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Starting with some (dis)honourable mentions: Game I Still Haven’t Finished of the Year Yakuza 0 Yakuza 0 was on my honourable mentions list last year as well but I've still not finished it. I've advanced several chapters and Kiryu is now a slot car racing champ and the real estate king of Kamurocho, so maybe 2022 will be the year? Most Likely To Be on My 2022 Top Ten Final Fantasy VII Remake This only came out on PC a few days ago, and what little I've played of it has made me reflect on how relentless the pacing of the Midgar section was in the original game and how well it whets your appetite for exploring the wider world. I'm aware that Remake is doing something very different to its predecessor, but I'm still interested to see how those story beats work stretched over a full game and interspersed with sidequests. Mini Boat’s Game of the Year Abzu My three-year-old is absolutely obsessed with ocean life at the moment, which has meant plenty of viewings of Blue Planet, Little Mermaid and Ponyo. He also regularly requests what he calls "the fish game". The only reason Abzu's not termed a "walking simulator" is because you're underwater the whole time, but that light level of interactivity is perfect for playing with a small child. You can even plop your character down to rest on a statue and let the camera freely roam around the area like it's a virtual aquarium. A wonderfully soothing game that's perfect for when child or parents need a bit of quiet time. Worst Game (I’ve Played) of the Year Twelve Minutes What a disappointment this was. An intriguing time loop concept and great voice cast let down by frustrating gameplay and an offensively stupid story. And on to the main event!  I don’t need to tell you how 2021 started - you lived it too. So I hope it’s understandable that I retreated from the real world and into virtual ones with the purchase of an Beat Saber is just a huge amount of fun to play, and gets even better if you mod it to include custom songs. As with any other community-driven rhythm game there are a vast number of 200bpm anime songs to sort through, but there’s also plenty of more accessible tracks for slow normies like me. It’s also a game you can easily pick up for a few minutes at a time - I’ve had to study for a lot of exams this year and my typical break in a study or revision session was to refresh my brain by quickly slicing my way through Toxic or X Gon Give It To Ya.  Is this a Dark Souls game? A Metroid game? I don’t really care, it perfectly captured the Star Wars feel and married it with punchy and engaging combat.  Like the first Ori game, this is a joy to control and every frame of it simply drips with charm. While you have to go through the Metroidvania tradition of relearning your skills, you’re thankfully given the first game’s standout move - the high-flying, projectile-redirecting Bash ability - very early on, and by the end of the game you’re expected to use every tool available to you to get around increasingly hostile environments. A gorgeous and joyful game from start to finish.  Hey, a 2021 release! Thanks Gamepass! Tim Schaefer and Double Fine return to the world of 2005's Psychonauts and (apart from a brief VR diversion) pick up just where they left off, with psychic-in-training Raz fresh from psychic summer camp and off to Psychonauts HQ. Psychonauts 2 perfectly recaptures all the things that made the original so beloved - smart writing, a great voice cast and astonishingly creative worlds that unfold from the minds of the various folks Raz encounters. That's not to say that it's just more of the same, as in the intervening years Double Fine have clearly paid attention to changes to 3D platformers and, more importantly, changes in how we think about mental health. I didn’t expect a game that looks like a Nicktoon birthed by Pixar (and I should make it clear that I mean this as a compliment) to deliver a thoughtful and compassionate view of the damage that alcoholism does to relationships, but I’m glad that it did.  2020 was a year of roguelites for me, but for some reason I didn’t get around to trying this run-based deckbuilder until this year. That’s probably for the best, as I’m not sure that 2020 would have allowed for another distraction gobbling up hours of my time. Spire's smartest feature, showing you exactly how hard each enemy is about to hit you, transforms every single turn into an optimisation puzzle. Do you build up enough block to soak the hits, or go on the offensive to take one of your foes out of the battle before they get the chance to strike? There’s rarely a “perfect” solution so you’ll be making tradeoffs almost continually, and it’s that depth that keeps it engaging for run after run. Now if I can just resist the urge to pick up every card that’s offered to me, maybe I’ll make it past Ascension 4.  With face-to-face socialising out of the question for much of this year, my gaming group revived our long-dormant Blood Bowl league in the virtual realm. Between tactical discussions, smack talk and even player interviews being sent back and forth on WhatsApp this has easily been the game I've thought about most this year. This is not a game for you if losses to RNG upset you - outside of movement, almost every action in Blood Bowl involves a dice roll and a single failure means your turn is over. As a 1 on a six sided die is always a failure, that means a lot of turns end prematurely even with rerolls. A good Blood Bowl coach therefore assumes they will fail at some point and prioritises their actions accordingly. I am not, and have never claimed to be, a good Blood Bowl coach. Sometimes I get lucky though, and those lucky streaks are some of the best moments I've had with a game this year. Of course I've had just as many unlucky streaks - Nuffle, the god of Blood Bowl dice rolls, takes as much as he gives after all.  At the heart of many great games there’s a simple but pleasing loop of interactions. In the case of Horizon: Zero Dawn, my personal gameplay loop is plan an attack on a group of machines, gently caress up, improvise, accidentally drag even more machines into the battle, survive by the skin of my teeth, repeat. Much like Breath of the Wild, it’s very happy to let you get in over your head and fight your way out. I just wish there was more of it - when the hunting lodge questline began I thought for one wonderful moment that I would have a bunch of sidequests hunting down named machines. Maybe in the sequel.  This is the reason I got a VR headset, and while it doesn't justify the purchase on its own, for me it's absolutely the best VR game I’ve played, largely because of how thoroughly Valve immerse you in the world that they’ve built. The word that comes to mind when I try to summarise the world of City 17 is "gross". Wet fungal growths plaster the walls of what was once an apartment building. Troubleshooting a Combine computer, I found that part of the CPU was grown from the still-living body of a rat, encased between sheets of glass. And that's before we get to Jeff. Jeff is the game's best moment, an invincible, blind mutant ceaselessly spewing choking spores into the air as he wanders an abandoned vodka distillery. The puzzles in this area repeatedly force you into uncomfortably close quarters with him, and there’s no shortage of bottles that can be accidentally - or deliberately - broken to attract his attention. The whole game delights in pushing dread and discomfort on you and Jeff is the pinnacle of that. The horror atmosphere isn't relentless though, largely thanks to Rhys Darby as Russell, providing advice and support over the radio. His description of a club sandwich to Alyx, who's spent almost all her life under Combine rule eating water-flavour ration blocks, is some of the best writing in a Valve game. There's also plenty of gunplay against Combine troops which had me ducking and dodging about while desperately trying to remember how to reload my guns. As a fan of the Half Life games I am slightly annoyed that the future of the series seems to be gated behind an expensive peripheral that not everyone can use, but the experience of Alyx absolutely would not be the same outside of VR.  The observation that Hideo Kojima accurately predicted a future where the well-off hunkered down inside their homes while underpaid couriers risked their lives to bring them everything they desire is a bit tired by now. It's still true though. Death Stranding might not be the best Kojima game, but it’s the most Kojima game. Untethered from the military shenanigans of Metal Gear, he delivered a game where deadly time-accelerating rainwater is filtered into Monster Energy® so you can piss on ghosts. Terrorist villian Higgs removes his mask to reveal another mask underneath. Late in the game Mads Mikkelsen’s character Cliff has a dying monologue where he explains in great detail how he is like an actual cliff. Even outside of the bizarre story, the gameplay of taking on orders and optimising your routes and loadout was oddly satisfying. A quick jaunt from A to B would have to go via C because you picked up something for them too, with an unplanned detour to D to deliver some stuff you picked up on the way. Add in the late-game planning out of roads and ziplines and you could easily spend dozens of hours just making your delivery network more efficient. I was initially sceptical of the game’s limited take on multiplayer, where other players’ structures appear in your world, but for the most part it worked really well, providing occasional help without being too overbearing. I did laugh in early January when I encountered a literal bridge to nowhere from a player with the username “VOTE TRUMP 2020” though. The smartest and subtelest feature is one called “desire paths”, where just as in real life the landscape changes in response to where successive players walk over time. It weirdly made me feel connected with all the other people who had taken that same route, so mission accomplished I guess Hideo. Keep on keepin’ on.  What can I say about this game that goons haven’t already said a hundred times over? The best writing in video games, an incredible voice cast (I’m pretty sure I never skipped a line of dialogue) and a world that is both real and unreal, with political institutions and the fabric of reality itself both coming apart at the seams. I was told early on that save-scumming isn’t recommended in Disco Elysium (at least for a first playthrough), as failures can advance the story just as well as successes do. So I owned my failures, and there were plenty of them. Two stick in my mind though. The first concerns the tribunal. I was an empathetic cop with Inland Empire as my signature skill, so my horrific necktie was talking my ear off from the start. I ignored a lot of its advice, but I did pick up the bottle of medicinal alcohol and, hours later in the tribunal, I got the prompt to stuff my tie in the bottle and hurl the makeshift spirit bomb. And of course I absolutely whiffed it. My horrible talking tie spent so long obsessed with its glorious destiny, only to smash uselessly on the Martinaise cobblestones because I made motorics my dump stat. It was hilarious, or would have been if it hadn’t gotten a bunch of people killed. The second is the resolution of the working-class woman’s story. Having pieced together that the body I found on the pier was her husband, dead in a tragic accident, I had to deliver the news to her. But as an empathetic cop this would be easy, no sweat. I rolled the dice and… snake eyes. It felt like the game was admonishing me for being so blasé about delivering the worst possible news to this poor woman. Of course Kim Kitsuragi (greatest character in all of gaming) came to my rescue, but it was a painful lesson in never taking success for granted. Failure is more interesting than success. Play Disco Elysium. Become an absolute disaster of a human being. Just the list for Rarity: 10. Beat Saber 9. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 8. Ori and the Will of the Wisps 7. Psychonauts 2 6. Slay the Spire 5. Blood Bowl 2 4. Horizon Zero Dawn 3. Half-Life: Alyx 2. Death Stranding 1. Disco Elysium Party Boat fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 15:10
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 20:45 |
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Oh yeah something I forgot to add Subscription Service of the Year Xbox Gamepass for PC Seriously it's responsible for like four of the games on my top ten as well as a bunch of smaller games like Carrion and The Artful Escape that I didn't find space to talk about, it's absurdly good value
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Dec 20, 2021 19:14
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A wise man once said "there's never been a better time to be playing video games" and these threads are an annual testament to that.
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Dec 21, 2021 09:41
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I think as long as you actually played some of the game in question that's still valid because time consuming ancillary material informs your view of the time spent playing the game. I only played Blood Bowl in two hour sessions every 1-2 weeks but spent much more time talking about it, researching strategy, and watching streams. And did all that make me a better player? Well look, it's a complicated game and so much comes down to dice rolls
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Dec 24, 2021 20:12
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Rarity posted:This is a funny way of saying I got too greedy with my star player and he got merked by some ratbag wood elf It was a kroxigor. Survived being on the receiving end of a block but then ate poo poo trying to dodge away from the prehensile tail
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Dec 24, 2021 20:41
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Archvale is also on gamepass, and you make a compelling argument BR. If it appears on my 2022 list it's all your fault.
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Dec 26, 2021 23:14
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Rarity posted:There'll be a most accurate predictions and biggest hipster award I'm shocked that I didn't win biggest hipster last year by including the Guardian crossword on my list
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Dec 28, 2021 21:32
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I think FFXIV has enough support without trying to get the Einhander guy's #1 vote as well This has been a great thread with some fantastic lists. Good work, goons!
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Dec 31, 2021 19:16
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Hell yeah crossword and sudoku representation Will the winner of this contest represent feathery Omega? (4,2,3,4)
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Dec 31, 2021 19:46
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Cool Sea Power beats to work / study / have an existential crisis to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJhCGVyRyiw
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Jan 1, 2022 21:05
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Bug Squash posted:Feels like a pretty good showing for Switch games this year. This might be the year I get a Switch. My last console was a Wii so I've been PC only for a long long time
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Jan 2, 2022 13:17
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Stux posted:swithc and pc is the gamers choice I already have all the indie darlings on PC but the Switch now has a good Mario, a good Zelda and a good Metroid. Not sure a console needs anything more than that.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:29
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Rarity posted:TODAY'S THE DAY AAAAAAAAAAA The most magical day of the year, when Rarity and VideoGames fly all around the world delivering GOTY write-ups to all the good posters in Games
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Jan 8, 2022 10:23
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What a thread and what a list! Endwalker taking the number one spot was no surprise given how many goons put it top, but I was amazed that Party Boat Game of the Year Disco Elysium made it all the way to #3 for a three year run of top ten places, and as a Metroid fan it was really heartening to see that Dread was enjoyed by so many - I guess I really do need to get a Switch now. Thanks to Veeg and Rarity for hosting and to everyone who contributed! See you at the end of 2022!
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Jan 9, 2022 09:49
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I don't even have the brain space for new games. My 2022 list is probably going to be FF7R (I'm most of the way through and loving it), Yakuza 0 if I ever actually finish it and a ton of Switch games if I make good on that purchase. Plus Disco Elysium again 
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Jan 9, 2022 15:19
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 20:45 |
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Reflecting on my 2020 list, I would put the Guardian crossword above Spelunky 2. Thank you
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Jan 9, 2022 21:29
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