Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: Battle Chef Brigade and Hollow Knight-Almost Missing Out on Battle Chef Brigade Has Given Me Major FOMO

Hey Alex,

This letter is going to be a little different than the others I’m doing for this series, mostly because we’re going to be talking about two games that aren’t from 2018. Mine is Battle Chef Brigade.

Everyone who pays attention to me on Twitter knows that I adore and evangelize Trinket Studios’ Battle Chef Brigade, a sleeper hit from late last year. It’s genuinely one of my favorite games ever, and adds more evidence to my claim that last year was the best year for video games we’ve had in awhile. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to it until this year. I picked it up on Switch on a day when I was feeling pretty down and instantly fell in love. Even as my moods have changed, and I’ve made my way through multiple playthroughs on both difficulty levels, that love has remained constant and strong.

Now that Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe has graced us with its very existence this year, I own the game on every possible system, allowing me to play it however I want, but also to easily stream it on days when I feel like myself and my little community could use some comfort and respite from the outside world. That’s the core of why I love this game so much. I go into it pretty in depth in my Love Letter to the game, but the way it captures how love and joy can manifest themselves positively into cooking and working towards your goals collaboratively, and with compassion for those who are attempting to reach those same goals is something I had never experienced in a game before, and that made it unbelievably special.

Why did I miss this little gem when it first came out? I think a lot of it has to do with the release date, honestly. By November 20th I was already heading into the anxiety of working on my first ever Game of the Year coverage, and attempting to wrap up all the games I wanted to cover. And there were already so many amazing games out at that point last year, some of which I would consider to be in my top five favorites. With both the date and competition stacked against it, Battle Chef Brigade didn’t really stand a chance.

But that’s kind of the nasty nature of what we do right? With so many amazing games coming out constantly, it can be so hard to keep up, especially when they’re on platforms we have less access to, or concepts that are hard to communicate through trailers or podcast discussions. I had heard Austin Walker and the Waypoint crew talk about BCB and how good it was. I even watched them play with the promotional Easy Bake Oven they got for it. But hearing what they had to say and even watching a little bit of gameplay wasn’t enough to convince me that the game was worth my time and energy.  

In her Deorbital article “There Are Not ‘Too Many Games’” Liz Ryerson talks about the notion of the “Indiepocalypse” and people in the games industry’s fears of how that will impact the visibility and sales of indie games in the marketplace. My fears lie less in that department, as I do agree with her that there should be a space made for art that is simply created for the sake of art, and more in that I just don’t have the time for all of the great games coming out that do get even a modicum of attention. How can we even experience all of the great games, be they more art-oriented or otherwise, when we don’t have the time for them?

I’ve found myself in a similar, and honestly more frustrating position this year with so many great indie games making a splash. As much as I’ve wanted to, I haven’t found enough time to play games like Celeste, or The Messenger, despite knowing how good they are. The games I have played have mostly been those I’ve wanted to write about. In fact, I think I’ve at least started drafting a piece for pretty much every game I’ve played this year with maybe one or two exceptions. And realizing that as I’m writing is honestly a bummer, because I’d love to have more games that I played just to experience them, but I just couldn’t sort out what would be worth it with the little time I had free.

So I guess that’s my question to you: do you think there’s a way to curate which rad indie experiences we consume as they come out to make sure we find the ones we’ll love off the bat, or are we doomed to always be catching up on a backlog and discovering treasures well past their initial release dates? Does being content creators limit us in how we can even start to do that curation work? I know you had a similar experience with Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight (another game I’ve yet to finish), so I’m curious on your thoughts here.