Jay Castello Is Trying To Figure Out Whether This was a Good Year For Games? | Winter Spectacular 2023
Everyone keeps telling me it’s been a great year for games.
Oh… right… Remember Starfield?
Even setting aside the giant asterisk that is that we’re approaching nearly 10,000 layoffs in the industry in 12 months, hearing this makes me feel, to my core, like a hater. Tears of the Kingdom was great to explore but its new mechanics were a marked step down from what I enjoyed in Breath of the Wild, and its story was frankly godawful. I think most people came around on Starfield being grey sludge, at least if the GOTY snubs are anything to go by, but the hype cycle breathlessly giving any AAA game 8s and above is less and less balanced with a secondary wave of crit as the games writing space gets more and more comprehensively gutted, making it feel alienating not to enjoy any big release.
This tunes ain’t quite right…
Assassin’s Creed Mirage was disappointing. Then there’s Baldur’s Gate 3, a game which is undoubtedly impeccably crafted but, as Gita Jackson writes in their review, unfortunately it rests on the foundation of D&D, which is dense with under-explained systems, combat heavy, and overall not a good starting place for the kind of game I want to play.
I don’t have a PlayStation for Spider-Man and I’m too much of a coward for Alan Wake 2. I know there are dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of indie games that absolutely ruled, but in the process of being hit with a tidal wave of releases and recommendations from friends and peers, I didn’t really keep note of any, let alone make time to actually play them. On a very specific personal level, even the games I’ve been playing for Turnabout Breakdown, a recap podcast I cohost specifically because I love Ace Attorney, have felt poorly paced and often dragged on.
Nothing more terrifying than writer’s block.
I thought about all of this and I thought about writing something for the Winter Spectacular and I thought, I don’t want to just be a hater. And didn’t I say all of this last year? Wasn’t my piece about how I was busy and about how playing games for work can warp your enjoyment of them?
It was about the opposite of that. It was about thinking that, and writing that as a first draft, and then actually considering the nuances of how much cool stuff I got to do related to games last year. And I completely forgot! The draw of that easy story won me over, again, even though I had specifically avoided it just 12 short months ago.
I didn’t do as much cool stuff this year, but the game I edited came out, and I wrote some things I’m proud of, and I even finished two of the games that I was lamenting not finishing last year. (AI Somnium Files and The Case of the Golden Idol. They were good.) And, on top of all that, I played exactly one game that I really loved.
Editor’s Note: You should check out the game Jay worked on. It’s rad!
Orbital, the 2021 tabletop RPG by Jack Harrison, is by far and away my GOTY this year. I played with three good friends, and when I told them I was writing this piece one of them said “It’s very funny that you would basically say that our storytelling is better than any released video game,” and it is but also it’s true, sorry.
We didn’t even really play Orbital, a game where you use tokens to make strong and weak moves which “can be played in a satisfying one-shot in 3-4 hours.” Our apologies to Harrison, but our game ended up being a multi-month sprawl; turn order, tokens, and moves almost entirely out of the window. I even ended up playing two characters at once, a house-rules-slash-hack that I will take responsibility for but not without calling my friends enablers.
After the game, we talked about what worked for us and what didn’t. What worked was almost everything; the only thing that didn’t was one side-effect of Orbital’s diceless system. Mostly, this system led to all of the extremely good and fun getting off the rails I described above, but when it came to tying those strings down, it was much harder to build final stakes. Rounding everything out felt clean and easy, even though the rest of the game had been chaotic on both a meta and in-fiction level.
I absolutely felt this as well, and I was probably the person most vocally wishing that I had the opportunity to absolutely sink myself with a bad roll of the dice (in fact, I think I “jokingly” suggested adding dice in the final session since we were already so far outside of the actual Orbital rules). The ending we built was good, it was coherent – but it was too coherent.
As a writer, I find a lot of satisfaction in tying everything up with a neat little bow – but simultaneously I crave nuance. Two seemingly opposing things can be simultaneously true. The same as last year, there was a tidy story here: I was a hater, games let me down, and I didn’t get time to play the ones I wanted to. But the same as last year, I was taking that story as something neat without looking at the reality. I did play a really good game this year, and that was Orbital, a game that drew out more and more chaos and proved a learning lesson in how satisfying endings can be paradoxically unsatisfying.
I’ve always hated writing conclusions. Maybe this piece in particular doesn’t need one.
