This Week In Retro: 2022 (Patreon)

2022: Surviving the new normal

by Diamond Feit

After two years of what felt like non-stop chaos, including global viral outbreaks, economic upheaval, and a presidential election which took weeks (and one armed insurrection) to decide, I must reluctantly admit that 2022 felt depressingly normal. I had no wacky adventures this year or horrible failures. I neither lost nor found any new jobs. If the concept of living our lives as COVID-19 looms over us all doesn't strike terror into your heart, then my 2022 contains no shocking stories for the history books.

The wildest experience I had all year just kind of happened by accident: I started catching up on films over the New Year's break (a lengthy period in Japan as many businesses close for days) and before I knew it I had managed to watch a movie every single day in 2022. I convinced myself this mini-streak mattered and that I must keep it going for the rest of the year, which I did. In fact, thanks to a few airplane flights and double features, I actually managed to watch 370 films in 365 days.

While I am happy to devote time in this column to the cinema when necessary, I won't break down the movies I watched in 2022 because my focus in these pages has always been interactive fiction. I'm sorry to say I did not play 370 video games in 2022—hell by my count I only managed to touch 69* games this year—but I believe there are lessons to be learned by looking back at the last 12 months through my time spent with a controller, mouse, or smartphone in my hands.

I stumbled into my first major gaming experience of 2022 purely by chance when I spotted a booster pack of Magic: The Gathering cards in a 7-11. A friend had introduced me to the collectible card game back in the mid-90s and I ended up spending thousands of dollars on cards and accessories before I divested myself of my entire collection a decade later. The last thing I wanted was to reignite a costly addiction but the strategic and creative aspects of Magic still struck me as appealing. A helpful tip from my pal (and MTG expert) Eric pointed me towards Magic: The Gathering Arena, a free-to-play digital version of the card game that enabled me to, as he put it, "scratch the itch" without so much as wounding my wallet.

After a few initial fumblings and reading about all the new rules I'd never heard of (Decay? Scry? Planeswalkers?), I won my first game on January 3 and playing MTG Arena quickly became a daily ritual for me. With no papers or dice to worry about, I could get in a match sitting at home on my couch just as easily as I could riding the monorail to work. Arena gives players an array of free starter decks to play with and regularly hands out packs of new cards, both in exchange for virtual gold or simply as a reward for scoring a victory.

The nature of digital distribution means that Arena can introduce new sets of cards every few months. This allows the Standard format to change multiple times throughout the year, preventing the game from becoming stale as older cards cycle out of rotation. Arena doesn't erase old cards from my inventory as other formats allow players to choose from a larger library of past releases, but given how I play the game, a new set serves as the perfect excuse to simply move on and try to make new decks with new creatures, spells, and combinations thereof.

Having perpetual access to an ever-growing collection of cards and the ability to play against people 24/7 certainly scratched an itch, but the always-available status of Magic: The Gathering Arena also unlocked a problem. As a card-based game, much of the outcome of any Magic contest is determined solely by the draw each player gets from their deck. You can have the perfect opening hand but if you lack the proper mana resources to cast those spells, you'll never win. The opposite is also true: If your opponent gets the right sequence of cards in their opening hand, you'll never win. The more time I spent playing Magic, the more I opened myself to bouts of inconsolable rage if I had a run of bad luck as all this comes down to random chance. Few things feel worse than spending my commute being slapped around by internet strangers before I'm supposed to perform my job, and a string of losses with my patience already short after a long day of work can lead to me screaming at the sky.

Another find in January turned into a year-long obsession as I caught the buzz surrounding a Steam Early Access title called Vampire Survivors. I kept seeing tweets and Twitch streams featuring tiny characters mowing down screen-filling waves of monsters. One session of the free demo on itch.io convinced me to pony up for the "full" version, and in a flash I was hooked.

Considering the amount of press Vampire Survivors has gotten in the subsequent months, it's unlikely I can sell you on the game if you haven't already tried it for yourself. It's certainly one of those things that no amount of promotional images or videos can convince you is worth your time; the pixel art is detailed but crudely animated, the flat stages stretch infinitely in every direction, and with automated offense you can play the game with just one stick (or a fingertip on mobile).

The magic of Vampire Survivors lies in its distillation of a complete, rewarding video game experience into a compact 30 minute session. Each time you play, your character begins with a single weapon to fend off the hordes. As you pick off the first few creatures, you gain XP and level up, earning an upgrade. Everything in Vampire Survivors is random, so your initial find could be a new weapon, a new power, or a new level for your current weapon. Choosing which enhancements to accept and which to pass on makes all the difference in building up your character and surviving the later, stronger enemies that follow as time advances. By minute 30, you're dealing out massive damage to all comers and seem nigh invincible, right up until the Grim Reaper appears and kills you in one hit. Game Over, want to try again? You will, repeatedly, and you'll enjoy the loop every time.

I've been reluctant to invest in Early Access games in the past as I selfishly felt a game should be "finished" before I spend money on it. Yet in today's marketplace, few games are ever "finished" upon release, as patches and DLC have become commonplace for even tiny, single-player games. By hopping on the Vampire Survivors train in its Beta state, I've had the privilege of playing the game as the creator expanded the original premise ten-fold, adding not only new characters and weapons, but also permanent upgrades and abilities that endure beyond a single session.

As of this writing, Vampire Survivors has been officially "released" on Steam and is included on Microsoft's Game Pass, which means yes, I absolutely downloaded it again on my Xbox to get all the achievements a second time. The game has also done so well, you can see dozens of copycat titles on the Steam store now, most of which simply replace the word "Vampire" in the title with another noun. I don't fault other developers for trying to iterate upon success (I can recommend 20 Minutes Until Dawn and Her Name Was Fire) but since I put so many hours into Vampire Survivors, Steam has a nasty habit of recommending every single knock-off whenever I open the app. I'm a complex and nuanced person, I don't salivate over a video game just because of a word in the title—but if I did, that word would be Vampire, not Survivors.

Even if I spent the largest percentage of my gaming time playing titles that either cost nothing or very little, I certainly made an effort to invest in new hardware this year. I know supply issues have plagued the PlayStation 5 since launch, but I assure you, the state of the market in Japan is worse than it is in any Western nation. At least overseas you have Wario64 and PlayStation Direct as potential sources for getting your hands on a console. No such luck for me, as few Japanese retailers even carry the PS5 and those that do will only sell it to card-carrying members of their store's loyalty program. As much as I enjoy upgrading my hardware, I'm not willing to apply for a new credit card just to do so.

The only other option I had was to periodically scan the few outlets that didn't require opening a credit line and apply for their lottery drawings; every six weeks or so I would open an app, throw my name into a virtual hat, and hope that fortune might smile upon me. Well in July of 2022 fate finally found me a PlayStation 5 as I got the phone call I had been waiting for (thank you, GEO). Funnily enough, in order to discourage scalpers from selling "new" consoles online, I had to open the box in front of the clerk and draw a big black X on the inner wrapping. If I had wanted to make a quick buck, however, no amount of hand-written letters would prevent a third-party from snatching up my already-open PS5 at well above retail price.

But no, I didn't spend two years of my life entering lottery after lottery for the opportunity to pay 50,000 yen in the hopes of making a meager profit. I legit wanted a PlayStation 5 and so far, it lives up to the hype. I immediately invested in the highest possible tier of PlayStation Plus which I think is called "premium" but don't quote me on that. Whatever its branding, I gained instant access to a slew of popular PS5 games along with a smattering of PS3 games via streaming and a select few PS1 and 2 games via emulation. If my console is capable of handling software from the previous four PlayStations I sincerely wish I could just insert one of the many discs on my shelf and enjoy my robust collection of past releases, but that's not profitable for the Sony Corporation so I can't. Microsoft makes it work though: Why does my Xbox One X effortlessly play 20-year-old Xbox games but my PlayStation 5 won't accept a nine-year-old PS3 disc?

If dropping hundreds of dollars on one new console wasn't enough of an investment this year, I also jumped on board when Valve finally opened preorders for the Steam Deck in Japan. Since they only allow registered Steam users to make a reservation and I created my account here in the land of the rising sun, I had no choice but to stare longingly as so many of my friends unwrapped their own portable PCs and could suddenly play thousands of games on the go. I almost succumbed to sour grapes and convinced myself that having bought my latest PC in 2021, no handheld device would possibly compare to the rig I already have. Yet after one hands-on experience at BitSummit this summer all doubt vanished from my mind: I didn't want to remain deckless.

Thankfully, the process proved much simpler than Sony's slapdash approach to console distribution. I spent a token sum of 1000 yen to reserve my console and, months later when shipping began, I paid the rest and received my Steam Deck within a week. As of this writing I've barely touched the latest addition to my hardware collection, but I've already googled "steam deck emulator" "epic and gog on steam deck" and "steam deck game pass" so I'm well on my way towards figuring out the next step.

Enough about money, what did I do with my shiny new hardware? My first proper PlayStation 5 game was Stray, the much-talked-about puzzle platformer where you control a cat exploring a sci-fi dystopia. As you'd expect, the graphics did indeed wow me, and the cat's authentic animations melted my heart. Even as someone who never grew up around kittens, I thought the opening segment where the cats all play and roam with each other was adorable, and I felt a sense of loss and fear when my feline protagonist slipped and fell into a dank urban pit.

As a game though, Stray didn't blow me away. I had a good time with it, making it all the way to the end as I delivered my furry avatar to the surface world safe and sound. Yet in a city populated with robots telling me where to go and what to do, Stray never justified the choice to give me control over a cat. The game could have just as easily starred a robot, small child, or a chartreuse alien and the experience would not change. I also found the decision to code all the robot denizens of the city as vaguely “Asian” didn’t sit well with me and at least one other writer, given that cyberpunk has a history of Orientalism.

I enjoyed the cat game fair enough, but I had much more fun as a different stray animal on my PS5 this year as a quick demo at TGS convinced me to try Sonic Frontiers. This wasn’t my first ever encounter with Sonic the Hedgehog—like many American teens, I owned a Sega Genesis—but Frontiers was my first 3D Sonic game which I know carries a different set of baggage. Coming from an admittedly unfamiliar position, I found the running and platforming around the “open zone” islands exciting, I played and replayed the 2.5D action stages to get better time records, and the wild, combo-heavy combat really surprised me by how well it worked.

More than any of that, the fact that these anthropomorphic animals talked to one another like real adults about serious topics (in between fighting robots) struck me as charmingly sincere in a way I did not anticipate. In almost 30 years Mario and Princess Peach have barely spoken yet in Frontiers Sonic and Tails tackle heavy interpersonal issues. Also, there’s a cat who wants to loan you a fishing rod. Absurdly entertaining, I say, and I welcome more of it!

Just as I sat down to start planning this column, however, two games I played in the waning days of 2022 gave me a lot to think about. First, after two months of putting it off, I finally installed Scorn via Game Pass, an extraordinarily gorgeous video game set in a disgusting, decaying world full of crust-encased walls and piles of hideous corpses. The art direction clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the work of H.R. Giger, especially his designs for the Alien series, although I saw much fewer penises that you’d think.

When I first played Scorn, the game told me next to nothing. A first-person game, my character awoke to silence; no quest markers, no on-screen tutorials, no HUD. I spent about 90 minutes wandering through dark hallways, discovering ancient machines and figuring out what tasks they performed. I found it exhilarating and wondered why I hadn’t heard more people laud Scorn as a hidden gem.

Turns out I hadn’t gotten far enough, as my next session revealed the true ugliness of Scorn: Awkward, unnecessary combat shoehorned into a game that needed no enemies. Instead of freely roaming unsettling corridors, suddenly I found misshapen creatures who wanted to fight me and all I had to defend myself with was a kind of jackhammer, a slow weapon with no range. When I died, the game saw fit to send me back at least 15 minutes, before I had completed multiple tasks to grab a key item. I gave up.

On the absolute opposite spectrum, a Twitter thread of Steam sale recommendations pointed me towards Time Bandit, a work in progress by a single developer. While it resembles Metal Gear Solid for the original PlayStation, the game’s story has nothing to do with war or soldiers. Instead, Time Bandit is an unapologetic Marxist work about, well, work. The player character fears his employer is literally stealing time by hoarding large crystals and must surreptitiously liberate them from the factory grounds, selling them on the black market for extra cash.

The game operates in real time and every task requires waiting for actual minutes to tick off the clock. The player character also has a strict energy meter that steadily depletes; rest requires walking home and lying down in bed for hours. However tedious this sounds, I found the innovation of it all eye-opening as it forced me to carefully consider my every move so I could start tasks, go back to bed, shut the game off and return later to make progress.

Scorn and Time Bandit have precious little in common beyond their palpable indie spirit. Even though I have no desire to return to Scorn and I cannot wait to try the full version of Time Bandit, both games reminded me how varied video games can be and how the plethora of material on digital storefronts guarantees an infinite number of surprises await anyone willing to look.

I'm not much for New Year's Resolutions, as I find it far better to approach January 1 with optimism and enthusiasm and simply see where life takes me. In 2022, it took me to Letterboxd every single day and it did so without me making that choice in advance. For that reason I'm not going to commit to any kind of "do-X-everyday" pledge in 2023 because that'll suck the fun out of whatever I might decide upon.

For now, my only personal note for the coming year is "be even more me." Make things. Read things. Try things. Don't settle for mundane activities out of any make-believe sense of obligation. It's alright if I don't watch 370 films next year; frankly, for all the great ones I saw, 30% of the time I forgot all about what I watched a week later. Instead, I want to continue to spend more energy on creative endeavors like Retronauts. I hosted 10 episodes of our podcast this year and appeared as a guest on six others; I believe I can beat those numbers in 2023. It's high time I started my own program too!

So for the last time in 2022, thank you. None of these essays would be possible without your continuing support, and there's nothing I look forward to more in 2023 than coming up with a new topic each and every week. To the threes!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch. Thanks for reading another year’s worth of This Week In Retro; Feit shall return with a new column on January 15.

*Nice.