Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: Battle Chef Brigade and Hollow Knight-The Bright Side of the Backlog

Hey Caitlin!

Boyo, putting the weight of solving the gaming industry’s greatest dilemma in the modern era on me, huh?

Kidding, but I think what you bring up is exactly the kind of problem every platform holder should be looking to solve. I want to believe things like wishlists, previous purchases, and all the algorithms that go along with creating these generated, curated lists of “what you should spend your money on” can get there, but honestly, I don’t know if I want them to. And regardless, all of us content creators ourselves are listening and consuming others’ voices so ravenously it’s only a matter of minutes before we hear a recommendation, a game description, or a simple comparison to a Souls-like, triggering me oh-so-deeply into spending about 47 hours with a totally out of left field newcomer to the title-to-time-ratio struggle like I did with Hollow Knight.

Just yesterday, in the first of many sessions recording my own game of the year content, Jurge Cruz-Alvarez described Year Walk, an indie game that only ever came to consoles in the form of a Wii U port in 2015, but sounds endlessly unique and fascinating, creating another gap in my ever shrinking point-of-reference for unique and beautiful games. Ultimately though, the journey for us to games should be at times challenging and we should push ourselves to spending time with the games that speak to us, avoiding the guilt that the great FOMO of popular games creates for us.

As an aside, it’s that exact guilt that leads some of us to wasting time on otherwise uninteresting games to us, much like Moises describes in his letter to you about God of War. I think many of us, myself included, thrive outside the vacuum of misplaced love for games that just don’t jive with us, and more in the field of seeking and consuming things that aren’t on the radar.

As the community playing games continues to exponentially grow, so too do the ones making them, and that means a bigger pool of unique and fascinating games that push the boundaries of controls, of interactive experience, and of the strict borders we put on games themselves. Just like not all of us will work for IGN, will have a million subscribers, and “make it” in whatever capacity we put on ourselves to do so, some of these games will go unplayed by the masses, by you and me, and in some cases, by anyone. It’s the human condition encapsulated in possibly the most narrow-casted metaphor.

But the Switch, the damn beautiful delight, has let one of those games not slip through the cracks for me. Hollow Knight is another Metroidvania in a year full of them, but was locked away from me and many other console-tied players in its initial release last year, and even though it’s a game I love, one of my newfound favorite games ever, I couldn’t play it in its year of release. Hell, it’s not even technically part of “game of the year” as it’s been relegated to the sidelines as a mere port in this calendar year of 2018.

Hollow Knight isn’t just a surprise because of how easily I missed it though. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, leading you down and down, and then further down into the darkest depths of a world full of bugs (which I normally don’t like) that for some reason I find adorable, and encroaches you in its lore before you even realize what’s happening. In a lot of ways, it’s the best and most true-to-itself Dark Souls since Dark Souls, creating a subtle cast of characters and a cut-out set of rules that make sense, that have context, in its creepy world. It’s a game I think is actively creepy but when I was in the thick of it I loved it, when I wasn’t playing it I wanted to be, and when it frustrated me I forced myself to overcome.

All of this was time, though, and that is just another thing you have to give up to find yourself making enough time to see the games that are slipping through the cracks when a little indie like Hollow Knight demanded over 40 hours from me. I loved every second, but some may see that as an opportunity to squeeze in a Battle Chef Brigade, a Messenger, and an Into The Breach.

Even with the Switch’s glorious power to give me time to catch up on titles: things will slip by.

If I can leave with a message for all the readers to solve this problem with, and an optimistic one at that, it’s the secret best part about video games that is often completely ruined by the shittest people in it: the community. I’ve been so graced to surround myself with a group that brings new games and new perspectives on those to my attention, and I get to work with them. Sure, not everyone is going to have an Irrational Passions or a group of collaborators to create with, but I’ve found that the friends I have who share their absolute favorites with me always bring the most impassioned recommendations to me. Hell, after reading this I think I’m going to go play Battle Chef Brigade.
It’s a hokey note, but it’s one that has rung true for me consistently. I poked fun at the content creator’s reaction to another is what led me to jumping into Hollow Knight, and how it’s a sometimes-sickness that affects all of us, but it’s also what keeps us sharp, and will lead us to new likes from developers and makers we’ve come to know, like a Team Cherry or a Trinket Studios. It’s an endless cycle in some ways, but my glass-half-full take reminds us that our friends and the games we share with them are sometimes the most special, whether it be one we recommend a lot *cough* Persona 4 *cough* or the ones that we’ve just now heard about.