This Week In Retro: 2023 (Patreon)

2023: To the Unforseen

by Diamond Feit

I've been writing things on the internet for a long time now, and I don't just mean as a professional freelancer. I started my own blog in 2004 and while feitclub.com no longer exists, I've kept up the habit on one site or another for the last two decades. Part of that practice has included an annual look back at each year's end; readers of this column have seen my previous three efforts, but I was posting essays of this nature well before Retronauts offered me this gig.

Since social media and online cloud storage make it so easy to revisit my past—Facebook even shows me updates of my posting history each day—I came to notice a pattern emerging in these late December scrawlings. While my particular reasons fluctuated to reflect current events, my overall tone did not, as I consistently spent every New Year's Eve declaring that the preceding 12 months went badly. Nine years ago, I called 2014 "an awful period in my life." As 2015 ended, I wrote "It’s hard to be excited about 2016 when I’m so scared and sad all the time." I titled the following year's essay "2016: I Failed" after I spent six months on unemployment and made an impromptu excursion to New York to bury my best friend.

While I certainly experienced my share of misfortune during this period, these tragedies could not solely account for my dour attitude year after year. I simply wasn't ready to see the world in a more charitable light. Even after I found a new job and began building a new circle of friends through that workplace, my general position did not alter from lamenting the state of my life on December 31st and hoping for a miracle to begin the next morning. And that's before 2020 arrived, bringing with it a pandemic that had us all sheltering indoors away from the places we loved or people we cared about.

Taking all this into account, I'm pleased to report that, at the end of 2023, I feel great. It's not like this year was all sunshine and rainbows—far from it—but as I sit here and think back about how things went for me, I'm pleased. Not content, not satisfied, but I'm proud of what I made this year and what I accomplished, even in the face of personal and global turmoil.

My year got off to a banging start when my employer offered me a free flight to one area of Japan I've never visited. Located at the southwest tip of the archipelago, Okinawa has its own language, a distinct cultural history, and a much warmer climate than the mainland, making it the perfect getaway for January. My job kept me occupied and indoors for most of my stay, but when I had time, I could walk the streets with a root beer in my hand sans jacket.

Beyond my commitment to teach English to children within the worlds of Fortnite and Minecraft, I spent the early months of 2023 catching up on my backlog from previous sales. It helped that I finally got my very own Steam Deck in the closing weeks of 2022, offering me an easy way to explore my massive library anywhere I please. Powerwash Simulator, which had caught my attention at TGS months earlier, took over my life once I discovered it made for ideal gaming while watching mindless television or YouTube video essays. I also found two retro-ish games, DRAINUS and Automaton Lung, just as compelling; the former offered a classic scrolling shooter experience with gorgeous pixel art, and the latter a cryptic N64-esque exploration game, one that actually came out on 3DS just months before Nintendo shuttered that eShop.

However, the punches you don't see coming are always the ones that hit hardest. No doubt placed on my radar by one of the many heroes who create lists of suggestions for every Steam sale, Forklift Load quietly debuted in 2020, an oddly ideal time for a game set in a world with no people in sight. You actually control an automated forklift and despite a total lack of humanity, you still have duties to perform for other artificial lifeforms. When a driverless car runs out of gas, who else but another machine can come to the rescue?

Of course, there's more to Forklift Load than riding down empty highways and running errands. Billed as an "open-world sci-fi forklift adventure," the game holds scattered notes and useful upgrades for players to discover. Once the entire story comes to light, Forklift Load unlocks one final mission for the player to complete, all leading to an ending far more emotional than its banal facade suggests. If you've got a couple bucks in your Steam wallet and a free evening, I advise you to hop into the perpetually-vacant driver's seat and carry that load.

As the cherry blossoms bloomed, I remained glued to my Steam Deck, now fixated upon two brand-new games, both of which heralded back to the past in their own way. I had high expectations for Grim Gal Guardians Demon Purge, another thrilling 2D action title from Inti Creates which I played at BitSummit last summer. While not quite a Metroidvania—the individual stages are largely linear—its replayability and alternate paths held my attention for many hours at a time. Regrettably, I had no co-op partner available to try the game with twice the firepower, but swapping between an origami-slashing sister and an uzi-blasting sister proved plenty entertaining on my own.

Yet once again, I find myself thinking more about a game released without much fanfare. Square Enix announced Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo in February and launched it on mobile, Switch, and Steam a month later. Part adventure game, part visual novel, Paranormasight dishes a tale of the occult as a group of ordinary Tokyoites find themselves caught in a net of deadly urban legends.

Set in Sumida City sometime in the bubble era, Paranormasight lacks a single protagonist, instead giving players a chance to spend a few days in the shoes of several different people drawn together by fate. The game makes wonderful use of panoramic landscapes to create backgrounds that let you scroll the screen up and down and all around, giving these real-life locations a great sense of place.

The legends at the heart of Paranormasight are real too, at least in the sense that the writers of the game didn't just make them up to tell a compelling story. I loved how they took a collection of so-called "mysteries'' and transformed them into curses that grant murderous powers to select individuals at the cost of putting a target on their back. Everyone in the world of Paranormasight wants their dreams to come true but the only way they can fulfill that fantasy is to take the lives of their fellow curse-bearers.

I also enjoyed how these conflicts play out in the game given the restrictions of the genre. You can't attack or dodge here, but you can out-think your opponents through clever dialogue choices or careful observation of your surroundings. Also, since the player cycles through control of multiple citizens, each with their own perspective on things, Paranormasight makes a point of highlighting the player as the main character, rather than anyone seen on the screen.

Traditionally, Japan views May as a summer month, and if we run with that definition then one name defined the season for me in 2023: Zelda. Six years after Breath of the Wild caught us all by surprise, this time I was ready and waiting to leap into Hyrule. Happily, Tears of the Kingdom exceeded my every expectation, building upon its excellent predecessor with honest-to-god improvements of Breath's flaws.

I spent well over 100 hours playing Breath of the Wild but never brought myself to complete the story, in part because little irritants eventually convinced me I had overstayed my welcome in the kingdom. I struggled to earn enough cash to afford all the arrows I needed, since the enemies never dropped rupees, only body parts which had no resale value. Those same enemies also refused to stay dead for very long, but since my weapons all eventually shattered from wear & tear, I ended up avoiding monsters whenever possible, even in the late game.

In Tears of the Kingdom, the all-new fusion system encourages perpetual experimentation. Whenever I lost a weapon, I could instantly synthesize a new one, usually by slapping a dead critter's horn onto an existing sword or spear. This incentivizes both combat and scavenging for parts, rewarding me to embrace rather than bow out of random battles. On that same note, I had no trouble stocking up on normal arrows—a cheap and plentiful resource—because the crafting mechanic also allowed me to make my own powerful projectiles on the fly.

I felt Breath of the Wild's Divine Beasts lacked the appeal of the series' classic dungeon designs, and I seldom made use of the rewards received from defeating the bosses therein. Tears of the Kingdom replaces these with much more enjoyable temples to explore, each with its own partner who assists Link with special skills. After clearing a temple, Link’s cohorts tag along with him in spirit form, eventually forming an entire party of phantom pals. One of them even doubles as a miniature mech suit he can ride, a bonus I never expected in a Zelda game.

The real star of the show is Hyrule itself, as Tears of the Kingdom expands the overworld seen in Breath of the Wild with two new layers to traverse. High in the sky, where the game begins, ancient technology holds countless islands afloat, some guarded by massive golems. Even more incredible, beneath the surface of Hyrule lies an entire system of pitch-black caverns. While plenty of creatures large and small inhabit the so-called Depths, I found the simple act of investigating and illuminating the entire underworld to be the most captivating element of the game.

Sadly, there's a very good reason I had ample time to commit myself to Hyrule this summer, as my employer opted to shut down operations at the end of May. Two years after losing one job at the mall, I had been laid off a second time. My former company eventually opened a new dedicated eSports edutainment complex hundreds of miles away in Kyushu, but I certainly had no reason to relocate. However, unlike my previous layoff, I also had no reason to panic. I wasn't thrilled about a drop in income but given its status as a part-time gig—combined with my gradual loss of interest in teaching English—I took the news in stride.

With the epic adventure of Tears of the Kingdom and traditional employment behind me, the rest of my summer took on a new tone. All of the fun plans I made before getting axed remained, only now I viewed them as an exciting new horizon instead of a departure from the norm. Going to BitSummit wasn't a break from my job, it was my job; I had flipped from a teacher who wrote on the side to a full-on writer/podcaster/performer. I still haven't found a way to profit from this metamorphosis but damn it, I'm over the moon to make this mental switch.

Hot on the heels of this major paradigm shift I hopped on an airplane with my only daughter in tow for a month-long stay in New York. Besides the always necessary family time and copious consumption of pizza, my sojourn also included my first-ever excursions to live events in the United States as a speaker. Obviously I had attended many such gatherings in my youth, including multiple Star Trek conventions and at least one comic book convention where I remember meeting Eastman or Laird of TMNT fame. This time, things were different: not only were these primarily video game events, I would be on stage addressing the crowd as a Retronaut.

Lest this sound like bragging, please understand my enthusiasm for these opportunities did not lie in the prospect of bypassing a door charge or any misguided sense of authority. Rather, I was (and months later, still am) honored to have earned my place amongst other writers whom I respect. Also, since these events took place in the United States, it finally gave me a chance to meet many of the voices I only knew from the internet in person.

Hands down, I had the most fun at the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. Located a short train ride from Manhattan inside an aviation museum, I found the venue and overall science-fair vibe delightful. I guested on two panels inside a planetarium where we projected our powerpoint slides onto a dome instead of a mere screen, but I also got to host my very own trivia contest in what I can only describe as an abandoned chemistry lab. Imagine my surprise when that last one had the biggest turnout of all my presentations.

Another reason LI Retro put such a smile on my face was seeing my daughter explore classic games freely. From the very moment my wife told me we had successfully conceived a child, I've long wondered how to best introduce my kids to video games. I worried that if they grew up solely with the newest and brightest software they'd scoff at the idea of older creations having any merit in the 21st century. Thankfully real life has proven me wrong; Shanoa found plenty of games to her liking that day, particularly Missile Defense 3-D on the Master System. Over three decades later, Sega still does what Nintendon't!

With family, food, the LI Retro and Retro World Expo in Hartford all competing for my attention in August, I found few free moments for games outside of quick time wasters like Connections. Ironically, the game I wanted to dive into had to wait until I returned home, for Time Bandit Part 1 makes very deliberate use of time and scheduling as its central gimmick. When you begin, you input your region which keeps the in-game clock in sync with your actual surroundings. Everything that follows will play out in real-time, right down to the second.

Time Bandit takes Marxist and socialist metaphors and builds an entire game around them, literally, as the player toils away as a laborer in a mine harvesting large gems. Your nameless hard hat soon learns that the baubles they've been extracting from the earth and handing over to management for a couple bucks each can alter the flow of time itself. Contacted by a former revolutionary, the wage-slave protagonist discovers that the executives' master plan is to ensure eternal life for themselves at the expense of those few willing to physically recover the valuable stones.

After this revelation, the player must carefully sneak the time crystals past security cameras and armed drones to sell them on the open market, simultaneously earning proper compensation for their efforts and foiling the company's malicious goals. Based on the game's internal clock, Time Bandit issues players a weekly work schedule, allowing them free use of the facilities while on-shift but restricting their access off-shift. Either way, whenever players find a crystal, they must remove it from the property without being spotted.

The real twist is that every task the player undertakes in Time Bandit in order to obtain the stones operates in real-time. Using forklifts to move heavy crates or trash compactors to prepare rubbish for relocation all consume actual minutes on the clock. For me, this meant logging into Steam throughout the day, planning out the tasks I had to complete, then putting them into motion before logging off for an hour or two. Even though Steam ultimately says I spent about 10 hours playing Time Bandit in total, it took me weeks to reach the end of Part 1. What the game lacks in polish and production values it more than makes up for with originality and an unapologetic message; I assure you, if this sounds at all interesting, it's worth your time.

Back home after my extended journey, I did my best to play more games during the fall, as well as catch up reading. I bought a number of books while in the States and I failed to open any of them before Halloween. One issue I have when it comes to reading is I dislike trying to juggle more than one narrative in my head at once. Given that self-imposed restriction, I vowed to finally finish the massive Higurashi When They Cry visual novel which I first began back in February of 2021.

If you've heard anything about the surprisingly expansive When They Cry franchise, it's likely related to its length. The story covers eight full chapters, all multiple hours in length, plus a prequel chapter and an alternate epilogue. Since its original release back in 2006, console ports, remasters, localizations, and adaptations into other mediums have followed year after year. Creator Ryukishi07 made headlines in 2022 when Konami announced he would write the upcoming Silent Hill f, easily the one forthcoming project in that franchise that I anticipate the most.

I dare not explain the story of When They Cry because it would lessen the experience of the full saga, but I can tell you it opens in June of 1983 in a rural Japanese village. New transfer student Keiichi Maebara has just arrived in town and he's still getting used to life in the countryside, but he's making fast friends at the tiny local schoolhouse where all grades must study together due to the lack of children and teachers.

As the big summer festival approaches, one with its roots in ancient traditions, Keiichi becomes increasingly aware that the residents—including his classmates—are reluctant to discuss a number of recent events. Keiichi's curiosity drives him to investigate rumors of a murderous secret society that may operate in the shadows of the community, and the more questions he asks, the scarier the answers become. A full English translation of When They Cry is available on Steam and the initial chapter costs nothing to download and play, so I humbly suggest giving it a try for yourself. It got its hooks into me two years ago and I regret putting off the ending for so long.

I also tore through Grasshopper Manufacture's debut work, The Silver Case, after Maddie's ringing endorsement on Twitter. The notion of a Suda51 script unencumbered by complex action sequences appealed to me, although I quickly learned the game does have its share of interactive exploration. Regardless, I recognized the story—first released in 1999—has a lot to say about modern Japan and the rise of the Internet, so I eagerly devoured it in a matter of days.

Not everything I played in 2023 revolved around reading, but two of the strongest games I discovered this year did push me to use my brain in new ways to make sense of what they showed me. The first of these, Chants of Sennaar, drops players at the base of a tower where the inhabitants use an unfamiliar language to communicate. With nothing more than contextual clues, gestures, and an in-game notebook, players have to decipher this syntax in order to solve puzzles and climb up the tower.

The catch is, much like the fabled Tower of Babel, all the communities in Chants of Sennaar host different cultures, each with their own native tongue. As soon as the game told me I had mastered one language, I had to start over with new citizens. My previous studies did not go to waste, however, as the further I ascended the tower, the more the disparate peoples came together through my actions. At select points, I stumbled into conversations between two strangers that I had to translate, interpreter-style, so that they could help each other thrive.

Chants of Sennaar uses all these mechanics to tell a light fantasy tale using make-believe alphabets, but its core conceit of deduction and communication made me wish I could play a version that actually taught real languages. I'm biased given that I live in a country thousands of miles from my birthplace, but for me the beauty of travel lies in such discovery. I still remember coming home from my very first night of Japanese class and discovering I could sound out simple phrases from the packaging of my imported video games. Chants of Sennaar offers that same thrill many times over in its brief runtime, and I can't recommend it enough.

In a similar vein, I also wish to highlight Cocoon, a puzzle-driven adventure that launched on Game Pass in September. While it lacks any text or speech at all, Cocoon tested my brain with its reality-bending pocket environmental challenges. Within minutes of booting up the game, I gasped when what I thought was an alien desert turned out to be something else entirely. That Cocoon leads players through strange spaces and tells a story with nary a word on screen really impressed me.

For all the differences between Chants of Sennaar and Cocoon, these two indie releases represent the best of 2023 to me. Both games took me on a journey with few signposts or hints and absolutely no lore dumps. Both sucked me in by presenting vast worlds that have a history all their own, but trusted me to figure out the information I needed to navigate them. Best of all, with each successful solution, both games convinced me—however fleetingly—that I'm a clever person, and there's no better feeling that a video game can bestow on a player.

The weather in Japan maintained mild warmth well into December this year before a sudden cold snap summoned winter in an instant. Thankfully, our family had long planned a little getaway for the four of us over Xmas weekend, as we left behind sub-zero temperatures for the spring-like shores of Okinawa. Just as I had done in January, I took advantage of the cultural shift to drink root beer every single day while also sampling the local brew of choice, Orion Beer. The trip reaffirmed everything I had come to believe this year: Traveling is fun, but traveling with my family is even more so.

Our vacation had its share of delays, so I took advantage of this downtime to finally, after a quarter-century of postponement, dip my toe into the icy waters of Metal Gear Solid. In hindsight I'm amazed that I waited until I landed on a small island in the Pacific to roleplay as a man landing on a small island in the Pacific. As of this writing I'm nowhere near the game's finale—my save file says I've only spent three hours in Shadow Moses—but I didn't expect how familiar all this would feel. I never played Metal Gear Solid upon its initial release but my friends sure did, and I remember watching them duel with Revolver Ocelot and pit their wits against Psycho Mantis. I suppose it's good news that I'm encountering all the things I already knew about Metal Gear Solid in its first few levels, because that means all the surprises will arrive during its conclusion.

While I could ramble about the naked political statements or unique control scheme of Metal Gear Solid, the bottom line is I'm enjoying it just like decades of information told me I would. Some parts irritate me—I haven't survived a single alert so I just reset when the guards clock me—but the game consistently delivers sufficient suspense, drama, and intrigue to keep me plugged in. In a way, Metal Gear Solid insists I accept it on its own terms as a video game and I find that refreshing.

I think that's a good note to end on, because acceptance was definitely a theme for me in 2023. Not everything went my way this year, so I had to take the good with the bad. Some unpleasantness was out of my control, but I also made plenty of mistakes, yet either way it fell upon me to deal with the fallout. More than anything else, I came away feeling good about how I handled myself, and I'm eagerly looking forward to what 2024 may bring.

So here I sit, watching the calendar advance again, with no real vision for my future. I've given up on empty resolutions and goals which ultimately never help me make any progress. I think the best thing I can do right now is keep listening to myself and following through on what clicks with my internal barometer. At the moment, podcasting, writing, acting, and other creative endeavors fill me with a sense of purpose. Teaching English to students who couldn't care less about what I'm saying no longer does. Perhaps it never did. Perhaps that's why I spent so many New Year's Eves looking back with misery welling up in my eyes.

I have no idea what's next, but I know I'm as ready as I'll ever be to face it, because I don't see 2023 as anything but a net positive. Call it self-confidence or blind faith, but if a year where I indulged my instincts, traveled more, and spent less time in an office gave me satisfaction, then I'm thinking that's the only way to live.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts about video games, films, and dessert. Thank you for tuning in to my little corner of Retronauts for another year. Please look forward to my next column on January 14th.