So, for the first time in… ever… I watched The Game Awards. Since it was allowed to do so, I ended up co-streaming it on my Twitch channel and I watched it together with some of my viewers who were up at the time… I also prepared a Bingo Card (see below) where I “won” twice, I guess. I just didn’t win a Steam Deck – which I expected but at the same time, it still would have been kinda cool to win a Steam Deck. Anyway, here are my highlights!
Bingo!
Okay, I know that Bingo doesn’t necessarily work this way… You can’t just create your own card or anything like that but I did. I went with some basic ones and then just shuffled it eventually with what I thought would be more unlikely or likely, etc. In my opinion, Bugsnax would have deserved Best Indie… same for Citizen Sleeper… but hey, whatever. Those two are still my GOTYs – and TGA doesn’t award the “best game” or anything like that… they just award special contributions to the industry basically… and that’s cool.
Anyway, I don’t have any beef with Horizon Forbidden West… in fact, I haven’t seen the game yet or played it (given that I don’t own a console, mostly) and I plan on playing it eventually as I love the universe. It’s just that FW came out in the same year as God of War: Ragnarök, Stray and Elden Ring as well as Sonic Frontiers… and I doubt that it stood a chance against those, just like how other games will have a hard time against the upcoming Supergiant Games title, Diablo IV, the new Kojima game and the new From Software game!
So, it’s not like I hate Horizon. In fact, I love Horizon… but since the four horizontal areas in the first row were very likely…
Horizon FW was my dark horse.
And it kept me quite on edge as it kept getting nominated for stuff but it just never won. I was honestly having a blast rooting for Horizon Forbidden West… not winning… It’s weird, innit? But this one was nice.
I also was glad that “Fans booing something” (in this case, Diablo Immortal which was nominated for “Best Mobile Game”) happened to be the only instance of any fans audibly booing something. I was upset about Sifu not winning “best fighting game”… and I was surprised that there was no FF7-Rebirth Trailer or another RE4-remake trailer… or a Metroid Prime Remaster Trailer… Like,… I was hoping for those, genuinely.
Games coming to PC! Finally!
So, being a huge Roguelike fan, I loved the existence of Returnal… Technically, Housemarque is technically an Indie Studio but it was published by Sony and hence I’m not sure if it’s still Indie or not… Either way, I’m excited for it to finally release onto PC. It just looked stellar previously when I watched someone else play it on Twitch and the bits and pieces of the story I got to see looked intriguing… so I’m excited about this. The game is set to release in early 2023!
And then there’s The Last of Us Part 1 which originally came out on June 14th, 2013! Now, ten years later, it was announced for March 3rd, 2023. Frankly, I only know about the beginning few hours of the game but I have never seen any more gameplay of it. The issue mainly being that I don’t watch too many playthroughs anymore and even back then when I did, I’d rarely finish them. So, not owning a console and never watching the game, naturally made me quite excited about this announcement.
New Games!
So, right away, there were many different titles here that looked incredibly cool and fun and whatnot… but at the same time, I figured I’d limit it to the titles I’m most excited about for the sake of not dragging this post out too much…
Have you seen Judas? Like, Judas‘ trailer just blew me away.
Developed by Ghost Story Games (which consists of some former Bioshock devs), I can’t help but see similarities to Bioshock here… but with a different premise. I loved the Bioshock games and I am not too excited about Bioshock 4… I mean… I am… but also… I’m anxious… and when I look at Judas, it just feels like Bioshock. The art style, the way the characters are introduced and the powers you wield… I’m stoked. Honestly, really looking forward to this, especially given its Sci-Fi setting as opposed to Bioshock’s 1960s setting.
I was pretty darn sure that Supergiants Games said somewhere that they don’t have any plans for another rogue-lite entry… but I guess it was a feint. Here we are. Hades II!
Hades II is the first-ever sequel from Supergiant Games (and that utterance kinda makes me think “will there be a Transistor 2 as well at some point?”, hopefully) and it “builds on the best aspects of the original god-like rogue-like dungeon crawler” – but it appears to be much more than just that. According to the steam page, it’s rooted in the Underworld of Greek myth and the dawn of witchcraft… and I love that.
ALSO (!!!), we’re playing as Melinoë, the Immortal Princess of the Underworld, and we’re trying to defeat Chronos, the Titan of Time, while wielding dark sorcery! Now, I’m quite excited about this character as Melinoë is a chthonic nymph, IIRC, and I love a lot of the chthonic myths… a lot… idk… I think Melinoë was the daughter of Persephone and Zeus – and Zeus basically tricked Persephone into sleeping with him by disguising himself as Hades…
But I doubt that that will see use of that myth in this game given that the Zagreus I’ve learned about is another bastard child of Zeus… and Zagreus looked sort of like a minotaur… not to mention that Hera struck him down with lightning – and his ashes were used to make the clay that Prometheus used to form the first humans… and in Hades, the first game, that’s just not the case which is fine. Creative freedom and stuff. I just hope that Melinoë has some ties to actual mythology, although I’m also intrigued about why she wants to kill Chronos, besides the obvious reason of “Titans = Bad”.
I’m not a huge fan of the Bayonetta franchise (yet). I mean, I haven’t played any of the Bayonetta games (yet!) but I do plan to play them eventually! And well,… Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon looks incredibly pretty and adorable and I really wanna play it. Also, I get goosebumps from the trailer. I don’t even know why.
And heck, it’s another March release (March 17th!), meaning this could be my birthday present… if I had a Switch… which I don’t… so I hope it comes to PC eventually as time goes on.
So, this is another one of those Extremely OK Games… titles… Sorry, not sorry.
Earthblade just looked stellar and I love to see the Celeste developers work on a new title (which I wasn’t aware of) and essentially present us with an enigmatic and incredibly adorable metroidvania title where you play as Nèvoa, a child of Fate returning at long last to Earth. I mean, it’s the Celeste devs… and it looked fun… and it’s beautiful… I’m looking forward to the soundtrack and can’t wait for 2024 to arrive…
Now, Diablo IV looked cool but I don’t really wanna be excited about it. So, I’ll leave that out.
Instead,… Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers, Ruined King) revealed their new game Wayfinder! So, I love Airship Syndicate and their ideas for combat and storytelling… and seeing them try something different is interesting and exciting! Apparently, Wayfinder will be a F2P Looter-MMO… I signed up for the closed beta right away. Super excited about this one and I’ll have to check if I’ll be able to write about it if I do get in.
The Lords of the Fallen looked incredibly cool… and that’s what hooked me. It’s just that. I know that it’s a reboot of a Souls-like series that was released eight or so years ago… but I honestly didn’t really think it would get a reboot of any kind… and well, here it is. It’s dark. It’s gritty. You look like a bad guy and I really just wanna play a game where you look like a medieval villain. Also I love the idea of having this lantern that wields the power to cross worlds… that’s pretty cool… but uh, yeah, I’m a simple man. When I see cool helmets, I click on the wishlist button. It doesn’t take more than that.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is another game from a series that I didn’t think would get any more titles, especially after the success of Bloodborne, Elden Ring and Sekiro… I mean… the last Armored Core game came out in 2013 or so? Anyway, I like mechs. And I always wanted to play one of the Armored Core games but they only released for consoles that I didn’t own… so… hell yeah.
Conclusion
Overall, I had a lot of fun with The Game Awards this time around. I suffered a few technical difficulties here and there where the stream on Steam would fail to load for no reason in particular – and a few friends of mine suffered the same issues.
At the same time, there was also the Steam Deck giveaway which I personally would have liked to win but with how many people were signing up for that… yeah, no shot. What was a little upsetting with that, though, was the amount of bots that just showed up… random strings of numbers were announced as winners and it just feels upsetting when you see grifters like that.
And then, of course, there were two highlights in the stream that I didn’t talk about yet… Flute Guy!
…and the person that invaded the FromSoft devs… Flute Guy deserves the world. I love him. The other one… I was confused at first, then realised what had just happened… and then I found it sort of funny before later realising how bad that must feel for the people that worked hard to earn this award only to then get speech-bombed by some random person.
Apparently, that random person tried to hijack whoever wins GOTY – anticipating GOW:R to win… and they wanted to hijack the stage for Bill Clinton – who according to him stands for a lot of Jewish values… but I don’t quite get activism like this and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, not to mention that Clinton is… Clinton. Let’s leave it at that. And Matan Evenoff is apparently a figure that has done this before but in support of the HK protests… but again, I’m not sure what he wants.
If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn’t – Roger Ebert
Overall, good event though. Had fun. It’s my first time actually watching these in full and not just the best-of or whatever… so… totally different experience.
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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