Welcome to the Third Annual Jordies! It wouldn’t be the Jordies if didn’t come extremely late. So let’s dive in!
I’m not joking. I f*ckin’ love keycards.
I’m not sure what it is about the keycard, but I think it is the pinnacle of door unlocking technology in games. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of hunting down keycards in Metal Gear Solid on the PS1. You know the ones I mean.
When I was a young lad, I thought opening a locked door via a keycard was peak scifi and I couldn’t wait to work at a place where I’d have a keycard strapped to my waist on one of those zippy-line-things or a lanyard around my neck. Now, of course, I don’t ever want to leave my house and I recognize that keycards aren’t quite the pinnacle of scifi tech I once thought they were, but I still love collecting them in games.
Most recently in Signalis (a game you should absolutely go play right this second, available on everything including Game Pass), a PS1-style retro-scifi survival horror in the vein of Silent Hill, I was reminded of my love of the keycard. The good folks at Rose Engine even gave me the opportunity to collect five of them for one door. They didn’t stop at collecting them, however, they even gave you the chance to write your own in a very cool retro punch-card computer.
Anyway, that’s all. I think the keycard is an underused item in the modern gaming landscape and I miss them. Make keycards great again.
Welcome to the second annual Jordies! These are my awards for the top books, games, movies and TV in 2022!* Yes, this is incredibly late and I should have posted it in December 2021 2022, but nevermind all that.
Book: The Humans
The bad news is I only hit 74% of my reading goal last year (26/35), but the good news is that I did read some absolute bangers. While there wasn’t an obvious winner like last year’s Annihilation, picking a winner for the Jordies 2022 was a major challenge. However, as I look over my Goodreads list, a book does sneak its way to the top: The Humans by Matt Haig (of The Midnight Library fame).
The Humans by Matt Haig is an extremely funny and extremely touching story of what it means to be human. This book was gifted to me (thanks Jess!) in early 2022 as I was emerging from a very deep depression and it hit all the right notes. You should absolutely read it.
Runners up that you should check out in no particular order: Slewfoot by Brom, The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht, Dawn by Olivia Butler, The Bone Mother (thanks Serenity) by David Demchuck, Wenjack by Joseph Boyden, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. These were all really excellent books for different reasons and you should give them a read.
Game: Signalis
Signalis hit just in time for my birthday and what a birthday gift it was. This was the best game I played all year and probably one of my favourite games of all time. A lovingly crafted ode to survival horror of olde (particularly Silent Hill) with fantastic pixel art and a beautiful story in a very unique sci-fi setting. Signalis is on everything and you owe it to yourself to try it.
Shoutout my runner up for best game of the year: Vampire Survivors which is just an incredibly fun little game which you should absolutely play.
Movie: The Northman
I’ll be honest. I don’t actually watch a lot of movies in the course of a year. It’s a big investment and I’m usually too tired at the end of the day. 2022 was a busy year for me, so I watched even fewer movies than I normally would. However, I will always make time to go see a Robert Eggers movie, and the best movie I watched in 2022. Eggers does a great job of capturing the theme of whatever he makes, and The Northman captures the saga in the same way that The VVitch captured an Elizabethan folktale.
TV Show: Wednesday
If you’re like me, you find it difficult to start watching a show. I struggle to invest time into a TV series and most require an episode or two to really grab me. I started watching Wednesday as something light to watch with my wife at the end of our day, but after two or three episodes I was pretty hooked. I think Wednesday is a very fun show with well realized horror elements (well realized enough that you are willing to forgive the absolutely awful, and I mean awful CGI creature) that keeps you interested. If, like me, you did not enjoy the first episode very much, keep watching. Like many shows, the first episode leaned too heavily on the most extreme aspects of the characters and it came off as very goofy, but by the second or third episode it hit a good balance and ended up being my favourite show of 2022.
*For the book category the book does not have to release in the year it is awarded, just the year I read it.
So, (almost) two years later, we’re finally being given the Cyberpunk 2077 we were promised. At least according to CDPR.
In reality, Patch 1.5, while it has introduced many good changes, it isn’t the panacea we were promised (or deserve). I’m very happy that I never purchased Cyberpunk, it was a gift, and so that has softened my feelings and expectations around the title, but let’s be real: it’s a disaster, and the most recent update corrupted data and broke the game for many PS4 users.
I’m not going to go into detail about Patch 1.5, you can read about that everywhere, but with Patch 1.5 I have decided to give it another go. Originally, I played maybe four or five hours of the game as a Nomad. I made it to what I would consider the main part of the game, as you have your background prologue and then a series of tutorials disguised as gameplay that act as another prologue and lead you to the famous Johnny Silverhand. I think the game starts way too slowly and was extremely obnoxious and childish (see: dildo gate), but once you near the end of prologue.2, it starts to pick up and Johnny himself is an interesting character. With this in mind, I wanted to start from scratch and so I created a Corpo (incidentally, I think this is the best path re: your introduction to the world and the city), and herein lies my problem.
Character creation. When I was younger I enjoyed character creation a lot more. I didn’t mind spending hours creating my character and getting things just so. I don’t enjoy this kind of character creation as much anymore because I don’t have any free time, but Cyberpunk’s character creation is particularly flawed for one big reason: your character doesn’t stop moving.
Many games have done this. You are creating your character and they look around, shift from side to side, smile or frown or make funny faces, etc… in an effort to make the characters, I don’t know, feel more alive I guess. As a player I find this so incredibly obnoxious and I will never understand how this passes any internal UX tests. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to pick what lips, or nose, or whatever you want your character to have just for that character to look away from the screen and touch or play with the body part you are adjusting.
In Cyberpunk, as I try to choose the eyes with which I want to look upon the world, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his eyebrows COVERING his eyes. As I try to pick the nose with which I want to smell the world, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his nose COVERING it. As I try to pick the lips with which I want my character to eat digital noodles, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his lips COVERING them.
To add insult to injury, it is done in the exact same way. Every. Single. Time.
This made character creation so frustrating and last much longer than it should have. It is so obnoxious and poorly done that I just can’t wrap my brain around the decision making process. Imagine going to a barber and every five seconds you twist your head to the side and touch your hair. You and your barber both would be furious with the result.
Welcome to the Jordies 2021! These are my awards for the top books, games, movies and TV shows I watched in 2021!*
Book
Annihilation
I remember seeing Annihilation on the shelf of an independent bookstore years ago, around the time the movie was releasing, and thinking “I would like to read this before I see the movie.” Well, I never got around to seeing the movie at the time, and I forgot about the book.
Then I received a Kobo for my birthday and connected it to my local library so I could borrow e-books in a try-before-you-buy-scheme (I bought too many books, many of which I never read or didn’t enjoy, so decided I would borrow what books I could and only buy the ones I can’t borrow or absolutely love). The first book I borrowed was Annihilation. I have no idea why or how this came back onto my radar, but I’m very glad it did. This book blew me away. In fact, Jeff VanderMeer’s writing in general, and Annihilation in particular, have ruined a lot of other books for me.
I devoured this book in a way I never do, reading this book in two days (I am a very slow reader). I hate too much exposition. I hate when my hand is held and every part of the world is explained to me. I love stories that make me ask questions, that don’t give me the answers, that force me to put the pieces of the puzzle together myself in such a way that I’m not quite sure they all fit. I love a story that respects my intelligence and this is that story. The quality of VanderMeer’s writing and his story-telling mastery is haunting.
Everyone should read this book.
Game
Resident Evil Village
If you know me, you know I love Metroidvanias. If you know me, you know that I’m not particular about the Resident Evil series. I enjoy it, for the most part, but I can take it or leave it. I played 4 and 5, watched speedruns or playthroughs of the others, and then fell out of the series altogether. RE7 was a great return to the series, I loved the first person perspective, I even loved the UI and UX on the menus, but the theme didn’t catch me. It was very unsettling, very scary, but a spooky redneck mansion in the southern swamps that gives off a Deliverance vibe doesn’t really interest me.
So when I saw the first trailers for RE: Village, I was pleasantly surprised. I love Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the book, not the atrocious movie) and the Dimitrescu castle gave me BIG Dracula vibes (I also love castles). I liked that it took place in Eastern Europe rather than America. I loved that it involved vampires and werewolves. I loved that it just didn’t seem to be very Resident Evil. I don’t care very much about the Pharmaceutical company bio-weapon storyline, and while I knew Village wouldn’t abandon it altogether, it did seem like it was taking a back seat to the more traditional monster mash of Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein.
While the end product disappointed me a little (I thought the castle would play a much larger role in the overall narrative) I did love Village. The first half of the game is genius, the next 25% is okay, and the last 25% is garbage, but this was still the best game I played in 2021. That first half really carries it through to the finish, even if you can’t go back to the castle after you left.
Movie
Dune
I love the Dune universe, or at least the first two or three books. After that it all gets a little wonky, but Dune itself is a classic of sci-fi and while the original movie is atrocious, this one is fantastic. A huge reason this outing was successful is because of the amazing art direction. The brutalist costumes, sets, and landscape make Dune a visual feast. I also love Chalamot Chalamet and think he does a great job playing the brooding and moody Paul Atreides and Stellan Skarsgard does a great job as the Baron.
I had the benefit of having read the books, so I had additional context that the movie, understandably, had to cut, but my wife, who did not read the novel, enjoyed it all the same even if she was left with a lot of questions about the world and the people in it. For me, it felt like a more grounded Star Wars; a more realistic, or maybe pessimistic, vision of our future among the stars.
While some may not enjoy the story or find it a little obtuse (shout out to the TikTok where someone described their experience as “I can’t believe I paid $20 to watch some kid and his mom talk about space politics in a desert for two hours) I think the visuals more than make up for any shortcomings in the narrative.
TV Show
Midnight Mass
There isn’t really a lot I can say about Midnight Mass other than I loved it. If you enjoyed Haunting of Hillhouse / Bly Manor then you will definitely like Midnight Mass and you should watch it right away. Like Hillhouse and Manor the more you invest, the more you pay attention to, in the show the more you’ll get out of it and I encourage you to try to connect the dots between each episode.
So what were your “Best of’s” for 2021? Let me know in the comments or @ me on sosh.
*For the book category the book does not have to release in the year it is awarded, just the year I read it.
Jordan Galbraith 