Video Game

1. The Evil Within 2 (might change to Cry of Fear after I play it)

For some background, one of my favorite video game series is the Resident Evil Series. It's a survival horror game series that scares you with minimal jump scares. Instead of jump scares, it uses the game's sound and lighting to constantly make you feel scared. You could be in a room and out the window, you see something pass by. Or you hear footsteps nearby. You don't encounter any enemies but you are constantly on edge about what's coming next. The survival part is that they give you weapons. How they keep it scary is by giving you limited ammo. The game lets you decide how to best use your resources. For example, if there are slow zombies in the living room, I am not going to shoot them. I will just run past them and save my ammo. However, if some large spiders start chasing me, I am going to shoot every one of them until I am out of ammo. I will not rest easy until I know I have killed each and every spider in the whole game.
The Evil Within 2 takes it a step further by incorporating trauma into the survival horror game. In Resident Evil, we are just fighting monsters. In Evil Within 2, sometimes the monsters take the shape of the character's past trauma relating to guilt over a lost loved one. I myself suffer from trauma and my favorite part is how the character's relationship with their trauma changes as the story progresses.

2. Yakuza 0

I have been playing video games since I was seven years old. I remember playing Pokemon Emerald on my cousin’s Gameboy Advance which you could flip open. As the years went by, I mainly played on PC going from Flash video games on miniclip.com to playing now on Steam. Somewhere in the middle, video games stopped being fun for me. I played the horrible game League of Legends where the goal is to be better than other players. I began playing video games less for fun and more for completion. I created a whole list of completed games which ranged to more than a 163. The only few times where I had genuine fun was when I played with my friends on Left 4 Dead 2 or on Monster Hunter World. It was like that until I played Yakuza 0. It reminded me of what video games were about, just being plain fun. It didn’t take itself too seriously and it had the most absurd minigames like delivering pizza, managing real estate, karaoke, and somehow making them fun. For that reason, it has a special place in my heart.