Welcome back to “The Games I Played in ____” where I will write about the games that I’ve played in the past month. This is the second installment in this series, so if you’d like to see what I played last month, you can find that here. To quickly recap, the purpose of this series is to write a bit about each game I play, focusing on all the things I want to say about them that will likely never amount to their own standalone article.
This month didn’t quite go as I had hoped. The on-and-off tendonitis issue in my thumb that I mentioned back in my article on Street Fighter 6’s focus on accessibility bubbled back up, so I had to take a bit of a break from more intense console gaming and shift over to more mouse and keyboard/relaxing kind of console games for most of the month. That also means that I didn’t play more, yet alone finish, Majora’s Mask like I had hoped, so the longer piece on that game will likely be coming after we get through Spooky Season (again with the foreshadowing). I am also finding that in its current form, this article is both quite long and takes an immense amount of time for me to write throughout the month, so don’t be surprised if you start to see me experimenting with the formatting a bit.
With all that out of the way, let’s get into it:
Street Fighter 6 (PlayStation 5)
The most consistent feedback I got to last month’s entry in this series is how much my write-up of Street Fighter 6 made readers want to try it out, which is absolutely awesome. I’m really glad that my enthusiasm for the game was that palpable. I wrote more about it earlier this month, focusing on my love for its accessibility options and how those options have allowed me to finally share my love of fighting games with my loved ones less entrenched in the genre. Overall, there’s just been a lot of positivity about Street Fighter 6 on this blog in the last few weeks, so I think it’s time for me to briefly touch upon something in the game that is growing to irritate me as I spend more time with it. As you will see, this is not game breaking and doesn’t change my overall absurd love for the game, but it does stand as a very obvious blight upon an otherwise incredible game.
The monetization of the game’s cosmetics is absurd and predatory. I didn’t touch upon this last month because I wanted to see if Capcom toned things down with later updates, but unfortunately it looks like things have only gotten worse. A large part of Street Fighter 6 is building out a custom avatar to play through the single player World Tour mode and to navigate the virtual arcades of the Battle Hub. While the game’s default cosmetic options are super deep, there are also premium items you can spend real currency on. You can also (sometimes) spend currency you earn in-game for completing tasks, but the grind there is so absurd that this option is nearly totally impractical. Some items have no option to be purchased via in-game currency, however. You don’t have to buy these cosmetics, but the option is there. And the pricing is well… woof…
So as I write this, there’s a big collaborative event going on with Nickelodeon where there are costumes of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles available in the store. Capcom read their audience well and assumed that all the oldheads playing Street Fighter since the ‘90’s would also likely be into TMNT as that was also huge in the ‘90’s. And they assumed well, I am. I think this is a cool collaboration and I would indeed purchase some of these cosmetics if they were priced affordably. How much would you pay for costumes of the Ninja Turtles? Think of an answer. Get that number in your head before you scroll down.
What if I told you that they’re $15? That’s insane, right?
Well, they’re not $15. They’re $15 each.
That’s right, unlocking the costumes for the four Ninja Turtles will set you back $60. That’s the full retail price of Street Fighter 6. $60 for costumes you can only wear in a handful of game modes. But that’s not everything in this collaboration! There are stickers, emotes, and other accessories for your avatar that all also cost additional cash. I haven’t sat down and priced everything out, but we’re likely talking something close to $100 in total for everything here.
This is just gross. And it immediately puts a damper on so much. Collaborations like this are so cool, but seeing the prices involved just makes it feel exploitative. I know that the people who have purchased these cosmetics made that choice themselves, but goddamn man, $60? And sadly, there’s a lot of people walking around the Battle Hub dressed up as Michelangelo (best turtle, fight me), so I fear this won’t change in the future. These custom avatar cosmetics are one thing, but if they start pricing the costumes and colors for the actual main cast that you actually see in-game accordingly, that just kills so much of my excitement for new announcements.
So, we’ll see. It seems like new costumes for the main roster will be coming out soon. Hopefully they are more affordable than this, but if not, this might not be the last I complain about this.
Recommended (but please god don’t spend money on the cosmetics at this price-point)
My Friendly Neighborhood (PC)
My Friendly Neighborhood was a real surprise. As I mentioned in last month’s Sneak Peeks section, My Friendly Neighborhood is a first-person survival horror game heavily inspired by the original Resident Evil (which just so happens to be one of my favorite games ever). The twist is that instead of taking place in a spooky mansion filled with genetic experiments, the game takes place in a public access television studio that produces what is basically Sesame Street.
And it’s absolutely fantastic. I did not think that a game that basically boils down to “Sesame Street – but spooky” would be a game that would crack my top ten games of the year (especially with how strong this year has been for new releases), but yeah it does. And it gets there by being just an incredibly solid and strong survival horror game at its heart, even if it’s seriously lacking in the scare department.
In a lot of ways, My Friendly Neighborhood plays out like a greatest hits of survival horror. The level design features multiple smaller, distinct areas like the older Resident Evil games, but eventually allows for full exploration and backtracking to find secrets (of which, there are a lot). It blatantly steals the best inventory management system ever, that being the attaché case system from Resident Evil 4 (second time I get to mention this in two months, let’s see how long I can keep that pattern alive). Downed Muppets will even get back up unless you spend an additional resource (duct tape) taping them down, much like how downed zombies will get back up later as Crimson Heads in Resident Evil Remake. While this might sound reductive or as if My Friendly Neighborhood is just copying and pasting things from other games, everything here comes together to form a really solid old-school survival horror experience that is somewhat hard to find anymore.
That said, there are a few little nits I must pick. First, the collision detection on some of the enemies in this game, at times, feels completely broken. I’ll be aiming directly at a Muppet only to see my bullets have no effect on them whatsoever. This became a problem near the end of the game as I was backtracking more and was finding my ammo dwindling further and further from the enemies respawning. This was made worse by a mid-game shooting gallery mini-game (yes, like the one in Resident Evil 4) where I wasted dozens of bullets due to this problem. It’s irritating and is hopefully something that gets fixed in a patch soon. I also had one instance of the game straight-up crashing which is never good, but is especially bad in a game like this that lacks an auto-save feature (you’ll be surprised to hear that it uses the typewriter/ink ribbon system from the original Resident Evil trilogy). Thankfully I didn’t lose much progress, but in a game that encourages speed-running and minimal saves, this seems like it could be a real problem for some players.
Because of those issues, I don’t think My Friendly Neighborhood will ultimately be very high on my top ten list for the year (especially looking at some of the things yet to come out or that I’ve yet to play), but honestly, even making the list this year is a solid accomplishment. I was very pleasantly surprised by My Friendly Neighborhood. It provided a really solid survival horror experience that I will likely find myself replaying again in years to come.
Recommended (especially if you are in any way a fan of old-school survival horror)
The Closing Shift (PC)
Chilla’s Art is a small indie developer run by two brothers out of Japan. They focus on making short, one-to-two hour horror games that draw heavily upon classic Japanese horror tropes that usually have a retro PS2-style visual design. In short, they make shit that is incredibly up my alley. They are probably best known for two games that have gone somewhat viral amongst Twitch streamers, 2020’s The Convenience Store and 2022’s The Closing Shift. As I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve played from this studio, I wanted to give The Closing Shift a shot for an article that I’m working on for the very near future (more foreshadowing). And while I did enjoy The Closing Shift quite a bit, a few issues hold this one back from being as good as it otherwise could be.
The Closing Shift is an entry in the surprisingly thriving corner of the indie horror game space that I’ll just refer to as “Retail Horror”. While I’m not sure what the first game to fill this space was, I’ve generally enjoyed most games in this space that I’ve played, the big standouts in the space being Happy’s Humble Burger Barn, Night of the Consumers (shoutout to Ragnar from RagnarRox for introducing me to both of those games in his fantastic Games from the Underground series a few years back), Rewind or Die, and the previously mentioned The Convenience Store. These are games where most of the gameplay and dread stems from the feeling of being trapped in a mundane, repetitive, and mildly irritating retail or service job until the more horrific elements enter the equation later into the game.
As you may expect from the title, The Closing Shift has you playing as a young barista on the closing shift at a totally-not-a-Starbucks in the early winter in Japan. As the game starts out, you will learn the slightly clunky art of slinging coffee-based beverages for the various customers who show up and keep the totally-not-a-Starbucks clean and tidy. As time progresses, you’ll also have customers begin to talk about a creepy guy hanging out in the parking taking photos of the coffee shop. Or maybe he’s not taking photos of the coffee shop. Maybe he’s taking photos of you?
This is the first area where The Closing Shift kinda stumbles. While there are some effectively creepy and subtle scares here and there, this game is about as subtle as a blaring tornado siren. The horror is so telegraphed and over-explained by the various NPCs stopping into the coffee shop that even the more subtle and otherwise effective scares lose their edge because they’re so blatantly called out moments before. Some subtle tweaks to the game’s scripting (if not outright removal of much of the NPC’s dialogue) would let The Closing Shift’s scares hit a lot harder. As is though, the scares here are largely your run of the mill predictable jump scare type stuff, which is fairly disappointing given how creepy some of Chilla’s Art’s other games are. That’s not to say that the subject matter itself isn’t effective, though. The actual subject and themes the game hits on are quite good (more on that later), it’s just the actual payoffs for the horror are on the same level as something like The Conjuring Part 7: Annabelle vs The Nun or something lame like that.
My other big criticism is the sheer number of bugs I ran into while playing The Closing Shift. Despite this game only being about an hour and a half long, I ran into multiple game-breaking bugs that required me to close out and restart my game at the beginning of the current in-game day. While thankfully the game is short enough to where I never had to repeat much to get back to where I was, that was still about 20 minutes of my hour and a half with the game, which is not great. And while two of the bugs I experienced were quite obvious (my mouse just not responding at all and the game’s camera glitching out and getting locked off-screen), there were other times where the bug was more subtle and I didn’t realize that an NPC hadn’t spawned to progress the story until I gave up and checked a guide online. There was another time where I thought I had hit another bug where an NPC hadn’t spawned, but unbeknownst to me they did, but just in an area that I was not at all expecting to see them. It’s clunky and awkward, which is not a thing I’ve experienced with other games from this developer. And the Steam forums are absolutely filled with posts about bugs and glitches, so this isn’t an isolated incident sadly.
So why am I still ultimately going to recommend The Closing Shift? It’s because that in between all the clunky bits, there’s a pretty solid little indie horror game here. The central game loop of making drinks and fulfilling orders is also actually quite fun. I tend to like weird and janky slice-of-life sim games, and in between the scares there’s a fun little barista simulator in here. The aesthetics and vibes in The Closing Shift are still top-notch, which is something Chilla’s Art always seems to knock out of the park. And while the scares here are really clunky, The Closing Shift focuses on an element of Retail Horror that I’ve not yet seen in another game, that being the horrors of being a young woman trapped behind a counter and on-display for the male-gaze.
While the game is not at all subtle about the stalker creeping on you from behind the windows out in the parking lot, that’s not the only creeper you encounter in this game. There’s a younger man who won’t take no for an answer when pushing to get your phone number, a creepy old man who takes his shirt off and makes a scene in the coffee shop, and more. There’s your patronizing and mean old senpai who talks down to you and downplays your worries about the recent news stories about stalker cases and the creepy men coming into the coffee shop near closing. Hell, there’s multiple conversations between women guilting each other for ordering too many desserts and shaming each other’s bodies. In a genre filled with games trying to be the next Silent Hill, it’s very refreshing to play a game that focuses on a much more real-world horror that you don’t see often as game development is still such a male-dominated field.
So yeah, it’s not perfect, but The Closing Shift still manages to stand out apart from other indie horror games in the Retail Horror niche. It’s also only $6 on Steam, so the risk involved in checking it out is pretty minimal. If anything I’ve mentioned above makes you interested, think about it and give it a shot. Just maybe check out a few of Chilla’s Arts other games first though. You might have a more consistent experience with those.
Recommended (but maybe check out games like Inunaki Tunnel and The Convenience Store first)
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch)
It’s frustrating reading and talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the internet in 2023. Like what happens with most games, the internet hive mind has coalesced around a few talking points that constantly get brought up whenever a conversation about the game breaks out. It’s less content rich than prior entries in the Animal Crossing series. Content is too gated and rolled out far too slowly to the player. There’s not much to do once you’ve fully built out your island and house. The villagers don’t have as much personality as they did in prior games.
And like, this is all true, but holy shit can we just stop and think about what this game was for so many people back in 2020? I, like many people in 2020, was sent to work from home in the early days of the pandemic. My wife and I isolated ourselves and stayed away from other people as much as we were physically able to until we were vaccinated in April of 2021. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t really leave my house for nearly 14 whole months. I didn’t see friends, I didn’t celebrate holidays, I grew a horrible quarantine mullet (no, you can’t see a picture of it), my world was my house.
And Animal Crossing: New Horizons was my social life. Most of my friends and family had picked the game up on launch, so we had regularly scheduled Zoom calls on Saturday nights where we’d hang out, tour each other’s islands, meet their villagers, and catch up on whatever little things we had going on in our lives that past week. And while that was a pale facsimile of a social life, it’s what we had, and it became something we all looked forward to. I can’t think of a single other game that could have possibly met the challenge that was 2020 as well as Animal Crossing: New Horizons did. It kept me, and many of my closest friends and family, sane during an insane time.
And as such, it’s become a bit of a comfort game for me. As someone who has been dealing with a pretty serious anxiety issue as a result of the last few years, Animal Crossing: New Horizon is a game that I do periodically come back to just to calm down and relax a bit when things get to be a bit too much. It’s comforting in a way that I find very few games to be. And strangely, while I don’t think I would ever consider listing it in my top ten games of all time or anything like that, it holds an importance to me that few games do.
Could it be a better game? Absolutely. But does it feel good for me to check in on my villagers from time-to-time, clean the island up, and maybe put out some Halloween decorations? Absolutely. There’s something about that ritual, for a few days every few months, that connects me back to that time. And it reminds me that I have the resilience to get through things much harder than I had ever thought I could.
I can’t think of any other games that make me feel that way.
Recommended (if you’re looking for a way to slow down and just relax)
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)
It’s wild to think how many hours I have poured into some version of Mario Kart 8. Being one of the two dozen people who owned a Wii-U, I played the crap out of the original release of Mario Kart 8 as what the hell else was I going to do with a Wii-U? I got gold-medals in every cup on every CC and on every time trial. I unlocked every piece of every kart. While I am not someone who typically is a completionist and goes for 100% in every game I play (look at how many games I’ve played since starting this series, could you imagine?), I did that in Mario Kart 8.
And now I’m doing it again in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. While I’m not doing it as quickly or playing as much as I did with the original release, every few months when a new DLC pack comes out, I pick Mario Kart 8 Deluxe up again for a few weeks, try out the new cups with my wife, and then slowly work on getting gold medals on higher difficulties. It’s a fun little ritual, and a testament to just how good this game is that I’m still playing it this regularly nearly 10 years since it first came out.
The new cups have brought some great new courses to the game (Waluigi Pinball) and I’m still hoping that one of the final few racers to be added is my boy Funky Kong. As the DLC packs focus mostly on bringing over courses from Mario Kart Tour, a game I’ve never played, the courses feel pretty fresh and new to me. If you’ve played Mario Kart Tour, they might not feel as fresh to you, but to me, these DLC cups have been fun and have given me something new to look forward to in a game that I thought I knew inside and out by this point. Definitely worth checking out if you have any affinity for the Mario Kart series, even if you’ve played Mario Kart 8 to death like I have.
Recommended (if you are in any way looking for more Mario Kart in your life)
Sneak Peeks!
Sometimes I will have recently started a game while putting the finishing touches on this article for the month. Because I’ve only just started those games, I don’t feel like I’ve experienced enough of it to really give a full recommendation and will instead include a brief “first impressions” of sort here in this section. This is one you’ll definitely hear more about next month, so I’m gonna keep this one real brief.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon (PlayStation 5)
At the time of writing this, I’ve only played Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon for a few hours, but I already feel pretty confident in saying that this is everything that I had hoped the return of the Armored Core franchise would be. Like a lot of people around my age, my gateway into anime was early 2000’s Toonami, and Gundam Wing was my entry point into mecha media (well, and I guess Metal Gear Solid was, too). Desperate for something close to a Gundam videogame, I remember picking up the original Armored Core and Armored Core 2 on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 and I loved them. They were janky as hell, and half of the game felt like a glorified spreadsheet, but man did I love that series back in the day.
Unfortunately for me, FromSoftware went ahead and made Dark Souls, changed the videogame industry, became an enormous and well-respected game developer, and left a lot of their older, weirder franchises behind. I mean, I’m not really unfortunate in that regard, because Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring are some of my favorite games I’ve ever played, but man, I really missed Armored Core. Well now, after a decade, Armored Core is back and it’s fantastic. Half of the game still feels like a glorified spreadsheet, but I wanted that. There’s something deeply rewarding about digging deep into Armored Core’s customization system to tweak and perfect your mech for each individual mission. The other half feels and plays better than the franchise ever has in the past with fast, bombastic combat and visuals I could have never dreamed of back when I was 14 and playing Armored Core 2 on my PS2. I am loving this and am so looking forward to getting further into it.
Fingers crossed that Armored Core 6 selling so well means that FromSoftware will unearth some of their other, dormant franchises. I would love to see a new Echo Night or Kuon at some point in the future. I’ve always loved this weird little developer and I’m glad that their new generation of fans are finally able to go back and experience one of the franchises that initially allowed them to go on to make Dark Souls and completely change gaming.
The Cult Classic 
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