Bytes ‘n’ Blurts: Whips, Metaphors, and the Most Disgusting Eggs Ever

Wondering what the Paste Games team has been playing lately? Don’t have time to read new game reviews, and prefer something quick and direct? Just looking for 1000 words to eat up a couple of minutes of your wait at the doctor’s office or airport lobby? Bytes ‘n’ Blurts offers a quick look at what games editor Garrett Martin and assistant games editor Elijah Gonzalez have been playing over the last week—from the latest releases to whatever classic or forgotten obscurity is taking up our free time. Since Thanksgiving they’ve been pouring hours into the brand-new Indiana Jones game, catching up on one of the year’s most acclaimed RPGs, and frying up some eggs and cigarettes (and cockroaches, yeah, it’s gross).

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Year: 2024
Platforms: Xbox Series X\S, PC

If you want a fairly long rundown of the new Indiana Jones game, you can go check out the review we published last night. If you just want the quick and dirty, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a pretty good interactive version of an Indy flick, with totally acceptable writing and solid acting performances all around. The fact that it’s a game means the pacing gets all screwed up—you’ll be spending hours in each location, just an almost endless amount of time in the Vatican and Egypt, instead of bouncing after some pulse-pounding, 15-minute action set piece—and the fundamental nature of Indiana Jones means you’ll be doing way more hiding, crouching and crawling than you will running or shooting (which, if you aren’t into slower, methodical, more strategic styles of play, might be a hang-up), but it packs just enough of the thrillpower of an honest-to-God Indy movie to make those slower portions worth the effort. You’ve got to have patience is the thing here, and it helps if you’re already a fan of Hitman’s World of Assassination setup or Looking Glass / Irrational / Arkane style immersive sims. Action games have understandably made players feel like invincible superhumans for decades, but this Indiana Jones is fragile and easily killed and so you can’t just burst into things all guns akimbo. Opinions vary on the last two Indy movies (I dug ’em, I’m an easy mark) but The Great Circle is more openly imitative of the ’80s originals than those two films, which will probably make it more broadly popular but also, frankly, a little less interesting to anybody who’s okay with fictional characters aging like real people do. (Sorry that your ersatz movie dad got old, sad and grumpy, but the bitter old Indiana Jones of Dial of Destiny flowed perfectly from the character seen in the earlier movies.) Still, it’s hard to make a bad Indiana Jones if you hit the formula hard enough, and The Great Circle does to rank as the best Indiana Jones game since ’92’s beloved Fate of Atlantis. So put on your old friend’s hat and jacket and come out here and try it out for yourself.—Garrett Martin

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Year: 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 4

It’s always nice to finally get your hands on a universally beloved thing and come away saying, “Wow, I too love this universally beloved thing!” This has been my experience so far with Metaphor: ReFantazio,  the latest turn-based RPG from the Persona team that mixes style (the best videogame menus you’ve ever seen) with substance (cerebral combat and engaging storytelling). Set in a world defined by factionalism and discrimination, you play as a scrappy band fighting for social justice as you seek to ensure the keys to the kingdom don’t end up in the hands of a sociopathic demagogue. No one told me this game is basically about running for fantasy president!

While the story’s take on social justice is incredibly blunt, borderline to the point of being too reductive, there’s enough specificity in how things like intergroup relations play out between the different Tribes—peoples with varying physical characteristics like horns, long pointed ears, etc.—which offers the world enough shades of complexity that its treatises on persecution hold water. The stigmas and prejudices here are specific to this backdrop, but they still get at the essence of how structural discrimination takes root and the massive amount of work needed to change it. Despite this deeply flawed setting, that doesn’t stop this narrative from delivering intensely optimistic overtures about both our capability to affect change and the power of stories to help chart a better world, elements that come across as hopeful without being naive.

And outside of its generally well-executed Big Ideas, much like Persona, it also helps that the game has some of the most tactically satisfying turn-based combat around, putting emphasis on exploiting enemy weaknesses, mana management, and other considerations that help ensure you’re not just mindlessly casting your highest damage spell over and over. On top of this, the class system is free-form and lets you cross-pollinate abilities, which gives a satisfying sense of customization and progression while bolstering the battles with changing options. There’s something deeply comforting about slipping into a massive, thoughtfully constructed RPG, and my time with Metaphor certainly fits the bill so far. —Elijah Gonzalez

Arctic Eggs

Year: 2024
Platforms: PC

A week or two ago I was looking over the votes for our best games of 2024 list and one name high on Dia Lacina’s ballot stuck out to me. Arctic Eggs totally missed my radar when it came out earlier this year, but I knew I had to give it a shot to see where (or even if) it belonged on that year-end list. So I paid the price and put it on the ol’ Steam Deck (a new thing to me which has completely changed how I play PC games, which I used to try as hard as possible to never have to play back when that meant spending extra time at my work desk) and yep: it’s one of the best things I’ve played this (or any other) year. Its surreal world and dialogue feel like something you’d see in one of those old traveling “underground cartoon” films (or, later, on MTV’s Liquid Television), a playfully absurd post-apocalyptic lark that’s rooted in environmental fatalism but is too smart and too damn cool to get all sad and preachy about it. Shit sucks, the planet’s screwed, we’re all going to end up in some permanently snowy urban blight hellscape where eggs are contraband and cigarettes are seasoning and cockroaches are extra protein, so suck it up and get to flipping, fry cook. Arctic Eggs has the most hilariously over-responsive physics ever seen in anything resembling a cooking sim, with the slightest flick of the right joystick making your eggs or bacon cartwheel a dozen feet into the air. Trying to cook these disgusting meals up as ordered is a short burst of absurdist chaos and frustration, reinforcing the bleakly comic grim resignation that is the game’s dominant tone. Play Arctic Eggs if you’re over being worried and love to hate games as much as you love to love them (or love for them to hate you).—Garrett Martin