<br>My normal taste in games leans towards arcade and action, but this year has been one where the extra focus to hone in on pinpoint-perfect reflexes just hasn't been as available as I'd like. Instead I've been taking it easy, using gaming as a way to relax and escape into a more manageable world. The game that I'm thankful for this year is SnowRunner?, which doesn't have an enemy anywhere in the whole world but instead requires the player to use its tools to complete a huge series of jobs across hostile terrain. While sorting out the controls takes some effort, once learned there are a huge amount of tools available to tackle even the roughest wilderness. Mountain tracks carved by streams, muddy bogs, rivers frozen solid and snowdrifts that even the highest-traction tires can't get a grip on all stand in the way of delivering Cargo to Place. You can tackle the challenges with brute force, careful plotting of the optimal route or relying on the winch to basically drag the truck to the goal, but there's always a way if you're patient enough. Few events are timed and just about everything is optional if you decide that a particular job feels like a bit much. There's pressure in navigating the tougher areas, of course, but otherwise SnowRunner? is a SLG game units of choosing a task and tackling it however you like, driving across the beauty of a wilderness that's just barely been touched by humans. It's challenging, sure, but also relaxing and satisfying, and I'm thankful there are games that let me unwind into a simpler, more-focused world.<br><br>To tackle the former comparison -- the reference to one of 2017's more lauded releases and a radical shift in series convention, to say the least -- it's not that such a descriptor is inherently untrue. It doesn't take long upon setting out into the fictional world of Teyvat to spot a fair number of similarities with Nintendo's work, some more blatant than others. But to come both into and away from Genshin Impact and proclaim this to be a clone and nothing else massively downplays the ways in which this game is presented. And above all else, does a great disservice to a developer that -- in all their imitation -- understand why the exploration, world and very level design itself of Breath of the Wild worked so wonderfully. There's even a case here that Genshin Impact actually builds atop the ideas Nintendo brought forth. Better still: masters them wholesale in carving out a game, a world, whose back-end monetization, brief technical frustrations and occasional grind can so easily be pushed aside.<br><br>Choosing a game to be thankful for in 2020 can be tricky. Given the current state of the world and how many of us are looking for ways to keep occupied while cooped up, I feel like we should be thankful for virtually any good, engaging games. But the one that I was thankful for the most is a game that felt optimistic, warm, comforting and colorful. Even if said game is about ferrying the souls of the dead towards the afterlife. I am, of course, referring to Thunder Lotus' Spiritfarer. Aside from being a possible GOTY contender in general, Spiritfarer hit a certain sweet spot for me, not only giving me the freedom to craft an insane ship filled with tons of activities and giving me an open world to explore, but also providing one of the year's best casts of characters. Azul, Gustav, Stanley...all of them were a blast to hang out with and I truly felt a bond between them as I learned more about their stories. It got to the point where I actually purchased the art book because I heard it had more info about them, and once I learned what not only went into their backstories, but how the world around them is all related to everyone and Stella in various ways, and the absolute tons of metaphorical layers that went into everything, I couldn't stop thinking about Spiritfarer for the longest time, about how what I thought were small bits suddenly had much more meaning. And all of this is just so refreshing. In a year where other games try to attempt drama by being continuously blunt, bleak and depressing by presenting horrible situation after horrible situation to the point where it almost cartoonishly feels like award bait and you stop caring about everyone in the plot, Spiritfarer decided to go hard in the opposite direction. Vibrant landscapes, cute animal characters who just want to hang out with you, a vast ocean filled with magical adventures...all of this means that when the emotional moments reveal themselves in a natural way and do hit, they hit hard. Spiritfarer never stops being comforting as a whole, but it deals with the themes of death and how everyone approaches them in such a beautiful, mature fashion. It's a brilliant bit of fantasy with the year's best writing and it's something we all need right now.<br> <br>Both the character banners and the weapon banner have guarantees on next-time pulls, similar to the 50/50 system with five-stars. If a four-star weapon or character is pulled that is not one of the featured ones, the next one pulled is guaranteed to be one of the featured ones. However, it can be any of the featured characters or weapons. If a player obtains a non-featured four-star character, for example, they're guaranteed to pull one of the three featured four-stars, but cannot choose wh<br>
