I bought a strip light and it's been a fascinating addition to my life. It's just really nice. Unfortunately it's online-only, and it's less customizable than I'd hope... It might be time to relearn python to make the lights do weird things via some unofficial API.

I've been looking for space.

Trying out a shotgun blast of games means diving into some genres without familiarity of the evolution of the genre, and that means my analyses this year will be extra sparsely informed -- but even as a relative stranger, you immediately pick up vibes, evidence, craters. By the time you try your third colony/building sim you can tell that the genre had an extinction-level Slay-the-Spire-type impact event, and now there's a shape to a subgenre that you see all over the place. I can't tell you what exactly happened here, but I can tell you they all involve semi-airtight rooms, control of various gases, temperature simulation, NPCs with stats and emotional states, etc, etc. It's not quite Dwarf Fortress, just one step removed... It's almost certainly RimWorld, right? I think there was a slow wave of games with similar mechanics, but RimWorld was the bottleneck so many other design went through. I think there's a consistent language among space-based peoples manager games now.

...None of those games are making it on to the list though, mostly because these are naturally very large games. Maybe a few years from now. This genre does tend towards being demanding of their players, and puzzle games have near-monopoly on those spoons for me, so I don't have high hopes?

On another corner of unfamiliarity, there's the space traveler genre. By default, my point of reference this year is No Man's Sky. This is not an ideal point of view to work with. It's very difficult to figure out what you want from a genre using a game that doesn't know what it wants. It's maybe even harder when you skip Elite(: Dangerous)Nothing personal, just a very demanding game that in another life I'd have imprinted on, but doesn't fit anywhere in my life. Vacation game search, remember?. Maybe I should even peek into Star Citizen? EVE?!

At least in NMS, there are many, many mechanicsThe game's got that live-game-itis where mechanics are added over time and don't really feed into each other, at least not cohesively. Digging into that would be utterly out of scope for a GOTY., and they all fit the general ideals of spacing-in-space. Gathering resources is standard for survive-em-ups, object scanning because why not, whole-planet exploration is maybe aiming too high but it's still welcome, space travel is reasonably done, space stations are disappointingly uniform (but maybe that's for the best...), base building is still standard for survive-em-ups but is caught in a weird medium between solo construction and having fellow colonists, colony management is odd, spaceship customization is standard, space trading isn't very explored but it's still partially a glue for the whole space travel thing, medium spaceship/corvette management is an awkward middle but I'm sure I'll get into it when I enter that income bracketMoney has been an interesting question in space fantasies, but money is getting its own digression later in this GOTY. Imagine a very large shrug for now., large spaceship/frigate/fleet management is getting strange and the game is overreaching by this point but it's functional. These are all space. Are these all what I'm looking for in space games? I wouldn't say no, I don't know if I would take any of them away, but this can't be what I would settle on. I think I'll still play quite a bit more of it before leaving, and in the end there's a lot to dissect about this game because it touches on so many things, and not badly at it. But it's caught in such a strange in-between of loneliness and not...

OK, let's narrow the scope way, way down. The central glue for space wandering games had always been to give a reason to travel between places, and the easy way to make someone travel between interesting places (constructed) and interesting places (natural) is to do some trading (and resource extraction). What if a game had nothing except for this, not even a minigame for trading or gathering? Then you'd have Galaxy Trader. Take the central loop for (arguably) No Man's Sky or its ilk, or maybe Uncharted WatersIs Uncharted Waters a space game? Or maybe No Man's Sky is a boat game. Maybe I should be looking at boats instead? and make 3D spaceship travel so dead simple that a touchscreen interface is more than fine. It still mostly works! I'm towards the end of the game and its very finite map, and the evil side of my conscience is telling me that this would have worked fine with a much larger map. It's not the game I'm looking for, but it has fed into my throughline of my year: Try out the games that have less game per game, sometimes they work! Figure out what gamey parts aren't as necessary as they felt, and interrogate what contributes to the actual pull of a game.

There are still many other subgenres I could talk about, but I don't need to make this genre crisis even larger. Space dogfight games are sort of in the conversation (Everspace 2 looks pretty good!) There are plenty of sci-fi narrative games set in various corners of space (sometimes involving a lot of space). On the farming side, Little-Known Galaxy isn't very spacey, but I think it sort of gets the vibe across? Maybe this is the problem of the everything-ness of space, maybe this cannot fit in my casual gaming slot. Some part of me fears that maybe I'm only looking for a novelty spigot. I like to think I'm still looking for the spaciness of space. I don't know if it's out there; I don't even know if it would be a single game. At least I think I'm having a better idea of what I don't want.

Maybe I really should spend a lot of time on Elite.

Jumping off Space Trader... There have been genres crystallizing as part of the cozy games movement, and at least from what I've played, courier games are in an interesting spot. It's not a genre that has solidified (there's no template getting copied like Slay the Spire or Vampire Survivors or Symphony of the Night) but there's... a consistent vibe? a direction a several games are sharing. It's the shared endpoint of taking relatively open action-adventure games and then removing all the combat from it. You tend to end up with collection quests and bringing things from one place to another, and the design challenge is making it still feel gamy. It's convergent evolution on trading-based games on the past (Uncharted Waters, early trucking games, Elite), but these aren't quite descendants of those games.

Some of the roots of the genre feel like they came from farming games, but I don't know if they initiate a proper chain of cause and effect all the way to current games. I can sort of argue that farming games have been pushing out in this direction, these games have pushed to be more excursionary. In a way, Stardew Valley and the Runes Factory represent action-adventures coming in to add dungeons and long expeditions. However, these trips don't always revolve around combat, and sometimes you take these trips just for random foraging or revisiting unique shops. And then you have games like My Time at Portia pushing these travels longer and longer, and it seems inevitable that some games will pop out that focus on travel.

So what's been inherited from farming games? You naturally have towns again (sometimes with villagers. and sometimes they even change over time). Day/night clocks almost feel obligatory, but sometimes they don't serve to provide pressure, instead it expresses passage of time and allows the setting to have distinct day- and night-vibes. I might dare to claim that Diaries of a Spaceport JanitorMight still be unmatched in vibe-setting. To this day games only rarely make places quite that populated, that bustling. is one of the earliest games leading into this genre. It's still very gamy because the mission statement is about the pressures of living, and not <the shared mission of explicitly-stated-as-"cozy" games>. Currencies still usually follow over, but that inheritance goes farther back. Infrastructure-as-metroidvania (building bridges, fixing things, etc) often make a return. A lot of the bones are still there.

The missing part of the theory is... I'm having trouble pointing out consistent halfway steps to this genre, at least among games I've played. Instead I have multiple approaches from different directions around 2021? Wytchwood is a mostly peaceful craft'em'up with a lot of gathering and grinding. It's something like fitting the form of Don't Starve to be less about a hostile world, but it still has hostile NPCs and a health system. Garden Story is mostly in the fighty action-adventure pool, but it's also dipping into farming mechanics *and* it's trying to make a multi-town world work. Fixfox feels so close to the genre as it is now, but the details all don't quite fit? I think its open world vibe is sort of off by having the world shuffle itself periodically? It is still very, very ahead of its time though. Can I patch my GOTY list that year to put it higher?

So where are we now? In the main list I've put Starstruck Vagabond, Distant Blooms, and Rekindled Trails. Clearly I can't finish this digression without mentioning Death Stranding (2), but it also can't help being very gamy, so I think its intended audience doesn't necessarily overlap with the other courier games that much? I've also run into Fading Serenades this year, which I'm not as sure about recommending, but you should glance at it. I can't quite put a finger on what it's lacking, but maybe it just needs a little more stuff overall. (Look, this entire GOTY writeup is a crisis about encountering je-ne-sais-quoi-s everywhere, go try some of these games.) I've also played the demo for Letters to Arralla and it looks quite promising, and that one's all about letter deliveryOh! Also shoutouts to Lake.. I wouldn't be surprised if the postal service wrapper will be a common base for this corner of cozy games, but maybe that doesn't happen without some breakout hit annihilating variety going forward.