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poo poo I hate having to write stuff, but lets see 10. Super Mario RPG 2023 - Amazing remaster, so charming and just great. 9. Metroid Prime Remastered - Prime is one of the best games ever, and this improves on all of it. 8. Dave the Diver - I really like this game, especially on the Deck. But it adds so many systems that I just don't give a poo poo about. 7. Marvel Midnight Suns - I can't believe I waited so long to play this game. Marvel + Fire Emblem: 3 Houses 6. Super Mario Bros Wonder - As everyone said, very charming and fun. It's weird they didn't just have a different Koopa Kid boss in each world, like SMW. but whatever. 5. Fire Emblem Engage - This game is so good, I'm still playing it because it's just so fun trying different builds with all the emblems 4. Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC - Didn't bother much with 2077 until this year with Patch 2.0 and the DLC. Man it's so good now. Beautiful. 3. Octopath Traveler 2 - Would've been my GOTY easy, unfortunately for it, it released in February in the year 2023. 2. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - I loved this so much more than BOTW and BOTW is one of the best games ever. Unfortunately it released in May in the year 2023. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 - One of the best games I've ever played. I can't stop playing this game. Co-op adds even more playability. A masterpiece.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:46
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Hollow Knight rules, and in great news, it was announced in 2022 that Silksong would be released by the middle of June of 2023, so I can only assume it's just sitting there available for anybody to purchase right now!
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Dec 31, 2023 02:53
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Jerusalem posted:Hollow Knight rules, and in great news, it was announced in 2022 that Silksong would be released by the middle of June of 2023, so I can only assume it's just sitting there available for anybody to purchase right now! As stacked as this year was, I'm kinda glad it's not out yet. I don't know if I would have gotten around to it if it were
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Dec 31, 2023 03:19
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Entenzahn posted:
I keep thinking about this post, and this entry. What led you to find this game? Did you know about and skip the first one? ... I'm tempted to pick it up as its trilogy is on sale for 8$ and well, I'm weak and curious.
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Dec 31, 2023 03:35
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Regy Rusty posted:Tactics Ogre Reborn – It didn’t even feel like there were any tactical decisions to be made during the fights. It was just balls of stats and hugely inflated HP pools bashing against each other on generally dull and uninspired maps from start to finish. Hmm, I'm not sure why I felt this way as well. The game has a bunch of cool classes and abilities that are almost completely unique to it. I set my guy up to do a cool thing and I take him into combat, and they do the cool thing and I melt into a bored puddle.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:24
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Shinji2015 posted:As stacked as this year was, I'm kinda glad it's not out yet. I don't know if I would have gotten around to it if it were I would have had to choose whether to shove Hi-Fi RUSH or Pizza Tower out of my top 5 and how the gently caress do you make that choice
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Dec 31, 2023 04:36
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Silksong GOTY 2024 with the Elden Ring DLC at #2
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Dec 31, 2023 04:43
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StrixNebulosa posted:I keep thinking about this post, and this entry. What led you to find this game? Did you know about and skip the first one? ... I'm tempted to pick it up as its trilogy is on sale for 8$ and well, I'm weak and curious. I played Guild Wars 1 back in the day and even attended a couple Guild vs Guild matches. I'm not sure how I originally got into GW2, but it was back in 2015 and it didn't stick. I only rediscovered it now through YouTube recommendations while I was on a Grim Dawn binge. GW1 is a very different experience than GW2, some even say it's more of an action RPG than an MMO. The open world zones are all instanced, so you can only meet and group up with other players in cities. I'm not sure how active the game is, but the good news is that most PvE content is designed so that you can play it solo with NPC followers. Building your character is much more about traveling the world and collecting skill cards that you can then slot into your skill bar, where your builds can combine skill cards from two different classes. Coming up with insane character builds has always been a highlight of the game imho. These days, I'll be honest, I prefer the grand spectacle of GW2's open world metas, so the first one is not quite for me. But if it sounds interesting to you and you don't mind the dated UI I hear it's still a very solid experience and has a small but consistent playerbase with some surprisingly active guilds. I can't confirm any of this first hand. Looks like you'll have to buy the trilogy and find out for all of us. Sorry.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:55
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Entenzahn posted:I played Guild Wars 1 back in the day and even attended a couple Guild vs Guild matches. I'm not sure how I originally got into GW2, but it was back in 2015 and it didn't stick. I only rediscovered it now through YouTube recommendations while I was on a Grim Dawn binge. That's way more detailed than I expected - thank you! I'll have a look, see what I want to check out. I'm an extremely solo player in MMOs so anything I can do alone sounds good.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:58
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2023 Game of the Year This year was weird and lovely but I gamed! 10. Baldur's Gate 3 This game is clearly good, but it's just not for my brain. I think D&D is not for my brain. Much rather punch everything like Jack. But i'm glad this exists for those that enjoy it. I played for <15hrs. 9. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I put 70 hours into this game and I know it's good but I didn't finish it. I'm riding a dragon to farm it for stupid loving parts for some stupid armor and you know what I said I'm not having fun I'm going to put this game down. The open world dream may be dead for me. 8. Vampire Survivors It's still good folks. Playing this game sometimes makes me feel like I'm tripping balls. 7. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Sometimes you just need to beat up an entire army by yourself. 6. Tetris 99 Getting a win in this game still gives me endorphins. I will always bust this out once or twice a month and have a good time. 5. Monster Hunter Rise & Sunbreak Tight monhun action. The setting is really fun and I love dango in real life as much as I do in game. 4. Stranger of Paradise Jack is the embodiment of punch first ask questions later and I love that poo poo. Also job systems gently caress do I love job systems. 3. Final Fantasy 16 The combat is fun the story is pretty tight if you don't side quest. You attack and kill god. It's everything Final Fantasy should be. 2. Armored Core 6 You're piloting a giant robot and kicking other giant robot asses. Incredibly well done by From. The mission structure makes it prime for gaming with limited time. 1. Street Fighter 6 This game got me out to locals. It reinvigorated my love for fighting games that started back on summer vacation in DR where I was shipped off too as soon as the school year ended. I vividly remember being huddled around a tv set up on a chair in an apartment building lobby passing the controller around playing street fighter 2. This brought that feeling back. Incredibly well balanced and welcoming to new comers. This game is really good and probably has redefined the fighting game genre. I really want to see more people playing and watching these games because I really think they're some of the highest ceilings of skill in gaming. Honorable mention: Team Fight Tactics this poo poo gets me through some boring bits of the day.
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Dec 31, 2023 05:32
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6. Tactical Nexus A simulation of what its like to be the time cube guy. Its brain melting. You feel crazy. Its fantastic. It’s iceberg Youtubes in game form. You will become feral. You are a vessel for the voice of gods, Cassandra. You will speak truth but no one will believe you. Only started playing, would rank higher otherwise. 5. Mechabellum Steel balls go brrrrr. Best autobattler in the biz. 4. Void Rains Upon Her Heart Queer alien bullet hell. One of the best games ever made. But this is a list for 2023 and not all time so only gets fourth here. 3. Misericorde Volume One Murder mysteries. Nuns. Homosexuality. These are all things I love. Also has good music. 2. My Time At Sandrock Jesus Christ, how is this game this good? Like have you played My Time At Portia? That game was so loving bland. This is on the other hand is charming and funny. Biggest improvement I ever seen from a sequel? I still neat to beat it but honest to god this might be the best in the genre. Its only real competition for me at this point is Rune Factory 4. 1. Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children The greatest SRPG of all time. The greatest video game of all time? Its up there. Don’t trust people who dislike this game, they are not your friends, and incapable of human emotions like love. This game has it all. Complex systems. Intrigue. Pets. Gay subtext. Dance Dance Revolution inspired mechanics. Deep politics. Prison reform. Play this game. Play this game. Play this game.
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Dec 31, 2023 05:35
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Now I'm thinking I need to get Sandrock, if the improvement was THAT big. I got addicted to Portia but it was so, so boring.
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Dec 31, 2023 05:41
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Metis of the Chat Thread posted:Now I'm thinking I need to get Sandrock, if the improvement was THAT big. I got addicted to Portia but it was so, so boring. If you were addicted to Portia then it really is a no-brainer, this is one of the most charming games I've touched in the last ten years.
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Dec 31, 2023 05:55
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This has been a crazy year where I didn't have a ton of free time, but I still managed to play some great games and thankfully am in a better place than when I started. Looking forward to having more time in the next year to catch up on the huge amount of excellent releases in 2023. Thanks for everyone's posts this year, I love reading everyone's thoughts on why you chose the given games and how they affected you. Added a few games to my backlog thanks to this thread. 10 . (the) Gnorp Apologue  Sometimes I like to chill out with an idle game and this one had a lot of fun gameplay twists and strategy to i. It was also satisfying to see how the different buildings and upgrades were represented. Good amount of choices to experiment with. No real story to speak of but fun to let idle and zone out to while multitasking. 9. TEVI  Best metroidvania I played this year. Lots of secrets and fun bosses. A semi bullet hell game, but I felt like the game gave enough options and cues to make it not too difficult to dodge the attacks even as the screen got covered in lasers. Surprisingly good worldbuilding with an interesting magic/tech system. Pretty fun and chill story as well with enough mystery to keep you wanting to find out more. 8. Void Stranger  Excellent story and gameplay twists. This would be ranked higher but I find Sokoban style puzzling way too frustrating. I got through the Void ending and found several secrets myself but used a guide to get through many of the puzzles afterwards. I thought the surprises were really rewarding. I would recommend anyone looking for a good meta story that also doesn't like this style of game to use a spoiler-free guide. I used this one from Reddit to be able to find some of the secrets I was missing without spoiling much beyond the puzzle solutions and some of the items you can get - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CH1UDJzEYcONpIxmEfnSyw2ee6HvRn3ZbXBc9oQQ1uo/edit#gid=0. 7. Remnant 2  A great improvement on the original. Added many options through the new class system that makes it much more fun than the previous game. I also appreciate all the secrets strewn throughout its worlds that made exploring a blast. The environments and boss battles looked great and I really appreciated the first area's Bloodborne inspired styling. Have not been able to play this with my friend group yet as this year has been crazy busy but I am sure it would be as good in co-op as the first one was. 6. Paranormasight  This was a great surprise this year, the initial chapters were fun and tense. Although the later chapters did not quite live up to them, they were overall still good and I liked the twists in the story although some of them took a bit too long to come to fruition with obvious foreshadowing. I enjoyed the meta aspects to some of the puzzles but there could have been more of that to make the gameplay more interesting. All in all this was a great horror game with light puzzling and a good story told in an unorthodox way. If you like Zero Escape's style of storytelling you will probably like this as well. 5. Diablo IV  Played this with my wife and we had a great time going through the surprisingly long campaign. Unfortunately it is not at the level of Diablo 3 post expansion yet but I feel they are heading in the right direction with the recent seasons. Glad that it does not have any Pay To Win microtransactions, as I was worried that would be the case considering how Diablo Immortal turned out. I think this game will most likely not be as fun as other entries in the series overall until the expansion, as that seems to be the track record with Blizzard's games for me. They always seem to get better post expansion. 4. Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty [img]https://i.imgur.com/uAHq7vv.png[/timg] Tried to get into this when it first came out and made it halfway through before stopping due to frustrations with the bugginess and lack of character building. They have greatly improved the gameplay with the 2.0 update, giving a reason to engage with the systems at play more and letting you build more of a character identity. The brutality of the combat made it really fun to go with a shotgun-based build that dabbled in stealth. Eventually started just Sandevistaning through with an explosive revolver as well to shake things up which was equally fun. The story and characters are on a whole other level from most games with a lot of grey morality and maturity. This game definitely got the themes of Cyberpunk media correct, having many dark and sad outcomes in quests but often still having a bit of light and hope in many of the side quests and story. 3. Lies of P  I love Bloodborne and this is the closest game in years to emulate it. The hilt + blade combination system is great to allow for trying out several different weapons/builds without having to make huge changes. I also was surprised by the story being pretty well done, as I thought going into it that a grim dark Pinocchio tale would be pretty silly but it handled it well. The puppet theme and madness of the setting was handled well and made you feel like you had to be on the lookout to get ambushed constantly when arriving at a new area. which also made exploration extra rewarding as you found both shortcuts and ways to turn the enemy's positions to your advantage, often taking several out at once. 2. Slay the Princess  Incredible story and excellent reactivity, going into many areas and themes I did not expect. I appreciate the emotionality and rawness in the story as well, it shows a great deal. I can tell the creators have experience with depression and other mental illnesses which it shows in the writing. As someone that is neurodivergent I have always liked stories that come from a real place and don't treat mental illness as someone bad but rather someone trying to overcome their illness and heal. 1. Baldur's Gate 3  Best Western RPG I have played in years. Has been a lot of fun playing with my wife, as I introduce her to do the DnD setting and have been telling her about some of my experiences in TTRPG. Definitely a bit of nostalgia in this. I only dabbled with the original Baldur Gates' games as I didn't really get into DnD until the Neverwinter Nights games and the custom module scene, but this blows any similar RPG I've played in recent years out of the water. Excellent grey characters and storytelling that emulates tabletop gaming well. The itemization was awesome and I love how they made it possible to make more interesting builds than in standard DnD with the different itemsets. The exploration and freedom was great with so much hidden content that made it a joy to try and find all the different routes available. Only disappointment for me is that it does not go to level 20 to play with some higher end spells and abilities. Hopefully Larian will continue to build on this and produce an expansion or addon that goes beyond this. Still need to finish a Dark Urge playthrough in single player so have plenty to do with this game yet. Quick List: 10 . (the) Gnorp Apologue 9. TEVI 8. Void Stranger 7. Remnant 2 6. Paranormasight 5. Diablo IV 4. Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty 3. Lies of P 2. Slay the Princess 1. Baldur's Gate3 Edited to change to descending order. Lonegar fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 06:44
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Lonegar posted:7. Remnant 2 just fyi the world order is random so your first area might not be someone else's. agreed that "gently caress it, literally yharnam" was a great choice well implemented.
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Dec 31, 2023 07:00
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I love these threads. Thank you so much for running it this year, VG. I think this year more than any other I've really just embraced my love of gaming. I haven't spent as much of this year watching TV series or movies, but as of December 28th when I started to finalise this list I've finished 56 games this year, and played countless others that I couldn't hope to remember or list if I tried. I plan next year to keep even more comprehensive notes, though - solidifying this into a locked down list has been a pain. For the purposes of my Game of the Year list, I have two criteria I use. First, the game needs to have released in 2023; I'll occasionally tweak 'release date' to suit my purposes by counting a substantial DLC release or significant port/remake as making the game eligible if it came out this year, but generally I'm trying to limit my focus to the games of the year that was. Second, I need to have either finished the game or else played a significant enough amount that I feel like I have a firm grasp on it. I've got a wandering attention span and I'm generally inclined these days to just drop games that I'm done with whether I've seen the end or not, but I also don't want to just throw out snap judgements of stuff that I played for an hour and never touched again. I've had to split this list in two to fit the character limit. Goddamn. Here's my spoilered list for VG to make things simple, otherwise read on for my full thoughts. 10 - Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 9 - Cocoon 8 - Humanity 7 - A Highland Song 6 - Venba 5 - Hi-Fi Rush 4 - Street Fighter 6 3 - Against the Storm 2 - Baldur's Gate 3 1 - The Making of Karateka #10 Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (PC, Switch, PS4/XB1, PS5/XSX)  The Sega Dreamcast is up there with the SNES for my favourite home console of all time. Coming off the Nintendo 64 which had left me pretty cold and sent me mostly back to PC gaming, the Dreamcast was a blast of fresh air, and one that I knew I had to get my hands on the first time I saw the intro for Sonic Adventure playing on a TV at my local Electronics Boutique. The early trifecta of games that cemented my love for the machine were Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, and Jet Set Radio. I'd never seen, played or heard anything quite like it. The cel shaded art style, eclectic soundtrack of funk, hip hop, and EDM, and combination of Tony Hawk-esque skating movement and time attack exploration of the game's contained but large and varied areas while evading police pursuit absolutely blew me away. The death of the Dreamcast saw me migrate to the original Xbox, which given Sega's partnership with Microsoft and a number of their studios producing exclusives for the console felt very much like a 'Dreamcast 2'. This included Jet Set Radio Future, a refinement of the formula that simplified the graffiti tagging mechanics and removed the time limits but expanded the size of the levels, interconnecting multiple areas and changing the focus from evading the police to more direct encounters. The first game lives a little larger in my memory than it's sequel, though I'll happily admit that I think the sequel is the better game of the two mechanically. And then that was it, aside from a mobile spinoff that never saw release outside of Japan, a GBA port of the original (that I haven't played yet, but it's likely going to show up soon in the Game Boy Game Club I run over in Retro Games), and a HD re-release of the first game, the series was just... done. The fanbase was far from dead of course, plenty of people all across the internet are happy to sing praises of the JSR series from on high, and there's been no shortage of fan creations out there, from fanart and fanfiction to musical output. Big shoutouts to both Jet Set Radio Live, an internet radio station serving up both the original game OSTs (including Bomb Rush Cyberfunk!) alongside remixes and curated playlists themed around the in-game gangs, and to 2 Mello's excellent tribute albums Memories of Tokyo-to and Sounds of Tokyo-To Future. Dinosaur Games apparently produced a pitch for a sequel called Jet Set Radio Evolution that wowed Sony executives but was turned down by Atlus. It wasn't until 2020 when Dutch developers Team Reptile announced their game Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio with a soundtrack featuring Hideki Naganuma that seemed from the very first trailer to nail the visual style and even more importantly the sound of JSR. I've spent so much of this write up talking about what came before Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to emphasize just how high my hopes were for this game going into it. Aside from the initial teaser and a release date announcement trailer I'd studiously avoided looking into anything more about the development of the game, not willing to let myself get my hopes up or get too invested. The game was delayed in 2022 and rescheduled for a release this year, and with this year being so jam packed with incredible releases it wasn't until quite late into it that I finally got myself a copy of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and booted it up. I had so many questions - JSR and JSRF were early 00s games. Did I even really want to play a game in that style anymore? Would I still find any joy to be had here decades on, or was this something best left in the past? It certainly nailed the look and the sound, but how was the gameplay going to feel? From the moment I landed on my first grind, a big grin started to spread across my face. They did it. They loving did it. This is a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in every sense of the word, an unapologetic loveletter to JSR and JSRF. It blends elements from both together, retaining the original games slightly more involved graffiti system and (eventually) regular police pursuit, blending it with JSRF's sprawling interconnected environments and verticality. It is so, so satisfying to proceed through each of its levels, seeing spots ripe for your gang tags and crafting on the fly how to make it up there. If I go up this rail, leap across this gap here and then chain wallrides here and here... Perfection. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk introduces its own wrinkles into the formula, the jetpacks that your characters wear acting as both a boost and a double jump that expands your mobility, and there's a shallow combat system that sees you actively combatting police forces rather than just skating around them or occasionally tagging them. The combat is definitely the glaring weak spot in the game - one boss fight in particular the 1v1 vs DJ Cyber lead to me look up what the hell the game was asking me to do as it wasn't remotely clear. The combat makes up a small portion of the game overall though, a blemish but not a dealbreaker and I appreciate the attempt at trying something different even if I don't think it was particularly successful. For good and for bad, for better and for worse, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is exactly the successor it wants to be. This is the only game on my list that I can't recommend without caveats - not to say it's a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it a transformative or innovative one. For people like me however who have desperately been waiting for another installment in the Jet Set Radio series, here is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Sega has since announced a new game in the franchise, one of several IPs that they're rebooting - it's my hope they find something unique and interesting to do with it, but if they need a starting point there are far worse places they could look for inspiration than here. #9 Cocoon (PC, Switch, PS4/XB1, PS5/XSX)  It's been a pretty good year for puzzle games this year, I think, with a number of releases that got very close to being on my final top ten list like Viewfinder and Chants of Sennaar. Ultimately, Viewfinder I found too easy, never really taking full advantage of its absolutely incredible mechanic. Chants of Sennaar was dragged down by some frustrating puzzle design and ill-fitting mandatory stealth sections. Although it isn't necessarily without its flaws either, the pristine polish of Cocoon is what elevates it for me. You begin the game in control of a little orb-carrying insect, your purpose relatively unclear in a world that eschews dialogue or any form of written storytelling. The central mechanic of the game though quickly becomes clear - the little red orb that you can carry around is its own self contained world that you can dive into and out of, both solving puzzles and progressing within it and transporting it around in the wider world when out of it. Already a cool enough concept, when you stumble across a second green orb and understand that it too is a second world that you can dive in and out of, the possibility space expands even further.  Then you pick up the red orb and dive into the green orb and now you are carrying the red orb around inside the green orb and your brain starts to have a very satisfying "wait, oh poo poo" moment as the central recursion mechanics of the game become crystal clear. Each orb that you carry has its own ability - the red orb reveals hidden pathways, the green orb switches certain columns between transparent and solid, and so on. Eventually, you'll be managing multiple orbs each with a different power, weaving them in and out of each other in a fantastic brain dance of recursive puzzle solving. The sheer amount of possibilities that this presents would be overwhelming, but Cocoon's developers Geometric Interactive have used fantastic environmental and puzzle design to ensure that your progress is always appropriately gated. There is always a single puzzle or challenge in front of you, and you have the tools that you need to solve it. While some might feel that this dampens the exploratory nature of the game - you're more or less progressing through a linear path of these puzzles - it does a lot to avoid player frustration. You're never left stumbling through the environment trying to work out whether or not you have the ability to solve a given puzzle and you're never left wandering around backtracking wondering if you've missed something. The puzzle difficulty feels well tuned too. The puzzles aren't overly difficult, but do produce an extremely satisfying number of "aha" moments when everything just clicks, and some of the later interactions between orb powers and layers of recursion are very, very cool. The game's presentation much like it's puzzle design is similarly polished to a mirror sheen. Each world you explore feels vivid and distinctive, populated by all manner of weird biological and biomechanical bits and pieces. Environmental art design is always clear and distinct - I never found myself questioning where it was or wasn't possible to go or what was or was not part of a puzzle or otherwise interactable. The music is provided by lush, ambient, dreamlike synths that suit the tone perfectly. The story is intriguing as well and I'm sure has lead to no short amount of speculation around the internet as to what it all means - your immediate purpose is incredibly unclear, but it will rapidly become obvious through the game's storytelling that a particular set of forces are working in opposition to you, and the final reveal once you do achieve your ultimate goal is a satisfying capstone. I mentioned at the top of the writeups that Cocoon wasn't without its flaws. The first is its boss battles - although there aren't too many, these have a baffling approach where taking a single hit will see you catapulted out of the boss arena and needed to redo the fight from scratch. It's a baffling misstep given the approachability and tight design of the rest of the game, and while they fit into the game significantly better than something like Chants of Sennaar's stealth segments I'd still question as to whether or not they were really necessarily. Secondarily, though I don't think quite as bad, there are a few moments late in the game that see you having to execute some press-the-button-at-precisely-the-right-time segments to proceed. I never encountered an issue with these personally but like with the boss fights, players who were expecting a chill puzzle experience might be offput that Cocoon is now suddenly demanding action game reflexes from them. Neither of these flaws were anywhere near significant enough, for me at least, to derail my enjoyment of the game, but I'd feel remiss to not mention them. While not my favourite puzzle game that I played this year, I'd have zero qualms in recommending Cocoon to just about everyone, even those who might not necessarily find themselves drawn to 'puzzle' games. The world of Cocoon was a delight to visit, and I'm very excited to see what the team at Geometric Interactive produce next. #8 Humanity (PC, PS4, PS5, PCVR, PSVR)  Humanity is the latest game from Japanese studio Enhance Games, headed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and behind the remasters of Rez and Lumines - Rez Infinite in 2016 and Lumines: Remastered in 2018 - as well as 2018's incredible synesthetic experience Tetris Effect. That alone was enough to put it on my radar, and when the early critical rumblings were coming back positive I bumped it up to the top of my list of games to play. In a year that's seen some very cool visual experiences, Humanity stands far and away as the most out and out visually arresting game that I've played this year, perhaps even more so given that I played it in VR. As a glowing ethereal Shiba Inu, you are initially given a simple task by a floating, glowing orb. The People will come through the door, in an endless stream - your job is to guide them, seeing them safely to the exit door at the other end of the level. To do so, you can lay down commands that The People will follow, initially starting with the simplest command of all - changing the direction that they're walking in. The game is reminiscent of a (good) 3D version of Lemmings (sorry, Lemmings 3D) and the initial puzzles focus on you guiding the stream of people via a series of commands across, around and through the floating environments that you find yourself in. But don't worry, the glowing orb helpfully informs you, if you should make a mistake with your guidance and send a stream of people mindlessly plunging into the void, they'll simple blip out of existence and eventually find themselves walking back through the door. The game helpfully keeps track of just how many of The People you've sent plunging into oblivion. The stages themselves are fairly sparse and brutalist, with grey concrete structures floating in a blue sky void filled with soft clouds, all of this plain set dressing only serving to accentuate the start of the show - the bright, multicoloured walking mass of The People, moving, running, leaping and swimming in their endless streams. There's a liquidity to them; Humanity's puzzles, at least to start with, could be easily replicated if you were just diverting a flow of water through various paths, but there's something intricately interesting in watching this giant mass of people wind throughout a level. Puzzle solutions aren't just satisfying because you've solved the level, often the end result that you've created as you watch The People move to their goal feels almost like an art piece, streams of humanity crossing over each other and forming waves, swirls and arcs. This is particularly stunning in VR, though no less engaging playing in flatscreen. If you have a VR headset, I'd certainly recommend playing Humanity on it, but if you don't you're by no means getting a lesser experience.  You'll also encounter Goldies - golden giants that must be collected by having The People pass through them. The Goldies will then obediently walk along with your stream of humanity, but unlike them if they plunge into the abyss they're lost forever unless you retry the level. You'll need to rescue certain amounts to unlock more stages, but as you accumulate more and more of them you'll also unlock a bunch of cosmetics that allow you to customise The People to your liking. It's important to remember as well that in many stages The People begin walking whether you're ready or not, and you'll frequently find yourself racing ahead of them to preventatively divert them away from a Goldie lest they immediate lead it straight to its doom. The game grants more and more commands to you over time, though never an overwhelming amount, as well as throwing other wrinkles in the formula your way. A series of levels themed around Fate for example tasks you with putting down your entire command sequence before you start the flow of time and release The People, with these levels taking on more of a programming puzzler feel. In the late game, with the introduction of some additional mechanics, Humanity begins to undergo somewhat of a genre shift from a Lemmings based puzzler to what ends up almost feeling like an RTS game. Puzzles shift to rely on more direct control of small clusters of The People, you'll often find yourself racing around frantically at a much higher pace and trying to micromanage groups. It also introduces a small degree of outcome randomness that can lead to frustration - there's one particular level that I had worked out the solution for, but due to a small factor that could have been a minor mistake in my timing or positioning, the approach didn't work. So I discounted that and tried endless other variations, until finally in frustration having to look up a video. This was the only level in the game I looked up the solution for, and I 100%ed the game, so I won't pretend I'm not a tiny little bit bitter about that. That individual moment of frustration though pales against the rest of a game as a whole though. I haven't touched on the plot of the game because I'm not even sure where I'd begin, other than to say that the writing and the level theming go hand in hand very well, and that the final stage of the game and the resulting conclusion feels suitably epic and satisfying for a game of this scale. The haunting, almost discordant central theme to the game worms its way into my brain still and likely will continue to do so for some time, and when I hear that music and close my eyes, I can still see glorious, sparkling rivers of The People soaring, twirling, floating and - more often than not - plunging in waterfalls into the void. #7 A Highland Song (PC, Switch)  If you're familiar with some of inkle's previous work - 80 Days and Overboard! specifically - you may already know what you're getting with A Highland Song. A well written game with multiple, branching, layered pathways through the game with nested secrets and rewards to discover if you're willing to take the time to plumb its depths. The big departure here though is that where inkle's previous outings have been (for the most part) heavily text based, the central mechanic of A Highland Song is clambering through the peaks and valleys of the Scottish highlands like a 2D Breath of the Wild. Fifteen year old Moira McKinnon has never seen the sea, but when she receives a letter from her Uncle Hamish telling her to come to his lighthouse by Beltane, she makes up her mind to run away from home. Playing as Moria, your task is simple - make your way to the lighthouse in just five days. This is far trickier than it initially sounds, however - Moira has mapped out the first paths through the hills from her bedroom window, but very quickly after that it will be down to you to find a way forward. A Highland Song's main gameplay loop is simple - explore a highland hill, finding items or encountering other people as you go and ascend to the peak. Once at the peak the map will zoom right out and allow you to plan a path forward as best you can. Sometimes (hopefully) you've found a map that will clue you in on a shortcut - by contrasting the map to the local natural features you can pinpoint the shortcut location. Other times you may be left wandering down the other side of the peak hoping for a trail marker somewhere that will let you progress on.  Exploring in the game is deeply satisfying as every corner of a hill usually has something of note there, whether it might be an item or a chance encounter with a character, or a map that might become relevant a few hills later. It's a gorgeous world to get lost in too, the multilayered hills made up of individual 'slices' of paths with a vivid 'painted' art style. As you make your way through the highlands, Moira shares recollections of letters between her and her Uncle that provide the local myths and legends around the various hills and occasionally hints on how to progress, or what a given hill might be called. The voice acting in the game is extremely well done and Moira is a charming character. I quickly found myself wincing any time I'd inadvertently take a path too fast and send her off a cliff - sorry about your ankle, Moira. The music is also a highlight, a mix of atmospheric and ambient pieces by composer Laurence Chapman and energetic, upbeat pieces by Scottish folk bands Talisk and Fourth Moon. These play out during the game's sprinting sequences where Moira gets space to run across part of the highlands, turning the game into a rhythm game briefly. There's a real joy in these moments watching the landscape fly past as Moira runs with the sounds of a song like Talisk's "Echo" in your ears. What feels most astonishing to me about the game is how you genuinely can become lost. On my first playthrough, I explored my way through a dark cave that turned out to be a lot bigger on the inside than I was expected. When I emerged blinking into the sunlight on the other end it suddenly hit me - I had no idea where I was in relation to the peak I had just left, and no idea what the name of the peak I was on was. There wasn't much else for me to do but pick my way upwards to try and find the summit so I could look around and work out where the hell I'd gotten to. The game has survival elements as well - nothing complex, but Moira can take damage if you fall or stumble which can most commonly occur from taking a too big drop. The quality of shelter you can find at night is important too; Moira will need to sleep eventually and sleeping in rough conditions will lower her maximum health. Rain, cold wind and snow will all start to take its toll as well - you can very quickly find yourself in a rough spot as mistakes compound on each other. These systems and the ever-present passing of time give some further friction to A Highland Song's gameplay. The trip to the next pass will take several hours, by the time you arrive there it will likely be nightfall. Do you keep pushing forward to squeeze some extra progress in the day, knowing that there may not be suitable shelter anywhere close on the other side of the pass? Or do you make your way back down this peak a little where there was a cottage shelter where you know you could get a good night's sleep? I'll say up front that the time limit both is and isn't a concern. The game features multiple endings, and even those where you arrive after Beltane are 'good' endings - my first successful completion I arrived a single day after Beltane and the ending gave me enough hints as to what the true ending might be if I make it by Beltane that I'm determined to get a better run through. This is aided by two things - first, A Highland song is a breezy game - 3 hours is about the length I'd say for a playthrough. Second, it has a New Game Plus mode where maps and items that you've found stay with you on restart, letting you slowly build up your knowledge of the hills and make faster and faster progress the more you explore. There's so much to dive into and discover here, with a 100 map fragments scattered through the hills. Lost things, echoes and memories to discover, and achievements for those who want to go above and beyond - naming every peak correctly and leaving an appropriate blessing at the top of them. I've loved my time in A Highland Song so far and I can't wait to keep exploring more. #6 Venba (PC, Switch, XB1, XBSX, PS5)  I've seen and heard Venba described as "this years Unpacking" which is not a bad comparison. On the outside looking in, it's not that Venba doesn't seem appealing per se - billing itself as a 'short narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom, who immigates to Canada with her family in the 1980s', Venba's opening pitch is enough to grab attention for sure, but I think it's not until you play Venba that, much like Unpacking, you get to see so much of the nuance of the narrative on offer here and see what makes it special. What is a narrative cooking game, anyway, you may ask? Predominantly, it's a visual novel as you may have guessed, but one punctuated with short puzzle sequences themed around cooking incredible looking Tamil cusine (playing this game made me incredible hungry). You're armed with your mother's recipe book, but it's well loved and rather worn, meaning that sometimes you don't quite have all the steps that you need. You'll need to intuit the correct sequence of steps required to cook a dish. Failure is inconsequential - you can just endlessly retry - and there's a built in hint system to help guide you in the right direction should you ever feel stuck. Venba is first and foremost telling a story, not aiming to challenge you.  So what sets this apart from the myriad of other visual novels? It's a short experience, I'd say clocking in around 1 to 2 hours depending on how fast you read, but it crams so much into that time about culture and immigration, family and family relationships, what it means for a child to grow up between two cultures and how they navigate that, and what it means for the parent to watch their child go through this process. I'm not an immigrant, I can't say I have lived experience of the myriad of topics related to this that Venba touches on such as discrimination and racism, the fear of living your own culture and just wanting to fit in. I'm also not a parent and can't speak to those experiences, raising a child and fearing for what the future may hold for them. But I can say this; the writing in Venba is beautiful and poignant. A scene where Venba and her son walk through a park in the evening searching - if you've played it, you know the scene I mean - had me on the edge of my seat. The ending of the game itself moved me to tears. The game covers large amounts of time but at the same time is never overly explanatory - it isn't afraid to simply leave gaps for the player to intuit what has happened in the meantime. There's so many little touches in the game, the way the characters move and react to each other, the contrast between a character's internal thoughts - voicelines for you to select - and what they actually say. There's a particular sequence late in the game that acts as sort of a cooking power fantasy, both letting you cook up a storm but also showing the development of the character's cooking ability - you are no longer hesitantly following recipes, now you just cook. Also, the soundtrack of Tamil inspired music absolutely owns. Venba is short, well written and deeply touching. It's one of my favourite bite sized experiences this year, and is also available on Game Pass. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading, see you in the next post.
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#5 Hi-Fi Rush (PC, XSX)  The shadowdrop surprise of the year, and what a fantastic surprise it was. A rhythm-based character action game from the studio that brought you.... erm, The Evil Within series? As incongruous as that might sound, Hi-Fi Rush is a fantastic synthesis of disparate elements that comes together to form an amazing whole. You play a Chai, self proclaimed future rock star and the biggest goddamned himbo of 2023. After undergoing experimental surgery, Chai winds up with his music player embedded in his chest giving him visual synesthesia and the ability to kick rear end in perfect time with the music. An ability he needs almost immediately as he gets branded as a defect by the company responsible for his surgery, and Chai's initial efforts to escape send him tumbling headlong into a wide-reaching conspiracy at the heart of Vandelay Technologies and it's sinister CEO Kale Vandelay. This game is an absolute treat, pulling players headlong into its world with a mixture of rich cel-shaded visuals (something I've long had a fondness for thanks to Jet Set Radio), awesome soundtrack - both the licensed and original, unlicensed music here is great - and genuinely funny writing. Hi-Fi Rush is an out and out comedy game, with bumbling airhead Chai and his frequently exasperated found family of allies having some great back and forth moments. This extends into the cast of robots scattered throughout Vandelay Technologies as well, from noir pastiche HR investigators to lazy and incompetent janitors, to the array of security robots who serve as the games main roster of enemies. This bright colourful chaos of a world and all its elements combines together with a character action combat system that rewards players for fighting to the beat, visually displayed on screen thanks to the adorable cat robot 808 but also by so much of the environment around you. As you string together combos, the finishers will also provide visual cues to sync up with the audio. When you're in the zone, going with the beat, the sounds of you smacking around robots punctuating the soundtrack as you leap, dodge, twirl and tear through everything in your way, this is when Hi-Fi Rush is at its absolute best, inducing a rhythmic flow state. Between combat encounters, you'll engage in mostly fine 3D platforming and exploration with the occasional moment of frustration as the camera decides to align itself perfectly in a way that makes judging a jump a complete pain in the rear end. Writing about all this is tricky, so here, let me just show you. This is from fairly late in the game but shows off so much of what I love about this game - it might be my favourite single moment in a game from this year. Moving from the idiot cartoon slapstick straight into a mass combat, with Invaders Must Die dropping? Perfect. (Disclaimer: I really like this song. If you don't like this song I guess this probably won't hit as well. It's a pretty great fight sequence though.) Also this video shows someone who is significantly better at this game than I am, which is nice to see as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrXHMEymHkY There's probably some preconceptions as to what sort of player will enjoy Hi-Fi Rush - if you find yourself interested but worried about either the complexity of the action combat gameplay or if you think you might have been born without any sense of rhythm whatsoever, there's a number of intelligent accessibility options included. Apart from options for colourblindness, there's also some extra rhythm visualisation options available - changing both the way that 808 displays the beat pulse but also you can just turn on a visual beat across the bottom of the screen. It's also possible to tweak the gameplay whether by dropping the difficulty or setting up auto action mode that still requires you to execute moves to the beat, but Chai will choose varied and appropriate moves for the situation. There's also some more traditional rhythm-game-y sequences that can be set to only rely on a single button press should you be finding the multiple button sequences too difficult. While the accessibility options aren't exhaustive, it's welcome to see them included at all. I'm never going to see all the content the game has to offer. Besides the collectables scattered throughout the stages, there's secrets scattered throughout the levels to encourage replay once you've unlocked abilities later in the game that will let you go back and open new areas, and a survival mode battle tower and accompanying challenges that are beyond my fairly meager rhythm and action game abilities - but I was able to clear the game on Easy and if I can do it, so can you! With all that said, Hi-Fi Rush still won't be for everyone - but if the video above looks at all entertaining to you, it's available on Game Pass and I'd encourage you to give a try. #4 Street Fighter 6 (PC, PS4, PS5, XSX)  Steam reliably informs me that I've spent more than 200 hours playing Street Fighter 6 this year, making it probably the single title I've sunk the most time into in 2023 by far. Fighting games are always a hard sell. If you've never found a fighting game that clicked with you, never had the moment of understanding where the basic concepts of fighting games start to lock themselves into your brain and muscle memory, they can often look deeply intimidating. It's easy to think that you'd never be able to learn how to play fighting games, so why bother? I mean hell, I spent 200 hours playing Street Fighter 6, am I really going to try and tell you that this fighting game is somehow the gateway into fighting games that you've always been missing? Yes. Street Fighter 6 does so much right to try and onboard newcomers to the genre. The single player World Tour mode lets you take a create-a-character avatar through the world of Street Fighter, cobbling together a moveset based on a character style and customisable iconic moves from the whole cast. Want to be Dhalsim but with a Hadouken and Blanka's Blanka Ball technique? You can! Throughout the World Tour, missions, challenges and minigames work to introduce basic fighting game fundamentals to the player - how to anti air, how to punish whiffs or unsafe moves etc. None of this is enough to sell Street Fighter 6 on alone, I'd never suggest someone buy it just for the single player content, but as a way to get a new player onboarded it's fantastic. Additionally, SF6 has introduced the Modern Control scheme. This aims to ease the burden of learning how to play fighting games by simplifying the classic 6 button control scheme down to 4, adding auto-combos and mapping special moves to direction and special button combos reminiscent of Smash Bros. Arguments rage online about how competitively viable this is for differing members of the cast, but it's important to remember that none of this should matter to a new player. What it does instead is let them skip immediately to the fun part of fighting games, fighting against other people and getting to pull off cool stuff. If you decide later that you want to learn classic controls then cool, that's still going to be there for you later and it will still be difficult, but you'll be armed with game experience at this point that will hopefully make for an easier transition. This all sits upon a rock solid foundation of core mechanics, the Drive Gauge system being so much more interesting than Street Fighter 5's V-Skill and V-Trigger systems. Character variety is decently spread for this point in the game's lifespan, and I'm excited to see how the game develops even further over time with balance adjustments and new DLC characters. The game looks and sounds great, the rollback netcode is some of the best that I've ever experienced, and I'm hopeful that the upcoming Tekken 8 has even half of the polish and approachability of this game. Fighting game is something so great. Come and see why. #3 Against the Storm (PC)  For best immersion for this post, have the rain falling outside and listen to this wonderful piece from the game's OST. Every year, I wait until pretty much the last minute before I assemble my list. It's the 31st of December in Australia while I write this, I've been writing on and off all day and I really need to get this wrapped up as I need to leave soon to head to a New Year's Eve party. It feels like every year though, I stumble onto a game in mid to late December that absolutely blows me away and forces me to drastically re-evaluate the position of everything on my list. This year, Against the Storm was that game. How good is Against the Storm? Good enough that upon learning that the Xbox Game Pass version had an issue where it would delete your saves (thanks to Microsoft's batshit handling of cloud saves), I bought the game on Steam again to start over. The prospect of starting over didn't bug me, and I likely would have bought a copy somewhere regardless just to give the devs money. That's how good Against the Storm is. Against the Storm is a roguelite city builder, a concept that at first read doesn't seem like it should work. How do you square hallmarks of the roguelite genre (itself a pretty drat nebulous term at this point but that's a debate for another thread) like procedurally generated or run based gameplay and metaprogression systems with a city builder - traditionally slow, thoughtful games around meticulously crafting your perfect model city? As it turns out, you do it by removing the endgame parts of a city builder that traditionally bore me to tears and instead just focus on the interesting initial stages of trying to carve out some form of viable settlement.  The old world was washed away by the Blightstorm, and now the last bastion of civilization is the Smoldering City, kept standing against the ravages of the cyclical Blightstorm through the grace of the Scorched Queen. You play as one of her Viceroys, charged with venturing out into the hostile wilderness to establish settlements. These are not enduring cities to stand the test of time, however, so much as pinpoints of light in the darkness to funnel resources back to the residents of the Smolder City. When the Blightstorm hits, everyone will return to the City for shelter as the world is washed away, and the cycle begins anew.. When you begin a settlement, you're dumped into the middle of a forest with a few villagers, some basic supplies and a Hearth, a burning fire at the heart of your settlement to be. Your task is simple - max out your Reputation bar and you've achieved victory, leaving your settlement behind as you proceed to the next further out in the wilderness. The Scorched Queen is not a patient monarch however, and her Impatience grows with every passing moment. Take too long, or make certain decisions that invoke her Majesty's ire, and her Impatience will max out and you will be recalled in shame. That's not the only danger you face however; if your Hearth ever runs out of fuel, your settlement likewise will be extinguished. The forest is alive and actively resists your imperialist incursions, growing more and more hostile with each passing year and the more that your woodcutters fell trees to provide for your need with resources and fuel. Storm, the harshest of the game's weather seasons, can be so miserable that your villagers abandon your settlement. Forest glades hide resources you'll desperately need, but the large ones that yield the most resources come with accompanying problems to match, and if you're not able to act fast and find a solution when they arise, it's often your villagers who will pay the price. So begins a race against time, harvesting resources from your surroundings, building production chains and advanced goods that contribute to the Resolve of the fantasy races that make up your settlement, all of whom have different specialities and needs. Reputation can be gained by fulfilling the Queen's orders - objectives relating to production, trade or exploration - and by pushing your villagers Resolve above certain thresholds at which point they'll begin to generate Reputation for you over time. It's a fantastic balancing act, and where the run based gameplay of Against the Storm starts to become clear. The game takes place across multiple biomes, each of which has different bonuses, maluses and resources that may be more available or more scarce. You only receive a small subset of production buildings on each run, so part of the puzzle is identifying what you need and what you have available to produce. The game quickly adds a trade system - an absolute lifeline that can be the difference between victory and defeat and also a viable path to victory in its own right - and rainpunk, capturing and using the magical rainfall of the forest to empower your production buildings at the risk of Blightrot cysts forming that you'll need to manage - too much corruption from the cysts spreading unchecked and your villagers will start to die. This short, encapsulated balancing act is what makes Against the Storm so wonderful to me, even playing as I am still very much in the early part of the game and playing on the second of many, many available difficulties. Each run is an interlocking puzzle of environmental conditions and resource and building availability that is a delight to unravel. There's no stability, no period until perhaps right before I'm about to win where I feel like I'm just running through the motions waiting for victory. This precariousness is its own sort of fun as well; I only need this settlement to do well enough to hit max Reputation right here and right now, my solution to doing that doesn't have to be sustainable! Off and away to the next settlement I go! As you proceed through cycles the metaprogression elements become clear - surrounding the Smoldering City are various Seals, acting as almost...boss stages... if you can say that about a city builder, where you'll need to satisfy a number of stiff challenges in order to successfully close off that Seal. If you succeed, the amount of time you have before the Blighstorm arrives begins to increase. Combined with upgrades from the Smoldering City that allow you to embark further and with more resources to hand, you can rapidly find yourself making progress further and further away from the City, the difficulty slowly increasing as you get further away (or you can simply increase it yourself at any point you're comfortable with, obtaining more rewards from your successful settlement as a result). There's no ending, and very little story taking place here. Although some of the world lore is hinted at in little snippets, the overall theme of the game is that what you are striving for is impermanent, though necessary to allow the next generation to survive the cycle. It's a melancholy tone, reinforced by the oppressive though often visually striking biomes you find yourself in from dense fairytale woodland to sprawling mushroom forests and the quiet, sorrowful, ambient nature of the soundtrack. I'd love to know more about this world, how people live in, how they deal with this perpetual cycle of a world destroying storm. I guess what I'm saying is sign me up for a narrative game set in this same world (give it to the developer who made Roadwarden, I think he'd nail it). I'm early in my journey with this wonderful game and there's a lot ahead of me, but this has bar none been my biggest surprise of the year. Even if you don't like city builders, give this one a shot. #2 Baldur's Gate 3 (PC, PS5, XSX)  Down, down, down by the river.... Frankly given how long I spent in the character creator for Baldur's Gate 3, I'm glad there was such a beautiful song to accompany me. Some friends and I all started playing BG3 around the same time and one of the first comments that we all made talking about it was "hey, drat, that chargen music is real nice, right?" I haven't read this thread yet. I'm going to take my time and luxuriate in it after I get my list posted, and I'll go through and read absolutely every single one. But I don't need to have read it to know that so much ink will have been spilled at this point about the qualities of Baldur's Gate 3. How do I begin to possibly do justice to something so utterly staggering in scope? I can tell you the impact it had on me, certainly - I voraciously devoured the game in unstoppable fashion from Act 1 all the way through to the start of Act 3 before finally taking a break for a while because otherwise I was just going to be playing this, all year, forever. I could tell you that I don't think any CRPG has so thoroughly and pervasively occupied my attention since the KOTOR games. Not to suggest that there aren't better CRPGs that have come out since then, but... I have ADHD. Sinking large amounts of time into sprawling games like CRPGs and JRPGs is always a dicey proposition for me. My brain craves variety and novelty, and as much as I love a game after I've poured like 70 hours into it, it's hard for anything to feel fresh. I'll often take a break, feeling burnt out and that will be it - I'll never be able to pick that game up again, I'll just move on to other things. So maybe I can just say that after 70 hours of BG3, having taken a pretty large break from it after hitting early Act 3, I'm looking forward to diving back into it and finishing it off. I grew up playing the original Baldur's Gate, though never remotely came close to finishing it - it was a pretty tricky game to grok and I didn't really have prior CRPG experience at the time, and was only 12 years old. I had much more success with Neverwinter Nights as controlling a single character and a hireling felt much more approachable to me than managing an entire party. I've tried revisiting the Infinity engine games as an adult and not had much more luck either. Real Time With Pause combat, beloved as it is for so many people, is a massive turn off to me. Hearing that Baldur's Gate 3 was coming out from the studio behind Divinity Original Sin 2, a game that one of my friends repeatedly kept suggesting to me that I would love ("Yeah I'll get around to it", I said, mentally filing it on my near infinite list of games that I will one day 'get to') and that it would have tactical turn based combat peaked my interest, but otherwise I didn't follow the development much. I went into the game pretty much blind, devoid of expectations, and was utterly captivated. From the early stages of Act I, the level of interactivity and reactivity in both the combat and non-combat encounters shot to the forefront. Everything just clicked for me in a way that so many crunchy tactical games never do. Normally in RPGs I hit a point where I start dreading combat encounters - in Baldur's Gate 3, I find myself looking forward to them. The writing had me hooked as well - the opening premise for the game was compelling, and the more I learned the more interested I was in seeing where all this was going. I was interested in the lives and the backstories of almost all of my party members, and also Gale and Wyll were there too I guess. My appreciation for what Larian had pulled off only grew greater when I started comparing notes with my friends, and reading other goons experiences in the BG3 thread. Act 2 only solidified all this even further, with so many interlinking plot threads and moments of reactivity unfolding and all culminating in a climax to the Act which quite frankly if the entire game had just ended there and there was no Act 3, I would have been completed satisfied. Hitting Act 3, getting the major story reveals that occur as you arrive in Baldur's Gate, and then slowly becoming aware of the frankly intimidating scale of the city itself... it was breathtaking (and my signal to take a break because....phew, it's like an entire second game occurring right after the entire first game that I've just played.) I don't have the industry insight or the words in me at the moment to take a stab at writing about what Baldur's Gate 3 "means" for CRPGs in general or for AAA roleplaying games more generally. But I can tell you that I absolutely, unreservedly love it and that, even without having finished the game, I think this might be one of the single finest video games ever made. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but for a game this incredible that succeeds so well in both what it aspires to be and what it is, I think saying anything less is selling it short. #1 The Making of Karateka (PC, Switch, XB1, PS4, XSX, PS5)  I've been writing for far too long today and I know I'm not going to find all the words I want to extol The Making of Karateka so let me just start with this. The Making of Karateka is the most important video game released this year, for what it represents as a path forward for the way we engage with, understand and appreciate video game history. If you play one thing from my list, one single game, please, please play this one Most of the video game industry, as a rule, doesn't give a poo poo about the history of video games or making that history available for archival, let alone for public access. A study published this year by the Video Game History Foundation reveals that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are completely unavailable. Major video game corporations are famously secretive, barely willing to reveal sales numbers let alone any actual insight into how the games that they create are produced. Hell, 2023 has certainly shown that major corporations also don't give much of a poo poo about the people who make them, as we've seen the industry racked with layoff after layoff from short sighted decisions chasing profit at a human cost. So much of the work of recording this history and preserving this information falls onto the shoulders of people trying to do their best to stem the loss of information against an industry directly hostile to them, whether that be organisations like the VGHF to amateur game historians on YouTube or software pirates archiving reams of games that companies have no interest in making available. The Making of Karateka is, as its namesake suggests, the story of Jordan Mechner creating the cinematic action game Karateka - an early 8-bit title for the Apple II with enormous influence on too many videogame creators to list. Karateka stood out for its stunning use of rotoscoped animation, along with borrowing cues from the visual and audio language of cinema. These things are absolutely commonplace now, but saw some of their earliest expressions in Karateka. The Making of Karateka presents this story in the form of an interactive museum exhibit, curated timelines laying out Mechner's earliest experiments in replicating arcade games, through several prototypes of Karateka and then finally to the release of the game itself and the most iconic of its ports to other systems. Littered throughout are artifacts that serve to tell this story - excerpts from Mechner's own journals and design documents, correspondence between Mechner and Broderbund who would go on to publish the game, video interviews with Mechner, his father Francis who served as the composer for the game (sidenote: the interactions between him and Jordan and his unwavering support of his sons interests are the most utterly touching part of the documentary footage), and industry figures that helped bring Karateka to life or who drew on it as a source of inspiration for their own games. My personal highlight of these is the original footage that would form the basis for the main characters animations, presented to allow you to slowly layer over the rough tracings and then the final game sprites in differing layers of transparency to understand exactly how the footage was converted into the game. Along this timeline as well you'll find a number of games to explore - some of Mechner's earliest games, then multiple different versions of Karateka. As a bonus, Digital Eclipse have included modernised remakes of both Karateka and one of Mechner's earlier action games called Deathbounce. The various games are emulated well and contain a number of different tweaks to make them more acccessible to a modern audience, letting you give yourself infinite lives or remap controls to whatever suits you. Even knowing how important the game Karateka is to video game history, would I recommend someone today go back and try and play it? Absolutely not, you'd probably find it a miserable experience unless you knew what you were getting into. Would I recommend that you play this game instead and then use the understanding of the context that Karateka exists in to play through the game with insight and appreciation that you absolutely wouldn't have had going in cold? Unreservedly.  Digital Eclipse has, between their Atari 50 collection and this first entry of what they're calling their Gold Master Series, made a wonderful case for what video game history can be. Games are an interactive medium above all else; why not use that interactivity to their advantage, to communicate and better understand and chronicle the context that they exist in? If you've never heard of Karateka, that's all the more reason to play this game. I believe that video games can be more than just entertainment, I believe that video games can be important, that they can shape society and pop culture, that they can affect people emotionally, that the work that people do in producing them has value. The history of games, of how they were made and the people who made them is important too. As we look forward to 2024, to amazing new releases and hopefully the betterment of conditions for those involved in creating them, we should also be casting an eye backward to understand and appreciate what makes this medium so special. Thank you, each and every one of you who post on the Games forum for making this my favourite space to hang out and talk about games. Wishing you all a safe and prosperous 2024 to come, and a wonderful New Year's Eve. Play The Making of Karateka. Thank you, and good night.
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Dec 31, 2023 07:38
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Also played: Warzone 2.0 In fact, more than any other game because my friends will not play anything else. I sucked at it, then got briefly decent, now suck even worse than I did before with the new map. Young players dance over my corpse and I am reminded that I am becoming an old man. Super Mario RPG Pleasant enough, but between this and the remake of Link's Awakening, Nintendo is too faithful to the detriment of showing these games off to new players. I haven't played the original but have played the other Mario RPGs and you can see how this is a prototype of what would be improved on in Paper Mario 64 and perfected in Thousand-Year Door. The Entropy Centre Decent Portal-influenced puzzler that doesn't feel as nice to play as Portal or Talos Principle. You don't move quite right and there's a lack of precision to the puzzles. But scratched the itch, and pairing the protagonist with a friendly AI makes for some funny dialogue. Super Mario Wonder A step down from the co-op blast I had with New Super Mario Bros for Wii U with its oppressive decision to tie the camera to one player, meaning the other player can only stick close by or risk dying. Cool ideas. Fun. Mario. Grime Hollow Knight-like Souls-like Metroidvania or whatever. Has excellent bosses. Ender Lilies better. Axiom Verge 2 Fine. Ender Lilies better. Top 10 10. The Talos Principle 2 The puzzles are brilliant and I love the ideas they've built on the original design (as well as some things they shaved off to make things slicker). I don't know how much testing has to go into a game like this to get every puzzle right. It's a staggering work in that respect. It's unfortunate that it's tied to a godawfully boring story that will not get out of your face. The original had a good story AND you could ignore it if you wanted to focus on puzzles. It's all philosophy no character and shoots this down from a higher position on this list. 9. Lost Judgement I like that it seriously tries to tackle the subject of bullying, something I don't think about much which it presents in an informed way as a major social issue. It also tackles in a jokey-but-maybe-not way the pains of crunch on game developers, and then you think about how Sega is cranking out these Yakuzaverse games at such a clip... but then again, there's so much copy and paste here of minigames and such from Judgement. I know that's kind of Yakuza's thing, but it's disappointing nonetheless to see that batting cages and darts are exactly the same as last time. 8. Judgement I do hope Yagami Detective Agency will have a dozen more mysteries to solve over the years. I hope he meets Kiryu one day and they team up  7. Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations I capped off the trilogy here and loved how well it all tied together. Genuinely gripping mini mysteries that tie into the greater arc of the series and so hilarious. I loved when Phoenix demands to cross-examine a parrot. 6. FFXIV I bought this at the start of last year when Endwalker won GOTY and finally convinced me to try a MMORPG. I loved it overall and played it more than anything else in '22 but burnt out after Heavensward and didn't touch it again for over a year. It was hard to get back into but once I did I enjoyed Stormblood and really enjoyed Shadowbringers, particularly the city of rich people who live in decadence under their fat king. It felt like the developers hit the peak of their powers with this expansion. The presentation is amazing. Anyway, I burnt out again and have still not reached Endwalker. 5. Resident Evil 4 Remake I played this alongside Super Mario RPG and it schools it so well in being a remake that is faithful but still its own creature. You can tell the developers enjoyed subverting expectations and inserting new or unused ideas into the adventure. All of the REmakes are the best remakes in the business and nothing comes close. 4. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Poured heaps of time into it. Excellent fun. Shame that from Majora to Skyward, Zelda had good stories with a streak of weirdness to them, like all of Majora's Mask, Zant in Twilight Princess and Ghirahim in Skyward. Now it's lame sub-Disney crap that's so safe and boring. Every line is read so stiltedly. Another great game tied to a bad narrative. 3. Signalis Would've been my number 1 if not for two late contenders. Story and presentation had me gripped. Real cinematic eye. The opening scene might be my favourite ever. A beautiful tragic love story. 2. Against the Storm Heroin. There's something evil about these games that trap you in a loop of work and reward where time flies by so fast. It's too addictive. There has to be something wrong with it. 1. Inscryption I only wanted to make this post after playing this. Was hungover and bored the other day. I hated Pony Island, which was also lauded, but I gave this a shot. I've flown through the whole thing in three days and was sad to see it finish. The base card game is extremely fun. I had no inkling of anything that was to come and don't want to hint at it to anyone who hasn't played, but I recommend you get this while the sales are on and jump in blind. A perfect game. snoremac fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 08:35
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ColdPie posted:Hello! The OP says: Good grief you are correct! I must have been looking at the wrong month. Yes. I meant the 6th or the 13th and based on my workload I think the 13th is most likely.
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Dec 31, 2023 09:20
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Wittgen posted:
hold me back
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Dec 31, 2023 09:35
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Mode 7 posted:Thank you, each and every one of you who post on the Games forum for making this my favourite space to hang out and talk about games.  And also thanks for the great list!
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Dec 31, 2023 09:44
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ShoogaSlim posted:hold me back there are lots of games that are much better than elden ring
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Dec 31, 2023 09:58
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Kerrzhe posted:there are lots of games that are much better than elden ring none of them are zelda
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Dec 31, 2023 10:08
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Kerrzhe posted:there are lots of games that are much better than elden ring It's not even the best fromsoft game
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Dec 31, 2023 10:10
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fridge corn posted:It's not even the best fromsoft game correct, that's Armored Core 6
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Dec 31, 2023 10:13
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Kerrzhe posted:correct, that's Armored Core 6 I'm playing it now kerrzhe!!! It's so good my word
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Dec 31, 2023 10:14
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SirSamVimes posted:none of them are zelda
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Dec 31, 2023 10:31
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SirSamVimes posted:none of them are zelda
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Dec 31, 2023 10:40
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Kerrzhe posted:there are lots of games that are much better than elden ring theyhatedhimbecausehespokethetruth.jpg
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Dec 31, 2023 11:06
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fridge corn posted:It's not even the best fromsoft game I'm 20 hours into elden ring and while it's very very good and will almost certainly be on my 2024 list, if I had to make room for it on this year's list based on what I've played so far it would bump DS3 to 3rd place with Sekiro remaining as champion
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Dec 31, 2023 11:27
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Haven't played that many games this year, but the ones I did play were absolute delights. 7. Lacuna    An atmospheric sci-fi pixel-art noir detective game, where you try to deduce the truth behind a murder and an interplanetary conspiracy. The "puzzles" in the game are cases you open as you progress, each one basically being a sheet you need to fill out with your answers to the questions posed. You can fail these and still progress the narrative, but the outcomes of the story will change. This introduces a wonderful sense of diagetic pressure to not gently caress up as you make your deductions, which is unusual in the small "deduction game" genre. The story itself is typical noir fare, with a heavy dose of political thriller. It isn't anything terribly original or exceptional, but it's executed decently and the core cast of characters are very well realized. There are a variety of endings you can get based on making the right deductions and some choices near the end, which adds to the engagement. The background art is good and gets across both the setting and required atmosphere. All in all a very solid package for fans of detective games like me. 6. Bad End Theater     This is a choice based VN with a cute art style. The plot and characters are simple yet charming, with the writing staring out as self-aware and tongue-in-cheek, but becoming more earnest and sweet towards the end. The strongest impression this game left on me was its core conceit - a surprisingly intricate web of choices and consequences, where the choices made from the perspective of each of the four characters change the flow for all the others. The main goal of the game is basically to play with the configuration of choices in the nested flowchart and reach all of the individual character endings, thereby unlocking the true ending. This system is insanely appealing to me and I would very much like for other choice-based VNs to steal it and use it in a more fleshed out narrative. I feel like it really holds an incredible amount of untapped potential. 5. The Case of the Golden Idol    A master class within the emerging deduction genre of games inspired by Return to Obra Dinn. The game is basically a collection of scenes frozen in time, where you have to figure out character identities, setting details and the flow of events based on nothing but the clues presented by the context of the scene. The scenes flow into each other to create an interesting narrative set in an alternate history pseudo-British Empire. It's very well made and put together. It never fails to elicit that 'a-ha, now I get it!' response upon reaching a breakthrough in reasoning, which all mysteries should strive for. 4. Slay the Princess  :no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25034873/ss_a21403e66530a55daf306332893ce6cfa3c76948.jpg) Another choice-based VN. This one does a lot with its core premise, exploring a variety of narrative scenarios emerging from your interactions with the Narrator, the Princess and the Voices in your head, tied together by a neat if overly-abstract metanarrative. There is a ton of witty writing, elevated by the incredible performances of the game's two VAs. The art is very striking. The ambience and presentation are sublime. The number of outcomes and variations is truly staggering, I have only half the achievements on steam even after two full playthroughs. This is an easy recommend to basically anyone. 3. Arknights  I have been playing this stylish tower-defence gacha game off and on for several years now, mainly drawn in by the story events. This time is no different, as the Lone Trail anniversary event is jam packed with content and an incredible plot. This story wraps up several long-running character threads, offers new insights into the 'lore' of the setting and explores interesting themes about the ethics of science. The whole package this time is simply perfect, including narrative, characters, presentation, art and music. A true tour de force reminding me why I keep returning this game again and again, despite the sometimes tedious grinding and predatory gacha model. If the budget keeps going into more events like this, I would gladly keep going back again and again. 2. Neon White    The premier speedruning puzzle FPS of the decade. Each level is an impeccably designed space that requires thorough exploration, creative routing and tight execution to reach the fastest completion times. The game's structure heavily incentivizes these via gating progress behind attaining medals, hiding collectible gifts around the levels and prominently displaying leaderboards for each level. Going through this game is an incredible experience that pulled in even someone as uncompetitive and speed averse as me. The deliberately cringe-inducing dialogue and story takes some getting used to, but is ultimately a minor part of the game experience. Do not miss out on this. 1. The Midnight Sanctuary      This is not a game, but an experience. It's basically a 3-4 hour long art movie, with the only player interaction being selecting the order of some conversation scenes in the 'wandering around town' sections. The otherworldly art, the creative camera direction, the surreal dialogue, everything combines to make this trip to an isolated Japanese village with its strange customs and inhabitants utterly unforgettable. I have never seen anything else like it. The closest equivalent would be something like Deadly Premonition or D4 without all the superflous (and bad) gameplay elements. There's also VR support, though I haven't tried it since I don't have VR. It's very cheap right now as its part of the Steam sale. It's best to go in as blind as possible. If any of this sounds even remotely interesting, please give it a try. It truly deserves to be a cult hit and not languish in obscurity as it is today.
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Dec 31, 2023 11:47
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Party Boat posted:I'm 20 hours into elden ring and while it's very very good and will almost certainly be on my 2024 list, if I had to make room for it on this year's list based on what I've played so far it would bump DS3 to 3rd place with Sekiro remaining as champion 
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Dec 31, 2023 11:52
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AFancyQuestionMark posted:1. The Midnight Sanctuary HELL YEAH CAVY HOUSE REPRESENT!
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Dec 31, 2023 11:57
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Boy, there were a fuckton of games this year. Spent most of my spare time this year gaming and barely made a dent in my backlog. A far cry from 2020 where I had to scrape together a list. Anyway, here's my list. Honorable Mentions Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Future Redeemed - Just to show how packed this year was, a sequel to my GOTY winner from last year couldn't make the cut. This expansion is a love letter to the entire Xeno series, with allusions to each one peppered throughout. They took criticisms of the base game into account, encouraging exploration by rewarding you with skill points for searching every nook and cranny. Rune Factory 5 - This is one of the weaker Rune Factory games, putting more emphasis on graphical upgrades and and 3-D movement over gameplay and character writing. Still didn't stop me from playing it constantly all year. All the rereleases we got this year - Seriously, so many great games finally got ported to modern consoles and in any other year they would have a spot on my list. Mario RPG, Baten Kaitos, A Wonderful Life, and Rune Factory 3. All games that were important to me during various years of my childhood. Though I'm not too fond of the changes they made to AWL, and the Baten Kaitos ports are buggy, it's still great to get to reexperience these games again. Slay the Princess - A game that took me completely by surprise. It's best to go in blind, but a general summary is this is a game about perception. How your character perceives both the Princess and themselves can drastically affect the narrative. I was always anxious to see what each new route had in store. The Witch/Thorn route in particular was amazingly well done. Baldur's Gate 3 - Oh, boy. I really wish I liked this game as everyone else. Unfortunately there were a bunch of factors that made me drop the game during Act 2. The most obvious problem I had was that 5e DND is poo poo. They did the best they could with what they were given, inserting a bunch of Larian trademarks to make the gameplay more fun, but it's still tough to get into when the core systems aren't great to begin with. Adding to the issue was I wasn't clicking with the party. I play wrpgs primarily for the characters, and am generally accepting of most games' parties. But these guys just didn't do it for me. Shadowheart is great, Karlach and Astarion were interesting, but that's about it. And shoving in Jaheira and Minsc into it just felt desperate. But what most made me stop playing was the constant patches. Bugfixes are one thing, but adding and removing content just made me decide to wait until they're done. I don't hate the game though, and in a year or two if they add more party members and maybe add even more dialogue skill checks this game could easily top a future goty list. The Actual Game of the Year List 10) Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia - A neat little Touhou fangame combining the setting of the Touhou games with the gameplay and aesthetics of the Shin Megami Tensei games. Even if you don't care about Touhou, if you're a Megaten fan you should pick this up. It's got the pixel art that made oldschool SMT so unique, with quality-of-life features that have been implemented throughout the years up to and including SMTV. 9) Fate Grand Order - With a year like this it seems insane to put a mobile gacha game on the list. But 2023 marked the release of Avalon le Fae, the best chapter in the game's history. A self-contained adventure that's the length of an actual visual novel with great atmosphere, an amazing cast of characters, and plenty of twists. I wouldn't recommend actually playing it, mind you. But it's worth watching a YouTube compilation of. 8) Live a Live - It's easy to see why this game inspired so many game developers like Toby Fox. It's hard to believe a game this ahead of its time was released on the SNES. And this remake ironed out so many of the dents you wouldn't think the game was 30 years old. Seven different stories are presented to you, each from a different genre. Some stories are better than others, but that's to be expected with how experimental each scenario is. 7) Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - As I said before, with wrpgs the party can make or break a game for me. And WotR has the best party I've seen in years. Of particular note are a spider-cat hybrid, a gnome deathknight, a repentant succubus, and a young witch that believes that anyone can be redeemed, who all your party members see as a surrogate daughter. The gameplay is your standard Pathfinder, an offshoot of 3rd edition dnd. But the game's Mythic Paths mechanic can grant your character crazy overpowered abilities, in exchange molding your character's destiny into one of multiple archetypes. Like all Owlcat games there's a mandatory subgame - this time a strategy board game - but it's miles better than Kingmaker's empire-building game. 6) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - BotW was great, but that greatness lessens the second time around. The main plot is mediocre, even by Zelda standards. And the starting tutorial area dragged on for so long I almost dropped the game. But once you touch down on Hyrule proper, the game picks up. Picking a direction and heading off still feels as fun as ever. The new building mechanic is fine, but the Fuse and Ascension powers stole the show for me. Fuse in particular felt great to use, making me excited whenever I saw a piece of junk lying around, wondering what properties it could give my weapon or shield. And while I was down on the story, the sidequests were fun. I loved catching up on npcs from the previous game. And any game with a house building mechanic gets extra points from me. 5) Octopath Traveler 2 - This game just scratches that jrpg itch in a way few games do. While these games advertise themselves on the whole "8 characters" thing, don't let that gimmick distract you from the fact that at its core it's a straight jrpg. Turn-based battles, items, a job system, it's got you covered. But it does those things really well. And while I'm not that big a fan of Square's "2d-hd" look for a bunch of it's games, this game has some really great spritework, especially its bosses. A huge step up from the bland Octopath 1, and a strong recommendation for any jrpg fan. 4) Fire Emblem Engage - By far the surprise hit of the year for me. Previews made the game seem generic as hell. Turns out this game is actually a return to form for the series. Don't let the art style fool you; this game can get hard. With the exception of a few maps in Conquest, the series hasn't had challenging, well-designed maps in 10 years, so this is a nice change of pace. It's also amazing what an improvement this game is over Three Houses. People harp on the character designs, but the models are a huge step up. And after the monastery in 3H barely ran at 10 fps, it's impressive how Somniel, this game's equivalent, runs at a consistent rate. As a final note, if you're one the fans upset that the past few games have become "glorified dating sims", you'll be happy to know there's no romantic pairing up or child mechanics in the game. 3) Pentiment - I regret sleeping on this game last year. After Pillars 1 and Outer Worlds proved underwhelming (not to mention Disco Elysian and Owlcat games eating their lunch), I lost interest in Obsidian games. However this game proved that even if Obsidian has started losing its luster, Josh Sawyer's still got it. It's clear that this was his passion project, something that let him flex his history major. Most writers would just write a medieval village as a bunch of uniform pseudo-Puritans. Pentiment instead realizes that while Christianity was a dominating force, individuals within that society had a more complicated relationship with religion. You play as Andreas, an artisan working his craft at a monastery. Over the course of the game you'll slowly build Andreas's personality, such as his interests and what he studied in the past. These facets will unlock dialogue prompts, but unlike most games of this ilk you need to be selective over when you pick them; you won't endear yourself to an old peasant if you correct his grammar, nor will the monks appreciate you bringing up the occult out of the blue. Like most Obsidian games, problems have multiple solutions with unexpected consequences. The game spans multiple years, and consequences can be long-reaching. Antagonize the monks and they might decide to bar you from the monastery. A mischievous girl swiped my hat; I didn't raise a fuss and she kept the hat years later. By far my favorite part of the game is the lunch system. Every day the villagers gather in groups to eat and you choose which group to spend time with. It's a natural way to learn about the community and pick up on any gossip that could prove useful. If you have a way to play this game, you need to pick this up. 2) Hi-Fi Rush - From the second this game's trailer snuck into the Xbox presentation I could tell this was something special. This game feels like a game that released on the GameCube to great reviews but poor sales. Not since Rez have I seen a game revolve this much around music. Your attacks get stronger by striking to the rhythm of the soundtrack, characters correspond to musical instruments, and even the environments pulse to the beat. The game is small in scope but technically impressive, seamlessly shifting between gameplay and cutscene. But what really sold me on the game was its humor. The game's jokes come off as genuine instead of forced. Not hurt by great delivery on the vas' part. Robbie Daymond as Chai is a standout performance and it sucks it didn't get a nomination from the Keighleys. Without a doubt the best game Tango Gameworks has ever made, and the best Xbox game in over a decade. 1) Resident Evil 4 (Remake) - This past year I had no illusions this wasn't going to take this slot. The original RE4 was one of the best games ever made, and this game imo is a worthy remake. There was no way they were going to catch lightning in a bottle like what happened with the original, so instead they improved on what made the game (and the other REmakes) so much fun. Standard Ganados feel great to fight, sneaking and stealth takedowns are surprisingly effective, and the knife parry is amazing. Even the infamous Island section is massively reworked, with fights properly thought out instead of the exhausting gauntlet the original was. What really clenched this game into the #1 spot is the release of the Separate Ways dlc, in which the addition of a grappling hook to your combat repertoire allows you to reposition yourself, yank shields away from enemies, and even melee attack them from afar. There have been several criticisms levied at the game, and many of them are fair. However, this is the game I think the most about, the game I most love watching people I know play for the first time, and the game I myself have replayed the most. It is unquestionably my game of the year.
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Dec 31, 2023 12:07
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Fuckin a, great list, great gifs. Thanks for some great recommends this year! Awesome stuff, such high quality posting ahoy itt snoremac posted:1. Inscryption Love to see this game occasionally blow someone's mind.  Party Boat posted:I'm 20 hours into elden ring and while it's very very good and will almost certainly be on my 2024 list, if I had to make room for it on this year's list based on what I've played so far it would bump DS3 to 3rd place with Sekiro remaining as champion I think I might like DS3 better than Elden Ring  VideoGames posted:The sheer amount of gaming ambrosia I have absorbed these last 36 months are making me powerful beyond belief, however, and I will consume the world. Hell yeah, VG, I loved reading your list. Truly a most bless-ed blob. VideoGames posted:
 Thanks, Veeg, I def lost a couple days of sleep over it. I guess I was worried I'd convey it in a way that came off as insincere, so I'm pleased that it resonated
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Dec 31, 2023 13:02
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 10. Street Fighter 6 I've been telling myself for years that one day I'd get really into fighting games. That still hasn't really happened, but Street Fighter 6 has come by far the closest a game ever has to changing that. I mean it was this game in this year that prompted me to buy a fight stick. Inevitably I bounced back off and that fight stick is largely collecting dust, but I had a pretty thrilling time with Street Fighter 6 while that engagement lasted. It's fast, fluid and fun, and objectively this game seemed to check most of the boxes for things you could want from a new SF game in the modern era. Bigger fans of the genre than me seemed super stoked about it, and I think that's worth considering in the context of the 30ish hours I got out of it before bouncing off.  9. Resident Evil 4 Resident Evil 4 is a good game. My experience with it has never quite matched the consensus and it's never been my favourite Resident Evil, but it is good. Shock horror then, that layering Capcom's current form and style for the series on top has also resulted in the release of yet another good game. This one might even be really good. Top tier presentation, better characterisation in some pivotal areas and a gameplay system that represents a fast, fluid and rewarding peak for this series.  8. Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun The competition in the boomer shooter space is fierce these days and it takes a lot to stand out. In some ways Boltgun falls somewhat short of that standard. However, I do consider Boltgun a triumph of perfectly executing on just a couple of good ideas. Notably the weapon feel of the boltgun itself and this games sheer commitment to the source material. Lets be honest, Warhammer is pretty dumb. Boltgun takes that, doesn't shy away from it and has some fun with it. It's a game where you are essentially a walking tank, gibbing brightly coloured monsters, with an awesome feeling and highly destructive signature weapon, and a dedicated taunt button. Despite some issues, that ended up being enough to carry me through a really enjoyable time.  7. Diablo 4 Probably the least I have to say about any of the games I played this year. Diablo 4 is a game that lots of people have a lot to say about, but I'm not one of them. I'm way up on the "£1 = 1 hour of gameplay" calculation that always makes me feel OK about a purchase and I continue to get a good time from the game, as I sporadically return to it for a few hours of clicking my way through demons and dungeons. It's a casual approach to a game like this (and I'm sure Blizzard would ideally want to hook me for more engagement than that) but it's stood me pretty well so far. It looks super nice while scratching an itch and I've certainly had my fun with it. The game almost certainly needs more in 2024, but I'm feeling pretty good about my time with it so far and the prospects of that continuing.  6. American Truck Simulator I'm always a little reluctant to include older releases in end of year lists, but ATS continues to be one of my favorite ways to spend my gaming time, and SCS Software just keep on trucking (LOL) with some really nice updates and consistently solid DLC as they chart their way East. Delivering cargo across the states is just a really zen time, and the "management sim" elements represent a light hook as you expand your little trucking empire. As ever, a good time to acknowledge both the time spent with the game this year and the anticipation for what's to come in the year(s) ahead.  5. Cultic "X mixed with Y" can be a pretty risky pitch for a game and frequently backfires, but Resident Evil 4 x Blood definitely worked for Cultic. That's a slightly reductionary and basic way to describe a game that really does stand tall on its own merits and deserves all the plaudits it gets, but Cultic really does nail the vibes its going for. Vaguely evoking (but actually massively expanding on) the atmosphere of RE4's village, with such incredible weapon feel and stylish visuals, was enough to punt the actual RE4 a lot further back up this list than I thought it would be going into this post. Even at only 1 episode (plus some extra bits and pieces), Cultic is just solid as hell and a real standout in its genre. Depending when we see Episode 2, Cultic is one of my early expectations to appear on this list again next year, potentially even higher.  4. BallisticNG Another slightly reluctant inclusion of an old release; 2023 wasn't the first time I played BallisticNG, but was the year when I stopped just moaning about the death of arcade racers on the internet and started appreciating the ones we have available. BallisticNG carries the torch not only for the classic and long abandoned Wipeout experience, but also for the blistering approach to what modern arcade/futuristic racing games can be. I described this game as "Wipeout 4 from another dimension" in leaving a Steam review, and I mean that with total sincerity. It's no longer surprising that indie developers can pick up the mainstream industry's slack when it comes to reviving and breathing life into forgotten games or genre's, but BallisticNG really doesn't skip a beat from the PS1 trilogy of Wipeout games. The excellent community support was the real key in my discovery this year that anti-grav racing is not just something I need to bemoan as a loss from the 90's, but is alive and well, here and now, and is as loving brilliant as ever.  3. Quake 2 I'm not entirely sure to what extent I enjoyed Quake 2's notoriously divisive campaign. It's certainly there, and certainly has some issues - not only compared to its contemporaries of the time but also the modern "renaissance" shooters it doubtless helped inspire. I did however enjoy it enough to see it through to completion, and I'm glad I did. But really, there's so much more to Quake 2's 2023 re-release than the merits of the campaign. There's the multiplayer. There's the original expansions. There are new expansions. There are long requested community fixes. There's the preservation, restoration and ability to get this out to more people across more systems. This is just a really complete, comprehensive and important release that does a ton of stuff extremely well, and easily represents one of the best ways I spent my time and money in 2023 as a total piece. That will likely continue through 2024 and beyond and maybe one day I'll even work out if the Q2 campaign is actually good or not.  2. Sigil II How "unofficial" is an expansion to Doom when it's John loving Romero making it? Anyway, this is "unofficially" the 6th episode to Doom 1, and it's incredible. Arriving late this year to coincide with Doom's 30th anniversary, this feels like peak Doom 1 to me. It's a look at a pioneer mastering his craft and just, well, seeming to really enjoy himself. Sigil II had a bunch of fun stuff going on around the edges with a big box release and a peak behind the map making curtain as John live streamed development on Twitch, and it was a delight for the end product to wind up as such a blast to play. Memorable maps and encounter design, clever traps and secrets, more Caco's than you can shake a Plasma Rifle at.. this thing rocks. As a 1-6 episode set, Doom now feels just as fresh and well rounded as it ever has even 30 years on.  1. System Shock In a year of really cool and big hitting remakes, System Shock managed to top the bunch for me, and ended up as the best thing I played in 2023 - treated as either a remake or as a new game on its own merit. This was a challenging, engaging and highly memorable experience that captured just about everything I'm looking for from games at this point of my life. Night Dive managed to expertly straddle the line between modernisation and retaining old school sensibility, right down to the clever way the visuals change depending on proximity and perspective of the world around you. This is the first game I've played in years where I found myself scribbling notes on a pad at my desk, and needed to occasionally consult a guide on the path forward. A sometimes complex game where it's only real "age" is probably best reflected by the industry changes since, but an experience I'll never forget. Bumhead fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 13:31
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Lots of good games this year so I'm going to try and hammer out a big post less than a day or so before the deadline. Games I Didn't Play But Maybe You Should Have I played a lot of games this year but there was still stuff I wanted to play but for various reasons wasn't able to.  Alan Wake II I loving love every single Remedy game, including Quantum Break, but the system requirements on this one really scared me away. Jealous of anyone getting to play this within the next 3 years.  Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name I didn't have the time or money to play what for many people was a great concise Yakuza game with genuine emotional feeling at the end.  Chants of Sennaar I love puzzle games as you'll see coming up but I just didn't get around to this one.  OXENFREE II: Lost Signals Did you know the sequel to Oxenfree came out this year? I understand why this didn't hit. It's a very different game buying climate, and actually finishing the first game was something only a small percentage of people did.  A Guidebook of Babel A time loop adventure with an interesting system for displaying it's quests. Low on my play priorities in 2023 but definitely one I'm doing sooner than later.  Slay The Princess I love Scarlett Hollows but put off this game and now the devs are saying there's going to be a big patch with new stuff integrated so I'm just waiting.  Dredge Basically Sunless Sea but accessible and fun minute to minute? Eyepop emoji. No wonder it was a huge hit. Honourable Mentions  The Void Rains Upon Her Heart After literally years of nagging people about it, this was the year The Void Rains Upon Her Heart broke through in to broader consciousness. I played a lot of it and it's still great.  Fuser This game died last year. I bought as much cheap stuff as I could and had a blast doing weird mash ups. Really needed hundreds more songs though.  Unheard - Voices of Crime Essentially a series of Ace Attorney cases but you can only hear the audio of the crime as it's happening and must piece everything together over time. The DLC is the best and most complex case where they go really ham on multiple nesting events.  Crystal Project You know the drill for this one. Job system Final Fantasy combined with open ended platformer exploration. I hit the moment when it really for real opens up and dropped it. Really great fun before then.  Volcano Princess Two Chinese women pulled a Stardew and revitalised the Princess Maker genre. It's got a lot of jank though and a bit rough around the edges. Can't wait for someone to really take the ball and run with it.  Cyclo Chambers Of all the Vampire Survivor clones I wish had gone on to success and continuous updates this is the one. There's already a great game here. Every upgrade synergises with each other. The character unlocks are interesting and provide new twists. I 100% it and wish there was more.  Foretales This is just a really cool narrative strategy game. For time loop enjoyers there's a bit of that here in that there's multiple paths through the game and you're explicitly told to replay and find the way to the best ending. The art's amazing. I didn't beat it but there's a lot of good stuff here.  Harmony: The Fall of Reverie Did you know that Don't Nod released a high production value visual novel this year? No, not many did as this was essentially sent out to die. Fully voiced with extensive animations and illustrations. There's real care and love on display here. It's a great experience with narrative choice system where you're essentially assigning points on the now standard visual novel flow chart/timeline. Too close to The Longest Journey to start but becomes it' own thing. If it matters to you literally everyone is either poly or queer. There's quibbles here that keep it from going on my numbered list but they're only quibbles.  Yogurt Commercial 3 rear end in a top hat physics the open world puzzle game. Impossible to describe except as try and shoot very specific yogurt commercials within a world of impossibly hostile particle physics. If lighting things on fire and then watching that fire get really really out of hand is a fun time for you, have a look. Genuinely surprised it hasn't made the rounds on Twitch.  Aces & Adventures I backed this on Kickstarter but this wasn't for me. However, I will never stop admiring the work, love, and care Triple.B.Titles put into their games. Their games always feel like 110% efforts.  RPG Time: The Legend of Wright I didn't play this enough to have a real opinion but it's an old school RPG heavily themed as played after school in a middle schooler's notebook. Seriously check this out, it's gorgeous:      Storyteller I didn't like this so much when it first came out as it was too short and not puzzley enough, a free dlc update changed that. Really breezy puzzle experience now.  Night of Full Moon My fave janky Chinese Slay the Spire KEEPS ON ADDING THINGS.   Slice of Sea and Submachine: Legacy Mateusz Skutnik makes beautiful click the screen adventures. It's real nice to see how far he's come.  Eigengrau Shmups don't get more creative than this  Final Profit: A Shop RPG Compulsively addictive for an RPG Maker game The List edit: too tired to do this properly so I'll do the quick version now. Will add deeper description later or never  10. Can of Wormholes A puzzle game that pushes it's own limits and does so much right  9. Astalon: Tears of the Earth A brilliant take on an old school metroidvania  8. Highland Song Inkle's game design sharpened into a fine point placed within a strand type game  7. Void Stranger An amazing deep puzzle game with layers on layers on layers  6. Talos Principle 2 It's great, look amazing, written great  5. Islands of Insight Public Test It's an open world witness like puzzler with a thousand different puzzles  4. Baldur's Gate 3 BG3 is as good as they say  3.Balatro demo This game is going to make so much money when it comes out  2. Afterimage This big metroidvania is very very big but the devs commit to a lot of polish on it.  1. ASTLIBRA Revision I ground so much in this weird horny bricolage game
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Dec 31, 2023 13:48
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fez_machine posted:
OMG I love this so much! Straight on the wishlist, thank you! What a good list.
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Dec 31, 2023 13:57
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fez_machine posted:
I love Balatro so much, but it definitely does feel like we're being jerked around a little with respect to its' release. The game is so close to being done! Or at least released into proper early access. Expect this to be on a GotY list of mine eventually.
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Dec 31, 2023 14:12
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thank you for posting Legend of Wright, I had seen that ages ago in a trailer but at the time it wasn't wishlistable on steam so I completely forgot about it. snagged it so I can play it maybe in a few years!fez_machine posted:
or you could play the current version and experiences the various routes that exist right now since it's obviously quite good as is, and then go back after it releases to see the new stuff, either or!
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Dec 31, 2023 14:16
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