11. Thousand Year Old Vampire (2019)
Though it came out in 2019, I didn’t get a hold of Thousand Year Old Vampire until 2020, deep in the worst, most uncertain days of the pandemic. It’s a game about horror, memory, loss and sacrifice, and it is played alone. The player creates the titular undead character and, navigating through randomly generated prompts, chart the centuries of their existence. Each prompt creates memories, but the ancient undead mind has only so much space, so the player has to choose which to save and which to discard. They can opt to transfer some memories to a diary, but they also risk being misplaced. Friends and enemies die of old age, again and again. Eventually, the vampire succumbs to the futility of existence and ceases to be in one of a variety of ways. It’s all very bleak and melancholy and probably the very worst solo RPG to play during the quarantine days; a self-inflicted existential crisis. But the mechanics of the game are brilliant – not only did a game I was playing alone manage to surprise me on more than one occasion, it evoked emotional responses that were so strong I had to set it aside for long periods of time, a feat managed for me by only a handful of books. I’ve never been able to quite get it out of my head since.
