This week, Yahtzee is running a roundup of all the video games he didn’t review in 2022 on Zero Interctuation.
Want to see Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators!
you damn people. “Yahtzee, have you played Signalis?” “Yahtzee, have you heard of Pentiment?” “Yahtzee, do you know the concept of video games?” Yes, I know video games to some extent, I haven’t reviewed many, because what ends up being the Zero Interctuation treatment is decided by a highly complex algorithm, a very small fraction of which is influenced by commentators who are like water in my ear trying to fill a sinkhole. 2022 probably set a record for the most games people have consistently recommended to me, usually on the basis that they’re like other games I like, which is flawed logic. “Oh Yahtzee you like masturbation, have you ever tried unwrapping a sausage roll over and over again?” So I figured let’s cover them in the 2022 roundup of games I haven’t reviewed and maybe keep she finally shut up. And as long as I dream, I would also like to have a magic carpet.
signalis
Phwoar crikey nobody could shut up, probably because it’s like Silent Hill 2 and liking Silent Hill 2 is the closest thing to religion. But Signalis isn’t just influenced by Silent Hill 2, it feels more like the result of someone who hasn’t played anything but Silent Hill 2 for ten years and assumes that’s how games are made. So it’s this retro-styled survival horror about robot anime girls in an oppressive, vaguely Germanic space future that has a few plot points and quite a bit more than a few gameplay elements, themes and atmospheric touches from Silent Hill 2 right through glowing red save points and jumping holes fetish. Still, it did enough to forge an identity of its own, but I didn’t finish it because I lost patience with the limited inventory system, which meant I was able to explore all of the three or so rooms before the Hello Kitty belt bag was mine robot anime girls popped up was full and I had to go back to the savepoint room to offload six ammo clips which I had very little use for because I quickly learned that combat is a prison game when the evil robot anime girls are rude enough to get back up after a very solid shotgun for the anime geezers but oddly polite enough not to chase you through doors. It was all a bit too obscure for me, too, although maybe that’s because the game wouldn’t let me carry a flashlight without using up an inventory slot. What, you couldn’t keep it in your damn mouth? Or is that a faux pas for robots? Is that the equivalent of cunnilingus on a small dog?
Case of the Golden Idol
Next in the world of things you’ll like, because it’s like what you already like, like a game like Return of the Obra Dinn if it were smaller, less cohesive, and rendered entirely with Fuzzy Felt. In Golden Idol we play a hypothetical disembodied essence who for each mission has to scurry around in the last moment of a poor guy’s life, rummage through everyone’s pockets and then fill in some blanks on a form to show that we’ve understood the text. So it’s a deductive puzzle game with slightly off-putting MS Painty graphics. I wish it had better ways of cataloging the information we find and I didn’t have to keep ducking people’s pants to confirm the details in the incriminating journals they all unwisely carry with them. But it’s an amusing little brain teaser while it lasts, and it builds a story that’s fun to look back on and sit down by the time you get to the end. As long as you can get over the fact that it looks like my old Amiga 600 has thrown up on a decorative Victorian fireplace rug.
citizen sleeper
Continuing the theme, this one is like Disco Elysium, except it’s about a cyborg in the future, and instead of watching a pair of sideburns self-sabotage for fifteen hours, you spend fifteen hours watching the exterior of a space station. It’s a nice little automated D&D campaign text adventure game where you are a little confused part of a person temporarily going through this huge incomprehensible world full of different threads that you have to follow until you find a continued existence, you can fall into, your path decided by dice rolls against your stats. It suffers a bit from being able to level up enough to end up being good at basically everything, but I found it an engaging and ultimately very human story about space people with whisks for feet.
sunday gold
Sunday Gold is a point-and-click adventure set in dystopian future London and obviously wasn’t made by people from London because everyone mispronounces “twat” and tries to do the puzzling point-and-click stuff with turn-based connect role-playing games. Doing everything costs action points, you need to end your turn to get more, and there’s a risk of baddies spawning if you do so. It certainly keeps me from forcing puzzles by taking down every key, piece of paper, and rotting chicken carcass in my inventory and rubbing them on everything in the area, but you use the same action points in turn-based combat and when you fight exit with no AP left and head back to point-and-click land, you must end your turn immediately and there is a chance you’ll be dropped straight into another fight. Potentially endless fights but limited healing items doesn’t add up to your game design tax return I’m afraid Sunday Gold so swing and a miss but I admire an experimental spirit. So I tried mixing rose petal liqueur with sloe gin.
thymesia
In my most recent video, I began to disclose my struggle with soul-like fatigue, and while playing Thymesia I realized I had a problem. It’s a bit like Bloodborne but with a Plague Doctor theme, and I stopped playing at the game’s first actual boss fight, after finally gruelingly munching away her first health bar and he unzipped his pants to reveal a second one, on which At that point I said, “This is too hard and I’m not having fun. Oh God. too heavy? No fun? what happened to me I used to happily fight the gaping dragon all night.” It might be that I hated Thymesia’s unique combat trick, where your hits only count if you pull out your other weapon to give a second opinion, but Soulslikes im General have fought this arms race to make things even harder and borderline unfair. At some point I feel left behind. “Why does everything always have to beat me up? Why can’t I play a game about being a friendly bear making pancakes?” bear and breakfast
Well, that’s more like it. Bear and Breakfast is about as cozy as cozy games without being printed on a tea towel. We play a bear living in the forests on the edge of human civilization who, in stark contrast to almost 100% of everything else in this setting, genuinely likes human intervention in nature and wants more of it to happen so he can have more of it can our delicious garbage. So they construct and rent out some vacation cabins in a light crafting management game. I want Bear and Breakfast to get together with Endling: Extinction is Forever, they’ll probably get into a fistfight in a parking lot. Anyway, it provided the cozy light simulation experience I wanted, until about two thirds into I realized that since furniture has different stats and there’s no real shortage of materials, the optimal play is to just decorate each individual room with the set up the same shit, and I wanted to play a game about a bear that makes pancakes, rather than one that has to single-handedly build a chain of budget motels where the staff spends three hours every morning cleaning up the suicide victims .
