I cannot emphasize how hard it was not to repeat Frostpunk as my game of the year in this sophomore year of the pandemic. I’ve sunk another several hundred hours into it, there was DLC, I’m a pleased bean.

But there is one game I had been craving to experience ever since finishing NieR Automata, and it’s the game whose “joke” ending spins into that far future sequel with robots and existential crises. With similar structure to Automata and the same beautiful music, I was thrilled to see the NieR remake announced, and got chills when I finally got to hear “Snow in Summer in context.

NieR Replicant ver 1.22474487139… is available on Steam, xBox, and PS4.