Day Five! Escape! Escape!

Super-Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up is a victim of its own success. Each time I appreciate an entry in Geoff Engelstein’s weirdly evocative series, he goes and makes a better volume the very next year. Would I still recommend it? Ehhh. Check out the Star Trek version, if anything.

Today’s motif was games that allowed us to flee from mundane reality into make-believe worlds, a wishy-washy enough category, but made all the flimsier because it contained a few rounding errors. Crash Octopus is still a delight, but escapism it is not. Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is superior to its original incarnation in a number of ways, yet over time I’ve grown disenchanted with it.

The remaining contenders fit the bill better, not to mention are excellent games in their own right.

Of the three, the ditty of the bunch is Sheepy Time. I have nothing but fondness for this thing, a perfect little game that gets so many things right without overstaying its welcome. There’s an argument to be made that many of our first forays into formal game-making were experiments in press-your-luck, bound up as they were in gambling. You’d think that would mean more games got it right, but, well, saying so would be a lie. Sheepy Time gets it right.

Sleeping Gods goes the opposite direction, requiring multiple sittings to wrap up its sprawling campaign. There’s a sequel out, and early reviews seem mixed. I’m curious whether there’s an element of culture at play; like everyone else, I’m getting burned out on games that refuse to get down to business. Then again, that’s part of what worked so well in Ryan Laukat’s first attempt at “Skyrim in a box.” Its first battle is dangerous, a trend that continues all the way until the end. Of the year’s escapist fantasies, this was the most fully realized.

But the best game of the year was still Mind MGMT. This has become the gold standard by which I measure every hidden movement game whether I intend to or not. It wormed its way into a conversation only two nights ago. A friend and I were playing through a perfectly good instance of the genre. After we wrapped up, the conversation turned to how the whole thing felt so uninspired, so burdened by the problems that crop up in lots of these games. Then, both at once, the discussion veered into how Mind MGMT tackled those exact issues. What a game.

And that’s it! Retrospective complete. It’s been a long two years since I wrote Best Week 2021. A lot has changed since then, and it’s useful to see what has held up and why — or conversely, what maybe shouldn’t have qualified even back then. Hopefully this new format better captures the intended spirit of looking back at all these games.

This article was funded by the generous donors at my Patreon. My next article, about playing Blood on the Clocktower with a group that disarmed me with their warmth and kindness, is available there now for subscribers.