It’s not that I have anything against Best Surprise category. But everyone and their dog is going “Wow, FF7 Remake is better than I expected! Dang, that new Musou game is really great!” We can leave that job to them. We want to talk about games you never saw coming.
The Winner
Banner of the Maid
If you want to talk about “from out of nowhere,” let’s talk Banner of the Maid. It’s a game made by a Chinese mobile game studio making their first non-mobile game. It’s a magical alternate history French Revolution game about Napoleon’s little sister. It’s Fire Emblem. Oh and all the French soldiers speak Mandarin. Oh, oh, and? It RULES. It’s so so good!
Banner of the Maid is a game that feels so unexpected, even as you’re playing it. You sit back and wonder how this all happened, and how it turned out so GOOD. Don’t sleep on Pauline Bonaparte, she’s sick as hell.
The Runners-Up
If Found…
If you’re a con-goer, it’s possible you saw some of the early demos of If Found… back in 2016. For the rest of us, I’m pretty sure this powerful visual novel about identity and queerness came out of nowhere. Unfortunately, this is me (Six) doing this write-up, and I haven’t played If Found…. However, I can’t deny the impact it had on Jen. We all know I can be a bit headstrong: when Jen keeps singing the praises of something even after I’ve expressed a lack of interest, it’s because it’s something truly special.
Umurangi Generation
We are not the target audience of this game, I think. I mean, sure: we hate imperialism. We like graffiti and spitting in the face of the overbearing hand of state power. But we aren’t big camera-heads. And with Umurangi Generation’s focus on different lenses, zoom, focus, angles, and all the minutiae of photography, we were set to get nothing from it.
That we feel so strongly about this game anyway is a testament to what a masterpiece it is. If we were camera people, this would probably win this category (and a few others to boot). As is, we just want to shout out: Umurangi Generation isn’t really for us, but it kicks ass.
—–
Every year I think we get better at drilling down into what the Gimmick Awards should be. This is a great example: this category celebrates what WE want to celebrate about games, without taking the conversation to a place that listeners can’t connect to. There are lots of other Game of the Year awards out there. We want ours to have conversations you won’t hear elsewhere.
Please stay tuned for the last category of the day, coming up ere long! A big thank you to Zwimmy (@zwimmy on Twitter) for our Game of the Year art!
