In one month, we're getting Sea of Stars (EXCELLENT GAME), Armored Core, Baldur's Gate, Starfield, and Blasphemous 2.

Earlier this year, Nintendo game us some excellent titles: Pikmin 4, Metroid Prime Remastered, and Tears of the Kingdom especially. It looks like the new Super Mario Wonder is going to be excellent as well.

But some old stinkers have really cleaned themselves up and started to shine. Halo Infinite is excellent and is easily The Best Halo now, No Man's Sky is constantly getting better.

There have been enough excellent games in the past two years to keep your backlog full. It still blows my mind that Metroid Dread came out, I haven't touched Elden Ring or God of War 2, etc.

What really surprises me is how many of these are AAA games which don't suck. I've really soured on AAA games over the years. It feels like we had a decade where the top AAA games were often disappointments, and the top indie games were marvels that made you rethink videogames entirely. (You're welcome to play Tunic and Outer Wilds at any time btw).

Anyways, if you need me, I'll be playing Sea of Stars.

Sea of Stars is what happens when a developer asks "what if JRPGs were good?" and then executes solely on that vision. I'm two hours in and I can't believe how good this is. I'm enjoying dialogue-heavy cutscenes, I'm excited for each time I get to fight an enemy, I'm amazed by the technical execution of the pixel art.

This is the first time in a long while I've seen something new in the medium of pixel art. Sea of Stars blends some recent technical innovations (think Enter the Gungeon) with some really creative uses of the medium. Most notably is how it implements lighting and verticality into the game.

But enough about the technical implementation. Here's one concrete example of how Sea of Stars uses pixel art in new and creative ways: Early on in the game, Sea of Stars uses a mixture of talk-portraits and character sprites to obscure a character's face, providing only brief glimpses. This makes some creative use of the medium to build mystery around a character in a way that usually requires a narrative conceit.

But there's so much more than just the artstyle. I'm invested in a JRPG story and characters for the first time since Undertale, the battle mechanics are fantastic, and the music is excellent. Every time I put this game down, I want to pick it back up.

To boot, it's made by the same developers as The Messenger, an excellent videogame. I don't want to spoil anything, but this reputation keeps me wondering "what comes next?" while I play Sea of Stars.

TLDR: Play Sea of Stars Outer Wilds actually