong. But it feels much more like a linear trek through one level after another, at least so far. Dark Souls 1, unlike other From Software games and even its direct sequels, feels like an interconnected world rather than a straight line with some interesting detours. The Parish-Shrine elevator showed me that interconnectedness for the first time. I understood that this was not just a real-time action-RPG, but would also borrow elements from Metroidvania titles. You don’t pick up new movement abilities that allow for access to new zones or shortcuts back to old ones, but rather keys that open locked doors. The skills you gain are primarily in your mind… and your stats, to be fair. I felt like I was improving my abilities in combat moreso than I was making numbers bigger, though both of those certainly happened. And as you progress, the game world becomes more and more interconnected, whether in finding new routes into and out of zones or through visiting places that can be seen from elsewhere.

 

To name just a few of those… you can see Demon Ruins and Ash Lake from the Tomb of the Giants, can see Anor Londo from most places above ground, can see that the gate to Sen’s Fortress is at first shut tight across a short bridge across from where Andre works his forge, and can see both the graveyard and Undead Burg from Firelink Shrine.

 

That first return to Firelink felt incredibly organic, really sold the illusion of being in Lordran, and its homelike feeling only deepened with each return trip I made. In returning to old zones, the player can flex their progression on earlier enemies, can build a sense of familiarity with the environments of the game. Back when I played on mouse and keyboard, I ground for souls in the graveyard near Firelink when I realized I was wasting time in New Londo, using the Morning Star to break apart the skeletons’ bones. They were like minibosses presented as regular enemies, paired off to present overwhelming challenges to my scared self as I played with suboptimal controls. I avoided that graveyard at the start of my controller playthrough, but coming back to the Catacombs at the end of that first proper journey and decimating the skeletons was a beautiful full circle to draw from my experiences. It’s all the more beautiful because they’re less than thirty seconds away from where the giant crow first drops you off.

 

Returning time and again to Firelink as you cross Lordran serves to make Dark Souls feel less like a video game a la Super Mario Bros., where the player’s journey is in a line from left to right. It makes you feel like an explorer trapped in an unfamiliar, dying land. Yet the gentle strings of Firelink Shrine’s soundtrack are familiar, welcome, beautiful. No combat will happen around the bonfire until you reach the graveyard or head up the stairs toward Undead Burg… or unless you murder one of the NPCs residing there. It is truly your safe haven, but it's impossible to forget the death and desolation all around.

 

Now seems a good time to mention the music. In a similar vein but much more unsettling than Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls knows how to save its soundtrack for the right moment. Many areas in BotW feature only whispers of older Zelda melodies, reflections of its broken land. Dark Souls takes this a step further with silence. It looks at BotW’s Hyrule and laughs like, “You call that broken?” 

There is so much violence and death in Lordran, even before the player arrives. Piles of bodies and/or bones make up some walls, floors, and ceilings, especially in New Londo (after you use the Key to the Seal) and in the Catacombs. The player eventually treks into what feels like Hell itself, in Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. The sins of humanity, the folly of the gods, the inevitability of the Age of Fire’s ending… these are all communicated through setting, not an element often nailed so thoroughly by game developers. Silent soundtracks in certain areas sell the ambient noises of the environment, of the player’s movement, of enemies, of combat, and make areas with music all the more special. Ash Lake’s tune, “The Ancient Dragon,” comes to mind, with its haunting vocal melodies and occasionally booming drums that so perfectly match the area.

 

This atmosphere accomplished something that no other game has done. It drove me to walk. If you’ve played any RPG – let’s take KOTOR, for instance – you can probably relate to me almost always running top-speed everywhere I go. There's no reason not to, unless confined by stamina. In KOTOR and its lone sequel, players usually invest in the Force Speed power as soon as possible, so that getting around the environments isn’t a chore. Of course, I sprinted most places in Dark Souls, too… but it just didn’t feel right for many of the zones in moments of calm. I had to look up at Anor Londo’s spires, Demon Ruins’ lava-drenched walls and ceiling, Ash Lake’s eerie beauty, and the gorgeous crystals and creatures of Crystal Cave. The excellent sounds of my heavy armor clanking and the perfect, fluid animations made walking just feel… right. If ever there was a game to take your time in moments of peace to just walk and take in the scenery, this is it.

No way was I sprinting through there.

 

Dark Souls makes understanding the lay of the land, enemy spawn locations, items, and how each zone connects to each other zone immensely satisfying. Finding the next bonfire feels not just like a checkpoint, but also both a marker of your progress and a familiar safe haven in an unfamiliar and unforgiving world. It brings such relief, adds to the accomplishment of beating a boss. It may feel like you’ll never see the next one sometimes, especially if a certain boss has decorated the floor with your guts a double-digit number of times, but there’s always a way forward, or ways around. And some bonfires are delightful secrets, like the one in Darkroot, outside the door that requires the Crest of Artorias as its key.

 

I’ve never experienced anything quite like my treks into the Depths, Blighttown, or the Catacombs. I’ve never felt that genuine unease, that despair-ridden homesickness, from being far away from familiar territory in a video game, especially as Estus Flasks and Heal charges ran low. The oppressive, claustrophobic walls seem to close around you; the enemies become terrifying threats to send you back to familiarity in the worst way possible – with wounded pride and endangered souls, tethered to your bloodstain.

 

The corpse run mechanic, as an aside, is ingenious in its induction of stress that allows for post-death redemption. I prefer Sekiro’s resurrection system as a player, but Dark Souls’ corpse run is much better from a design perspective. It leads to risk-reward weighing, excitement, and either triumph or more despair upon Retrieval or defeat. And we love games that make you feel genuine emotion, even when that emotion could be classified as negative.

 

Anyway, the elevator from the Undead Parish to Firelink is not the only place in Dark Souls 1 where the game’s interconnected world design becomes wonderfully apparent. That elevator is also the way to get back to the Undead Asylum, by hopping off at the right time and rolling at the right spot. This return serves to make the Asylum feel like more than just a tutorial area – it makes it feel like a part of this rotting world we inhabit as we play Dark Souls. And returning there to get the Peculiar Doll from your old cell allows you to get to the Painted World in Anor Londo.

 

Even absent sidequests like that, the player descends ever-deeper into Lordran, getting lost and finding the way again. Even after a second playthrough, I couldn’t tell you where half the items in Blighttown are, though I found many of them both times. The Undead Burg is connected to the Parish and Lower Undead Burg, the latter of which connects to the Depths, which is nowhere close to the deepest point in the game. No, it rather cheekily drops down to Blighttown, which drops further into Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. The Burg also connects, through Havel’s watchtower, into Darkroot, which in turn leads us to Artorias’s grave, the Hydra, Oolacile, and back to the Parish, which connects to Sen’s Fortress and thus to Anor Londo, a walled city high above the rest of the game’s zones.

 

The many tendrils of this world stretch out in all directions, sometimes leading us back to other areas, sometimes leading to a boss that serves as a fingernail of that particular limb of the world, a stopping point from which we return to another zone. The game world stretches up from its roots in Lost Izalith all the way to the Duke’s Archives atop a mountain that overlooks Anor Londo. The walled city can be seen from the very first time you lay eyes upon Lordran in the claws of the giant crow.

Arriving there was magical, made all the sweeter by the brutal trials of Sen's Fortress.

Anor Londo, though disconnected from most of the other zones in the game, represents the Age of Fire and the hubris of the Lords. Gwyn, in linking the Fire for the first time, tries to keep the Age of Dark at bay. And yet, even here in the land of the “gods,” we see endless death as far as the eye can see. All that remains alive and non-hostile within the walls of Anor Londo: a lone firekeeper, and a few trees reaching up for the light of Gwyndolin.

Even before the city darkens, many of these trees live in shadows.

Most of Anor Londo, though gorgeous, is cold, dead, unfeeling stone. Nestled high above the rest of the world, this place is just as hellish as the Depths or Lost Izalith, just with a veneer of beautiful architecture. Most of Lordran is covered in similar, if less grandiose, structures. This game world has much to say about our own. Here, in my little Squirrel Hill apartment, all that is alive (other than the two human beings) is a single jalapeño plant, trapped in a little pot beneath a UV grow light. The closest nonhuman living thing other than our plant and neighbors' pets is a little patch of trees a few blocks away. Anor Londo is a reflection of what we have done to our world. Perhaps an age of Dark comes for us as well.

 

Let’s pivot back to Dark Souls before I weep for Earth's creatures. Even in Anor Londo, we can see the interconnected, 3D puzzle-like design that constitutes my favorite feature of Dark Souls. The first bonfire in this zone leads us to the Duke’s Archives later on, and down an elevator onto where we will eventually meet Gwynevere. First, we must get through a Chapel filled with Painting Guardians. On its lower floor, we can enter the Painted World of Ariamis, an optional “bonus zone,” if you will, that has its share of looping level design as well, complete with shortcuts and verticality ranging from a high tower down into secret tunnels below a well.

 

Below the Chapel, we find (well, we’re supposed to find. I didn’t until the winged demons before the Silver Knight Archers killed me a few times – a running theme of my first journey) Darkmoon Tomb and its bonfire, which can later lead to Gwyndolin. Then, after getting past those notorious archers, Solaire can be found at another bonfire. After getting near the Ornstein and Smough boss fight, we can find a broken window that leads down to an item and the giant blacksmith, and/or a door back outside.

Shortcut pictured here on my second playthrough, minutes before I finally darkened this decadent, desolate remnant of the Age of Fire.

 

This shortcut leads back to the weird spiral staircase elevator that can loop back to Darkmoon Tomb or the painting Chapel. Anor Londo, high above the other zones, still features that sense of interconnectedness, mystery, and adventure that permeates the rest of the Dark Souls experience. And after Ornstein and Smough lie dead, it gives us access to fast travel via the Lordvessel, allowing the rest of the game to become much more fast-paced and less about exploration.

 

I can understand the argument against fast travel’s inclusion, since the second half of Dark Souls did indeed feel a lot less like an adventure through unfamiliar territory, uncovering new links between zones and so on. The Valley of Drakes does lead us to Blighttown, New Londo, and Darkroot, which would allow the player to get around relatively quickly, even without fast travel. But I still like its inclusion, since repeatedly going through the Valley would get a little tiresome, to say the least, especially if you change your destination partway through or if you just want to hit up one last merchant before facing a particular boss. Oh, and the post-Lordvessel post-boss bits would need to be redesigned, since the Bed of Chaos, Seath, and Nito all have arenas which would be either tedious or impossible to get out of without being able to warp from bonfire to bonfire. Well, bosses do drop a Homeward Bone most of the time. But isn’t that a kind of fast travel anyway? It would admittedly be cool to see some Skyrim-esque dungeon design where the boss room unveils a shortcut back to the entrance once they are defeated.

 

Either way, I much prefer this fast travel system to being able to warp from the beginning of the game, as in Sekiro or DS3. Even with more linear areas like Anor Londo or Sen’s Fortress, shortcuts can be found and links to other zones established. The masterful world design of Dark Souls makes the player into an adventurer through unfamiliar and hostile territory, asks us to map out the world in our minds, with no world map to speak of. It’s all the better for not including one, instead pushing the player to think for themselves. And the wiki’s always there if you need it.

 

Even on a second playthrough, new connections were forged. I found places I missed the first time around, like Oolacile, that jump from house to house in the Undead Burg, and the Gravelord Servant covenant in the Catacombs. The DLC is certainly more linear than the main game, but is interconnected primarily through time rather than space. Oolacile would later become Darkroot, with Artorias's grave remaining in the same place. That was interesting to see, and the extra challenges were welcome... though cutting off Kalameet's tail was exponentially harder than anything else it had to offer.

Oh, and I first visited Ash Lake during this second playthrough as well. The Great Hollow and Ash Lake are two of my favorite areas now, annoying to navigate as that tree may be. Solana, my second character, invested in Strength and Intelligence because Luna relied on DEX and had a few miracles. This strong sorcerer became a Darkwraith of Kaathe. I didn't invade people all that often, but it felt like the right contrast to my previous playthrough as a servant of light. Fall Control made getting down the Great Hollow tolerable, and Ash Lake’s inclusion increased my immersion in this wonderful world even further.

 

An ancient place, unnecessary when it comes to completing the game, Ash Lake serves to pique interest in the lore of this world and adds to the sense of being a part of a larger world full of mystery and mystique. It seems to be a remnant of the Age of Ancients, seems to point to Dark seeping into the Age of Fire. Note the dark water, the monsters, the Hollow archtrees. Here, we can find the Everlasting Dragon, which rather disappointingly has no dialogue and for some bizarre reason does not mind you chopping his tail off. Still, getting to Ash Lake in my second playthrough was a highlight of my overall Dark Souls experience, an amazing set of moments that brought me even further into this world borne of From Software’s twisted imaginations.

An archtree seen outside Nito's boss arena. Hearing that I could actually get there blew my mind.

 

As we see in the intro cutscene, we stand during Dark Souls at a crossroads of Yin and Yang, borne of the disparity brought by fire. “Heat and cold, life and death, and of course… Light and Dark” came to Lordran with the introduction of Fire. At the game’s start, the Age of Fire approaches its end. Our choice (unfortunately, only after the final boss lies dead at our feet – previous choices, such as covenants, do not play into the ending) is to either sacrifice ourselves so that the Age of Fire may continue for a while longer, or to let it burn out and become the Dark Lord.

 

Luna, named for the moon, chose to link the Fire. She began as a warrior and ended a miracle-wielding pyromancer. From Dark, Light. Solana, named for the sun, started as a Pyromancer of the swamp and ended a strong, dexterous sorcerer clad in heavy armor, with her “unusual face” (as the character creator text read) proudly bare beneath a maxed-out black cap. She ended Gwyn and became the Dark Lord. From Fire, Darkness.

 

Which ending is better? Hard to say. The Age of Dark is inevitable. Time here seems cyclical. The “Chosen Undead” would become the next Gwyn should they choose to link the Fire, a burned husk waiting to be killed by either the Dark Lord or the next fuel for the First Flame. And Oolacile seems proof enough that humanity would not take well to an Age of Dark. I’m still processing these endings. I think I prefer the Dark Lord ending for now, since upholding the hierarchy of the gods seems an unworthy goal when compared to being at the helm of inevitable Darkness. 

Either way, the journey to these points was absolutely magical. Dark Souls has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time, one I will no doubt play many times more and will recommend until video games become obsolete. I will carry these fond memories of its masterfully interconnected world until I next return to Lordran.

The Top Ten Games I Played in 2020

With Hell Year 2020 behind us and with a good 2021 looking rather unlikely unless a drastic shift in human consciousness occurs suddenly, I’ve been sitting down and playing games a lot. Might as well while we’re stuck inside, right?

Melee netplay with rollback netcode took up a lot of my time until my brain categorized it as Diet Melee and I couldn’t deny the allegation. I miss in-person Melee too much to mention it on the list proper, but know that it remains my favorite game ever by far.

This list is just for fun. I didn’t play ten new releases this year, so it’s just a hodgepodge of what I played, a window into my experiences in quarantine. Bonus points for actually coming out in 2020. First, here are a few… mentions. Not all of them are honorable.

 

Dark Souls Remastered (2011, 2018)

 

OK, I only started this one properly in 2021 but I couldn’t wait any longer to mention it. What a masterpiece! I was too intimidated by this when I first bought it, but that was with a mouse and keyboard, an experience that I’ll just say was rough. On my Switch Pro controller and with much time having passed, it now plays like a dream. Dark Souls has what I now consider to be the gold standard in single-player melee combat, and absolutely incredible world design. As a newcomer to From Software, I’ve been very impressed so far. Overcoming adversity and pushing ahead to keep the Age of Dark at bay has been a wonderful experience, if exceptionally disturbing at times. I can’t wait to finish it and to write about it more. At time of writing, I just finished my first playthrough and already have plans for my next character. For my first, I didn’t do any major sequence breaks other than wandering into Blighttown early, thanks to having the Master Key and natural curiosity. I still rang the Bells "in order" because the ghouls guarding it (it's more Blight than Town) sent me back to the Firelink Shrine bonfire with my character Hollowed. And yet, as after every death, I pressed on. I refused to abandon the game and, as so many NPCs do, allow my soul to dissolve into nothingness within the Undead Curse. Death feels like any other enemy, something which can be overcome. You may lose souls and Humanity, but every mistake can be learned from, and every enemy is beatable.

 

Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, who is surprisingly bad at Dark Souls

The feeling captured time and again by Dark Souls is that of a world gone mad with violence and endless death. The player must find their way, in individual rooms, enemies’ locations and attack patterns, and around the world “map” without a map. I’ve discovered hidden treasures, conquered demons, and linked together this dying world in my mind. Anor Londo is my favorite area, hinted at masterfully earlier in the game and unbelievably well-executed upon arrival. Though everything is neat, clean, and awash in artificial light, there is almost nothing alive within the walls save for a few lonely trees and NPCs. Reminds me of any modern city’s streets, a grim warning about the path we’re on. If you were ever put off by this game’s difficulty, as I was, I implore you to give it another try. It’s a masterclass in setting, combat, and general design.

Dragon Age: Origins (2009)

 

Aside from the stupid subtitle that implies a prequel before there ever was a sequel, and which was already trite back when it released, this game’s combat is just too tedious for me. I vastly prefer other BioWare RPGs that in my opinion have stronger writing, better settings, and better combat than this title. That makes it a never-finished game for me, unfortunately. I’ve tried many times, enjoying the opening quests of each titular Origin enough to play to varying degrees of “finished.” The closest I got was a return to Denerim as a female city elf rogue… whenever that happens in the game. Could be near the end, could be like halfway through. No idea.

The plot of the game would be satisfying, if it ended with the death of a certain teyrn. Not sure, though, and never will know. Long ago, I played until Denerim, but that save file is lost. In 2020, I only made it (as a female human noble) to Lothering Village, basically after the protagonist’s backstory ends and the game begins. Too much MMO combat, not enough DnD… in a game with both dungeons and dragons.

 

Even Alistair looks bored.

See, in no longer working with LucasArts, the studio wanted to make its own brand. So why did they release this unoriginal fantasy RPG that could have been produced by an AI that distilled down other fantasy RPGs? I mean, come on. Mass Effect has plenty of originality, though it did borrow a few story beats from the studio’s writing in KOTOR. So, why does Dragon Age consist of humans, elves, and dwarves that can be warriors, rogues, or mages? There are other races in the game, too, but even the Qunari aren’t exactly breaking new ground, and you can’t play as one. It’s a shame that “trite fantasy” is even a phrase which can be uttered, and it’s all too true when spoken about Dragon Age.

I like Bioware’s writing enough to try this one all too often. Hopefully I remember this list when I think about installing it again as I’m tempted by the grayed-out options of my Steam library.

 

Skyrim (2011)

 

Similar experience to Dragon Age. It’s Skyrim. If you’ve played even five minutes of Skyrim, you know what the gameplay is like. Bethesda releases unfinished, shallow glitchfests and waits for the community to make them into decent games. It’s a time sink that you feel must be fun or you wouldn’t play it, but it’s not really all that fun once you stop and think about it. I modded the hell out of the game that I once somehow played vanilla on an Xbox 360 and had a… time, for the fourth or fifth time, in 2020. I don’t really know why I have so many hours on this game. I won’t post the rather embarrassing number. The mod Take Notes made the experience much better, allowing me to actually play a role and remember a few things, but now I can’t access those notes because inevitably, one too many mods broke Todd Howard’s back. This file collapsed like all the others, saving me from the monotonous quests and boring combat I had once again fallen into. But it did at least look fantastic with a few different ENBs installed, which certainly helped immersion, as did the admittedly intriguing lore, especially when it comes to the Dwemer.

Mafia 2 (2010)

 

Meh. Was fun when I was a teenager. Not so much now. Got to the timeskip and promptly uninstalled. Vito died in prison in my playthrough, I guess.

 

Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

 

What a buggy, unfinished disaster. I feel ashamed to have given CDPR money, but I played it for longer than two hours so now it’s in my Steam library forever. Hopefully they actually finish this dumpster fire by 2022. Now for the real list.

10. Jackbox Games

 

I threw this one at ten because it’s the metaphorical apple compared to the oranges on this list. It’s a great time, no matter which party pack you’re playing, though everyone will have a favorite (mini?)game. Mine’s probably Blather Round as of Party Pack 7, the most recent release. It features players taking turns using pre-selected words to try and get their free-typing compatriots to guess a certain person, place, or thing. The first player to type a close-enough answer wins and gets points. The player forming together the hints from building blocks gets bonus points for how quickly a friend solved it, down to 0 if no one gets it in time.

Other hits include Quiplash and Joke Boat, which similar experiences of just trying to make your friends laugh with some help from prompts. There’s Champ’d Up and Tee K.O., which are about one person having a drawing pad and making things too hilarious to not vote for. Trivia Murder Party is a great outlier where correctly answering trivia questions can stop you from getting "murdered" by the eerily hilarious host, and even ghosts can still win.

 

A Tee K.O. winner. You can actually buy the shirts after the game.

I had a blast with Jackbox at various points throughout 2020. It’s a very laid-back and casual experience to share with friends, which was great in quarantine, even if we had to do it virtually. Discord and jackbox.tv make that easy, and almost halfway as good as being together in-person.

 

9. Halo: Reach (2010, 2019)

 

This one came out in December of 2019 but I played it most in 2020. I didn’t play any of the Halos besides this one on my Xbox 360 because I was too young and into other stuff to play Halo when it was in its heyday. Reach’s multiplayer and varied Forge tools still hold up to this day. But what were they thinking with holding back the Forge for months into this re-release? Come on, 343. Modders were using it months before us regular people, and that was one of Reach’s best features.

 

The story is… fine, I guess. The campaign is fun, even if the writing’s a little underwhelming. The Spartans have more life and arc to them than Chief did, from what I’ve seen of the original trilogy (which is admittedly not much, if that statement offends you). I do remember Halo 2’s “War is Cool” opening where Chief rides a bomb with spikes on it (SPIKES. On a BOMB!) off of one ship to blow up another. I have to say that Reach pulled me in much tighter and I even felt twinges of emotion at times. I beat it on Legendary for the first time with this remake in 2020, which felt great, if a little frustrating at times.

 

The other games of the MCC have come out since my time with Reach. I bought Halo 1. I’m surprised Microsoft didn’t release a Halo One (new game) along with the Xbox One (new console) but that’s neither here nor there. There, in Halo 1, I found a very old game that I had no nostalgia for and didn’t make it far into the campaign before never touching it again.

 

But Reach has so many memorable moments that solidified in my biased mind with this playthrough. My favorite mission is Tip of the Spear, where the opening cutscene had me and my brother screaming way back when. That’s the mission that most feels like a war fought between humans and aliens, a feeling that feels like Halo’s main draw to me.

 

And the multiplayer is incredible. So many great maps. So many fun weapons. The progression system… oh, but they didn’t port Reach’s incredible progression system, did they? No, 343 made it into a shitty BR-style battlepass. Thanks. Most things that Bungie didn’t code are pretty bad with this port, such as the menus.

 

Those are relatively minor gripes, to be fair. Where was I? Right, multiplayer. Assassinations! Hold the melee button behind someone for a flashy kill. Feel like a badass with a dope animation. Hell yeah. Or save your teammate from an assassination with a quick sniper shot. Maybe a case of the only thing cooler than a great shot in hockey or soccer being a great save. I had a blast, as I did on the 360, playing the Invasion game mode. It feels almost like an extension of the campaign in that it captures the feeling of a human-Covenant war in a multiplayer setting. That’s a rare feeling for shooters with campaign-multiplayer splits, where the single- and multiplayer modes are in any way connected.

 

And the map design, as previously mentioned, is great. I feel like the official Forge World maps were depressingly rare in my time with the remake, as The Cage was my favorite back in the day with its long sightlines and tight corridors… but I only played on it two or three times in all my time with the Master Chief Collection.

 

I didn’t spend nearly as much time on this as I thought I would. Just beat the campaign, played some multiplayer, and haven’t gone back in months. I suppose it’s because the golden age of Reach is far behind us. I will say, I’m rather sad that my aim kind of sucks on PC. I used to be a CoD GoD if you’ll believe that, back on the 360. I have no footage to prove it, though, and all I’ve got now is too much aiming experience with the horrid Xbox 360 controller and not enough with mouse and keyboard controls. Speaking of…

 

8. Valorant (2020)

 

I’ve written a lot about this game for Esports Talk, and I’m sure I will in the future. Just a little burned out with Valorant for now, mostly because of my aforementioned shit aim. I played a little CS:GO in 2020 as well, after not touching the latter since 2015. It was hard to pick between the two since CS seems stronger mechanically, but Valorant is jam-packed with personality, vibrant colors, and cool weapons, skins, and abilities.

My main man Brimstone looking fly on the cover of my economy guide.

I went with Valorant for this list because it had a much bigger impact on me personally. I’m certainly not destined to be a top-level player of either title. Still, being able to write about the esports scene for Valorant has been a joy. I also found a few groups to play with, and that made all the difference. It’s just about always a better experience than solo queue, which is how I spent just about all of my time in 2020 with CS:GO. Ranked still just isn't that fun of an experience for me in most games. Feels like a hamster wheel with a few highlights and lots of lowlights, especially if your aim is as bad as mine. No singleplayer content either, but that's to be expected with this heavy of a focus on the multiplayer tournament scene, and the in-game practice tools are surprisingly solid.

 

Valorant is deep and engaging, and the esports scene is really fun to watch if you know the basics, especially after the patches that have released thus far. I think this game will be incredible (or perhaps unplayable, if Riot takes this one in the direction that they took League) in a few years, so I’ll be sticking around for a long while, even though I watch way more than play these days.

7. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

 

I almost don’t want to talk about BotW in detail here. I could write a novel-length post about it. I’ll stick to what was different about last year’s playthrough. I did it on Master Mode. I never beat the Trial of the Sword because there’s a level with two golden lizalfos and I didn’t feel like grinding for hours on end just to mess up stealthing around or to run out of weapons as the annoying bastards regenerated health.

 

On that note, Master Mode’s not great, which is why this game is relatively lower on this year’s list than it would be on my all-time games list. All it does is rank up every enemy by one rank and give them annoying regenerating health when not being actively smacked around. I had hoped for a tweaking of enemy AI and damage values to return that feeling of a hostile world out to get me that I lost around the point of beating my third Divine Beast for the first time. My first playthrough was a cakewalk after that point, and so was this one, but this time all the way through. The Great Plateau was certainly more threatening, but I just snuck around until Link had enough hearts to handle getting hit more than once. The cake in the Master Mode cakewalk just regenerated health if I stopped eating it for a moment, and had an occasional gold finish.

 

That said, the second DLC, which I never played on my Wii U copy of the game but did this time around on my Switch, was just incredible. It added so much to the world, new areas to explore, and a new dungeon that exceeded my expectations. My favorite moment was the glide down Death Mountain to find one of the new Shrines. The Master Cycle Zero would’ve been a profoundly baffling and annoying reward to receive at the end if I’d gone in blind, so I’m oddly glad that the bike was spoiled for me. The Champions’ Ballad is not about the reward at the end, but the journey to that point.

 

I experienced BotW the first time totally unspoiled. I had seen not one second of gameplay or the world, and it was all the better for it, utterly magical. I’ll never forget first seeing a dragon, or stumbling upon Lurelin Village, or building Tarrey Town from the ground up, hearing a new instrument introduced with every new NPC.

 

What a wonderful world.

I waited years before I was sure I had forgotten enough to experience some of that magic again. It wasn’t all there, but I didn’t expect it to be. Instead, I got to explore Hyrule again, now familiar, still lost in a beautifully immersive open world with fantastic ambiance, music, wildlife, monsters, and NPCs. Link is more expressive and more a person than ever before. Some people say this “isn’t a real Zelda game” but those people haven’t played the original. Nothing else in the franchise better captures the feeling of exploration and wanderlust when compared to Zelda 1 like Breath of the Wild. There were some diminishing returns when compared to my magical first playthrough, but this game’s still a masterpiece in 2021.

 

6. Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)

 

If you haven’t played this yet, you’re missing out on one of the most unique video game releases in recent memory. My partner had played it before, and watched me play a few times a week until I finished filling in the fates of each person aboard the Obra Dinn. They offered a helping hand when I was stuck without spoiling too much, which was more than welcome for some of the crew members. Taking it slow was the way to go, since this game has very little replay value once you’ve solved the mysteries it has to offer.

 

If you don’t know the concept behind this indie gem, the idea is that you’re an insurance agent in the heyday of the British Empire, sent to investigate a ghost ship with a crew that almost entirely died. The twist is that you have a magic pocket-watch that can teleport you back in time to the exact moment of someone’s death. An ingenious innovation that allowed Lucas Pope to make this game without having to animate very much, it’s also the root of the game’s challenge. You hear a conversation like a radio play before the scene starts, and then you can walk around the still “image” of whichever death you’re currently investigating. You then fill in the fates of people by matching a picture of them to their name, how they died, and who or what killed them, using templates like “[Bob] was [decapitated] by [a terrible beast],” with the bracketed sections being interchangeable with other options. The game checks for correct fates in groups of three, leaving a nice balance between allowing for some guesswork and not allowing players to just randomly guess until the game says it’s over.

 

Detective games aren’t really my thing, nor are old-timey naval tales, nor is having to swap around the names of the four Chinese topmen until the game says I got them right. Yes, there’s probably a way to tell them apart using your noggin, but it was nowhere near as easy as racial profiling… and encouragement of racial profiling isn’t exactly worthy of a GOTY title (two years after its release). These moments of guesswork were also nowhere near as exciting as actually figuring out who died where and why, and those topmen weren’t the only people I found myself having to guess for.

Another gripe I need to voice is that everyone who ended up surviving the cursed voyage ends up in the same place, but the game offers like six different possible locations for them all. Seems odd to make that a choice at all. There should have either been multiple destinations for them, or this "feature" should have been removed.

 

My personal favorite moment in this wonderfully unique game was having to figure out who died on a certain lifeboat way off in the distance of one of the death scenes, since zooming in on them did not pull them up in the journal, as zooming in on a closer character would have done. Unlike most detective games, Return of the Obra Dinn supplied many eureka moments that felt earned rather than handed out. That alone is worth an appearance on this list, though personal taste and some distasteful moments dictate it landing at #6.

5. Mass Effect Trilogy (2007, 2010, 2012)

 

Yeah, I’m cheating. The remade trilogy doesn’t come out until May 2021. I still played all three of these games last year with tons of mods all the way through. They still hold up after my nostalgia-goggle-donning experiences back in the Xbox 360 days. They, in a first for the industry, carry player choices and the consequences of those choices between all three games. That is the defining feature of BioWare's magnum opus. So, here’s a mini-ranked list right in the middle of our bigger list.

           

3. The third installment is my least favorite but has the best gameplay of the bunch. The ending is just such a let-down after so much good build-up. Many of the missions in this one are fantastic, but our choices don’t matter one bit in the end. Sure, you get a different slideshow now, as of the “We are Embarrassed by the Original Ending, so Sorry; Here’s a PowerPoint Presentation” DLC, but it’s still inexcusable. And you simply choose an ending at the end, as far too many games have done. They should’ve just confirmed the Indoctrination Theory in DLC because it would’ve made a smidge of sense, as opposed to the utter bullshit the player finds on the Catalyst. Choices in virtual RPGs are often illusions compared to their tabletop counterparts, or at least only lead down one of two paths, but ME3 takes that to a whole new level. All I have to say about the “choices” you have in this game: yikes. The RPG parts all but completely ripped from its DNA, ME3 is a disappointment that did admittedly have great mechanics and fantastic multiplayer. The multiplayer did, however, popularize the horrid business practice of lootboxes. Without so much interference from EA, and with more time to finish an RPG where player choices actually impacted the ending, ME3 could have become an all-time classic and a fitting end to one of my favorite gaming trilogies. Instead, it permanently fumbled the ball at the goal line. A shame.

 

TWO Shepards. Image credit here

2. With the best balance between shooter and RPG elements in the trilogy, Mass Effect 2 manages to sturdily span the gap between ME1 and ME3 while introducing great loyalty missions that bring Commander Shepard closer to their crew. These culminate in one of the best finale sequences of any video game, one that so wonderfully reflects the potential of RPGs to have dozens of consequences for player dialogue and actions. With the removal of planetary exploration and many RPG elements, though, I felt a little more disconnected from the Commander, more like watching a movie and less like being the Commander themself. Herself, in my 2020 case, if you were wondering. I’m in the camp that Jennifer Hale plays a better paragon and Mark Meer a better Renegade, but Renegade Shep is just weird. In Mass Effect, you can either be a galactic savior or a galactic savior who is an occasionally murderous asshole. Binary choice in this trilogy is not one of its strong suits, but ME2 still allows you to feel connected to the choices you do make, and not all of them are black-and-white. The ending of Tali’s loyalty mission comes to mind. Shoutout to the Sunry quest in KOTOR – Bioware seems to have a knack for morally ambiguous trial quests. Much of the “streamlining” that was done between the original and this title removed features wholesale. The Mako’s removal meant that the feeling of galactic exploration was gone, replaced by a painfully boring planet scan mechanic, and the removal of the inventory makes the galaxy’s small arms armament feel painfully tiny. ME2 walks the tightrope between old-school RPG and new-school shooter “action adventure” where you occasionally make a number get bigger.

 

Ah, yes. "Reapers."

1. Mass Effect 1 is one of the best virtual RPGs ever, and I’ll stand by that. One could perhaps argue that RPGs have not yet lived up to their potential, of course, and that’s why you’re finding this trilogy in the middle of my list. The class and origin system get the player to feel more connected with the Commander and yet still get us into the action with relatively minor story changes. The game still does a great job of introducing or altering content based on these choices. Saren is hands-down the best villain in the series, a fallen hero with understandable, dare I say "human" motivations. Mass Effect 1 evokes feelings in me that can’t really be put into words. Magic is the closest word I’ve got. The magic of exploring the galaxy, finding flora, fauna, and skyboxes that fill one with awe… feeling like a human explorer caught on various hostile alien worlds, threatened with the rumblings of an ancient machine race hell-bent on wiping out all organic life… forging connections with your crew… feeling like a proper battlefield commander with one of the only RPG + real-time systems I’ve found that works, where you can pause to give orders to squadmates… Mass Effect does all of these things with all the poise and grace you can expect from a game this old… which is to say, not a ton, but more than you’d expect, given its release date. The Codex entries and planet descriptions on the galaxy map do so much for immersion, to further that magic. The unique skybox of each planet visited on the Mako never fails to make me feel like an interplanetary explorer. The aforementioned moral choice system is the singular major issue I have with ME1. Another minor gripe I have is with the relatively tedious inventory system and the lack of cooler weapon models toward the end of the game, with each kind of firearm having only two actual variants and dozens of paint jobs. Still, I’m very attached to this game, and I’d recommend it to any shooter or RPG fan, or anyone that wants to explore space as a semi-believable badass.

 

4. Skate 2 (2009)

 

I wanted to rank this one higher for the funnies of making a 2009 release my 2020 GOTY, but I can’t in good conscience rank it above what you’ll see below. But, damn, EA. What happened to you? This game is amazing! This is back when you made games that deserved to sell well by their mechanics and not just supposedly addicting snorefests designed more to charge credit cards than to engage the player.

 

It’s just… fun! Nonstop skating action, high-speed, high-skill fliptricks, body flips, tweaked air grabs, tweaked grinds, dope gaps, fun races, and sick contests against solid skaters. Now, if any of that lingo annoys you, just imagine the game itself. I played a bunch of Tony Hawk titles with my cousins, and this game blows them all out of the water, to the point that my brother and I sunk countless hours into this title in 2020. We loved just about every minute, minus a few annoyingly hard-to-land tricks, some technical hiccups, and a few lame story challenges. We’ve got an ever-growing collection of clips on our old Xbox 360. Here's my personal favorite, a cell phone recording of a TV, in true 2009 fashion:

The elusive Crail to Tailwalk backflip. Don't mind Zelda chomping on a chew toy in the background.

The parks are the big draw of this one compared to Skate 3, which might edge out 2 in terms of mechanics but just doesn’t have that many sweet spots to skate sesh compared to its predecessor. The only park I enjoy in 3 is the Super-Ultra-Megapark. Now, in 2, you’ve got Danny Way’s Megaramp and park, but my experience there is mostly just doing the Megaramp and the ramp after it before resetting to the top. And there’s S.V. Stadium, the craziest place to land insanely huge air tricks, like the clip above. The Fun Track is really fun, as you'd expect. The Boneyard has the best rail in the game and a dope half-pipe, along with a couple spots to get crazy big air.

 

My personal favorite, though, is the Monster Clubhouse. At first, I felt ripped off for my $200K of virtual cash. But once I did the challenge hosted there, I was blown away by how cohesive and incredible the park was. See, I had been skating it wrong. I tried to go up and around rather than down, like a fool. The contest event at this park showed me to the top of the ramp that I at first thought was just a weird decoration. The top is a perfect place to put a marker down, land a body flip, and go on to shred four awesome tiers of props to grind, air, and plant on as you make your way down to a halfpipe with a bowl before warping back to the top.

 

Just hours and hours of landing sweeter and sweeter tricks. A great experience. Definitely recommend trying it if you have even the faintest interest in skating. Please note, I do not have even an inkling of an iota of interest in skateboarding. I merely have the memory of renting this game and then buying it because the mechanics are just that good, just that fun to learn and execute. My only big complaint there is that too many fliptrick inputs are too similar, which is a bit of a downer. Throwing in more fighting game inputs like dragon punch motions and so on would have been better (in my opinion) than making a hair’s breadth be the difference between a Laser Flip, a Hardflip, and a Shuvit.

 

The other, smaller complaint I have is that, mechanically speaking, your player character and many other skaters are invincible superheroes that can use the Force to pull their board into their hand from anywhere in the world, teleport at will, use super-strength to move even the heaviest of objects, and never get hurt for longer than the fall takes. But the story itself doesn’t play this up at all, which would have added some much-needed spice to some very boring writing. It also leads to some weird moments where Reda, your cameraman, says stupid shit like “Oh my God… I think we need an ambulance,” when your invincible super-skater trips over a bush and scrapes a knee before teleporting back to the spot where they fell. In true EA fashion, the game’s writing is clearly based in asking 6 different committees to survey skaters in order to understand their alien language. Another result of these linguistic committees is that many of the challenges have nearly incomprehensible requirements if you’re not versed in the lingo. Oh, and most (not all) NPCs called my female skater “man” and used he/him pronouns. This led me to believe that she is trans as a slightly better alternative to EA giving that little of a shit about women playing their games.

 

Still, Skate 2 remains a dark horse classic, a remnant of brighter days for the video game industry, and a reminder that mechanics are still king.

 

3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012)

I wasn’t sure I played this title in 2020, but there you go. Love me a good technicality. My first playthrough was on the vanilla game, and I played it again in January with the DLC installed. Both experiences were great, and though I was happy to experience the base game, I’d recommend jumping in with the full package. I’m glad I did technically play XCOM: EU last year, because it means I get to talk about it here.

 

Do you like Fire Emblem as much as I do? If so, you’ll love XCOM. The gameplay is very similar – turn-based, grid-based combat with varied unit types to play as and against. Comparable to chess with swords and Pegasi or guns and aliens. XCOM is a departure from the fantasy continents of Fire Emblem, a series that must exist on a planet at least fifteen times the size of Earth with how many continent-spanning wars we’ve seen from Nintendo’s strategy RPG series. XCOM: EU tells a similar story to the original XCOM, an alien invasion of Earth with a global response force. Firaxis definitely gets points for not just calling this reboot "XCOM" like many companies would have. This title has modernized features like… well, 3D models, for one.

 

It’s an experience that I think will hold up to the test of time much better than its already-forgotten original, with many of the same puzzle pieces in place. Procedurally-generated human heroes fight on the front lines against an alien invasion. Though everyone in the vanilla game talks in an American accent and there are only voiceovers for roughly half the languages that your troops would speak in the DLC, it’s beyond easy to get attached to the characters the game produces for you.

 

How could I forget Colonel Kim of Korea, gifted with psionic abilities in addition to her medical prowess, or Sassoon and Owen of Enemy Within, who sacrificed their bodies for humanity, losing limbs to become machines of war, named for my two favorite WWI soldier-poets? My French sniper landing that 30% shot to save my Nigerian heavy trooper is burned into my brain forever, as is Ashley Williams (so named for her voice actress’s Mass Effect character) running behind enemy lines to blast gray after gray in the face with her shotgun, singlehandedly clearing several city blocks. All of these troops allowed missions to tell stories just through gameplay. And that’s something truly special, not often done in the medium of video games. Ocarina of Time is the first that comes to mind; expect a full breakdown of that from me in the future.

 

XCOM does this storytelling-through-gameplay in a unique way. Battles play out in individualized and intriguing ways, using excellent procedural generation balanced with set design elements. Moments like using an explosive to destroy a wall, giving your immobile sniper a sightline to an enemy that’s about to kill a friendly unit, are wonderful to think up and to see play out. The game fosters attachments to procedurally-generated troops and then can kill them off if you fail to command them as effectively as you can… or to save-scum.

 

Mechanically speaking, XCOM turns turn-based combat, which often feels stiff, unresponsive, and unrealistic, into a tactical war. Sure, there are weird moments like melee-focused aliens running right up to someone and then staring at them while waiting to get shot. But the Overwatch ability, which allows a troop to take a turn preparing to fire (at a reduced accuracy, which unlike Fire Emblem is actually a percentage instead of dice rolls disguised as percentages) at anything that moves… this ability allows soldiers to feel more engaged, even on the enemy’s turn. In many SRPGs, most units (especially enemy units) will simply stand still and wait to get hit before returning the favor. XCOM allows for turn-based, strategy-focused gameplay that feels fluid and unpredictable, more like a real war than any competitor that I’ve tried, including Fire Emblem, Wargroove, and this game's rather disappointing sequels.

 

And I haven’t even mentioned the intensely interesting decision-making that happens back at base in this one, like research and unit promotions. The progression from terrified resistance group to psionic band of heavily-armed badasses is exceedingly satisfying. If you’ve never played XCOM and you have even a passing interest in strategy games, give this one a try.

2. Portal (2007)

Another technicality.

This seems a short PLAY TIME for one of my favorite games of all time, but I’ve beaten it a good five times now, maybe more. A few times back on The Orange Box, and now three definitive times on PC. A little under two hours: all the time Valve needed to give us a mind-bending puzzling experience, rooted in understanding an intuitive physics engine and coming up with clever solutions to the game’s presented problems. It’s utterly flawless, just as long as it needs to be, perfect from start to finish… overdone community memes notwithstanding.

 

Portal’s been dissected to death by countless people, and for good reason. I have very little that I could add to the conversation this late in the game. It’s short but oh so sweet, an all-time classic which I hope will be preserved until our civilization is nothing but ruins for an alien species to dissect. Someone, anyone, please put a working copy of this game in your fallout shelter.

1. Spelunky 2 (2020)

 

I didn’t play all that many new releases this year. It’d be nuts to rank this above Portal all-time, but I promised bonus points for coming out in 2020. And it certainly gave me much more value per hours played if you’re a fan of using that metric. It’s all the more impressive that something like this masterpiece came out during an international quarantine. It quickly became one of my all-time favorites, at any rate.

 

The original (Spelunky “Classic,” which I did a few runs of before wanting desperately to go back to 2) was a free treasure-hunting roguelike platformer designed ingeniously by Derek Yu and his devilish algorithms to always have a path to the level’s exit, but plenty of risk and reward for those who tread away from that critical path, and plenty of random elements to keep things fresh from run to run. This design endures all the way to 2020 with the game’s first proper sequel. Spelunky HD certainly feels like one, but it’s “just” a remake of Classic. All three titles use a formula that ensures that the player will have to master mechanics and make decisions on the fly rather than just memorizing enemy locations and level layouts. It feels like anything can happen, for better or for worse. Sometimes, Lord Derek will bestow upon you two Kali altars and Climbing Gloves before you've even fought the boss of World 1. Sometimes, you get no bombs for the entire run and die to a Rube Goldberg machine of enemies flying into each other and eventually your character.

 

Spelunky 2 has an interesting gaming taxonomy. Obviously, it borrows heavily from HD and therefore from Classic, with Derek’s original spelunking formula now fine-tuned to perfection. We've got the ledges and now in the sequel, the platforms from Smash, in addition to unique stuff like ropes and bombs and a selection of roguelike items which unfortunately hasn't gotten much bigger since Classic. With a little of Rogue and a lot of Mario in its DNA, Spelunky 2 offers incredibly fluid and tight controls, and ensures that each run has meaning, even if you die. There’s always something to learn. For example, getting your electronic backpack on fire is a good way to lose 11 HP. Don’t fall on spikes unless you’ve got a means of slowing down your fall, like a Turkey or Cape’s glide ability. Ropes that fall all the way to the ground work, too, as does crawling off a ledge that’s close enough to the spikes. Don’t step on the Octopy enemy if you don’t have shoes, and using the Spike Shoes to do so will actually kill them. Don’t go to the Temple of Anubis unless you want to unlock the characters on that route because DAMN, is that world way harder than the Tide Pool.

 

Spelunky 2 offers choices in the worlds you explore, from 1-1 to 7-4. Five worlds have four levels a la Super Mario Bros. on the NES (that’s why I call them “worlds” and not “biomes” or whatever). The Ice Caves have been streamlined into being 5-1 before you go on to 6-1, after just one level. There’s an extra-special secret challenge for god gamers who ascend past the final “final” boss if my counting has thrown you and you don’t know about a certain Ocean.

 

I spoiled a fair bit of the game for myself by watching gameplay before getting into it, and I imagine that the feeling of discovery for the first players who got their hands on this game was pretty awesome. I didn’t at all mind being relatively prepared for some of the later areas and challenges, though, and World 7 remained a mystery to me until I got there. Many worlds do return direct from Spelunky 1, looking rather similar to their Spelunky HD variants, especially the Jungle. Hell has been tweaked, moved from a final secret challenge to one chosen world 2, and renamed Volcana. On a related note, this game kicks your ass through your skull at every opportunity. It’s one of the most difficult singleplayer games I’ve ever played.

 

But that's honestly a big part of what makes Spelunky 2 so engaging and absorbing. The challenges are ever-shifting, slightly different from all of your other runs, always difficult to overcome, and all the more satisfying for it. You don’t make progress by getting far and hitting checkpoints. You make progress by learning and later executing. Over my 100+ hours with Spelunky 2, I’ve learned about which rewards are worth which risks, about how to navigate common room layouts, about how to deal with enemies and bosses, about how to progress the game’s secret questlines. Once all the pieces come together, and you kick the game back, whether just beating the leader of the cavemen in 1-4 or beating the final challenge Spelunky 2 has to offer… I can think of few better feelings in all of gaming. Defeating a close rival in a fighting game is about all that comes to mind.

 

Not many GOTY lists for 2020 that I’ve seen online highlight Spelunky 2, and that’s flat-out robbery. I’m sure Hades is good too, but I prefer roguelikes vastly over roguelites. The difficulty curve goes up rather than down in a proper roguelike, a genre I was previously unacquainted with. Spelunky 2 was just about the best introduction I could have asked for. Don’t let yourself be put off by a good challenge. Overcoming the thousands of challenges this game throws at you is intensely rewarding, and the game is a ton of fun even before you git gud.

 

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Hit me up and play co-op Spelunky 2 with me sometime. Stay tuned to this blog for more general gaming content. Follow my work at Esports Talk. And sub to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/cmcneil, where I've begun to post my poems, short stories, and lyric essays. Here’s to better days ahead of us. I plan to use this blog in the future as a space to post stray thoughts about games that don't fit in on Esports Talk, as well as posting Patreon posts about a month or so after Patrons get to see them... or maybe just the poems. We'll see.

Memories of Mike Valley, Meditation, and Ruminations on the Competitive Ego

Starting this back up again. Writing is what I want to do with my life, so I might as well write, right? I never finished that piece about yomi I promised at the end of two blogposts ago, since I think David Sirlin said it better than I could hope to. I felt embarrassed enough about not updating that I embarrassingly stopped trying altogether even though it was pulling decent STATS for a blog. I almost failed stats a few years back, and motivation has been tight nowadays too. Writing seems nonviable. Do we still read? Are virtual reading and writing even worthwhile? If you want to help answer these questions by encouraging this kind of content creation and have money to spare, please consider donating a little of it to me. I have student debt to pay off and rent to pay, and though I continue applying to various journalism, editing, and content creation jobs, and continue working for DoorDash in the meantime, money is very tight right now. But I want to produce rather than just consume. The blog is just a start, pure writing, but I plan on making videos too. I don’t know if they’ll purely be about Smash, granted, but I need to do something creative or this quarantine will drive me completely insane. I’ve been plugging away at a book, too, but everyone knows that getting published is pretty difficult, let alone having a significant number of people actually buy the book, let alone read it all the way through. It’s not a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, poems, and essays loosely centered on… reconnecting with Nature, let’s say. Writing brings me fulfillment, but it doesn’t pay the bills, for now – and it won’t without support. Stay tuned for more updates about the book.

Anyway, because the grass is always greener somewhere else and nostalgia easily lets us slip into memory, COVID-19 as me reflecting on my favorite in-person Melee tournaments. One of these was Penn State’s Mike Valley, which took place in September of 2019.

The night before the tournament, I got roughly three hours of sleep. I woke up at just about quarter to 6 AM after going to bed around 2, having tossed and turned for a while before finally drifting off. I made the mistake of hitting a nicotine vape for the first time before our local Pittsburgh weekly, which took place the night before the tournament in question. The owner of said vape was sick, but I’m choosing to blame the sickness which followed on the nicotine and plan on staying away from that particular drug for the rest of my life. At any rate, I woke up way too early and was way too sick.

I considered skipping Mike Valley that morning. I’m very glad that I didn’t.

Part of my motivation for still going was not wanting to let my teammate, Sp1nda, down. That part didn’t end up mattering.

We got a flat tire about twenty minutes away from the venue and were disqualified from doubles. That’s probably the reason I did so well in singles. Well, not necessarily just missing doubles, though that did help me avoid burning out. The flat tire gave me time to meditate in the grass on the side of the road as my friends changed the tire together.

“Meditation” is a bit of a tricky word, as in my experience it means a kind of inner wordlessness – a way of letting my internal dialogue give way to an acute awareness of the senses. So how to explain what is unexplainable in words? It’s steeped in mysticism and is slowly being co-opted by companies that push meditation as a way of INCREASING YOUR PRODUCTIVITY or some such nonsense. But in the words of philosopher Alan Watts, “if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you've got your eye on the future and you are not meditating.”

True meditation is pure presence in the present, the only real time. When it was “the past,” it was now then. When tomorrow arrives, that will be today, will also be right now, just as it always will be, though century continues to follow century. And once you realize that the past and future don’t exist and never will exist, you can have a blast remembering the past and planning for the future – this just comes with renewed understanding that it always has been and always will be right now. Even if you reminisce on the past or plan for the future, you’re doing that in the present. There’s no escaping the present, but acceptance of it and total presence in it brings comfort and inner peace.

I was able to find that pure presence here and now back then, on the side of the road, while Luke & Laurel changed the tire. I just listened to the cars go by. I just watched the trees wave to me in the wind. I let the chattering voices inside my skull take a backseat to what was seen, what was heard, what was felt, like the pinpoint of skin touching skin where forefinger brushed against thumb and the comfortable clothes covering this body. In this state, I could just be – no more, no less, fully here and now.

I don’t know how long it took to change the tire. But when we were moving again, I felt wide awake.

When we arrived, I had a bit of trouble finding friendlies. See, I still prefer to use vanilla inputs, and only some of the setups at Mike Valley had the Slippi port-toggle mod for UCF that lets players opt out. I think that should’ve been an option from the very first release of UCF, since it’s pretty obviously the best compromise between vanilla and UCF, but whatever. I eventually played a few games with a Falco on the Slippi setup I’d brought and was feeling good about my movement & combo game.

That’s the best thing to get hype about, in my opinion – not wins and losses. Results in Melee can only emerge from individual interactions. As much as people talk up the consistency of the game – that is, where the “better player” will usually win – no one is safe from losing individual interactions, and these can build up into stocks and therefore entire games. Even if you get demolished, there are (usually) things you did right, things to keep in the gameplan, and there are always things that can be improved, at least until we sacrifice ourselves to the machine gods and all become TASBot incarnate.

This drive to improve has been the case with the beatings that Ganondorf (a Pittsburgh Fox player with an absolutely horrible gamertag) has dished out to my Ice Climbers. He plays the matchup so efficiently that the final match of my pool, against Zealot, a solid Fox from Colorado, wasn’t as out-of-reach as I had assumed it was – Ganondorf had left me well-prepared. In an admittedly sloppy set on both sides, I was able to clutch out games 1 and 3 with some well-timed grabs and solid use of my shield and out-of-shield options against Zealot’s pressure. Immediately after the set, I went back and fist-bumped Ganondorf, thanking him for all the Fox practice.

I remember a few of my social interactions that day. One involved sitting outside of a local Sheetz with Shnack Wrapz in hand, shooting the shit with Luke and Laurel. Another involved talking with Polish about his set with JJM. Polish won but played very sloppy, leaving the set too close for comfort. I tried to communicate what I wrote above and will write below about meditation, about focusing purely on the actions and interactions at hand. My voice was close to gone by that point, but I like to think my reminders that all we can control in Melee are the individual interactions that go into settling games were well-received, since Polish seemed to greatly clean up his play for the rest of the day. As an aside, watching him get better has been a joy that culminated in assuring him that his nerves and somewhat-below-his-potential play against Nintendude at Smashcon 2019 were good enough to get top 6 at a national, which is impressive in its own right.

Anyway, back to ME. After getting past a player named Greasy as my first match in bracket, my next test came in the form of Panos, a good Falcon player from New Jersey. The set came down to my solo Popo against his last stock. The set wasn’t recorded, unfortunately, but the final game was on Dreamland, and ended with a tech-chase into a downsmash that left him offstage, just far enough away that I was able to secure the set with a simple roll edgehog. I pumped my fist and bumped his.

Having already far exceeded my expectations of myself, I was perfectly fine with losing to Juicebox’s Sheik. He played the matchup well, switching between platform-hopping and efficient Nana-killing. Normally, after a loss, I get all huffy and puffy and blow off steam outside the venue, but on that day, I just accepted the loss and started getting ready for my losers’ bracket matches. This is the way I’ve been striving to lose since then. It’s hard to control the salt, sometimes, especially if an opponent seems less interested in interactive gameplay than they are in perfecting the “optimal” flowchart. But it helps no one to get upset about a loss, least of all yourself.

My first match in losers’ was against Nagy, a Marth who got fairly salty after the set about all the wobbling that came his way. As I said, I understand. Getting hit by an infinite is never fun, but at any rate, I moved on and he did not. He later apologized for the salt, demonstrating more maturity than I have at various points in my Melee career.

My favorite set of the day came in the next round, losers’ octofinals, against JJM, a fellow Ice Climbers main. The first game was hilarious in that it had the maximum possible amount of wobbles that could happen in a single game of one-on-one Melee – seven in a row, leaving only one stock un-wobbled, and that happened to be me. We shared a chuckle after I turned to him and said that I was pretty sure every stock ended with a wobble. There were less infinites in the games that followed, and even that game was extremely engaging and interactive, at least in the realm of the neutral game.

See, I’ve always had a little trouble with the ICs ditto – the general neutral game mixups are generally as follows: wavedash in and smash attack to get them to shield, wavedash in and grab (ICs backthrow is probably the best throw in the game at splitting up their fellow climbers since it has a hitbox well-suited to doing so and will often trigger the invisible ceiling glitch to boot, which will lead to a guaranteed knockdown if the backup climber is grabbed) to beat the shield, stay back and throw ice, or fair over their desyncs. There’s a bit of rock-paper-scissors to those options, complemented by the yomi level 0, defined here as waiting to anti-air the fair approaches or to jump over their wavedash in. But the scramble situations are where the matchup becomes extremely difficult. In-close, it can be hard to adapt on the fly, to pick the right option at the right time.

This particular set was back-and-forth until the very end, where my solo Popo went up against his pair of climbers. I was able to break out of his final grab attempt since his backup climber dashed past us. I then quickly dispatched his backup with a well-timed spotdodge, grab, anti-air upsmash, and landing punish, leaving me with a percent lead going into our last one-on-one fight. A frantic scramble of spotdodges and smash attacks took place, which I ended by waiting out the last one and grabbing JJM. He broke out of my grab, we scrambled again, and I ended the set with one last spotdodge into downsmash followed up by an easy edgeguard to seal the set.

I said, “Great set!” while pounding my opponent’s fist. Even had I lost, I like to think I’d have set the same thing, or at least something similar. Polish is my inspiration here – it seems that whenever he wins, like he did against Nintendude, he feels like he played terrible, and when he loses, he feels like he played the best Melee of his life. Though I won, my set with JJM was certainly some of the best Melee I’ve ever played – back and forth, near equal skill, hype scrambles, entertaining situations, and well-executed gameplans, all leading to an exciting finish.

To embrace irony and talk purely about results, I was able to pull through in the end, and my reward was a set against Peach player Wally – and that matchup is notoriously terrible for our character. I kept that set respectable, managing to bring game five to a last-stock situation, but in technicality only since my Nana was already gone. Oh well – out at fifth. I’m far from a pro, but I look back on my play that day with fondness.

The main point I want to draw from these experiences is the way that one’s ego can interfere with playing one’s best. My ego was quiet that day, since it had low expectations going in. Normally, I place far too much thought into what it would be like to win or lose, on how my friends, opponents, and naysayers would react to the result. In the heat of the moment, this can be devastating for one’s play. The ego and the linguistic part of our minds are not particularly helpful during competition. At least, that’s the way it is for me. I’m sure there are people who can have effective internal dialogues (“They use X option in Y situation, so next time I’ll use Z to counter that”) but that’s not the way my brain usually works. For example, in my hazy, tired state, part of what was going through my head during my Zealot set was a particular lyric from Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” … for some reason. I had been listening to it often for the week or two before the tournament, and so, over and over, “I'm tryna keep my faith / But I'm looking for more / Somewhere I can feel safe / And end my holy war” repeated in my mind, but I was able to mostly ignore this in favor of pulling my consciousness back to what my hands needed to do.

These kinds of internal distractions can be extremely annoying, and so we return to meditation. “Meditation,” in the history of our language, has meant at certain points in time “to ponder a particular thing” – to meditate on something. Anyone who actually practices meditation would find this rather confusing – we don’t meditate on anything; we just meditate. The “flow state” is another word for this kind of meditation, though that term mostly comes up in the context of competition. To flow in this way is to simply execute one’s strategies to the best of one’s ability, to not get bogged down in internal conversations, to simply allow thoughts to flow away, consciousness coming back to what needs doing – focus purely on the actions. If you think about not-thinking, that’ll only make it worse. To aid in this discipline, I recommend breathing exercises. Just watch the breath, gently pulling conscious attention back to the rhythm of breathing in… holding it… and letting it go. Thoughts will pop up; that’s perfectly okay. Just bring it back to the breath each time this happens. Over time, it will be easier and easier to let thought take a backseat to the meditative focus, whether that’s breath or Melee or whatever’s on your plate.

To quote one of my favorite figures from “real” sports, Pittsburgh Steelers legend Troy Polamalu, with the word “football” omitted twice, “I think there comes a point in a game where you’re not really cognitively thinking… you just kinda see the way that everything develops… and the more and more you play the game, the more and more you have this sensitivity [to] the rhythm of the game.”

This, I think, is applicable to just about every competition. I think that getting gradually better at reading the rhythm of the game is something which happens in everything from football to hockey to Counter-Strike to fighting games. Melee is perhaps the most rhythmic of all one-on-one competitive games. It’s a complex dance as much as it is a fight, with the players’ inputs and subsequent characters’ sounds often matching the rhythms of the songs in the background. For example, watch this combo against Taki, then just listen to it with your eyes closed, and then watch it again, hopefully seeing and (more importantly) hearing what I mean:

Side note: that's the craziest combo I've ever done. Main note: once you start hearing matching character-music rhythms like this, you'll notice them all over competitive Melee.

To flow in Melee is to feel this rhythm, to tap into it, to delay one’s attacks long enough to be unexpected, to dashdance and wavedash and perform combinations of moves as well as one has practiced. Or, really, oftentimes, to flow in Melee is to play like it’s a friendly. Every tournament player knows tournament nerves, the inexplicable shift in one’s actions that comes with knowing that pride and money are on the line.

The best players don’t get bogged down by this. They’ve played in enough tournaments, have been exposed to those nerves enough times that their execution is not hampered significantly… at least until it’s game five, last stock, high percent. No one is immune to these nerves, but there are ways around it. For me, at Mike Valley, the way was getting sick thanks to hitting a friend’s vape and not getting any sleep and meditating while my friends changed a flat tire. During the tournament, my ego was mostly silent and my characters were able to dance as if all my matches were friendly.

Maybe all it takes is remembering that nothing’s really on the line other than your entry fee. “It’s just a game,” after all. We are small parts of eternity, each one of us.

This is our divinity and our mortality, our reason to play our best and to be unconcerned with the ultimate outcome. Countless years preceded us; countless years will follow us. But we are lucky enough to be in a now which features Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube. Talk to your friends afterward all you like about your sets, but humble that pride, even if you just won a major. It’s just a silly party game made for children in 2001, after all. But in this silly party game is the potential for a complex dance of characters, strategies, defense, offense, and nearly-infinite situations. What it takes to get to the next level is simply playing your best in all of the situations you can, not letting a few nagging neurons get in the way of what must be done onscreen, onstage, in-character.